WHAT WOULD NOT DO TO SAY

THE “CLEANSING” OF GEORGE ORWELL

A Real Shove from Above

In many ways, George Orwell’s greatest book is Homage to Catalonia, which documents his direct participation in the Spanish Revolution (civil war), a great book of a crucial revolution that is essentially elided from James Wood’s sociopolitical take on Orwell’s life and works in his April 2009 New Yorker article, “A Fine Rage” slugged “George Orwell’s revolutions.” Orwellian: the most liberatory of “revolutions” involving George Orwell is essentially nowhere to be found in “A Fine Rage… George Orwell’s revolutions.”

Wood claims Orwell “idealizes” the working class, then immediately cites Orwell’s description of what Wood labels “the best kind of proletarian home.” If “best” does not tend toward the “ideal” what does? A month earlier in the New York Review of Books, Julian Barnes notes in “Such, Such was Eric Blair” that Orwell “described the condition of the working class with sympathy and rage, thought them wiser than intellectuals, but didn’t sentimentalize them; in their struggle they were as ‘blind and stupid’ as a plant struggling toward the light.” Hardly ideal.

Wood describes Orwell as having “Rousseauian tendencies” (to be a sort of nature lover, Wood means), and additionally calls him a “puritan,” and labels him an “upper-class masochist” who wanted not to “level up society” but to “level it down” – and then, a “puritan masochist” whose “real struggle… was personal…the struggle to obliterate privilege, and thus, in some sense, to obliterate himself. This was at bottom a religious mortification.” And “perhaps Orwell had, by the late nineteen-forties, soured on socialism, along with capitalism.” No longer then a masochist suicide? Please. Wood would do well to save the amateur psychoanalysis hour for himself. “Orwell feared what he most desired: the future.” Orwell had “a tendency toward drab omnipotence.” Such is Wood’s New Yorker style piety, vacuity, and smear.

Wood describes a “judgment against Dickens” by Orwell as being “unwittingly comic.” Orwell: “However much Dickens may admire the working classes, he does not wish to resemble them.” Wood wonders, “Why would anyone want to…resemble …the working classes…least of all the working classes themselves?” He adds “…the problem with ‘admiring’ the working class is that it doesn’t, on its own, help anyone to get out of it at all.” Which is evidently why Orwell, far beyond admiration, risked his life in fighting on behalf of the working classes during the Spanish Revolution, as described in Homage to Catalonia.

Clearly Orwell saw more virtues and value in “the working classes” than Wood does. In fact, it is the many pressures applied by the working classes against the ruling classes that help to shrink the size of the more oppressed classes and ameliorate conditions within. Gifts are rarely granted from above, not without being forced from below by those who do the work – an active feature of many working classes that is admirable, and worth resembling.

In Spain, Orwell was willing to fight and to risk dying among the working classes who were in revolutionary mode, attempting a liberatory revolution that certainly did not spring from the privileged ruling classes but rather pushed against them – a “real shove from below,” a means to change mocked by Wood: “Ah, that will do the trick.” Does principled, justified force from below not sometimes produce real concessions from above? Does not much progress, let alone a revolution, often require it? Does Wood forget how the American colonies once sent his homeland’s Kingdom packing? The Spanish revolt of the working classes was largely a liberatory revolution that the wealth of the world left on its own, to be crushed. Other working class revolutions succeed or lay groundwork for progressive movements to come, to gain power under more peaceful conditions. One may see the Americas not least, including contemporaneously, for inspiring examples.

Before and during the Spanish Revolution (civil war), largely working class Spanish socialists and anarchists organized popular workers groups and movements, struggled, fought, and in part successfully replaced Republican Spain’s oppressive liberal capitalist rule, while holding off the fascism of Franco, for a time at least, greatly transforming peoples lives on a large scale, until the revolution was crushed by force – and mocked or ignored by others.

Establishment Innuendo

There is no little reason to want to embody the genuine qualities and enlivening characteristics of the working classes in a variety of ways. Orwell shows why most dramatically in Homage to Catalonia, the revolution blanked from Wood’s New Yorker article on “George Orwell’s revolutions”:

[In Barcelona 1936] it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also, I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers’ State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed or voluntarily come over to the workers’ side; I did not realise that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.

[See an expanded excerpt of Homage to Catalonia appended.] What occurred in Barcelona, revolutionary Spain in 1936 was extraordinary, partially witnessed and participated in by Orwell, and had been long built toward by working class organizing – popular progressive action. Had western “democracies” lifted a finger to assist the anarchists and liberatory socialists, rather than purposefully failing to support them and even working against them, the world could well be a far better place today. But little official sympathy and far less than needed appreciation and understanding of such popular movements exists or is tolerated still today and little, none, or negative appreciation is mainly engendered by the most highly acclaimed prominent fiction and prominent literary criticism of our time – as we see in the essential blanking of Homage to Catalonia and its crucial import in Wood’s sociopolitical review of Orwell and his works.

Regarding various features of Orwell’s work, Wood belittles the thoughtful observations (Wood calls them “attacks”) of postcolonial analyst Edward Said on the one hand, and quotes approvingly and snidely from Philip Larkin, “a racist who wrote of stringing up strikers,” as Terry Eagleton notes. Such tenor and shading readily come across to many casual readers, let alone to close readers. As does plenty of other establishment innuendo: “So the question hangs over Orwell, as it does over many well-heeled revolutionaries: Did he want to level up society or level it down.” If such a “question hangs over…many well-heeled revolutionaries” (hanging above one’s head by a thread like the deadly Sword of Damocles, one presumes), then similarly loaded questions hang over all establishmentarians, and especially over prominent ones like James Wood, only moreso. At best, the former has much to lose, and the latter has much to save. The innuendo is of some potentially frightening change posed by revolutionaries, never mind that establishmentarian forces have long been deadly and oppressive for many, and are potentially fatal for the species entire. Such is the status quo or reactionary rhetoric, the basic line of Wood’s essay. This is the voice of not only the counter-revolutionary, which one assumes Wood realizes, it’s the voice of the anti-humane, the inhuman, which he either fails to grasp or does not want to, joining a long line of Harvard type intellectuals committed in opposition to libertarian socialism – an overt acceptance of which, recent polls indicate, is on the rise in the US, the basics ever more popular.

Establishment PR

The basic ideology of James Wood to this point is that of a status quo liberal, that is a neo cold warrior, an ideology that may delude itself to presume it is largely progressive, while essentially manifesting itself as status quo, with reactionary tendencies.

James Wood is typical of the New Yorker, or maybe somewhat more reactionary. His article on Orwell presents the New Yorker’s kind of mental cleansing for and by the liberal and conservative readers of the magazine, the mindset of ruling class culture and society. It’s not only the voice of going along with the ruling establishment to get along, it’s the voice of the blinkered and the blinding. “If you have gone to the best schools,” notes Noam Chomsky –

and graduated from Oxford and Cambridge, and so on, you have instilled in you the understanding that there are certain things it would not do to say; actually, it would not do to think. That is the primary way to prevent unpopular ideas from being expressed. The ideas of the overwhelming majority of the population, who don’t attend Harvard, Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge, enable them to react like human beings, as they often do. There is a lesson there for activists.

Activists and artists in general. (One such lesson: read and write through Liberation Lit – liblit.org – and other liberatory venues.) Though sometimes beneficial in truncated ways, the New Yorker’s literary and other art efforts are often slight, wrong, corrosive, or beside the point. Much of the literary establishment takes its cue from the New Yorker, or otherwise more-or-less shares its class-based affinities, not infrequently with much admiration and the wish to resemble.

Wood points to the contemporary relevance of Orwell’s “coinages” in his novel 1984, such as “‘doublethink’ and ‘Newspeak’ and ‘Big Brother’ [that] now live an unexpectedly acute second life” – only “now”? “unexpectedly”? – “in the supposedly free West” but Wood makes no mention that Orwell wrote 1984 based in substantial part on his experience of working as a propagandist for BBC during World War II, where he was surrounded by and part of propaganda techniques, including those of the sort commonly used by the Nazis. Jutta Paczulla notes in the Canadian Journal of History (Spring-Summer 2007):

When writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell drew on the MOI [Britain’s Ministry of Information] as a model for the novel’s Ministry of Truth. Not only does the Ministry of Truth building in the novel resemble that of the MOI, but Room 101, where the Eastern Service Committee held its meetings, becomes the room in which Winston, the central character in Nineteen Eighty-Four is tortured and broken. Moreover, the atmosphere created by the mutual censorship conducted by [Orwell’s] BBC colleagues is reflected in the novel’s atmosphere of paranoia and anxiety.

Introducing the first book of the recent two volume edition of Orwell’s work that prompts Wood’s article is George Packer, another of the New Yorker’s liberal apologists for imperialism, as detailed by Edward Herman in “George Packer and the Liberal Struggle to Support Imperialism” Z Magazine 2005. Packer claims there is:

a strange gap in Orwell’s work – for he never wrote a novel or nonfiction book about the most historically important event of his life [World War II, during which] he spent ‘two wasted years’ as a producer in the Eastern Service of the BBC.

Setting aside the question of whether or not WWII or the Spanish civil war or some other event was “the most historically important event in Orwell’s life,” the point is apparently inconceivable to both Packer and Wood that Orwell’s famed novel 1984 is based substantially on his time working for the BBC during World War II. While Orwell directs the satire of 1984 most evidently toward the Soviet Union, also Franco Spain, the satire applies directly to the propaganda institutions and capacities of the liberal “democracies” where Orwell lived and breathed some of the atmosphere and propaganda realities and irrealities that he describes and conjures up in 1984. Newspeak, doublethink, Big Brother, memory hole – all are longstanding specialties of the BBC, and dominant US media, as Orwell came to know and experience ever more intimately during World War II. Thus, the “strange gap” is resoundingly filled and the centrality of Orwell’s coinages to the West today is not only not unexpected by unbiased observers, but an understanding of the Orwellian has long since been remarked upon and employed in independent media analyses of the dominant corporate media of the US, England, and allied states.

About his state propaganda work at the BBC, Orwell expressed publicly that he kept the “propaganda slightly less disgusting than it might otherwise have been”…while writing privately in his diary:

You can go on and on telling lies, and the most palpable lies at that, and even if they are not actually believed, there is no strong revulsion. We are all drowning in filth…. I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth….

“Orwell’s problem,” as Noam Chomsky describes it, permeates the establishment in the US and beyond: How is it that oppressive ideological systems are able to “instill beliefs that are firmly held and widely accepted although they are completely without foundation and often plainly at variance with the obvious facts about the world around us?” As evidenced in James Wood, George Packer, et al, Orwell’s problem has not lessened since Orwell’s lifetime, and now the Obama administration is a leading part of the problem. There is no mention in Wood’s article about the Orwellian nature of today’s top rulers. No mention that President Obama and his administration’s rhetoric of “change” and “security” purposefully mask the essential preservation of the status quo, let alone continue and escalate the militarism – a state of affairs that recalls “doublethink” and “Newspeak” and “Big Brother” as much as “Fox News…during the last Presidential election” recalls 1984’s “Hate Week.”

By mentioning only Fox News election coverage, Wood softens his weak nod to the relevant immediate, neatly placing Orwell and Hate Week distinctly in the past. (Meanwhile, for similar ongoing Hate Years in regard to immigration see CNN and Lou Dobbs…) This helps the establishment generally and the Obama administration in particular to “manage expectations” raised by sweeping progressive campaign rhetoric. It gives ruling party Orwellisms a pass. It overlooks the brazen duplicitous propaganda of the current rulers – never mind that they all along as background clinically and soberly revealed that their sweeping progressive flourishes were not to be taken seriously, that is honestly. In this empire of lies, to fuel this empire of lies, the financial institutions – the core funders of both the Democrats and the Republicans that are currently thieving bottomless dollars from taxpayers by way of the Obama administration – gave more money to candidate Obama than to candidate McCain. For now at least, the Obama crowd are more the establishment’s preferred front faces than are the “Hate Week” “Axis of Evil” demonizers. Wood gives an Orwellian pass to the current rulers.

Like a “good liberal” – though many liberals (Hillary Clinton, for example) ludicrously prefer to be thought of as “progressive and perhaps soon as “socialist” – Wood lauds the establishment line about the basic economic status quo, giving the impression that “upwardly mobile working classes” change society enough to justify it. At least Wood gives no indication otherwise. Where has he written for libertarian socialism or for much or any vision of emancipation from class and conquest? That’s no minor or irrelevant part of literature, or shouldn’t be. He gives a few nods to the oblique or roundabout, say, the allegories of Saramago, while part-and-parcel with the establishment he largely ignores or distorts central works and tendencies in literature that are especially liberatory and comprehensive and basic – for example: of the Victorian era, Victor Hugo’s anti death penalty novel The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829) and his anti-class-exploitation novel, Les Misérables (1862); of the “modernist” era George Orwell’s liberatory partisan nonfiction narrative Homage to Catalonia (1938); of today Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s unsurpassed novel Wizard of the Crow (2006). Les Misérables and Wizard of the Crow are as great as any novels ever written, plus of more profound, comprehensive, and quality norms than perhaps any. Wood has never mentioned these tremendous works, or others of the sort, while writing out of history the liberatory tendency of which they are part – sent down the Orwellian memory hole – and instead expounds at length along the establishment’s bunkered path.

The Sinister Fact

Where are today’s liberatory critics? At Counterpunch. ZNet. Liberation Lit and related sites. And scattered in some limited handfuls in virtually invisible academic journals. The status quo discourages them and filters them out. One does not become either a New Republic or a New Yorker critic by taking a much liberatory route. Instead one propounds a liberal (and conservative and reactionary) literature of class oppression, repression, distortion, or marginalization. In fact, one had better take issue with those who do venture too close, too deep into the more fully liberatory, as Wood does in chastising Orwell for not appreciating the appeal and benefits of “upward mobility,” while essentially blanking any mention that Orwell went out of his way to put his life on the line for full working class emancipation. Wood, at best, sometimes lauds improvements in the conditions of oppression, while mainly propounding the point of view of the victors, the basic status quo, the so-called “conventional wisdom” of which Wood is largely a synthesizer and delimiter in literature. Orwell dared more – intellectually, not to mention otherwise – and in doing so achieved far more of vital insight and work than Wood and the New Yorker can allow. With the New Yorker goes the vast majority of the literary establishment, academic and otherwise, minimal ranging aside.

In addition to extraordinary work that is especially accomplished, like Wizard of the Crow, there are other less accomplished but extremely important and powerful popular novels like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin that also get regularly slighted and dismissed by the relatively prominent, including Keith Gessen in his introduction to the second book of the recent two volume edition of Orwell’s work. No slight intended! Gessen would no doubt protest, though unless he can read the future, he has no way of knowing that Orwell is wrong, let alone “howlingly wrong when [Orwell] says that Uncle Tom’s Cabin will out-live the complete works of Virginia Woolf.”

First, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Woolf’s complete works both remain of general interest, both may try one’s patience, both are valuable and compelling. Second, due to historical and social reasons, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is at least as culturally integral as Woolf’s complete works, possibly moreso and plausibly considerably moreso. Meanwhile, the novel continues to sell well, as do Woolf’s works. Third, speaking of the accuracy of “outliving,” in his 1945 essay “Good Bad Books,” Orwell explained:

Perhaps the supreme example of the ‘good bad’ book is Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is an unintentionally ludicrous book, full of preposterous melodramatic incidents; it is also deeply moving and essentially true; it is hard to say which quality outweighs the other. But Uncle Tom’s Cabin, after all, is trying to be serious and to deal with the real world. How about the frankly escapist writers, the purveyors of thrills and ‘light’ humour? How about Sherlock Holmes, Vice Versa, Dracula, Helen’s Babies or King Solomon’s Mines? All of these are definitely absurd books, books which one is more inclined to laugh at than with, and which were hardly taken seriously even by their authors; yet they have survived, and will probably continue to do so. All one can say is that, while civilisation remains such that one needs distraction from time to time, ‘light’ literature has its appointed place; also that there is such a thing as sheer skill, or native grace, which may have more survival value than erudition or intellectual power. There are music-hall songs which are better poems than three-quarters of the stuff that gets into the anthologies…[which] I would far rather have written…. And by the same token I would back Uncle Tom’s Cabin to outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf or George Moore….

By now, Orwell’s “backing” of Uncle Tom’s Cabin over George Moore appears ever more solid, and time will have to tell regarding the works of Virginia Woolf. At this point, both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Woolf’s works seem they may be equally durable, as much as any other outcome. That’s far from a “howlingly wrong” estimation of the books’ comparative durability after these few decades, let alone of their ultimate durability. But Gessen like Wood conveys a smug, presumptuous, corrosive, and misleading “conventional wisdom.” Gessen conveys an establishment impression that liberatory works like Uncle Tom’s Cabin do not measure up to certain establishment favorites (let alone surpass them socially or culturally), and even are laughingly not worth the time of day – an impression that comes across, intended or not – that great estimations of the lasting nature of such liberatory works are to be laughed at to the point of howling. The indoctrination goes deep. Uncle Tom’s Cabin more enduring than Woolf’s complete works? Everyone knows that’s a howler! Wait a minute. The fact is, Stowe’s novel and Woolf’s works both continue to be strong sellers. The jury is still out, and the verdict has not remotely begun to be returned conclusively. But Harvard grad Gessen is howling, his mind educated to its foregone conclusion, however empirically challenged, however theoretically lacking. Which is actually what may sensibly draw a laugh in all this. Upton Sinclair’s kindred novel to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Jungle, is doing well also. How finely written is much of, say, the Bible or the several millennia old epic of Gilgamesh? How enduring?

The New Yorker’s lead story for the issue of Wood’s essay on Orwell asks as title: “Can Iran Change?” More telling to ask, Can the US? Can the New Yorker change? Can status quo criticism? I suppose they can – at the point of revolution, probably best arrived at step by step. This article on Orwell is certainly no step, except backwards. To further help see why such work gets published as it does, we turn again to Orwell in “The Freedom of the Press,” an excerpt from his suppressed preface to Animal Farm:

The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban…. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trouser in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

This from even Orwell, who was far from always the most progressive or revolutionary (sometimes the flip opposite) writer or thinker one might find or imagine.

Moving Beyond Class Structure

While there are some real individual and social gains from “upward mobility,” there are those central and fundamental features of life in an oppressive system that no amount of “upward mobility” can touch, and which Wood scarcely approaches in the New Yorker article, or ever much concerns himself with, unlike Orwell. Class mobility is far from any guarantor of overcoming as a society the unjust and devastating class structure and imperial nature of states. In fact, class mobility greatly functions to preserve the fundamentally inegalitarian and anti-democracy hierarchies found throughout “the West” and beyond. In a review of Paul Lauter and Ann Fitzgerald’s anthology, Literature, Class and Culture, Lisa A. Cooper notes:

As Laura Hapke points out, in working-class writings, students’ belief systems are called into question as they read works ‘that challenge rather than celebrate upward mobility,’ and upward mobility and this idea of a shared notion of success is what most middle or upper class students have been taught to give credence to in capitalistic society.

Additionally, class mobility works both ways in the US, the much lauded land of upward mobility (more and more a relative myth). Leaving even the recent economic collapse aside – the ongoing multi-trillion dollar thefts from the populace by the wealthy ruling classes – the US prison system continues to grow like the torturing monster that it is. Even the establishment New Yorker recently gave some decent related insight into this, in its article “Hellhole” by Atul Gawande, on the widespread practice of torture in US prisons that is long-term solitary confinement (among other official barbarities). By 2006, “1 of every 31 adults in the US was on probation or parole or incarcerated in jail or prison” – the highest rate of incarceration and the largest prison population of any country anywhere – not to mention those imprisoned or living and dying under US guns all around the globe. The sun never sets on the US garrisons and guns of the world, as with the British Empire of old. Neither does the sun set on its Empire of lies and its other deceptions and misrepresentations, fostered near and far by establishment media and other institutions of the status quo.

Since class-based society fosters mobility both up and down, does that mean its inhabitants whether privileged or virtual vassals, serfs, and real prisoners are doubly free? Or should they be working, thinking, and organizing internationally and domestically toward progressive and revolutionary accomplishments that achieve and surpass those temporarily gained in Spain, and more permanently elsewhere – or should one wish to be and “resemble” the relatively privileged classes and their typical literary criticism (and fiction), such as in the New Yorker that sees fit to send continuously down the memory hole key liberatory realities and possibilities?

Apparently some particular class or readership might be tempted to “gloat” over any of Orwell’s shortcomings, for Wood is compelled to add that “it is too easy to gloat over his contradictions.” Gloat? Now who – which people, which classes – would want to “gloat” over Orwell’s “contradictions”? The ones whom Orwell at his best wrote on behalf of and fought alongside? Or…the privileged classes. Orwell noted in 1946: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” So who are these anti-democratic-socialists so craven as to apparently instinctively “gloat” over the contradictions, perceived and otherwise, of Orwell? The implications are striking.

In The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, Orwell wrote that ruling types could:

keep society in its existing shape only by being unable to grasp that any improvement was possible. Difficult though this was, they achieved it, largely by fixing their eyes on the past and refusing to notice the changes that were going on round them.

Orwell:

They are not wicked, or not altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable. Only when their money and power are gone will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they are living in.

Orwell:

Even among the inner clique of politicians who brought us to our present pass [World War II] it is doubtful whether there were any conscious traitors. The corruption is more in the nature of self-deception… And being unconscious, it is limited. One sees this at its most obvious in the English press. Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. Yet I do not suppose there is one paper in England that can be straight-forwardly bribed with hard cash.

Orwell:

The underlying fact was that the whole position of the monied class had long ceased to be justifiable.

Wood’s emphasis on “upward mobility” gives the impression that the upper classes are the hope of the working classes, a place to escape to, where they may become the new managers and class system enforcers – devil take the hindmost. It sure worked like nothing else in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Journalist Alex Constantine observes:

To quote [historian] Felix Gilbert, ‘At the time the Nazis took over, recovery from the recession was beginning’ and Germany was economically prospering…

Economic prosperity, however, as catchwords like public works and infrastructure programs reveal, also meant the continued Americanization of Germany’s economy under Hitler. Indeed, the dictator himself seems to have welcomed America’s efficient methods of production. Hitler was, for instance, a proponent of mass-consumption, as shown by his statement from September 1941: ‘Frugality is the enemy of progress. Therein we are similar to the Americans, that we are fastidious.’ [Historian] Detlev Peukert underlines Hitler’s pro-American stance, arguing that, not unlike the U.S., the Third Reich consciously aimed to represent ‘the dawning of the new achievement-orientated consumer society based on the nuclear family, upward mobility, mass media, leisure and an interventionist welfare state […].’

And mass incarceration. Alongside “upward mobility.” Ah, that will do the trick. Things sure turned out well. That was quite a path, that route of mass confinement and upward mobility. Quite a final solution. Today: the great American lockup and Good Americans moving up to help administer and expand Empire USA, the Good British always ready to lend a helping military hand. “The descent into barbarism” of Germany in a mere decade from much admired heights of Western civilization – forgotten already? Conditions today are especially volatile and disastrous for many, and not only socially – also environmentally and militarily–

in part due to the establishment notion of “economic growth” that conquests and trashes the earth. Conditions are grave. (Meanwhile there exist far more constructive realities and movements in the arts and culture, in society and politics however marginalized – efforts that struggle for all the energy, growth, support, and progress they can possibly achieve.)

Orwell:

There they sat, at the center of a vast empire and a worldwide financial network, drawing interest and profits and spending them – on what? The British ruling class obviously could not admit to themselves that their usefulness was at an end. Had they done that they would have had to abdicate. For it was not possible for them to turn themselves into mere bandits, like the American millionaires, consciously clinging to unjust privileges and beating down opposition by bribery and tear-gas bombs. After all, they belonged to a class with a certain tradition, they had been to public schools where the duty of dying for your country, if necessary, is laid down as the first and greatest of the Commandments. They had to feel themselves true patriots, even while they plundered their countrymen. Clearly there was only one escape for them – into stupidity.

Into the mental cleansing of history.

Valuing the Work of Orwell

Near the end of his New Yorker article on Orwell, James Wood tutors the establishment to not “gloat” at Orwell’s “contradictions.” That would be “too easy.” Not too mention pitifully superficial, ignorant, and outrageously reactionary, particularly due to Wood’s blanking of Orwell’s most liberatory understandings and efforts.

“Instead,” Wood declaims, “one is gratefully struck by how prescient Orwell was, and by how much he got right” and how “curiously precise: he was…because of his contradictions…”:

This combination of conservatism and radicalism, of political sleepiness and insomnia, this centuries-long brotherhood of gamekeeper and poacher, which Orwell called ‘the English genius’, was also Orwell’s genius, finding in English life its own ideological brotherhood. For Good and ill, those English contradictions have lasted.

So you see, Dear Readers of the New Yorker, we cannot gloat for we would be gloating at the “contradictions” of ourselves, for we are not essentially keepers of the status quo, we too are like Orwell at his best, propagandizing for democratic socialism, as he understands it, in everything we write, and in so very much that we do – just so, history has been obliterated into fantasy, in the pages of the New Yorker by the award winning critic (2009 American Society of Magazine Editors’ National Magazine Award for criticism).

In this splendid fiction according to James Wood – cultured good liberals and conservatives, or progressive pretenders, need not worry – need not even know – that Orwell was ever so very revolutionary after all, for Wood has leveled such history to the ground, and below. In this he is professionally assisted in the Orwell volumes I and II introductions by George Packer also of the New Yorker and Keith Gessen of n+1 in various ways, including fixations and ultimate focus on Orwell’s niceties of form and style. At least English novelist Julian Banes in the New York Review of Books, though a basically establishment write up, spends some time depicting the manufacture of Orwell’s reputation as National Treasure, then closes by quoting Orwell and emphasizing that:

“The central problem—how to prevent power from being abused—remains unsolved.” And until then, it is safe to predict that Orwell will remain a living writer.

Even this slim point of emphasis is beyond Wood, Packer, and Gessen for whom Orwell is far more to be cherished and known for his writing and his nationally treasured “English genius.” To Wood and his chorus, Orwell is “us” after all, in the end – the more-or-less talented and privileged status quo. For which we are grateful. He is our brother through and through. Not that there is nothing to that. After all, Orwell was early in his life an Imperial policeman, and though he emphasized how he despised it, at the end of his life he was a police informer, pointing out leftists or perceived leftists, including Charlie Chaplin. So there is certainly that establishment strain in Orwell.

Except, brazenly unrevealed in Wood’s largely socio-political article is Orwell’s most vital, greatest socio-political work. Moreover, Orwell pointedly noted that one group had opted out of “the English genius” that Wood says is “Orwell’s genius,” part of an “ideological brotherhood”: the intellectuals. They opted out of the English genius, the brotherhood, according to Orwell, and Wood pointedly omits this crucial fact – again, brazenly, especially in this day of the easy check internet. “Nearly everyone,” Orwell writes, “whatever his actual conduct may be, responds emotionally to the idea of human brotherhood,” that which Wood describes as the “centuries-long brotherhood of gamekeeper and poacher,” thus misrepresenting England as a land of legal workers and illegal workers – with no owners, no landlords to employ the gamekeepers or to prosecute the poachers, no monied rulers.

Contra Wood, Orwell in fact explicitly includes in the “brotherhood” the “millionaires” and the “class-structure” and “all ranks of society … [where] … the most atrocious injustices, cruelties, lies, snobberies exist everywhere,” which he claims are all part of a “cultural unity,” except for that one group, long since, the intellectuals. Orwell observes in his 1940 Dickens essay that the “brotherhood” has long been broken, that:

In one sense it is a feeling that is fifty years out of date. The common man is still living in the mental world of Dickens, but nearly every modern intellectual has gone over to some or other form of totalitarianism. From the Marxist or Fascist point of view, nearly all that Dickens stands for can be written off as ‘bourgeois morality’. But in moral outlook no one could be more ‘bourgeois’ than the English working classes. The ordinary people in the Western countries have never entered, mentally, into the world of ‘realism’ and power-politics. They may do so before long, in which case Dickens will be as out of date as the cab-horse.

And in its most liberatory forms actual democratic socialism may have a chance. The intellectuals – those who staff and run the governments, those who fill the privileged schools – opted out of the “brotherhood” one hundred and twenty years ago. And it is the establishment intellectuals, like Wood, who have a real stake, ruling stake, in keeping up “the lofty old schools” on both sides of the Atlantic, “much as always,” despite “all the transformations,” to “educate the upper classes to govern the country,” to “wreck” cities and countries and continents and to have their “lovely” homes and “parties.” Orwell’s “brotherhood,” his ostensible “genius,” the “English genius,” includes considerably more than Wood indicates (the “millionaires, the landlords – the owners) and considerably less (the “intellectuals”), and meanwhile, the brotherhood’s masses (working classes) would be “as out of date as the cab-horse” in revolutionary Spain, or in any functioning democracy or socialism worth of the name. For this genius that Wood mischaracterizes we are grateful? So who is “leveling down” and taking insight and possibility with it?[^1]

And so it is that Wood leads readers blindly away from many of Orwell’s most valuable, outraged, and revolutionary insights[^2] in the article titled with Orwellian flair, “A Fine Rage” and slugged, “George Orwell’s revolutions.”

Should journals of literature and other art aspire to the crucially gutted literary work so typically vaunted and displayed in the New Yorker and in periodicals of similar ethos? Are there no countervailing literary forces at work? No striking progress? No real revolutions in the brewing? None advancing step by step? Would anyone, could anyone, remotely know by reading the prominent literary voices of the US and the West? Is there no “sinister fact,” no voluntary suppression in the dominant media, the establishment media, anymore? Nothing Orwellian in the New Yorker?

____________________

NOTES:

¹ Worth quoting in its entirety is this comment by “driedchar” to a particular blog post of George Packer, “Reading Orwell: George Packer” in the New Yorker April 23, 2009. “Driedchar is a big fan of John Updike, as noted in another comment. It doesn’t get much more establishment than Updike, a long time New Yorker writer. Yet such is the egregiousness of Wood’s misrepresentation of George Orwell that even from various points in the establishment one may feel compelled to point out Wood’s “irksome … condescension to Orwell and to the working class” and to “the mugging” that Wood delivers, courtesy of the New Yorker, in his article that George Packer calls “excellent.” The comment:

I agree with most of what Packer has to say, except his reference to James Wood’s “A Fine Rage” as an “excellent essay.” Wood’s piece is filled with questionable statements. For example, when he says, “There is a difference between being revolutionary and being a revolutionary, and journalists are not required to be tacticians,” he implies that Orwell didn’t really understand the realities of revolt. He fails to mention that Orwell fought (voluntarily) on the front lines against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Wood takes a sentence in Orwell’s “The Lion and the Unicorn” (“However horrible this system [Fascism] may seem to us, it works.”) out of context and uses it to conclude: “So the example of efficient Fascism is what inspires the hope of efficient socialism.” Wood fails to point out that in “The Lion and the Unicorn,” not to mention many other essays and reviews, Orwell is at pains to distinguish between Fascism and socialism. For example, in “The Lion and the Unicorn,” Orwell says, “Hitler’s real self is in Mein Kampf, and in his actions. He has never persecuted the rich, except when they were Jews or when they tried actively to oppose him. He stands for a centralized economy which robs the capitalist of most of his power but leaves the structure of society much as before. The State controls industry, but there are still rich and poor, masters and men. Therefore, as against genuine Socialism, the moneyed class have always been on his side.” Orwell goes on to describe Fascism as “spectacular, conscious treachery.” Wood is wrong to connect Orwell’s socialism with Hitler’s fascism. He is also wrong to allege Orwell’s “reputation’s later theft at the hands of the right wing.” What exactly is Wood referring to here? Is it something disparaging T. S. Eliot and/or Malcolm Muggeridge said about “Animal Farm”? Wood does not substantiate his allegation; he merely says Orwell’s reputation was stolen by the Right. As far as I know, no such “theft” ever took place. Wood describes Orwell as a “puritan masochist.” Puritan apparently because he is sensitive to squalor; masochist because he repeatedly immersed himself in squalor? A fairer interpretation is that Orwell was onto a great subject – poverty and working class suffering – and that he was very good at describing it. The most irksome aspect of Wood’s piece is his condescension to Orwell and to the working class. He says of Orwell, “But it is too easy to gloat over his contradictions…. Gloat? Implicit in that is Wood’s enjoyment of the mugging he’s administering. Regarding the working class, Wood quotes Orwell on Dickens: “However much Dickens may admire the working classes, he does not wish to resemble them.” Woods then asks, “Why on earth should Dickens have wanted to resemble the working classes? Why would anyone want to, least of all the working classes themselves?” Well, I for one identify with the working classes and proudly consider myself part of them. I believe Wood is coming across here as quite a snob. I have only touched on a few of the many troublesome and problematic aspects of James Wood’s “A Fine Rage.” Far from being “excellent,” as Packer describes it, it is thoroughly rotten and regrettable.

² An excerpt from George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia:

I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life – snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc. – had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master. Of course such a state of affairs could not last. It was simply a temporary and local phase in an enormous game that is being played over the whole surface of the earth. But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone who experienced it. However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘comrade’ stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality. I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy ‘proving’ that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the ‘mystique’ of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all…. In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me….

This was in late December 1936 [in Barcelona], less than seven months ago as I write, and yet it is a period that has already receded into enormous distance. Later events have obliterated it much more completely than they have obliterated 1935, or 1905, for that matter. I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workman. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said ‘Señor’ or ‘Don’ or even ‘Usted’; everyone called everyone else ‘Comrade’ or ‘Thou’, and said ‘Salud!’ instead of ‘Buenos dias’. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no ‘well-dressed’ people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also, I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers’ State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed or voluntarily come over to the workers’ side; I did not realise that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.

Together with all this there was something of the evil atmosphere of war. The town had a gaunt untidy look, roads and buildings were in poor repair, the streets at night were dimly lit for fear of air-raids, the shops were mostly shabby and half-empty. Meat was scarce and milk practically unobtainable, there was a shortage of coal, sugar and petrol, and a really serious shortage of bread. Even at this period the bread-queues were often hundreds of yards long. Yet so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people and no beggars except the gypsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. In the barbers’ shops were Anarchist notices (the barbers were mostly Anarchists) solemnly explaining that barbers were no longer slaves. In the streets were coloured posters appealing to prostitutes to stop being prostitutes. To anyone from the hard-boiled, sneering civilization of the English-speaking races there was something rather pathetic in the literalness with which these idealistic Spaniards took the hackneyed phrase of revolution. At that time revolutionary ballads of the naivest kind, all about the proletarian brotherhood and the wickedness of Mussolini, were being sold on the streets for a few centimes each. I have often seen an illiterate militiaman buy one of these ballads, laboriously spell out the words, and then, when he had got the hang of it, begin singing it to an appropriate tune.

Aaron Bady at The Valve calls 2010 Academy Award winning movie for best picture, The Hurt Locker, “a cinema of truthiness,” of a kind.

In my view, the main truthiness (truthiness being a sort of refined Orwellianism) is that “The Hurt Locker” is a biased cinema of retail violence, rather than an illuminating cinema of wholesale (and retail) violence – which the owners don’t allow to be portrayed for the masses.

The Cindy Sheehan Story, if done well as movie, incorporating Dahr Jamail type reporting, would be a poly-subjective/objective cinema of wholesale violence (also retail).

It would be a war (or rather conquest and resistance) story on a large scale, instead of being reductively confined to a warrior/occupier story.

Imagine retitling “The Hurt Locker” as “The Travails of the Conquistadors.” Or call it, symbolically, “The Good Russians in Afghanistan.”

“The Hurt Locker”? Orwellian dreams. A whole cinema of it. Best Picture! By the logic of reduction – possibly so. By the logic of empire – definitely. Political? Sure. Pernicious? Sure. Well wrought? Could be. One can admire what slaves make, whether it’s a good apple, or excitement in art, while despising what they are…enslaved, tools of empire; and/or, in the case of many soldiers (and occupying armies), mercenaries essentially, and lethal indentured servants.

And of course there is always the question of how admirable is what they make. The conquistadors suffered, and suffer today too. It’s the picture of the year, or the era. The excitement and the sufferings of the conquistadors are henceforth to be known as Kathryn Bigelow films? What an honor.

And The Cindy Sheehan Story?

Or what about An Iraqi Lament?

Picture of the never? Novel of the nowhere? Imagination unmappable? Unmapped? Or “…thoroughly forgotten, ignored, and under-articulated…” here, as elsewhere.

“…the representational conundrum that Kathryn Bigelow’s film is stuck in…” is a conundrum of genre and content.

“…the Iraq war…reality is a thing for which narrative is insufficient” in expression when expressed as a contemporary Western, or Spaghetti Western, or Knight-Errant tale – as The Hurt Locker is. This film that is a kind of Die Hard In Iraq! is set up to really show virtually nothing about what dying hard in Iraq today actually means. Die Hard in Baghdad, the enemy mechanized. In fact, the genre and content are a set up to show the opposite of what dying hard in Iraq today most essentially means. As comes natural to a conquistador culture. Picture of the year!

After millennia, is the endless reveling in the martial the best we can do in art? What would we think of a Russian “Hurt Locker” during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan? Wow, those Russian soldiers sure do rock and roll! And the important conundrum there would be what?

“Missing” and “Romero” – these are vital, high impact movies of “war,” that is of conquest and resistance. No academy awards though. And not much academic appreciation either. And I can think of such novels too. Not much conundrum there. Just some great and vital art. Buried like IEDs, I guess, in the paths of establishment scholars’ and critics’ careers, in favor of star shine and star drek. It makes sense to critique the star works of art because they are so visible, and to do so first and foremost at the most fundamental levels; it also makes sense to critique the invisible works of art that are far more vital, to render visible the vital invisible. Either or both done thoroughly can cost matriculation and tenure though, which is why it is so seldom seen in certain circles.

(What a novel that would make! and has partly been made in the great second novel by Miles Franklin, The End of My Career, 45 years delayed in publishing and apparently out of print in the US, though available used and in full online at Australia Gutenberg under its original, better title, My Career Goes Bung.)

xposted: Apart from local diversity, which is important or vital, I see far more similarities across European, American (North and South), African, and Asian novels than differences. (Though maybe I’ve read too selectively.) It seems there’s more variance within place than across it. (I think science has determined that the same is true for race.) Underlying this is the socio-political commitments, no matter the place, the kind of basic ground-level commitments of the novel. And while those can vary vastly within a single city, given the interests or commitments of the novelist, they can and have also taken form of a global solidarity and movement, as Denning points out.

So, human nature is universal, socio-political and other commitments of novelists vary but can and have taken the form of an international, and yet too much discussion of novels goes on out of all broad socio-political or historical context, as if the form or genre were not a living organic socio-political (that is, historical) thing, a knowable creature in the overall socio-historical web. So often novels are treated like alien objects landed from outer space which must be hermetically probed and de-encrypted. This is flattering to the author but shows weakness or snobbery in the critic. Which then impoverishes thinking and making, including novel thinking and novel making, as it makes even utterly typical novels look freakish, strange, and more unique, promising, or interesting than they are, due to some idiosyncratic quirk or particular threaded element. And this suits short term or short sight marketing, which goes its own pathological way.

Which goes back to Denning:

“Like world music, the world novel is a category to be distrusted; if it genuinely points to the transformed geography of the novel, it is also a marketing device that flattens distinct regional and linguistic traditions into a single cosmopolitan world beat, with magical realism serving as the aesthetic of globalization, often as empty and contrived a signifier as the modernism and socialist realism it supplanted”

The vapid and pathological marketing of marginal or pathological or subservient novels, one is to be wary of, but the novels that do represent the “transformed geography of the novel” of liberation, that Denning gets toward, that’s where the discussion of novels would do well to be, for humanistic, intellectual, and artistic reasons all. To do otherwise, is to engage in discussion that is “often…empty and contrived,” trivial or marginal, or obscurant, however sometimes or seemingly complex.

2666 and the Bolano oeuvre by and large, including the short stories, fail to impress, though are not totally without interest. Not totally. As for The Kindly Ones, I get the sense it was written as a joke or as a sheerly careerist effort, or a dull combination of the two. The flood of commentary on the The Kindly Ones reads to me much like a Bolano novel, that is, as a stunted phenomena barely endurable or alive, a few lively or pointed moments aside. Overly harsh? I’m comparing the work of Bolano to the great and vital works that are neglected, that are where the greater life of the novel, of fiction, is really going on.

Continued:

One can look at “The Part About the Crimes” as part 4 of 2666, or, as Bolano apparently wished, as a stand alone work. It hardly matters. Either way it’s the most vital thing there, and the greatest failure. It’s the most vital thing for obvious reasons, not least because the subject is so visceral and of serious magnitude. Unfortunately, because it is so relatively meaninglessly or minorly set forth (that is, contextualized) it is failed badly, if not utterly. What’s the point of the litany of gruesome horrific murders? Who knows? Could be this, that, or the others, depending on what you want to read into it, that is must read into it. There’s no reason a novel can’t posit great meaning to its subject, and yet then allow readers to read into _that_ at considerably more advanced levels. But here Bolano, as is typical in his work and in so much of the work celebrated by the establishment, fails in the former and thus effectively prevents, bars, vitiates the latter.

And I mean that criticism not primarily as a criticism of Bolano. Bolano did not make Bolano famous and prominent. The establishment did. So the main criticism goes to what the establishment values and celebrates (and reads, and allows published), first, and then to an analysis of his work, second. That said I think this secondary analysis is worthwhile too because it’s the sort of thing that goes too often unremarked, or decried: the importance of positing great meaning(s) to subjects, especially to dire subjects, before expecting readers to pay great attentions, or much attention at all.

Personally, I think Bolano is a mildly interesting minor author. Pretty tedious really. And that the adulation accorded him and other establishment stars is a far more interesting phenomenon, more worthy of study and critique. In many ways it can be more interesting, not to mention more worthwhile, to study what has not been published in any way, shape, or form (along with that which has been systematically marginalized) than to study what is regularly published and celebrated.

Adapted from comments at The Valve:

Have you read 2666? Compare your thoughts and feelings about it to an equally long novel. First, you may see more the mishmash of 2666. Second you may see what a wheel spinner it also is. That’s what I see. What Bolano has going for him is that he was not a total sellout to the nefarious conventions and mores of his time, and he goes his own way. In fact, he had a good bit of the thoughtful rebel in him. What he has going against him, is that it’s fine to be against this and that, but he is not for very much, is he? In his fiction. The game (his own way) doesn’t seem to me to be much worth the candle (our time and expense). The tedium, the tedium! And the trivia. That that is true of much of praised contemporary fiction makes it no less troublesome. Bolano is a sometimes jaunty explorer of deserts but even then it’s still the desert. The vital wider world goes wanting, a few stabs at larger life aside.

One can see why his work would become so celebrated in established circles. The vacuities don’t hurt him there.

Commenter: ” ‘The vital wider world goes wanting’?  I’m not so sure.  It’s been several months since I read the novel, but I found the fourth section a crucial material and historical frame of reference for the entire work.  I think it makes the book.”

The fourth section consists entirely of retail violence. As horrific and significant as it is, it’s virtually off the map when one looks at the wholesale violence of the world, say that carried out by, for example, the major state in the world, the US.

Obviously Bolano especially in that section is in the relevance to the world, journalistic and crime line of the novel. But that’s what I mean by “a stab” at larger life. Sure, the stabs are there, even bulked in like excess fiber, but in both a marginal and a marginalized way, leading essentially nowhere. Like I said, very establishment.

Compare to the off the radar big novels Wizard of the Crow (2006) by Ngugi, or to Les Miserables (1862) by Hugo.

I’ll add that the problem with creating great novels as with creating great (or even survivable) culture is that the right is bankrupt and the left is broke. (And the middle is middlin’.) I think only as part of the rebuilding and the establishing of the left can the needed novels be written, that is the far greater novels than the celebrated pap that dominates.

No blueprint for this but I think there’s a knowing where to to look, or at least a recognition of where the light is that helps, that is the only chance.

While it may appear that the novel collapsed in the “West” of its own weight around the turn of the century, a century ago, very roughly, I think it’s more accurate to note that it collapsed, or was warped, due to sociopolitical throttling.

The novel was partially revived in the twentieth century by the international and multicultural forces of the left – from where it seems to me the most exciting and promising developments continue to appear.

Much of this history and creativity is explored in our recently released Liberation Literature anthology.

Michael Denning has done some interesting work in this regard: Read the rest of this entry »

Via Znet:

Why are so many films so bad? This year’s Oscar nominations are a parade of propaganda, stereotypes and downright dishonesty. The dominant theme is as old as Hollywood: America’s divine right to invade other societies, steal their history and occupy our memory. When will directors and writers behave like artists and not pimps for a world view devoted to control and destruction?

I grew up on the movie myth of the Wild West, which was harmless enough unless you happened to be a native American. The formula is unchanged. Self-regarding distortions present the nobility of the American colonial aggressor as a cover for massacre, from the Philippines to Iraq. I only fully understood the power of the con when I was sent to Vietnam as a war reporter. The Vietnamese were “gooks” and “Indians” whose industrial murder was preordained in John Wayne movies and sent back to Hollywood to glamourise or redeem.

I use the word murder advisedly, because what Hollywood does brilliantly is suppress the truth about America’s assaults. These are not wars, but the export of a gun-addicted, homicidal “culture”. And when the notion of psychopaths as heroes wears thin, the bloodbath becomes an “American tragedy” with a soundtrack of pure angst.

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is in this tradition. A favourite for multiple Oscars, her film is “better than any documentary I’ve seen on the Iraq war. It’s so real it’s scary” (Paul Chambers CNN). Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian reckons it has “unpretentious clarity” and is “about the long and painful endgame in Iraq” that “says more about the agony and wrong and tragedy of war than all those earnest well-meaning movies”.

What nonsense.  Her film offers a vicarious thrill via yet another standard-issue psychopath high on violence in somebody else’s country where the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion. The hype around Bigelow is that she may be the first female director to win an Oscar. How insulting that a woman is celebrated for a typically violent all-male war movie. …

Keith Oatley at OnFiction:

In a scathing article, Jerome Stolnitz (1991) argued that art has only short term effects. Greek drama is regarded as powerful but, says Stolnitz: “There is no evidence that Aristophanes shortened the Peloponnesian War by so much as a day” (p. 200). Stolnitz asserts that effects of art simply do not appear in history.

Except that—as Frank Hakemulder has pointed out to me—they do. They appear in the history of human rights. As historian Lynn Hunt (2007) has shown, the establishment of human rights has been strongly affected by literary art. …

“What’s Lib Lit? – Library, map, lens, scalpel, compost, chisel, textbook, excavation: voices, images, wrestling, contradicting, confirming, the matter of resistant art and practise.” – Adrienne Rich

AMZ
BN

“Where ‘Literature’ Comes From” by Edmond Caldwell:

In the larger literary venues (and on the more sycophantic lit-blogs) this phenomenon of corporate pre-determination of the “literary field” goes almost entirely unremarked. It amounts to “the repressed” of mainstream book-reviewing, as that which must remain unspoken in order for a certain type of utterance to exist at all. Reviews are written as if the titles swim into the reviewer’s ken on their own little spiritual wings or somehow magically materialize in the critic’s inbox; as if literature were somehow self-generating and “immediate” rather than constructed and subject to considerable mediation. There is in James Wood’s work not the least institutional self-consciousness or self-questioning, not a moment of institutional critique. “Literature” and “fiction,” when he speaks of them, are mystified categories.

For one antidote to corporate publishing, see Liberation Lit.

excerpts via Vice:

Between seasons of a lot of hit shows, adjustments will be made that are clearly based on network notes about what’s perceived to be most popular with viewers.
We never had that dynamic in our heads. What we were asking was, “What should we spend 12 hours of television saying?” And that’s a journalistic impulse. That was coming from the  Wire writers who were journalists and, to an extent, the novelists who wrote for the show who write in a realistic framework, like researched fiction. People like Pelecanos, Price, and Lehane.

Those three guys seemed to have the perfect backgrounds to bring a lot of valuable stuff to The Wire.
It wasn’t like we were putting Isaac Bashevis Singer on staff. I love his stuff, but we were looking for novelists who were doing researched fiction, and particularly in an urban environment. I’m also not mistaking The Wire for journalism. I have too much respect for journalism to make such a statement. But the impulse, the initial impulse behind doing the show? It was the same reason somebody sits down to write an editorial or an op-ed. Read the rest of this entry »

via Counterpunch:

Dick Wolf, who created “Law & Order” and its two successful spin-offs, “Law & Order: SVU” and “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” should probably consider establishing a branch office in Pennsylvania.

It seems that whenever any of the New York City cops take a road trip to find a fugitive or track down a witness, they go to Pennsylvania. Apparently, New Jersey is only a buffer zone.

Part of the reason why Pennsylvania routinely figures into the hour-long dramas may be because Wolf, a New Yorker, is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. Another possibility, although much more remote, may be because his first of three wives was named Susan Scranton.

Nevertheless, Pennsylvania has been the site of sufficient plots the past couple of years as the three TV series have increased their levels of social consciousness.

from “A Very Nigerian Literary Festival” by Sefi Atta:

Unlike the students I’d encountered at Northwestern University, the students who attended my fiction workshop at the festival did not write about personal relationships.  Their stories were topical.

Eugene Almazov, “The ‘Tendentious’ in Literature” Mainstream magazine (1947):

The question, then, is not whether a writer is, or is not, tendentious; but rather what are the tendencies he follows. The antagonists of tendentious art in modern literature are people who remain aloof from the questions occupying the mind of our disturbed world. They are indifferent to the fate of the millions who want bread, work and conditions which will enable them to find delight in the beautiful.

S. Finkelstein, “National Art and Universal Art” Mainstream magazine (1947):

In its lesser, as well as its greater achievements, the national art of the nineteenth and twentieth century had qualities which made it a powerful force opposed to the art-for-art’s sake neo-classicism and the individualistic, anti-social, pessimistic and introspective individualism which dominated so much of the art of the times. One of these qualities was a vitality which came from the entrance into this art of the masses of people, through a language which they themselves have helped fashion. This quality may be seen in the sheer abundance of human beings who fill the pages of Dickens, Mark Twain and Gorky….

With the masses of people there entered into this art their philosophy of life, a realistic acceptance of the world reaffirmed in the face of its multitude of hardships. And so if we find irony and protest in the work of these folk-inspired and national artists, we also find the most full-throated laughter…great comic artists in complete contrast to the romantics’ emphasis on the “man alone,” his pseudo-tragic feeling caused by a self-imposed withdrawal from the real world.

Still another quality of this art was its imaginative use of whatever materials came to hand. While these artists fought for their integrity as honest artists, against censorship, they did not regard a practical use for their art as an intrusion upon their freedom. It was an intrusion only when its conventions were dictated by a ruling-class forcing its own fears of reality upon the artist. When a new medium for art brought these artists closer to  a mass audience, and allowed them to speak honestly with it, the medium itself set their ideas flowing. Thus Goya created his epic history and portrayal of the Spanish people in the etching and lithograph; Daumier did the same for the French people, between the 1830 revolution and the Commune, in the form of the lithograph and newspaper cartoon. Dickens grew on the penny serial, Mark Twain on frontier journalism, the Irish poets and prose artists on the Abbey Theatre.

This national art was and is highly experimental. Its experimental qualities were obscured in the later nineteenth century, when critics were enraptured by the one line of romanticist, impressionist, symbolist and expressionist experiments, the deliberate invention of ambiguities, the probing into dream and the subconscious. It remained for the twentieth century to discover the fresh and truly ground-breaking character of the national movement in the arts, and to carry this movement in the idioms of art the constantly changing aspect of the world and people, the search for new materials and media for art, which led to the scientific analysis of the languages of art, the vast enlightening study of ancient, folk, Asiatic, Indian and African cultures, which has made our own age, in the sheer knowledge of its tools, the most educated in history.

A new obscurantism has appeared in critical theory, clinically discussing the styles of such art with an ignorance of the search for greater realism and power in communication behind it. Whitman’s free verse is studied without Whitman’s democracy; Picasso’s cubism without his humanity; Bartok’s polytonality without his folk core. Such tendencies have been fostered by some of the artists themselves, such as Stravinsky and Gertrude Stein, who moved increasingly in their art away from human images and broad emotions, and by the small-minded imitators who far outnumber the genuine creative minds.

The most striking quality of national art is that almost alone among modern art movements it seeks to recreate the epic line. The bourgeoisie, who had raised the epic to such heights when they were battling against feudalism, almost destroyed the epic when faced by the struggles of the working class, fostering every theory that would remove art from a devotion to contemporary history and the fullness of society. The epic, except in false neo-classic imitations, is the study of human beings in terms of history, with human knowledge of nature and of social forces replacing the myths that had served such a function in ancient times….

A national art is one that operates simultaneously  on different levels: the small forms of immediate popular impact and daily use, the grand line of the social epic, the scholarly research into the past, the laboratory experiment. It is broad in its base, allowing the richest differentiation among the peoples and localities who make up the nation, and profiting from the wealth of idiom developed by the people through their active participation in cultural life.

The movement for a national art is now faced with the practical problem of having the political space in which to grow. In America, cultural as well as political democracy is under increasing attack by reaction. The artist who hires out his talents is forced to give up his integrity and to work hobbled by the most stifling restrictions of form and content. The great public realms of radio, newspaper, motion picture, magazine and book trade, as important to the public domain as education and food, are increasingly forbidden to artists who want to remain artists and to serve the public as honest masters of the means of human communication. The great areas of the American land, the working class and the national minorities who together make up the majority of Americans, are denied the cultural life through which their artists can grow and develop in home soil, speaking to audiences of their own people, rising in stature (as artists can only rise) through constant living contact with an audience. The great masses of people are robbed of the healthy folk and popular culture which can only come through the restoration of creative participation in art to the people. The growing monopoly of every public form of communication, of the means of production and distribution of art, has produced a grotesque mockery of a national cultural life. Yet the potentialities exist in America for a renaissance unequalled in history.

Today the working class is the leading force in the fight for democracy and for a thriving American nation that will serve the welfare of its people. The struggle of a national culture is part of this struggle for a democratic America, and just as the working class must realize the powerful ally it can have in the artist, so the artist striving to grow as an artist must understand that his ally is the working class. Art is the expression among people of their joy in life, their growth, their understanding and mastery of the world. It is the exchange of their experiences and ideas. The very variety of language and forms a national art can take makes for unity among peoples, for the very depth and insight with which art portrays the unique character of a people gives it the power to transcend national boundaries, becoming a force through which people can better understand one another, work together and build a world without exploitation of human beings and wars among states.

Pretending Not to See: Murder by Corporate State Design

The Fort Hood shootings. As of this writing, 13 dead, 31 injured on the Texas military base.

By coincidence, this week’s edition of the New Yorker magazine has an article by Jill Lepore titled “Rap Sheet,” slugged, “Why is American history so murderous?” The graphic of a gun – pointed at the reader – held in a hand is slugged, “Homicide may have a political dimension.”

May? Read the rest of this entry »

“The State of the Crime Novel” by Jason Pinter at Huffington Post. A thoughtful round-table as far as it goes, but how far does their notion of crime, and its revelations, go?

Great review of Iraq conquest film The Hurt Locker by Jasmin Ramsey at AlterNet: “Iraq Movie, ‘The Hurt Locker’ Is Generating Oscar Buzz: But Does It Deserve It?” The film greatly hyped by the establishment is shown to be the appalling creature it is by Ramsey. See the most vital Iraq conquest film to date: G. I. Jesus.

Via Foreign Policy In Focus:

… Over the last 10 years, there has been a noticeable shift in content and consciousness of Bollywood films. On the surface, it is still unthinkable to produce a Hindi film without any song, dance, or romance. On a deeper level, the industry is addressing sensitive social issues that have been largely ignored for decades.

Today’s Bollywood operates along increasingly inter-communal and international axes. Whether by recognizing differences and encouraging viewers to overcome them or by highlighting underlying similarities between religious and cultural groups in India and neighboring Pakistan, Bollywood films have finally begun to address the social tensions that have been ever-present in India’s history and remain salient today.

However, this trend is nascent at best. Nationalistic, slash-and-burn films are still popular, as are crowd-pleasing action movies and cheesy romantic comedies. The Bollywood I’ve grown up with, sung and danced with, isn’t going anywhere. But a handful of filmmakers are using the industry’s popular appeal to spread a powerful message of tolerance that politics has yet been unable to champion. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Denning, “The Novelists’ International” Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (2004):

In the middle of the age of three worlds (1945-1989), the novel looked dead, exhausted. In the capitalist First World, it was reduced to increasingly arid formalisms alongside an industry of formulaic genre fictions. In the Communist Second World, the official conventions of socialist realism were ritualized into a form of didactic popular literature. Into the freeze of this literary cold war erupted Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude] (1967), the first international bestseller from Latin America and perhaps the most influential novel of the last third of the twentieth century. In its wake, a new sense of a world novel emerged, with Cien años de soledad as its avatar, the Third World as its home, and a vaguely defined magical realism as its aesthetic rubric.

Like world music, the world novel is a category to be distrusted; if it genuinely points to the transformed geography of the novel, it is also a marketing device that flattens distinct regional and linguistic traditions into a single cosmopolitan world beat, with magical realism serving as the aesthetic of globalization, often as empty and contrived a signifier as the modernism and socialist realism it supplanted. There is, however, a historical truth to the sense that there are links between writers who now constitute the emerging canon of the world novel – writers as unalike as García Márquez, Naguib Mahfouz, Nadime Gordimer, José Saramago, Paule Marshall, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer – for the work of each has roots in the remarkable international literary movement that emerged in the middle decades of the twentieth century under the slogans of “proletarian literature,” “neorealism,” and “progressive,” “engaged,” or “committed” writing…. And though the novelists of this movement were deeply influenced by  the experimental modernisms of the early decades of the century, they rarely fit into the canonical genealogies of Western modernism and postmodernism. Though the royalties were small, the writers not all proletarians, and the audience often more a promise than a reality, the movement transformed the history of the novel. Read the rest of this entry »

“The Education of Bob Baer – Unlearning the CIA” by Christopher Ketcham, via Counterpunch:

When [Bob Baer] left the Agency in 1998, he hunkered down and wrote about his time as a spy.  His first two books – a memoir, See No Evil, and an expose, Sleeping with the Devil, about the demented US relationship with the Saudis – netted him a deal with Hollywood.  But what Syriana as film could not capture – because, after all, it’s a Hollywood operation and dedicated, like the CIA, to a good cover story, one that sells, keeps us watching without really understanding – is that the CIA isn’t very good at doing what it’s supposed to do, which is not to assassinate or to blow things up or to mount ill-conceived coups, but to know. …

When Hollywood came calling after the success of “See No Evil” and Syrianawent into production in 2004, Baer snagged a cameo role, playing an FBI agent.  He had one line, demanding George Clooney give up his “passports” – in the plural – and he kept flubbing it.  There are a lot of ex-CIA officers who tell me they’ve laughed at the Syriana version of the CIA, among them Bob Baer.

What Syriana offers, beyond its obvious portrait of the symbiosis of big oil and aggressive foreign policy, is a clean conspiracist choreography of agency men.  The CIA dances without fail to the tune of oil corporation executives and DC lobbyists and lawyers who, in undisclosed channels as ethereal as ESP, order the agency to assassinate a Middle Eastern emir the oil corporations don’t like.  This preposterous clockwork CIA world is run, like most CIA conspiracies on film, with no snags, no accidents, no bureaucratic in-fighting, no paperwork, no stupidity or incompetence or laziness, and certainly nothing of the tiresome and tragically boring real world interregnums where officers like Baer sweat in those hotel rooms in Beirut debriefing sources, slowly making connections, piecing the puzzle or not piecing it at all.  Real intelligence work doesn’t make for good movies.

In this regard, Syriana is a remarkably dated vision that aligns nicely with the agency of the 1950s and 1960s that swooped around the planet toppling governments during the golden age of covert action, back when the CIA was deadly effective and not the clipped-wing thing it is today.  One could argue that Syriana is in fact a kind of backhanded propaganda, as deafeningly simplistic as a James Bond film.  “The objection I have with Baer’s work is that the entertainment angle unintentionally shows the CIA as an efficient organization,” says Ishmael Jones, who spent 15 years in deep cover with the agency.  “Syriana may seem a negative portrayal of the CIA – as an organization of assassins seeking to advance American oil company interests – but it also presents the CIA as all-knowing, determined, tough and hard-working.  The CIA, as a living creature, would prefer this portrayal to that of being devoted only to its own feeding and growth, avoiding rigorous work and foreign duty.”  When I asked Baer about his fellow officer’s assessment, he shot back in an e-mail: “He’s right.” Read the rest of this entry »

As written by Shelley Ettinger – on Zeitoun by Dave Eggers.

Via Counterpunch:

Imagine a historical novel about an indigenous confederation of nations faced with the loss of its lands to European colonists.  Now imagine those colonists in rebellion against their government overseas because of its demands to curtail and tax the colonists’ trade.  Where does that leave the indigenous peoples?  Should they side with the overseas government that has treated them with a certain respect expected of honorable men or should they side with those colonists who they know are stealing their lands?  After all, both the overseas government and the colonists are part of the original project to establish their presence on land that is not their own.

Now imagine this novel being written by a collective of Italian fiction writers.  Sound far-fetched?  Impossible to pull off?  Just plain impossible?

Let me introduce Manituana.  It is a story set in the Mohawk nation in the 1770s.  Joseph Brant, Mohawk war chief and his family, friends and enemies are the primary characters.

Via ZNet:

Having spent much of his adult life campaigning on issues including the arms trade, the illegality of the Iraq war and the misdeeds of Coca-Cola, comedian and activist Mark Thomas has now turned his attention to the ongoing financial crisis.

With banker bonuses and government bail-outs there has been a huge amount of public anger about the credit crunch. But at the same time, esoteric terms such as derivatives, quantitative easing and fractional reserve banking mean many people are also very confused and ignorant about the issue too.

“I don’t think it is that complex, but the jargon is baffling,” Thomas tells me backstage before one of his shows at the Tricycle Theatre in London.

“I think people get it automatically. It is very, very simple: the bankers have got the money, we’ve got the recession. They’ve got the increase in wages, we’ve got the increase in unemployment. You don’t need a degree for that.”

In the Meanwhile, the Incorporated Estates of Dearth, and not only the North American subsidiary, sponsor every day the “123 Years of Incorporated Evisceration Book Awards” (not least since the 1886 Supreme Court ruling taken to mean that corporations are legally persons, entitled to their rights, except infinitely more powerful). Prominent winning novels of late include:

• Mr. Mundane’s Big and Special Day
• View of a Pity
• From Gloss to Dross and Back Again
• Learning to Love Mr. and Ms. Not Quite So Tepid, I Swear
• Cool Zones and … … …
• America, Wherefore Art Thou, You?
• Here We Sit Ensconced in Our City
• The Gritty and the Bloody, Bleeding, Oozing
• TUATAU: The Unaligned Aligned, The Aligned Unaligned
• Not So Much
• Between Flaming Death and a Boy on His Bike
• Dysfunction – It’s Not Just America
• She’s Incredible and So Might You
• Fast Words and White Space
• Quirky, Suave, and Monied
• Poof! Time’s Up, My Warlock Dear Read the rest of this entry »

Hundreds of thousands of copies of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby are sold each year. Meanwhile, Claude McKay’s 1929 novel Banjo, which is at least as accomplished and probably far more vital, remains virtually unknown. See excerpt: Banjo – fiction by Claude McKay.

The Great Gatsby ranks 2nd on the Modern Library‘s list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century. Banjo does not appear.

Shelley Ettinger’s views on the recent novel by Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood:

…the big problem with all these speculative fictions whose speculation consists primarily of prophesying doom is that when they look at the current state of human society and conclude that it’s all downhill from here, they don’t take into account the most important variable of all: the class struggle. It’s as though the workers and oppressed have no role in the world’s future, whereas in fact the opposite is true–we have the decisive role. The fate of the planet, of the many species threatened with extinction, our own above all, is in the hands of working class, the oppressed and all those who end up as allies. Will we succeed? In time? No one can foresee the future so no one knows. But to simply omit the possibility of real revolutionary change seems to me to be a failure of the literary imagination. A failure to recognize workers and poor people as central to the story, as, not to put too fine a point on it, the agents of history. Which failure is to be expected, sure, from any but the most explicitly class-conscious writers, and can be chalked up to the death-grip bourgeois ideology has on most, but still registers as a disappointment each time I come upon it.

Especially with a writer as good as Atwood, and one so obviously political in her own well meaning way. This book is a warning. Here is what capitalism has brought the world to, or rather what it will bring the world to if things continue this way, she’s saying, here are the results of the rule of profit, here are the even worse horrors to come. Yet she doesn’t delve all that deeply into the implications of what she does clearly identify as the cause of the crisis. Nor does the fact that capitalism is the root of the problem seem to have set off any light bulbs for her about what direction to look for the solution.

Given this major failing, it’s not surprising that page by page there are lots of littler ones. …

Continued at Read Red: “On Atwood’s dystopia.”

While Richard Powers’ novels hold a sometimes interesting and informative young sci-tech appeal, the novels’ limits of the social and political, not to mention the intimate personal, are stark. In “Brain Drain: The Scientific Fictions of Richard Powers,” James Wood dissects the limits of character and philosophy or theme in the novels in some ways that make sense. Still, it’s a review by penlight. Why the small scope? Because of the small conception. For example, Wood binds himself with this misrepresentation: “The traditional domain of the novel—eros, marriage, the question of children, the irreducible particulars of domestic life…” These elements may comprise the traditional domain of the domestic novel but not the traditional domain of the novel, far from it, let alone imaginative fiction writ large. Don Quixote? Robinson Crusoe? Les Miserables? Has the domestic novel come to mean the “traditional” novel? If so, a pity. Such a misrepresentation squashes both life and the novel, leaving a critic able to do little more than belabor the most evident limits in Powers’ fiction, while distorting or overlooking greater underlying problems. Read the rest of this entry »

Another one of the establishment’s stunted lists of fiction: The Millions’ “best books of fiction of the millennium” [2000-2009]. Wizard of the Crow, the 2006 novel by Ngũgĩ  wa Thiong’o, stands head and shoulders above this list.

In part, Wizard of the Crow illuminates how centralized governments in the age of propaganda function globally, more or less, not least in the US (where Ngũgĩ  has lived and worked for 16 years, since 1992, the beginning of President Bill Clinton’s terms). The Clinton-Bush regimes in Washington DC were forced to “continually invent tales that, with breathtaking speed, become the new realities that the country must live by” whether to invade and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan indefinitely, or to demonize welfare, or to endlessly bailout high finance, or to flood prisons with non-violent drug-law offenders, or to continually prop-up pharmaceutical and insurance companies while demonizing Medicare for all, and on and on. President Bush II shoved the military into Iraq and Afghanistan with his “iron hand” and by way of “dealing businessmen” in the media and elsewhere (often not so “ignorant”). The Bush regime could and so it did, even though the majority public opposed it, even in the US except for a few months in the beginning of the invasion when the massive fraudulent propaganda deluge worked its effect, mentally cleansing the US majority ever so briefly. And now the Barack Obama incipient regime, only slightly less status quo aggressive and fanatic, has more subtly maneuvered, but in just as wholesale a fashion, America’s “desperation” in grasping at fake change “to a vision of national strength, fervently attended to by popular demonstrations all over the country” and beyond (hundreds of thousands gathered to cheer him on while in Europe prior to the US election). “Significantly, the [presumptive] Ruler has not said a word to create this new reality,” not a word that is meaningful in any basic concrete way. “He has spurred his [PR] ministers to invent an entirely new reality, and to find methods by which to force it into existence” at least in appearance.

Read the rest of this entry »

Via Democracy Now! “Ralph Nader on the G-20, Healthcare Reform, Mideast Talks and His First Work of Fiction, ‘Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!’”

AMY GOODMAN: Your book, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!”, it’s just out. Kind of fiction, not really nonfiction, you call it a practical utopia. Where did you get the title?

RALPH NADER: The title came from—Warren Buffett was watching post-Katrina in his living room in Omaha, and he saw these streams of poor people fleeing the floods and the winds, and no food, no water, no shelter, on the highways north of New Orleans. And no one was helping them. And so, he couldn’t take it anymore, and he got a whole convoy of supplies, and he took them down to the New Orleans area. He went down himself and distributed all the food and the tents and the medicine to these desperate families and came across an African American family, who was helping, and the grandmother grabbed his hands, looked up at him and said, “Only the super-rich can save us.”

And that haunted him all the way back to Omaha, where he developed a plan to get seventeen older super-rich enlightened Americans at a hotel on a mountaintop in Maui, Hawaii, and basically asked themselves, what is it going to take to turn this country around? It’s going to take mass media. One of the seventeen is Barry Diller. And it’s going to take a reversal of the insurance industry. It’s Peter Lewis. It’s going to take dealing with deficits and subsidies and organizing the veteran and veteran groups and the women’s clubs around the country. Ross Perot. It’s going to take a real coordination and putting in a lot of money. That’s what they all represented. Bill Cosby is one of them. Phil Donahue is one of them. Yoko Ono is one of them. William Gates, Sr., Leonard Riggio, Bernard Rapoport. These and others get together, and it all happens in one year, 2006.

When you read this book, you’ll not only get a lift in terms of the feasibility of change, if we only change the predicates and stop trying to go after trillion-dollar industries with a few million dollars of citizen group budgets, and you not only get a lift, but you can see, step by step, the strategy, the tactics—how they set up a People’s Chamber of Commerce with tens of thousands of progressive small businesses around the country; how they set up a sub-economy, where they bought all kinds of businesses and got inside the corporate beast, because they own these companies; how they developed mass media; how they got people’s attention through the use of, for example, this parrot, Patriotic Polly, which got on TV early in 2000 and got millions of emails when it kept saying, “Get up! Don’t let America down! Get up! Don’t let America down!”

You know, in the early part of the twentieth century, Amy, and the latter part of the nineteenth, there were practical utopias, or there were just plain utopias, like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, that really infused and raised the horizons of the progressive movement and people like Eugene Debs. In fact, that book sold a million copies,Looking Backward. We’ve stopped doing that in the last two generations. Our imaginations have been stifled by the grim reality of concentrated corporate power.

But when you see how these Meliorists, which is what these seventeen super-rich elderly progressive Americans called themselves, when you see how Sol Price, who started the Price Club, took on Wal-Mart to unionize Wal-Mart, you will see what happens when there’s smarts, determination and adequate money to take on a behemoth like Wal-Mart. You’ll also see how entrenched right-wing politicians, when they’re surrounded with mass movements back in their congressional district, and they’re basically confronted with ultimatum in this climactic scene in Congress at the end of the book, how they react.

And it’s important, I think, for all of us to stop just documenting and documenting and diagnosing and proposing these things, when there’s no power behind, there’s no juggernaut, there’s no pressure to organize the mass of the citizenry in the directions that really reflects their public sentiment, to use Abraham Lincoln’s phrase.

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, why fiction?

RALPH NADER: Because nonfiction prevents you from imagining. You have to, in effect, document Blackwater. You have to document the atrocities in Iraq, the military-industrial complex. All of these books, wonderful books, are coming out, more than ever in American history. You’ve had many of the authors on your program. But they are bound by nonfiction. They’re bound by the realities of concentrated power, which they are exposing in terms of their abuses. So you have to have fiction to raise the imaginative capability, what is feasible to fulfill life’s possibilities for people in this country and abroad. And that’s why fiction is so important.

I didn’t take the novel approach, because that’s very restrictive. That’s why it’s called a practical utopia. A professor in California, Russell Jacoby, wrote a book in 1999 called The End of Utopia, and I picked it up. I said, “What’s this all about?” because, you know, utopia, in most people’s minds, is like off-the-chart science fiction. It turns out he documented how, even in the academic world, the capacity and ability to imagine has been frozen. It’s been stuck, just like the society is stuck in traffic. So that’s why the fictional approach was used.

And also, look, you have a mega-billionaire. His name is Jerome Kohlberg. He was a big acquisition, merger person on Wall Street. His passion is election reform, which is part of this book. And while he started it a little bit, and then nobody, you know, rallied to his cause, but the key is, was he willing to spend a half-a-billion dollars getting it underway? That’s the key here. This entire redirection of our country embodied in this fiction of “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” was pulled off not just by smart strategies, legions of organizers, legions of grassroot lecturers, but the whole thing cost less than $15 billion.

And you know there are people—Bloomberg is worth more than that. Carl Icahn is worth more than that. One multibillionaire. We have to imagine, step by step. So there are no magic wands in this book. This is a very realistic, month-by-month strategy for a titanic power collision with the entrenched CEOs and their political allies.

Leslie Stahl read this on her vacation in August, and she wrote me a very nice letter. You know, she’s the correspondent for 60 Minutes. And she thought the book was engrossing, creative and funny. And I said, “I’ll take all three, Leslie.”

AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, why do you call these people “Meliorists”?

RALPH NADER: Because they were trying to figure out what they were going to call themselves to avoid a Bush Bimbaugh-type smear. One of the characters in the book is Bush Bimbaugh, who we all know is a takeoff on Rush Limbaugh. And a wonderful scene there when he invited Ted Turner into his studio, because he was losing ratings because of the growth of the progressive movement. They were saying, “What do we call ourselves so we’re not smeared, you know, by the editorialists of the Wall Street Journal or others?” And they came up with this word Meliorist, which means betterment. These are retired, progressive, enlightened billionaires and mega-millionaires who want to better the country. That’s what they called themselves.

But they didn’t go public until the mid-year, as they—that they were a coordinated effort. And as a result, they were able to engage in a strategy of coordinated surprise when they took on the CEOs.

And the Darth Vader in the book, who’s called Lobo, retained by the CEO Goliaths, represents every conceivable effort to stop the Meliorists. This is a titanic power collision. It’s not philanthropy. It’s not soft charity. It’s shifting power from the few to the many, top down, bottom up. That is, top down from the mega-rich, enlightened older people who are the Meliorists, down to the low [inaudible].

There’s a very good section in the book on how they did it in southwest Oklahoma to take on a thirty-eight-year-old veteran, House Rules Committee veteran, Republican—remember, the scene takes place in 2006—how they mobilized it in very practical ways. It eliminates all the stereotypes that we’ve learned to swallow as progressives about red state, blue state. It gets down to the concrete lives and the concrete hopes and the concrete capacities of our country.

AMY GOODMAN: So, have you lost faith in grassroots movements making that difference, making that change?

RALPH NADER: No, they can’t make it without very significant resources. If you want to set up 2,000 people organized in each congressional district, as the Meliorists do, you’re going to need tens of millions of dollars to get the staff, the offices, to find those 2,000 people, to root them so they go beyond the first year and they institutionalize themselves.

And this book, I hope, will be read by mega-billionaires. I hope they’ll say, “You know, all this time we wanted to do something about the crazy war on drugs or the prison reform or tax reform”—it’s inside their heads, but they’re very discouraged. I’ve talked to a lot of these super-rich, enlightened people over the years. I’ve never seen them so demoralized about the state of their beloved country. And in their advanced years, they don’t want to just watch it decay. But they’re all very egocentric, in a way. I mean, they’re entrepreneurs. They’ve done it, you know, without great help. And they don’t collaborate. And that’s the key, that the seventeen Meliorists are far more powerful than the sum of their parts, in terms of what they bring to this gigantic battle with the corporate and political power structure.

AMY GOODMAN: Have you gotten reaction from any of them, since this is a fictional account, but you’re using real people, real descriptions, real super-rich in the book?

RALPH NADER: I think they’re starting to read it now. They’ve had it for a couple weeks. It’s going to—you know, it’s a pretty hefty book, and the whole reason is because it’s all in the details. And the details are not dull. The idea here is to make apathy boring and to make civic action exciting. There are parades and bands, and the activity is in the rhythm of people’s cultural habits as they’re eased out into the public arena from the desperation of their private lives, economically and otherwise.

“Only the Super-rich Can Save Us!”  - a novel by Ralph Nader. AP:

He cites a couple of reasons for waiting until now to try fiction: “insufficient” imagination and a stubborn belief, now worn down, that the truth was enough, that “around the corner we’d have a breakthrough in health care, we’d have a breakthrough in corporate accountability.” His mind was not changed by the election of Barack Obama.

From: MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

MEDIA ALERT: THE COCKROACH TEST

Alain de Botton, “Branded Conversations”, and Runaway Climate Change

News that philosopher Alain de Botton had been hired as Heathrow’s “writer in residence” generated minor ripples across the media pond, including occasional murmurs of disapproval. Journalists momentarily failed to repress their awareness that truth into corporate profit-maximising does not go, although without perceiving the implications for themselves. 

Thus Dan Milmo, writer in residence at the Guardian, noted that de Botton was “the latest artistic figure to tread the precarious line between creative independence and commerce after signing a publishing deal with the financial support of Heathrow’s owner, BAA.” (Milmo, ‘High minded: Heathrow hires De Botton: Philosophical author begins work as airport’s writer-in-residence,’ The Guardian, August 19, 2009)

Milmo recalled how novelist Fay Weldon had been found to be responsible for “one of the most notorious sell-outs of recent times” when it emerged that her latest novel had been sponsored by the Italian jewellery firm Bulgari. Weldon explained last month:

“I was accused of defiling the novel. The deal was that I must mention Bulgari 12 times in a novel I wrote for them as a giveaway. My agent was terribly good and knocked them down to nine and a half mentions. In the end I mentioned them 46 times.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/aug/30/fay-weldon)

If some small part of Milmo’s brain recognised that he also treads a “precarious line” between creative independence and commerce, it didn’t show – journalists typically play intellectual possum when the issue is raised. In a recent discussion on the ethics of advertising in an age of climate crisis, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said it was fine for newspapers to be funded by Wal-Mart, “as long as Wal-Mart demands nothing in return” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainability/video/sustainability-advertising-alan-rusbridger). 

This kind of assurance is a complete red herring. The point is that when corporate advertisers keep media corporations in business, the corporate nature of both parties all but guarantees a corporate-friendly media performance. Nobody has to tell a media business to favour business, to tread carefully around issues that harm business control of society. Especially when politics, which is also in thrall to corporate power, has the power to reward and publish, praise and lambast, ‘respectable’ and ‘irresponsible’ journalism. 

Similarly, the problem is not that writers sell-out, but that, as Noam Chomsky told the BBC’s Andrew Marr, “if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting”. (The Big Idea, BBC2, February 14, 1996) Chomsky once related a story he had heard from a civil rights activist at Harvard Law School:

“He once gave a talk and said that kids were coming in to Harvard Law School with long hair and backpacks and social ideals and they were all going to go into public service, law and change the world. That’s the first year. He said around April the recruiters come for the summer jobs, the Wall Street firms. Get a cushy summer job and make a ton of money. 

“So the students figure, What the heck? I can put on a tie and jacket and shave for one day, because I need that money and why shouldn’t I have it? So they put on a tie and a jacket for that one day and they get the job for the summer. Then they go off for the summer and when they come back in the fall, it’s ties and jackets and obedience and a shift of ideology.” (http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/Chomsky_Tapes_MAlbert.html) 

De Botton was educated at the elite Dragon School, and at Harrow and Cambridge. His father was head of Rothschild Bank, then founded Global Asset Management in 1983 with £1m capital and sold it to UBS in 1999 for £420m. (Sunday Times profile, ‘A kicking from the boohoo boy of books,’ July 12, 2009)

…

Via Counterpunch:

“Deracination” by Charles R. Larson

Laleh Khadivi’s luminescent writing in her first novel, The Age of Orphans, speaks of Kurdish subjugation for most of the past hundred years, approaching what some of the Kurds’ neighbors would clearly prefer: obliteration. Though born in Iran in 1977, the writer herself has spent much of her life in the United States, most recently completing this novel–described as the first volume of a trilogy focusing on Kurdish men in the twentieth century. These goals are admirable, but Khadivi will need to bolster her exquisite prose with more action and dialogue if she hopes to grow a significant following of readers.

The protagonist of Khadivi’s narrative—while still breast-feeding, years beyond what would be considered normal–is circumcised and, somewhat later, trundled off to war where he observes his father’s death. He’s the only survivor from his village and, at age eleven, fully vulnerable to the Shah’s soldiers who are intent on pacifying the Kurds in the southwestern part of the newly-formed Iran (1921). Soldiers identify the boy as a tribal conscript, someone they can use to strengthen their country, and re-name him Reza Pejman Khourdi. Quickly, he’s programmed to fight for the new Iran. …

Megachurch performance

From the brilliant and vital novel by Miles Franklin – written in 1902, published in 1946 – My Career Goes Bung:

[Publisher:] “As for that notion of the brotherhood of man that you have, and loving the unwashed, anything in that direction is sheer drivel, drivel! Propaganda is fatal to any artist.”

[Young Author:] “What does propaganda mean?” I enquired. I knew the word only as a joke to couple with improper geese.

“Aw!” he said impatiently, “it’s any of those luny ideas about the underdogs being superior because they have nothing, and the theory that their bettors should support them in a velvet cage.”

“I see. It’s propaganda to advocate justice for the weak and helpless. What is it to uphold the rich?”

“Ha! Ha!” he chuckled. “It’s darned good business. It pays.”

“I see,” I repeated with a chill down my spine. “When you propagand for the top dogs it’s not propaganda: it’s like praising God: and God must be praised all the time or you’ll go to hell.”

Mr. Hardy laughed, but rather grimly. “See here, a man must take pride in his breed, and uphold the Empire.”

“Of course, but couldn’t there be different ways of upholding it?”

“Now don’t spring any more of that socialist rot about the young men’s dreams, and the old men being able to rest, or you’re a goner as a writer. Editors would scent you a mile off. See here, the biggest literary success, the greatest artist today is the most rousing imperialist. Gad, if only I could write like Kipling!”

To succeed by his recipe I should have to deny what I honestly felt. I should have to keep my inner self hidden from Mr. Hardy or it would be bruised and sore…

via Democracy Now!:

Academy Award-winning actor, director and writer Tim Robbins is involved in a new production of Father Daniel Berrigan’s acclaimed play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. The play centers on the events of May 17th, 1968, when nine Catholic peace activists, including Father Daniel Berrigan and his brother, the late Father Philip Berrigan, entered a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, and removed draft files of young men who were about to be sent to Vietnam. They were arrested and then sentenced in a highly publicized trial that galvanized the antiwar movement. We speak to Robbins about the play, which is being staged by his Los Angeles troupe, the Actors’ Gang.

“Kelman blasts mediocrity of boy wizards and crime bestsellers” by Phil Miller in The Herald:

James Kelman, the Scottish Booker Prize-winning author, has launched a furious attack on the way literary fiction is regarded in his homeland – criticising the praise lavished on “mediocre” detective writers and apparently even JK Rowling.

Kelman, appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, said that if the Nobel prize for literature was awarded from Scotland, instead of Sweden, it would be given to “a writer of f****** detective fiction” or work about “some upper middle-class young magician” instead of literary fiction.

…

He added: “Our tradition is actually an intellectual tradition, and an intellectual tradition that is not scared to be radical, and if that radical nature takes us into particular political positions then we should take them.

“And these positions have meant that we have not allowed ourselves to look at our own tradition, so that our own radical tradition is a mystery to us, that we don’t know about our historical links with people who we should be proud of – we should be proud that James Connolly the Irish socialist leader is an Edinburgh man, why are we not proud of that? One of the greatest twentieth century socialists was murdered by the British Army in 1916 – why do we not admit what happened with John Maclean, somebody who was murdered, who was poisoned by the State. Why is he not a hero?

“How can you give all this to somebody like Burns and not give a thought to all the other great Scottish writers.”

Science Fiction of the Now:

District 9 is not a pretty movie. It doesn’t look pretty. Its message isn’t pretty. It hurts the eyes to watch. In fact, District 9 is an outright ugly movie, but it is an ugly that is perfectly crafted and takes ugly to the heights of a new aesthetic. The screen is full of unflinchingly realistic ugly slums, banal ugly interiors of institutionalized spaces, and ugly people whose entire lives and bodies have been corrupted by the ugly greedy powers that dominate everything in the landscape.

Set in Johannesburg, South Africa, the movie centers on a camp of stranded space aliens who have been contained within a hideous filthy militarized slum and are in the process of being relocated to a concentration camp in the desert. Through its narrative, District 9 overtly exposes South Africa’s egregious practice of apartheid, a system of segregation that was the government-sanctioned practice of legal racism. It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out this connection and to understand the film in relation to its historic and geographic specificity. Certainly, apartheid and all systems of racism need to be addressed. But what makes this movie most interesting is how it uses the real life practice of apartheid as a jumping point to expose a whole global system of exploitation, discrimination, and economic cannibalism.District 9 doesn’t take on these big issues with bombastic Hollywood gloss and spectacle, but rather through a beautifully ugly hybrid of film genres – sci-fi, body horror, toxic accident, war and action films – to show how in a world where the toxins of global capital are so fluid, everything is corrupt, nothing is in its natural state, and toxic hybrids have become the new norm.

Though District 9 is indeed a mix-up of a number of film genres, it is first and foremost science fiction. But this is not the über-slick sci-fi of Michael Bay or Steven Spielberg that has dominated the global marketplace for the past couple of decades. District 9 isn’t the kind of high gloss spectacle that subordinates any meaningful socio-political content in a tale to the quest for maximum proft.. District 9’s ugly exterior and its realistic settings work to reclaim the ideological backbone of the best sci-fi by de-glossing the sci-fi production and bringing it down to the land of the real. Long ago and far away, sci-fi was a genre that was used to expose and critique savage socio-political systems. Sci-fi in the tradition of Philip K. Dick served a political function. Often infused with a good dose of Marxism, sci-fi dissected and exposed collusions between industry and government to achieve global economic domination at the expense of the working people, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized. In fact, the sci-fi of the past often exposed a system not unlike the Global Capital Machine of the present, the one that dominates the globe and cannibalizes the vast majority of the world’s population. As the Hollywood Machine became more sanitized and safe (beginning with the Reagan era and moving forward), sci-fi became an industry staple to generate enormous profits instead of civil unrest. Any subversive political content became glossed over by mega FX and superstar heroes that raked in enormous profits at the box office. Sure, sci-fi movies have tangentially addressed political and economic corruption, but rarely with a hell of a lot of conviction or bearing on the real world.

There is no denying the real world in District 9. …

On the film Balibo - Via ZNet – Pilger:

On 30 August it will be a decade since the people of East Timor defied the genocidal occupiers of their country to take part in a United Nations referendum, voting for their freedom and independence. A “scorched earth” campaign by the Indonesian dictatorship followed, adding to a toll of carnage that had begun 24 years earlier when Indonesia invaded tiny East Timor with the secret support of Australia, Britain and the United States. According to a committee of the Australian parliament, “at least 200,000″ died under the occupation, a third of the population.

Filming undercover in 1993, I found crosses almost everywhere: great black crosses etched against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides, crosses beside the road. They littered the earth and crowded the eye. A holocaust happened in East Timor, telling us more about rapacious Western power, its propaganda and true aims, than even current colonial adventures. The historical record is unambiguous that the US, Britain and Australia conspired to accept such a scale of bloodshed as the price of securing Southeast Asia’s “greatest prize” with its “hoard of natural resources”. Philip Liechty, the senior CIA operations officer in Jakarta at the time of the invasion, told me, “I saw the intelligence. There were people being herded into school buildings by Indonesian soldiers and the buildings set on fire. The place was a free fire zone… We sent them everything that you need to fight a major war against somebody who doesn’t have any guns. None of that got out… [The Indonesian dictator] Suharto was given the green light to do what he did.”   Read the rest of this entry »

Great interview on social change and writing at Africa is a Country.

Or rather, Atticus Gladwell.

It’s telling that one of the most valuable pieces of criticism of fiction to come out of the New Yorker in a while was not written by any of its literary critics but by another staff writer, Malcolm Gladwell. It’s telling additionally that on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the central US novel To Kill a Mockingbird, a review of the novel and its fit in society was either declined by the entire lit crit staff and all adjunct literary reviewers of the New Yorker or was directed away from all of them. Maybe they were all on vacation, forced or otherwise. One can see why. After all, George Packer, James Wood, and Keith Gessen were recently exposed for their severe distortions of another socially central writer, George Orwell; and Louis Menand recently admitted in a review of Pynchon’s latest novel that “I could be missing something, of course. I could be missing everything” in regard to the existence of allusions in the text of a writer famed for allusions. Perhaps New Yorker subscribers don’t mind such cavalier attitude to their subscription funds.

Regardless, Gladwell’s article, “The Courthouse Ring,” goes only a small step forward in New Yorker criticism. Who knew that an early 1960s portrayal of an early 1930s Southern lawyer in a  small town would reveal “the limits of Southern liberalism” rather than “instruct us about the world”? Well but Gladwell may mean that the (white) masses hold this belief that goes against reason. But the masses encouraged and “led” by whom? The publishing and lit industry? The corporate-state, its media and schools? Surely not.

At least Gladwell usefully spells out some points of concern: Read the rest of this entry »

Consider Dave Eggers’ story “Max at Sea” in the recent New Yorker in light of Maxwell Geismar’s comments over half a century ago:

…a negation of the ‘mind’…in favor of the pure and primary world of childhood sensation. That lost world of childhood indeed to which somehow or other, [J.D.] Salinger, like the rest of the New Yorker school, always returns! That pre-Edenite community of yearned-for bliss, where knowledge is again the serpent of all evil: but a false and precocious show of knowledge, to be sure, which elevated without emancipating its innocent and often touching little victims… The root of the matter is surely here, and perhaps all these wise children may yet emerge from the nursery of life and art (208-209)…

More from Geismar in the same book, American Moderns – From Rebellion to Conformity (1958), including the quote above in further context:

The present volume began as a collection of articles and reviews writing in the Nineteen-Forties and Fifties for a more or less popular audience… Some of these articles are in the polemical vein which a critic uses with reluctance when his second nature, or his first, is to inquire, to balance, and to evaluate. The central focus of the volume is on the transitional decade from the Second World War to the middle of the twentieth century – from McCarthy to Sputnik. The historical setting is that of the uneasy ‘peace,’ the tensions of the Cold War, the return to ‘normalcy,’ and the epoch of conformity.

Or was it euphoria? In literature the period marked the decline of the classic modern American writers at the peak of their popular reputation. In criticism there was the movement towards higher and higher levels of aesthetic, or scholastic, absolutism…

There was indeed a state of general inertia in the arts, as the familiar sequel to an age of anxiety: of problems urgent and not resolved, while the surface of the globe, and outer space too, vibrated in the throes of change. The American literary scene of the Forties and Fifties must have presented to the rest of the world an odd and ironic spectacle at times; and perhaps the polemical note was indicated; and meanwhile I trust that this spectacle may also be instructive… (ix-x). Read the rest of this entry »

More on this when I get a chance [update: Malcolm Finch and the Limits of Liberal Fiction] but just want to note that – re: Malcolm Gladwell’s article on To Kill a Mockingbird in the recent New Yorker – the novel is more sociopolitically limited by far than Gladwell conveys. Also the novel is far more than a study of “the limits of Southern liberalism”; the novel had huge New York and national imprint and involvement in its production and creation and further dissemination (the film), as well as having strong current relation (in a variety of ways). The work greatly typifies the limits of liberalism in general. Similarly, Gladwell’s article is a study in the limits of liberalism (north, south, east, or west).

The May 2009 book by James A. Miller – Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial covers some of this ground. See in particular the Epilogue and “Chapter Eight: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird: The Final Stage of the Scottsboro Narrative.” Read the rest of this entry »

Liberatory, visionary SF: Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach and Solartopia by Harvey Wasserman, their conversation at Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/callenbach06052009.html. Also Joe Emersberger’s more recent, related Wovokia.

Good review, excerpted below, of an important book and author. Stella Miles Franklin’s novel My Career Goes Bung (The End of My Career) has far more going for it than most novels today, also as much as or more than the valuable and acclaimed novels written about the same time, such as Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. See an excerpt at Lib Lit, as well as an excerpt of another valuable neglected novel, The Marrow of Tradition, by Charles Chesnutt.

Lisa Hill:

I’m not in the habit of writing fan letters, but I am very tempted to write to Jill Roe to thank her for writing this magnificent biography. Stella Miles Franklin, A Biography is not just an authoritative exploration of the life of one of my literary heroes, it’s also an intriguing read in its own right.  It’s excellent because it is so well structured, because the author’s prose is a pleasure to read and because the scholarship shines through without being heavy-handed.

Roe has not only read Franklin’s oeuvre and her voluminous correspondence, she has also read the books that Franklin enjoyed and considered memorable; she has read the most obscure of reviews about Franklin’s work, and she has the knack of using an apt comment from her sources to amplify her own analysis of events.  It is this perceptive analysis which sets this biography apart from the Olley biography which relies on commentary instead.

Almost everyone is familiar with My Brilliant Career – from the film if not from the novel - but I was intrigued to see that whereas today this book tends to be analysed in terms of gender and psychology, in Franklin’s day it was viewed through the perspectives of autobiography and class. Sybylla was rebellious and ‘unladylike’ it is true, but it was the gulf between the impoverished selectors and the squatters that lay at the heart of her rejection of Henry Beecham.  Even though she mellowed a little in her old age, Franklin was always radical in her opinions and politics, and nationalism and feminism were equally important in shaping both her professional and personal life.

Will Grant, BBC, “Venezuela’s Revolutionary Reading”: “The [Venezuelan] government has given out tens of thousands of free copies of Don Quijote by Cervantes and Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, saying that such events ‘promote reading for the construction of socialism and humanist values’.”

“Plan Revolucionario de lectura es particpativo“

On TV, learning how to “survive,” by Alan Farago.

In lit, learning how to live, by Victor Hugo.

At The Valve, Andrew Seal writes:

“I’m not asking for a canon or a best of [science fiction]—in fact, that’s rather the opposite of what I’m interested in—but rather what Adam is talking about—which [SF] books aren’t just classics but have (or have retained) that waking and shaking power?”

Clearly this is going to vary widely, infinitely, depending upon who the reader is.

That said, a problem with work that self or primarily identifies as SF is the primary focus on the fantastic, which is often largely a media creation, a marketing tag or categorical brand, emphasizing fantastical cleverness above all, whatever else gets explored.

Would one call the Epic of Gilgamesh, or the Odyssey, or the Inferno, or Utopia, or The Praise of Folly, or Gulliver’s Travels, or Wizard of the Crow SF? Then where are such great, even landmark works (of all literature) in these discussions? These are all fantastical fictions but they are so much more besides that it may sound odd to call them SF, or Science Fiction, or Fantasy, or Speculative Fiction, even though they are. It may seem odd (at first) to include them integrally into such discussions but they should be included, even centrally because they are examples of great landmark works of literature regardless or genre or type that happen to be fantastical. Even while inseparable from their fantastic elements, core elements in some cases, these are stories primarily known and emphasized for something greater than their fantastical cleverness and achievements just as Middlemarch and other such great Victorian novels, for example, are primarily known for something other than their mimetic fidelity or dramatic or comic acuity.

Many of these conversations assessing contemporary SF works are self-confining when they don’t jump out of the SF media/marketing box.

Such discussions often exclude crucial novels that may be in many ways either conventional or unconvential SF works but that aim for and achieve much more than the clever fantastic: works like those that I’ve mentioned and others such as Herland and The Yellow Wallpaper and Ecotopia and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, The Dispossessed, and The Parable of the Sower, and others. And at Lib Lit, the journal I co-edit, stories like Joe Emersberger’s “The Publisher,” “Dave the Prophet,” “Segundo’s Revenge,” and “Wovokia,” among others (http://liblit.org/fiction/). Fantastical works like these long have been and currently are at the very least as challenging to current achievements in SF as those mediated and marketed as SF, as not much more than some clever fantastical trip, maybe marginally topical or otherwise thematic. Their fantastic elements and natures qualify them to be in the SF discussion, and for some of them their genuine landmark reality or normative power and import are a great challenge to what qualifies as vital and accomplished fiction throughout the years, both fantastical and otherwise.

I don’t know that this is news to many but seems worth serious emphasis. Fantastical cleverness is great but normative import and vitality is at least as much a factor in making or breaking a great novel or story, no matter the genre or type of work. Emphasis on the normative achievement and urgency of such works can also help break open the demeaned media/marketing box that SF is too often pushed into or left confined within.

Casablanca: When Melodrama Trumped History” by David Macaray via Counterpunch:

Not only is “Casablanca” regarded as one of the greatest American movies ever made—throbbing romance, exotic setting, superb cast, memorable song (“As Time Goes By”), signature dialogue (“Play it again, Sam”)—it managed to beat out an astonishing nine other nominees to win the 1943 Oscar for Best Picture. …

But for all the adoration and praise this movie has received, has anyone actually examined its plot?  Has anyone asked themselves what this movie isreally about? Because, if they had, they’d realize the movie’s central premise is patently absurd. …

And for those who think this appraisal is too petty or negative, let us go to the source.  Let us quote Julius J. Epstein, the co-writer (along with his brother, Philip) of the screenplay for “Casablanca.”

These are Epstein’s words:  “It was just a routine assignment.  Frankly, I can’t understand its staying power.  If it were made today, line for line, each performance as good, it’d be laughed off the screen.  It’s such a phony picture.  Not a word of truth in it.  It’s camp, it’s kitsch.  It’s shit!”

Ouch.

In her recent essential collection of essays, A Human Eye (2009), Adrienne Rich writes in ”Poetry and the Forgotten Future”:

Antonio Gramsci wrote of the culture of the future that “new” individual artists can’t be manufactured: art is a part of society – but that to imagine a new socialist society is to imagine a new kind of art that we can’t foresee from where we now stand. “One must speak,” Gramsci wrote, “of a struggle for a new culture, that is, for a new moral life that cannot but be intimately connected to a new intuition of life, until it becomes a new way of feeling and seeing reality and, therefore, a world intimately ingrained in ‘possible artists’ and ‘possible works of art.’”

In any present society, a distinction needs to be made between the “avante-garde that always remains the same” – what a friend of mine has called “the poetry of false problems” – and a poetics  searching for transformative meaning on the shoreline of what can now be thought or said. Adonis, writing of Arab poetry, reminds Arab poets that “modernity should be a creative vision, or it will be no more than a fashion. Fashion grows old from the moment it is born, while creativity is eternally modern.”

Case in point for fiction, the relatively unknown novel Banjo (1929), by the great poet and novelist Claude McKay, which remains these past 80 years easily more fresh, incisive, and urgent than the vast majority of the celebrated works of its time and our time.

Banjo, and the work and thought of McKay in general, is vastly underappreciated, not least in light of the work and thought of Gramsci and Rich, as well as that of Raymond Williams and other progressive or revolutionary – liberatory - critics. Below, an ever-timely excerpt from Williams’ ”The New Metropolis” in The Country and the City (1973): Read the rest of this entry »

from Counterpunch - “Mothers and Military Lies”:

I only started singing two years ago.  I came to realize the power of a song.  People will listen to a song with words they wouldn’t want to read or hear in a speech.  I realized if I am going to invest my time in learning a song, it should be one that might make a difference.  One that might wake up a soul or two.  That might touch people in a way to at least plant a seed in their soul that maybe there is more to this war thing than pressing “reset” and starting over. 

When I first heard the song, John Brown, it smacked me awake, and woke me up to a new reality.  He wrote it in 1963, years before the Vietnam War peaked, although talk of it was in the air.  It is a timeless message.  And a painful one.  I think it carries a message that many of us would like the world to know.  It’s a message we’d like other mothers, fathers, sons and daughters to understand BEFORE it’s too late.

It’s one thing to go to Vegas and drop a chunk of money on slots or blackjack.  The gambler at least knows the worst case possibility of how much he or she may lose.  It’s important for enlistees and their parents to truly understand that enlistment in the military is a gamble, with the highest stakes imaginable.  The enlistee is agreeing to gamble on the loss of his or her mind, body, and soul.

“John Brown” by Bob Dylan.  Sung by Diane Rejman and Trond Toft Read the rest of this entry »

Darah: The radicalisation of the Niger Delta political space has had its effect on the themes and rhetoric of works by the region’s writers, activist thinkers, and cultural mediators. I am currently working on a book of essays on Niger Delta literature as a follow-up to my recently edited anthology, Radical Essays on Nigerian Literatures: Volume I which appeared in 2008.

For the past 20 years or so, I have written passionately about the situation in the Niger Delta region. I have done so through the mass media and in public lectures and discourses. The common theme that runs through my interventions all these years is that a revolutionary process is unfolding in the oil-rich but economically and politically colonised Niger Delta. The manifestations of this political upheaval are more visible in the theatres of politics and movements of change or self-determination.

The vision and trajectory of these movements and actions are to promote a radical change in Nigeria’s political configuration so that the nations and peoples who are victims of local colonialism can emancipate themselves. The nations and peoples of the Niger Delta are determined to enjoy the freedoms and privileges that should flow from their resource endowment and strategic location in the world’s economy. My position is that the themes and idioms of this liberationist endeavour are reflected in the arts and literatures produced in the region. This address aims to highlight the manner this politics is reflected and refracted.

…

In his edited book, Before I Am Hanged: Ken Saro-Wiwa, Literature, Politics and Dissent (2004) Professor Onookome Okome observed that the “tales coming out of the Niger Delta are not evidence of dead dreams. Rather, they are examples of dreams which the suffering people are trying to make into reality”. From the genres and generations of literature that I have reviewed in this address, we can confirm our tentative judgement that the Niger Delta is both the locomotive of the Nigerian economy as well as the centre of gravity of the best traditions of the nation’s literatures and letters.

___________________________________________________________

Professor Darah is of the Department of English and Literary Studies, Delta State University, Abraka. This is a slightly revised version of the address he delivered at the 2008 Convention of the Society of Nigerian Theatre Artistes at the University of Benin.

Because intellectualism is for everyone and creativity is rebellious – at ZNet:

This is a call for the left and for revolutionaries to break with old paradigms of education and argument and to take art, or culture, seriously. To use it to wake people up, to communicate, to argue, to show people how beautiful that other world we are proposing, is.

The Play – prose poem by Alaa Kadhim al-Jabiri

“I beg your pardon my dear readers I did not mention the name of the play which is ‘The Mass Graves’.”

Emergency Clinic – poetry by Adrienne Rich

The Briefing – fiction by Arundhati Roy

Below are parts 3 and 4 of a six part section on James Wood’s April New Yorker article on George Orwell, “A Fine Rage.” The full version of “What Would Not Do To Say – The ’Cleansing’ of George Orwell” will appear as part of an expanded version of “Fiction Gutted – The Establishment and the Novel” in paper form in the Liberation Lit anthology forthcoming this summer. The parts of “What Would Not Do To Say” that may be found only in Liberation Lit are “A Real Shove From Above”; “Establishment Innuendo”; “Moving Beyond Class Structure”; and “Valuing the Work of Orwell.” See below: “Establishment PR,” “The Sinister Fact,” and an appendix. [full article, all 6 parts, now available online] Read the rest of this entry »

by Mark Engler
ZNet / Foreign Policy In Focus

Tapping into a long tradition of politicized science fiction, the young, New-York-based filmmaker Alex Rivera has brought to theaters a movie that reflects in news ways on the disquieting realities of the global economy. Sleep Dealer, his first feature film, has opened in New York and Los Angeles, and will show in 25 cities throughout the country this spring. 

Set largely on the U.S.-Mexico border, Sleep Dealer depicts a world in which borders are closed but high-tech factories allow migrant workers to plug their bodies into the network to provide virtual labor to the North. The drama that unfolds in this dystopian setting delves deeps into issues of immigration, labor, water rights, and the nature of sustainable development.

Rivera’s film drew attention by winning two awards at Sundance–the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for the best film focusing on science and technology. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote of the movie, “Adventurous, ambitious and ingeniously futuristic, Sleep Dealer… combines visually arresting science fiction done on a budget with a strong sense of social commentary in a way that few films attempt, let alone achieve.” 

Rivera spoke with Foreign Policy In Focus senior analyst Mark Engler by phone from Los Angeles, where the director was attending the local premier of his movie.

Z Magazine Net Briefs – “Petitioning PEN”:

From penpetition.blogspot.com and kingwenclas.blogspot.com comes the news that PEN American Center in New York, an organization to protect and defend dissenting, outcast, and marginalized writers, has virtually shut out impoverished writers. The centerpiece of the PEN American Center is its gala, which occurs every year in late April. The funds are raised by wealthy attendees—$766,625 gross receipts in 2007. (Tickets are usually in the neighborhood of $1,000 a head.) The expense to hold this swanky aristocratic affair was $247,773 in 2007. PEN holds other literary affairs every year—such as the International Writers Festival, staged at the mind-boggling expense of $536,005. PEN promotes its festival as an “answer to American cultural insularity.” Of the $111,000 monetary awards to individual writers in 2007, the top three were: $40,000 to Philip Roth, who’s published by both Houghton-Mifflin and Random House; $35,000 to Columbia professor Janna Levin, published by Alfred Knopf; $10,000 to James Carroll, published by Houghton-Mifflin. By giving grants to authors who should be fully paid by their giant publishers, PEN American Center is in effect subsidizing billion-dollar book conglomerates. Various writers are petitioning PEN, asking people to sign the following:

“We the undersigned petition PEN American Center in New York to democratize their organization by appointing, as Trustees, not solely writers who are entwined with book companies owned by media monopolies. This includes writers who’ve dissented against the established U.S. literary mainstream. We ask all writers, from all backgrounds, to sign this Petition, including current PEN members and Trustees, in the interest of realizing the PEN mission, voiced by PEN’s Larry Siems, of ‘bridging intellectual chasms and cultural divides’.”

A Writer’s Violent End, and His Activist Legacy – by Patricia Cohen, NYT:

[Ken] Saro-Wiwa, a popular author who helped create a peaceful mass movement on behalf of the Ogoni people, was executed in November 1995 along with eight other environmental and human rights activists on what many contended were trumped-up murder charges. His body was burned with acid and thrown in an unmarked grave.

PEN, an international association of writers dedicated to defending free expression, along with Guernica, the online literary magazine, sponsored the panel with Mr. Patterson, Mr. Ndibe and Ken Wiwa, Mr. Saro-Wiwa’s son, to discuss Mr. Saro-Wiwa’s literary and political legacy.

Fourteen years have passed. General Abacha has died, and Mr. Saro-Wiwa has had a proper burial, but the circumstances surrounding the nine executions, along with related incidents of brutal attacks and torture, are getting another hearing. This month the Wiwa family’s lawsuit against Royal Dutch Shell over its role in those events goes to trial in federal court in Manhattan.

“We feel that Shell’s fingerprints are all over,” Ken Wiwa told the audience. “Clearly Shell financed and provided logistical support.”

Among the accusations are that Shell employees were present when two witnesses were offered bribes to testify against Mr. Saro-Wiwa, said Jennie Green, a senior lawyer at the nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights, which is representing the family. She said Mr. Saro-Wiwa’s brother Owens has also stated that Shell’s managing director, Brian Anderson (now retired), told him, “If you call off the campaign, maybe we can do something for your brother.”

Under American law you don’t have to be the one who “tightened the noose” to be found guilty, Ms. Green said.

…

During his imprisonment Mr. Saro-Wiwa said that he often envied Western writers “who can peacefully practice their craft.” Yet he also recognized that wasn’t his path. As he wrote in 1993, “The writer cannot be a mere storyteller, he cannot be a mere teacher; he cannot merely X-ray society’s weaknesses, its ills, its perils, he or she must be actively involved shaping its present and its future.”

See also: Ten Years On, Nigeria’s Ogoni Minority Mark Saro-Wiwa’s Death

The man with the Mau Mau spirit
Remembering Bantu Mwaura

Shailja Patel

Pambazuka News

Poet and performer Shailja Patel celebrates the life of Bantu Mwaura (1969-2009) – Kenyan artist, activist and academic – through a series of reminiscences about what he meant to different people. Mwaura, husband of Susan and father of Makeba and Me Katilili, died on 26 April. ‘He was expression without hindrance; the way Africa used to be. He left behind power and energy; people speaking. In his dreadlocks and movements and smile and dress, Bantu carried an entire people.’]

‘It’s what we do at a very determined individual level that changes what happens in whatever field we work in.’
Bantu Mwaura, interviewed by Doreen Struahs and David Paul Mavia, 2006

‘Nothing was usual about him. He stirred people to thought. You could not ignore his presence and sense of things. A level of responsibility of the highest order. A passionate desire to think clearly and to be useful to all. A certain level of service; when I saw him I felt things were being taken care of, in freedom and resistance so powerfully merged. You would be tempted to ask him, which goddess asked you to do things this way? We should follow her ways.’
Philo Ikonya, president, PEN (Kenya chapter)

‘See, Bantu was not just all argument; he was a complex human being with an even more complex personality that perhaps society saw too harshly, or chose to not to see at all, because what he said disturbed us.’
Mbugua wa-Mungai, Ohio State University, Centre For Folklore Studies

The first time I met Bantu Mwaura, a few years ago, he showed me, unprompted, his cellphone display: A photo of his wife, Susan, and two children. When he told me his daughters’ names: Makeba (after Miriam Makeba) and Me Katilili (Kenyan woman who led her Giriama people in armed struggle against the British in 1913), I teased him: ‘No pressure there, huh? No burdens of history on two gorgeous children?’
He laughed, his face alight with love and pride in his family.

The burdens of history caught up with Bantu Mwaura four days ago. We still do not have a definitive, trustworthy account of how he met his death. Kenyan press reports that his body was found on Monday morning, on a path of the Nairobi housing estate where he lived. An autopsy was carried out on Tuesday, where a pathologist from the Independent Medico-Legal Unit (a Kenyan human rights organisation) was present alongside the government pathologist. The certified cause of death was ‘chemical poisoning’. I am told that ‘investigations continue’ into how the poison was administered – and by whom.

Bantu’s voice unspools in my head as I write this. With all his fierce righteousness, honest rage, passionate scholarship, loathing of hypocrisy, love of true art, uncompromising rigour of standards, commitment to making good work, activist power, courage of spirit, and largeness of heart. Read the rest of this entry »

See Shelley Ettinger’s May Day themed short story “Herb and Leo Are at It Again” at Liberation Lit: on unions, organizing, immigration, and friendship… See also recent cartoons by Marina Weidemanne and others by Carol Simpson.

Which Side Are You On?
Rebel Diaz

Which Side Are You On?
Dropkick Murphys

Which Side Are You On?
Natalie Merchant

Which Side Are You On?
Billy Bragg

Which Side Are You On?
Pete Seeger

Which Side Are You on?
Florence Reese
(“an American social activist, poet, and folksong writer. Born in Sharps Chapel, Tennessee the daughter and wife of coal miners, she is best known for the song, “Which Side Are You On?“ written in 1931 during a strike by the United Mine Workers of America in which her husband, Sam Reece, was an organizer.”)

Come all of you good workers,
Good news to you I’ll tell,
Of how that good old union
Has come in here to dwell.

cho: Which side are you on?
     Which side are you on?
     Which side are you on?
     Which side are you on?

My daddy was a miner,
And I’m a miner’s son,
And I’ll stick with the union,
Till every battle’s won.

They say in Harlan County,
There are no neutrals there.
You’ll either be a union man,
Or a thug for J.H. Blair.

Oh, workers can you stand it?
Oh, tell me how you can.
Will you be a lousy scab,
Or will you be a man ?

Don’t scab for the bosses,
Don’t listen to their lies.
Us poor folks haven’t got a chance,
Unless we organize.

Interview and song – video

Detroit video tribute

Joe Emersberger’s story Segundo’s Revenge is an accomplished and valuable story. It’s artistic and readable, informative and educational. Though pointed and factual in urgent ways, it exhibits as well ambiguity of life and art. The story exemplifies quality propaganda and quality art, which writers on the left have sometimes noted can coexist well, contrary to what liberals and conservatives often decry or dismiss. Stories are invariably propagandistic or political in various ways. What makes Segundo’s Revenge special for progressive social change is that it works both as propaganda and as art, both implicitly and explicitly. Liberal works often function as propaganda mainly implicitly, though sometimes explicitly in part. Liberals often claim that overt propaganda is neither desirable nor aesthetic.

Not all art needs ambiguity to be aesthetic – this story happens to have it as a secondary or tertiary feature, some might argue primary. Segundo’s Revenge is artistic as well beyond ambiguity; for one, it is aesthetic in ways directly tied into the norms of the story and its structure – about which a great deal could be shown. Overall, the story is full of life, an end in itself, and a great tool. Paradoxically, the story’s utility both enhances the art (including the aesthetics) and makes the art often disappear in the face of its normative and educational power. Segundo’s Revenge is complex but simple. It is a pointed and purposeful and agitating creature, a remarkable work of art and education, both welcoming and working. Read the rest of this entry »

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o in his critical work Decolonising the Mind (1986) below. His masterpiece novel Wizard of the Crow (2006) goes hand in glove with it. Wizard of the Crow is the equal of any of the Victorian novel greats.

In the Preface of Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ notes:

“Inevitably, essays of this nature may carry a holier-than-thou attitude or tone. I would like to make it clear that I am writing as much about myself as about anybody else. The present predicaments of Africa are often not a matter of personal choice: they arise from an historical situation. Their solutions are not so much a matter of personal decision as that of fundamental social transformation of the structures of our societies starting with a real break with imperialism and its internal ruling allies. Imperialism and its comprador alliances in Africa can never never develop the continent.”

The University of Iowa is home to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, one of the leading, or the leading, graduate creative writing centers in the US, nationally and internationally renowned. But let’s consider all the creative writing programs across the US and the faculty and grad students, and let’s think of all the literary journals, and let’s consider in addition all the novelists in the US, and the publishers. How many explicit investigative novels about the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, for example, have been written? And published? How many have been taught? Virtually none. The novel is a popular vehicle. The US conquest of Iraq, of greater Oila, is one of the great crimes and calamities of the time for which the US is responsible. Academics, intellectuals have an obligation to solicit, foster, produce, publish, teach, and otherwise disseminate such work. Essentially, they don’t. That’s a culture that is complicit.

Historian Paul Street recounts in “Cowardice Pays: Reflections on Academic Abdication and a Paul Krugman Lecture in Iowa City“:

“Academic co-optation” is not just a “cynical” radicals’ fantasy. It really exists across the middle and upper reaches of “higher-education,” where engaged radical sentiments and activism are commonly seen as naïve and un-professional and where cowardice can pay quite handsomely. And if it can explain the conservatism and indifference of state university professors deep in the heartland, imagine how far it can go with a heralded, Nobel Prize-winning Princeton academic who also holds down cherished column space at the nation’s leading newspaper of record?

Brute realism – not the end all be all in art but sometimes useful:

“Matteo Garrone’s “Gomorrah” – The Mafia Without Moralizing” by Kim Nicolini via Counterpunch, excerpted:

Shot on location with non-professional actors and stories based on actual events, Gomorrah brings the Mafia Myth down to its ugly reality. The film integrates a number of stories: thirteen-year old Toto, who is being recruited by the mafia; Don Ciro, who delivers money to families of imprisoned mob members; Marco and Ciro, two young men who worship Scarface; Pasquale the tailor who works in a mob-run sewing factory; and Roberto who facilitates the mafia’s exploits in waste management. Through these intersecting stories, their relation to the environment in which the movie is filmed, and the spare cinematography, Gomorrah shows the dark, gritty underbelly of capitalism and its relation to organized crime. There is nothing flashy here: no artful montages like the famous baptism scene in The Godfather, no self-reflexive storytelling like we get in Goodfellas. What we get instead is brutally claustrophobic documentary realism that refuses to distance us from the ugliness that plays out on the screen. Read the rest of this entry »

At Stanford – the announcement - more info at press page – includes the familar quote on politics in lit by Stendhal, with discouraging implications  that are belied by the quote continuation, which is virtually never noted  – see below, excerpted from Fiction Gutted – The Establishment and the Novel, Part Four: Read the rest of this entry »

From The Vassals Handbook – Lesson  sixteen - Profit U

So I wrote a speech to end all speeches for our beloved President of the Incorporated Estates of Earth, Al O’Toole. He delivered it to the rebels. It did not go over well. I am not surprised. The truly intransigent cannot be reached. We go through the motions, as required.

I must admit I was underwhelmed by my meeting with the President of the IEE. It made me think I am not the right man for the job of Official Sloganeer. I longed to return to my first true love: teaching. I recalled fondly my years of joy as Terminator of History at Rockview Terminal. Who knows what connections exist between our thoughts and the actions of the universe? About that time I was offered the Presidency of the newest university on earth: Profit U. Good ole PU.

PU is founded in this time of psycho-socio-economic crisis with the intent of restoring faith in the system of the IEE. I accepted the Presidency of PU, stipulating that I continue work on the epic in progress, the how-to book for good loyal consumers of the IEE, The Vassals Handbook. The Executors Board of PU readily agreed. IEE President Al O’Toole wished me well and said he would sign up for a distance learning course if I were to lead one. Of course I promised to come up with something. So here I am, newly installed as the first President of PU. The school cheers ring in my ears. Let’s go PU! Here we go PU! We Are PU! We’re Number One! PU! Number One!

PU! PU! PU!

The rosy-fingered dawn of the new day breaks at PU.

Profit U. We are tasked to challenge Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the other greats for intellectual and moral supremacy in the IEE. We are charged by the leaders of the IEE to take on their traditional roles as the bastions of all that is wise and good. We are charged to lead the IEE through crisis high and low. What ambitious young man or woman would not want to attend PU? The question answers itself.

“In a word, the revolutionary critic does not believe that we can have art without craftsmanship; what he does believe is that, granted the craftsmanship, our aim should be to make art serve man as a thing of action and not man serve art as a thing of escape. 

- V. F. Calverton (George Goetz), The Liberation of American Literature

James Wood opens his essay ”The Tunnel,” a review of John Wray’s novel Lowboy, by claiming:

“Fiction is at once real and imaginary. Not real at one moment and flickeringly illusory the next, like the fading pulse of a dying man, but both at once, as if a ghost had a pulse. Fiction is one giant pseudo-statement, a fact-checker’s nightmare. Like one of our own lies, it can be completely “wrong” about the world and yet completely revelatory – completely “right” – about the psychology of the person issuing the error. Thus, one of fiction’s most natural areas of inquiry, from Cervantes to Murakami, concerns states of confusion, error, or madness, in which a character’s crazy fictions become intertwined with the novel’s calmer fictions, and the reader’s purchase on the reliable world becomes intermittently tenuous.”

Wood’s emphasis here - a kind of tautological claim, that the very nature of fiction “at once real and imaginary…as if a ghost had a pulse” acts to produce in readers an “intermittently tenuous purchase on the reliable world” – functions to misrepresent or mask his implied observation that fiction as a curious mix of fact and make-believe allows readers a mostly reliable grip on the world, even when involving a character who also mixes fact and make-believe.  Read the rest of this entry »

Some roundup comments on establishment and liberatory fiction – The Kindly Ones, 2666, Les Miserables, Wizard of the Crow… Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Boggs:

Stephanie McMillan is the author of Minimum Security, a radical comic strip that approaches some of the most pressing issues of our time: the global environmental crisis, rampant consumerism, U.S. imperialism, and institutionalized gender and class inequalities. Much of McMillan’s work challenges readers to look beyond a system that does not serve the needs of people or the natural world. She says, “Beliefs are extremely tenacious and we’re trained from birth to believe in this system—that it’s the only possible way to live.”

See her graphic novel: “As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial,” created with writer Derrick Jensen, 2007, Seven Stories Press.

From The Vassals Handbook – Lesson fourteen – in the banks we trust

I pledge allegiance to the banks of the Incorporated Estates of Earth and to the Rulers, whom they enrich, one Command throughout the land - obedience - with conformity and subservience for all.

Good vassals learn the Bank Pledge by heart when still wet from the womb. And with good reason. The Bank Pledge can take a vassal far in the Incorporated Estates of Earth. The banks are divine, and vassals mere mortals who owe their breath to the going rate of exchange. Few vassals would rather defy banks and starve than obey banks and have a chance. All is fair in love and banks. Read the rest of this entry »

Lesson twelve – the economy is fundamentally sound

What we mean when we say the economy is fundamentally sound is that the Incorporated Estates of Earth are fundamentally sound.  No rogue nation are we, no failed state, no terrorist sect. What we mean when we say the IEE is fundamentally sound is that this is the best system ever. Ever was, ever is, ever will be. History has ended, nature has decreed, the universe declares: vassalism is perfect. As perfect as can be. As close to perfect as one can possibly imagine.

Look, Great Depressions, let alone recessions, are unavoidable, like unemployment, a fact of life, a law of nature, a boon to the economy in the end. It serves the common good to keep wages down, expectations in check. Full employment? The pipedream of children.

Even during Great Depressions and myriad wars the economy is always and everywhere fundamentally sound. That is, ultimately. You know this. Temporary glitches or catastrophes, mass layoffs, environmental wipeouts, ongoing battles over scarce resources, the arms race – these phenomena are all part and parcel of the fundamentally sound nature of capitalism cum vassalism. In this we trust and believe. With the lords of commerce. Let it be. Amen.

Dahr Jamail, “The Ongoing Occupation of Iraqi Artists“:

When Art, a crucial component that sustains the socio-cultural fabric of a society, and the Artist, who weaves this fabric, are both under assault, society tends to get frayed and fractious. As my sculptor friend Alawchi stated most succinctly, “It is dangerous for people to leave the arts. It’s dangerous, because art is the front face of the community. We now have the desertification of the art world in Iraq.”

And not only in Iraq. 500 years of imperialism has its effect on the culture.

["Lessons" are temporary posts. These early drafts may come down after a few days. Any surviving or revised remnants and expanded passages can be found at The Vassals Handbook page – also subject to revision.]

Lesson eleven – we mean well

The great thing about being a vassal is that you always know you mean well. We mean well, we do. Isn’t it obvious? We mean well, always. No matter what others might say about us. No matter what silly arguments they might raise.

Take for example universal health care. We don’t have it. And for that we are thankful. Lack of universal health care is a sign of our inherent fairness, generosity of spirit, economic thrift. We mean well because we are well.

Do not speak of the supposed virtues of equality of condition, wherein everyone has a right to health care. Preposterous. The United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights is not worth the paper it is written on. Useful only for starting fires. Unlike the laws of the Incorporated Estates of Earth, the laws of the old United Nations do not mean well. The UDHR remains a document of illness, if not raving lunacy, signed long ago in some sick spasm of internationality.

What could be more generous than allowing everyone the equal opportunity to fend for themselves? Poor health and death take the hindmost. Time to face reality, vassals. Life is a race from the wolf at the door. If you mean well, if you really do, you will run for your life, like good vassals everywhere.

The same holds for international affairs. The Incorporated Estates of Earth owns the world, as it should, because it means well, always and everywhere.

Thus we intervene constantly against people of color the world over. We garrison the earth, and every year we spend over half our money on all matters militant.

It’s easy to find people of color to smash. There are so many of them, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Africa, South America – even in the heart and soul of the IEE, the USA, where the prison population - chock full of people of color, not to mention people of no money - leads all Earth. More prisoners per capita, more prisoners period. Hey, we’re number one!

Those who we don’t smash, we threaten. Because we mean well. The order and security of the Incorporated Estates of Earth demands it. The IEE likes to, needs to, aims to extract oil like blood from these people. Just blow them up and the oil comes splurting out into our waiting pipes, tankers, pockets. So what if millions upon millions of innocents are slaughtered in the process of IEE invasions, occupations, sanctions? We mean well. The wars of the IEE grease the gears of the economy so we know we are doing well. Business is booming. We are far to the right in meaning well. We mean it. We mean well. Read the rest of this entry »

["Lessons" are temporary posts. These early drafts may come down after a few days. Any surviving or revised remnants and expanded passages may be found at The Vassals Handbook page – also subject to revision.]

Lesson nine – the treason of the credit unions

Let no one speak of turning to credit unions, which are owned and operated by the depositors. Credit unions ought cease and desist their attempts to undermine by their very presence the fiscal authority of the IEE. So what if credit unions are democratically controlled, one person, one vote – and banks are not? So what if credit unions have lower fees and better rates than banks? So what if credit unions have stronger community ties and involvement than banks? So what if credit unions return revenues to their depositors rather than operate for profit like banks? So what if they remain solvent? Such feel good tripe misses every point that matters. And how can it last? Why would good vassals anywhere want credit unions to persist in this golden era of vassalism? Read the rest of this entry »

Q: Anthony, why is the fiction of Jonathan Littell and Roberto Bolaño currently all the rage in educated circles?
A: Once more to the liberal cesspool. Once more to the conservative craphouse. Clear enough?

Q: Could you expand?
A: As widely reported and discussed, Littell’s prize-winning mammoth novel, The Kindly Ones, which publishers are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for the rights to publish (and market), tells the fictive story of a “former Nazi SS officer, who in addition to taking part in the mass extermination of the Jews, commits incest with his sister, sodomizes himself with a sausage and most likely kills his mother and stepfather.” It’s a novel about atrocity featuring a sociopathic psychopath conveniently far removed from the sociopathic atrocities being perpetrated today by the respectable, by the more or less normal individuals and officials of the sociopathic corporate-state.

Q: And Bolaño?
A: He was instantly canonized. In the US, at least, Bolaño was instantly exalted once translated. Pervasive through his fiction is a deeply amoral pose. Established “taste” finds this deeply appealing. He strikes the pose purposefully as the centerpiece of his work. It provides a certain suspension, levity, tension - striking an amoral pose in extremely morally fraught situations. Though there are some exceptions to this general Bolaño rule, amorality pervades character and plot and setting. It is the dynamo - more alive than character and plot and setting. Similarly, the weightless is also rendered amoral. For example, early in his long novel 2666 (Time magazine’s “Best Book of 2008″), Bolaño essentially guts the writing of moral and intellectual freight and poses the characters (scholars) as perceiving weight and meaning where there is none. The narrative view remains amoral, clinical, for there is precious little apparent consequence of any kind, of anything. Bolaño’s writing is not entirely sterile, as one can see the ironies tweaked and played and driven. Bolaño has a lot of experience of the world and he shares it. And there is some value in that. He is an experienced guy building experienced worlds of, well, experience – especially as compared with much of the fluff and pap published otherwise. He has been around and he takes readers around with him in a very nonthreatening (if unpromising) amoral way. So the establishment loves him. He is no threat to anybody’s wealth. He may in passing amorally illuminate a bit of the status quo. He will not cross examine it but skips off like a spaceship approaching the atmosphere of earth at too shallow an angle. He just skips off, back into space, away from the density and the most compelling gravity. Some people like that; more have been trained to it; many others merely tolerate it, or ideologically laud the style and effect, for various reasons including those heretofore noted. Bolaño sketches scenes with play and pathos and goes relatively easy on the satire. He alludes to matters of great weight but even in Nazi Literature in the Americas draws little more than what he intends to, comic blood. Even when overviewing mass murder in gory detail in 2666, the notes, as they feel, scarcely leave the state of the clinical. This is a strategy one might plausibly adopt when writing for money. Apparently, Bolaño wrote the bulk of his fiction for money and with some desperation given the illness he died of age 50. Read the rest of this entry »

Guardian Books: “’No better mind has gone to work on where we are post-9/11,’ author and judge Lee Abbott told the Washington Post,” about Joseph O’Neill and his PEN/Faulkner award winning novel Netherland. It “made the longlist for the Booker prize and was the bookies’ favourite to win before it was snubbed for the shortlist….” “It was described by the New York Times as ‘the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Centre fell’, while James Wood in the New Yorker called it ‘one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read’.”

Meanwhile, Shelly Ettinger at Read Red comments, O’Neill  

“means well, no doubt, and he is it seems trying to get at several complexities about identity and immigration and friendship and history with the novel’s title, but it strikes me that what he’s cooked up is more like Neverland, one more postcolonial fantasy of what life is like for those driven across the world by the crimes of colonialism – as told by the inheritor of the riches stolen from their forebears. There’s a liberal smugness to it, or at least that’s how it sits with me.”

Discussion of the notion of the post-9/11 novel and literature in general leaves out the question of whether or not 9/11 is much of an appropriate touchstone, given the great catastrophe that was kicked off in the March 2003 ground invasion of Iraq, an extension of the murderous US-UN sanctions era kicked off by invasion more than a decade prior…. Our suffering defines a literary era but the far more massive suffering we inflict on others does not.

That’s retrograde, it seems to me, even though much of the “post-9/11″ lit conceit may be of liberal or progressive intention. The unthinkable has been filtered out prior to the discussion. Along these lines, other significant moments or era shifts – the various US invasions, the shift to a finance based economy in recent decades, the rise of the PR industry beginning about a century ago, the fall and rise of widespread activist movements - seem like far more meaningful markers of changing sociopolitical and cultural eras that would most insightfully and most dramatically inform literature.

Of course, 9/11/01 is in its own right a “novel event” – as Noam Chomsky notes: Read the rest of this entry »

Cross posted from the comments at Blographia Literaria:

Too often the literature establishment produces (I’ve noted elsewhere) “almost meaningless skirmishes between the so-called ‘hysterical realists’ and Flaubertian intimatists, between the free-wheeling fabulists and the empathetic realists, and other establishment fronts and alignments.” This is a narrow formalism dominant. Read the rest of this entry »

“Anti-war ‘Trial’ worth revisiting” – by Jeff Favre:

Famed novelist Gore Vidal and peace activist Ron Kovic spoke opening night at the Actors’ Gang revival of “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine,” an indication that this seminal 1971 play still holds significance with those who protested the Vietnam War…. Though big news in 1968, the action of nine Catholics burning draft files in a Maryland town would be forgotten by nearly everyone if participant Daniel Berrigan hadn’t written a play based on the protestors’ trial….

Much of the text is taken from the actual trial. The defendants admitted to burning nearly 400 draft files with homemade napalm. The argument for their action is that stopping an immoral and possibly illegal activity – such as the Vietnam War – through nonviolent means is justified. Each draft file burned, they believe, may have saved a life. Berrigan, his brother Philip (Scott Harris), who also is a priest, and the seven others provide passionate pleas for peace, but much of their time on the stand is spent explaining how America’s involvement in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and parts of Africa establish a pattern of behavior that “forced” the Catonsville Nine to act in such a bold manner.

 Via ZNet: “These are extraordinary times. Vicious colonial wars and political, economic and environmental corruption cry out for a place on the big screen. Yet, try to name one recent film that has dealt with these, honestly and powerfully, let alone satirically. Censorship by omission is virulent. We need another Wall Street, another Last Hurrah, another Dr. Strangelove. The partisans who tunnel out of their prison in Gaza, bringing in food, clothes, medicines and weapons with which to defend themselves, are no less heroic than the celluloid-honoured POWs and partisans of the 1940s. They and the rest of us deserve the respect of the greatest popular medium.”
 

Once More to the Orthodox 

The literature establishment is constantly grasping for some standout voice or another to cover up its too often eviscerated and eviscerating core. In his recent New Yorker commentary “Zadie Smith Reports from Dream City,” Hendrick Hertzberg urges: “Please, I beg you: drop whatever you’re doing and read Zadie Smith’s brilliant meditation on Barack Obama…” ‘Speaking In Tongues,’ in the New York Review of Books “….a wonderful essay” of “sparkling words” that is “so absorbring…an exhilarating slalom” that shows “how well [President] Obama is positioned…to summon us so thrillingly to a vision of ‘the United States of America’ and a belief, as he said in his Inaugural, ‘that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve’….” Apparently, the master state(s) will remain.

Smith’s lecture gives grand voice to the establishment, for it is a voice rich and eloquent, however antique, not least in its ideological orthodoxy. Per usual, the speech borders on parody at its most ideological moments in familiar guise of aestheticism denouncing ideology, a would be post-ideological stance.

Ms. Smith acknowledges that she has been well trained. She states her “regret” at losing her Willesden voice the voice of her youth that “was a big, colorful, working-class sea” for her college voice, her Cambridge voice, acquired in:

“a smaller, posher pond, and almost univocal; the literary world is a puddle. This voice I picked up along the way is no longer an exotic garment I put on like a college gown whenever I choose—now it is my only voice, whether I want it or not. I regret it; I should have kept both voices alive in my mouth. They were both a part of me. But how the culture warns against it!”

Despite Smith’s being trained into a “puddle,” and her stated regret, she finds that all is not lost, and of course it is not. Unfortunately, the intellectual or literary recompense she hails is her adoption or assumption of the standard line of the status quo that not only declaims it prizes no ideology at all but (equally false) that ideology in literature functions as a lesser thing, a devaluation of literature, a betrayer of literary ideals and life. She believes literature can be ideology free – a belief that only the privileged puddle can afford to float (and even then only in the short term). Dream City indeed. It is the dream of a both servile and ruling status quo ideology: Read the rest of this entry »

Rebecca Solnit at TomDispatch:

Argentina is big in land, resources, and population with a very different culture and history than Iceland. Where Iceland goes from [bankruptcy] is hard to foresee. But as Icelandic writer Haukar Már Helgason put it in the London Review of Books last November:

“There is an enormous sense of relief. After a claustrophobic decade, anger and resentment are possible again. It’s official: capitalism is monstrous. Try talking about the benefits of free markets and you will be treated like someone promoting the benefits of rape. Honest resentment opens a space for the hope that one day language might regain some of its critical capacity, that it could even begin to describe social realities again.”

 The big question may be whether the rest of us, in our own potential Argentinas and Icelands, picking up the check for decades of recklessness by the captains of industry, will be resentful enough and hopeful enough to say that unfettered capitalism has been monstrous, not just when it failed, but when it succeeded. Let’s hope that we’re imaginative enough to concoct real alternatives.

Paul Craig Roberts at Counterpunch:

The unreality in which the US government operates is beyond belief.  A  bankrupt government  that cannot pay its bills without printing money is rushing headlong into wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran.  According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, the cost to the US taxpayers of sending a single soldier to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq is $775,000 per year!  

Obama’s war in Afghanistan is the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.  After seven years of conflict, there is still no defined mission or endgame scenario for US forces in Afghanistan.  When asked about the mission, a US military official told NBC News, “Frankly, we don’t have one.”  NBC reports: “they’re working on it.” 

Speaking to House Democrats on February 5, President Obama admitted that the US government does not know what its mission is in Afghanistan and that to avoid “mission creep without clear parameters,” the US “needs a clear mission.”

How would you like to be sent to a war, the point of which no one knows, including the commander-in-chief who sent you to kill or be killed?  How, fellow taxpayers, do you like paying the enormous cost of sending soldiers on an undefined mission while the economy collapses?

In art, the norms matter – along with the facts, the context, the technical proficiency…. Larry Beinhart: “The Right’s Jack Bauer Fantasy“

Also see: Fictive TV Torture Leading to Real Torture in Iraq, and Vice Versa and 24 – Isn’t It Just Torture? – interview by Marc Lee

Neuroscience and Moral Politics: Chomsky’s Intellectual Progeny:

Nussbaum (1997) defends American liberal education’s record at cultivating an empathic imagination. She claims that understanding the lives of strangers and achieving cosmopolitan global citizenship can be realized through the arts and literary humanities. There is little solid evidence to substantiate this optimism. My own take on empathy-enhancing practices within U.S. colleges and universities is considerably less sanguine. Nussbaum’s episodic examples of stepping into the mental shoes of other people are rarely accompanied by plausible answers as why these people may be lacking shoes—or decent jobs, minimum healthcare, and long-life expectancy.

Fiction (and “the arts and literary humanities”) that fails to posit such well known “answers” fails a great capacity.

The space within educational settings has been egregiously underutilized, in part, because we don’t know enough about propitious interstices where critical pedagogy could make a difference.

Only “in part” though. The progressive potential of liberatory art has long since been demonstrated (and moreover for all but the indoctrinated is self evident, one would think)…

Arguably the most serious barrier is the cynical, even despairing doubt about the existence of a moral instinct for empathy. The new research puts this doubt to rest and rightly shifts the emphasis to strategies for cultivating empathy and identifying with “the other.” Joining the affective and cognitive dimensions of empathy may require risky forms of radical pedagogy (Olson, 2006, 2007; Gallo, 1989).

“[R]adical pedagogy” and “radical” fiction and other art, etc.

Evidence produced from a game situation with medical students strongly hints that empathic responses can be significantly enhanced by increased knowledge about the specific needs of others—in this case, the elderly (Varkey, 2006). Presumably, limited prior experiences would affect one’s emotional response. Again, this is a political culture/information acquisition issue that demands further study.

A key element in liberatory literature: emphasizing “the specific needs of others,” and revealing crucial specific facts and information of many types. Read the rest of this entry »

Sign-up for ZNet’s 10 week Spring ZSchool is currently ongoing, including for Liberatory Lit: Imaginative Writing for Social Change:

Literature and other art may be created to liberate or enslave, to enlighten or deceive. This course will explore progressive and revolutionary tendencies in liberatory literature. While broad based enough to facilitate explorations of a wide variety of arts, this course will focus especially on liberatory fiction and liberatory criticism of imaginative writing. I will present my own lib lit criticism and fiction, along with works of a variety of other scholars and imaginative writers. Course members are expected to participate in exploring the existing reality and potential of lib lit and to contribute to its further creation. We will use the new art and issues journal Liberation Lit (liblit.org) as a touchstone.

See initial readings below – however, the course is rather free form and probably should be thought of as an independent study, with forums, shaped by participants’ interests and time beyond the background readings and knowledge provided. Participants should feel free to explore their particular liberatory interests and avenues beyond the provided background.

I’ve provided links to all the readings online to ensure that everyone has ready access. Unfortunately, it takes some digging or is impossible to turn up paper versions of many of these readings. Books of other liberatory criticism and fiction can be substituted if extensive online readings are objectionable, or too remote from participants liberatory interests and needs. The course may be either reading intensive or writing intensive as participants choose.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Novelist John Updike dead at 76: Was he a ‘great novelist’?“:

“The need to bend the truth, avoid certain realities, above all, not look too probingly at America’s social foundations affected his art, deflecting it and blunting it. In the more than 20 novels, there is far too much waste, secondary material, running in place, even showing off. As well, frankly, there is a good deal of mean-spiritedness directed toward those who fall outside of or reject Updike’s limited middle-class American universe.”

Amy Goodman reports:

Tim DeChristopher is an economics student at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He had just finished his last final exam before winter break. One of the exam questions was: If the oil and gas companies are the only ones who bid on public lands, are the true costs of oil and gas exploitation reflected in the prices paid?

DeChristopher was inspired. He finished the exam, threw on his red parka and went off to the controversial Bureau of Land Management land auction that the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance called “the Bush administration’s last great gift to the oil and gas industry.” Instead of joining the protest outside, he registered as a bidder, then bought 22,000 acres of public land. That is, he successfully bid on the public properties, located near the Arches and Canyonlands National Parks and Dinosaur National Monument, and other pristine areas. The price tag: more than $1.7 million.

He told me: “Once I started buying up every parcel, they understood pretty clearly what was going on … they stopped the auction, and some federal agents came in and took me out. I guess there was a lot of chaos, and they didn’t really know how to proceed at that point.”

Patrick Shea, a former BLM director, is representing DeChristopher. Shea told the Deseret News: “What Tim did was in the best tradition of civil disobedience, he did this without causing any physical or material harm. His purpose was to draw attention to the illegitimacy and immorality of the process.”

There is a long tradition of disrupting land development in Utah. In his memoir, “Desert Solitaire,” Edward Abbey, the writer and activist, wrote: “Wilderness. The word itself is music. … We scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not yet been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by the caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination.”

Abbey’s novel “The Monkey Wrench Gang” inspired a generation of environmental activists to take “direct action,” disrupting “development.” As The Salt Lake Tribune reported on DeChristopher: “He didn’t pour sugar into a bulldozer’s gas tank. He didn’t spike a tree or set a billboard on fire. But wielding only a bidder’s paddle, a University of Utah student just as surely monkey-wrenched a federal oil- and gas-lease sale Friday, ensuring that thousands of acres near two southern Utah national parks won’t be opened to drilling anytime soon.”

Likewise, the late Utah Phillips, folk musician, activist and longtime Utah resident, often invoked the Industrial Workers of the World adage: “Direct action gets the goods.” …

Mark Vallen notes: Arts Stimulus Plan Petition - A petition calling on the new Obama administration to create a stimulus package for the arts was launched on January 20, 2009, by the Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) Washington D.C. think tank in alliance with the Split this Rock Poetry Festival.

Shelley Ettinger: “The Crab-Canning Ship is the story of a struggle by shipboard workers horribly exploited by the crabbing and processing industry. Its 1929 publication caused a sensation in Japan, and drew the imperial government’s attention and enmity, driving Kobayashi underground. In 1933 undercover police agents trapped him, captured him, beat and tortured him and, when he refused to squeal on his communist organizer comrades, murdered him. Fast forward to 2008-2009: the book is in the midst of a huge revival in Japan, where its message of class struggle resonates with masses of young workers facing cuts, takebacks, layoffs, rising prices, all the ills of the deepening capitalist economic crisis.”

Ettinger on the Acclaimed Young Writer and lit establishment ideology: “Virtually every time I’ve ever seen the case made that a politically conscious approach to art is illegitimate, and this certainly applies to the case made by Mr. AYW, it relies on three logical (actually political!) bases. None is explicitly stated. Each is assumed to be understood. Each is mind-bogglingly wrong.”

Wikileaks - ”Harry Nicolaides’ Verismilitude“:  On 19 Jan 2008, the Australian author and academic Harry Nicolaides was sentenced by a Thai court to three years prison for Lese Majeste — criticizing the King. The sentence follows Mr. Nocolaides arrest in August 2007, allegedly for this passage in his 2005 novel:

From King Rama to the Crown Prince, the nobility was renowned for their romantic entanglements and intrigues. The Crown Prince had many wives “major and minor” with a coterie of concubines for entertainment. One of his recent wives was exiled with her entire family, including a son they conceived together, for an undisclosed indiscretion. He subsequently remarried with another woman and fathered another child. It was rumored that if the prince fell in love with one of his minor wives and she betrayed him, she and her family would disappear with their name, familial lineage and all vestiges of their existence expunged forever.

For the full novel and further information, see: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Imprisoned_Australian_author_Harry_Nicolaides_censored_novel:_Verismilitude%2C_2005

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/01/19/thai.jail/index.html#cnnSTCVideo

Pointed incoherence is hallmark of Jonathan Franzen’s thoughts about the social novel (fiction that is especially sociopolitically engaged). This telling garble is demonstrated in the 1996 essay Franzen wrote on the social novel – both the original and revised version, “Perchance to Dream” in Harpers and “Why Bother?” in How to Be Alone – and recurs most recently in an interview this January 2009 at 5th Estate where Franzen states with trademark non sequitur:

[When] young I actually thought I was the only one with [more-or-less progressive sociopolitical] perceptions. … I think the difference now is that I recognize that there’s a small but non-zero segment of the population that feels and thinks in all of those literary ways….

Franzen falsely conflates “literary” with enlightened sociopolitical views. Franzen has shifted from trying to reveal public reality for a broad audience to writing for a much smaller audience that shares his sense of the “literary,” whatever the sociopolitical. Read the rest of this entry »

Stateville hobble-hopped his mangled body into the lobby searching for coffee or maybe a pitcher of ice water with slices of lime. Coffee today. Stateville slung a golden mug from his ribs and poured a brew. He noticed a line. He loved lines. He hobble hopped over. He liked to join bank lines especially when he had no money to give or take. “They pay well in this joint? Slave you much? Boss you all day long?” Stateville passed through life as perpetual job seeker, traveler, lost soul, wise man, kid eccentric, elderly beggar, philosopher, clown, worker. Today he joined a line for workers behind a woman with purple and orange plaits cascading from large skull, one of several dozen people in line from the neighborhoods. “They want those who can talk is what I hear. Mhhmh. Not just anyone can talk, you ask me. There’s the war, elections, the weather, family, land, God. God is good to talk.”

“‘No gods no masters’ – no ma’am.” Stateville peered over his golden cup. “No god ever offered me a job. No god ever built me a home, offered me bread, gave me a lift, took my hand, led me anywhere but here where I am already. What do I need what don’t exist for? Fairy tales are fine but – is what is – all gods are make believe. Is what is. Far as anyone knows. Now, you got a great story? Fine, do tell. Story is not god. Story is signs and story is what is. But God no.”

“Mhhmh. You won’t get far without God in your life. You got to believe.”

“I believe in democracy not theocracy. ‘No gods’ – I tell it straight – ‘no master’.” Read the rest of this entry »

ZNet Commentary:

His song titles are blunt and straightforward: “We’re All Immigrants,” “The Injustice System,” “Military Recruiters Lie,” etc., etc. Metaphors, poetic devices are completely absent here; his lyrics include sections like this one: Read the rest of this entry »

“Writer of 1970s ‘Ecotopia’ Makes a Comeback in the Green Era” by Anita Weier:

It is useful to understand “liberatory” in two basic ways for literature. In the past the term in lit has been used mainly in regard to “women’s lib” of the ’60s, ’70s as far as I’m aware – I don’t recall that the lit critics of the ’30s and so on use it, though it nearly gets into the title of one of VF Calverton’s books, and maybe it is used in passing somewhere or another. More or less progressive critics of that time used words more like “revolutionary” and “proletarian” and “Marxist” or “materialist”. One broad basic sense of liberatory is in reference to about any sort of freeing or advancing or progressing phenomena of literature, especially in regard to normative issues (morals and ethics…politics and culture) and less so (secondarily or as derivative) aesthetically. So, for example, the multicultural expansion of recent decades is liberatory in this sense even when it occurs in basically a liberal and conservative or other status quo framework. In this sense, “liberatory” is a synonym for “progressive” (or “enlightened” – as in of the Enlightenment – or moving toward “ideal”) however limited or bound that progress may be. Elements of liberalism and conservatism contain some liberatory aspects also (especially in having some roots in the Enlightenment or other relation to it). All this understands liberatory in a very broad sense of the term.

The primary and most crucial sense in which we might understand liberatory is to distinguish progressive or revolutionary literature from status quo work that blocks or slows progress (let alone revolution) actively or passively, inadvertently or knowingly. Again, the term refers in this use mainly to normative respects of literature as revealed in a story’s substance, effects, functions, and consequences. Revolutionary lit, or to be more clear, liberatory revolutionary lit is the strongest sense in which the term might be used – again referring essentially to normative revolution, whether or not the aesthetics are also much revolutionized or advanced. Read the rest of this entry »

The Complicit Culture

In literature, as in politics, and plenty of life, there can be a big difference between liberal and left. Literature is not somehow mystically ideology free. Don Quixote, as with many other classics, was written as propaganda. A lot of progressive views are to the left of the basic liberal views of periodicals like The Nation, n+1, The Guardian, London Review of Books, the New Yorker, etc. Substantial left views should be heard in national publications, especially since left views, as I understand them, and as polls reveal, are largely popular views. Instead, many left views are severely drowned out “even” in liberal media, as great media watch organizations like FAIR and Media Lens demonstrate. (Of course in my view conservative and reactionary views are typically as bad as or worse than liberal views.)

Obviously there are some ideological differences between basically liberal publications. There are significant differences between, say, The Nation and the New York Times, and so on. Alexander Cockburn, for example, is a left columnist for the predominantly liberal Nation magazine (though his column space was halved a few years back). The New York Times has no corresponding left columnist, though Paul Krugman occasionally comes close. The Nation is basically a liberal publication with some left tendencies, and its commentary on literature reflects its predominantly liberal emphasis, with many left views blocked out and discredited. The New Yorker, though predominantly liberal, lies to the right of the Nation. Though liberalism and its variants evince some genuine qualities, they also possess predominant and atrocious deficiencies, crucial to reveal. Read the rest of this entry »

Frequent New York Times contributor and novelist Benjamin Kunkel has an article “Dystopia and the End of Politics” in the establishment journal Dissent that is the most recent in a lengthening line of State of Fiction (SoF) commentaries by various authors, picking up with James Wood’s book How Fiction Works (and related articles), tracing through a series of challenges to HFW, hopping to Zadie Smith’s “Two Paths for the Novel,” and then shifting to Kunkel’s piece with no basic new turns in the thinking of the status quo writers amid all declarations and pronouncements lavish, banal, seeking. Some parts of these essays hit the mark in noting the severe limits of various novels and their types, yet the status quo State of Fiction analysts can’t or won’t turn their heads far enough to note or to compensate for, let alone adequately address, ideological binds administered by the caging hands that feed, in academia and commerce.[1] 

In Dissent, the longtime cold war journal of Swiftian title, Kunkel writes like a character out of a Roberto Bolaño novel, rendering himself chaotically familiar and essentially inept. Chaotic because reasonable insight mixes with misprision leading to hapless assertions and vacuous conclusions.[2] As for content, Kunkel, focusing on all too prevalent sterile lit surrounds, looks to fly to fertile land, plunging instead into sand. Kunkel’s article stands as one of the many pinched walls and series of iron bars of the literature establishment, likewise the writings of Bolaño, at least as they function in the US, though Bolaño’s work is less familiar and less inept and contains a number of enduring qualities. (Kunkel’s writing can come across as less sophisticated or refined than that of the larger lit establishment, possibly willfully so, thus it may appear more evidently flawed to some, more bemusing to others, and so on. That the sentences in his Dissent article hang like debris clouds freeze-framed after a building collapse merely provides extra asthmatic effect. Kunkel may seem an easy or unnecessary object of criticism, but he remains an establishment outcropping, visible enough for critique.) Read the rest of this entry »

Oh man, it was a tough day to stand by President George Bush, even for me, his main PR man, yours truly, Stan D. Garde. They threw everything they had at us today, everything but the book. They fired shoes, sure, you heard about those, size 10, truly a coward’s size, but we also ducked, dodged, and skirted random machine gun fire, rocket propelled grenades, and assorted other small arms fire attacks, half a dozen mortar rounds, and miscellaneous other missiles. Man, where’s the love, man? We liberated these ungrateful Oilans. You would think they would at least give us a pass for that gift. Not so. Instead it’s like they think we blew up their country and slaughtered their people and tried to steal their oil. Oh well, it’s probably only a minority here out to kill us. I’m sure the masses still love us. Well, it’s not like we’re too much safer on our homeland streets back in the good old US of A, you know, what with all those raging pot smokers and immigrant service workers and smart-aleck rappers we need to keep locking up in record numbers. Just what this world is coming to, I haven’t the faintest idea. Fortunately, reality this past century or so is totally optional especially now that we’ve got all the crucial propaganda safely on our side, billions and billions of dollars worth of glorious gloss in ever more righteous e-gaze and garde. Oila for the Oilans! I say. We’re all Oilans now. Read the rest of this entry »

John Pilger:

One of the cleverest films I have seen is Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray plays a TV weatherman who finds himself stuck in time. At first he deludes himself that the same day and the same people and the same circumstances offer new opportunities. Finally, his naivety and false hope desert him and he realises the truth of his predicament and escapes. Is this a parable for the age of Obama? … He will continue to make stirring, platitudinous speeches, but the tears will dry as people understand that President Obama is the latest manager of an ideological machine that transcends electoral power. Asked what his supporters would do when reality intruded, Stephen Walt, an Obama adviser, said: “They have nowhere else to go.”

Not yet. If there is a happy ending to the Groundhog Day of repeated wars and plunder, it may well be found in the very mass movement whose enthusiasts registered voters and knocked on doors and brought Obama to power. Will they now be satisfied as spectators to the cynicism of “continuity”? In less than three months, millions of angry Americans have been politicised by the spectacle of billions of dollars of handouts to Wall Street as they struggle to save their jobs and homes. It as if seeds have begun to sprout beneath the political snow. And history, like Groundhog Day, can repeat itself. Few predicted the epoch-making events of the 1960s and the speed with which they happened. As a beneficiary of that time, Obama should know that when the blinkers are removed, anything is possible.

From Edwin Muir’s thoughtful The Estate of Poetry (1962):

“I’ve been trying to measure the gap between the public and the poet, and to find some explanation why it is so great…. The first allegiance of any poet is to imaginative truth…but it does not mean that he should turn inward into the complex problems of poetry, or be concerned with poetry as a problem. That is something which has commonly happened in the last fifty years. There was some excuse for it after the years of experiment associated with Mr. Eliot and Mr. Pound. To them, about 1910, poetry seemed to have come to a dead end, and intense thought had to be given to it. The experiments of that time and the succeeding years have become a part of literary history. As they were new and strange when they were first attempted, they were found difficult by the reader; and they seem to have left for a time in the minds of poets and critics the belief that poetry should be difficult. The experimenters have done their work, and we should be thankful to them. There have been many experimenters in English poetry: Chaucer was one; and Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Wordsworth were all experimenters. The experimenters of forty years ago did something to poetry and something for poetry. One kind of poetry was written before T.S. Eliot, and another kind after him. But the point of an experiment is that it should solve the particular problem set for it. This was done in the twenties…. There remains the temptation for poets to turn inward into poetry, to lock themselves in to a hygienic prison where they speak only to one another, and to the critic, their stern warder. In the end a poet must create his audience, and to do that he must turn outward. Even if he is conscious of having no audience, he must imagine one. That may be the way to conjure it out of the public void.” Read the rest of this entry »

Milton’s republic - by Terry Eagleton, in the Guardian - “Our great dissident poet, born 400 years ago today, did more than just hymn the praises of revolt”:

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm. The two intersect only in such absurd anomalies as the poet laureateship. But whereas Andrew Motion does his bit to keep the monarchy in business, one of the greatest of English poets played his part in subverting it. John Milton, who was born in Cheapside 400 years ago today, published a political tract two weeks after the beheading of Charles I, arguing that all sovereignty lay with the people, who could depose and even execute a monarch if he betrayed their trust.

We are not used to such revolutionary sentiments in our poets. When he left Cambridge, Milton refused to take holy orders and, in his first great poem Lycidas, he mounted a blistering assault on the corruption of the clergy. He was a champion of Puritanism at a time when that meant rejecting a church in cahoots with a brutally authoritarian state.

His political dissidence, however, had its limits: he defended the notion of private property, unlike the more communistic wing of the parliamentary forces. As for sexual politics, Adam in Paradise Lost is a priggish patriarch. Yet Milton was also an early advocate of divorce, claiming that a lack of love and companionship was a more important ground for separation than adultery.

At the heart of Milton’s political vision lay a belief in liberty and self-government. Pressed to an extreme, this doctrine could appear anarchic: grace freed humanity from law and authority. He thus came to reject the Calvinist doctrine of predestination in the name of personal freedom. One of his most magnificent pamphlets, Areopagitica, inveighed against the state censorship of books. He denounced the censorship of works before publication as a strangling of free inquiry. “Almost kill a man as kill a good book,” he observed. If truth were to be established, an open marketplace of opinions was indispensable. “So truth be in the field,” Milton insisted, “we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worst, in a free and open encounter?” Read the rest of this entry »

William Deresiewicz Reviews How Fiction Works by James Wood

Is there no current liberatory criticism, no viable alternative to the status quo criticism of fiction and other literature as William Deresiewicz claims in the Nation magazine?: “The very idea of heroic criticism, like that of heroic art, is…no longer credible” given “the abandonment of the political dimension of radical critique over the past several decades” and “any sense that politics and culture are connected, or that their criticism should be connected….” 

Actually, some liberatory criticism is being produced in the academy let alone elsewhere, especially online, along with some other liberatory lit as well. Considerable progress has been made in criticism in recent decades, especially originating largely outside of commercial critical circles, given the work of Edward Said, for example, among others.

Dominant criticism is too much impoverished Deresiewicz notes but far more impoverished than he touches on. This long into the age of the internet in particular, to not look readily beyond the dominant journals and magazines for other current critical tendencies is to be remiss, at the least, to perpetuate the grip of the closeted approach to literature decried in the article, especially since about the only alternative presented is the limited too often biased or retrograde dominant criticism of decades past. Even as Deresiewicz claims James Wood’s example would lead criticism into a desert, his own article already leaves readers there, for not only does Deresiewicz bury contemporary liberatory criticism, he buries such criticism of the past, a tendency in American criticism more vital, more crucial than the bulk of the critical tradition he cites. 

He elides accomplished critic Maxwell Geismar, the increasingly progressive Geismar who wrote at the same time as the dominant critics Deresiewicz lauds (“the New York critics”), Geismar who was for a time no stranger to the pages of the Nation but has subsequently been written out of history, along with much of the roots, current realities, and possibilities of liberatory lit. Deresiewicz finds himself with Wood and the New York critics among the dominant lit dunes of their own making. Read the rest of this entry »

Some thoughtful recent posts:

A Serb’s story
The second noteworthy book reviewed in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review is The Delivery Room by Sylvia Brownrigg. Why is it noteworthy? As usual, not because of the review itself, but because of what a careful red reader can glean from it. The novel’s main character, it seems, is a Serb. Not only a Serb, but a politically and historically conscious Serb who sharply opposes the U.S./NATO breakup of Yugoslavia and the imperialists’ 1999 bombing war against her country. Dare I hope? Can it be: a fiction that rejects all the outrageous U.S. lies about Serbia, Bosnia and Kosovo that have been served up to justify the Clinton administration/Pentagon/Nato criminal war of aggression? I won’t know for sure until I read it. But reading between the lines of this lukewarm and ultimately politically hostile review, hope swells. …

Joe Hill & Paul Robeson
November 19 is the anniversary of the murder of the great labor organizer and people’s singer-songwriter Joe Hill by the capitalist robber barons’ firing squad in Utah in 1915. Joe Hill’s last written words were in a letter to Big Bill Haywood: “Goodbye Bill. I die like a true rebel. Don’t waste any time mourning–organize!” …

A new James Kelman novel
I’ve read two Kelman novels: How Late It Was, How Late and You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free. I loved them both. Another, Translated Accounts, has been on my night table pile for a while. Now I’ll add this new one, Kieron Smith, Boy to the to-read list. Sunday’s NYTBR review by Marcel Theroux was lukewarm–filled with damning-with-faint-praise formulations like “Still, this isn’t a bad book”–but that doesn’t deter me at all. I’m glad for the review because it alerted me about the book and, well, that’s about the extent of its use. …

“Know Literature, Know the World“: “A team from Manchester University and the London School of Economics claim that stories and their writers can do just as much as academics and policy researchers, perhaps even more, to explain and communicate the world’s problems. Fiction, they boldly venture, can be just as useful as fact.”

The artistic efforts and social effects referred to within the article are very much within status quo parameters. Still, the article is a useful reference for rebutting the continuous claims that fiction does not and cannot effect much in the world, and other such intentional or unintentional apology for the negligent literature of the oft criminal status quo. Typically, one can only go so far toward revealing the world and its possibilities in dominant realms. The result is a negligent, complicit, shrunken, unreal or fraudulent literature, enchained when not wielding the club outright.

“A Practical Policy has an extremely bloated and yet rather dull-witted response to Zadie Smith’s recent, excellent NYRB article Two Paths for the Novel. It can be enjoyed alongside a similarly uncomprehending attempt at a rejoinder, Zadie Smith’s annoying Critique of ‘Realism’, (sic!) from Nigel Beale.” – Mark Thwaite

One might say that Mark Thwaite has an astonishingly shrunken and yet rather pinheaded response to some “uncomprehending” comments from my previous post that may be “enjoyed” at form-is-not-story-but-its-shape mainly, though the faulty parallelism would make for flawed sense, would be ironic in a post on the importance of form, would advance little of substance, and, well…one might do well not to go there.

I don’t argue that lyrical realism is not overrepresented in lit production. I’ve not expressed much opinion on the question, because it seems to me beside the point, and diversionary from the crucial issues, at least as typically discussed by the establishment. I think forms of fiction should be diverse, as my own fiction happens to be, and so too should content be greatly diverse, across the fields of fiction. Read the rest of this entry »

Form Is Not The Base Of Fiction                         [Of Form and Content - followup post]

It may be that the establishment scarcely flounders more than when it claims to see that it is floundering. A recent example is Zadie Smith’s article “Two Paths for the Novel.” Comments interspersed for clarity below after sequential select article excerpts: Read the rest of this entry »

Not much in this article (authors on America after Bush), though of some skewed note, Edmund White:

“…the last great taboo in America is class. No one is allowed to mention it, not even novelists. Whereas British novelists are always beavering away defining ever more minute class differences, American writers can get a sense of contrast only by looking at the Third World. As a judge two years ago for the Granta top 20 American writers under 35 contest, the trend I most noticed is what I’d call the Peace Corps novel. Everyone is writing about India and South America and the Philippines and Vietnam – no one is writing about the big city or rural poor in America.”

Junot Diaz by far the most insightful voice in the article, “Hopes for a happy ending: Literary voices on the American Election” by John Freeman:

“The horrific violence of our current economic system, which kills more people daily than our wars,” says Díaz, who won a Pulitzer for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, “will not change one jot under an Obama administration. Right now these elections are all about who plays the music at the party. Doesn’t change the fact that there’s a massacre going on. No US election is going to change that. And any writer worth a damn might be in the party but what he’s really listening to, bearing witness to, in small ways, in elliptical ways or flat-out head on, is the violence and terror and inhumanity that reign beyond the party’s walls.”

Of course the wars are a big part of the economic system and vice versa.

“It took an artistic director in Los Angeles,” Hare says, “Gordon Davidson at the Mark Taper Forum, who did it as the last play of his 35-year tenure as artistic director, and said, ‘I can only do this play because I’m leaving after I do it.’ The fact that it sells out wherever it’s performed,” Hare continues, “doesn’t seem to sway minds at all. People would rather have empty theatres where people are passing crumpets to each other than full theatres with plays about contemporary events. I don’t know why.” -from Theatre: Stuff Happens and war ensues, thanks to W., Rummy and Condi by Peter Birnie, Vancouver Sun: Read the rest of this entry »

[Science fiction novelist Joe] Haldeman [experienced] “the dislocating effect of warfare”…firsthand. Like the soldiers in Haldeman’s book, Vietnam veterans came home to a society that had changed rapidly in their absence. “Soldiers find out they’re not fighting for their own culture,” he said. Read the rest of this entry »

Misrepresentation 36 – limits on the real: The more that James Wood carries the term “realism” or “real” or “reality” the less water it holds. “…we are likely to think of the desire to be truthful about life – the desire to produce art that accurately sees ‘the way things are’– as a universal literary motive and project, the broad central language of the novel and drama…” Here we see (a repeat of) “the way things are” as “reality” that stories “bring…to mind” – never “possibilities” that stories bring to mind, or even “real possibilities,” which is the language not of the status quo. Fiction may reveal reality and possibility, both, in exploring the nature of the human condition achieved and potential – or what is the imagination for?

Victor Hugo:

“The human mind – an important thing to say at this minute – has a greater need of the ideal even than of the real.

“It is by the real that we exist; it is by the ideal that we live.”

Below are some brief excerpts from Victor Hugo’s book, William Shakespeare (1864), which is less about Shakespeare and more an exposition of Hugo’s views on art:

To work for the people, – that is the great and urgent necessity.

The human mind – an important thing to say at this minute – has a greater need of the ideal even than of the real.

Read the rest of this entry »

“Healthful Messages Wrapped in Fiction” by Tara Parker-Post at NYT: Read the rest of this entry »

The young Milan Kundera reportedly “betrayed” a western spy, the sort New Criticism “founder” John Crowe Ransom recruited. As widely reported:

[updated, below]

Read the rest of this entry »

Fiction Gutted: The Establishment and the Novel
- current entire - (PDF)

Read the rest of this entry »

Fiction Gutted
The Establishment and the Novel 

PART ONE

As Gideon Lewis-Kraus notes, writing in the Los Angeles Times, James Wood is a writer who matters. People read him, people of the educated, monied, controlling part of the populace. That’s why it’s important that what James Wood writes does not matter – in central ways. Nowhere is this more on display than in How Fiction Works, the star critic’s most recent book, a truncated politically-charged though aesthetic appreciation of fiction that is spectacular in its misrepresentation of reality, or “the real, which is at the bottom of [Wood's] inquiries.” Ask Wood to annotate a novel, and he provides sometimes splendid views of narrative lines by way of an at times “uncannily well-tuned ear,” as Terry Eagleton notes. He is eager to discourse at length, often with quick pith, on how to strive toward reality in fiction (or criticism), reality of the profound sort, the truth, a worthy aim. Unfortunately, HFW is resolute in not accurately representing central elements of reality in both fiction and, call it, actuality, life outside fiction. A few examples of these crucial misrepresentations show how such blindness chops understanding of fiction and life, and why it makes one safe to be a literary star of the status quo, of the establishment, of money and power. One must bury and falsify crucial reality. To that end, in How Fiction Works, James Wood has written an establishment polemic in the guise of aesthetics – a deeply partisan status quo account of the novel that is also pervasive in its misrepresentations of both reality and aesthetics.

The first dozen misrepresentations:

1 – the book; 2 – free indirect style; 3 – narrative puzzle as worth; 4 – qualities of narrative mode; 5 – the development of the novel; 6 – selectivity; 7 – the meaning of time and experience; 8 – Flaubert’s “advance”; 9 – Flaubert’s value; 10 – the visibility of the novelist; 11 – “shiny externality” and miasmic internality; 12 – “juvenility” of plot

Read the rest of this entry »

Fiction Gutted
The Establishment and the Novel

PART TWO

The misrepresentations continued:

13 – “Our memories are aesthetically untalented”; 14 – preeminence of the “subtle“; 15 – plot in the novel; 16 – value of place; 17 – quality of plot; 18 – limited engagement; 19 – fiction no use; 20 – fiction no remedy; 21 – fiction “makes nothing happen”; 22 – writer as “good valet”; 23 – “No one is literally run off her feet”; 24 – the petty terrorist

Read the rest of this entry »

Fiction Gutted
The Establishment and the Novel

PART THREE

No end in sight, the misrepresentations roll on. Before we take up these next dozen, let’s consider the relationship between liberatory lit and the establishment in more detail. Despite some contrary gestures and rhetoric, despite the exalted hopes of Flaubert, “often held to be the quintessential chronicler of nothingness,” modernist and other establishment works do not lack meaning, far from it. On the contrary, such works are full of meaning, but establishment minds are naively well schooled or otherwise sense or know it is safest for their own status quo positions, and therefore preferable, and therefore all but inevitable, that in such a powerful form as the novel, meaning be not too liberatory, lest some establishment superior find excuse to filter out, censor, bar any modern liberatory perpetrator, for much besides “obscenity” or “lewdness.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Fiction Gutted
The Novel and the Establishment

PART FOUR

The next dozen misrepresentations:

25 – fiction of the present is passé; 26 – the reactionary and status quo as preeminent literary political fiction; 27 – 9-11 as rallying cry for a turn inward, and worse; 28 – Henry James, TS Eliot, the CIA, and the cultural cold war; 29 – liberatory lit attacked, buried; 30 – fiction shrunk; 31 – the partisan orthodox nature of status quo lit; 32 – basic public realities denied, distorted;  33 – the immateriality of the status quo; 34 – the public chopped from the personal; 35 – ideology in guise of aesthetics; 36 – limits on the real

Read the rest of this entry »

Fiction Gutted
The Establishment and the Novel

Hugo and Flaubert

Rather than Victor Hugo’s society-rocking fiction and daunting aesthetic achievement, today James Wood and many a writing circle celebrate the (by comparison) wan and dreary writing of Flaubert as seminal and essential – “Novelists should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring; it all begins again with him.” Ignored is the complex more comprehensive and profound let alone liberatory writing of Victor Hugo in Les Misérables, and other works. Flaubert instead is pushed as a central writing workshop and establishment presence – a situation again that comes close to “tragedy manifesting itself as comedy.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Quotes from The Sun Also Rises, Homeland, and Plutocracy: Read the rest of this entry »

Bartsart Read the rest of this entry »

The cover was bad enough. Now this – the kiss of death: The New Yorker Endorses Barack Obama. Another example of liberals undermining liberals. Only McCain-Palin can bailout Barack Bailout Obama now. Flaubert for Obama.

POTUS Speaks Read the rest of this entry »

Nobel Literature Chief Bashes American Literature

Malin Rising and Hillel Italie:

“Bad news for American writers hoping for a Nobel Prize next week: the top member of the award jury believes the United States is too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing.”

New Yorker editor David Remnick tries to defend the US by noting that the Nobel also passed over “Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov” – of France, Ireland, and Russia. (Though Nabokov eventually became a naturalized American, he wrote his first nine novels in Russian.) Other Europeans also passed over (unmentioned by Remnick) for being a bit too progressive for the Nobel a century ago: Tolstoy (late), Ibsen, and Zola. Most such mildly progressive writing is still too progressive for the New Yorker over a century later. Read the rest of this entry »

John le Carré – mild threat to the establishment? The establishment resorts to smear.

An important article for imaginative workers, writers:

Doc and dram

by David Edgar

The Guardian

Why has this decade seen the rise of a vibrant theatre of reportage? Playwright David Edgar points to a decline in conventional journalism and TV documentary Read the rest of this entry »

Jared Roscoe at n + 1: 

“I paced around my parents’ house, talking nervously, trying to keep up with him [David Foster Wallace], vainly trying to impress him. He refused to give me the validation and satisfaction I wanted. It’s not going to come from writing, he told me. Writing can never do that.”

Maybe it had better, yes? If writing is going to be a large part of one’s life, and that of others, then as with any act it is certainly healthy if writing really does help provide a sense of self, as it does in good amounts for many people.

John Berger’s A to X reviewed, with a nod to Robert Newman’s The Fountain at the Center of the World; and The Grapes of Wrath in context today: Read the rest of this entry »

As historian Michael Kimmage notes in “The Journey Continued and Abandoned,” an essay on Lionel Trilling’s second novel (The Journey Abandoned), Norman Mailer showed a way to solve the dilemma of Trilling, or at least of Trilling’s protagonist in The Journey Abandoned, the would-be-writer Vincent, “Vincent’s dilemma” – though it’s not much of a good solution – for both fiction writers and nonfiction writers, and curiously, Mailer never solved it well for himself in fiction, never came close in my view (since both Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song are nonfiction essentially). And in any event, Mailer’s solution involves sooner or later (immediately on some topics) a lot of compromise, to the point of utter censorship – obviously, a solution that is soon found wanting. Ideologically based rebuffs from the establishment under the guise of aesthetic criticism – many a progressive or revolutionary minded author quickly encounters plenty of those or decides not to bother testing the waters in the first place.

It’s interesting to compare accomplished critic Lionel Trilling with accomplished critic Maxwell Geismar: Trilling, first tenured Jewish professor at Columbia, and Geismar, first Jewish student at Columbia to be, I think, Valedictorian, or to achieve some such rank (though if I recall correctly from Geismar’s memoir, Columbia might not have been aware he was Jewish). Regardless, it may as well have been Trilling, who showed up on national TV to help torpedo Geismar’s career, as the two men who played a key role: William vanden Heuval and Irving Kristol – the former a “protégé” of the “father” of the CIA and the latter the CIA flack and “father” of neoconservatism who several years earlier had passed on his position as editor of Commentary magazine to Trilling’s student, Normon Podhoretz. As I’ve noted elsewhere, when William vanden Heuvel (father of the current editor/publisher of The Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel) tag-teamed with Irving Kristol (the father of current prominent Fox TV political pundit Bill Kristol) – when these central figures of the political establishment hastened to appear on national TV over four decades ago to attack directly to the face of the silenced progressive literary critic Maxwell Geismar, on the occasion of the publication of Geismar’s book of criticism about Henry James (”a primary Cold War literary figure”), Kristol and vanden Heuvel, two exemplars of the status quo, serving retrograde state interests, executed a prominent role in destroying Geismar’s accomplished literary career and ending his run on a national literary television show, Books on Trial (”or something similar,” in Geismar’s recollection). Geismar posits William vanden Heuvel as “a rich, cultivated, charming, and liberal member of the upper echelons of the CIA [who] had a large hand in embroiling [the US] in Vietnam,” while Irving Kristol “as it later turned out was almost always affiliated with many State Department or CIA literary projects in editing, publishing, and the academic world…a hired hand of the establishment.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Much more about DFW here, here, and here. Also here.

Rambling David Foster Wallace

by Douglas Valentine

I hadn’t heard of David Foster Wallace prior to his suicide. I had never read anything he wrote, though among the many recent obits I read, I saw that he had written a book titled Infinite Jest. When I saw that I thought, “Ah so! A man after my own heart.” By which I meant a master of invention and device, of irony – for he was certainly referring to Hamlet’s impromptu eulogy for Yorick, whom we all know so well.

As Hamlet facetiously said while holding Yorick’s skull like a grapefruit and gazing into the empty eye sockets, “Not one now, to mock your own grinning? Quite chap-fallen?”

Any writer who would choose Infinite Jest as a title, I assumed, would appreciate Hamlet’s ironic flirtation with madness, the wry comments made to amuse himself and confuse his foes. And indeed, many reviewers say Wallace’s works are full of irony.

But as I read more and more reviews and obits, I found that Wallace, like a former Party official denouncing himself at a Stalinist show-trial, had branded irony (along with irreverence and rebellion!) as “not liberating but enfeebling.”

I immediately thought, “Is he being cute?” Such a broad generalization could never stand up and walk on its own legs. “His poor students,” I thought, as I apologized on Wallace’s behalf to all of our irreverent literary and historical revolutionary heroes and heroines.

…

Sign-up for ZNet’s 10 Week Fall ZSchool will open soon, including for Liberatory Lit: Imaginative Writing for Social Change:

Literature and other art may be created to liberate or enslave, to enlighten or deceive. This course will explore progressive and revolutionary tendencies in liberatory literature. While broad based enough to facilitate explorations of a wide variety of arts, this course will focus especially on liberatory fiction and liberatory criticism of imaginative writing. I will present my own lib lit criticism and fiction, along with works of a variety of other scholars and imaginative writers. Course members are expected to participate in exploring the existing reality and potential of lib lit and to contribute to its further creation. We will use the new art and issues journal Liberation Lit (liblit.org) as a touchstone. Read the rest of this entry »

The literature establishment speaks – many dim and a few perceptive comments on politics in the novel:

REFLECTIONS

By MADISON SMARTT BELL, DANIEL KEHLMANN, RICHARD FLANAGAN, DANA SPIOTTA, LYDIA MILLET, DUBRAVKA UGRESIC, NORMAN RUSH, VALERIE MARTIN, CLAIRE MESSUD, MARGOT LIVESEY, ZAKES MDA, AND SIDDHARTHA DEB

“What Would Obama Think“

by Deb Flomberg

I walked into the Bug Theatre not knowing what to expect. With all of the talk about politics and the election that is surrounding us here in Denver, I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to go to a show called “Iraq War, The Musical!” However, I went, figuring that either way I was in for an interesting night. Yet, I am not reviewing this show. I feel that it speaks for itself. If your political views don’t swing very far to the left, or you don’t follow politics much at all, then don’t see it. You will be mad. However, if you do consider yourself a liberal and you are informed about the political events of the past eight years, then you’ll probably enjoy it. So, the reason I am choosing not to review this show is because there was something else that really struck me as I watched this show. I was reminded that theatre is about freedom of expression and that one of the most wonderful things about being a writer, director, or actor is the ability to make people think.

‘Bury the Dead’ at the Actors’ Gang

Charlotte Stoudt:

War casualties as an image problem are the conundrum in “Bury the Dead,” Irwin Shaw’s righteous, funny and painfully relevant 1936 one-act now playing at the Actors’ Gang. The author had just graduated from college when his antiwar drama landed on Broadway, and this is very much a young man’s play, its ethos driven by core pleasures (a woman’s smile, a cold beer, the dream of a future) and an instinctive distrust of authority.

Lights up on a bleak field, where a couple of beleaguered doughboys (Seth Compton and Rick Gifford) dig a communal grave for six of their fallen comrades. No sooner have they started to cover the corpses in the dirt when slowly, eerily, the six stiffs climb to their feet and stare down the living. Yes, they’re dead all right, but they’ve decided to stick around, having had their lives cut obscenely short by what they term “the general’s real estate,” a few bloody yards of battleground. Flummoxed, their thoughtful captain (Simon Anthony Abou-Fadel) turns to Army brass, religious leaders and finally the fairer sex to convince their deceased loved ones to go gently into that good night.

Art of Democracy is building a network of exhibitions and events that will all take place in the fall of 2008. New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, St. Louis, Puerto Rico, Muncie, and several more locations are planning exhibitions. Join us as we work to amplify artistic voices willing to speak out in this dangerous hour.

Unlocking the Power of Art to Counter Injustice

Anthony Papa via Counterpunch

The artist’s role as social commentator and activist has historically been engrained in our culture. Art and its creation as a response to social and political issues can become powerfully influential in raising public awareness that results in positive change.

Art as a social weapon has been around for a long time. Recall the great German expressionist painter Kathe Kollwitz, who created works of art that centered on themes such as poverty, unemployment and worker exploitation. Diego Rivera and the other Mexican muralists used their art as a tool for the oppressed against their oppressors. They expressed their opinions and got their message across to the literate and illiterate alike, and earned worldwide recognition. In April 1937, the world learned the shocking truth about the Nazi Luftwaffe’s bombing of Guernica, Spain – a civilian target; Pablo Picasso responded with his great anti-war painting, Guernica.

Proceeds from the art exhibit and auction will benefit DPA and be used to respond to the destructive consequences of the war on drugs. The U.S. now has the highest incarceration rate in the world — one American adult out of every 100 is currently behind bars.

by Jeff VanderMeer

via Huffington Post

Summer Political Fiction: From Jessica Z to Black Clock 9

Man-eating sharks, James Bond-style villains with snow-white lap cats, superheroes in capes and tights saving the world. Mmmm, yes. Summer reading. The potent fantasy of sitting on the beach or by the pool — or at home with a hand-made paper umbrella in your rum-and-coke if you’re enduring a self-enforced “stay-cation” — and just losing yourself in a good book…

So you could be forgiven for not thinking about political fiction until the fall, especially given the recent release of the Ralph Reed fundamentalist snoozer, Dark Horse. But the fact is, this summer has seen the release of some engrossing novels (and one magazine) in which politics and social commentary take center stage. These texts reflect a post 9-11 sensibility that assimilates and responds to the last seven years of absurdity, horror, heartbreak, stupidity, and dueling cynicism-idealism. That many of these recommended reads use the near-future as a way to comment on the present shouldn’t surprise you. What writer really wants to dwell in the here-and-now given all the challenges facing the world? And who can really make sense of it all without a little distance?

For example, Shawn Klomparens’ Jessica Z (Delta, trade paperback) is set perhaps a year or two from now. It combines the concerns of literary fiction about sex and relationships with the kind of paralyzing sense of dread fueled by the continuing erosion of civil liberties. When San Francisco is hit by terrorist attacks, 28-year-old copy writer Jessica must cope with upheaval in both her public and private worlds. What’s normal post-attack, and who can be trusted? Jessica Z also quietly emphasizes the casual acceptance of torture into our current version of reality, along with the info-tainment quality of TV media. Klomparens’ particular gift is to embed the details of our self-induced dissolution into an erotic coming-of-age story that’s not only slyly funny at times but has aspects of a thriller.

Less nuanced, more direct, Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (Tor Books, hardcover) is Orwell for the teen set, a young adult tale of fighting back against a Department of Homeland Security run amok in the aftermath of a terrorist attack in San Francisco (apparently a popular target). Jailed and tortured, seventeen-year-old Marcus, a hacker, decides to take on the DHS. There’s little subtlety here — the bad guys are bad guys, the teens heroic and ultra-competent — but Doctorow’s understanding of modern technology and his ability to connect with the next generation make Little Brother as close to a handbook for the resistance as any novel yet written.In contract to Doctorow’s earnest realism, David Ohle’s

The Pisstown Chaos (Soft Skull Press, trade paper) deals in irony and absurdism. Parasite infestation has created new social pariahs and new opportunities for unscrupulous politicians. The United States has come to be ruled by Reverend Herman Hooker, an “American Divine,” a fascist in religious guise. The Balls family falls afoul of Hooker’s policies and is relocated to a detention camp. The story of their survival is told in intricate detail, with the Reverend’s desperate attempts to control the country serving as the backdrop. It’s hard to explain the power of Ohle’s compelling and potent approach to political commentary. His Reverend isn’t just a cartoon caricature and his family isn’t your normal clean-cut American nuclear unit, either. Somehow, Ohle manages to create three-dimensional characters and make some stark satirical points at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn

Our love for telling tales reveals the workings of the mind

By Jeremy Hsu

As many as two thirds of the most respected stories in narrative traditions seem to be variations on three narrative patterns, or prototypes, according to Hogan. The two more common prototypes are romantic and heroic scenarios—the former focuses on the trials and travails of love, whereas the latter deals with power struggles. The third prototype, dubbed “sacrificial” by Hogan, focuses on agrarian plenty versus famine as well as on societal redemption. These themes appear over and over again as humans create narrative records of their most basic needs: food, reproduction and social status.

Happily Ever After
The power of stories does not stop with their ability to reveal the workings of our minds. Narrative is also a potent persuasive tool, according to Hogan and other researchers, and it has the ability to shape beliefs and change minds.

Advertisers have long taken advantage of narrative persuasiveness by sprinkling likable characters or funny stories into their commercials. A 2007 study by marketing researcher Jennifer Edson Escalas of Vanderbilt University found that a test audience responded more positively to advertisements in narrative form as compared with straightforward ads that encouraged viewers to think about the arguments for a product. Similarly, Green co-authored a 2006 study that showed that labeling information as “fact” increased critical analysis, whereas labeling information as “fiction” had the opposite effect. Studies such as these suggest people accept ideas more readily when their minds are in story mode as opposed to when they are in an analytical mind-set.

Works of fiction may even have unexpected real-world effects on people’s choices. Read the rest of this entry »

When the bankers bailed out their own bankruptcy with the future earnings of debtors, we satirists surrendered.

We trooped en masse to a hastily arranged convention determined to write a Manifesto of Surrender. How could we knot? The world defeated us – had, has, and will have. We were so defeated we could knot even explain how defeated we were. Did knot even know where to start. Did knot know where knot to start, so defeated were we. So we called a convention. Isn’t that what you do when you don’t know what to do? You call a big meeting. At least then you can point to the ignorance of the guy beside you.

Well all these satiric fools my friends, probably seeing in me a remarkably dimmer version of themselves, nominated and appointed me, by unanimous descent, to be a Thomas Satiric Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Interrogation, to be author of our very own Manifesto of Surrender. I felt fooly honored.

“We give up!” I suggested, as opening line. Read the rest of this entry »

Though available in English for a couple years, it’s worth a revisit. Reviewed by Aminatta Forna:

In the year in which the despotic leader of the fictional African nation of Aburiria announces a grand scheme to build the world’s tallest building, Kamiti, a luckless job seeker, wakes up on a rubbish heap to find himself possessed of magical powers.

So begins Wizard of the Crow , Ngugi wa Thiong’o's epic African political satire, his first novel in 20 years. Daunting in its ambition and scale, spanning more than 700 pages, it is, in the author’s own words, the story of “Africa of the twentieth century in the context of two thousand years of world history.” Read the rest of this entry »

Jennifer Nix:

I once again see the potential and power of literature, and hope to tell new and necessary stories. As activists, we must not lose sight of art. Let’s reach out to artists and publishers, and find ways to connect, cross-pollinate and collaborate. Let’s all tell some new stories.

In the meantime, here are some questions I posed to Aleksandar Hemon. Take another moment…I promise you’ll enjoy his sense of humor. And, if you make it to the end, I just have this to say: Page 150.

JN: How did you discover Lazarus Averbuch, and did you set out on this project with all of the political themes in mind?

AH: A friend of mine gave me the book called An Accidental Anarchist by Walter Roth and Joe Krauss. It was a straight, smart historical recounting of the Lazarus Averbuch affair, including the political fallout–the persecution of anarchists and foreigners, changes in immigration laws etc. I have deep interest in immigration and displacement, for obvious reasons, so the book was very fascinating to me. I am a history buff, because it interests me how people lived in the past and how we got to this point, whatever the point.

And history is always political, both in its form and in its content. On the one hand, what people look for and see in history is necessarily related to their politics. On the other hand, history to some extent always records the human consequences of political decisions and catastrophes, as well as the decisions and catastrophes themselves. Which is to say that I did not need to set out to do a political book. I simply knew that neither the politics of that time (and our time) nor the fallout of human suffering could be kept out of the book.

Spike Lee to Film Tony Award-Winning Musical “Passing Strange” as Show Comes to a Close on Broadway

Passing Stange was first commissioned by the Public Theater of New York, premiered at the Berkeley Repertory Theater, and is now a hit show on Broadway. The last performance takes place at the Belasco Theatre on Sunday, but that won’t be the last time audiences get to enjoy the show. The acclaimed filmmaker Spike Lee is planning to film the musical this weekend to bring it to a wider audience. Speaking at a press conference earlier this month Spike Lee described why he wanted to film the play.

SPIKE LEE: As a filmmaker, for me, the greatest artists are musicians. I know there are painters and sculptors and novelists, and what not. But for me, musicians are the greatest artists on this earth, because I feel the talents they have come directly from God, and I really feel that. And when I saw the play at the Public, I was knocked out. And I came back a second time with Wesley Snipes, and I go, “You gotta see this!” And the story—the story, the musicianship, the acting, it was a revelation. Read the rest of this entry »

July 2000 article at US New and World Report, and extensive discussion at The Valve.

A view on the politics of some of Shakespeare’s plays:

‘Guilty in Defence’: Shakespeare’s Radical Political Theatre by Ken Jessome

in miniature

THE LAST CHARACTER IN THE WORLD

Once upon a time in a land very very close by, in something of a pious fraud of a mass email, lived a media figment of the imagination. His name was the President of the United States – POTUS. Potus, for short.

Potus was a real person but he did not play one on TV. His role on TV was that of corporate drone looking the part of a human being working hard at being a corporate drone – with fetching big military muscles – for which Potus was cherished lauded and applauded by many another drone-being-drone, DBD, on TV. Potus ruled over the entire world, or thought he did, or gave the impression he would want to as was expected of the last great hope on Earth.

Potus bowed so often to his paymasters, the Banksters and all their buddies, that he had silver dollars for eyes. Without all his banksters Potus was invisible, no one could see him, least of all the TVs. So Potus was a true TV hero and heroic only there, an actor in The Greatest Show on Earth! His was the reality shows of reality shows. Everyone wanted to play Potus, be Potus, see Potus. (Well, not everyone but so many did that it hardly seems an exaggeration.) Potus was popular.

Well not popular exactly. No Potus these days could scarcely get a quarter of eligible voters to so much as move a finger for him, other than the middle, once every four years. But popular enough! After all, his story was beamed through the media all the time, 24/7. Potus was a star, the star. He was sort of like the first and last character in the world. At least, that is how he appeared in America, if, sadly, not exactly everywhere else. Read the rest of this entry »

Review by Peter Faulkner:

This well informed and clearly written book has two main aims: to tell the reader about the importance and extent of the tradition of anarchist or left-libertarian writing in Britain; and to argue for the urgent relevance today of that tradition of political thought, particularly in its pacifist and environmentalist forms. The latter aim is necessarily the more difficult to fulfil, since it may well come up against the reader’s existing political prejudices or commitments; and I will consider it later. But in that it provides a great deal of information in a form that is both accessible and suggestive of the importance of the tradition discussed, the book is undoubtedly successful. Eight writers classified by Goodway as anarchists are discussed at length, in historical order as follows: Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, John Cowper Powys, Herbert Read, Aldous Huxley, Alex Comfort, Christopher Pallis and Colin Ward. In addition, Goodway offers thoughtful readings here of three other writers broadly sympathetic to the anarchist tradition, but with more reservations about it: William Morris, George Orwell and E. P. Thompson. Each writer is carefully placed in his historical context: Morris in that of late-Victorian radicalism; Orwell that of Spain and the Civil War; and Thompson in that of nuclear disarmament and the ‘New Left’.

…

From Anarchist Librarian’s Web:

Favorite Anarchist/Libertarian Novels 1.0 – July 1998 – This list compiled from discussions held on the anarchy-list in July 1998:

In no particular (dis)order:

• Four Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula Le Guin
• Always Coming Home by Ursula Le Guin
• The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
• He, She and It by Marge Piercy
• Woman on Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
• The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You by Dorothy Bryant
• The City, Not Long After by Pat Murphy
• Illicit Passage by Alice Nunn
• A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski
• Anarchist Farm by Jane Doe Read the rest of this entry »

Great Novel of the People - Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
Leftward Whoa! The Academy
PEN and Public or Political Fiction
“Incompatible”? – Novels, Politics, News?
Literature, Teaching, Ideology
The Reactionary Ayn Rand
Huckleberry Finn and Effects of Story
John Updike’s Lit Establishment Rules
Noam Chomsky, Orwell, and the Importance of Caricature
The Power and Import of Purpose in Fiction
The Possibilities of “Political Fiction”
Impact of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
Orwell’s Problem and Partisan Fiction [with links, clear quotes, see here]
Progressive Political Fiction 
Write a Political Novel?
The Power of Political Fiction and Mainstay Press — Interview
A Few Notes on the Literary Establishment  
Against Vicious Injustice — An Interview with Mickey Z
Politics and Art – The Personal is the Public and Private
Great Lit Is Based On Principle – Letter to ULA
The Future of Imaginative Literature – Roles for Novelists 
The Fate of Plutocracy; Or, American White Slavery
Fiction and Social Change – Some Limits of DeLillo, Pynchon…
NYT Best Fiction Discussion and Artists in Times of War (Arundhati Roy)
“Best Work of American Fiction“
More on the NYT “best of” American fiction list
Barbara Kingsolver’s 2006 Bellwether Prize
The Politics of Literary Politics
Have They Been Banned? Iraq War Novels — Interview
Establishment Irresponsibility: Ana Marie Cox Wrong on Stephen Colbert…
Send a Novel Message
Nothing They Care to Hear — Stephen Colbert
The Power of Poetry

Karen D’Souza:

“Americans (and many others) are hungry for something beyond the political twaddle that passes for national debate in this country, and indeed globally,” says Stanford University drama professor Rush Rehm. “The Mime Troupe calls things as they are; our political debate at the national level has an ‘all wear gloves’ approach, only rarely can anything be talked about.

“The Mime Troupe uses one of the rare public spaces available – performances outdoors in the park, free, and there, lo! still some truths can be told. Audiences like that, and we need it.”

For the Mime Troupe, art and activism have always been flip sides of the same coin. These left-wing rabble-rousers don’t even charge for tickets (though they do pass the hat); they believe that if theater is to be for the people, it must be truly accessible.

Lisa Traiger:

It’s hard to get rid of the sinking feeling that occurs in reliving the run-up to the most recent invasion of Iraq. In Stuff Happens, onstage at Olney Theatre Center through July 20, British playwright David Hare takes on very recent American history, recounting the maneuvers and backroom alliances made and broken by the Bush administration. Truth and fiction intermingle as we see the folly of a few leaders, enamored of power, tear asunder nations and people.

That’s Stuff Happens, its title drawn from the simplistic shrug then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made in response to a question about rioters looting Baghdad following the U.S. invasion.

Within this larger landscape, there’s one gasp-inducing moment in the Olney Theatre’s three-hour production, strategically directed by Jeremy Skidmore. Naomi Jacobson plays a nameless Palestinian woman, her hair modestly covered, her accent thick with the sand and sun of the Middle East. Plaintive and accusatory, the woman, a Palestinian scholar, asks, “Why Iraq? Why now ֹ for us, it is all about one thing: defending the interests of America’s $1 billion a year colony in the Middle East.”

“We,” she asserts, “are the Jews of the Jews.”

At a theater like Olney, long ensconced in suburban Montgomery County with its heavily Jewish audience, a collective gasp at that moment comes without surprise. While Hare’s work is no shock-and-awe campaign, this monologue hits with surgical accuracy.

Nick Miroff:

Seeing the city’s efforts as a ruse to silence him, Fernandez insists he will not remove the sign, nor allow it to be removed. Instead — and this is where the standoff takes an especially strange twist– Fernandez plans to enlarge the structure, having spent $1,500 on architectural drawings for a new, bigger, L-shaped wall, 140 feet by 61 feet, that would span the length of the property.

The new sign, Fernandez said, would feature painted murals and captions depicting the history of American racial injustice. “I really want the community to see what has been done to us people of color these last 500 years,” said Fernandez, whose message to the “European Americans” of Manassas considers Latino immigrants to be “Native Americans” with a historical right to live in the United States.

John Fox:

Last year, one of the most interesting nominations for the Booker was a book called “Animal’s People“, written by Indra Sinha, about a boy walking on all fours because of the Bhopal chemical incident. Well, now Indra Sinha is standing behind the work he did on the novel by joining eight other people on a hunger strike designed to bring the chemical manufacturers who created this atrocious situation, U.S. based Dow Chemical, to justice.

Trumbo trailer:

 
 
NPR feature:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91576667&ps=bb2   

The topical satiric comics by David Rees - Get Your War On.

Play adaption – Get Your War On – Shawn Sides / David Rees:

Based on David Rees’s popular clip-art-style Internet comic strip, the foul-mouthed production owes its sensibility to the mocking deadpan of Stephen Colbert, the sour indignation of Lewis Black and the suffer-no-fools-gladly outrage of Bill Maher. Watching “Get Your War On,” you are reminded how lily-livered the political skits have become on “Saturday Night Live,” long the nation’s main outlet for topical satire.

Then again, a show this scorching — the live-theater equivalent of a wildfire — would send network censors straight for the economy-size bottles of Stoli. Rees’s strip, begun in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, takes as its sardonic raison the administration’s war on terrorism. The stage adaptation closely follows the strip, with profanity-laced lampoons of all of the signature news events and code words of the ’00s: the Enron scandal, colorized terror alerts, “freedom fries,” red-state/blue-state, weapons of mass destruction, Halliburton and “Mission accomplished.” The show gives each its scalding turn in the hot seat, and takes swipes at the deficit, Hurricane Katrina and Israel’s war with Hezbollah.

Unfortunately, as the NYT reports:

Eventually, what separates this show from most Bush-bashing satires is a subtext about our own powerlessness. The critics onstage — and those laughing in the seats — seem content to poke fun without ever asking that old, essential question: what is to be done?

What is to be done? Lots of things. Including what happens at the end of the best movie of the US conquest of Iraq thus far, G.I. Jesus.

But in 1947, Trumbo was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) as part of the “Hollywood Ten,” who were questioned about their ties to the Communist Party.

Trumbo refused to testify and was later blacklisted by Hollywood studios. His story is told in the documentary Trumbo, due in theaters June 27. Read the rest of this entry »

State By State List of Creative Writing MFA Programs

By Fall 2005, story workshopping occurred in the US in over 100 MFA programs and in more than 600 other creative writing programs – an explosion to nearly 800 degree conferring creative writing programs (along with hundreds of conferences and seminars) – up from merely 80 such programs in 1975. What is the MFA experience like? Read up on one such experience in the novel TEXAS MFA.

Alabama
University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa

Alaska
University of Alaska - Anchorage
University of Alaska - Fairbanks

Arizona
University of Arizona
Arizona State University

Arkansas
University of Arkansas

California
Antioch University - Los Angeles
California College of the Arts
California Institute of the Arts / CalArts
California State University - Fresno
California State University - Long Beach
Chapman University
Mills College – Poetry / Prose
Otis College of Art and Design
Saint Mary’s College of California
San Diego State University
San Fransisco State University
San Jose State University
University of California - Irvine
University of California - Riverside
University of California - San Diego
University of San Francisco
University of Southern California

Colorado
Colorado State University
Naropa University
University of Colorado Boulder

District of Columbia
American University

Florida
Florida Atlantic University
Florida International University
Florida State University
University of Central Florida
University of Florida
University of Miami
University of South Florida

Georgia
Georgia College & State University
Georgia State University
University of Georgia

Idaho
Boise State University
University of Idaho

Illinois
Columbia College Chicago – poetry / Fiction
Northwestern University
Roosevelt University
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Southern Illinois University – Carbondale
University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign

Indiana
Indiana University
Purdue University
University of Notre Dame

Iowa
Iowa State University
University of Iowa – Fiction / Nonfiction

Kansas
University of Kansas
Wichita State University

Kentucky
Eastern Kentucky University
Murray State University
Spalding University

Louisiana
University of New Orleans
Louisiana State University
McNeese State University

Maine
University of Southern Maine (Stonecoast)

Maryland
Goucher College
Johns Hopkins University
University of Baltimore
University of Maryland

Massachussetts
Boston University
Emerson College
Lesley University
Pine Manor College
University of Massachusetts - Amherst

Michigan
Northern Michigan University
University of Michigan
Western Michigan University

Minnesota
Hamline University
Minnesota State University – Mankato
Minnesota State University – Moorhead
University of Minnesota

Mississippi
University of Mississippi

Missouri
University of Missouri - St. Louis
Washington University - St. Louis

Montana
University of Montana

Nebraska
University of Nebraska-Omaha

Nevada
University of Nevada - Las Vegas

New Hampshire
New England College
Southern New Hampshire University
University of New Hampshire

New Jersey
Drew University
Fairleigh Dickinson University
Rutgers University

New Mexico
New Mexico State University
University of New Mexico

New York
Adelphi University
Bard College
Brooklyn College
City College Of New York – CUNY
Columbia University School of the Arts
Cornell University
Hunter College – CUNY
The New SChool
Long Island University – Brooklyn
New York University
Queens College
Sarah Lawrence College
Stony Brook – Southampton
Syracuse University

North Carolina
North Carolina State University
Queens University of Charlotte
University of North Carolina – Greensboro
University of North Carolina – Wilmington
Warren Wilson College
Ashland University

Ohio
Bowling Green State University
Northeast Ohio Universities Consortium
Ohio State University

Oregon
Oregon State University
Pacific University
University of Oregon

Pennsylvania
Carlow University
Chatham University
Pennsylvania State University
Rosemont College
University of Pittsburgh
Wilkes University

Rhode Island
Brown University
Converse College

South Carolina
University of South Carolina

Tennessee
The University of Memphis
Vanderbilt University

Texas
Texas State University
University of Houston
University of Texas - Austin
University of Texas – El Paso
University of Texas - Pan American

Utah
University of Utah

Vermont
Bennington College
Goddard College
Vermont College of Fine Arts

Virginia
George Mason University
Hollins University
Old Dominion University
University of Virginia
Virginia Commonwealth University
Virginia Tech University

Washington
Eastern Washington University
Pacific Luthern University
Seattle Pacific University
University of Washington
Whidbey Writers Workshop

West Virginia
West Virginia University

Wisconsin
University of Wisconsin – Madison

Wyoming
University of Wyoming

Canada
University of British Columbia
Fairfield University

Flobots videos:

No Handlebars
The Flobots No Handlebars video reminds me quite a lot of the troubled beauty, and the joy and terror in Andre Vltchek’s novel Point of No Return.

Iraq Rap

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A car bomb ripped through the street outside the Danish embassy here, killing at least six, in an apparent act of revenge against cartoons of the prophet Muhammad published in Danish newspapers in 2005.

A Danish citizen of Pakistani origin was among the dead, according to the Danish Foreign Ministry in Copenhagen . Local Pakistani media put the fatalities at eight; 35 were injured.

Morris Dickstein has an article “Fiction and Political Fact” in the current issue of Bookforum. Dickstein has come up with some thoughtful moments of criticism in his past work. This is not one. The article is more a classic expression of reigning status quo (liberal/conservative) ideology. One could critique the article at length pointing out its absurdities, vacuities, and sheer distortion. Regular readers of this site should be able to note as much…

From a thread at The Valve:

“What, I ask first, is this poem trying to do. Then: is it successful? Then: Is it worth doing?” – Kevin Prufer – http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2008/05/interview-with-kevin-prufer.html

“Luther Blissett”: “…something well beyond art: we need discernment to foster critical thinking, to make good citizens, to use our time on earth wisely, to heighten our pleasures, to effect social change, to effect personal growth, etc.”

None of the above is necessarily beyond art, or even beyond aesthetics. In fact, these are often central purposes and contents of the experiences that are art.

Many artists ask themselves all the time not only what can I create, but what should I create. Critics, audiences should question (evaluate) that too. Read the rest of this entry »

Election, Incorporated. The sequel:

As their contest for the White House draws closer, watch how, regardless of the inevitable personal smears, Obama and McCain draw nearer to each other. They already concur on America’s divine right to control all before it. “We lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good,” said Obama. “We must lead by building a 21st-century military . . . to advance the security of all people [emphasis added].” McCain agrees. Obama says in pursuing “terrorists” he would attack Pakistan. McCain wouldn’t quarrel.

…Like all the candidates, Obama has furthered Israeli/Bush fictions about Iran, whose regime, he says absurdly, “is a threat to all of us”.

On the war in Iraq, Obama the dove and McCain the hawk are almost united. McCain now says he wants US troops to leave in five years (instead of “100 years”, his earlier option). Obama has now “reserved the right” to change his pledge to get troops out next year. “I will listen to our commanders on the ground,” he now says, echoing Bush. Read the rest of this entry »

Rovics:

I first became familiar with the Utah Phillips phenomenon in the late 80′s, when I was in my early twenties, working part-time as a prep cook at Morningtown in Seattle.  I had recently read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, and had been particularly enthralled by the early 20th Century section, the stories of the Industrial Workers of the World.  So it was with great interest that I first discovered a greasy cassette there in the kitchen by the stereo, Utah Phillips Sings the Songs and Tells the Stories of the Industrial Workers of the World.

Eagleton:

“Culture is ordinary,” Williams wrote in a pioneering essay, and his own life was a case in point. He saw his transition from Black Mountains to Cambridge spires as in no sense untypical. Right to the end, he regarded the politically conscious rural community in which he was reared, with its neighbourliness and cooperative spirit, as far more of a genuine culture than the Cambridge in which he held a professorial chair and that he once acidly described as “one of the rudest places on earth”. Working-class Britain may not have produced its quota of Miltons and Jane Austens; but in Williams’s view it had given birth to a culture that was at least as valuable: the dearly won institutions of the labour, union and cooperative movements.

Since Williams’s death in 1988, culture, one might claim, has become more ordinary than ever. Not in the sense that Milton is sold in supermarkets, though Austen has been sprung from college libraries into film and television. In the teeth of the Jeremiahs, Williams never ceased to argue for the progressive potential of the media. But he believed that these vital modes of speaking to each other should be wrested back from the cynics who exploited them for private gain. His prescription for dealing with the Murdochs of this world was bracingly free of his usual circumspection: “These men must be run out.”

Ruth Franklin:

In the course of a writing life that has included five novels, collections of short stories and poetry, and numerous essays and lectures, Achebe has consistently argued for the right of Africans to tell their own story in their own way, and has attacked the representations of European writers. But he also did not reject European influence entirely, choosing to write not in his native Igbo but in English, a language that, as he once said, “history has forced down our throat.” In a country with several major languages and more than five hundred smaller ones, establishing a lingua franca was a practical and political necessity. For Achebe, it was also an artistic necessity—a way to give expression to the clash of civilizations that is his enduring theme.

Donaghue, the Henry James Professor of Letters at New York University, in 1981, summing views of Mary McCarthy with which he disagrees:

Mary McCarthy’s new book transcribes the Northcliffe Lectures she gave some months ago at University College, London. Her main argument is that the classic novel in the 19th century grew up and grew strong upon ideas and arguments provoked by public issues, politics, religion – the questions of Free Trade, Empire, women, Reform and so forth. It was assumed that a serious novel would deal with such questions in their bearing upon the themes of power, money, sex and class. The novelist’s relation to his readers was sustained by a shared assumption that these matters constituted reality. Miss McCarthy believes that this assumption was undermined by Henry James, and that James’s sense of the novel has dominated the general understanding of fiction from that day to this. She argues that in the typical Jamesian fiction ideas, concepts and public issues are mostly replaced by images, hints, guesses, sensations, nuances of sensibility. James’s characters, she says, are mostly interested in themselves and in one another, not in anything as external as Free Trade. They visit art galleries, but they never argue about the pictures they have seen.

According to Miss McCarthy, the damage James did in practice was given currency and respectability by T.S. Eliot’s theories: It was Eliot who praised James for having ”a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.” Eliot’s influence was such that readers started thinking that ideas are crude things, good enough for journalism but not for a work of art. The serious novelist in our own day, Miss McCarthy argues, is discouraged from dealing with ideas or from making debate and argument an important part of his fiction.

Also see more cold war lit confrontation involving critic Maxwell Geismar and Henry James “a primary Cold War literary figure” at Books on Trial by Burial.

Palestinian News Network:

From 7 to 11 May, 16 International Authors visited Palestine in solidarity with the Palestinian People, in recognition of Palestine’s cultural contribution to the world, in affirmation of the power of the word and the responsibility of speaking it. The Palestine Festival of Literature was inspired by the call of the late great Palestinian thinker, Edward Said, to “reaffirm the power of culture over the culture of power.”

The Palestine Festival of Literature was held under the patronage of Chinua Achebe, John Berger, Mahmoud Darwish, Seamus Heaney and Harold Pinter.

In the sixtieth year since the Nakba sixteen international authors will hold the first International Literary Festival in Palestine. 

In partnership with the British Council, the Al-Qattan Foundation, Bethlehem University, Birzeit University, Dar an-Nadwa in Bethlehem and Yabous Productions. 

In recognition of the difficulties Palestinians face under military occupation in travelling around their own country, the Festival will travel to its audiences in the West Bank. It will tour from Jerusalem, to Ramallah, to Jenin, to Bethlehem. 

Anna Clark is a freelance journalist and fiction writer living in Detroit, MI. Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Utne Reader, Women’s eNews, Bitch Magazine, Writers’ Journal, RH Reality Check, and other publications. She maintains the literary and social justice website, Isak. From “Society of the Incarcerated“:

…a movement that challenges the prison industrial complex and acts from the belief that it’s real people inside those walls, and that real families are affected. The movement also acknowledges that victims of crimes are real people too, whose experiences deserve understanding, not media caricature or political exploitation.

Consider the Prison Creative Arts Project, a collaborative organization that facilitates writing, art, drama, and music workshops in prisons, detention centers and urban schools throughout Michigan. It’s produced 13 annual exhibitions of art by Michigan prisoners at the University of Michigan, facilitates one-on-one arts training with people who are incarcerated and supports artists who are released from prison by connecting them with working artists in the communities they return to.

Consider The Sentencing Project, a national organization that documents the disturbing trends in the prison industrial complex while agitating for viable alternatives to incarceration and current sentencing law.

Consider PEN America’s Prison Writing Program, which has provided mentoring, workshops, readings and publication to incarcerated writers since 1971.

Consider the Women’s Prison Association, which advocates for women with histories in the criminal justice system. It particularly supports a woman’s need for housing, employment and health care when she returns to her community.

Consider Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation, which challenges the death penalty through constant interaction with citizens, media and policy makers. Since 1976, MVFR has contended that legal executions lead to yet another family losing a loved one to violence, while capital trials absorb dollars that would be better put to victim services and law enforcement.

Most of all, consider yourself-and your own stake, intentional or not, in a system that will continually and quietly shape the direction of our country unless we agitate for an alternative.

In the Declaration of Emancipation I’ve recently rewritten the (US/13 Colonies) Declaration of Independence, by simply re-using much of its language, and making it applicable to the Americas as a whole, and changing the title to reflect the emancipation manifestos and legislation freeing the Russian serfs and US slaves.  

Because I incorporate so much of the original text, it’s in a sense co-authored with the Declaration of Independence signers, though modified, updated, expanded somewhat. 

A big factual text I’ve started on is the “U.S. Military Counterinsurgency Manual, December 2006″ which I’ve begun to reconstrue ultimately in novelistic or epic imaginative form as a Field Guide to Revolution for defeating not a counterinsurgency (or COIN, in the military’s acronym) but for defeating counterrevolutionary (CORE) forces like corporations and states and so on, and for carrying out a liberatory revolution (LIBREV) by revolutionaries. 

Again, I simply incorporate very much of the actual counterinsurgency manual – minus the violence – including sentences, paragraph structure, ideas and information while modifying wherever necessary to produce a liberatory revolutionary approach, ironically co-written, in a sense, with the military and the outside scholars they involved.

In some ways it starts out sounding like the opening of an epic novel, so I note it as such. This nearly 300 page military manual could be rewritten to incorporate more novelistic features to render it more in depth a novel of ideas or an imaginative epic of some sort.

The broader implications of this are that there is an ever growing number of such state-corporate type documents being produced at local, national and international levels, everything from economic treatises, to sweeping health care legislation and documents, to environmental manifestos, corporate rights law documents and so on. Some NGO documents may be somewhat liberatory, plenty of documents are reactionary, all could be, maybe should be re-imagined, closely to or wholly out of their nonfiction form. Read the rest of this entry »

John Cusack’s War: The Actor Battles to Un-Embed Hollywood With His New Film, ‘War, Inc.’ – by Jeremy Scahill:

Back in 1989, in his smash hit “Say Anything,” John Cusack famously stood with a boom box above his head outside the home of the woman he loved blasting Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.” With his latest films on the Iraq war, Cusack is standing outside Hollywood with a TV above his head broadcasting his political movies calling on the public to wake up and “Do Something.”

John Cusack began working on his new film “War, Inc.,” which premieres in LA and New York May 23, about a year into the US occupation of Iraq. From the moment US tanks rolled into Baghdad, Cusack was a voracious consumer of news about the war. He took it deadly seriously, regularly calling independent journalists and asking them questions as he sought as much independent information as he could. Watching the insanity of the erection of the Green Zone and the advent of the era of McWar, complete with tens of thousands of “private contractors,” Cusack set out to use the medium of film to unveil the madness. He wanted to do on the big screen what independent reporters like Naomi Klein, Nir Rosen and Dahr Jamail did in print. Over these years of war and occupation, Cusack has become one of the most insightful commentators on a far too seldom discussed aspect of the occupation: the corporate dominance of the US war machine.

Cusack is no parachute humanitarian. While he continues to do the Hollywood thing with big budget movies, he is simultaneously a fierce un-embedded actor/filmmaker who has been at the center of two of the best films to date dealing with the madness of the Iraq war.

“A candid conversation between the playwright of Over There/Over Here opening May 29th at Warner Grand Theatre in San Pedro for its West Coast Premiere, and the Artistic Director of The Relevant Stage Theatre Company, Ray Buffer. Michael Reyes, Playwright.”  The Relevant Stage

An interesting lively example of mixing aesthetic criticism with ethical (or general normative) criticism is found in a review by Eileen Jones of the recent Iraq war film Stop-Loss, which she details as:

“a protest movie about the war that-follow me closely here-doesn’t actually protest the war. Because that would be a bummer, getting us into that whole thing again about Bush and Cheney and the WMDs that weren’t there and the no-exit-strategy. Not to mention the 4,000 dead Americans we’re sort of peeved about. We support our troops, you know! In this movie Peirce insists on supporting our troops so hard it’s impossible to figure out what’s ailing us, watching these fine boys with their fine parents all having fine values in this fine country of ours. Nagging questions hang over the whole project: if our Texas-style patriotism is so great, and our mission to defend America is so great, and we’ve got hordes of studly young guys leaping at the opportunity to go fight whoever they’re told, and they’re all great, too, and their families and communities are great, then uh … what’s the problem? Why isn’t everybody happy?

“Well, for one thing, it turns out that if you go fight in a war, you can get SHOT. Yeah! It’s true! Even a righteous American, with a big gun, and a Kevlar vest, and a Hummer! That’s the movie’s first-act revelation. We see our boys in Iraq, doing their jobs chasing insurgents into local people’s apartments, and those bastards start SHOOTING at ‘em!”

It may be difficult to separate out where the aesthetic criticism ends and the ethical/normative criticism begins here because in this case they are extremely intertwined, often co-dependent. The normative breakdown generates broken aesthetics; not much chance of satisfying rising climax and poignant moments (in terms of aesthetics) when the ethics or other normative features are impoverished/degraded… And when otherwise the aesthetics are well done but the underlying norms are bunk, well it’s lipstick on the poor pig, at best.

Historical Criticism and Social Change

In the excerpts below, Edmund Wilson presents his thoughts on what it means to understand literature in its “historical” aspects, that is “its social, economic and political aspects.”

He notes that this tradition of criticism began during the Enlightenment and developed during the subsequent centuries. He begins by describing other prominent traditions of criticism then focuses on the historical one, which is a key critical tradition, especially its more progressive and revolutionary elements, overviewed and explored by this site. Read the rest of this entry »

Some of the most thoughtful work I’ve seen regarding aesthetics and ethics, and the related, is by Kenneth Burke in The Philosophy of Literary Form (the 1941 date below is for the collection, not for the essays, most of which were written in the 1930s, I think):

(1941) Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” The Philosophy of Literary Form:

“Here I shall put down, as briefly as possible, a statement in behalf of what might be catalogued, with a fair degree of accuracy, as a sociological criticism of literature. Sociological criticism is certainly not new. I shall try to suggest what partially new elements or emphasis I think should be added to this old approach. And to make the ‘way in’ as easy as possible, I shall begin with a discussion of proverbs. Examine random specimens in The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs. You will note, I think, that there is no ‘pure’ literature here. Everything is ‘medicine.’ Proverbs are designed for consolation or vengeance, for admonition or exhortation, for foretelling” (253).

(1941) Kenneth Burke, “The Nature of Art Under Capitalism,” The Philosophy of Literary Form:

“The present article proposes to say something further on the subject of art and propaganda. It will attempt to set forth a line of reasoning as to why the contemporary emphasis must be placed largely upon propaganda, rather than upon ‘pure’ art…. Since pure art makes for acceptance, it tends to become a social menace in so far as it assists us in tolerating the intolerable. And if it leads us to a state of acquiescence at a time when the very basis of moral integration is in question, we get a paradox whereby the soundest adjunct to ethics, the aesthetic, threatens to uphold an unethical condition. For this reason it seems that under conditions of competitive capitalism there must necessarily be a large corrective or propaganda element in art. Art cannot safely confine itself to merely using the values which arise out of a given social texture and integrating their conflicts, as the soundest, ‘purest’ art will do. It must have a definite hortatory function, an educational element of suasion or inducement; it must be partially forensic. Such a quality we consider to be the essential work of propaganda. Hence we feel that the moral breach arising from vitiation of the work-patterns calls for a propaganda art. And incidentally, our distinction as so stated should make it apparent that much of the so-called ‘pure’ art of the nineteenth century was of a pronouncedly propagandist or corrective coloring. In proportion as the conditions of economic warfare grew in intensity throughout the ‘century of progress,’ and the church proper gradually adapted its doctrines to serve merely the protection of private gain and the upholding of manipulated law, the ‘priestly’ function was carried on by the ‘secular’ poets, often avowedly agnostic.  Read the rest of this entry »

Preston C. Enright:

“Having recently seen author David Hajdu on C-SPAN, I was motivated to create this list of artists who are dealing with complex issues in a way that super-hero comics never did. Hajdu, the author of ‘The Ten-Cent Plague’ outlined the history of the repression of comics in America, including a decade (1945-1955) when comics were being publicly burned. Today, there is a renaissance of thoughtful illustrators who are thinking outside the box. There is also an increased interest in the ‘underground’ comics of the 60s and 70s. I’m looking forward to watching this field develop in the coming years.”

David Bacon:

I was disappointed that Daniel Day- Lewis won an Oscar for There Will Be Blood, not because he’s not a great actor (he is), but because the movie was such a betrayal of the book on which it was based. Movies don‘t have to follow books. Many don‘t. But in this case, what we missed were the things that made Upton Sinclair’s Oil! a politically courageous book for its time. For our time, it unearths a crucial part of the hidden history of our own working class movement. 

PEN asks: “…what novels were ever pointedly relevant to public and political life?”

No little bit of research and analysis on it. One could do worse than to recall Victor Hugo’s great novel of the people, Les Miserables. Biographer Graham Robb notes:

“One can see here the impact of Les Miserables on the Second Empire…. The State was trying to clear its name. The Emperor and Empress performed some public acts of charity and brought philanthropy back into fashion. There was a sudden surge of official interest in penal legislation, the industrial exploitation of women, the care of orphans, and the education of the poor. From his rock in the English Channel, Victor Hugo, who can more fairly be called ‘the French Dickens’ than Balzac, had set the parliamentary agenda for 1862.” 

Since it’s publication in 1957, Atlas Shrugged, the philosophical and artistic climax of Ayn Rand’s novels, has never been out of print. It continues to receive critical attention and is considered one of the most influential books ever published, impacting a variety of disciplines including philosophy, literature, economics, business and political science. Read the rest of this entry »

 - open letter -

Send us the money. We know what to do with it.

As reported in the Harvard Crimson, you noted that “many writers have been in a post-Sept. 11 malaise, and that it grew so severe that at one point [you] considered offering up [your] own money in order to urge writers to break through their writer’s block.”

You state, “I actually had an idea a couple of years ago – when six or seven people I knew were all in a similar place of frustration with the novel – of sponsoring a prize, of offering $10,000 of my own money who first delivered a novel.”

Within two or three years of 9-11 both Andre Vltchek and I had written geo-political novels that no publisher would touch – too progressive for the status quo literary world. We lacked the malaise but could have won your $10,000, which would have helped us greatly in starting up Mainstay Press and its journal Liberation Lit as a way of publishing our work and the accomplished literature and art of others that the status quo lit world shies from. $10,000 would still greatly help us publish the first print issue of our liberatory literature journal Liberation Lit, featuring several dozen authors. As it is we will be hard pressed just to get contributor’s copies to some of the contributors. So substantial financial help would be much appreciated. Our post 9-11, post Iraq war, post Hurricane Katrina novels and numerous other works both long and short show that we have surely and consistently produced, and know what to do with the money.

We do most everything. We write novels, plays, stories, and works of criticism, and we edit them and those by others, and we proof them, and format them, and design and create the covers, and publish them, and attempt to publicize them. And since we do it with next to no resources, you can trust that we know how to stretch a dollar. Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Fisk:

I was in the occupied Palestinian city of Hebron once, in 2001, and the Palestinians had lynched three supposed collaborators. And they were hanging so terribly, almost naked, on the electricity pylons out of town, that I could not write in my notebook. Instead, I drew pictures of their bodies hanging from the pylons. Young boys – Palestinian boys – were stubbing out cigarettes on their near-naked bodies and they reminded me of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, all arrows and pain and forgiveness, and so all I could do was draw. I still have the pictures. They are ridiculous, stupid, the work of a reporter who suddenly couldn’t bring himself to write the details on the page.

But I understand Hoyland’s picture, even if it is not my picture. After I saw the oil fires burning in Kuwait in 1991, an Irish artist painted Fisk’s Fires – a title I could have done without – in which she very accurately portrayed the bleached desert with the rich, thick, chocolate-tasting oil we tasted in the aftermath of the war. Sometimes, I wish these painters were with us when we saw the war with our own eyes – and which they could then see with theirs. …

Via ZNet

Nadine Gordimer on her decision to participate in “Israel at 60 Celebrations”

Dr. Haidar Eid:

Dear Ms. Gordimer,

I am a Palestinian lecturer in Cultural Studies living in Gaza. I happen to also have South African citizenship as a result of my marriage to a citizen of that beloved country. I spent more than five years in Johannesburg, the city in which I earned my Ph.D and lectured at both traditionally black and white universities. At Vista in Soweto, I taught your anti-apartheid novels My Son’s Story, July’s People and The Late Bourgeois World. I have been teaching the same novels, in addition to The Pick Up and Selected Stories, to my Palestinian students in Gaza at Al-Aqsa University. This course is called “Resistance, Anti-Racism and Xenophobia”. I deliberately chose to teach your novels because, as an anti-apartheid writer, you defied racial stereotypes by calling for resistance against all forms of oppression, be they racial or religious. Your support of sanctions against apartheid South Africa has, to say the least, impressed my Gazan students.

The news of your conscious decision to take part in the “Israel at 60″ celebrations has reached us, students and citizens of Gaza, as both a painful surprise, and a glaring example of a hypocritical intellectual double standard. My students, psychologically and emotionally traumatized and already showing early signs of malnutrition as a result of the genocidal policy of the country whose birth you intend celebrating, demand an explanation.
 

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Mark Vallen:

The April 2008 edition of Modern Painters: The International Contemporary Art Magazine, is devoted to “the politically driven art made in response to war and its critical reception.” An introductory statement from the magazine’s Assistant Editor, Quinn Latimer, sums up the profusely illustrated April edition thusly: “Each month, with some discomfiture, we publish art criticism that rarely touches on the Iraq war. But the fifth anniversary of the American invasion compelled us to unambiguously address the conflict. …

PD Smith:

The great scientific romancer HG Wells could hardly be described as hostile to science or scientists. It was his anger at the misuse of science to create weapons of mass destruction that led him to condemn such scientists. I share that anger and it prompted me to explore the cultural reasons why people from all walks of life came to think that superweapons were a solution to human problems. …

Debra Linn:

Edwidge Danticat’s family memoir Brother, I’m Dying riled us up. Outraged us, actually. We were incensed by the treatment her uncle received when he arrived in Miami from full-on upheaval in Haiti. Our book club had received the call to action, our chance to start living up to our name, Page Against the Machine, an opportunity for book club activism.

Book club activism sounds high-minded and formal, but really, just about any book can spur your club to action. It rises organically from your connection to the book. What Is the What by Dave Eggers leads to activism about Sudan. Water for Elephants to the Humane Society or PETA, perhaps. …

Out back is where we crucify the students. The loyal-consumers-in-training, I mean. The lcit.

Actually, out back is mainly where we crucified the lcit – those who have most seriously erred – but now, times being what they are, we crucify them all over the Terminal and Terminal grounds.

There seems to be an inevitable rhythm to the crucifixions. This stern punishment arises from incidents that arrive in clusters around the holidays, near the beginnings and endings of the Terminal year, and semesters, and months, and weeks. Also, the beginnings and endings of days, classes, and exam periods are particularly fraught with tension and volatility. Not to mention to different degrees every moment in between. We find remedial crucifixion necessary for lcit crimes deemed especially heinous, such as duct-taping over forehead ID bar codes and other subversive behavior, like excessive cooperation and socializing.

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at Café Brazilero, in historic center city Montevideo

Q: Eduardo Galeano, after so many years are the veins of Latin America still open?

A: Yes; obviously yes. I think they are. Not long ago I met count Dracula in Buenos Aires. He was looking for an Argentinean psychoanalyst. Argentina produces many psychoanalysts. Dracula was told by someone that he can still be cured by an Argentinean psychoanalyst. I found count Dracula in a terrible state; really depressed, thin, terrible…

Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Vallen reports:

LA vs. War promises to be one of the largest antiwar cultural happenings in the recent history of Los Angeles. Organized by the activist artists of Yo!, the same people who put together the Yo! What Happened to Peace? international touring peace poster exhibit, the LA vs. War extravaganza is scheduled to run April 10 – 13, 2008, at The Firehouse art space in downtown Los Angeles. In the words of the organizers, the show will be “an unprecedented gathering of artists united to deliver a message of peace, and offering resistance and opposition to war and violence.”

Tim Robbins’ reimagining of Orwell’s ’1984′ resonates in 2008 by James D. Watts Jr. -

“It’s one of those books you think you know well — until you sit down and read it,” said Tim Robbins, the Academy Award-winning actor and director who founded The Actors’ Gang. “And then you realize just how prescient George Orwell was, and how incredibly relevant this book is today.”

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Albert: 

…in sum, parecon creates conditions conducive to society benefiting from artistic talent and conducive to capable artists expressing themselves as they choose. More, parecon does all this consistently with economic equity and justice for the artists but also equally for all other workers and consumers. Parecon is an art friendly, even an artistic economy.

Pretending poetry, or any considered creation, is not political is sheer ignorant (to put it poetically) or a lie. Pretending poetry is not political is itself extremely political, as poem or otherwise, extremely ideological.

“Faith” is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see —
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency.

-Emily Dickinson

Split This Rock [poetry festival] calls poets to a greater role in public life and fosters a national network of activist poets. The festival will explore and celebrate the many ways that poetry can act as an agent for change: reaching across differences, considering personal and social responsibility, asserting the right to free speech, bearing witness to the diversity and complexity of human experience through language, imagining a better world. It will feature readings, workshops, panel discussions on poetry and social change, youth programming, open mics, films, parties, walking tours, and activism.

Some further notes on the politics of art, from a discussion at Common Dreams: 

Read the rest of this entry »

Springsteen Youngstown Montage 

Iran and Afghanistan in film.

From Works on Political, Social, and Cultural Criticism of Imaginative Literature
(with an emphasis on the nature and role of propaganda)

(1928) “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet. They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world…. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine. I am aware that the word ‘propaganda’ carries to many minds an unpleasant connotation. Yet whether, in any instance, propaganda is good or bad depends upon the merit of the cause urged, and the correctness of the information published. In itself, the word ‘propaganda’ has certain technical meanings which, like most things in this world, are ‘neither good nor bad but custom makes them so.’ I find the word defined in Funk and Wagnalls’ Dictionary in four ways: …‘ “Propaganda” in its proper meaning is a perfectly wholesome word, of honest parentage, and with an honorable history…’ “

–Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda

(1928) “Propaganda itself is preferable to shallow, truckling imitation. Negro things may reasonably be a fad for others; for us they must be a religion. Beauty, however, is its best priest and psalms will be more effective than sermons.”

–Alain Locke, “Art or Propaganda?” African American Literary Criticism, 1773-2000 (Hazel Arnett Ervin, Ed.)

(1931) “I believe therefore that the time is at hand when these writers, who have largely dominated the literary world of the decade 1920-30, though we shall continue to admire them as masters, will no longer serve us as guides. …the private imagination in isolation from the life of society seems to have been exploited and explored as far as for the present is possible. Who can imagine this sort of thing being carried further than Valéry and Proust have done? And who hereafter will be content to inhabit a corner, though fitted out with some choice things of one’s own, in the shuttered house of one of these writers—where we find ourselves, also, becoming conscious of a lack of ventilation?

     “The reaction against nineteenth-century naturalism which Symbolism originally represented has probably now run its full course, and the oscillation which for at least three centuries has been taking place between the poles of objectivity and subjectivity may return toward objectivity again: we may live to see Valéry, Eliot and Proust displaced and treated with as much intolerance as those writers—Wells, France and Shaw—whom they have themselves displaced. Yet as surely as Ibsen and Flaubert brought to their Naturalistic plays and novels the sensibility and language of Romanticism, the writers of a new reaction in the direction of the study of man in his relation to his neighbor and to society will profit by the new intelligence and technique of Symbolism. Or—what would be preferable and is perhaps more likely—this oscillation may finally cease. Our conceptions of objective and subjective have unquestionable been based on false dualisms; our materialisms and idealisms alike have been derived from mistaken conceptions of what the researches of science implied—Classicism and Romanticism, Naturalism and Symbolism are, in reality, therefore false alternatives. …our ideas about the ‘logic’ of language are likely to be very superficial. The relation of words to what they convey—that is, to the processes behind them and the processes to which they give rise in those who listen to or read them—is still a very mysterious one. We tend to assume that being convinced of things is something quite different from having them suggested to us; but the suggestive language of the Symbolist poet is really performing the same sort of function as the reasonable language of the realistic novelist or even the severe technical languages of science” (231-234)

–Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle

(1932) “Genuine proletarian criticism has seldom sought to deny the importance of literary values because of its desire for social significances. On the contrary, except in the United States, revolutionary critics have often been harder taskmasters from the point of literary quality than aesthetic critics…. The revolutionary critic should demand as much of the art he endorses as the reactionary [critic]. No revolutionary critic, for example, should deny that art in itself, in whatever form, is a trade just as pottery-making is, and as a trade it has its technique which has to be mastered if that which is produced is to be worthwhile.”

        “Revolutionary art has to be good art first before it can have deep meaning, just as apples in a revolutionary country as well as in a reactionary country have to be good apples before they can be eaten with enjoyment. The fact that the pottery or the apples are the products of a revolutionary culture—that is, made or grown by revolutionists—does not itself, or by any kind of special magic, make them good. It simply gives them a new form of ideological identification….

        “[Great revolutionary] films are great not because they are [only progressive in ideology] but because they are great first in their formal organization, and then greater still because of the social purpose which they serve. The revolutionary proletarian critic does not aim to underestimate literary craftsmanship. What he contends is simply that literary craftsmanship is not enough. The craftsmanship must be utilized to create objects of revolutionary meaning. Only through this synthesis does the revolutionary critic believe that art can serve its most important purpose today. Revolutionary meanings without literary craftsmanship constitute as hopeless a combination from the point of view of the radical critic as literary craftsmanship without revolutionary purpose. If proletarian literature fails in so many instances in America, it is not because it is propagandistic—most of the literature of the world has been propagandistic in one way or another, including even that of William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw—but because it is lacking in qualities of craftsmanship.

        “In a word, the revolutionary critic does not believe that we can have art without craftsmanship; what he does believe is that, granted the craftsmanship, our aim should be to make art serve man as a thing of action and not man serve art as a thing of escape. …Proletarian writers are not necessarily proletarians…but they are writers who are imbued with a proletarian ideology instead of a bourgeois one. They are writers who have adopted the revolutionary point of view of the proletarian ideology in their work. That often they fail in such expression is inevitable in a transitional stage of society in which we are living in today.

        “This much should be clear, however, and that is that proletarian writers are not to be confused with literary rebels. Literary rebels believe in revolt in literature; left-wing, that is proletarian, writers believe in revolt in life. The literary rebels, for example, who became the advocates of free verse as opposed to conventional verse must not be associated with proletarian writers, who are opposed to the society in which we live and aim to devote their literature to its transformation. Proletarian writers, then, are more interested in social revolt than in literary revolt. As a group they are convinced that present-day industrial society is based upon exploitation and injustice; that it creates distress and misery for the many and brings happiness only to the few; that its dedication to the ideal of profit instead of use is destructive of everything fine and inspiring in life; and that until its private-property basis is destroyed and replaced by the social control of all property, the human race will never be able to escape the horrors of unemployment, poverty, and war. More than that, proletarian writers believe that their literature can serve a greater purpose only when it contributes, first, toward the destruction of present-day society, and, second, toward the creation of a new society which will embody…a social, instead of an individualistic ideal. Unlike Ibsen, they do not ask questions and then refuse to answer them. Unlike the iconoclasts, they are not content to tear down the idols and stop there. Their aim is to answer questions as well as ask them, and to provide a new order to replace an old one. Their attitude, therefore, is a positive instead of a negative one” (459-462). 

–V.F. Calverton, The Liberation of American Literature

(1934) “The moral office and human function of art can be intelligently discussed only in context of culture. A particular work of art may have a definite effect upon a particular person or upon a number of persons. The social effect of the novels of Dickens or of Sinclair Lewis is far from negligible. But a less conscious and more massed constant adjustment of experience proceeds from the total environment that is created by the collective art of a time…” (344). “The theories that attribute direct moral effect and intent to art fail because they do not take account of the collective civilization that is the context in which works of art are produced and enjoyed. I would not say that they tend to treat works of art as a kind of sublimated Aesop’s fables. But they all tend to extract particular works, regarded as especially edifying, from their milieu and to think of the moral function of art in terms of a strictly personal relation between the selected works and a particular individual. Their whole conception of morals is so individualistic that they miss a sense of the way in which art exercises its humane functions. Matthew Arnold’s dictum that ‘poetry is a criticism of life’ is a case in point…” (346).

–John Dewey, Art as Experience

From Works on Political, Social, and Cultural Criticism of Imaginative Literature

(with an emphasis on the nature and role of propaganda)

(1934) “In one issue of the New York Times—May 10, 1933—we learned from the Mexican Bolshevik artist, Diego Rivera, that ‘art which is not propaganda is not art at all,’ and from Hitler’s Minister of Education that ‘it is no longer art for art’s sake in Germany, but art for propaganda’s sake—otherwise it is not art.’ The German Bolshevik artist, George Grosz, had already declared that ‘The artist of our day, if he does not want to be an empty runner…can choose only between technique and class-struggle propaganda.’ And Mussolini recently expressed the same view by refusing to open the Style Show at Turin until all the slim girls in the mural had been washed down, and issuing an instruction to the press to accept for publication only such representations of the female figure as exemplify the ‘fully developed bust and hips appropriate to the fascist girl and mother.’ It seems well agreed on both sides of the barricades, that in the future at least art is to be crudely purposive, and the artist’s prestige to depend upon his service to a social or political cause” (3-4). 

–Max Eastman, Art and the Life of Action

(1935) “To characterize an essay or a book as a political pamphlet is neither to praise nor to condemn it. Such pamphlets have their place in the world. In the case of the liberal critic, however, we have a political pamphlet which pretends to be something else. We have an attack on the theory of art as a political weapon which turns out to be itself a political weapon…. The liberal critic, the Man in White, wants us to believe that when you write about the autumn wind blowing a girl’s hair or about ‘thirsting breasts,’ you are writing about ‘experience’; but when you write about the October Revolutions, or the Five Year Plan, or the lynching of Negroes in the South, or the San Francisco strike you are not writing about ‘experience.’ Hence to say; ‘bed your desire among the pressing grasses’ is art; while Roar China, Mayakovsky’s poems, or the novels of Josephine Herbst and Robert Cantwell are propaganda …. If you were to take a worker gifted with a creative imagination and ask him to set down his experience honestly, it would be an experience so remote from that of the bourgeois that the Man in White would, as usual, raise the cry of ‘propaganda’ ” (9-12).

–Joseph Freeman in Proletarian Literature in the United States, Granville Hicks, Ed., et. al.

(1936) “I think that literature must be viewed both as a branch of the fine arts and as an instrument of social influence. It is this duality, intrinsic to literature, that produces unresolved problems of literary criticism” (3).

        “I suggest that in the field of literature the formula ‘All art is propaganda’ be replaced by another: ‘Literature is an instrument of social influence’…. [Literature] can be propaganda—in the more limited sense of my definition of propaganda; and it can sometimes perform an objective social function that approaches agitation. However, it often performs neither of these functions and yet does perform an objective social function… I am making these distinctions on the grounds of strategy and clarity, so that we may know what we are doing and what we are talking about. A leading critical confusion—as I have said—has arisen from using the word propaganda in various senses; then from hitching literature sometimes to one; sometimes to another, of these meanings; and finally from thinking that we have always had the same meanings in mind and that these meanings exhaust the roles that literature plays objectively in society, and subjectively upon the individual consciousness of the reader. In so doing, we have produced wasted polemics; and in confronting critics who oppose Marxism, revolutionary criticism has led with its chin; is it any wonder that opponents have leaped at it when such opportunities were offered?” (169-171).

–James T. Farrell, “Literature and Propaganda,” in A Note on Literary Criticism

(1939) “Socialist criticism in America may conveniently be dated from the founding of the Comrade—‘An Illustrated Socialist Monthly’—in 1901…. The Comrade appeared at the beginning of the muckrake era. It was superior to the muckrakers in the clarity of its vision as to the basic cause of social evils and the way to cure them…. The aims of socialist critics were propagandistic, and it was inevitable that they should be paramount in a time when American critical systems were divided between art for art’s sake, art for morality’s sake, and various compromises between those two exhausted theories of esthetic purpose.¹ Consider the essays and lectures on the contemporary theatre by the anarchist Emma Goldman. Miss Goldman made no bones about her intentions. Her essay on ‘The Modern Drama’ in Anarchism and Other Essays (1911) was frankly a salute to its subject as an instrument for the dissemination of radical thought.”

        (¹“ ‘propaganda’ is not used here as an invidious term. It is used to describe works consciously written to have an immediate and direct effect upon their readers’ opinions and actions, as distinguished from works that are not consciously written for that purpose or which are written to have a remote and indirect effect. It is possible that conventional critics have learned by now that to call a literary work ‘propaganda’ is to say nothing about its quality as literature. By now enough critics have pointed out that some of the world’s classics were originally ‘propaganda’ for something”) (289-292).

        “The socialist’s affinity with realism was stated forcefully in the leading editorial of the Masses in February 1911—the second issue of a magazine…which was a successor, on a more mature and ‘politicalized’ level, to the Comrade. It said: ‘It is natural that Socialists should favor the novel with a purpose, more especially, the novel that points a Socialist moral. As a reaction against the great bulk of vapid, meaningless, too-clever American fiction, with its artificial plots and characters remote from actual life, such an attitude is a healthy sign …’ ”(289-290).

        “Its militancy is the most obvious characteristic of American criticism since the war. In the whole of nineteenth century there was only one critic, Poe, who was deliberately and consistently disputatious. No one else made polemics the basis of a critical method. Whitman was a maverick, but he was exclamatory rather than argumentative. Now, however, it is customary for critics to be bellicose, and there are few who have let politeness stand in the way of controversy. The reason is not hard to find. Criticism in our time has been largely a war of traditions—a struggle between irreconcilable ideologies…” (302).

        “The academy was growing up. It was beginning to share the emotions of serious adults who were trying to adjust themselves to an America become rich and imperialistic. In its own special field, literary history, it was beginning to achieve mature and realistic interpretations. In 1927 it came of age: V. L. Parrington, professor of English at the University of Washington, published the two completed volumes of his Main Currents in American Thought. With that work the academy was at last brought face to face with the ideas, sentiments, and historical methods of today…. Parrington’s Main Currents arrived to supply the most needed things: an account of our literary history which squared with recent works on the history of our people and a realistic technique for analyzing the relationship of a writer to his time and place—in addition to a militantly progressive spirit. Professorial and literary circles had consciously been waiting for such a work, and if the one that did come forth was far more radical than some people cared for, it simply could not be rejected. The author was a professor too; his scholarship defied scrutiny; and his ideas were couched in terms that were native American, most of them having come over shortly after the Mayflower. One must emphasize Parrington’s radicalism because it is probably the most significant aspect of his work. He sharpened, gave point to the economic interpretation of literary movements because of his desire to reveal the motivating interests and real direction of specific works of literature… (330-331).

        “There was one critic who apparently possessed all the virtues—fine taste, poetic sensitiveness, intellectuality, an experimental inclination. His literary scholarship was beyond dispute, his writing deft and memorable. He was, moreover, a poet of the first rank, which gave his criticism of the art an extraordinary authority. He was universally respected: by Pound, by the later expatriates, by the impressionists of the Dial, by the Hound and Horn group. This critic was T. S. Eliot. His volume of essays, The Sacred Wood, published in 1920, is still considered to be one of the truly distinguished works of esthetic criticism produced in this century…. The reader will note that he is here described in the past tense. His works are many now, but The Sacred Wood alone is a consideration of esthetic problems. In the rest the emphasis is on the esthetic effects of moral and social beliefs. His development is one of the ‘consequences’ touched upon in the following chapter….  (358-359).

        “[T.S. Eliot wrote,] ‘There are two and only two finally tenable hypotheses about life: the Catholic and the materialistic [i.e., Marxist]. It is quite possible, of course, that the future may bring neither a Christian nor a materialistic civilization. It is quite possible that the future may be nothing but chaos or torpor. In that event, I am not interested in the future; I am only interested in the two alternatives which seem to me worthier of interest….’ Eliot chose not only the Catholic hypothesis, but also its political corollaries. His literary opinions were thus given a firm philosophical base to rest upon, and from that fact he drew the reasonable conclusions…[that] ‘Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint. In so far as in any age there is common agreement on ethical and theological matters, so far can literary criticism be substantive. In ages like our own, in which there is no such common agreement, it is then more necessary for Christian readers to scrutinize their reading, especially of works of imagination, with explicit ethical and theological standards. The ‘greatness’ of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.’ To this has esthetic criticism at last come—to a realization that non-esthetic criteria are the ultimate tests of value. Whether they be called philosophical, moral, or social criteria, they are still the ideas that men have about the way human beings live together and the way they ought to live. The quest of beauty had become the quest of reality. It had become, in essence, literary criticism as socially conscious and as polemical as the criticism of the Marxists….

        “Eliot spoke of alternatives, not of choices…. He believes that one of the alternatives has greater value, is nobler, is in a sense more real, than the other. The question is therefore not simply one of personal taste. It is a question of evidence and reason. But the alternative he favors admits of no evidence and derogates from reason. His philosophy is, in the last analysis, wholly mystical. It is not capable of being tested and verified and improved. The alternative he rejects is, on the other hand, the one that is favored by those who are determined to be as scientific as one can be in a non-physical field. The literary criticism of the neo-classicists is a criticism composed of obiter dicta inspired by intangible emotions. The literary criticism of the materialists stands or falls by the findings of the social scientists, psychologists, and historians. Eliot’s alternative involves a revulsion against democracy; the materialists are partisans of democracy. The literary criticism of his school tends to create a literature that will express the sensibilities and experiences of a few fortunate men. The criticism of the opposing school tends to create a literature that will express the ideals and sympathies of those who look forward to the conquest of poverty, ignorance, and inequality—to the material and intellectual elevation of the mass of mankind….”

“To whom does the future belong? In January 1939 Eliot announced that the Criterion, the literary journal he had edited since 1922, would no longer be published. His Europe had crumbled; the culture in which he had put his faith was dying. The Criterion had served its purpose. Eliot had arrived at a mood of detachment. There was nothing he could hopefully fight for now. But those who believe in scientific methods, in realism, in social equality and democracy, are hopeful and are fighting.” (384-387)

–Bernard Smith, Forces in Literary Critcism

(1940) “The propaganda novel is quite simply a story with a purpose. Not that every novel may not be interpreted as a story with a purpose; but there are some authors whose educative mission burns so ardently within them that it becomes impossible to consider any kind of writing save that of direct entreaty. There is little masking of the challenge. The banners flutter, the trumpets blare. The slogan flies to its appointed target. ‘And now, men and women of America,’ cries Mrs. Beecher Stowe, at the conclusion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ‘is this [slavery] a thing to be trifled with, apologized for, and passed over in silence? Farmers of Massachusetts, of New Hampshire, of Vermont, of Connecticut, who read this book by the blaze of your winter-evening fire; strong-hearted, generous sailors and shipowners of Maine—is this a thing for you to countenance and encourage?’ Such is the voice of the authentic propagandist. The pointed moral, and a tale adorned thereby.”

        “It would be erroneous to suppose, however, that every type of propagandist found a field so favourable for opportunity as Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. All too often in history the reformer has been compelled to clothe his meaning in parable and allegory. This was Rabelais’s method in dealing with the corruption of the mediaeval Church, and that of Swift and Voltaire with the vileness of eighteenth-century government. The heavy-witted saw only the facile story: the man of critical intelligence the rapier point beneath.”

        “The propaganda story, then, from sheer pressure of events, may shape itself to the half-concealed, the oblique approach. Perhaps the most famous example of this method is to be found in Nicolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. Primarily, Dead Souls is as much concerned with the problem of chattel slavery as Uncle Tom’s Cabin; but Gogol’s treatment is as far removed from that of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe as the timber profusion of eighteenth-century Moscow from the primly ordered architecture of Hartford, Connecticut…”

        “How many real Socialists did [Upton Sinclair’s] The Jungle make? It is difficult to say. Very few indeed, if municipal elections between 1906 and 1936 count for anything. But perhaps the sum total of literary influence cannot be assessed by the mathematical habit. That Charles Dickens assisted the reform of the Poor Law, and Charles Reade that of the Victorian prison system, is undeniable; but exact measurement is beyond the reach of even the most ardent of social investigators. Such novels influence; but downright conversion is another matter. It is doubtful indeed if a novel of propaganda ever really converted anyone. That it may emphasize an atmosphere in which conversion becomes possible is perhaps as far as the Plain Man would care to go” (35-46).

–Roger Dataller, The Plain Man and the Novel

From Works on Political, Social, and Cultural Criticism of Imaginative Literature

(with an emphasis on the nature and role of propaganda)

(1941) “The Grapes of Wrath is perhaps the finest example we have so far produced in the United States of the proletarian novel. This is a somewhat loose term to designate the type of novel that deals primarily with the life of the working classes or with any social or industrial problem from the point of view of labor. There is likely to be a considerable element of propaganda in any novel with such a theme and such a point of view. And it often happens that the spirit of propaganda does not carry with it the philosophical breadth, the imaginative power, or the mere skill in narrative which are so important for the production of a work of art. Upton Sinclair is an example of a man of earnest feeling and admirable gifts for propaganda who has not the mental reach of a great artist nor the artist’s power of telling a plausible story and creating a world of vivid and convincing people. One sometimes has the feeling with Sinclair that he starts with a theory and then labors to create characters who will prove it; that his interest in the people is secondary. And that is a bad start with a writer of fiction” (327).

–Joseph Warren Beach, “Art and Propaganda,” American Fiction: 1920-1940

(1941)  “Here I shall put down, as briefly as possible, a statement in behalf of what might be catalogued, with a fair degree of accuracy, as a sociological criticism of literature. Sociological criticism is certainly not new. I shall try to suggest what partially new elements or emphasis I think should be added to this old approach. And to make the ‘way in’ as easy as possible, I shall begin with a discussion of proverbs. Examine random specimens in The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs. You will note, I think, that there is no ‘pure’ literature here. Everything is ‘medicine.’ Proverbs are designed for consolation or vengeance, for admonition or exhortation, for foretelling” (253).

–Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” The Philosophy of Literary Form

(1941) “The present article proposes to say something further on the subject of art and propaganda. It will attempt to set forth a line of reasoning as to why the contemporary emphasis must be placed largely upon propaganda, rather than upon ‘pure’ art…. Since pure art makes for acceptance, it tends to become a social menace in so far as it assists us in tolerating the intolerable. And if it leads us to a state of acquiescence at a time when the very basis of moral integration is in question, we get a paradox whereby the soundest adjunct to ethics, the aesthetic, threatens to uphold an unethical condition. For this reason it seems that under conditions of competitive capitalism there must necessarily be a large corrective or propaganda element in art. Art cannot safely confine itself to merely using the values which arise out of a given social texture and integrating their conflicts, as the soundest, ‘purest’ art will do. It must have a definite hortatory function, an educational element of suasion or inducement; it must be partially forensic. Such a quality we consider to be the essential work of propaganda. Hence we feel that the moral breach arising from vitiation of the work-patterns calls for a propaganda art. And incidentally, our distinction as so stated should make it apparent that much of the so-called ‘pure’ art of the nineteenth century was of a pronouncedly propagandist or corrective coloring. In proportion as the conditions of economic warfare grew in intensity throughout the ‘century of progress,’ and the church proper gradually adapted its doctrines to serve merely the protection of private gain and the upholding of manipulated law, the ‘priestly’ function was carried on by the ‘secular’ poets, often avowedly agnostic.

        “Our thesis is by no means intended to imply that ‘pure’ art or ‘acquiescent’ art should be abandoned. There are two kinds of ‘toleration.’ Even if a given state of affairs is found, on intellectualistic grounds, to be intolerable, the fact remains that as long as it is with us we must more or less contrive to ‘tolerate’ it. Even though we might prefer to alter radically the present structure of production and distribution through the profit motive, the fact remains that we cannot so alter it forthwith. Hence, along with our efforts to alter it, must go the demand for an imaginative equipment that helps to make it tolerable while it lasts. Much of the ‘pure’ or acquiescent art of today serves this invaluable psychological end. For this reason the great popular comedians or handsome movie stars are rightly the idols of the people. Likewise the literature of sentimentality, however annoying and self-deceptive it may seem to the hardened ‘intellectual,’ is following in a direction basically so sound that one might wish more of our pretentious authors were attempting to do the same thing more pretentiously. On the other hand, much of the harsh literature now being turned out in the name of the ‘proletariat’ seems inadequate on either count. It is questionable as propaganda, since it shows us so little of the qualities in mankind worth saving. And it is questionable as ‘pure’ art, since by substituting a cult of disaster for a cult of amenities it ‘promotes our acquiescence’ to sheer dismalness. Too often, alas, it serves as a mere device whereby the neuroses of the decaying bourgeois structure are simply transferred to the symbols of workingmen. Perhaps more of Dickens is needed, even at the risk of excessive tearfulness” (271-278)

–Kenneth Burke, “The Nature of Art Under Capitalism,” The Philosophy of Literary Form

(1942) “Our modern literature was rooted in those dark and still little-understood years of the 1880’s and 1890’s when all America stood suddenly, as it were, between one society and another, one moral order and another, and the sense of impending change became almost oppressive in its vividness. It was rooted in the drift to the new world of factories and cities, with their dissolution of old standards and faiths; in the emergence of the metropolitan culture that was to dominate the literature of the new period; in the Populists who raised their voices against the domineering new plutocracy in the East and gave so much of their bitterness to the literature of protest rising out of the West; in the sense of surprise and shock that led to the crudely expectant Utopian literature of the eighties and nineties, the largest single body of Utopian writing in modern times, and the most transparent in its nostalgia. But above all was it rooted in the need to learn what the reality of life was in the modern era. In a word, our modern literature came out of those great critical years of the late nineteenth century which saw the emergence of modern America, and was molded in its struggles…. We live in a day when the brilliance of some of our critics seems to me equaled only by their barbarism. In my study in Chapter XIV of the twin fanaticisms that have sought to dominate criticism in America since 1930—the purely sociological and the purely textual-‘esthetic’ approach—I have traced some of the underlying causes for the aridity, the snobbery, the sheer human insensitiveness that have weighted down so much of the most serious criticism of our day….” (viii-xi).

–Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds

(1943) “The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trouser in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.”

–George Orwell, “The Freedom of the Press” (Excerpt from the suppressed preface to Animal Farm; published 1972 in the Times Literary Supplement, also 1993, in the Everyman’s Library edition of Animal Farm)

(1949) “In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that cornerstone of American social protest fiction…speaking for the author…Miss Ophelia and St. Clare are terribly in earnest. Neither of them questions the medieval morality from which their dialogue springs: black, white, the devil, the next world—posing its alternatives between heaven and the flames—were realities for them as, of course, they were for their creator…. Mrs. Stowe’s novel, achieves a bright, almost a lurid significance, like the light from a fire which consumes a witch. This is the more striking as one considers the novels of Negro oppression writers in our own, more enlightened day, all of which say only: ‘This is perfectly horrible! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!’ (Let us ignore, for the moment, those novels of oppression written by Negroes, which add only a raging, near-paranoiac postscript to this statement and actually reinforce, as I hope to make clear later, the principles which activate the opposition they decry.)” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteousness, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty; Uncle Tom’s Cabin—like its multitudinous, hard-boiled descendants—is a catalogue of violence. This is explained by the nature of Mrs. Stowe’s subject matter, her laudable determination to flinch from nothing in presenting the complete picture; an explanation which falters only if we pause to ask whether or not her picture is indeed complete; and what constriction or failure of perception forced her to so depend on the description of brutality—unmotivated, senseless—and to leave unanswered and unnoticed the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds.” “But this, let us say, was beyond Mrs. Stowe’s powers; she was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer; her book was not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong; was, in fact, perfectly horrible. This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel; and the only question left to ask is why we are bound still within the same constriction. How is it that we are so loath to make a further journey than that made by Mrs. Stowe, to discover and reveal something a little closer to the truth?” “[…] In Native Son, Bigger is Uncle Tom’s descendant, flesh of his flesh, so exactly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems that the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead New England woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle; the one uttering merciless exhortations, the other shouting curses…. The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.”

–James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Notes of a Native Son, 1955; American Literature, American Culture, 1999

(1950) “How should Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Germinal, and Mary Barton be classified? As proletarian literature? If Gentleman’s Agreement is a problem novel what is Daniel Deronda? Jack London may be a proletarian writer but his most famous book The Call of the Wild is an adventure story. George Sand has been called one of the founders of the ‘problem’ novel but the bulk of her output dealt with those bourgeois emotions: love and passion. I think one of the difficulties here is the refusal to recognize and admit the fact that not all of the concern about the shortcomings of society originated with Marx. Many a socially conscious novelist is merely a man or woman with a conscience. Though part of the cultural heritage of all of us derives from Marx, whether we subscribe to the Marxist theory or not, a larger portion of it stems from the Bible…”

–Ann Petry, “The Novel as Social Criticism,” African American Literary Criticism, 1773-2000 (Hazel Arnett Ervin, Ed.)

From Works on Political, Social, and Cultural Criticism of Imaginative Literature

(with an emphasis on the nature and role of propaganda)

(1953) Nelson Algren, Nonconformity: “We live today in a laboratory of human suffering as vast and terrible as that in which Dickens and Dostoevsky wrote. The only real difference being that the England of Dickens and the Russia of Dostoevsky could not afford the soundscreens and the smokescreens with which we so ingeniously conceal our true condition from ourselves.

“So accustomed have we become to the testimony of the photo-weeklies, backed by witnesses from radio and TV, establishing us permanently as the happiest, healthiest, sanest, wealthiest, most inventive, tolerant and fun-loving folk yet to grace the earth of man, that we tend to forget that these are bought-and-paid-for witnesses and all their testimony perjured….

“‘Whin business gits above sellin’ ten-pinny nails in a brown-paper cornucopy,’ Mr. Dooley decided, ”tis hard to tell it from murder.’

“But behind Business’s billboards and Business’s headlines and Business’s pulpits and Business’s press and Business’s arsenals, behind the car ads and the subtitles and the commercials, the people of Dickens and Dostoevsky yet endure…. The lost and the overburdened…are still torn by the paradox of their own humanity; yet endure the ancestral problems of the heart in conflict with itself. Theirs are still the defeats in which everything is lost, theirs victories that fall close enough to the heart to afford living hope. Whose defeats cost everything of real value. Whose grief grieves on universal bones.

“And it is there the young man or woman seeking to report the American century seriously must seek, if it is the truth he seeks.” …

(1953) Gilbert Highet, People, Places, Books: “Satire is just as valuable a type of writing as lyric poetry or fiction; but it is far harder to bring off…. In order to write satire of any kind, one has to have a number of special talents, and also a special attitude to the public…. The public usually does not believe that anything is deeply wrong with society, and it often thinks that satirist is a sorehead. It has grown up and found a job and got married and brought up its children in the existing social framework. Why should it believe that the whole thing is tunneled through by gangsters, and bought and sold by crooked politicians, and redesigned to give the biggest profits to the ruthless and the corrupt? No, surely not. Therefore the satirist, who believes these things, usually strains his voice shouting, to making the public hear; and then the public is even less inclined to listen…. They are very amusing and penetrating, these contemporary satires. The only trouble is this: they don’t seem to matter much…. This, I regret to say, is the mid-twentieth century. What we need is a satirist bold enough to attack the crooks who run national politics in many countries; the parasites who make vast fortunes by buying something on Monday and selling it on Tuesday, usually to the government; the idealists who ship five million families off to labor camps in order to make their theories come right; the soreheads whose pride was hurt once and who are determined to start a war to take care of the bruise: the rats in the basement, the baboons playing with dynamite. Satire will not kill these animals; but it will make clear the difference between them and human beings, and perhaps inspire a human being to destroy them.”

“They are very amusing and penetrating, these contemporary satires. The only trouble is this: they don’t seem to matter much. Miss McCarthy spends a lot of care and observation on proving that the Dandelion League colleges are eccentric, confused, and hyper-emotional. Mr. Waugh exposes the burial ceremonies of the Californians with an odd blend of charm and callousness, like sweet-and-sour sauce. But such subjects are not terribly important. This, I regret to say, is the mid-twentieth century.”

(1955) Joseph L. Blotner, The Political Novel: “In The Charterhouse of Parma the witty and urbane Stendhal says, ‘Politics in a work of literature are like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one’s attention.’ His own work contradicts the great French novelist, yet his comment is perfectly accurate for many other novelists. Politics in some modern novels of political corruption, such as Charles F. Coe’s Ashes, do seem loud and vulgar, and in books like Upton Sinclair’s the reader may hear not one pistol shot but a cannonade. But this is not to say that the use of political material must disrupt a work of literature. The trick, of course, is all in knowing how. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote an artistically weak, politically successful work in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, while Fyodor Dostoyevsky produced a politically unsuccessful, artistically enduring classic in The Possessed…. 

“A political novel written from a point of view favoring a particular faction is a political instrument in effect even if not in intent. A writer may sternly tell himself at the outset that he will be completely impartial, only to have reviewers note all sorts of bias, real or imagined, of which he may not have been conscious. This happened to Turgenev when he published Fathers and Sons, and it continues to happen every year. The intensity of the authors’ feelings varies from obsessive preoccupation to passing interest. The novels in this chapter were included because they contain definite opinions, sometimes appeals, on political subjects. Some of them never exhort the reader or seem to lead him by the hand to the author’s point of view. But each of them contains material capable of influencing the reader’s opinions about some phase of political activity. If a novelist gains a reader’s support for a cause, arouses his distaste for a course of action, or simply produces a reevaluation of previously accepted beliefs, his work has served as a political instrument just as surely as a pamphlet mailed by a national committee or a handbill stuffed into the mailboxes of a sleeping city.”

(1955) Ralph Ellison, “The Art of Fiction: An Interview,” Collected essays, 2003; Shadow and Act, 1964: “I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground is, among other things, a protest against the limitations of nineteenth-century rationalism; Don Quixote, Man’s Fate, Oedipus Rex, The Trial—all these embody protest, even against the limitation of human life itself. If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens and Twain? One hears a lot of complaints about the so-called ‘protest novel,’ especially when written by Negroes, but it seems to me that the critics could more accurately complain about their lack of craftsmanship and the provincialism.”

(1956) Walter B. Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States—1900-1954: “Taken in its entirety, then, a half-century of the radical novel has had its effect on and made a contribution to American literature. It has also affected and contributed to American life, not just uniquely, however, but as part of the whole larger course of the novel of social protest, that tradition which has proliferated so variously in the troubled twentieth century and which extends back into the nineteenth through the early Hamlin Garland and the Utopians, through Mark Twain, in some of his moods, back to, and well before, Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin did as much to change the face of the nation as, perhaps, all the proletarian novels put together. This tradition, which is certainly a great, though not the only one, the radical novel of the present century has helped to continue. Despite their orientation toward Marxism, the Socialist, the proletarian, the independently radical novelists have not been able to obscure the fact that in essential ways they represented yet another manifestation of the American middle-class conscience, which has been the major force behind the literature of social criticism from Harriet Stowe down even to the present day. Viewed as part of a developing process, the radical novel shares in the value of the whole, the value of protest against the still limited democracy that is an affirmation of the democracy that can be. For protest is valuable, quite as valuable as that acceptance without which no continuing social organization is possible. Whether wrong-headed or right, protest will always be essential in order to stir our civilization into self-awareness and thus prevent it from stiffening into an inhuman immobility. In the frequently unwise thirties this rather elementary final statement would have been assumed. That it must now be asserted indicates that the fifties have their own particular lack of wisdom…” [In the 1992 introduction, Rideout notes:  “Rereading The Radical Novel in the United States for the first time in decades…it struck me as a reasonably good book…though I did wonder how I could have had the patience to get through so many awful novels in order to reach the fewer worthwhile ones…. In a few reviews, two linked objections emerged…: first, that I had too rigidly limited my subject by defining a radical novel as ‘one which demonstrates, either explicitly or implicitly, that the author objects to the human suffering imposed by some socioeconomic system and advocates that the system be fundamentally changed.’ Granted this definition required me to discuss many bad novels and not to discuss certain better ones; but even bad novels can be illustrative, and it seemed, and still seems, to me that such a sociopolitical definition enabled me to treat in some depth a specifically sociopolitical genre of fiction aimed at fundamental change rather than at reform which would improve the system but not change it basically. Better a limiting definition, I would argue, than one which might turn out to be imprecise and overinclusive.” “My point may be clearer if I move to a second objection, a corollary of the first, that I should have written about the much more extensive fiction of ‘social protest.’ Suppose I had written or tried to write the kind of book these reviewers had wanted me to instead of the one I did. Quite aside from the probability that the ratio of bad to good social protest novels would be about the same as bad to good radical ones, I would have been faced with two problems: how should ‘the fiction of social protest’ be defined, and how could I, or anyone, hope to cover thoroughly in a single volume a very large and disunified field? For really, in American fiction just of the first half of the twentieth century there were many different kinds of social protest going on….”

(1957) Irving Howe, Politics and the Novel: “This book is meant primarily as a study of the relations between literature and ideas, though a considerable part of it, I should say, consists of literary criticism. My interest was far less in literature as social evidence or testimony than in the literary problem of what happens to the novel when it is subjected to the pressures of politics and political ideology. In discussing nineteenth century writers I have employed more or less conventional methods of criticism, while in treating twentieth century writers I have found myself placing a greater stress upon politics and ideology as such; but this was not the result of any preconceived decision, it was a gradual shift in approach that seemed to be required by the nature of the novels themselves” (11).

     “The greatest of all political novels, The Possessed, was written with the explicit purpose of excommunicating all beliefs that find salvation anywhere but in the Christian God. ‘I mean to utter certain thoughts,’ wrote Dostoevsky, ‘whether all the artistic side of it goes to the dogs or not…even if it turns into a mere pamphlet, I shall say all that I have in my heart.’ Fortunately Dostoevsky could not suppress his ‘artistic side’ and by the time his book reaches its end it has journeyed through places of the head and heart undreamed of in his original plan. But whatever else it does, The Possessed proves nothing of the kind that might be accessible to proof in ‘a mere pamphlet.’ For while a political novel can enrich our sense of human experience, while it can complicate and humanize our commitments, it is only very rarely that it will alter those commitments themselves. And when it does so, the political novel is engaged in a task of persuasion which is not really its central or distinctive purpose. I find it hard to imagine, say, a serious socialist being dissuaded from his belief by a reading of The Possessed, though I should like equally to think that the quality and nuance of that belief can never be quite as they were before he read The Possessed.

     “Because it exposes the impersonal claims of ideology to the pressures of private emotion, the political novel must always be in a state of internal warfare, always on the verge of becoming something other than itself. The political novelist—the degree to which he is aware of this is another problem—establishes a complex system of intellectual movements, in which his own opinion is one of the most active yet not entirely dominating movers. Are we not close here to one of the ‘secrets’ of the novel in general?—I mean the vast respect which the great novelist is ready to offer to the whole idea of opposition, the opposition he needs to allow for in his book against his own predispositions and yearnings and fantasies. He knows that his own momentum, his own intentions, can be set loose easily enough; but he senses, as well, that what matters most of all is to allow for those rocks against which his intentions may smash but, if he is lucky, they may merely bruise. Even as the great writer proudly affirms the autonomy of his imagination, even as he makes the most severe claims for his power of imposing his will upon the unformed materials his imagination has brought up to him, he yet acknowledges that he must pit himself against the imperious presence of the necessary. And in the political novel it is politics above all, politics as both temptation and impediment, that represents the necessary.”

     “[…] The criteria for evaluation of a political novel must finally be the same as those for any other novel: how much of our life does it illuminate? how ample a moral vision does it suggest?—but these questions occur to us in a special context, in that atmosphere of political struggle which dominates modern life. For both the writer and the reader, the political novel provides a particularly severe test: politics rakes our passions as nothing else, and whatever we may consent to overlook in reading a novel, we react with an almost demonic rapidity to a detested political opinion. For the writer the great test is, how much truth can he force through the sieve of his opinions? For the reader the great test is, how much of that truth can he accept though it jostle his opinions?” (22-24).

(1957) Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content: “Some critics consider any mention of content a display of bad taste. Some, more innocent and more modern, have been taught – schooled – to look at paintings in such a way as to make them wholly unaware of content…. But again, we must look upon form as the shape of content…
      ”…form is the right and only possible shape of a certain content. Some other kind of form would have conveyed a different meaning and a different attitude. So when we sit in judgment upon a certain kind of form – and it is usually called lack of form – what we do is to sit in judgment upon a certain type of content.”
     “While I concede that almost every situation has its potential artist, that someone will find matter for imagery almost everywhere, I am generally mistrustful of contrived situations, that is situations peculiarly set up to favor the blossoming of art. I feel that they may vitiate the sense of independence which is present to some degree in all art…. One wonders how Cézanne would have progressed if he had been cordially embraced by the Academy. I am plagued by an exasperating notion: What if Goya, for instance, had been granted a Guggenheim, and then, completing that, had stepped into a respectable and cozy teaching job in some small – but advanced! – New England college, and had thus been spared the agonies of the Spanish Insurrection? The unavoidable conclusion is that we would never have had ‘Los Caprichos’ or ‘Los Desastres de la Guerra’….

“Thus, it is not unimaginable that art arises from something stronger than stimulation or even inspiration – that it may take fire from something closer to provocation, that it may not just turn to life, but that it may a certain times be compelled by life. Art almost always has its ingredient of impudence, its flouting of established authority, so that it may substitute its own authority, and its own enlightenment.”

“I believe that if the university’s fostering of art is only kindly, is only altruistic, it may prove to be also meaningless. If, on the other hand, the creative arts, the branches of art scholarship, the various departments or art are to be recognized as an essential part of education, a part without which the individual will be deemed less than educated, then I suppose that art and the arts will feel that degree of independence essential to them; that they will accept it as their role to create freely – to comment, to outrage, perhaps, to be fully visionary and exploratory as is their nature.

“Art should be well-subsidized, yes. But the purchase of a completed painting or a sculpture, the commissioning of a mural – or perhaps the publication of a poem or a novel or the production of a play – all these forms of recognition are the rewards of mature work. They are not to be confused with the setting up of something not unlike a nursery school in which the artist may be spared any conflict, any need to strive quite intently toward command of his medium and his images; in which he may be spared even the need to make desperate choices among his own values and his wants, the need to reject many seeming benefits or wishes. For it is through such conflicts that his values becomes sharpened; perhaps it is only through conflicts that he comes to know himself at all.

“It is only within the context of real life that an artist (or anyone) is forced to make such choices. And it is only against a background of hard reality that choices count, that they affect a life, and carry with them that degree of believe and dedication and, I think I can say, spiritual energy, that is a primary force in art. I do not know whether that degree of intensity can exist within the university; it is one of the problems which an artist must consider if he is to live there or work there.”

(1957) Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History: “In Czarist Russia of the mid-19^th–century, a didactic theory of literature was strongly invited not only by political and social conditions but by the actual pre-eminence of a generation of socially conscious novelists…. The greatest Russian literary figure to participate in the 19^th-century complex of socio-realistic theory and the writer whose pronouncements on art have impinged with most authority on the English literary mind, was undoubtedly Tolstoy—‘the conscience of Russia’ in his time, ‘the conscience of the world’ ‘the conscience of humanity’…. He was in his middle age a violent convert to a kind of Christian thinking. A period of furious tractarian activity followed the production of the great novels. And it is a religious theory of literature that near the end of his life issues in his thunderously deliberate denunciation of all that he himself and all that European artists for 300 years had created…. The destruction of the idea ‘art for art’s sake’ and the reconstruction of art as a monitor and propagandist for the social process is the gist of Tolstoy’s preachment, and this has been also the monotonous burden of subsequent Marxist criticism in Russia and the instructed echoes of this in English and American writing which sounded in the later 1920’s and the 1930’s… In America the idea of a socially activist literature appears during the first decades of the 20^th century with the ‘muckraking’ movement (of which Upton Sinclair’s Mammonart, 1924, may stand as the sufficient symbol) and after that in the overtly Marxist criticism of the later twenties and the thirties—the work of such writers as Michael Gold, editor of the New Masses, Joseph Freeman, editor of the anthology Proletarian Literature in the United States, 1935, and V.F. Calverton, editor of the Modern Quarterly….” [Ignored here, among others, W.E.B. DuBois, editor of Crisis] “A major monument was Vernon Louis Parrington’s three-volume Main Currents in American thought (1927-1930)…. Marxism and the forms of social criticism more closely related to it [V.L. Parrington, et. al.] have never had any real concern with literature and literary problems. In this country the cause enlisted some keen journalistic and literary minds. But a number of them, like Max Eastman as editor of The Masses, avoided sociology in their literary criticism. Eastman shied away from doctrinal and scientific claims for literature and worked up a theory of vivid sensory realization that belongs rather in the tradition of art for art’s sake. Edmund Wilson in Axel’s Castle, 1931, made gestures acknowledging the social responsibility of the artist but only as if in atonement for his having dwelt at such length among the mysteries of symbolism. As early as the anthology acclaiming Proletarian Literature in 1935, the editors of the Partisan Review were observing a flow of ‘gush’ and ‘invective,’ in place of analysis, and the exercise of Marxism as a ‘sentiment’ rather than a ‘science.’ James T. Farrell’s A Note on Literary Criticism, 1936, is a critique by an ‘amateur Marxist’ of the party-line simplifications. By 1939 it was possible for the Partisan editor Philip Rahv to write an essay under the title ‘Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy.’ Marxist naturalism persists in American letters today less as a proclaimed cause than as a deeply rooted sympathy (A Gnostic utopianism) ready with each shift in political or literary dialectics to exert itself in a new stratagem” (460-471).

1958-1963                                            EXCERPTS CONTENTS

________________________________________________________________       

Bibliography – 1800s to 2003            

Critical Excerpts – 1883 to 2003 

Quick Views    

Social and Political Novel  

Social and Political Literature  

  ________________________________________________________________ 

From Works on Political, Social, and Cultural Criticism of Imaginative Literature
(with a special emphasis on the nature and role of propaganda)

(1958) “There is the intricate, yet ultimately persuasive, distinction which Marxist theory draws between ‘realism’ and ‘naturalism.’ It goes back to Hegel’s reflections on the Iliad and the Odyssey. Hegel found that in the Homeric epics the depiction of physical objects, however detailed and stylized, did not intrude upon the rhythm and vitality of the poem. Descriptive writing in modern literature, on the other hand, struck him as contingent and lifeless…. Compared to Homeric or even to medieval times, modern man inhabits the physical world like a rapacious stranger. These ideas greatly influenced Marx and Engels. It contributed to their own theory of the ‘alienation’ of the individual under capitalist modes of production. In the course of their debate with Lassalle and of their study of Balzac, Marx and Engels came to believe that this problem of estrangement was directly germane to the problem of realism in art. The poets of antiquity and the ‘classical realists’ (Cervantes, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac) had achieved an organic relationship between objective reality and the life of the imagination. The ‘naturalist,’ on the other hand, looks on the world as on a warehouse of whose contents he must make a feverish inventory. ‘A sense of reality,’ says a contemporary Marxist critic, ‘is created not by a reproduction of all the features of an object but by a depiction of those features that form the essence…while in naturalistic art—because of a striving to achieve an elusive fullness—the image, also incomplete, places both the essential and the secondary, the unimportant, on the same plane.’ This distinction is far reaching. It bears on the decline of French realism after Balzac and Stendhal, and tells us something of Zola’s obsessive attempt to make of the novel an index of the world. By virtue of it, we may discriminate between the ‘realism’ of Chekhov and the ‘naturalism’ of, say, Maupassant. Through it, also, we may ascertain that Madame Bovary, for all its virtues, is a slighter thing than Anna Karenina. In naturalism there is accumulation; in realism what Henry James called the ‘deep-breathing economy’ of organic form…” (321-322). 

     “At the origins of the Marxist theory of literature there are three celebrated and canonic texts. Two of them are citations from Engels’ letters [to Kautsky and Harkness]; the third is contained in a short essay by Lenin [“Party Organization and Party Literature”]…. Engels is not objecting to a litérature engagée as such but rather to the mixture ‘of mere empiricism and empty subjectivity’ in the bourgeois novel of the period. Obviously dissatisfied with this treatment of the problem, Lukács reverted to it in 1945, in his ‘Introduction to the Writings on Aesthetics of Marx and Engels.’ Here he contends that Engels was distinguishing between two forms of litérature à thèse (it is significant that the English language and its critical vocabulary have developed no precisely equivalent expression). All great literature, in Lukács’ reading, has a ‘fundamental bias.’ A writer can only achieve a mature and responsible portrayal of life if he is committed to progress and opposed to reaction, if he ‘loves the good and rejects the bad.’ When a critic of Lukacs’ subtlety and rigor descends to such banalities—banalities which directly challenge his own works on Goethe, Balzac, and Tolstoy—we know that something is amiss. The attempt to reconcile the image of literature implicit in Lenin’s essay with that put forward by Engels is a rather desperate response to the pressures of orthodoxy and to the Stalinist demand for total internal coherence in Marxist doctrine. Even the most delicate exegesis cannot conceal the plain fact that Engels and Lenin were saying different things, that they were pointing toward contrasting ideals” (305-307).

     “Marxist-Leninism and the political régimes enacted in its name take literature seriously, indeed desperately so. At the very height of the Soviet revolution’s battle for physical survival, Trotsky found occasion to assert that ‘the development of art is the highest test of the vitality and significance of each epoch.’ Stalin himself deemed it essential to add to his voluminous strategic and economic pronouncements a treatise on philology and the problems of language in literature. In a Communist society the poet is regarded as a figure central to the health of the body politic. Such regard is cruelly manifest in the very urgency with which the heretical artist is silenced or hounded to destruction. To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs—but a tribute nevertheless” (323).

–George Steiner, “Marxism and the Literary Critic,” in Language and Silence, 1967

(1962) “I’ve been trying to measure the gap between the public and the poet, and to find some explanation why it is so great. I began with the time when there was neither poet nor public, when the anonymous song or ballad was transmitted from generation to generation by the peasantry, and poetry was a possession so common that poet and audience were lost in it; we have been irreversibly changed. At best we can gain from that or oral poetry that beauty which is in it, and the knowledge that poetry is not a thing reserved for a few, since it was once, and for a long time, treasured and fostered by so many. If, knowing this, we could be brought to modify our contemporary notion of poetry as a rarified and special and often difficult thing, it might have a salutary effect on our criticism and our practice of poetry as well…” (94) “There is a greater poetry than that of the ballads; they [ballads] do not contain those universal statements of life which we find in Dante and Shakespeare; but they were once a general possession as Shakespeare has never been. And that great poetry can, or once could, be a general possession is a fact which we should not forget: those of us who write poetry, and those of us who criticize it. If we could keep it in mind, I think it would give us a more just and adequate idea of poetry…” (22) “[A reporter] also quoted Mr. [T. S.] Eliot as saying that ‘criticism of poetry began and ended in enjoyment,’ which I think is the traditional practice. But the observation that is most illuminating in this report is that ‘a genuine poem may arouse a very great number of differing responses, yet there will be always something in common between them,’ and that this is what poetry is for. There have been some very strange responses to poems, as Mr. Richards has shown so convincingly in his book, Practical Criticism, responses which seemed plainly to contradict one another. Yet, even allowing for this, there will be something in common between people’s varied responses to a poem, and the poem exists for that purpose. If we believe this, poetry takes on a wider significance than it is currently allowed, and lets in the ordinary unanalytical reader, and with him human nature. People will read poetry for enjoyment, since that is what it is intended for; and they will not, except in a few exceptional cases, take it up as a strict methodical study. And it may be said that they will get more help, both in enjoyment and understanding, from the traditional critic who tells them what the poem means to him, than from the new one who warns them that it cannot possibly mean what it appears to mean, so that he has no choice left but to explain it. The divorce between the public audience and the poet is widened by this critical method; or perhaps one should rather say that the method legalizes the divorce as a settled and normal state. And that is what we feel to be wrong… (76-77)

        “The first allegiance of any poet is to imaginative truth…but it does not mean that he should turn inward into the complex problems of poetry, or be concerned with poetry as a problem. That is something which has commonly happened in the last fifty years. There was some excuse for it after the years of experiment associated with Mr. Eliot and Mr. Pound. To them, about 1910, poetry seemed to have come to a dead end, and intense thought had to be given to it. The experiments of that time and the succeeding years have become a part of literary history. As they were new and strange when they were first attempted, they were found difficult by the reader; and they seem to have left for a time in the minds of poets and critics the belief that poetry should be difficult. The experimenters have done their work, and we should be thankful to them. There have been many experimenters in English poetry: Chaucer was one; and Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Wordsworth were all experimenters. The experimenters of forty years ago did something to poetry and something for poetry. One kind of poetry was written before T.S. Eliot, and another kind after him. But the point of an experiment is that it should solve the particular problem set for it. This was done in the twenties…. There remains the temptation for poets to turn inward into poetry, to lock themselves in to a hygienic prison where they speak only to one another, and to the critic, their stern warder. In the end a poet must create his audience, and to do that he must turn outward. Even if he is conscious of having no audience, he must imagine one. That may be the way to conjure it out of the public void. Yeats, who had to wait for it long, declared that you must have an audience, and that he could not write without one. Anyone reading his poetry must feel that the audience was an imaginary one long before it became real. To imagine an audience, one must hold up before himself the variety of human life, for from that diversity the audience will be drawn. The poet need not think of the public—its vastness and impersonality would daunt anyone; he should reflect instead that in no other age than ours—I mean the last hundred years or so—has a poet had to deal with it. He has to see past it, or through it, to the men and women, with their individual lives, who in some strange way and without their choice are part of it, and yet are hidden by it (108-110). 

–Edwin Muir, The Estate of Poetry

(1963) “That Karl Marx could not have envisioned the extremes to which the Soviet totalitarians would put his literary theories is obvious. We know, for instance, that his colleague Frederick Engels wrote the following in a letter to an early ‘proletarian’ novelist who asked for Engel’s help in popularizing his novel: ‘Look at your heroine, with her dialectical materialist eyes and her economic determinist nose and her surplus value mouth. You take her in your arms and you kiss her. I know I wouldn’t want to’ ” (145). 

–Vernon Hall, Jr., A Short History of Literary Criticism

(1963) “When President Lincoln greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe with the words, ‘So you’re the little woman who made the book that made this great war,’ he was speaking as a political realist who had learned by experience to respect the power of the pen. It was not for him to refer slightingly to ‘mere literature.’ Without Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in the opinion of Sumner, there would have been no Lincoln in the White House.

     “But the historian must avoid hyperbole. In spite of the enormous vogue of Mrs. Stowe’s novel, it is doubtful if a book had much power to change the course of events. More persuasive than her tender pleadings was the harsh propaganda carried on by Abolitionists for over thirty years. And mightiest of all was the trend of liberal opinion through the nineteenth century, which was bound to sweep out of existence even the most beneficent and patriarchal of feudal survivals. In the last analysis slavery was abolished because men could no longer endure the thought of it. Shrewd common people were the first to sense how the tide was turning” (563).

 ________________________________________________________________       

From Works on Political, Social, and Cultural Criticism of Imaginative Literature (with an emphasis on the nature and role of propaganda) 

(1964) “American writers have repeatedly been worried, confused, or angered—rarely amused—by the irreconcilability of American ideals and American experience, and one result of this sense of the gulf between the way things should be and the way things are, has been a readiness to regard the novel as a political instrument. English reform movements have tended to be dominated by intellectuals, whose preferred media have been the essay and, occasionally, the problem play. In seeking to achieve radical alterations in society, they have not directly sought mass support; in fact, much of their attention has been directed to the problem of restraining popular unrest and of guiding it into the most profitable channels. …the novels of Ignatius Donnelly, Edward Bellamy, William Dean Howells and many others were the often unsubtle but nonetheless powerful advocates of a wide variety of political doctrines and Utopian dreams. At the end of the nineteenth century, writers such as Gustavus Myers, Jacob Riis, and Lincoln Steffens showed that straight reporting might in certain circumstances be more effective than fiction, but Jack London and Upton Sinclair, more doctrinaire in their approach to social problems, continued to preach socialism through the medium of the novel—presumable because it was wider in its circulation, simpler in its appeal, and less hampered by the discipline of observable fact.

     “In addition to these narrowly political writers there have been the many novelists of social protest. Early in the century there were the ‘muckrakers,’ such as Winston Churchill, William Allen White, Robert Herrick, and Ernest Poole; later came Anderson, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, the ‘proletarians,’ and Norman Mailer. For all the differences between them, such novelists of social protest have at least one thing in common: They approach society not in a responsive or sensitive way but with their minds already made up; they come armed not only with their talents but with a theory. It is of the essence of the novelist’s job that he should impose a pattern upon his material, but these novelists impose a pattern not of art but, in the broadest sense, of politics. “[…] It can be argued that the delineation of society as such is a dubious undertaking for any artist. Again and again the material takes charge, as it does in Dreiser; or the political intention takes charge, as in so many of the novelists of social protest; or there is a tendency for the social material, the ‘information,’ to become separated out from the ostensible action of the novel…. The proper function of social description in a novel must be to define and illuminate the human predicament. This is something which English novelists seem almost automatically to have accepted. Many American novelists have not accepted it, and they have often squandered their powers as a result” (196-200).

     “In the last analysis, what we ask of the social novelist is not so much that he should reflect our view of society, but that he should make us see society his way” (205) and that such novelists “look beyond [the national experience] to the universal human experience of which it is inevitably a part” (212). “In admiring the novels of George Eliot, we need to remember that what seems to us the accuracy of her social observation is in some degree an indication of her greatness as a novelist, of her power to make us accept the image of society she presents. It matters little whether or not William Faulkner’s novels give an ‘accurate’ picture of the South; what matters supremely is that Faulkner presents his South, the world of Yoknapatawpha County, solidly and vividly, both as a setting and as a conditioning environment…” (205).

–Michael Millgate, American Social Fiction

(1965) “It can be said at once, I should think, that we are all agreed upon the most important point: that morality as shown through human relationships is the whole heart of fiction, and the serious writer has never lived who dealt with anything else. And yet, the zeal to reform, which quite properly inspires the editorial, has never done fiction much good. The exception occurs when it can rise to the intensity of satire, where it finds a better home in the poem or the drama.” 

–Eudora Welty, “Must the Novelist Crusade” (1965), in The Eye of the Story (1978)

(1978) “A study of the writer as a critic of society that ends with science-fiction fantasies and anti-war novels such as A Clockwork Orange, Fahrenheit 451, Slaughterhouse 5 and Catch-22 had better acquire what academic respectability it can by starting with the ancient Greeks, with Plato in fact. In Plato’s Republic, that early blueprint for a benevolent dictatorship and first example of Utopian fantasy, no place can be found for the imaginative writer. In justification Plato gives three reasons. The poet, he argues, deals with reality at two removes. He tells lies about the gods and heroes, a complaint that is not difficult to translate into terms that would be applicable to any modern dictatorship. And he appeals to emotions, when he should appeal to man’s noblest faculty, the reason. ‘We shall,’ says Plato ‘bow down before a being with such miraculous powers of giving pleasure; but we shall tell him that we are not allowed to have any such person in our commonwealth; we shall crown him with fillets of wool, anoint his head with myrrh, and conduct him to another country’ (Republic, Book 10). Regretfully, because Plato is certainly not unaware of the sublime powers possessed by the inspired poet, but firmly and magisterially, this stern moral puritan dismisses the poet from his ideal state. Here, then, in Plato’s Republic, we have the first memorable statement of the clash between two ideals of order: the inspired order of the artist and the imposed order of the state, an opposition that permeates Romantic and post-Romantic literature. And in exiling the artist from his ideal state, Plato is the first to create for him that very modern role, the Outsider….

     “The successful critic of society, it may be suggested, is the writer who learns the wisdom of indirection. He is the writer who learns to combine instruction with delight, without in any way compromising his integrity of blunting the force of his social criticism. Some literary forms are especially suited to methods of indirect attack: satire, for example. From the time of the Greeks onwards, satirists have invented a variety of ways to maintain apparent detachment and the indirect approach, while pressing home their attack. The three commonest forms are the beast fable, the imaginary journey, and the Utopian fantasy. The beast fable has been used by the Greek dramatist Aristophanes in the Frogs, by Chaucer in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, and by George Orwell in Animal Farm. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels provides a model for the imaginary journey, while the history of literary utopias stretches—to take it no further—from More’s sixteenth-century Utopia, to Butler’s Erewhon (1872), Morris’s News From Nowhere (1891), and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). It is essential for the satirist’s purpose to shock us into seeing our own familiar world through unfamiliar eyes; some radical change of perspective is therefore absolutely necessary. Each of the three devices, the beast fable, the imaginary journey, and Utopian fantasy achieves this end” (1-2).

–John Colmer, “The Writer as Critic of Society,” Coleridge to Catch-22: Images of Society

(1983) “If we refer to the nineteenth century as the Age of Ideology, then it seems even more appropriate to regard the present century as the Age of Propaganda…. The relationship of literature and art to propaganda is not at all straightforward, and would in any case be dismissed as insignificant by many modern critics, whose evaluative criteria would lead them to make a distinction between ‘real literature’ and ‘tendentious’ writing. Even so, George Orwell, who stated that ‘all art is to some extent propaganda’…, was probably closer to the truth than Hitler, who on one occasion was heard echoing the popular view that ‘art has nothing to do with propaganda’…. Not the least of ironies contained in these seemingly contradictory statements is the fact that Hitler’s remarks were addressed to Josef Goebbels who, as head of the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, had attempted to create a state apparatus for thought control which could have served as a model for the perfect totalitarian state depicted in Orwell’s novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four…. Propaganda does not often come marching towards us waving swastikas and chanting ‘Seig Heil’; its power lies in its capacity to conceal itself, to appear natural, to coalesce completely and indivisibly with the values and accepted power symbols of a given society. When Hitler claimed that art had nothing to do with propaganda he was anticipating a perfectly integrated Nationalist Socialist Germany whose art would spontaneously and unthinkingly reproduce the desired images and perceptions. Even in the early revolutionary period of the Third Reich, Goebbels, who had objected to the word propaganda being used in the title of his Ministry, insisted that ‘news is best given out in such a way that it appears to be without comment but is itself tendentious’…. If a simple principle can be derived from the discussion so far, it is that the recognition of propaganda can be seen as a function of the ideological distance which separates the observer from the act of communication observed…. Hitler’s assertion that art has nothing to do with propaganda does not contradict Orwell’s statement that all art is propaganda, but is rather contained within it, for the propaganda-free art which Hitler envisaged was an art within which the values and beliefs of National Socialism would be dominant, invisible and totally natural. This ‘illusion of pure aestheticism’ was for Orwell a reminder that ‘propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose—a political, social and religious purpose—that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs’…. Although there is no ready-made method for detecting propaganda, we can become aware of the general categories in which it manifests itself and we can attempt to classify its techniques and forms…. This approach does not mean that we must study literature as a set of documents rather than as a set of aesthetic objects. For in effect it denies the validity of such a distinction by assuming that the propagandistic or demystifying moment of literary communication may be inseparable from its aesthetic function….”

–A. P. Foulkes, Literature and Propaganda (from the Introduction and Conclusion)

1983-1988                                                   EXCERPTS CONTENTS

________________________________________________________________       

Bibliography – 1800s to 2003            

Critical Excerpts – 1883 to 2003 

Quick Views    

Social and Political Novel  

Social and Political Literature  

  ________________________________________________________________ 

From Works on Political, Social, and Cultural Criticism of Imaginative Literature
(with an emphasis on the nature and role of propaganda) 

(1983) “In ordinary critical usage, the term ‘roman à thèse’ has a strongly negative connotation; it designates works that are too close to propaganda to be artistically valid. No self-respecting writer would consent to call his novels by that name. A roman à thèse is always the work of an ‘other’… There do exist a few critical studies, published quite a while ago, that discuss [certain] novels…as ‘political novels’ or as examples of ‘committed’ or engagé literature. Neither of these categories corresponds exactly, however, to the roman à thèse. The political novel as a generic category is at once too broad (Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme is, as Irving Howe has shown, a superb political novel, but it is not a roman à thèse) and too narrow (Mauriac’s ‘Catholic novel,’ Le Noeud de vipers, is a roman à thèse, but not a political novel). As for ‘littérature engagée,’ it is too imprecise a term to designate a genre; furthermore, I feel it is too specifically associated with the name of Sartre, who did not invent the term but who made it current—and who, incidentally, went out of his way to distinguish ‘engagé’ novels from roman à these (although it may once again have been a matter of rejecting the name rather than the thing itself)…. As a starting point, I propose the following definition: a roman à thèse is a novel written in the realistic mode (that is, based on an aesthetic of verisimilitude and representation), which signals itself to the reader as primarily didactic in intent, seeking to demonstrate the validity of a political, philosophical, or religious doctrine…. One could…claim that every novel, indeed every work of fiction…, can be read as expounding a ‘thesis,’ to the extent that it is always possible to extract from it a general maxim of some kind…. Following this line of reasoning, one would soon have to conclude that the roman à thèse is everywhere and nowhere—in other words, that it is a phenomenon of reading (viewed from a certain angle, all works are didactic) rather than of writing. At that point, there would be no reason to try to define a genre called roman à thèse, for the concept of genre implies that there exist certain properties that texts have in common, not that (or not only that) there exist certain modes of reading—or as is commonly said nowadays, certain interpretive strategies—that can be applied to any and every text. [However]…I consider undeniable…: there exist nontrivial differences between and among texts, as well as between readers, or between interpretive strategies that readers deploy in order to understand a text. Novels that are roman à thèse have certain identifiable traits which distinguish them from other novels and other genres. One of these traits, and no doubt the most important one is that romans à thèse forumulate, in an insistent, consistent, and unambiguous manner, the thesis (or theses) they seek to illustrate…. Whether its thesis is conservative or radical, defending the status quo or calling for its abolition, the roman à thèse is essentially an authoritarian genre: it appeals to the need for certainty, stability, and unity that is one of the elements of the human psyche; it affirms absolute truths, absolute values” (3-10).

(1983) Introductory quotations from Susan Rubin Suleiman’s Authoritarian Fictions:

     “Literature, as it has been understood by all the masters, is an interpretation of life. It eliminates in order to prove.” –Maurice Barrès

     “All literature is propaganda. […] Art, for us, is what makes propaganda effective, what is capable of moving men in the direction we wish. –Paul Nizan

     “Then comes the modern question: why is there not today (or at least so it seems to me), why is there no longer an art of intellectual persuasion, or imagination? Why are we so slow, so indifferent about mobilizing narrative and the image? Can’t we see that it is, after all, works of fiction, no matter how mediocre they may be artistically, that best arouse political passion? –Roland Barthes

     “…it is the very notion of a work created for the expression of a social, political, economic, moral, etc. content that constitutes a lie.”

–Alain Robbe-Grillet

(1987-1999) “[Orwell’s Problem: how is it that oppressive ideological systems are able to] instill beliefs that are firmly held and widely accepted although they are completely without foundation and often plainly at variance with the obvious facts about the world around us?” “If Orwell, instead of writing 1984—which was actually, in my opinion, his worst book, a kind of trivial caricature of the most totalitarian society in the world, which made him famous and everybody loved him, because it was the official enemy—if instead of doing that easy and relatively unimportant thing, he had done the hard and important thing, namely talk about Orwell’s Problem [as pertains to England and western states], he would not have been famous and honored: he would have been hated and reviled and marginalized.” […]  “About Orwell's 1984, I thought, frankly, it was one of his worst books. Could barely finish it. Some parts (e.g., about Newspeak) were clever. But most of it seemed to me—well, trivial. The problem is not a very interesting one; the modes of thought control and repression in totalitarian societies are fairly transparent. In fact, they often tend to be rather lax. Franco Spain, for example, didn't care much what people thought and said: the screams from the torture chamber in downtown Madrid were enough to keep the lid on. It's not too well known, but the Soviet Union was also pretty lax, particularly in the Brezhnev era. According to US government-Russian Research Center studies, Russians apparently had considerably wider access to a broad range of opinion and to dissident literature than Americans do, not because it is denied them but because propaganda is so much more effective here. Orwell was well aware of these issues. His (suppressed) introduction to Animal Farm, for example, deals explicitly with "literary censorship in England." To write about that topic would have been important, hard, and serious—and would have earned him the obloquy that attends departure from the rules.

     “Caricature can be very well done. Swift is marvelous, for example. Animal Farm is pretty good, in my opinion. But 1984 I thought was a serious decline from his best work. Caricature is an art, and not an easy one. But when well done, a very important one. As for dealing with Orwell's problem, I try to do it in the ways I know how to pursue; 1000s of pages by now. No doubt there are other ways, maybe better ways. But others will have to find what works for them. …my co-author Edward Herman has done excellent work of caricature on Orwell's problem. I am thinking of his work on "doublespeak," including a book, modeled more or less on Ambrose Bierce.” 

“If you want to learn about people’s personalities and intentions, you would probably do better reading novels than reading psychology books. Maybe that’s the best way to come to an understanding of human beings and the way they act and feel, but that’s not science. Science isn’t the only thing in the world, it is what it is…science is not the only way to come to an understanding of things.” “If I am interested in learning about people, I’ll read novels rather than psychology.” “I think the Victorian novel tells us more about people than science ever will…and we will always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” “We learn from literature as we learn from life; no one knows how, but it surely happens. In fact, most of what we know about things that matter comes from such sources, surely not from considered rational inquiry (science), which sometimes reaches unparalleled depths of profundity, but has a rather narrow scope.” “It is almost certain that literature will forever give far deeper insight into what is sometimes called ‘the full human person’ than any modes of scientific inquiry may hope to do. “[However] I’ve been always resistant consciously to allowing literature to influence my beliefs and attitudes with regard to society and history.” “There are things I resonate to when I read, but I have a feeling that my feelings and attitudes were largely formed prior to reading literature.” “Look, there’s no question that as a child, when I read about China, this influenced my attitudes–-Rickshaw Boy, for example. That had a powerful effect when I read it. It was so long ago I don’t remember a thing about it, except the impact. And I don’t doubt that, for me, personally, like anybody, lots of my perceptions were heightened and attitudes changed by literature over a broad range–Hebrew Literature, Russian literature, and so on. But ultimately, you have to face the world as it is on the basis of other sources of evidence that you can evaluate.” “If I want to understand the nature of China and its revolution, I ought to be cautious about literary renditions.” “Literature can heighten your imagination and insight and understanding, but it surely doesn’t provide the evidence that you need to draw conclusions and substantiate conclusions.” “I can think of things I read that had a powerful effect on me, but whether they changed my attitudes and understanding in any striking or crucial way, I can’t really say.” “People certainly differ, as they should, in what kinds of things make their minds work.” “I don’t really feel that I can draw any tight connections [personally].”

–Noam Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader, biographies, etc…

(1988) “When the MLA put together its centennial issue of PMLA in May 1984, it commissioned Paul Lauter to write about the impact of society on the profession of literary criticism between 1958 and 1983. Lauter was a radical associated with the Movement in the sixties…. According to Lauter, the MLA between the fifties and the eighties had expanded and diversified immensely, yet ‘the hierarchy of the profession remains fundamentally unaltered, so—as yet—does the hierarchy of what we value’…. This conclusion was based on two surveys of hundreds of syllabi collected from around the nation in the eighties. Just as the reigning critical ideology in the late 1950s was ‘formalism,’ so the dominant mode of criticism in the 1980s was ‘formalism,’ however expanded to include hermeneutics, semiotics, and poststructuralism, all of which criticism ‘accepts the formalist stance by analyzing texts, including its own discourse, primarily as autonomous objects isolated from their social origins or functions’…. What most dismayed Lauter about such fashionable criticism were its alignment with linguistics and philosophy rather than history and sociology, its tendency to become obscurant self-referential metacriticism in a debauch of professionalism, its preference for a limited canon of elitist texts, its increasing abnegation of practical exegesis and humanistic values, and its deepening occupation of the core of the profession”…. [Even the rebirth of Marxist criticism in the 1970s deviated from “history and sociology” in that]: “What was odd about the Marxist criticism of this [1970s] Renaissance associated with the post-1950s new left and the Movement was its complete disregard of the old left. Mention was never made of V. F. Calverton, James T. Farrell, Granville Hicks, Bernard Smith, Edmund Wilson, or other Leftist Critics prominent in the thirties. The native tradition of radicalism stemming from the nineteenth century had been forgotten during the heyday of the new left….”

        “In H. Bruce Franklin’s view, what was wrong with academic literary professionals was their thorough immersion in the bourgeois ideology of formalism, which itself was rooted in the counterrevolutionary antiproletarianism of the thirties. ‘In the present era, formalism is the use of aestheticism to blind us to social and moral reality’….”

         “Rather than an instrument or weapon of ruling-class oppression, literature was potentially liberating [in the view of Louis Kampf], provided it was set within a living context close to daily life and removed from its sacrosanct place in the great tradition. ‘In spite of our academic merchants, literature is not a commodity, but the sign of a creative act which expresses personal, social, and historical needs. As such it constantly undermines the status quo.’ The task of the radical critic was to destroy received dogmas and procedures, letting literature be an instrument of agitation and resistance and a force for freedom and genuine liberation. ‘As members of the educated middle class, we must learn that our words should discredit our own culture. Those of us who are literary intellectuals and teachers ought to illustrate in our work that the arts are not alone available to those who are genteel…’.”

–Vincent B. Leitch, American Literary Criticism from the 30s to the 80s (Chapter Thirteen: “Leftist Criticism from the 1960s to the 1980s”)

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Bibliography – 1800s to 2003            

Critical Excerpts – 1883 to 2003 

Quick Views    

Social and Political Novel  

Social and Political Literature  

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From Works on Political, Social, and Cultural Criticism of Imaginative Literature
(with an emphasis on the nature and role of propaganda)

–Toni Cade Bambara, Black Women Writers at Work (Claudia Tate, Ed.)

(1990) “I see protest as a genuine means of encouraging someone to feel the inconsistencies, the horror of the lives we are living. Social protest is saying that we do not have to live this way. If we feel deeply, and we encourage ourselves and others to feel deeply, we will find the germ of our answers to bring about change. Because once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy. And when they do not, we will ask, ‘Why don’t they?’ And it is the asking that will lead us inevitably to social change. So the question of social protest and art is inseparable for me. I can’t say it is an either-or proposition. Art for art’s sake doesn’t really exist for me. What I saw was wrong, and I had to speak up. I loved poetry and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That’s the beginning of social protest.”

–Audre Lorde, Black Women Writers at Work (Claudia Tate, Ed.)

(1993) “The 1930s literary radicals, I have demonstrated, brought various considerations to bear in their definitions of proletarian literature. There was, however, no party line on the subject. As Jack Conroy remarked retrospectively about the debates over what proletarian literature was, ‘We used to talk about it endlessly and never arrived at any definite conclusion’…. Even if writers did not feel bound to one or another definition of proletarian literature, [certain] critics argue, they felt obliged to conform to a rigid didacticism involving stock characters, formulaic plots, and a programmatic optimism. Art had to be a weapon and, as such, an instrument of propaganda. But since art and propaganda are antagonistically opposed, left-wing didactic literature was condemned to mouthing slogans and preaching conversion to the cause.

   “In future chapters we will have the opportunity to determine whether proletarian novels were in fact as formulaic and predictable as their detractors charge. What I shall argue in this chapter is that there is very limited validity to the charge that routinely accompanies accusations of political straitjacketing—namely, that Third-Period Marxist critics, as mouthpieces for the party line, sought to impose a specifically propagandistic view of literature upon the writers in the party orbit. I shall show that left-wing literary commentators only rarely promoted the notion that literary works should impart or promote specific tenets of party doctrine; insofar as the critics had a coherent aesthetic theory, this theory was almost exclusively cognitive and reflectionist rather than agitational and hortatory. Indeed, I shall argue that in certain important ways the American approach to questions of representation and ideology was committed—as was the dominant tendency in all Marxist criticism of this period, Soviet and European—to a number of premises about literary form that were bourgeois rather than revolutionary. Literary radicals might applaud proletarian novelists whose works encouraged revolutionary class partisanship. Gold hailed Conroy as ‘a proletarian shock-trooper whose weapon is literature’; the novelist Ruth McKenney wrote Isidor Schneider that his From the Kingdom of Necessity was ‘a more powerful weapon than any tear gas the other side can manufacture.’ In general, however, commentators, critics and novelists alike, held back from theorizing—let alone legislating—any of the representational maneuvers specific to this literary weaponry. Their espoused commitment to the notion that all literature is propaganda for one side or another in the class struggle was countered by a deep antipathy to viewing proletarian literature as propagandistic in any of its distinctive rhetorical strategies. The 1930s radicals never fully repudiated the bourgeois counterposition of art to propaganda: to them, proletarian literature contained very different values and assumptions, but as literature, it was just like any other kind of writing. Ironically, to the extent that they were prescriptive in advocating any given set of aesthetic principles, the Marxist critics urged a largely depoliticized conception of mimetic practice that coexisted only uneasily with many of the values and ideas that they congratulated writers for articulating in their texts” (129-131).

–Barbara Foley, “Art or Propaganda,” in Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941

(1995) “Ernest Hemingway, thinking of himself, as always, once said that all American literature grew out of Huck Finn. It undoubtedly would have been better for American literature, and American culture, if our literature had grown out of one of the best-selling novels of all time, another American work of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which for its portrayal of an array of thoughtful, autonomous, and passionate black characters leaves Huck Finn far behind… The power of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the power of brilliant analysis married to great wisdom of feeling. Stowe never forgets the logical end of any relationship in which one person is the subject and the other is the object. No matter how the two people feel, or what their intentions are, the logic of the relationship is inherently tragic and traps both parties until the false subject/object relationship is ended. Stowe’s most oft-repeated and potent representation of this inexorable logic is the forcible separation of family members, especially of mothers from children…. The grief and despair [the] women display is no doubt what T.S. Eliot was thinking of when he superciliously labeled Uncle Tom’s Cabin ‘sensationalist propaganda,’ but, in fact, few critics in the nineteenth century ever accused Stowe of making up or even exaggerating such stories. One group of former slaves who were asked to comment on Stowe’s depiction of slave life said that she had failed to portray the very worst, and Stowe herself was afraid that if she told some of what she had heard from escaped slaves and other informants during her eighteen years in Cincinnati, the book would be too dark to find any readership at all… One of Stowe’s most skillful techniques is her method of weaving a discussion of slavery into the dialogue of her characters…. Stowe also understands that the real root of slavery is that it is profitable as well as customary…. The very heart of nineteenth-century American experience and literature, the nature and meaning of slavery, is finally what Twain cannot face in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn…. Why, then, we may ask, did Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for all its power and popularity, fail to spawn American literature? Fail, even, to work as a model for how to draw passionate, autonomous and interesting black literary characters? Fail to keep the focus of the American literary imagination on the central dilemma of the American experience: race? …The real loss, though, is not to our literature but to our culture and ourselves, because we have lost the subject of how the various social groups who may not escape to the wilderness are to get along in society; and, in the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the hard-nosed, unsentimental dialogue about race that we should have been having since before the Civil War. Obviously, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is no more the last word on race relations than The Brothers Karamazov or David Copperfield is on any number of characteristically Russian or English themes and social questions…. When Stowe’s voice, a courageously public voice—as demonstrated by the public arguments about slavery that rage throughout Uncle Tom’s Cabin—fell silent in our culture and was replaced by the secretive voice of Huck Finn, who acknowledges Jim only when they are alone on the raft together out in the middle of the big river, racism fell out of the public world and into the private one where whites think it really is but blacks know it really isn’t.” “Should Huckleberry Finn be taught in the schools? The critics of the Propaganda Era laid the groundwork for the universal inclusion of the book in school curriculums by declaring it great. Although they predated the current generation of politicized English professors, this was clearly a political act…. I would rather my children read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, even though it is far more vivid in its depiction of cruelty than Huck Finn, and this is because Stowe’s novel is clearly and unmistakably a tragedy. No whitewash, no secrets, but evil, suffering, imagination, endurance, and redemption—just like life. Like little Eva, who eagerly but fearfully listens to the stories of the slaves that her family tries to keep from her, our children want to know what is going on, what has gone on, and what we intend to do about it. If ‘great’ literature has any purpose, it is to help us face up to our responsibilities instead of enabling us to avoid them once again by lighting out for the territory.”

1996-2003                                                   EXCERPTS CONTENTS

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Bibliography – 1800s to 2003            

Critical Excerpts – 1883 to 2003 

Quick Views    

Social and Political Novel  

Social and Political Literature  

  ________________________________________________________________ 

From Works on Political, Social, and Cultural Criticism of Imaginative Literature
(with a special emphasis on the nature and role of propaganda)

“Fiction has a unique capacity to bring difficult issues to a broad readership on a personal level, creating empathy in a reader’s heart for the theoretical stranger. Its capacity for invoking moral and social responsibility is enormous. Throughout history, every movement toward a more peaceful and humane world has begun with those who imagined the possibilities. The Bellwether Prize seeks to support the imagination of humane possibilities.

        “Defining a literature of social change: Socially responsible literature, for the purposes of this award, may describe categorical human transgressions in a way that compels readers to examine their own prejudices. It may invoke the necessity for economic and social justice for a particular ethnic or social group, or it may explicitly examine movements that have brought positive social change. Or, it may advocate the preservation of nature by describing and defining accountable relationships between people and their environment. The mere description of an injustice, or of the personal predicament of an exploited person, without any clear position of social analysis invoked by the writer, does not in itself constitute socially responsible literature. ‘Social responsibility’ describes a moral obligation of individuals to engage with their communities in ways that promote a more respectful coexistence.

        “Clear, analytical and literary accounts of political and social injustice (either current or historical) include the following excellent examples: Beloved, by Toni Morrison; Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson; To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee; Crows Over a Wheatfield, Paula Sharp; Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison; The Women’s Room, Marilyn French; Memoirs of An Ex-Prom Queen, Alix Kates Shulman; Mean Spirit, Linda Hogan; Cloudsplitter, Russell Banks; The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver; The Color Purple, Alice Walker. Other contemporary contributors to this tradition include Michael Dorris, Louise Erdrich, Ursula Hegi, Ursula K. LeGuin, Ruth Ozeki, Grace Paley, Marge Piercy, and John Edgar Wideman.

        “These authors notwithstanding, issues of social responsibility have in recent decades held a less commanding place in U.S. literature than in the wider world. Social commentary in our art is frequently viewed with suspicion. Its advocacy does not fall within the stated goals of any major North American publisher, endowment, or prize for the arts. The Bellwether Prize was conceived to address this deficiency. We would like to see the place of conscience in our nation’s artistic landscape restored to the same high position it holds elsewhere in the world. By means of this prize we hope to enlist North American writers, publishers, and readers to share in this crucial endeavor.”

–[Barbara Kingsolver]  Bellwether Prize

- NOTE: I view the views by Wood in the several excerpts below to be essentially misguided, though he is referring to novels with a variety of weaknesses. I include the excerpts here however because they are a useful reference to lit establishment views about politics and society in fiction. -

“Zadie Smith is merely of her time when she says, in an interview, that it is not the writer’s job ‘to tell us how somebody felt about something, it’s to tell us how the world works.’ She has praised the American writers David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers as ‘guys who know a great deal about the world. They understand macro-microeconomics, the way the internet works, maths, philosophy, but… they’re still people who know something about the street, about family, love, sex, whatever.’ But this idea—that the novelist’s task is to go on to the street and figure out social reality—may well have been altered by the events of September 11, merely through the reminder that whatever the novel gets up to, the ‘culture’ can always get up to something bigger. Ashes defeat garlands. If topicality, relevance, reportage, social comment, preachy presentism, and sidewalk-smarts—in short, the contemporary American novel in its current, triumphalist form—are novelists’ chosen sport, then they will sooner or later be outrun by their own streaking material. Fiction may well be, as Stendhal wrote, a mirror carried down the middle of a road; but the Stendhalian mirror would explode with reflections were it now being walked around Manhattan. For who would dare to be knowledgeable about politics and society now? Is it possible to imagine Don DeLillo today writing his novel Mao II—a novel that proposed the foolish notion that the terrorist now does what the novelist used to do, that is, ‘alter the inner life of the culture’? Surely, for a while, novelists will be leery of setting themselves up as analysts of society, while society bucks and charges so helplessly. Surely they will tread carefully over their generalisations. It is now very easy to look very dated very fast.”

–James Wood, “Tell Me How Does It Feel?” The Guardian, October 6, 2001

(2001) “If anyone still had a longing for the great American ‘social novel,’ the events of September 11 may have corrected it…a passage at the conclusion of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, about the end of the American century, now seems laughably archival: ‘It seemed to Enid that current events in general were more muted or insipid nowadays than they’d been in her youth. She had memories of the 1930s, she’d seen firsthand what could happen to a country when the world economy took its gloves off…. But disasters of this magnitude no longer seemed to befall the United States. Safety features had been put in place, like the squares of rubber that every modern playground was paved with, to soften impacts.’ Despite the falter of this passage, Franzen would probably agree that the novel should not go chasing after the bait of social information. Five years ago he published an essay in Harper’s in which he declared that the social novel is no longer possible. The piece was so punctually intelligent and affecting—it had the charm and the directness typical of his work—and it was above all so long, that few noticed its incoherence. Franzen began by admitting to a recent depression, a dejection about the American novel, a ‘despair about the possibility of connecting the personal and the social.’ No challenging novel since Catch-22 had truly affected the culture, he complained. As a young writer he had believed that ‘putting a novel’s characters in a dynamic social setting enriched the story that was being told.’ The novel, he used to think, should bring ‘social news, social instruction.’ It should ‘Address the Culture and Bring News to the Mainstream.’ It had ‘a responsibility to dramatize important issues of the day.’ Franzen’s first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, was such a book; but it came and went pretty quietly, and Franzen was left pondering ‘the failure of my culturally engaged novel to engage with the culture. I’d intended to provoke; what I got instead was sixty reviews in a vacuum.’ To be sure, there was a book tour, a photo spread in Vogue, and a large advance (which is more than most serious writers are vouchsafed): all this was merely ‘the consolation of no longer mattering to the culture.’ Franzen’s second novel also dribbled into the celebrity-sand; there were good reviews, ‘decent sales, and the deafening silence of irrelevance.’ So the social novel, it seemed, had no utility. The novel had lost its cultural centrality, its cultural power; modern technologies, such as television, ‘do a better job of social instruction.’ And how to create something permanent whose subject—modern culture—is ephemeral? Franzen rightly asked the question, perhaps the most tormenting one for contemporary novelists, of how to write a novel both of its time and properly resistant to its time: ‘how can you achieve topical “relevance” without drawing on an up-to-the-minute vocabulary of icons and attitudes and thereby, far from challenging the hegemony of overnight obsolescence, confirming and furthering it?’ By the end of his essay, Franzen had decided that there was ‘something wrong with the whole model of the novel of social engagement,’ and had admitted to a ‘conviction that bringing “meaningful news” is no longer so much a defining function of the novel as an accidental product.’ The solution, it seemed, was aesthetic. ‘Expecting a novel to bear the weight of our whole disturbed society—to help solve our contemporary problems—seems to me a peculiarly American delusion. To write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: isn’t this enough? Isn’t it a lot?’ It certainly is.”

–James Wood, “Abhorring a Vacuum,” The New Republic, October 18, 2001 [retitled in part as an essay on the “Social Novel” in The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, 2004]

(2002) “In his memoir The Noise of Time, Mandelstam recalls a haughty friend who used to say, disdainfully, that ‘some men are books, others—newspapers.’ The remark might be adapted. Some books are books, others—newspapers. In recent years, the large American novel has frequently aspired to the condition of journalism. The great quarry of the last decade, and sometimes the great cemetery, has been the social novel, the vast report on the way we live now, the stuffed dossier, the thriving broadsheet streaming with contemporary brightnesses. Tom Wolfe’s barely literate plea for more of just this kind of fiction has always seemed nonsensical in the age of Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, and most recently Jonathan Franzen. We have too much socially and politically obsessed fiction, not too little. Mimesis deserves a holiday. The bright book of life need not include all of life.”

–James Wood, “Unions,” The New Republic, October 10, 2002

(2003) “I suggest that the role of the artist is to transcend conventional wisdom, to transcend the word of the establishment, to transcend the orthodoxy, to go beyond and escape what is handed down by the government or what is said in the media…. It is the job of the artist to think outside the boundaries of permissible thought and dare to say things that no one else will say…. It is absolutely patriotic to point a finger at the government to say that it is not doing what it should be doing to safeguard the right of citizens to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…. We must be able to look at ourselves, to look at our country honestly and clearly. And just as we can examine the awful things that people do elsewhere, we have to be willing to examine the awful things that are done here by our government.”

–Howard Zinn, Artists in Times of War 

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Bibliography – 1800s to 2003            

Critical Excerpts – 1883 to 2003 

Quick Views    

Social and Political Novel  

Social and Political Literature  

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