Subversive

Given the debate that ensued over this post, perhaps it is time I further clarified my position on the relationship between politics and fiction, more generally about the social role literature is presumed to have.

When I use the word "politics" in this context, I am referring to its narrowest, most concrete meaning: "the art or science concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy"; "the art or science concerned with winning and holding control over a government"; "political actions, practices, or policies." In my opinion, when writers or critics speak of fiction as being "political," they most often mean that it concerns some subject or idea that might have some immediate consequence in terms of "influencing governmental policy." The website Literature and Social Change puts it this way:

Imaginative writing can be both literary and political simultaneously, and inevitably is, to varying degrees. In its own way, fiction can accomplish something similar to what Noam Chomsky and many other progressive workers try to accomplish through non-fiction: the creation of works that clarify and better the world socially, politically, culturally. . . .

Right down to the invocation of Chomsky, this is the sort of thing I object to when I hear talk about "political literature." Notice how this very definition actually erases itself: How can fiction "be both literary and political simultaneously" if it is attempting to do what "many other progressive workers try to accomplish through non-fiction"? If the goal is so resolutely political, it can't also be literary, or the two terms are simply washed of their meaning. Further, since the goal, to the extent it can be reached, is going to be reached more readily through non-fiction (why bother with the artsy stuff?), why not just stick to nonfiction? Is it somehow not glamorous enough? Needs to be gussied up with some "literature"?

Perhaps when some people speak of the "political" impact of fiction, they really just mean that works of fiction "reflect" the society that produces them, or that some readers might find what they read in a work of fiction to have some sort of broader, social relevance. But this is then made out to be something with much more significance than it really has. How can a work of literature not reflect the social forces that have made themselves felt to the writer, since the writer belongs to his/her society and unavoidably responds to such forces? Readers may indeed find a particular novel or poem to have social implications, but this does not mean that the work was written to have this effect. Certainly such implications can be a salubrious side-benefit to an otherwise attentive reading experience, but surely few writers really want these particular implications to be the only ones their work might have. I don't want to close off the possible meanings a work of literature might have for an individual reader, but to value fiction or poetry primarily for its social commentary is not really to give your full attention to what literature has to offer.

Sometimes, especially among academics, the "political" value of literature is identified more specifically as its capacity to be "subversive" or "transgressive." As M. Keith Booker puts it in his book Techniques of Subversion in Modern Literature, "After all, even the most transgressive works of literature do not in general immediately send their readers into the streets carrying banners and shouting slogans. Transgressive literature works more subtly, by chipping away at certain modes of thinking that contribute to the perpetuation of oppressive political structures." To the extent that literature professors still put any value at all on literature itself, it is ususally through this construct of the subversive. Not all works of literature finally measure up, of course--some are simply hopeless in this context, and since for such critics there is no other context, they are better consigned to the trash heap of literary history--but even those that don't seem to hold out much promise of being transgressive in any obvious way can be shown to have their transgressive moments if the critic digs hard enough and misreads strenuously enough. Booker, for example, finds Gilbert Sorrentino hopeless, his "mere rule breaking for the sake of rule breaking" insufficiently "transgressive in a genuine political sense, i.e. challenging existing dominant ideologies in a way that contributes to the process of social change." On the other hand, the fiction of Monique Wittig " [harnesses] the transgressive techniques that are inherent in sexuality not in the service of subjectivized experience but of a socialized and communal political statement." Beware of those "subjectivized experiences."

So-called "conservative" defenders of art or literature are finally no better, even though they frequently claim to be "depoliticizing" the arts. In a recent interiew at Front Page, Roger Kimball says of academic criticism in general that "One common ingredient is an impatience with the idea of intrinsic merit or intrinsic worth: a poem, a novel, a “text” of any sort never means what it appears to say but is always an essentially subversive document whose aim is to undermine established values." One might think this is a defense of the aesthetic in art, but it's really just another version of poltics. "Intrinsic merit" is itself a political tool; as Kimball also puts it in the same interview: "The great enemy of the totalitarian impulse, in intellectual life as well as in politics, is the idea of intrinsic worth." Putting aside the unexamined metaphysical assumptions informing the notion of "intrinsic worth," what Kimball really wants to recover is not art itself but "the traditional fabric of manners and morals that stands behind the work of art." For someone like Roger Kimball, art is no more to be valued for its real aesthetic qualities (which do often indeed rip at the "traditional fabric" he wants to preserve), but for the way in which it can be enlisted to enforce a "traditional" social order. In the end, people like Roger Kimball and M. Keith Booker are dancing a kind of vicious dance together, each partner despising the other but unable to let go.

Do I then think literature is merely a "subjective experience" or, even worse, just "entertainment"? Absolutely not, although it is those things first and foremost. A "subjective experience" of art or literature can indeed be a very profound one, even transforming the way the subject thinks about him/herself as well as the social world into which the reader must inevitabley return. I might even say that such an experience can ultimately prove "subversive" in its effects, as long as the word is used in something like the sense conveyed by the poet Stephen Dunn, also in a recent interview:

No, I don't think [artists] have a moral obligation, except maybe to be interesting. Or, if they do, it's to subvert the status quo by resisting official versions of it, then reconstructing it so others can see it anew. Not with an agenda in mind, but through simply trying to find the right language for what is elusive. . .

"Official versions" of the status quo are not just political. Such versions can be imposed by family or by our own incuriosity, or by society and culture more broadly. They are all "official" versions of the way things are that we have simply come to accept and haven't questioned much. Works of literature can provoke us into questioning them by showing us that there are always alternative versions, that descriptions of reality are only tentative and that a final understanding of the way things are isn't going to be possible. (Art that suggests there can be a final understanding isn't really art.) Literature does this both through its content--the alternative versions we're presented with--and through form--the way in which the perceived world is "reconstructed," to use Dunn's word. Literature in its aesthetic dimension--literally, the "art" by which it is made--displays to us the imagination at work, reminds us that there are effectively no limits to the human imagination.

To me, this is all indeed powerfully subversive. Through art we become aware that the world can always be remade. Art is the enemy of all certainties and settled doctrines. This is not likely to be acceptable to political critics of either the left or the right, the Bookers or the Kimballs, which is why I would say that in the final analysis such critics don't really much like art at all. They literally don't have any use for it, unless it can be distorted to suit their own ideological predispositions. As Stephen Dunn says, poets and fiction writers are "trying to find the right language for what is elusive." And afterwards, it remains elusive. In my opinion, the only way that literature can "clarify and better the world socially, politically, culturally" is by revealing to us, perhaps to our dismay, that this is a fact.

Comments

[Tony Christini]

That will be news to the people and organizations who produce and publish his plays. And Howard Zinn is a great historian, to say the least.

[Dan Green]

If you think The Jungle and Waiting for Lefty are "literary," then we embrace wildly divergent definitions of the term. And quoting Howard Zinn does nothing for me. He may or may not be a reputable historian, but he knows nothing about literature.

[Tony Christini]

Probably I should note I accidentally left off a quotation mark after the last CIO (in my previous post). The last few sentences, beginning with "Political art" are my own, though Michael Denning expresses much the same ideas in The Cultural Front.

[Tony Christini]

You write: How can fiction "be both literary and political simultaneously" if it is attempting to do what "many other progressive workers try to accomplish through non-fiction"?

-->Easily. The technique is different, though the goal is the same. Same purpose, different medium. An analogy would be to select various mediums for communication of a particular point or to reach a particular goal: mouth, pen, internet, radio, TV, film. The medium may well affect both how and what is done to communicate, but the goal remains the same. The goal, the political point(s), will likely be achieved in different ways when choosing to communicate or express by prose (non-fiction or fiction) or poetry or drama or song or painting, etc…

You write: If the goal is so resolutely political, it can't also be literary, or the two terms are simply washed of their meaning.

-->This is not argument, or evidence, or explanation. It is simply your assertion re-asserted. In my previous posts, I provided evidence and explanation that can be examined. Here is some of it again:

(1994) Michael Hanne, The Power of the Story: Fiction and Political Change: “One of the earliest, and best known, examples of a novel which is claimed to have exercised a massive, direct, social influence is Goethe’s story of hopeless love, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which is said to have so stirred the feelings of a whole generation of young readers all over Western Europe that a number were recorded as committing suicide in imitation of its lovesick hero. Of a very different kind is the impact claimed for the novels of Dickens and Charles Kingsley, which have been credited with contributing, through the exposure of some of the social evils of mid-nineteenth century Britain, to the most important pieces of reform legislation enacted in the later part of the century. Perhaps the most specific (and best-documented) claim for a novel’s leading to significant legislative change relates to the publication in 1906 of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which, through its depiction of the lives of workers in the Chicago meatpacking industry, is reliably said to have been instrumental in ensuring the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in the U.S. Congress a few months later…. (A curious knock-on effect of the widespread anxiety about the health risks associated with canned foods provoked by The Jungle was the immediate collapse of whole communities based on canning quite remote from Chicago—including those in my country, New Zealand.)”

You write: Further, since the goal, to the extent it can be reached, is going to be reached more readily through non-fiction (why bother with the artsy stuff?), why not just stick to nonfiction

-->There are a number of reasons why people who are trying to create social and political change should not just stick to nonfiction (which itself must not necessarily be without strong aesthetic qualities). First, because life does not “just stick to nonfiction.” So why erase all political content, communication and impact from art…were it possible? That would obviously only hinder social change because opportunities are being missed (for making a political impact). (I don't think all art should be political. I happen to love many of Emily Dickinson's poems that are full of nature imagery in which I detect essentially no political elements and in which I could not care less if there is anything political or not.) Second, nobody knows what is most effective for reaching “the goal” of creating social and political change. In fact, there is some evidence that storytelling itself may be the most effective means for achieving change. Also, some people, perhaps some cultures and ages are better situated to act and make impacts in aesthetic artistic ways. Howard Zinn notes:

"The political power is controlled by the corporate elite, and the arts are the locale for a kind of guerilla warfare, in the sense that guerrillas in a totalitarian situation look for apertures and opportunities where they can have an effect. When tyrannies are overthrown -- as, for instance, in fascist Spain or the Soviet Union -- it starts in the culture, which is the only area where people can have some freedom.... Art makes you think about reality in a way that a simple non-fiction account could not possibly match.... Of course different forms of art have different possibilities of transforming people's consciousness. The art of literature -- that is more direct. The art of poetry may be a little more indirect. Music could be as direct as anti-war songs or maybe more subtle. Paintings can be very directly political, like the paintings that were done by Goya during the Napoleanic war, showing the horrors of war. Art can be very direct, but it can also be subtle, and yet still by saying something about the human condition -- have an effect on people's consciousnesses.... Very often, artists who venture out into the field of politics and make political statements feel uncertain because they know that other artists -- fellow artists and the public outside the art world -- will look at them askance and say, 'They shouldn't be doing this, they shouldn't be singing about war, they should just be entertaining.' It may not stop them from doing what they want to do, but it helps them when they hear somebody tell them that this is historically the great role of artists. This is how artists have inspired social change.

And Michael Denning, in The Cultural Front notes:

“On 6 January 1935, the audience at New York’s Civic Repertory Theatre, 1,400 strong, chanted ‘Strike! Strike!’ at the end of the first performance of Waiting for Lefty. An unknown one-act play about a taxi strike by an unknown playwright, performed by Group Theatre actors to benefit the left-wing magazine New Theatre, Waiting for Lefty captured the imagination of this movement; theater groups across the country produced it. By the end of the year, Waiting for Lefty was ‘the most widely performed play in America—and the most widely banned.’ America, it seemed, was waiting for lefty. The heart of this cultural front was a new generation of plebeian artists and intellectuals who had grown up in the immigrant and black working-class neighborhoods of the modernist metropolis. They were the second generation of the second wave of immigration….” “A new radical culture was taking shape….” “In September 1934, a national strike became the largest strike in a single industry in American history, involving 400,000 workers from Maine to Alabama. Strikes in California’s factories in the fields were the largest agricultural strikes in American history. These strikes seared the imaginations of young writers and artists. ‘I have never been in a strike before,’ Meridel Le Sueur wrote of the Minneapolis General Strike. ‘I felt my feet join in that strange shuffle of thousands of bodies moving with direction, of thousands of feet, and my own breath. As if an electric charge had passed through me, my hair stood on end. I was marching.’ ‘The strike taught me that I was definitely a part of the labor movement,’ the Filipino poet Carlos Bulosan later wrote of a lettuce strike in Lompoc. ‘From this day onward my life became one long conspiracy … I was so intensely fired by this dream of a better America that I had completely forgotten myself.’ A year later, in the fall of 1935, the leader of the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis, responded to the labor uprisings by forming the CIO (Committee for, later Congress of, Industrial Organizations). The next two decades were the age of the CIO.

Political art can open people’s eyes, inspire people, motivate people; it can teach and energize. Sometimes the impact is quite direct, sometimes indirect—either way, often powerful. There is plenty of evidence for this. Moreover, it makes sense.

[Dan Green]

"Works tinged by references to child sexuality" is much different from what Kevin means by "child pornography." I hope.

[Hapax Legomenon]

.makes child pornography attractive."
Well, it may depend on your definition, and what societal norms happen to be and what types of mediums are available, but I can think of many works.

In my experience with erotic fiction, there are a lot of works tinged by references to child sexuality. In fact it is pervasive (even in the highbrow works). And I'm not just talking about the usual suspects (Romeo & Juliet, etc).

I'm working on a lengthy critical analysis of erotic writer Marco Vassi, whose subjects sometimes explore such taboos to artistic success (I would argue).

This is a tangential point, and perhaps I am touching on a point about moral suasion rather than political suasion.

[Dan Green]

Kevin,

This is probably where we most unavoidably disagree. For me, a work of art that "undermines belief in a transcendent truth" is doing its job. If there is such a thing as "transcendent truth" (and I don't think there is), especially where art is concerned, and especially if this truth gets enforced by some self-appointed arbiter, then art couldn't be art at all unless it reinforced this truth--a "totalitarian impulse" indeed.

I am unaware of any "compelling work of art that. . .makes child pornography attractive."

[Kevin Holtsberry]

I am leery of art as a weapon in the cultural wars but I think you take aestheticism and then give it a "subversive" or radical twist at the end. Perhaps this is my banal humanism coming through but, one can appreciate art for art's sake on one level and yet see it as an important part of social health as well.

In this way something can be great art but ultimately be destructive. For example, one can appreciate the aesthetic merit of Phillip Pullman's work for example but believe that in so far as it undermines belief in a transcendent truth that it is destructive. Or say a compelling work of art that, through its aesthetic appeal, makes child pornography attractive. Perhaps that is a extreme example, but it seems to me that it is one thing to try and force art to serve politics and another thing to view art in support of the true and good as better than art that subverts those aspects of society.

[amcorrea]

Thank you, thank you!