Literature and Literary Criticism at the Turn of Epochs

Abstract

The world is reflected not only by the mass media in their news coverage, which is clearly ideologically profiled, so that promises about public service media resemble pre-election promises. Science and art also reflect the world. It turned out that even these two «media» are actually part of the big mass ones: science that is not in the media, doesn't even exist, not to mention arts: the media also determine the price of paintings and the bestseller status of books. It is obviously connected with the struggle for power, which is total and includes naturally also the sphere of sciences and arts. But, after all, this connection is not immediate: art, if it wants to remain art, retains something of its independence from power and money, from politics and ideology, even if it intervenes in them, because it must inevitably be their transcendent part. Of course, this also applies to belles lettres, fiction. However, its importance today – compared to the recent and distant past – has fallen catastrophically. Belles lettres no longer serves so powerfully as a source of sustenance, it does not have such social authority, literature is no longer feared by the political power, as it was before in totalitarian systems. Nevertheless, literature should seek and find human identity in various fields, including national and language one.

People are divided into two categories: some still maintain the old, perhaps now outdated, character of art as something ambivalent, ambiguous, where hyperbole, litotes, irony, self-irony, grotesque, absurd work side by side, where there is no unambiguousness which the others do like. Because unambiguity is the death of art. It is this ambiguity, irony, and, above all, self-irony, that arouses admiration in people who like art, the basic feature of which is not a norm and one opinion and one interpretation, but freedom. And sometimes even the interpretation of literature itself can seem redundant and undermine the power of art, because it kills the art itself and its essence, which is often irrational, unapproachable by reason, rather intuitively graspable: like when you want to explain why people laugh at an anecdote, or when you explain it. That is why art is an elusive statement, it is slippery, it cannot be bound: otherwise, it is no longer art. Art in general and belles lettres in particular is a bitter, painful thing. In the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes (Kohelet / Ecclesiastes) it is argued that where wisdom abounds, wrath abounds, and whoever multiplies art multiplies pain. Writers used to claim to be the conscience of the nation. However, writers need not only be the conscience of the nation; it would be enough for them, in all their transformations, to be exponents of traditional humanist themes and ideas: literature as a warning, not an idyll, because the warning image of our world is not only the work of the media and – to paraphrase Paul / Pavel Eisner – language and literature as both a temple and a fortress (continuity on solid traditions, not their undermining, which, of course, means pluralism and openness of opinion). The field for belles lettres is more than wide. Hic Rhodus hic salta.

Literature and literary criticism form communicating vessels. Even though today there is talk for the umpteenth time about the crisis and even the demise of literary criticism as we have known it, for example, the end of literary theory (e.g. according to the British professor of Bulgarian origin Galin Tihanov, whose concept does have a rational core), it is still practical, only its methods and approaches are varied, adapting to different literary material. It is the literary criticism itself which can maintain, encourage and strengthen the ambiguity that is the basis of all arts including belles lettres, because it simultaneously brings certainty and, at the same time, permanent uncertainty into our lives. This oscillation is the essence of the aesthetic function of belles lettres. If it disappears, the mourning bell could ring for belles lettres and art in general. But: as in John Donne’s Meditations and Ernest Hemingway: «... and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee».