Stan Dragoș - Mihai

The Role of Literature in Contemporary Society

We are living in strange times and there is no doubt that great achievements of
intellectuals and great events are constantly memorialized. In this essay, I will attempt to
approach the role of literature in contemporary society, following a method that Maurice
Blanchot, the French critic proposed in his seminal work Le pas-au-dèla (The Step Not
Beyond), more precisely taking one step back (therefore going back to Plato’s paradigm of the
cave, as well as several mid-twentieth century thinkers) in order to be able to contemplate the
present. Maurice Blanchot is a critic who constantly asked the question of literature from his
récit L'Attente l'oubli (Awaiting Oblivion, 1962) to La Folie du jour (The Madness of the Day,
1973) and L'Ecriture du désastre (The Writing of the Disaster, 1980). In Blanchot’s view, the
pure question whether literature at all existed was the beginning of literature itself. 1
Whilst in the past, the role of literature was mainly developing the individual’s moral
sense and integrating him in society (let us remember for instance the role of Renaissance
tragedies, which were supposed to educate the audience through catharsis), literature still
plays a key role in contemporary society even if not as direct as in the past. On the one hand,
literature has a significant influence on the relationships between individuals because it stands
for human sensibility and it offers a mirror-like image of society in the most trivial manner.
At the same time, it challenges the critical thinking and it makes people appreciate beauty,
developing their aesthetic taste. On the other hand, its main goal is still to educate and to
develop people’s ability to communicate, to express themselves fluently; in other words,
through archetypes, the gentle and sublime consciousness of open minds, it makes an
individual’s way of thinking more subtle. Literature does not transform the individual’s
personality spontaneously but rather it works on one of the deepest levels of his conscience,
where the seat of all human emotions lies.
Our contemporary society is naturally shattered by contradictions and different in
ways of thinking and development of culture; we cannot draw a line and say that all
individuals from all social classes are receptive to literature and culture, yet, we can say that
access to culture is easier to the ones who read literature. The less one reads, the less he will

1
See Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Original Experience”, in The Space of Literature, trans., intr. Ann
Smock (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 209-210.
be able to understand the society he lives in. I would attempt to illustrate this by going back to
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave where a group of people was living chained to the wall of a cave
for all their lives and constantly faced a blank wall. Individuals were entertained by shadows
that were projected on the wall and by things that were passing in front of a fire behind them.
These shadows might be considered metaphors standing for the society that never seizes to
hide its essence behind appearances. Plato describes the role of the philosopher who is
doomed to be a prisoner in a realm of confusion but who eventually frees himself from the
cave and learns that the shadows on the wall don’t offer an image of reality at all and that he
can make the difference between truth and reality through personal contact with objects rather
than through the shadows that are seen by the prisoners.
Taking one more step back, I will also synthesize Jacques Derrida’s point of view
regarding the “strange institution” called literature as he named it, but also Jean-Paul Sartre’s
rhetorical questions “What is Literature?”, “Why Write?” and “For Whom Does One Write?”
which represented in fact titles of chapters in his work “What is Literature” and Other
Essays. In his Acts of Literature Jacques Derrida focuses on the primary question “What is
literature?” and also on the secondary query “Who decides?”. Derrida’s interest in literature
came as early as his first philosophical concerns and his preoccupation with writing derived
from his desire as an adolescent to approach autobiography and a rather confessional style. In
what he called “the moment of narcissistic adolescence”, he felt the need of literature that
could also help him respond to questions such as “Who am I? / Who is me? / What is
happening”.2 For Derrida, literature was an institution that allows the writer to say everything,
the entire philosophy of his conscience, what he considers right or wrong and mainly his
views of society and its flaws “The space of literature is not only that of an instituted fiction
but also a fictive institution which in principle allows one to say everything. To say everything
is no doubt to gather, by translating, all figures into one another, to totalize by formalizing,
but to say everything is also to break out of prohibitions.”3 J. Hillis Miller, an American critic
and deconstructionist who constantly analysed precisely Derrida’s approach of literature
assessed the French philosopher’s “allegiance to literature” as another version of this
recognition of the performative, constitutive efficacy of the "literary" dimension of
language”4, which represented a challenge to the notions of ethics and politics at the end of
the twentieth century.

2
See Jacques Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature”, in Acts of Literature, edited by Derek
Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 35.
3
Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature”, 36.
4
J. Hillis Miller, “Derrida’s Topographies”, in Topographies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 314.
 In his interview with Derek Attridge, Derrida confessed his bewilderment with “the
possibility of consigning things to paper”: “The philosophical becoming of these questions
goes by way of the content of the texts of the culture I was emerging- when one reads
Rousseau or Nietzsche, one has a certain access to philosophy-just as much as through naive
or marvelling bewilderment at remains as a written thing.”5To answer the question “What is
literature?” Derrida went way back to his adolescence when he first discovered Jean-Paul
Sartre’s texts. Nausea, Sartre’s epistolary novel, made a strong impression and provoked a
mimetic movement on him.
Jean-Paul Sartre was a man who, above all, aspired to write for his time; long after his
death in April 1980, the reactions of his name were ranged from both adulation to dismissal;
this represented what Sartre called before his last words “the superiority of live dogs to dead
lions” 6 . Being a man who craved to write for his public, dismissal was the harshest of
condemnations; it is still a question of whether Sartre represents a figure of the post-war
modernity or that his existential ideas are modern enough for our present way of thinking. The
main questions that persist throughout Sartre’s essays are related to writing and the reasons
behind writings. He is curious to know why someone with a talent for arts would choose
literature instead of sculpture, painting or even music; was a writer of past centuries asked to
apply his talent to other arts? Or one could easily apply his talent to any source of the artistic
calling.
Doubtful one could find the need to express his emotions through colours and sound
rather than words. An artist sees the bouquet of white roses, he knows that they signify purity
and he stops to smell the odour in the highest degree before he can start transferring the
emotions that surround him to the canvas; the result will consist in the representation of an
imaginary object that passed the filter of his conscience, a replica of the original, an object
that copies the identity of the real one just like a portrait represents a person that is seen
through the eyes of an artist and it cannot speak in the name of the person that it represents;
let us consider the fact that another artist can paint the same portrait in a different manner, that
is evidence that we are different in the way we see things. Therefore, we cannot consider
sounds and colours as language:

And if he puts together red, yellow, and green, there is no reason why this collection of
colours should have a definable significance, that is, should refer particularly to another
object. Doubtless the composition is also inhabited by a soul, and since there must have
been motives, even hidden ones, for the painter to have chosen yellow rather than violet,
it may be asserted that the objects thus created reflect his deepest tendencies. However,

5
Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature”, 37.
6
See Jean-Paul Sartre in “What Is Literature?”, 3.
 they never express his anger, his anguish, or his joy as do words or the expression of the
face; they are impregnated with these emotions; and in order for them to have crept into
these colours, which by themselves already had something like a meaning, his emotions
get mixed up and grow obscure. Nobody can quite recognize them there.7

Nausea, which Sartre published in 1938, was welcomed with astonishment but also with
curiosity and misapprehension As Maurice Blanchot pointed out, critics wondered whether it
was a novel whilst pondering such a work “in which the creation of types, the representation
of life, attention to circumstances count for little.”8 Several readers and critics saw it as a
philosophical essay but Sartre meant more than that; his ambition drove him to create a myth,
not to re-enact the flaws of human life but to verify the source of all myths. He had no interest
in adventures, fantasies, things out of the ordinary, complacency of the characters; he
approached the most intimate of all genres, the tragedy, via the philosophical questioning of
existence. He took the novel to another level by inserting philosophical notions like being and
existence, which was the main preoccupation of phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl and
Martin Heidegger. Sartre ended up telling the utopian story of a man “[...] struck dumb before
the fact of existence and seeking to go beyond it to a deeper world.” 9 Sartre can be a
reincarnation of the myth of Doctor Faustus which was harnessed by Christopher Marlowe
and his successor Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Jacques Derrida considers literature a historical institution, meaning that it exists since
writing appeared, with rules and conventions but also an institution of fiction that gives
anyone who adheres to it the power to say anything he wants therefore, avoiding the rules and
breaking free of the moral constraints. The imagery behind the words can be vast and it stands
for the principle of power “to break free of the rules, to displace them, and thereby to institute,
to invent and even to suspect the traditional difference between nature and institution, nature
and conventional law, nature and history.”10The institution of literature spawns the modern
idea of democracy in the Western civilization and it certainly forms the freedom of speech in
the mind of the reader. Modernist texts in the twentieth-century, also considered non-
traditional works, have in common the same thing, they bear “within” the question “What is
literature?” and “What should we do with it?”, they function as a counter-attack towards the
institution of literature and speculate its weaknesses; it is very important to determine the
reason behind a literary text and the intentions for which it serves.

7
Jean-Paul Sartre, “What is Literature” and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 26.
8
Maurice Blanchot, “The Beginning of a Novel”, in Michael Holland, ed., The Blanchot Reader (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 33.
9
Blanchot, “The Beginning of a Novel”, 34.
10
Derrida, Acts of Literature, 37.
In countries that after the Second World War fell under the Iron Curtain, democracy was
replaced by censorship that annulled authors’ and readers’ rights. If we take for instance the
fact that for almost fifty years, authors were forced to write propaganda literature in favour of
the communist party and were banned to write anything that could inspire masses towards the
idea of democracy, we can see that even under such hard times, literature found a way
through, by resorting to use what Andrei Terian had called ‘Aesopian language’, which was a
form of ‘literary travesty’11 by which writers would criticise the repressive regime of Ceauşescu.
The idea of democracy and social justice could therefore penetrate even in the ‘golden age’ (epoca
de aur), which was as Vladimir Tismăneanu put it, “the malignant outgrowth of narcissism, with
the entire population subjected to an erratic Stalinist dictator’s dreams of imperial grandeur”12.146
The third part of this essay will focus on literature as a fundamental element for the
development of contemporary society. No longer an age of censorship, has our contemporary
society offered a writer the possibility to communicate freely without any concern that his
work will be stopped from publication. The contemporary writer who lives and writes in a
democratic society can guide his/ her readers towards symbols of social injustice but it is up
to the reader to decide whether facts that are presented are true or not. The reader can judge
the characters in his own way, he can make out his opinions regarding, for instance, what
wrong has been done, what racist act disturbed the peace of a community and who must be
punished for his/hers crimes against others whereas “The painter is mute [...] He paints the
Arab, the Child, the Woman; the good one knows that neither the Arab nor the proletarian
exists either in reality or on his canvas. He offers a workman, a certain workman. And what
are we to think about a workman? An infinity of contradictory things.”13
However, even in our contemporary age, there are writers who were citizens of a state
but who felt denizens of the world and wanted to express through words what they suffered;
writers like Azar Nafisi, Ruhollah Khomeini, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi who are now
isolated from their countries because they share different religious views or even dare to think
otherwise.
In conclusion, we must accept literature as an indispensable tool that serves our
imagination whenever it is needed and we cannot deny its historical and artistic legacy; a
writer who has the gift of writing will always serve his Age because through each of our acts
we continuously discover new faces of the world. The world is a vast place to live in,
constantly changing, finding new forms of organization and literature has survived the

11
Andrei Terian, “The Rhetoric of Subversion: Strategies of “Aesopian Language’.” in Romanian Literary
Criticism under Late Communism’, SLOVO, 24/2 (Autumn 2012), 83
12
Vladimir Tismăneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003), 214.
13
Sartre, “What is Literature” and Other Essays, 27-28.
quarrel; it successfully offered us a retrospective image of other civilizations from other
cultures and naturally other periods of time, that is why we cannot deny its compulsory role,
for our development as better persons, in our contemporary society.

Bibliography

Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Translated, and introduction by Ann Smock.
Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

Blanchot, Maurice. The Blanchot Reader. Edited by Holland, Michael. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers, 1995.
Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Literature. Edited by Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,
1996.
Miller, J. Hillis. “Derrida’s Topographies”. In Topographies. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1995.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. “What is Literature” and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1988.
Terian, Andrei. “The Rhetoric of Subversion: Strategies of ‘Aesopian Language’.” Romanian
Literary Criticism under Late Communism , SLOVO, 24/2 (Autumn 2012), 79-95.
Tismăneanu, Vladimir. Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian
Communism Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.