Can Literature Express Immutable Truths about Human Nature?

In the introduction to the book that I am currently reading, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino, Peter Washington writes, “Calvino concluded that, although belief in the power of literature to promulgate a particular political doctrine was as deluded as the conventional view that literature expresses immutable truths of human nature, the writer still has legitimate political roles” (Calvino xiii). This opinion, that literature does not express humanity's immutable truths stands in stark contrast to the ideology of the American New Critics. By informing “the study of literature with a concern for traditional religious and aesthetic values of a kind being displaced by science,” New Critics were able to advance their own “values of Christian theology and idealist aesthetics” (Rivkin 6). Calvino has been able to define a social and/or political responsibility for the writer without relying upon “the idea that universal truth is available through art of a kind that is not determined by material social and historical circumstances” (Rivkin 6). A writer can be the voice for those who are “inarticulate.” “By presenting possible worlds, he can remind us that there are alternatives to the present order of reality. Most important of all, he can practise the negative but essential virtue of encouraging his readers to take nothing on trust” (Calvino xiii).