In this entry, I am going mention, though only a little bit, all the authors I have come across when I was thinking about the power of literature and technology. I found unfair not to bring them up in this blog.
Being guided by a chronological order, I will start with Shakespeare (who else?).
Shakespeare is the most famous english writer, from seventeenth century, of all time. He was a poet and a dramatist whose biggest concern was ageing and death. Of course the love theme is almost always characterized in much of his work, but dying is what made him lose sleep.
For that reason, he believed in the power of writing so that he would be able to live forever; I mean, he was convinced of the power of poetry and literature over death.
Actually, in one of his most famous sonnets, Sonnet 18, we observe immediately how he is asserting this theory if we take a quick look at its last two verses:
"So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee."
On the opposite, Jonathan Swift from the eighteenth century . Within Gulliver's Travel there is so much about writing, but considered not as good as Shakespeare did. Swift, through Gulliver, shows his belief in writing as a mistrusting weapon.
Therefore, when Gulliver sat sail from Brobdingnag, the captain suggests that he should write a book with his memoirs but Gulliver tells him that each book which describes the journal of a sailor used to be full of lies and that he "doubted some authors less consulted truth, than their own vanity, or interest, or the diversion of ignorant readers".
However, this is quite ironic, considering the fact that he is himself writing a book of travelling memoirs.
Straight forward to the first half of nineteenth century, we find one of the best female writers of England: Jane Austen.
Jane Austen spent most of her living writing about love, morality, women and classes in general but in her not-so-known novel (which was the first she ever wrote), Northanger Abbey. It is a book with certain gothic characteristics in which she gets to talk, moreover, about novels, writing and reading, sometimes in an ironic way.
Catherine, the main character, consumes her life reading Gothic novels, wrapped up in the reading world so much that she herself recognises she is "delighted with the book" and that she should like to spend her whole life in reading it. Therefore, Austen deals with literature theme, though maybe in a weaker way, such as Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 will later do, in a funny way, forcing her madeup characters to read reaching the point that they may not be able to tell apart reality from fiction.
<<He smiled and said, "You have formed a very favourable idea of the abbey?"
"To be sure I have. Is not it a fine old place, just like what one reads about?"
"And are you prepared to encounter all the horrors that a building such as 'what one reads about' may produce?">>
(Henry Tilney laughs at Catherine leaning to confuse reality with fiction.)
Now reaching the late Victorian (and almost modernist) period, we will slightly deal with Oscar Wilde's only novel, The Picture Of Dorian Gray.
Oscar wilde was an aestheticism philosophy follower, so he thought art was the second most important thing we have because it involves the most important thing in the world: beauty. However, he did not thought as good of culture. Furthermore, culture, according to his point of view, does not have to be good by definition, it could (and, DOES, in fact, in the book) corrupt people and be a bad influence, as it happens with the case of Lord Henry (a well-educated man who teaches Dorian not to follow anything but beauty and pleasure).
"There are no temptatios in the country," says Lord Henry to Dorian, "that is why people who live out of twon are so absolutely uncivilized. Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity to being either".
So, Wilde proves through his alter-ego Lord Henry that civilization is a necessary mix between culture and corruption.
George Orwell created, as well, around the first half of the twentieth century, 1984, a political work in which techonology and literature are used for the State to control its citizens and have them in their pocket. Telescreens supervise everyone but the ones who are members of the Inner Party, allowed to turn them off any time they want. And also, as it happens in Fahrenheit 451, books are destroyed so that it is impossible to think for oneself, ergo, rebellion is inconceivable.
Summing up, we reckon that, even though ignorance may be bliss in several cases, literature is what makes us nonconformist, mavericks, rebels in a way we should not just accept the laws whcih are stablished, we should and must consider whether we agree or not with them. That is the power literature gives you, the capacity of discovering our own selves.
<<The Savage shook his head. "Listen to this," was his answer; and unlocking the drawer in which he kept his mouse-eaten book, he opened and read:
"Let the bird of loudest lay
On the sole Arabian tree,
Herald sad and trumpet be…"
Helmholtz listened with a growing excitement. At "sole Arabian tree" he started; at "thou shrieking harbinger" he smiled with sudden pleasure; at "every fowl of tyrant wing" the blood rushed up into his cheeks; but at "defunctive music" he turned pale and trembled with an unprecedented emotion.
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
I say goodbye with a song by The Smiths, influenced by Virginia Woolf's previously explained theory of Shakespeare's Sister:
Autumn
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