Most Revolutionary — Part Four — Attack — Prefatory
A Nature Shape Poem & 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.
As Palestinian Americans are denied the opportunity to speak from the stage this week at the Democratic Party National Convention, we see again the power of story, of narration, whether imaginative or clinical. The liberatory lit criticism coincidentally scheduled for this week, below, speaks directly to this timeless propaganda tactic of silencing, not least as “The most destructive bombs that have actualized this rhetoric of extermination are being furnished by America,” Ta-Nehisi Coates reports, “and more specifically, by the head of the Democratic party.” No consolation that the Republican Party propaganda machine is even more monstrous. The indefatigable Ryan Grim and Drop Site news provide great windows to the corporate-state forces overrunning the world, as well as to the many people and organizations fighting back and otherwise creating a changed and more humane culture and society.
Fruit
The mountaintop swamps
like the tropics
like rainforests everywhere
have this song
where they want you to come
lick them up
forget all family all friends
go be happy in love
go to the whole wide world
air earth breathing
NOTES ON LIBERATORY LITERATURE
Michael Hanne – The Power of the Story: Fiction and Political Change
Storytelling, it must be recognized from the start, is always associated with the exercise, in one sense or another, of power, of control. This is true of even the commonest and apparently most innocent form of storytelling in which we engage: that almost continuous internal narrative monologue which everyone maintains, sliding from memory, to imaginative reworking of past events, to fantasizing about the future, to daydreaming…. It is a curious thing that, in the liberal democracies, the word “power” is used more frequently than any other by publishers and reviewers to indicate, and invite, approval of a work of narrative fiction…. This flooding of popular critical discourse with the term “power” does not, of course, indicate a widespread belief in the capacity of narrative fiction to “change the world.” The use of “power”…indicates little more than approval of the novel’s capacity to involve and move the individual reader emotionally. Indeed the term is so devalued as to imply a denial that narrative fiction can exercise power in a wider social and political sense…. Power, as is usual in a liberal democracy, is treated as individual and unproblematic, rather than collective, structural, and problematic.
John Whalen-Bridge – Political Fiction and the American Self
The demand for an absolute separation of politics and aesthetics is today rarely voiced as an imperative, but occasionally we happen upon it whole cloth. In the section of its booklet entitled “What the Endowment Does Not Support,” the National Endowment of the Humanities makes it clear that it will support no projects that “Are directed at persuading an audience to a particular political, philosophical, religious, or ideological point of view, or that advocate a particular program of social change or action”. This policy gives us a negative definition of the political novel ... found in critical standards and even government policies that attack works of art that “advocate a particular program of social change.” Art must affirm the status quo to receive NEH funding. The political novel exposes itself to economic and critical perils that are somewhat more focused than those faced by other novels; its author will receive fewer government grants, or it may be singled out for reproach in reviews. This condition has not always obtained to the same degree, and there have been moments in this century when challenges to the idea that politics and literature are unmixable discourses were particularly strong.
Nadine Gordimer – The Essential Gesture
Long before it was projected into that of a world war, and again after the war, Camus’s natal situation was that of a writer in the conflict of Western world decolonisation – the moral question of race and power by which the twentieth century will be characterized along with its discovery of the satanic ultimate in power, the means of human self-annihilation. But the demand made upon him and the moral imperative it set up in himself are those of a writer anywhere where the people he lives among, or any sections of them marked out by race or colour or religion, are discriminated against and repressed…. Whether a writer is black or white, in South Africa the essential gesture by which he enters the brotherhood of man – which is the only definition of society that has any permanent validity – is a revolutionary gesture.... The transformation of experience remains the writer’s basic essential gesture; the lifting out of a limited category something that reveals its full meaning and significance only when the writer’s imagination has expanded it. This has never been more evident than in the context of extreme experiences of sustained personal horror that are central to the period of twentieth-century writers.... Their essential gesture can be fulfilled only in the integrity Chekhov demanded: “to describe a situation so truthfully…that the reader can no longer evade it”.
Barbara Harlow – Resistance Literature
The struggle for national liberation and independence, particularly in the twentieth century, on the part of colonized peoples in those areas of the world over which Western Europe and North America have sought socio-economic control and cultural dominion has produced a significant corpus of literary writing, both narrative and poetic…. The connection between knowledge and power, the awareness of the exploitation of knowledge by the interests of power to create a distorted historical record, is central to resistance narratives.... The texts themselves, however, are immediate interventions into the historical record, attempting to produce and impart new historical facts and analyses, what Edward Said has referred to as “new objects for a new kind of knowledge...”
A.P. Foulkes – Literature and Propaganda
If we refer to the nineteenth century as the Age of Ideology, then it seems even more appropriate to regard the present century as the Age of Propaganda…. The relationship of literature and art to propaganda is not at all straightforward, and would in any case be dismissed as insignificant by many modern critics, whose evaluative criteria would lead them to make a distinction between “real literature” and “tendentious” writing.... [The] “illusion of pure aestheticism” was for Orwell a reminder that “propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose—a political, social and religious purpose—that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs”. The propagandistic or demystifying moment of literary communication may be inseparable from its aesthetic function….