Marxist views about the writer and society penetrate democratic countries to an astonishing extent. Entire debates about “commitment” or “the function of the writer” are accommodations to concepts prevailing it. the Soviet Union. There, the writer exists to convey Party ends as effectively as possible to the masses who must work to realize them. Every single novel published in the Soviet Union is a political novel; every character within those novels has a didactic role. Anti-Party literature cannot exist officially. Naturally, the rewards for the compliant writer are high.
Quite why so many European writers have been glamorized by the prospect that they too might do Party duty is a separate question, to be answered by psychologists rather than historians. The Bernard Shaws and Romain Rollands, the Brechts and Malrauxs, were the first of many to politicize literature according to the doctrines of the Soviet Union. The influence of the Soviet Union, steadily extending since 1945, directly through its satellites and indirectly through its admirers, has put under great pressure the residual belief that the proper concern of literature is the human condition as a whole.
In the current intellectual climate in the West, a writer is still a purveyor of ideas and words, but by virtue of his profession he also becomes a representative figure, and if at all successful, entitled to the rank of spokesman. As such, he may sign manifestos and resolutions upon all the issues of the day without anyone calling into question his authority to do so. His books are examined for their “message.” In these proceedings, the degradation of his standing as an individual is more subtle but no less sure than it would be through membership of the Soviet Writers’ Union.
The primacy of the political dimension of literature opens a great many novels and virtually all poetry to the charge of escapism and triviality. Correspondingly, whether a particular work promotes or rejects a political system, and totalitarianism above all, turns into a touchstone, here as in the Soviet Union. No novels in the postwar period have had the resonance to compare with those offering imaginative insights into totalitarianism, from Orwell and Solzhenitsyn, to Camus’s La Peste and Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
To entertain a discussion of the political novel outside these developments is deformingly abstract, and rather provoking as well. The title of Robert Boyers’s new book, Atrocity and Amnesia, with its suggestion of big events and inadequate responses, is simple misrepresentation, down to its opportunistic alliteration. Of course nobody gave Boyers a brief to write one book rather than another and at the outset he disclaims any intention to survey contemporary political fiction. After two preliminary chapters of theorizing, he produces specialized textual commentaries on a single selected work by writers whom it is convenient to list at this point—V. S. Naipaul, Graham Greene, Garcia Marquez, Solzhenitsyn, Nadine Gordimer, Jorge Semprun, George Steiner, Günter Grass, and Milan Kundera. Dissociation between the wide subject matter and the narrow academic treatment could hardly be more complete.
For Boyers, the political novel happens not to be one whose subject is politics or ideology in practice.
For Boyers, the political novel happens not to be one whose subject is politics or ideology in practice, as in Paul Bowles’s The Spider’s House, say, or Sartre’s Les Chemins de la liberté. Nor is it a novel in which individual freedom is constrained by politics, as in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour or Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago. Still less is its concern to be politically instructive, as with Michel Tournier, Richard Hughes, Elie Wiesel, Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy.
Instead, he devotes himself to theoretical definitions all of which prove to be self-limiting for no very discernible reason. In a first attempt, he tentatively defines a political novel as one with “a projection of hope, a movement towards a world not yet made.” This supposes that hope and the world not yet made are compatible, if not synonymous, a dubious proposition in the light of contemporary events. The formulation would also serve for the merest romance, which is perhaps why Boyers is soon trying to improve it into, “if the work is in fact properly designated a political novel, the determinate goal toward which the various elements tend will have something to do with ideas about community, collective action, and the distribution of power.” The secretary of any local Party literary section will go along with that. “Something to do” with collective action and the distribution of power is a phrase which weasels around the crucial test of whether more of these ends is desirable, or less.
Boyers’s own disposition may be discerned when he praises Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter for having in it “the idea of politics as the collective assertion of the will to power.” Discussing Grass’s The Tin Drum, he remarks similarly with approval that “political novels are always necessarily concerned with change or the prospect of change.”
Practically every novel carries a notion of change, with only a Butor or a Robbe-Grillet so static or mannered as to be disqualified by this criterion. In a yet further definition, the stress on the passage of time is slightly altered when Boyers judges that “a political novel is necessarily engaged in drawing comparisons and thinking out ideas whose motive is change or resistance to change.”
A certain conclusion is then adumbrated. “The consideration of ethics in the political novel is also necessarily a consideration of its capacity to project a sense of what an acceptable political culture might be.” Inevitably he has at once to add the qualification, amounting to a denial of the whole proposition, that most political fictions do not get around to showing that culture but leave readers to infer it.
Nothing very helpful can be made of all these scattered and vague aspirations about community and collective will and projected hope. Followed through, the definitions together add up to thoroughly vapid piety about improvement through activism, without specifying what activism might really be like.
Repeated use of the word “necessarily” usually reveals a man who has read more Marxist books than is good for him. Marxist critics have confected an idea of “absent cause,” and this has impressed Boyers. Reduced from jargon, it means that there are conditions within any novel which a novelist may take for granted without the bother of elucidating. In a typical domestic novel, for example, it is understood that larger social and political realities continue to pertain, at whatever distance from the localized setting. Jane Austen’s novels were written during the Napoleonic campaigns, an overall political factor for which there is no internal evidence in her books.
Now presumably “absent cause” was introduced by Boyers not out of chic but in order to be an organizing principle in the essays about political novelists whom he wishes to discuss. Not a bit of it. A red herring, in every sense. If the reader wishes to interpret Boyers’s writers in the light of “absent cause,” then he will have to do so for himself.
No critical principle or unifying perception holds together the works under discussion. Without exception, however, the writers happen to be under the spotlight of present fame and fashion. In the order already given, they generalize into a Third Worlder, a Western renegade, a Latin American, a dissident Russian, a guilty South African, a gentile victim of Nazism and a Jewish witness, a repentant German, an emigre Czech. This makes for a clean sweep of headline issues, except for America, but then American writers enjoy the privilege of living too far from the totalitarian experience to be able to qualify for inclusion according to Boyers’s standards of publicized activism.
It is not clear whether totalitarianism is actually supposed to be the “absent cause” which these writers have in common, but if so, it disintegrates: some of them are against it, others are for it. Marquez does permanent Party duty, in whatever imaginative form it might be cast in his fiction. The latter part of Semprun’s career has been devoted to undoing earlier Party duty. Readers of Gordimer will find themselves advised about right conduct against apartheid. For years Greene and Grass have been among the most assiduous makers of political statements, the former often an outright Soviet apologist, the latter now seemingly following down that path. But anti-Party sentiment inspires everything Solzhenitsyn writes.
Anti-Party sentiment inspires everything Solzhenitsyn writes.
Perhaps it is too late to complain of a style with coinages such as “enwombed, nexal, motivic, prioritize, narrativization,” or about a form of essay which cranks toward the concluding handclaps of “major work,” “satisfyingly complete,” “authentically visionary,” and the rest of it. All the same, to submit writers so diverse to this grind of response and language is to kill excitement and to enforce conformity. In the world as it is, every one of them had a specific context and purpose. To treat political novels as academic documents is to carry the aesthetic point of view to an extreme: in contrast, it is vulgar Marxism to make a common political cause out of assorted writers.
In all likelihood, Naipaul had no direct political aim in Guerrillas beyond the telling of truth as he sees it. Boyers reaches the lamely activist conclusion. “No one can say for certain what effects Naipaul’s work will continue to have, whether his unmasking of third world delusions will serve illiberal or counterrevolutionary purposes.” How could the purposes to which readings of Naipaul might or might not be put have any bearing on evaluations of his work?
It is also remarkable to present The First Circle as though it were problematic, written in terms of the characters’ “self-confrontation.” If it is a great political novel, and Boyers does not think otherwise, “it must be seen to operate politically in a way that does not compromise the other functions assigned to it by the literary imagination.” “It has a politics,” we are told, “not a political ideology, but a political vision of that which human beings require, minimally, to live decently with one another.” That “minimally” is fun.
“Greene’s careful probing of the necessary limits in this novel, like his respect for the necessarily limited parameters and registers of a work so schematically conceived as The Quiet American, makes his book a minor classic in the genre of the modern political novel.” In itself, the sentence is close to parody, but the judgment is comically remote from Greene’s overwhelming desire to hurt America and American interests, as most consummately expressed in The Quiet American. No secret has been made of Greene’s waging of the Cold War in that spirit. Preferring parameters and registers to plain reality, Boyers is in the line of those innocent American preachers whom Greene loves to depict as more harmful than any old original sinners.
Steiner’s The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. has no business here, if Boyers’s definitions are justified. There is nothing about projected hope, or change and time, or about the distribution of power; and even to allow for collective action is stretching a point. A novel of ideas, it deals with the argument which the state of Israel has opened up about the nature of being Jewish, nationalistically, religiously, or otherwise, and the part which Nazism might have played in reaching conclusions. While failing to catch his own hare, Boyers nonetheless examines skillfully the criticism of those who objected that the last word in the novel was given to Hitler, and in the idiom of the survivors of Nazism. The author and his characters, Boyers maintains, are distinct.
The restoration of primacy to readings might be very welcome as a stand against ever-encroaching politicization in literature. It is eccentric, if not meaningless, to start the process at the point where literature is deliberately political. This enterprise is as confused as it is confusing.
