Most Revolutionary — Part Five — Date — Prefatory
Liberatory Criticism
MOST REVOLUTIONARY — A SERIALIZED NOVEL
During a killer Iowa blizzard, fearless DAPL militant and radical plant nursery grower Sabia Perez first saves then kidnaps the stranded President of the USA to ransom a better world.
Self Act
Now is the time to change.
A change so subtle no one will know
it is consciously carried out.
A change so drastic
people may hesitate in their recognition.
A change so final
it goes virtually unremarked.
NOTES ON LIBERATORY LITERATURE
Ralph Ellison — “The Art of Fiction: An Interview”
I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest. Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground is, among other things, a protest against the limitations of nineteenth-century rationalism; Don Quixote, Man’s Fate, Oedipus Rex, The Trial—all these embody protest, even against the limitation of human life itself. If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens and Twain?
Ann Petry — “The Novel as Social Criticism,” African American Literary Criticism, 1773-2000 (Hazel Arnett Ervin, Ed.)
Many a socially conscious novelist is merely a man or woman with a conscience.
Alex Comfort — The Novel and Our Time
Because of the involvement of the novel form with the entire structure of Westernism ... its history is the history of a continuous movement to the present point ... at which his success or failure depends on his power of comprehension as much as on his power of imaginative creation. The period of early industrialism and the rise of socialism coincided closely with the period at which conscious insight into history began to be a prime qualification for the novelist, and the novel itself reached its greatest heights in the hands of those writers who were capable of fulfilling those conditions before they became inescapable. To see it all we need to look at France and Russia, but in English literature alone there is a well-marked turning point in Dickens and Thackeray. Before them, narration, style, humour, and a sense of magnitudes qualify a novel for major achievement; after them, the criterion is an increasingly responsible understanding of social and historical events….
Whether we [novelists] are able to influence human conduct will depend very largely upon the number of people in a given asocial society who react by rational aggression towards that society rather than by irrational aggression towards their fellow individuals. The social role of the novel will depend very largely, in coming years, upon the persistence of sufficient rationally disobedient individuals to make novel-writing of the kind I have described possible.... While interpretation rather than an attempt to convince is the chief object of art, the novel is more apt than any other literary form to exert direct pressure upon the growth and forming of ideas, and it will do so whether we intend that or not…. Because of the essential humanity which a writer must possess to write major novels, I am confident that it will play a large part in the events which precede the end of asociality, and should it pass out of currency as a form, it will be replaced by the unanimous literature of tyranny or the spontaneous social literature of a free society, depending upon how far its readers are able to share and imbibe the responsibility of its best practitioners....
The responsible writer sees everyone naked, and is as naked himself. He is not devoid of political and moral judgments, but he makes them equally. In reading, therefore, ask: Is this writer capable of recognizing a human being? Is he able to reject the art of diverse weights, for which an act identical in every respect is a heroic but regrettable necessity when done by Our Side and a contemptible atrocity when done by Their Side? Is his judgment of human decisions level or weighted: does he know filth from food, whatever the wrapper? If he does, he is capable of being a great artist under barbarianism, and if not, he is another part of barbarism made manifest.
Terry Eagleton — Literary Theory
Radical critics…have a set of social priorities with which most people at present tend to disagree. This is why they are commonly dismissed as “ideological”, because “ideology” is always a way of describing other people’s interests rather than our own.
George Orwell — “The Freedom of the Press”
The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that “it wouldn’t do” to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is “not done” to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trouser in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
Larry Beinhart — “Politics & Mysteries”
In a mystery (and all the sub-genres) crime is personal. Hands on.... If some distant and cool and impersonal act of policy impels the criminal act, that allows us, the readers, to make the translation from the institutional to the personal. Politics offers us something real and vital for the story to be about. The story, ideally, takes us past the rhetoric and the posturing, to the reality of the politics. A great symbiosis. That explains why lots and lots of writers would combine politics and mysteries. But they don’t. Even when they do, it’s rarely about politics as policy. It’s mostly politics as a setting.... Fiction, specifically mystery fiction, is the tool that I have available to me to talk about the unreality of our public mythologies.