I
It seems to me that in the last 100 years or so there have
been at least three main modes of viewing the transformative function of
literature or art in general (I will use the concepts poetry, art and writing more or less interchangeably in
the following pages). The first view is the view of the politically active
author – be she socialist or conservative or whatnot. In her case every work
must have a decisive social role, it must unveil injustices or wrongs and
direct us, the reading populace, towards justice and revolution. If it fails to
do so – or even worse, does not try – the work can only be categorised as "banal"
or "evil". It goes without saying that for each group – socialist,
conservative, etc. – the work must conform to present manifestations of the ideologies
in question.
It can
be argued that most work that does not adhere to this kind of direct political
writing merely supports the status quo – i.e. the "ruling ideology",
the water in which we boil – of any given time and place, not only by not
confronting it directly, but also by preaching the normative. For instance, a
reader will not notice anything misogynistic about a novel which is the produce
of a society where misogyny is not recognized; so when a 19th century reader
fawns over Jane Austen's novels he may not realize that the female characters
have no agency. Such work may of course later be seen as either a portrayal of
such injustice, as subverting it or as simply advocating it, maintaining its
continual normalisation.
The
second view is the romantic view that "poetry makes nothing happen",
as W.H. Auden put it. Poetry is from this perspective a thing in and of itself,
a mode of being, a mode of thinking, which is separate from the mundane
intentions of mere people. Art, it follows, is created by a talent with a
higher sensibility, disconnected from the writer-as-human, an instinctual kind
of thinking, semi-religious, very spiritual, what we call inspiration (divine
or otherwise). Ideas are thereby not thought, they come; the artist simply fishes
them out of the ether; her role is the role of the visionary, to see what
others don't: that in the rock there is a sculpture of a man on a horse and to
then cull it out. Artists of this kind can hardly be held accountable for the
ethical or moral content of their work, since it was never theirs to begin
with. The art is the subject, the artist the object. You might as well shake
your fist at God as objecting to its politics.
It is perhaps
from this vantage point that Plato objected to poetry as inherently unethical,
it being simultaneously useless and based in falsehood, numbing the faculties
of reason, writing that the poet "knows nothing of true existence, he
knows appearance only". It is also here that a latter-time subversive
poetry is born: the poetry which wishes not to be part of the contemporary
market place; be it the schools of slow poetry, valuing as they do the personal
connection (poet-speaks-to-reader-one-on-one
as opposed to poet-speaks-to-the-populace);
or the tongue-in-cheek post-avant writer, claiming as she does that since
poetry is inherently worthless the mere printing of it devalues the paper it is
written on, and thereby undermines capitalism regardless of the content of the
poems.
This
last type of poetry also belongs to the third category, which is the view that
the role of writing, art, or poetry is simply to disrupt the function of the
world. This is art that means to make a difference but leaves the direction of that
difference up to other powers – be they inspiration, democratic congress,
God, the individual or something else entirely. This includes the transgressive
arts, the Zen-like craziness meant simply to jolt us out of our otherwise
catatonic existence, as well as those contemplative novels which mean to
"complicate" and "explicate" the dramas of our lives in
order to "move" us, shake our very foundations, without any
particular view of how, or a concrete opinion on what was wrong with our
foundations to begin with.
II
The boundaries between these three perspectives are not
altogether clear to me; and I am not sure where to situate certain works within
them, as a reader or as a writer. In fact I am quite sure the borders are
blurred and most writers' intentions a complete mess, like most readers'
interpretations. I would however like to take three examples of how work may
change, or try to change, the world. One of the examples is from my reading,
one is from a work I've heard about (but very few have actually experienced)
and one is from my writing.
Crime and Punishment is the book which
has had the profoundest impact on me. When I first read it at seventeen I felt
that the world would never be the same and I often wonder who I would've become
had I not read it. But in what way did it change me? I have hardly ever felt
that the killing of little old ladies is normative behavior. And I am not sure
that I am truly incapable of mindlessly reaping the benefits of death – as
long as I don't need to do the killing myself. And I don't go around confessing
all the evils I've done – or even feeling particularly pained by them. Did
I personally confuse heroic egotism with social bravery, and have I stopped
since? That's the closest I can get guessing.
But what if Crime and Punishment was a book of the
same overall emotional and artistic quality – written with the same passion,
the same love – but advocated ... I don't know ... racism? What if I were to
tell you that it was a thoroughly misogynistic book – don't google it – would
you think less of it? 5% less? 10% less?
25% less? Or is it all the same? Would you think less of me, having been
changed by a misogynistic book?
The
second more recent example, worthy of note, is Kenneth Goldsmith's
"uncreative writing" – a practice mostly focused on reframing already
existent texts, in a kindred manner to Duchamps famous framing a urinal as a
fountain. Goldsmith has framed weather reports as lyrical poetry, an entire
newspaper word for word as experimental narrative etc. etc. Recently he took
the autopsy report of Michael Brown – the young man shot dead by the police in
Ferguson – and read it slightly edited as if it was his poem entitled "The Body of Michael Brown". Goldsmith
did this at an event at Brown University called Interrupt 3. The work was
received with anger, to say the least, and Goldsmith was accused of crimes
ranging from shameless self-promotion – coat-tailing on the politics of the now
– to appropriating the "black body" in a way reminiscent of slavery,
no less. Now, Goldsmith has staked out a corner for himself as an apolitical
writer – or at least one whose work cannot be taken at face value, writing at
one time:
[...] far be it for
the conceptual writer to morally or politically dictate words that aren’t
theirs. The choice or machine that makes the poem sets the political agenda in
motion, which is often times morally or politically reprehensible to the author.
The politics of „The Body of Michael Brown“
could never simply be the politics of Kenneth Goldsmith, they are always also
the politics of the writers of the original text, as well as the politics of
those who receive the work. In his excuse for the work, posted on Facebook a
few days after the event, Goldsmith ends with the words: Ecce homo, behold the man – in effect claiming to be the
mirror, to be the messenger, and neither the image nor the message itself. As
far as interpreting the intentions of Goldsmith himself, "The Body of
Michael Brown" could easily have been read as an act of solidarity – like
most work written about racism in America, even when written by white people –
but ended up being read as an inherently racist attack, a sort of continuation
of the murder by other means.
Thirdly
and lastly, I've recently finished the third – and probably last – in
a series of novels where I've attempted to write with what I refer to as an "honest
political agenda". How I define "honest" here is based on the
feeling that once you've made an emotional connection to a person, a reader
– as I am sure most writers aim to do with their readers, although
admittedly this connection is only one-way – you have a certain responsibility
to not manipulate them. In a two-way emotional connection there can be a
certain amount of fencing – all lovers also struggle. But when reading an
emotionally harrowing novel which then tells you how to behave morally,
socially or politically – or even more likely whom to judge, how and for what – you find yourself
defenseless, or at least weakened by the emotional impact of the story. It's
like loving someone who on the one hand refuses to see you, and on the other
makes stringent moral demands of you (incidentally this would be the
relationship many people have to God). You're given the option accepting the
morale of the story or not, and your decision will not be separated from your
overall judgment of the book, your liking the characters or lamenting their
fates.
The
political parable of downtrodden-person-tries-to-find-happiness-and-is-stepped-on
– be it in the manner of Gorkis social-realism or Rands objectivism – is not
only dead but dishonest. You cannot approach your reader with less respect than
those you love; a reader is not an object whose mind you need to change, but a
subject whose mind and heart you are obligated to engage.
In
the three novels I mentioned – Kindness,
Evil, and Stupidity, the last of which is yet unpublished – I have tried three
ways of engaging, all of which entail quite a bit of political, social and
moral signaling, while attempting not to be heuristic. In Kindness, which deals with national bankruptcy and the Icelandic
left, this engagement is sought through hyperbole or hysteria – taking the
narrative always a step further than one would plausibly do, if one were
honestly trying to advocate political change (the book ends with every single
refugee in the world coming to Iceland; and Iceland simply dealing with it, as
you would deal with any other fait accompli). In Evil, which deals with racism, otherness and the holocaust, I try
to engage through directly adressing the reader, both as narrator, so that the
reader constantly feels adressed (rather than disappearing into story which tells
itself, bearing truth-without-perspective), and by embedding the politics
within direct, repeated (and often contradictory) rhetorics. In Stupidity – which is a dystopian novel –
I've concentrated on simply amplifying a handful of known features of
contemporary society (most notably, surveillance and social media) and
performing the world most familiar to me – i.e. life of writers, in my hometown
etc – within those amplified conditions in a manner sparse enough that each
reader needs to fill in a lot of the blanks (albeit with my insinuations) for
themselves. The commentary in the novel about what the world actually looks
like in this supposed future would probably fit on a single A4 page.
III
I have at times wished to differentiate
between good (i.e. quality) and bad novels on the one hand, and good (i.e. kind)
and evil novels on the other. A novel could thereby be kind yet bad – this
is probably the most common form the political novel takes, well meaning but
trite – and just as surely it could be good and evil; that is to say, well
written, captivating, enthralling, yet containing a principally hateful
message. It goes without saying that such a message would need to be coded – or
even subconscious – because we would all naturally despise a novel we
experience as hateful. We'd instinctively search it for the aesthetic fault
needed to justify disregarding its beauty, or perhaps even make its particular aesthetic
signify something evil (think of Leni Riefenstahls defenders and detractors) so
that anything resembling it in the future immediately is met with disdain
(think of the feeling you get seeing swastikas in Asia).
What
frightens me most, though, is that all of the novels – or poems or artwork –
that we enjoy, or even read, whose socially upheaving and progressive message
we celebrate, are novels that in fact leave us unchanged, unmoved, novels which
strengthen the foundations of what we already call our lives, our morals and
our politics – not too mention the delightable status quo. That we as readers
wish for novels to replicate us, so that we feel more real; and we as writers
just want to make everyone like us (in both senses of the term). This leaves me
feeling stuck in a hellish circle of banality.
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