"The Literary Imagination"

In my last entry, I mentioned that there were similarities between Charles Dicken's Hard Times, which I coincidentally happened to be reading for my British Literature class, and Rushdie's novel. Then I read the essay, "The Literary Imagination," by Martha C. Nussbaum and was surprised to find that her entire essay focused on Hard Times.

Nussbaum does a great job in talking about the value of literature and what the literary imagination does for us. She points out that if Mr. Gradgrind finds that literature must be suppressed, then clearly literature has great power over us. In Rushdie's book, the politician Snooty Buttoo hires Rashid to help him gain popularity by telling stories. Although he tries to utilize Rashid's storytelling for a political cause, it's the storytelling that intrigues people. In the end, storytelling has greater power. In fact, we are so intrigued by literature and the literary imagination that the more it is suppressed, the more we are drawn to it; when speech and storytelling are in danger of suppression, the Land of Gup finally goes to war with the Land of Chup. As the Cultmaster says, and as Mr. Grandgrind says, Fact is to be given the greatest importance and fanciful thoughts are to be shunned. Nussbaum adresses this question--"why novels and not histories or biographies?" She answers this question by writing, "Literary art, [Aristotle] said, is more 'philosophical' than history, because history simply shows us 'what happened,' whereas works of literary art show us 'things such as might happen' in human life."

But what happens in Rushdie's novel can't happen in real life. While reading the book, I was quite sure that Haroun's adventure would turn out to be a dream and was surprised when it wasn't. This is where literary imagination plays its biggest role. In presenting things that are absurd and unrealistic, it urges us to imagine a world of absurdity and surrealism. Through the surrealism, we are able to discern "what could happen." Though it's impossible for the Earth to have a second moon inhabited by creatures who are at war with one another about free speech, this fanciful story brings us to the realization that the suppression of free speech and the "public imagination" is all too real. This brings me back to what I wrote in my paper on Sylvia Plath's poem. Literary works shock us into realizing things. Nussbaum writes, "Because it summons powerful emotions, it disconcerts and puzzles. It inspires distrust of conventional pieties and exacts a frenquently painful confrontation with one's own thoughts and intentions...Literary works that promote identification and emotional reaction cut through those self-protective stratagems, requiring us to see and to respond to many things that may be difficult to confront." In his essay "Circles," Emerson says the same thing when he talks about the effect of being unsettled: "People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them." Literature "disconcerts and puzzles" us, or in Emerson's words, unsettles us. Emerson says that being unsettled is a desirable condition and Nussbaum explains that this is so because "[literary works] make this process palatable by giving us pleasure in the very act of confrontation."