To the Editors:
In the February issue of The New Criterion, David Pryce-Jones so entirely and deliberately misrepresents my book Atrocity and Amnesia that I can only wonder what made him suppose he would get away with it. He even goes so far as to tar with the Marxist brush a book several of whose chapters celebrate writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, V. S. Naipaul, and Saul Bellow. But then a reyiewer who is inclined to smell a Marxist under every bed that has not been tucked and fitted in the best neoconservative way can hardly be expected to see what is in front of his ever so sensitive nose. In any case, Mr. Pryce-Jones ought at least to have a few simple questions and provocations put to him:
1. How is it possible for a given book—in this case, mine—“to treat political novels as academic documents,” that is, “to carry the aesthetic point of view to an extreme,” while at the same time falling prey to a “vulgar Marxism” which is said “to make a common political cause out of assorted writers”? The utter confusion and senselessness revealed in this example is characteristic of the entire piece by Mr. Pryce-Jones.
2. How can a person who has read a book detailing the political activities of a wide range of characters living in places like South Africa, the Belgian Congo, Haiti, Paraguay, and so on, speak about the book’s failure to specify “what activism might really be like”? Mr. Pryce-Jones refers in passing to my chapter on Nadine Gordimer. Could he have forgotten that it deals almost entirely, and at great length, with a family of South African activists named Burger?
3. How can a reviewer who begins by descrying the politicization of literature—by which, presumably, he means the tendency to judge works of literature by asking whether the politics of those works or their authors corresponds to one’s own—allow himself a sentence like the following: “Marquez does permanent Party duty, in whatever imaginative form it might be cast in his fiction”? From such a sentence we may conclude only that Mr. Pryce-Jones doesn’t care what Garcia Marquez’s novels actually say or do. He knows that the novelist is a frequent habitue of Castro’s Cuba, and that is all he needs to know about him or his fiction to conclude that the object of his writing is political propaganda. If the propaganda is discernible to no one, if even Mr. Pryce-Jones cannot make out in a work like Autumn of the Patriarch the sinister lineaments of the Party member, well, just think how insidious are the obfuscations of these devilishly clever Latinos! Or is there some other meaning lurking in Mr. Pryce-Jones’s sentence, and the other sentences like it in a review which is bent on nothing but the politicization of literary discourse?
4. Is it cricket—that’s the game respectable, stolidly anti-Communist British boys like Mr. Pryce-Jones are supposed to play, I believe—for a reviewer to write that “in the world as it is, every one of them [the novels I discuss] had a specific context and purpose,” when the obvious intent of that sentence in context is to suggest, whatever the evidence to the contrary, that poor benighted Boyers wouldn’t know a context from a cantaloupe? A reader has only to consult the footnotes of my book to discover the contexts Mr. Pryce-Jones misses. Or would he not credit as evidence of context references to demographic studies bearing upon Naipaul’s accounts of Africa; or detailed references to official government accounts of South African township riots in Soweto and Sharpeville; or abundant references to important scholarly works on Soviet society under Stalin or the German population under Hitler? Reasonable persons may argue about the adequacy of these materials to the issues raised by the novels and discussed in my book. But the suggestion that my book does not care about specific contexts is an outrageous falsehood and may not be allowed to stand.
To any reader of The New Criterion interested in what now passes for responsible literary journalism I’ll be happy to send a more extensive list of questions, equally tedious, which I should like one day to put to Mr. Pryce-Jones.
Robert Boyers
Skidmore College
Saratoga Springs, NY
David Pryce-Jones replies:
It must be quite frightful that laughter from the cricket pitches should reach as far as Skidmore College. Who could have imagined such a thing? Another unwholesome gust is prompted by what Professor Boyers writes, with his busy metaphors about beds and smells.
Repeating myself to someone who will not pay attention is a waste of time. I cannot find equivalence between novels which are disposed to totalitarianism and those disposed against it. I think that who is saying what, and when and where and why, are matters upon which moral judgments turn, and that these judgments are not relative.
Professor Boyers holds otherwise; he prefers to contrive theses whereby political novels of incompatible kinds are put upon the same standing—a strange proceeding which leads him to borrow from aestheticism as from vulgar Marxism, according to his needs for argument. Too bad.