Literature and Human Understanding

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What is the function of imaginative literature in the lives of men? What do we take understanding to mean? If we enable young people to engage with awareness and appreciation in the illusioned worlds created by literary artists, will they emerge with heightened knowledge about the world in which they live? Will they be better equipped to make enlightened value judgments? Will they have learned more about themselves as human beings more about the human condition at this particular moment of time? When contemplating such questions, one is at first inclined to see in literary art a kind of countervailing force at a time when whirl is apparently king, when life seems to affect thousands of people as if it were a perpetual Happening. By this is meant an inchoate, directionless experience, an affair of simultaneities, lacking beginnings, middles, and ends. It is the kind of experience which purportedly surrounds and involves those concerned but which demands of them an attitude of detachment, the attitude described as cool. Can imaginative literature be viewed as an anti-Happening, a resource of form and purposiveness? Can it be treated as a kind of window on a domain of meaning which has somehow been lost from view? Answering such questions affirmatively, one may be brought to a stop if the first works of art that come to mind are contemporary ones. Literary art, after all, must be in some sense encompassing; and there are clearly numerous modem works which major critics, at least,