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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 3, No. 7

Literature and Society — Modern Books Discussion

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Literature and Society

Modern Books Discussion.

A few weeks ago, Modem Books, the Wellington cooperative bookshop, invited all friends and supporters to a hearty wrangle over thrillers and what to do with them. The final trend of that discussion suggested a new subject, which was taken up on Wednesday, 18th September, at a well attended meeting, with Dr. J. C. Beaglehole as referee, to see fair play.

"Should literature today, to he of real worth, have a social reference and purpose?" was the subject.

Mr. F.L. Combs felt that it should. In any age, he remarked, fixing the audience with his eye, the great men, the great writers, had been supremely representative of the spirit of the age, and could not cut themselves adrift from their own times without losing something of their own quality and inspiration. The spirit of t ho present age was marked by an urge to return to something - which if not communism, was at least communalism - the social consciousness and sense of solidarity which had existed in medieval Christendom, just as it had in primitive tribal societies, and which had been broken down by the rise of Protestant individualism, competitive capitalism, and laissez-faire liberalism. He was particularly in favour of modem American literature, which he said had a vitality and a realism lacking in English work of the same period.

Mrs. Sylvia Smith objected to the "should" of the subject with its restrictive implications. Soft-voices, she whispered that "real worth" in literature meant surely durable worth, values not for an age, but for all time", values which were a matter of art and not of subject matter, and which depended on the freedom of the author to write as he pleased, and the reader to follow his own tastes and interests. Good literature of course would reflect the society of its time, but incidentally and not deliberately.

Mr. Jackson-Thomas declared that in his opinion, books, instead of being symptoms of the disease of society, should be its doctors. Literature today could not be of real worth unless it flowed with the great movement towards socialism so outstanding in the modem world. The writer as a complete human being, should also be an active and conscious influence in this movement.

Miss Cicely Hefford argued that it was not a bad thing in literature to be a symptom of the diseases of society. The doctor's diagnosis was impossible without observing symptoms. Books should give a picture of modem society, the society the writers know and were part of, and so far must have a social reference. If the writers probed evils or suggested solutions their work would have a social purpose, as so much fine literature of the past and present certainly had. The danger was that consciously purposeful writers might sacrifice the human truth of their work to their aim as propagandists of one kind or another, but this was chiefly a fault of writers who in any case would not have written great books.

An argument about "art for art's sake" literature developed, and spread to the audience, and was only interrupted by a large and bountiful supper.

C.H.