The Written Word: How the Prevalence of Writing is a Threat to Literature

Written language surrounds us. On billboards, television ads, street signs,t-shirt logos, newspapers, magazines, and menus. It seems like there is never a time when the written word isn't staring us in the face.

The ubiquity of the written word can lead us to take it for granted, to forget about its potential for joy, surprise and eloquent expression. All too easily we fall into the assumption that writing is purely functional.

A well written poem can open our mind to new perspectives. A single turn of phrase in a short story may sum up a philosophy of our own so succinctly that we say out loud, "That's it!" like an aha-moment where we discover we aren't alone in our thinking. A well written novel can change the way we view our relationships and our own stories.

This is true because literature is an art. As a true art, the goal of literature is not purely functional. The aim of Moby Dick is not to simply inform the reader on the subject of whaling. Its aims are complex and various. Concerned with the costs of adventure, the psychological risks of obsession with the past, and a worldview that links fate, fortune, and misfortune together as one system in a man's soul, this novel is so much more than an expository essay.

Literature is more than the communication of a story also. If Melville wrote Moby Dick only to "tell a story" it would be five sentences long instead of 500 plus pages. There is more, between the covers of that hefty novel, more than the measure of a plot.

Consider this comparison: If painting were purely functional, it would not be seen as one of the high arts. Instead it would be a craft. If the central goal of painting were to present objects realistically, Picasso would have never gone to Cubism. He would have gone to Cuba instead and sat on the beach sipping Margaritas and eating cold sandwiches.

Picasso, like the great writers of literature, was not an artisan. He was an artist. His interest was in exploring ways of looking at the human world. To paint a picture using blue, angled rectangles was to construe the world according to a perspective of influence. When I view one of these paintings, I sense that the figure in the painting has been drawn together from the far corners of the world - perhaps like Picasso, who lived in Spain and France and the United States - the figures in his paintings are not all of one piece. Any accurate expression of the human, as Picasso must have seen him, must take into account the various elements that make him up. The cubes of Cubism are like the pieces of influence that created the man who created the style. To put it another way, the style expresses the perspective of the painter in a way that goes far beyond the object represented in the painting.

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If the point of painting were to get objects onto the canvas as realistically as possible, we would just paste photos inside the frame and be done with it. In literature, if the point of writing were merely to tell a story with a beginning and end, we'd probably draw a diagram with stick figures and arrows.

The art of writing and painting comes in the "how" and not the "what". "How" a work is constructed, the way that the sentences are put together, the ideas thrown into the mix, the manner of description used to create the fictional world - this is the stuff of literary study.

We shouldn't forget about the art and beauty of literature as a result of being surrounded by written language. If the Bed, Bath, & Beyond flyer doesn't offer any perspective on the world we live in, no fresh modes of thought, it doesn't mean that we should give up on Baudelaire and Becket.

Words are all around us. To read or not read is not the question. The question is one of seeing. Will we see the written word, in literature, as an art capable of making us better people, or will we stop at the label on the back the candy bar?