Everyday Canvas

Literature Isn't Useless

Prompt: “For the twenty million Americans who are hungry tonight, for the homeless freezing tonight, literature is as useless as a knowledge of astronomy” Andre Dubus, Broken Vessels: Essays
What do you think? Is literature as useless as Andre Dubus says?

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This is Andre Dubus the father, not Andre Dubus III the son, and I can understand the author’s pain, but I don’t agree with his conclusion.

My point of view is, yes, our basic needs have to be met for us to live, at least, like well-cared pets or animals. Yet, I believe there is more to a human being.

Literature and, in fact, all arts reflect the culture they are created in. Especially in our day, literature expands our worldview and offers an appreciation for other cultures and beliefs. In this way and with getting deeper into the human psyche, literature shows us human nature and conditions that affect all people. Through literature, we learn to handle our and other people’s imperfections better and build better critical thinking and writing skills.

Literature can also signal and warn societies of the future. The imagined technologies in some of H.G. Wells’ stories have come true, haven’t they!

Then, who can forget the new modernism movement after the nineteen twenties and thirties when objects, not people, became important with writers? The poetry took objects as its main course and replaced people with them. The objects poets and writers gave importance to were domestic or man-made and they were mostly associated with everyday life. After all, their solidity and preciousness were something to be admired and their vulnerability to breakage encouraged some serious literary creations.

As the result, objects and not people became the most important thing. I am sure this idea of people not being so important influenced societies and the general thinking, and eventually, it led to people being herded in large groups into camps, gas chambers, armies, or other unlivable conditions.

As to Andre Dubus, the father, he spent all his life in a wheelchair, which made him a pessimist. The thing with pessimism is that what a pessimist says sounds as if it is reality and everything else is frivolous. This can make the people take a pessimist’s words as the gospel truth.

Also, Broken Vessels is a deeply religious book, which this quote is from. The book has a sense of spiritual righteousness which adds to its power of conviction as well as being not too specific because the author doesn't seek the material world, but the abstract regions of his own heart.