The Writer and the Society

Do writers change the society around them or is it perhaps the writers rise to the silent demands and expectations of the public? That means the about-changing society creates a silent need which the writers fulfill by their creative ventures. Or is it just a writer writes something and the society wakes up by that and goes in a new direction? Yea we can think a lot both ways. This thought was occurring to me having the great poet Bharathi in mind, when I was reading the introduction written in the DeLuxe edition of Joseph Addison's Essays. Perhaps it is written by John Richard Green who has edited it. Of course an old book. And Joseph Addison is a master of language of the yester-years. But so what, the crux of the problem is still fresh.

'If Marlborough and Somers had their share in shaping the new England that came of 1688, so also had Addison and Steele. And to the bulk of people it may be doubted whether the change that passed over literature was not more startling and more interesting than the change that passed over politics. Few changes, indeed, have ever been so radical and complete. Literature suddenly doffed its stately garb of folio or octavo, and stepped abroad in the light and easy dress of pamphlet and essay. Its long arguments and cumbrous sentences condensed themselves into the quick reasoning and terse easy phrases of ordinary conversation. Its tone lost the pedantry of the scholar, the brutality of the controversialist, and aimed at being unpretentious, polite, urbane. The writer aimed at teaching, but at teaching in pleasant and familiar ways; he strove to make evil unreasonable and ridiculous; to shame men by wit and irony out of grossness and bad manners; to draw the world to piety and virtue by teaching piety and virtue themselves to smile. And the change of subject was as remarkable as the change of form.'

Then he draws attention to what change of subject was there. It is interesting that such attentive writing has been done about the abstract features of the social interests and expressions.

'Letters found a new interest in the scenes and characters of the common life around them, in the chat of the coffee-house, the loungers of the Mall, the humors of the street, the pathos of the fireside. Every one has felt the change that passed in this way over our literature; but we commonly talk as if the change had been a change in the writers of the time, as if the intelligence which produces books had suddenly taken of itself a new form, as if men like Addison had conceived the Essay and their readers had adapted themselves to this new mode of writing. The truth lies precisely the other way. In no department of human life does the law of supply and demand operate so powerfully as in literature. Writers and readers are not two different classes of men: both are products of the same social and mental conditions: and the thoughts of the one will be commonly of the same order and kind as the thoughts of the other.'

He has put forth his observations in a clear and forceful way. And I was thinking of the situations as applied to the days of Bharathi and his times. It is easier to think that a writer comes as a lever to push ahead the society and the society gains momentum only at that instant. Or should we think in more details and only then we arrive at the real picture.?

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