What is the Purpose of Literature and Public Life?

In her speech “Literature and Public Life,” Toni Morrison discusses the importance of literature in our lives, especially in the bringing together of our private selves with our public communities. Surrounded by the spectacle of mass consumer culture, Morrison sees “literature as an amelioration to this crisis,” a crisis that drives us further and further apart as we silo into our own enclaves. The “Age of Spectacle,” as Morrison calls it, “promises to engage us, to mediate between us and objective reality in nonjudgmental ways” while “[t]he news promises to inform us.” Each of these, however, revel “the fault lines within,” driving people apart.

Literature, though, serves as a way to suture those divisions back together, providing space for healing to begin. We hold that literature opens our minds and eyes to the world around us, whether that is to other people or places. We hold that it produces within us empathy for those we come in contact with everyday. As James Baldwin put it, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

Yet, does literature actually do this? Or, does it serve to gloss over the chasms…