Vivas make everyone anxious, and when they are 30% of your grade, you have to be a little careful. I’m generally a bit anxious about demonstrating my understanding to a face staring blankly at mine, but literature vivas are different. I love the ease they bring and the fact that you can never be wrong, at least not entirely if you have a little idea of what you’re talking about.
So, as the clock struck 10 a.m. on a random day, of a random month, in a COVID year, I opened my Google meet and recalled my name and roll number to a black screen ready to ask questions. It was a literature viva. I knew what to expect-themes, characters, setting, plot, etc., so it didn’t bother me. I thought it was going to be just another viva and I’d be done in under 15 minutes. And so it began, without me knowing that I’d remember this one for long. After I introduced myself to the teacher I had never met or seen before but only heard about on Google Meet classes, the first question was tossed on my way, “Tell me everything you know about the novel “Notes from Underground”. Easy, I thought.
It was a novel by Dostoevsky and one that resonated with me, so it should not be difficult. I was happy with the question. As I began to describe the novel, the underground man, his lifestyle, his life of alienation, and the terrible failure of having harmonious relations with fellows and a few human connections, the story continued to flow out as my mind let out layers of details. I began by explaining how the underground man remains unnamed throughout the novel because his alienation is his gift.
He talks to himself as well, how he is constrained by the scepticism that prevents him from living life as other people do, and how his emotional being is so distressed it keeps him away from any meaningful human connection, any connection to any animate thing at all, how he is barely human in his loneliness. The Underground Man, like many of us, second-guesses his decisions, rendering him unable to make any decisions at all. Although this man might not feel relatable to many, in most ways, he is just like all of us: alone in his misery, tangled in his thoughts, yearning for human companionship but not knowing how to approach one, loathing himself and just feeling estranged. I explained how the underground man, having retired and secluded himself in his shabby apartment, loathes society and its active members.
Some time had passed before I realised that some of these feelings were felt by Holden Caulfield in The Catcher of the Rye by J.D. Salinger. And so I mentioned him in my viva as well. The viva ended twenty-five minutes later. The thought stayed with me after it had started. On many occasions, I felt like the underground man, a 40-year-old living in Russia. And so Holden Caulfield, a 16-year-old New York native, felt as he struggled to leave his childhood behind to enter into the world of adults. What the underground man felt in 1840 was felt by Holden Caulfield in the early 1950s and by me in the COVID years of 2019–20 as the whole world felt estranged, vulnerable, scared, longing for human connection but crippled away from society.
What connected us, across timelines and distances, was nothing but literature and poetry. The humanness of our beings was cemented by mutual experiences in life and the acceptance of our feelings. People often ask about the importance of literature, implying that only what can be capitalized is worth studying at all. Literature, I tell them, makes life less lonely; it makes sorrow bearable.
In an interview with TED, Ethan Hawke once said, “You’ve got to ask yourself,” “Do you think human creativity matters?” Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, right? They have a life to live and they’re not really that concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems or anybody else’s until their father dies, they go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don’t love you anymore, and all of a sudden you’re desperate to make sense out of this life, and “Has anybody ever felt this bad before? How did they come out of this cloud?” Or the inverse, something great happens. And that’s when art’s not a luxury, it’s actually sustenance. We need it. “
The need for poetry has been criticised throughout all ages. Sir Philip Sydney, in his essay, “An Apology for Poetry,” mentions that all other human arts are subordinate to nature; poetry alone transcends nature since the poet is a maker. He argues against the critiques of poetry—that poetry is a waste of time, it is the mother of all lies, it is the nurse of abuse, and that Plato would have none of it, so he got poets banished from his Republic. Sydney refuted all these claims and even argued that Plato was not against poetry in general.
So, when poets like William Wordsworth and Mary Oliver fill their readers with love for nature and hope for life, they make it easy to understand that life is nature and nature is poetry, and thus poetry endures, whether its critics like it or not. John Keating in Dead Poets Society says, “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute.” We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. “
Poetry, in a sense, ignites the human spirit. Poetry has always been used to express what plain language cannot: to celebrate loved ones, to honour national and religious heroes, and to praise God. Poetry has always delivered. Poetry has also been a very important element in revolutions and reforms. As John Keating says, “No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.” The universality and timelessness of poetry are what sustain it, and as long as humans are sensitive to emotion, poetry will always find a way to cherish joys, lessen sorrows, and impart hope to the dejected. Every person, even those averse to poetry, at some point in their lives feels a need for poetry, and poetry sure does find them.
James Baldwin says, ” You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.” And to the readers, I say, “That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse”, what will your verse be?
