“The shadows are long on the valley’s floor, and the evening beckons with its lulling songs of ancient folktales sung around fires, it is not the time to mourn, it is the time of the early morn; For all of those that have yet to sprout their first, It is twilight for the figure with grey hair telling these ones in a tone forlorn. Reciting the poetry of some mystic figure of yore recounted in some ancient lore.
Twilight is telling dawn the tale of yesterday, and dawn is listening, no! Dawn is not listening, lulled to sleep is he by the warmth of the fire…lulled to sleep is he by the cadence of ancient folklore recited by the one with grey hairs in the twilight of his life…dawn will wake up tomorrow!”
As I type these words from a poem I wrote long ago living at a government tenement at Ha-Hoohlo in 2006, autumn is around the corner, and those whose nostrils know the smell of the season’s change know that the time of torrential rains and fading leaves is here.
It is the end of the season of warmth, and the frosty mornings and chilly evenings are soon to begin; it is like that every year.
Where other creatures are going into hibernation, some will come out and play: it is a nocturnal diurnal type of exchange in terms of existence, where some creatures function better in the day and others are more comfortable working in the dark stillness of the night. The words by the French-Algerian writer, Albert Camus, “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer…” describe the relationship between the writer and reality, between literature written and reality, and the core of the industry of writing. Seasons do have an influence on how one writes, they provide the stimulus for some of the best concepts in writing literature.
The rest of the sentence further describes exactly what it is that drove Camus the author to churn out the finest literature of the absurd of his era and perhaps the latter eras where the search for the actual relationship between literature and reality continues. Views may have shifted somewhat, but the core to the questions literature poses remains stuck to the private quest to make meaning of life and the realities associated with it.
The Camusian perspective states that, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” Fiction is part of literature that to a large extent is seen as a distortion of the truth for the sake of telling the truth. However, it is not a distortion of the truth but is to a certain level an exploration of the truth through an imaginative means, that is, fiction sets out to describe lives in the real through the extensions provided by imaginary character, created themes, well-thought-out plots, and imagined locations.
Fiction in every modern sense is the ‘avatar’ of truth such that the character with a different name in a far city may actually turn out to be the exact behaviourally replicated image of an actual figure living nearby. A stone may represent a virtue, and a flower may be the image of beauty, and that is the whole irony of the lie used to tell the truth that we call fiction.
Most writers are most creative in the midst of winter, and others still find their pen hand in the middle of summer. That which they write on makes them happy, for the pursuit of the pen says that no matter how hard the current trends in the world push in the less favourable, the spirit within the writer pushes him to the page. There is always something the writer can write on going on at any point in a day, and no matter how sad the day may seem, there is always something better to inspire him to write.
Albert Camus stated, “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself…” it is a noble pursuit that demands careful observation before jumping to the pen and paper mating session as a writer. The question of how real the world the writer is writing about usually comes to the fore for the critics (in their abundance), the issue of the work’s relevance in terms of the time it was written in, and (lately) the life story of the author with its associated interviews come to the fray. All these issues are irrelevant if one does not consider the simple question: does the given work explore real truths?
It was at the end of 1954 that Roland Barthes, the French essayist, wrote a review of Albert Camus’ masterpiece The Plague. He pointed out a lack of coherence between the real history of French Resistance against German occupation during Second World War and the fictional struggle of Oran’s citizens against a disease. For Barthes, the problem was that ‘in reality’ the struggle of resistance could not be presented, without reservations, as an allegory of people fighting a lethal disease.
The view however autocratic it may sound, can be held true by the average man in the street that does not understand the gist of the act of representing reality when it comes to literature. While it is true that French underground resistance members, in their fighting of the Nazis had to confront real people, not a disease or an abstract metaphysical problem, Camus needed to distort the picture a bit to pass the message on.
Barthes argues that: “The evil has sometimes a human face and about this, The Plague speaks nothing” (Barthes, 1955, p. 7). This observed difficulty according to Barthes has important, moral consequences. The consequences of war are similar for the majority of the people, but the real fact of the matter is that Barthes may in his review have missed one glaring factor: evil in the case of the theme of war explored in The Plague had a face.
The face had a Charlie Chaplin moustache and could rouse entire crowds into frenzy with his raving episodes of rhetoric: that figure was Adolf Hitler, the true face of the evil that sent the whole world into the arms of World War II.
The unity of the people, as presented by the struggles of the port city of Oran in Albert Camus’ novel, is formed against a dehumanised threat, an invisible enemy very similar to the current COVID-19 pandemic. The discussion about what the bubonic plague does amongst the citizens does not according to Barthes address the real moral consequences of the actual confrontation episodes between human beings. The people are fighting a plague, and they have to engage in combat with other humans to avoid being infected themselves.
This is a difficult undertaking if one views it on moral grounds; one is forced to abandon their neighbour because contact with them may lead to their being infected with the plague. America in the two world wars came in as a reluctant latecomer to the fracas; because the country thought distance would mean it was safe: but Pearl Harbor came and America created Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One therefore can conclude that Camus’ perspective on the novel being the representation of the war was actually right despite the criticism by Roland Barthes, his critic of the moment.
It is not wrong to see matters according to the critic, but at that point in time one perhaps could not foresee the return of a similar plague that would be on a larger global scale. The world is seen on the basis of the novel by the critic, and the reader interprets what the actions of the citizens of Oran would be when fighting against the threat of a pandemic. First time readers do not see the threat posed by human beings; it is only after the critic has spoken that they begin to see the other perspective of the novel’s possibility of being the representation of something other than a bubonic plague delivered by dead rats in the street.
There are numerous rats on social media platforms in this modern multimedia world, and what they spread sometimes carries equal potential with other previous pandemics. The solidarity of the people as presented by Camus, according to Barthes, even when obviously successful when opposed against fictional evil, cannot be helpful in real, historical struggles of humans against humans: “The characters of Camus could not keep themselves away from being executioners or their accomplices without accepting being solitary and this is whom they truly are”.
According to Roland Barthes, “the solitude or the failure of solidarity based on morality of characters from the novel, does not await only Camus’s heroes. The author himself, firmly believing in such morality, as is presented in the novel, is consequently condemned to loneliness.” This conclusion by Barthes was that allegorical presentation of historical resistance, depicted as a struggle against natural epidemic, leaves the reader unaware of moral dilemmas faced by people engaged in conflict.
Barthes the great scholar here was in essence wrong in terms of literary technique; there is need to leave the reader room to imagine their own world through the scope of the novel they are reading. One as a writer cannot lay everything bare; one may as well just write a work and go give lectures and interpretations of the meanings behind the themes and motifs in the work. The reader should be left with the benefit of re-imagining what they are reading on.
Barthes perhaps meant that The Plague as a novel does not represent the persistent difficulty of being actively engaged in resistance, which involves killing people and taking responsibility for deeds done in the course of war, and also the dozens or hundreds of innocents that are executed as mere collateral damage that can be dismissed and forgotten.
Though Camus does not explain in detail his moral position regarding political violence in his memoirs, his personal beliefs were founded on his strong moral acceptance that violence against oppressive ideology or tyranny is permissible. This is one of the reasons why he was the supporter of the Algerian Arab uprising though he was a member of the upper class. Algeria, like South Africa was divided into two societies, and he belonged to the upper class but still managed to write for the Algerian general society. He was in essence the outsider, though he had the opportunity to benefit from his social status as a member of the pieds noir or black feet as Europeans living Algeria were known as in his time.
The life of the author reveals one factor; the water is similar to the rock that gave birth to the well, tastes like the well, because the water is of the well. Writers are observers that are forced by their profession to stand outside society and adopt an outside-looking-in type of perspective when making their observations. This means that good literary authors are often outsiders even if they spend their evenings at gala dinners or in private restaurants once their fame catches on. This is the reality of the author in the writing of literature, but that literature too can be twisted and extended by the state of mind of the author in certain instances.
The name of George Luis Borges is associated with stories that take his readers on labyrinthine journeys with no discernible exits that cannot ordinarily be expected from more conventional fiction. His 100 Years of Solitude is a tale without a head or a tail, a classic masterpiece of a work that takes the reader through time, out of time and in time because of its endlessness. The reader meets a single character in different centuries across the span of history and the character is relevant in all the eras he is met in each chapter.
It is a technique that according to one critic is used because, “It is in this way that Borges gives his readers a radical extension of reality. While a good story can transport the reader, under Borges’ direction you are transported further still.” Some tales need no end, because there are such tales in the world of the living under the reality of one fact, continuity: the show sometimes must go on non-end or until the last patrons have fallen into the arms of slumber in their seats in the theatre.
By radically extending reality through the power of his creative vision, Borges ensured that his art can be seen in the progressive light. Culture as a concept is broad, and it has shifted shape throughout the entire span of history, and the writings of Borges as art forms gave the definition of culture a kind of imaginative liberation, allowing it to thrive in books with endless tales.
The definition to the relationship between literature and reality is found in the 1968 Massachusetts interview he had with Rita Guibert in Cambridge. The reply by Borges with regard to his work in literature was:
People are generally wrong when they take reality as meaning daily life, and think of the rest as unreal. In the long run, emotions, ideas, and speculations are just as real as everyday events. I believe that all the dreamers and philosophers in the world are having an influence on our present-day life.
What we think ultimately ends up on a page someone will read and it helps them make a meaning of the world in which they live. That is the relationship between literature and reality.
Tšepiso S Mothibi
News1 month ago
Business1 month ago
News1 month ago
Business1 month ago
Business1 month ago
News1 month ago
News1 month ago
News1 month ago