Metaphor for literature

“Literature is not a lamp that lights your room — it is a lightning bolt that burns it down, so you can finally see the sky.”

At first, literature felt like a lamp to me — something that simply adds light, something that helps you see a little better. It was part of my syllabus, something to read, something to complete. I knew names, texts, and meanings at a surface level, but I did not feel their force. I was, in the words of T.S. Eliot, "distracted from distraction by distraction" — present in the text, yet absent from its meaning.

Later, when I began to engage more seriously with literature, I realised that it is not gentle like a lamp. It does not exist to comfort or to decorate understanding. Charles Lamb had already warned me of this distinction — that there is a difference between the literature of knowledge, which informs, and the literature of power, which acts upon us. I had read those words in my syllabus. But I understood them only when I felt the difference in my bones.

Like lightning, literature does not ask for permission. It disrupts.

Franz Kafka understood this force with uncomfortable precision when he wrote — "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." That frozen sea was my unexamined life. The books I had read before my serious engagement with literature had touched the surface of that ice. They had not broken it. I grew up surrounded by ideas that I never fully questioned. They felt normal because they were repeated around me — about society, religion, and everyday life. I did not strongly resist them, but I did not examine them deeply either. Literature changed that. Not slowly, not comfortably — but through moments of shock.

Karl Marx had described religion as "the opium of the people" — a numbing comfort, a borrowed warmth that asks nothing of you in return. I recognised myself in that description. I had been living, in many ways, inside an administered comfort — taking what was handed to me, spiritually and intellectually, without question. When literature struck, it struck precisely there. When I encountered ideas that challenged religion, power, and social structures, I felt that disturbance. It was not easy to accept. It was like watching something familiar being broken apart. The beliefs that once felt stable no longer held the same certainty.

George Orwell made this danger visible in Animal Farm and 1984 — showing how power does not always announce itself with violence. Sometimes it arrives through language, through repetition, through the slow rewriting of what is considered normal. "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." I had once read that sentence as fiction. Now I read it as a warning.

But that is exactly what lightning does — it destroys the illusion of safety.

Before, I thought literature was a reflection of society — something that shows what already exists. But now I understand that it does more than reflect. As the critic Terry Eagleton observed, "Literature is not simply a mirror held up to reality, but a production of reality itself." It tears through the surface and exposes what lies beneath — the structures of power, the machinery of belief, the silence that surrounds what cannot be said. Matthew Arnold had once called literature "a criticism of life" — and that word criticism is important. Not praise. Not reflection. Criticism. An active, restless, uncomfortable engagement with the world as it is. And once that happens, there is no going back to the old view.

Virginia Woolf wrote that "a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit." But I would add — it is also, sometimes, the slow poison of a comfortable lie. The lie that the world is as simple as we were told. The lie that stories are merely stories. The lie that Animal Farm is about animals, and 1984 is about a distant future.

Just like a room burned open by lightning cannot be closed again — the mind that has been struck by literature cannot return to its earlier ignorance. What replaces it is not comfort, but clarity. A wider, more open awareness of the world. This is what Roland Barthes called the moment of jouissance — not the gentle pleasure of reading, but the rupture, the shock, the text that unsettles you.

For me, literature is not something that gently guides. It is something that breaks, exposes, and forces me to see.

And in that destruction — as Rainer Maria Rilke once counselled — "You must change your life."

That is what literature said to me. Not softly. Not as a suggestion.

As a lightning bolt.