There has been criticism against literature of this nature, where the mix of good and evil is depicted without moral instruction, and I believe Twitter and other reductive forms of media are to blame. I deactivated my account a few weeks ago, but I had been hacking down my ideas to fit into tweets for so long that it will take some time to recover.
The fundamental difference between politics and fiction is very nicely (beautifully, I dare say) described in this post.
It's a salutary reminder that life and the world cannot be reduced to black and white (it has a 'mixed quality' as this post suggests), and that even in the most depressing situations, as individuals who are part of a collective, there are other recourses to us than seek the 'comfort' of common cause.
'[Even] The personal is political' has become something of a credo in our times and it is genuinely liberating to seriously consider others' problems ours too. Where fiction / literature perhaps differs is in imagining that the way to connect with, empathise with and seek solutions to others' problems needn't always be collective, let alone prescribed.
yes! keeping heroic actions the actions of fallable imperfect humans is crucial. i believe as Brecht did that we are only as heroic as our last act of courage.
Thank you for this - I really enjoyed it. I have loved the Nabokov story for years, without fully 'understanding' it. I just know it says something universal that moves me every time I read it.
Frank O Connor's short story 'Guests of the Nation' is also a story that you might like in terms of a rich and complex human portrayal of what it is to be caught in political forces that bring people into places that are very dark - and yet, at the end of the story, places the events in a broader, kind of 'cosmic' setting. I read it at school (I'm from Ireland) when I was 15 - it still remains one of my favourite stories. For a lot of people of my generation in Ireland it has huge resonance.
Excellent, thoughtful post about a challenging subject. Especially appreciate this: "What I am saying is that stories about political systems or social struggle are most poignant and effective when they acknowledge we are all up against such harsh mystery whether we are a powerful statesman or a poor child."
Irrational goodness! I always struggled to pin down what he meant by that. I love your answer, although it’s nowhere near any of the ones I found myself groping towards. But then, isn’t Nabokov, in that essay, giving us -- each of us -- a maze in which to trace our own, personal version of the irrational Good? I always thought that was what he was up to, in the end, there (and elsewhere); and the point of the ambiguity was exactly that, to release a living, protean, metamorphic butterfly into the world, rather than a dead definition, spread out for inspection. Incidentally I loved the way you had Paul, in The Mare, be so often the one with the impulse to pin things down, define them once and for all... only for him to release that lovely Vanessa at the end... “there’s hope for us all”...
I forget who said that cinema was essentially fascist as a medium, because it “forces” a specific, objective and non-negotiable image before the viewer, but playing off that, it’s possible that literature (or more narrowly the novel and the short story, as opposed to epic poetry and verse) are inherently ironizing as a medium, or inherently subjective in its attempt to depict “reality” (which is itself ironic, that the closer fiction writers tried to get to “the real,” the more they collapsed into the subjectivity of free-indirect style and stream-of-consciousness individuation). It’s probably a class thing as well, with the novel being basically a middle-class invention, and where a rising mercantile class is supposed to carry certain virtues of the working class upward while also aspiring to the more socially desirable traits of the aristocracy. Such a mixed (and above all practical) worldview would seem likely to reject political absolutism of both the revolutionary and reactionary type.
Great essay! I especially loved this: "I do it to say that we live in a world of surpassing strangeness and power, a world that for all we understand about it, we still don’t understand."
I've been making an effort to include more mystery in my fiction, trying to tap into human unconsciousness. When I was younger, I thought I could change people's minds politically with my writing, but now what I think people need the most is to realize there's life beyond politics. But polemics disguised as fiction sure are trendy now.
Do you think dreamlike writing can move people politically? The Gospels or uncle toms cabin, or on team evil the turner diaries? Maybe even “the apprentice” was a sort of fever dream of a cruel savior rich man? Dunno!
All art is political, though it will manifest a politics you'd never claim to profess. Focusing on form gives you plausible deniability. Nabokov played that game with us and with himself. He's not alone; it's the hide and seek of moralism and its opposite (which is another form of moralism) from Eliot to the Nouveau Roman. Huysmans returned to the Church. Robbe-Grillet and de Man, Nazi collaborators, moved into the theatrical fakery of full-on formalism/Mannerism.
But all of it is literature, as much as Wittgenstein's Tractatus. And if you're sensitive to the desires behind the elisions, which are all there on the page, you can learn from them without being seduced. And that's what art is. It's the con that reveals itself as a con, as it tries to con you.
Milton "was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it." Blake
"ARTISTS. All charlatans." Flaubert.
Just look behind/ think beyond any discussions of "aesthetics", which are as bogus as any discussion of "truth".
Better in the end to have a political life—to face politics as vulgar necessity—than indulge the fantasy of a political (utilitarian) art. Fascism after all is the dream of art as life.
My favorite discussion of the relation of art and politics is from a piece by AJ Liebling, traveling with the irregulars, fighting in North Africa,
---…in a hospital tent at the clearing station I came across a man with a French flag wrapped around his waist; the medics discovered it when they cut his shirt away. He was a hard-looking, blondish chap with a mouthful of gold teeth and a face adorned by a cross-shaped knife scar—the croix de vache with which procurers sometimes mark business rivals. An interesting collection of obscene tattooing showed on the parts of him that the flag did not cover. Outwardly he was not a sentimental type.
"Where are you from?" I asked him.
"Belleville," he said. Belleville is a part of Paris not distinguished for its elegance.
"What did you do in civilian life?" I inquired.
That made him grin. "I lived on my income," he said.
"Why did you choose the Corps Franc?"
"Because I understood," he said. ---
You have to know when the draw the line. Or better: you have to know that there's a point at which you'll draw it.
This is such a wonderful post. I had to come back days after my first reading and read it again. I wasn’t familiar with the Nabokov essay. “Small, soft humans” and the “mysterious, asocial” operations of fiction … yes, yes. The question of whether fiction is or can be a moral force (or might even be moral in its amorality, if that makes any sense at all) has always interested me, and I love this contribution to the discussion. And especially the exploration of the beautiful “Signs and Symbols.”
I am going to have nightmares about the terrifying sand striker! What place does it occupy in the evolutionary plan except to feed on the less fortunate? (capitalist analogy?) Love the illustrations you choose for these essays, Mary.
The subtle art between truth and reality...but what is true? What is real? Our lives, subjective at best.
The embedded voice readings you use to draw us further into your writing continue to help me become a better listener and understand the nuances of wordplay.
There has been criticism against literature of this nature, where the mix of good and evil is depicted without moral instruction, and I believe Twitter and other reductive forms of media are to blame. I deactivated my account a few weeks ago, but I had been hacking down my ideas to fit into tweets for so long that it will take some time to recover.
The fundamental difference between politics and fiction is very nicely (beautifully, I dare say) described in this post.
It's a salutary reminder that life and the world cannot be reduced to black and white (it has a 'mixed quality' as this post suggests), and that even in the most depressing situations, as individuals who are part of a collective, there are other recourses to us than seek the 'comfort' of common cause.
'[Even] The personal is political' has become something of a credo in our times and it is genuinely liberating to seriously consider others' problems ours too. Where fiction / literature perhaps differs is in imagining that the way to connect with, empathise with and seek solutions to others' problems needn't always be collective, let alone prescribed.
yes! keeping heroic actions the actions of fallable imperfect humans is crucial. i believe as Brecht did that we are only as heroic as our last act of courage.
Thank you for this - I really enjoyed it. I have loved the Nabokov story for years, without fully 'understanding' it. I just know it says something universal that moves me every time I read it.
Frank O Connor's short story 'Guests of the Nation' is also a story that you might like in terms of a rich and complex human portrayal of what it is to be caught in political forces that bring people into places that are very dark - and yet, at the end of the story, places the events in a broader, kind of 'cosmic' setting. I read it at school (I'm from Ireland) when I was 15 - it still remains one of my favourite stories. For a lot of people of my generation in Ireland it has huge resonance.
Excellent, thoughtful post about a challenging subject. Especially appreciate this: "What I am saying is that stories about political systems or social struggle are most poignant and effective when they acknowledge we are all up against such harsh mystery whether we are a powerful statesman or a poor child."
Irrational goodness! I always struggled to pin down what he meant by that. I love your answer, although it’s nowhere near any of the ones I found myself groping towards. But then, isn’t Nabokov, in that essay, giving us -- each of us -- a maze in which to trace our own, personal version of the irrational Good? I always thought that was what he was up to, in the end, there (and elsewhere); and the point of the ambiguity was exactly that, to release a living, protean, metamorphic butterfly into the world, rather than a dead definition, spread out for inspection. Incidentally I loved the way you had Paul, in The Mare, be so often the one with the impulse to pin things down, define them once and for all... only for him to release that lovely Vanessa at the end... “there’s hope for us all”...
I forget who said that cinema was essentially fascist as a medium, because it “forces” a specific, objective and non-negotiable image before the viewer, but playing off that, it’s possible that literature (or more narrowly the novel and the short story, as opposed to epic poetry and verse) are inherently ironizing as a medium, or inherently subjective in its attempt to depict “reality” (which is itself ironic, that the closer fiction writers tried to get to “the real,” the more they collapsed into the subjectivity of free-indirect style and stream-of-consciousness individuation). It’s probably a class thing as well, with the novel being basically a middle-class invention, and where a rising mercantile class is supposed to carry certain virtues of the working class upward while also aspiring to the more socially desirable traits of the aristocracy. Such a mixed (and above all practical) worldview would seem likely to reject political absolutism of both the revolutionary and reactionary type.
Great essay! I especially loved this: "I do it to say that we live in a world of surpassing strangeness and power, a world that for all we understand about it, we still don’t understand."
I've been making an effort to include more mystery in my fiction, trying to tap into human unconsciousness. When I was younger, I thought I could change people's minds politically with my writing, but now what I think people need the most is to realize there's life beyond politics. But polemics disguised as fiction sure are trendy now.
Do you think dreamlike writing can move people politically? The Gospels or uncle toms cabin, or on team evil the turner diaries? Maybe even “the apprentice” was a sort of fever dream of a cruel savior rich man? Dunno!
All art is political, though it will manifest a politics you'd never claim to profess. Focusing on form gives you plausible deniability. Nabokov played that game with us and with himself. He's not alone; it's the hide and seek of moralism and its opposite (which is another form of moralism) from Eliot to the Nouveau Roman. Huysmans returned to the Church. Robbe-Grillet and de Man, Nazi collaborators, moved into the theatrical fakery of full-on formalism/Mannerism.
But all of it is literature, as much as Wittgenstein's Tractatus. And if you're sensitive to the desires behind the elisions, which are all there on the page, you can learn from them without being seduced. And that's what art is. It's the con that reveals itself as a con, as it tries to con you.
Milton "was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it." Blake
"ARTISTS. All charlatans." Flaubert.
Just look behind/ think beyond any discussions of "aesthetics", which are as bogus as any discussion of "truth".
Better in the end to have a political life—to face politics as vulgar necessity—than indulge the fantasy of a political (utilitarian) art. Fascism after all is the dream of art as life.
My favorite discussion of the relation of art and politics is from a piece by AJ Liebling, traveling with the irregulars, fighting in North Africa,
---…in a hospital tent at the clearing station I came across a man with a French flag wrapped around his waist; the medics discovered it when they cut his shirt away. He was a hard-looking, blondish chap with a mouthful of gold teeth and a face adorned by a cross-shaped knife scar—the croix de vache with which procurers sometimes mark business rivals. An interesting collection of obscene tattooing showed on the parts of him that the flag did not cover. Outwardly he was not a sentimental type.
"Where are you from?" I asked him.
"Belleville," he said. Belleville is a part of Paris not distinguished for its elegance.
"What did you do in civilian life?" I inquired.
That made him grin. "I lived on my income," he said.
"Why did you choose the Corps Franc?"
"Because I understood," he said. ---
You have to know when the draw the line. Or better: you have to know that there's a point at which you'll draw it.
This is such a wonderful post. I had to come back days after my first reading and read it again. I wasn’t familiar with the Nabokov essay. “Small, soft humans” and the “mysterious, asocial” operations of fiction … yes, yes. The question of whether fiction is or can be a moral force (or might even be moral in its amorality, if that makes any sense at all) has always interested me, and I love this contribution to the discussion. And especially the exploration of the beautiful “Signs and Symbols.”
I am going to have nightmares about the terrifying sand striker! What place does it occupy in the evolutionary plan except to feed on the less fortunate? (capitalist analogy?) Love the illustrations you choose for these essays, Mary.
The subtle art between truth and reality...but what is true? What is real? Our lives, subjective at best.
The embedded voice readings you use to draw us further into your writing continue to help me become a better listener and understand the nuances of wordplay.
Why a photo of Rand at the start of this excellent essay?