Writers in their times: useful or useless?

Don't ask me. I don't know.

What?! I can't just say that and go now? But why? No, let go of me! I didn't do anything!!! Eh, that's why?!

Where are you, you hellish piece of paper where everything ( yes, even the reason of our existence ) is written?

If I find you, I will eat you! Non, that's not quite right... But more importantly, what was I supposed to do in the first place?

Oh, right... but no, I don't wann... OK, OK, I'll do it.

Humanity is not so much of an ideal thing.

Was the engagement of some authors in their times effective enough to change things?

Well, if you ask me, I'd say that not a book in the world could alter the reality of human beings. Because a book is nothing more than a book. The ones who will change this world can be readers, inspired or awakened by the reading of a book, but not the book itself, let alone its author. An author may be a lever, a switch that will activate the change, but I would never venture to say that he is a person who has changed societies or anything else.

But being a switch is already something.

And engagement may be many things, from information, denunciation, to action. Even a mere critique, to which some will always find a denial, "it is nice to say, but you do nothing to stop it either" kind of reaction, can put uncomfortable those who otherwise would have stayed at home and push them to do something.

One of the most revelant english author from this point of view is of course Charles Dickens. His way of describing simply what is true, and an irony with the appearance of surprise, threw in what was blurred pond, through which those who had the power were refusing to look at, and even see, a wider malaise. How then could people continue ignoring the truth and the misery of the people?

1984, written by George Orwell, is too a good way of denuncing what was not right in political system such as the distorted communism ofthe URSS. Neither of these two books explicitly say "Hurry up and do something for those who are starving you have to act," and yet it is more than obvious, by reading, that the aim of the authors is to stem a mechanism drawing humanity to its downfall.

Orwell as much as Dickens did their best, and their work was, in a way, efficient enough. But if authoritarian regimes didn't come to Europe more than it was already, how to know why? It's surely thanks to authors as Orwell, but not only. If the living conditions of people became better after the publishing of Dickens' novels, it would be unfair to say that he is the only instigator of those changes.

This does not mean that the work of an author or an artist, and comitment, is useless. By denouncing the defects of a society, you can hope to improve it. It often is only the remoteness of partisans of the same cause that causes them to be unheard.

Steinbeck, for example, has played his part in tackling the difficult life of the peasants driven far away from their homes in the early twentieth century by the banks in The Grapes of Wrath. To react, we must first know, and to know, there have to be someone to inform. This novel, although historically situated, is nonetheless universal : in general, the major actors in the misfortune of men are the men themselves.

Similarly, Lewis Allen and his poem Strange Fruit illustrate the absurdity of humanity. Whites slaughter, either physically or metaphorically, Blacks, and that even though they are all, ones as much as the others, humans, Those who are the actors for now were the victims sometimes before, because everyone was in this role one day, and that since the beginning of time .

Considering the effectiveness itself a novel, just see the respective success of all these works that survived to the years, although disturbing for some people, in our memory. An d well, for sure it has some effects. But how to know how much...