Art is the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance. Consequently, relating the truth in an artwork depends on how aesthetically an author wants to show his work. Truth is something that has conformity with fact or reality. “An author corresponds his artwork through literary imagination, as a way of getting his message across to the audience. Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.”
Samuel butler said ‘Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.’ A literary work has some subjectivity in it so my knowledge issues are “Can subjective communication of thoughts hide the truth of an art? Or truth is such a thing that cannot be fully revealed through subjective medium.” Emotions, reasoning and language play a major role in spreading truth through a literary work so with regard to my knowledge issues I am taking emotion, reasoning and language as my ways of knowing and exploring the knowledge issues in the area of knowledge art.
With literature, at times when a writer claims something, within his work he does give some example and proves it right or wrong and we accept whatever the claim is as truth regardless of the fact that the story in which he is proving something as truth is fictional. What a writer writes is his point of view hence, when art is displayed truthfully the way it is, it may not have the right appeal to the readers consequently art that is truthful could be labeled as an unaesthetic work “By ‘unaesthetic’ I understand a relation of philosophy to art that, maintaining that art is itself a producer of truths, it makes no claim to turn art into an object for philosophy.
Against aesthetic speculation, unaesthetic describes the strictly intra-philosophical effects produced by the independent existence of some works of art.” Sometimes Even if the writer shows a truth that in reality exists, the way he depicts it might change it’s complete meaning and can fail to convey what he is trying to say to the readers through his work. This shows that literature doesn’t always define reality but is close to it and that sometimes it could be that people tend to not accept the truth simply because they are not ready to accept it.
Emotions are mode of influence as emotions can lead us closer to the way we see truth. Our emotions affect the meaning because they can either draw us or influence our perception of the literature work. In literature, even a story that is not true can show the reality of the society or life for example in twilight Stephenie Meyer wrote “hasn’t anyone ever told you? Life isn’t fair.”[1] Stephenie Meyer, her novel shows how the character faces problems in her life and then claims that life isn’t fair. Those readers who faced a lot of problems in their life and they relate themselves to this character might take this as truth.
Even if a writer shows truth in his work a reader will not acquire it unless he has the same emotions while reading it in line with the way the writer felt about the character while writing it. Emotions cannot take us close to truth, in the case of those readers who never face the same problems as the character. For them Stephenie Meyer’s quote wouldn’t be relatable to their lives. So to bring out the truth from a literature work, readers need to feel how the writer felt. Emotions can take us close to truth only if the reader can relate to the author’s claim in the sense what the author thinks or the experiences faced by a character in the novel.
Sometimes the Language used in art is powerful enough to bring us closer to truth. The writer’s language does affect a reader’s mind. Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize for Gitanjali, is the best example of those authors whose main focus is not to make a work aesthetic but to show the reality. The power of language is used to show the reality not to make it artistic “Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!” In Gitanjali, Rabindranath Tagore effectively used the language to expose the harsh realities of Indian society, which was castridden, irrational and extremely religious. It was the power of the language, which Rabindranath Tagore used in Gitanjali that touched everyone’s heart. It’s the language that forced readers to accept the truth that existed but wasn’t really accepted.
