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Literature and Society

This document discusses the relationship between art and society. It argues that art should serve a higher purpose for humanity by addressing social issues and realities, rather than just pursuing beauty alone. Young writers who do not write about society may become indifferent or dislike humankind. True great art springs from an artist's deepest feelings about human love, freedom and social justice.
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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
34 views5 pages

Literature and Society

This document discusses the relationship between art and society. It argues that art should serve a higher purpose for humanity by addressing social issues and realities, rather than just pursuing beauty alone. Young writers who do not write about society may become indifferent or dislike humankind. True great art springs from an artist's deepest feelings about human love, freedom and social justice.
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Module 3 Readings (Literature and Society)

Monday, 12 April 2021 1:02 pm

(Salvador P. Lopez, Abar & Gemino (ed), The Likhaan Anthology of Philippines Literature in English from
1900 to the Present. QC: The UP Press, 2002)

Sets the tone of what Lopez wants to state, if words are living/alive, then it is a powerful tool.
• Word has soul and body.
○ Writers who consider themselves keepers of the word may not ignore the fact that it has a
physical body and possesses qualities of sound and color, fancy and imagination.
○ It is more than sound and color.
○ it is a living thing with blood and fire, capable of infinite beauty and power.
○ It is not an inanimate thing of dead consonants and vowels but a living force-the most
potent instrument known to man.

Advocates use of words to serve a higher purpose for humanity and civilization
• An individual that uses speech merely to evoke beauty of sound or beauty of imagination is not
exploiting the gift of speech for all that it is worth.
○ They are exploiting it only in those qualities that are inherent in the word but external to the
mind and soul of man.
○ When writers use words purely for their music or purely as an instrument of fancy, they may
claim that they are a devotee of pure art, since they insists on using words only in their
strictly primitive qualities.
 In point of fact they are really a decadent aesthete who stubbornly confuses literature
with painting and refuses to place words in the employ of man and his civilization.

Progression in writing/art is from sophomoric to something more serious about society because the
artist is confronted with social realities and will not be able to escape them but put them in his/her
work.
• Their sophomoric certainties cast the shadow of terrible happenings that include:
○ Whole nations in the grip of terror
○ Starved
○ Maimed or killed through no fault of their own
○ Pawns in the bloody game of men lustful for wealth
○ Power crushed under the heels of the dictators
• An amorphous idealism or precocious cynicism is no longer adequate to meet the vast problems
which daily present themselves before his eyes.
• Writing that echoes books and writing the book of life does not blind artist from other beauties.
○ Writing that echoes books are writings about nature and beauty.
○ Writing the book of life are writings with compassion for the oppressed and anger for the
oppressor.
○ Today, with more sensitivity to definite principles of beauty, and justice and truth, they
pursue truth instead of phrases.
 Justice and truth means uncovering ugliness.
 Phrases is the beauty of words.

Young writers not writing about society/social themes will end up as indifferent or misanthropic.
• Indifferent or misanthropic is the dislike of humankind and avoidance of society.
• Indifference is due to ignorance or in wrongly believing that real life is beyond his/her art
○ It can be remedied by instruction if just about ignorance but if from twisted point of view,
then the case is hopeless
• Misanthropy is due to losing clarity from personal disappointment, weak will or intellectual
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confusion.
○ It can be remedied by helping the artist stand on indestructible faith or principle to develop
tough-mindedness so spiritual sensitiveness does not become a vice

Art for art sake has been discredited but it persists.


• This is easily explained through the universal fear of insecurity that include chaos and war
○ Chaos and war has had the effect of distorting the vision of a beautiful and orderly world
that third rate artists as a rule are prone to affect.
 This fear has driven them into fashioning a comfortable philosophy of escape through
the medium of which they hope to flee the ugly facts of life and the repulsive realities
of the contemporary scene.
 Like frightened children they are overcome by fear of the dark and seek refuge in
some untroubled Shangri-la of art.

The world is too much for humans because they have nothing to do with struggle.
• Humans conceive art as an escape from the ugliness around them.
○ This is the reason why they consecrate themselves to the expression of beautiful thoughts
and the creation of beautiful things.
• Life is ugly enough as it is.
○ This proposed humans to make it more beautiful with the products of their imagination.
• Humans attempts to change themselves or the world they live in that is bound to be a futile
enterprise.
• Art is a method of escape
○ It is an end in itself, never a means to an end.
○ e.g., The pen was made for purposes utterly different from the sword.
• Humans refuse to be artists in uniform.
• The argument mentioned seem sound until humans reflect that the highest form of art is that
which springs from the wells of man's deepest urges and longings of humans' love of their own
kind and their longing to be free.
○ Divest man of these interests, and they ceases to be what they are.
 The richest subject for observation, portrayal and study that the artist can have before
them.

The opinion is still widely held that the artist and the man of letters should leave social agitation alone
and stick to art, that it is not their business to help advance social justice and to defend democracy, but
exclusively to paint a landscape, compose a song or write a sonnet.
• The events in the modern world have made it increasingly difficult for artists to do their work,
there are still those who fondly cling to the delusion that there is an Ivory Tower to which the
worshippers of Beauty can retire away from the madding crowd.
○ There is no such tower because only people who imagine that they dwell in one.
• Deliberate isolation from the rest of the world and complete indifference to the fortunes of
mankind on the part of the artist can only mean one thing:
○ Humans are incapable of profound thought and deep feeling and is therefore, to that
extent, incapable also of great art.”
• Being unmindful of social issues in your art reveals lack of capacity for profound thought and deep
feeling.
○ Society is where profound thought and feeling are present

Only greatness of heart and mind and soul can produce great art.
• The development of a man's emotional, intellectual and spiritual qualities is impossible.
• Human's heart, mind and soul are enriched by fruitful contact with others.
• Humans can know themselves only through knowing others.
○ To be self-centered is to be small in heart, narrow of mind, mean of soul.
Selfishness
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○ Selfishness is the natural effect of cynical and barren solitude, and the absolute
divorcement of the artist from the world which alone can provide a large background for his
work must result in mediocre or inferior achievement.
• Growth via being in the world and through interaction.
• Self-centeredness is to separate from the world and result in inferior achievement

What artists talks about:


• The facts of everyday life disproves the contention of the Art-for-Art-sakers.
• When artists and writers meet, do they talk of art and literature?
• Outsiders who attend their gatherings and listen to their conversation, will be appalled to discover
that for hours they will talk of everything under the sun save only art and literature.
○ These two things they will dismiss after one or two remarks on the latest books and an
unusually good story that appeared the previous day.
○ Then the talk will veer to the arrant stupidities of public officials, the latest statement of
President Quezon on social justice, national defense, the war, the coming elections, and
even perhaps the latest piece of scandal.

Literature and propaganda:


• The greatest writers are ever those whose feet were planted solidly on the earth regardless how
high up in the clouds their heads might have been.
○ This is not to say that great writing must pertain to some department of propaganda.
• Propaganda is written with the definite object of influencing people to believe or to do
something.
○ There are a few books which have survived the immediate motive of propaganda that
inspired them, yet one can say truly that the bulk of literary works of permanent value
consists of those that are neither pure propaganda nor pure art but which are in some way
deeply rooted in the earth of human experience.
• The choice of the writers of the Philippines is clear that is ask if:
○ Will they spin tales and string verses in an Ivory Tower?
○ Will they fiddle while Rome burns?
○ Will they wall in a vacuum?
○ Will they, without forgetting that art must make its appeal to man through beauty and
power, rather do their work in the world of men, breathing the air we breathe, thinking of
the problems that puzzle us, lending the vision and genius with which they are dowered to
their ultimate solution
• Poetry is probably the oldest form of literature.
○ it is akin to song in which form primitive man thought to preserve the remembrance of his
heroic past.
 It is akin to magic by means of which he sought to preserve himself from evil spirits
through incantation and to win the favor of the beneficent deities through praise and
prayer.

Utilitarian function of art:


• Primitive man may be said to have stumbled upon literature, if he did not purposely fashion it as
an instrument primarily functional in character.
○ It may be stretching the point too far to say that with him art was a purely utilitarian device,
but it seems logical to suppose that the natural economy of his life was such that it did not
easily encourage indulgence in activities of an artificial, superfluous or useless character.
○ He fashioned a stone ax, it was to facilitate the securing of his daily food, and when he sang,
danced, or chanted poetry it was not merely to fill an idle hour with pleasurable excitement
but to invoke the favors of his gods.
○ With him who has not fallen into the error of regarding civilization as a process of
enfeeblement and deterioration.
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• The dogma of Art for Art's sake is the mark of a decadent generation, advanced and defended
most stoutly by those who have irretrievably lost something of the vitality of nature through
vicious self-indulgence or by those who have been tainted in the blood by some inherent vice.

Degrees of importance among artists with those writing about their times than about beauty only.
• Men in every generation who will create for their own sake beautiful things which it is our duty to
treasure.
○ These artists represent an aberration from the normal course of nature, and if we confer
upon them the name of genius, it is genius of a decidedly inferior category.
 e.g., Shakespeare is a greater artist than Christopher Marlowe, Shelley than Keats,
Walt Whitman than Edgar Allan Poe. Shakespeare, Shelley and Whitman achieved
more than mere beauty in their works; they were, in a fashion that is not to be
confused with crude instruction, teachers of men.

Beauty of words and beauty of ideas using beautiful of words:


• If poetry originated as a functional activity prose which is even more frankly utilitarian in
character.
○ Prose is of the world, it is too earthly to serve as a vehicle of pure fancy.
 The greatest masters of prose are those who have employed it in the service
principally of reason and secondarily only of the imagination, those who have used it
for what Matthew Arnold has called the "criticism of life."
 Thus the man who wrote Job was a greater artist than he who wrote the Song of
Songs, and the author of Ecclesiastes than he who wrote the Psalms.
□ The former are smiths of ideas that have the power to impart the stirring
thought.
 Their language a means to an end, instrument of ideas
□ the latter are smiths of language that have the talent to fashion the perfect
phrase.
 Their Language seems almost to be an end in itself, a device of pleasure.

Useful and good results from art other than from satisfaction of being able to express himself/herself
• What really interests the writer in the end is granting that he recognizes the value of social
content in literature, is some sort of assurance that his writing will result in something that he can
lay his hands on as good and useful.
○ For certainly he has a right to expect that, having acceded to the demands of society upon
his talent, certain measurable benefits will flow from his work wholly distinct from the
purely subjective satisfaction that is his birthright as an artist and which comes naturally
with the act of creative expression.

A writer at the present day either believes in progress or he does not.


• He either believes that:
○ Man is improvable because he has the innate capacity to correct his errors
○ Man is convinced that man is eternally damned beyond any possibility of redemption.
• All that have said about writers is meant only for those who believe in progress, not that would
withhold from the others the name of writer, but that these have excluded themselves by nature
or by choice from a calling that is essentially an endeavor of hope.
○ Writer as believers of progress
○ Art/writing as an endeavor hope

Art for the service of society wherein improvement of human condition and defense of freedom does
make a human lose from being a creative artist and will not make you a propagandist.
• The challenge which humans ask the intelligent writer to meet is not challenge to beat the drums
and to blow the trumpet of progress.
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• Humans are only reminding him that of all the ends to which he may dedicate his talents, none is
more worthy than the improvement of the condition of man and the defense of his freedom.
• The writer does not need to feel that he is being compelled to become a social reformer rather
than an artist.
○ Whatever the writer's conception of his craft may be, he can safely cling to the principle that
literature is the imaginative representation of life and nature.
 Upon this principle honestly build his achievement.
 If he is sincere and if he has the ability, he need have no fear that he will become a
purveyor of propaganda and lose caste as a creative artist.

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