the ramble dump

It returned to that same old fight, as it always does after a few drinks. I was arguing that literature can change the way people look at the world. Then one friend asked me something interesting. She asked, 'But has there really been a book that's done that? What novel has changed your life?'

I paused. The honest answer was that no single novel had ever radically changed my outlook on life. I told her that. But then I told her that literature doesn't need to radically change anything. It only has to make you think.

We talked about Orwell's 1984. It was her own choice of example, presumably because it has had the label of 'great novel' attached to it. She seemed to view it as some kind of paranoid manifesto against government and surveillance and declared it unlikely. I countered that it served as a warning. Maybe it was unlikely to happen, but it wasn't just about how many CCTV cameras we get captured on every day. I told her it was about the potential dangers of a controlling government, refuting as I usually do the line of thought that 'if you're doing nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about', because that entirely depends on what the government considers to be 'wrong'. If you have a Big Brother character whose main aim is to stay in power, 'wrong' could be anything that is felt to be a threat to that power. This threat could even be the ability of people to think for themselves: while we were so busy arguing over surveillance, we both completely forgot to mention anything about doublethink, about dumbing down the language, about how this language can be used to control...

1984 isn't important because it makes us go around pointing the accusing finger at every sign of government we see. It's not seeking revolution through paranoia. It's there to make us think. It is there to make us aware of the potential issues, however much we might feel they apply to our own lives, our own government, our own whatever.

No single book has ever completely changed how I look at the world, but countless novels have, for better or for worse, caused countless small shifts in my perspective. Like all art, literature can still have massive influence on the way we think. I think it's worth taking seriously just for that.

Labels: censorship, i am the ramblemaster, literature, morality, orwell

# posted by Chris @ 11:32 AM