Individual Flaws In Literature

An Individual Flaw
Because of the nature of literature, books are imperfect. Readers travel to a convenient, simplified world that appears to clarify human experience, but ends up muddling story with the author’s prejudice and bias. People have a limited capacity to understand a lived experience that is not their own. Since books are a form of simplified, convenient reality, it is important to recognize all-encompassing structures, like literature, that synthesize the human experience and expose fundamental truths that keep us civilized.
In States of Reading, Sven Birkerts claims that optimal reading transforms an individual’s reality, and allows readers to indulge in other walks of life that occur on a more convenient timeline. To create this
Books are imperfect, but when stories form a collection of human thought that influence society, literature is created. This culmination, literature, represents a body of human consciousness that documents and represents every prejudice and sympathy we have towards each other. With access to only books, disassociated from one another, humanity would be unable to discern the fundamental truths that appear in literature. According to Mario Vargas Llosa, “Nothing teaches us better than literature to see, in ethnic and cultural differences, the richness of human patrimony, and to prize those differences as a manifestation of humanity’s multifaceted creativity” (Llosa, 2002, 297). In a society without literature — or a society with only books — people could relate only to each other through insignificant similarities and differences. There would be no sum of human experience, no big picture, and our connections would be significantly less meaningful than those in a society that uses literature to synthesize everybody’s experience in an accessible way. According to Llosa, we would be “spiritually barbaric” (Llosa, 2002,
In a way, this is the goal of literature. Literature is a gathering of every imaginable text, idea, and description to create a cumulative understanding of life that presents underlying themes and facts that allow us to not be spiritually barbaric. This is probably what Proust meant in saying “Real life, at last enlightened and revealed, the only life fully lived, is literature” (Llosa, 2002, 298). Individual books and humans contain a narrative that is personal and biased. Only when a vast accumulation of individuals come together to create a god-like understanding of the world can a truly enlightened understanding of life emerge. And in a tangible way, that enlightenment exists in literature, coming from flawed, individual books, bubbling and flowing into an extensive literary