The Power of Literature?

August Wilson

Shaping Reality?

(Image from Wikipedia)

Richard Stern -- the Helen A. Regenstein Professor Emeritus in English Languages and Literature (University of Chicago), a writer of fiction (e.g., Almonds to Zhoof, 2005) and recipient of the Medal of Merit for the Novel (American Academy of Arts and Letters) -- comments in an entry "Alternate Realities" (5/13/2007) at The New Republic's sort-of blog, Open University, on the power of literature to shape reality.

Stern opens with a quote from John McWhorter's post on the last play by August Wilson, Radio Golf, a play that Stern says treats "the theme of personal authenticity through acceptance of one's blackness." McWhorter -- Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and former Associate Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley -- had dreaded to see this final play because he suspected that it would be about how much of a mess someone like him was. McWhorter writes:

As much as I have loved so many of Wilson's plays, I do not accept that the life I lead is unreal, inauthentic, or broken. Our vegetable garden is authentic, and I do not water my cucumbers because I wish I was white. My life is authentic. It is authentic to me ... the racial identity [Wilson] is suggesting is based on feeling ever conflicted, deeply different, with roots in a far off land in another time. That might float some people's boats, but I am more interested in feeling whole right here and now. History is important -- but not so much that, as Faulkner had it, the past isn't even past. August Wilson was, no questions asked, real. I wish that in his parting message to the world, he could have allowed that I and millions of other black people leading lives like mine are real too.

Stern agrees that "[t]hese words alone do much to vouch for McWhorter's reality, authenticity, and wholeness." Wilson's drama would thus seem to lack power over McWhorter's life.

Stern, however, turns from this point to emphasize literature's power:

Those elements of the past which form parts of what we call our identity -- family, religion, ethnic background, class, biological being including gender, strength, and health, our place in the communities of which we're a part -- almost surely lead to internal as well as external conflicts in the course of our life. Perhaps only those who never feel such conflicts can be called inauthentic and unreal. One talent of the dramatist and prose fiction writer is to stage the conflicts, that is, to so isolate or exaggerate one or more of the conflicting elements that it upsets the status quo of the drama's beginning and begins its drive toward another status, tragic, comic, or some rich combination of them. The bliss of the audience or readers is to get swept up in this two- or thirty-hour transfiguration[, e.g., in the case of Wilson's 10-play cycle,] in such a way that our own reality is enriched with what we've seen, heard, or read. The work of very powerful dramatists and novelists will in time alter, indeed, become the culture, that is, the very "reality on the ground."

This is a very strong affirmation of literature's power to shape reality. On that basis, Stern moves far abroad:

How wonderful it would be if there were in Iraq today a few dramatists with August Wilson-like gifts whose plays could enchant great numbers of Shia and Sunni with the dramatization of their complex identities in such a way as to get their fingers off gun triggers and their minds into the reflectiveness of Wilson's audiences or, for that matter, McWhorter's fine [comments].

I wonder if this could work in the way that Stern would wish. McWhorter's point -- one of them, anyway -- is that Wilson's formulation of the African-American experience doesn't fully speak to his own personal reality. If it speaks to a reality at all, then it fits more what McWhorter suggests:

I think I understand where Wilson was coming from. He grew up in the days of Jim Crow, when a black identity was not something to be chosen, nurtured and custom-fitted the way it is now.

McWhorter's point is that Wilson's dramas reinforce an already given black identity. That is their power.

By analogy, an Iraqi dramatist embodying the same sort of power would likely belong either to a Shia or Sunni community and demonstrate literary power by emphasizing an already given sectarian identity.

Thus, the power to shape reality and "in time alter, indeed, become the culture," would -- ironically -- depend upon an already given "reality on the ground," which it would reinforce, and that is not quite what we're looking for.