======================================================================
Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
======================================================================
(Not very well I'd say.)
Sunday NY Times Book Review September 17, 2013
How Well Does Contemporary Fiction Address Radical Politics?
Each week in Bookends, two writers take on pressing and provocative
questions about the world of books. This week, Pankaj Mishra and
Jennifer Szalai discuss the representation of extreme political ideas in
fiction.
By Pankaj Mishra
Fiction by women seems the most sensitive to the variety, ambiguities
and contradictions of radicalism
In the 1930s, many politically engaged writers in the West were
engrossed by André Malraux’s “Conquerers” and “Man’s Fate,” both set
amid the turmoil of the Chinese Revolution. Malraux was one of the first
novelists to reckon with two new 20th-century realities: the revolt of
the masses and the power of ideology. Aligned with working-class
movements, his smart, self-aware characters made the conspirators of
Joseph Conrad’s “Under Western Eyes” and Henry James’s “Princess
Casamassima” seem like petty and irrelevant hecklers of an imperturbable
bourgeois order. But Malraux still found himself attacked by Leon
Trotsky, who said the French novelist was too much of a bourgeois
individualist, and not Marxist enough to comprehend the great events he
was part of.
An equivalent accusation was brought against many writers engaged with
the energies, both liberationist and nihilist, released by anticolonial
movements and the arduous process of state-building in Asia, Africa and
Latin America. Fortunately, these breakers of long national silences
(including Indonesia’s Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Chile’s Roberto Bolaño)
were less compelled by Marxist dogma than by the nobility of individual
passion for justice and dignity. The antiapartheid activists of Nadine
Gordimer’s “Burger’s Daughter,” the Trotskyist revolutionary of Mario
Vargas Llosa’s “Real Life of Alejandro Mayta” and the low-caste opponent
of Communist government in Arundhati Roy’s “God of Small Things” show
how the wish for radical innovation has been diversely realized, and
often corrupted, but never less than urgent.
This longing for an alternative order could not have been similarly
commemorated in post-World War II American fiction. While other
countries struggled with genocides, military coups and economic
calamities, the United States saw an unprecedented period of prosperity,
nearing what Carl Schmitt called a state of “neutralization”: the end of
struggles between rival ideologies and systems, and the rise of a
politics dominated by experts and mass persuaders.
Writing as the clamorous protests of the 1960s faded away, Philip Roth
seemed almost envious of writers in Communist Eastern Europe, who had
gained moral prestige and authority through their perilous defiance of
repressive governments: “There,” he wrote, “nothing goes and everything
matters; here everything goes and nothing matters.”
The American novelist’s unease about his comfortable isolation,
frequently expressed through reflexive irony, rarely flowed into an
empathetic understanding of those intractably embodying the will to
change at home. In “American Pastoral,” Roth himself seemed to equate
political radicalism with a form of lunacy. The vicious attacks of Sept.
11 could only strengthen the tendency to see militant dissent as a
species of pathology.
Confronted with the facts of mass politics and ideological fervor, John
Updike and Martin Amis psychologized them away as symptoms of sexual
frustration. Presumably free of male anxieties, fiction by women —
Deborah Eisenberg, Jennifer Egan, Susan Choi, Barbara Kingsolver, Ann
Patchett, Dana Spiotta — has seemed much more sensitive to the variety,
ambiguities and contradictions of radical thought and action. (Depicting
Robespierre in “A Place of Greater Safety,” Hilary Mantel may have given
us contemporary fiction’s richest portrait of a revolutionary.)
Remarkably, almost all events and characters in these works are drawn
from the past. But then the few people pushed to radical gestures in our
own era of unparalleled conformity and political passivity are more
likely to be scorned than admired.
More ominously, the future holds none of the possibilities of
far-reaching transformation that galvanized a writer like Bolaño.
Indeed, his example shows that Trotsky, unreasonably doctrinaire with
Malraux, was right in one respect: The writer chronicling political
events in fiction is most effective when participating in a historical
process or movement. No such tonic immersion is available to most
contemporary writers, who, as sequestered as ever, must strive alone to
transcend the general impoverishment of the political imagination.
Pankaj Mishra is the author of several books, including “The Romantics:
A Novel,” which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First
Fiction, and “From the Ruins of Empire,” a finalist for the Orwell and
Lionel Gelber Prizes in 2013. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature and contributes essays on politics and literature to The New
York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Guardian of London and The
London Review of Books.
◆ ◆ ◆
By Jennifer Szalai
Despite America’s recent political and economic depredations, our
fiction tends to locate subversion in other eras or other places.
If we were to deduce what reality looks like from the fiction that gets
read the most, politics would seem to be less real to us than king
slayers and Dante fanatics. This isn’t to say political intrigue is
missing from best-seller lists; thriller writers often use it to set a
plot in motion, deploying it as a backdrop or a pretext. But “the
political novel,” which the critic Irving Howe defined in terms of “a
dominant emphasis, a significant stress,” is more elusive. It always has
been. Writing in the late 1950s, Howe was talking about the rare work of
fiction in which the political element “is interesting enough to warrant
investigation.” Restless, radicalized characters offer one reliable way
of making things “interesting enough.” Characters taking pleasure in the
political status quo generally don’t.
The novelist Ian McEwan has tried to combine the two, depicting radical
politics from the perch of a decidedly nonradical protagonist. In
“Saturday,” a wealthy neurosurgeon thinks deep thoughts about terrorism
and Sept. 11. He diagnoses the malady of radical discontent with
confident ease: antiwar protesters are animated by their “cloying
self-regard,” and terrorists are driven to murder by their foolish
commitment to “mirages” like “the ideal Islamic state.” Radical politics
in all forms gets cast as either a vanity project or a logical error.
“Saturday” reads like a tribute to upper-middle-class values — a
bourgeois manifesto of sorts.
Fiction can address radical politics at a genteel remove, as McEwan
does, treating it like a curiosity to be looked at and commented on.
While this kind of loftiness may be a legitimate goal for a social
scientist, it seems weirdly limiting for a fiction writer, who has the
freedom to imagine himself into the lives of others, to become someone
else. Writers like Norman Rush and Deborah Eisenberg have long handled
politics in their fiction with exceptional sensitivity and intelligence,
refracting pristine ideas through the unruly subjectivity of their
characters. Similarly, in Rachel Kushner’s recent novel “The
Flamethrowers,” set in the 1970s, an American falls in with Italian
radicals for reasons that are only obliquely political: after chancing
on her boyfriend with another woman, she tries to lose herself in the
righteous slogans of others, joining a movement she knows “little to
nothing about.” Yet her reasons aren’t entirely self-absorbed; she’s too
observant for that. At her boyfriend’s palatial family home, she notices
the casual “cruelty” of expecting “a servant in uniform not just to
bring your coffee but also to pour it.”
Howe suggested that a real understanding of politics — a feeling for
even extreme political ideas and their seductive power — comes with an
existential crisis, in which people feel themselves at the mercy of
“large impersonal forces over which they can claim little control.” With
the exception of the Civil War, he argued, Americans could always count
on a “way out.” Thomas Pynchon’s homegrown paranoiacs have since
struggled to subvert what the author once called the “emerging
technopolitical order,” and Don DeLillo has positioned his solitary
characters against the mass market and the faceless crowd. But despite
the political and economic depredations of the last 50 years, much
contemporary American fiction tends to locate political subversion in
other eras or other places. So it’s striking when writers train their
gaze on us, looking closely at what happens here, at how pretensions to
inclusiveness can still leave people feeling invisible and estranged.
Sometimes the political action is explicit, as in the smart, scathing
fiction of Kiran Desai, but some of the most startling work sticks
closer to the intimacy of experience. I’m thinking of the quietly
astonishing stories of Edward P. Jones, or the funny and pointed
brilliance of “Americanah,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel: their
characters may have no interest whatsoever in revolution, but they are
finely attuned to the ironies that can give rise to one, to the
discrepancies we don’t even know are there.
Jennifer Szalai was until 2010 a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine,
where she oversaw the publication’s “Reviews” section. She has written
for The New York Times Book Review, The Nation and The London Review of
Books, among others.
________________________________________________
Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu
Set your options at:
http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
