Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

CWSA 27

Fragment ID: 6651

Life-Experience and Literary Creation [2]

What a stupidly rigid principle!¹ Can Buddhadev really write nothing except what he has seen or experienced? What an unimaginative man he must be! And how dull his stories must be and how limited.

I wonder whether Victor Hugo had to live in a convicts’ prison before he created Jean Valjean. Certainly one has to look at life, but there is no obligation to copy faithfully from life. The man of imagination carries a world in himself and a mere hint or suggestion from life is enough to start it going. It is recognised now that Balzac and Dickens created out of themselves their greatest characters which were not at all faithful to the life around them. Balzac’s descriptions of society are hopelessly wrong, he knew nothing about it, but his world is much more striking and real than the actual world around him which he misrepresented – even life has imitated the figures he made rather than the other way round.

Besides who is living in entire seclusion in Pondicherry? There are living men and women around you and human nature is in full play here as much as in the biggest city – only one has to have an eye to see what is within them and the imagination that takes a few bricks and can make out of them a great edifice – one must be able to see that human nature is one everywhere and pick out of it the essential things or the interesting things that can be turned into great art.

26 May 1934

¹ The Bengali writer Buddhadev Bose remarked that great literature could not be produced by people living in entire seclusion in Pondicherry. – Ed.

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