Re-weaving The Glorious Rainbow

Re-weaving The Glorious Rainbow


Many literary theorists love to bemoan the doom that is surely to" befall literature,"
citing either its morally corrupting influence as Plato would contend or its outright
superfluity to which many of the apologetics, every century more or less has one,
respond. The onset of modernism with its accompanying technological advances has
injected a new dose of neurosis into this tearful litany " for it rendered our world overly
practical and too materially focused to entertain any aesthetic existence." However, the
anticipation of such death has been the pleasant accompaniment of literature since the
dawn of humanity and while it can be plausibly legitimate given its tumultuous existence,
modern critics should be wiser to learn from the lessons of history to cease fussing over a
demise that will never happen.

Many of the concerns stem from unwarranted presuppositions about art, its nature and
function. Critics like Plato for example anticipates its death by an implied definition they
have for literature, " a tool for moral education." Failing hence to measure to such a
standard decrees according to Plato its death. What if, however, literature is not supposed
to morally instruct but psychologically relieve, as Aristotle would have it? What if that
very morality, elusive as it may, should be achieved by delineating the play out of its
antithesis? The argument hence is turned on its head for what morality is and whether or
not literature is ought to teach it and the manner that it should employ should it teach it
are all vague notions anchored on insupportable assumptions and measured by illusive
yardsticks.

Another criticism falsely presupposes the mutual exclusivity of science and art. A
typical example of this is the romantic poet Keats, which in one of his absurd romantic
indulgences laments how " Newton ruined the rainbow for us." Literature is all about
insight into that which is true and everlasting and should be all the more zealous about
science and its promise of discoveries of those very truths that it can then celebrate and
glorify but we find rather an uneasiness, even a rivalry that opts to sleight its importance
to outright adopt a hostile stance against it. In fact science can enormously enrich our
poetic wonder and the rigor of scientific precision and predictability will all the more
invite imagination to exercise its pleasant lawlessness through the creativity of art but
critics either dimly recognize this or too acutely recognize it that it threatens them.

Hence, quite contrarily, figures like Newton, Darwin and Einstein have in fact nuanced
literature and enriched it so inestimably that we owe them nearly as much as we owe the
great literary bards for their contributions. Literature thrives in such attempts at cognitive
reconciliation occasioned by the results of new scientific discoveries and the moral
conflicts generated by their collision with religion, faith and popular commonsense.
Literature assumes therein its role in reconciling the epistemologically disjointed,
personalizing the impersonal and moving people from a state of spiritual haziness into an
ever newer existential shelter to ease the turbulence of their grand cosmic uncertainty.
Literature of existence, absurdity, dehumanization and the will to power all owe their
presence to Darwin's theory of evolution that decentered man from the heart of god's

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cosmic scheme, sharply demoting his divine status to cheerfully share ancestry with the
apes.

Finally and in as much succinct words as we can muster , literature can never die but it
has always sadly been insecure of itself because its effect, however massive and world
encompassing, is not quantifiable. One thing however is certain and that is literature is
going to be there as long as we are for its existence parallels closely our own by virtue of
nothing but our very own humanity and all the implications that this entails. We stay
away from literature only to return to it with the moral vigor of the penitent and the
eagerness of a guilty seeking his redemption and this is available to us to see through a
mere precursory look at history. Thus to bewail the death of literature due to either its
potential immorality, superfluity or the increasing naturalization of our-worldview, citing
the dwindling of metaphysics as if it's its sole fount, is a senseless and a gratuitous
weepiness from the part of an overly neurotic critics who should thoroughly relax their
critical angst and employ it elsewhere, that we leave to their imaginative faculty to
devise.


Bilqis

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