The Revolutionary Moment in the Day & Novel
The Fight in Story
Where’s all the explicit and overt revolutionary fiction topical to the moment?
While my two novels of revolt and revolution Loop Day and Most Revolutionary continue to roll along here in serial form, this post is the first of a few essays on the intense political attacks, confusion, and deceit by the establishment (literary and otherwise) that gut much liberatory lit, let alone revolutionary imaginative work and critical thinking. The American literary establishment knows well how to rip the revolutionary guts out of fiction, as shown by its long and grotesque history of doing so.
This post shows key flashpoints in this brute history. It’s an excerpt from Fiction Gutted, which, nearly two decades on, remains directly and topically on point to the genocidal baby-killing moment.
In a subsequent post of this sort, I’ll look briefly at one of the arguably most damaging and certainly most blatant forms of intellectual deceit and enduring confusion in the literary establishment, regarding the identity of the author of the works of “William Shakespeare” — a pseudonym if there ever was one — a pen name faked and forced for over 400 years, due to the original intense power and politics surrounding and contained within the specific works and their publication — works acclaimed for many years now to be some of the greatest imaginative literature of all time in the English language, or the greatest, and by the literary figure considered to be preeminent in the entire language.
I don’t happen to be especially endeared to the works of “Shakespeare” though I recognize the immense talent and achievement, not to mention the perhaps unrivaled vocabulary of this extraordinary individual. By now equally impressive to the literary achievement is the reality that the political figures and institutions and ideologies that feared these imaginative works so intensely helped cause the author’s identity to be scrubbed from history for over four centuries, ongoing, despite being considered to be the preeminent author and imaginative writer in the entire language, one of the most globally dominant languages today, and the language of the most powerful empire in world history, by far. The heated persistence of the 400 year-old lie seems to me to be at least equally impressive to the extremely highly esteemed literary quality of the works themselves.
Jumping ahead from the late 1500s of “Shakespeare” to the Enlightenment and through all the centuries since, we find that the political literary situation in some basic ways is unimproved in what the public is permitted to be exposed to and to know. The point and effect is to shatter consciousness, including consciousness of the liberatory, the revolutionary, and to condition people to the intolerable, including the genocidal, and by now the wholesale ecocide of Earth. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o — Decolonising The Mind: “…the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism … is the cultural bomb.” Hugo Chavez — “The Empire sows death with its weapons. In contrast, these are our guns: books, ideas, culture.” The establishment too knows that “books, ideas, culture” have the power of guns. Thus the battles for and against Empire, for and against Revolution are waged on many fronts. Imaginative story and art, its criticism and its production and distribution, are vital fronts with powerful impact where important battles are won or lost.
The Revolutionary Moment in the Day & Novel — The Fight in Story
Misrepresentation 25 — fiction of the present is passé:
… The importance of the relationship between imaginative literature and social and political issues has been understood in critical circles since at least the eighteenth century, notes Edmund Wilson in "The Historical Interpretation of Literature," nor are these understandings and explorations devoid of aesthetic concerns and qualities. When [star literary critic James Wood] brings up the social novel, he characteristically does so to dismiss it, or to encourage authors to deviate from it in meaningful ways, so as to get "stories, above all, about individual consciousness, not about the consciousness of Manhattan" or about, say, Ruralville. This seems to be dubious advice, as contemporary epic novelists obviously sense. It scarcely takes prominent twentieth century philosopher John Dewey to note in The Public and Its Problems (1927) that "Even if 'consciousness' were the wholly private matter that the individualistic tradition in philosophy supposes it to be, it would still be true that consciousness is of objects, not of itself." Just so, many leading novelists apparently intuit that if they are to fully represent personal consciousness they had better dramatically incorporate not only people but places, things, and events on a global level in a world where by now entire societies and the persons within them are greatly globally interdependent and interactive, in myriad visible and invisible ways.
The main problem is that much contemporary sociopolitical, or public, reality is as incomprehensible or as out of bounds to the rest of the establishment as it is to Wood. Establishment writers are fond of quoting or following the near literal lines of Stendhal's famed prose in the Red and the Black:
Politics…is a millstone tied to the neck of literature, and drowns it in less than six months. Politics in imaginative work is like a shot in the middle of a concert. The noise is deafening but it imparts no energy. It doesn't harmonize with the sound of any other instrument. Such political talk mortally offends half of one's readers – and bores the other half, who, in a different context, in the morning paper, find such things interesting and lively…
Stendhal's statement succinctly captures a certain literature establishment ideology, an orthodoxy, that typically denies it is ideology/orthodoxy. Stendhal's words are one famous version of the creed at least. Meanwhile the establishment virtually never quotes Stendhal's immediate next paragraph, nor makes note of what then follows:
If your characters don't talk politics, replies the editor, this is no longer France in 1830, and your book is not the mirror you pretend it to be…
The novel then dives into political speech and discussion for the next 9 pages.
Surely politics are inherently as fit for story as any other topic. In any case, the mounds of ostensibly nonpolitical topics and fictions can easily come across as just as offensive (politically and otherwise) and white-noise-deafening and as boring as anything labeled political. Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola – a powerhouse line of (French) novelists. Flaubert is the least prolific of the five and the least socially engaged, especially in the work for which he is most renowned and especially by longstanding establishment reputation. He is the establishment's pet and model, and amulet against significant breaching of its control. He is a much venerated former "lover" to Wood whose most celebrated pair of works explore monied miasmic "romances" and sentiments centrally. Meanwhile, Hugo's main novels reveal people battling social injustice and related despair – working up, out, and along rather than down, in, and arrested. Though one can learn from the latter work, amid its tedious and severe limits, Flaubert is no great "spring" of literature, certainly not moreso than his three great countrymen predecessors, and in my view all of them much less so than Hugo of Les Misérables, that novel of novels which knows well – lucidly, with liberation – in moving and profound utterance, what is what, both public and private, its empathetic and useful emphasis on the vital public realities of the societal and the personal, without which private realities and preoccupations (miasmic or otherwise) can draw only limited breath.
Misrepresentation 26 — the reactionary and status quo as preeminent literary political fiction: "What I am writing now is a tendentious thing," famously wrote Dostoevsky about his accomplished novel The Possessed. "I feel like saying everything as passionately as possible. (Let the nihilists and the Westerners scream that I am a reactionary!) To hell with them. I shall say everything to the last word." Far from deploring this novel (and its kind) today the establishment loves such work. It's not threatening; on the contrary. The establishment has long embraced this sort of work because of its focus on retail pathology rather than direct overt focus on wholesale state pathology. It has long valued such works for their limited efforts to clarify much beyond marginal geopolitical realities or for their success in distorting reality – as in Wood's misrepresentation of terrorism in relation to the problems of the West. The new lords of the land in Iraq (US policy planners) are eating Iraqi babies for breakfast, as Jonathan Swift once discoursed in ripe literary fashion of the English devouring the offspring of the Irish. This is a far more relevant understanding – actually, central – to the problems of the West in regard to terrorism and much else. If Homeland Security wants to know the situation and the anger contained in many Iraqis and many others across the lands as concerns the West, then they should read with all intended irony, "A Modest Proposal" by Swift, and also take a look at the ongoing polls of the people.
Which brings up another problem in reality: to know and to not act appropriately is to not care, enough, basically. Prior to the US invasion of Iraq, leading US intellectual Noam Chomsky wrote satirically about the at best farcical consequences of a US invasion, and he wrote prophetically, as it turned out (given the catastrophe and what else the US is on track to accomplish in the Middle East, unintentionally shifting regional power to Iran, at the least). Chomsky wrote that the US might as well as urge Iran to invade Iraq. The US invaded and today we see Iranian power has grown, and Iraqis continue to want the US out [writing circa 2008]. Should anyone not now expect Bush or his successor (Barack "Half Withdrawal" O'Bomba or John "100 Years" McPain) to announce a globally implemented and Western regulated policy of commercial trafficking of children for pacifying the Middle East and the world. Has not the time long since come to officially sanction the body parts trade – with its many corporate biproducts and fiscal derivatives heretofore untapped? the up-and-coming global growth industry – children as prolific cash crop? Would not such a move be as rational and ethical as the US invasion and occupation on whole? Need one wonder how the literary establishment would view such "A Practical Policy" as literary text? Too voicy? A nondescript style? Lacking much substance or any point of view of interest? Too weak or suspect in character? So goes the politics, the ever politicized aesthetics of establishment fiction. Progressive and revolutionary work is marginally tolerated or buried, in actuality if not in rhetoric. Status quo and reactionary work is enabled, advanced, glorified, contrary flourishes aside.
Not for Wood and the establishment are certain movements of progressive or revolutionary writing that touch too close to home, progressive and revolutionary writing and writers who, "As a group," as VF Calverton notes:
are convinced that present-day industrial society is based upon exploitation and injustice; that it creates distress and misery for the many and brings happiness only to the few; that its dedication to the ideal of profit instead of use is destructive…. More than that, [these writers] believe that their literature can serve a greater purpose only when it contributes…toward the creation of a new society which will embody…a social, instead of an individualistic ideal. Unlike Ibsen, they do not ask questions and then refuse to answer them. Unlike the iconoclasts, they are not content to tear down the idols and stop there. Their aim is to answer questions as well as ask them, and to provide a new order to replace an old one. Their attitude, therefore, is a positive instead of a negative one.
Such liberatory fiction contains "ideology" for which the establishment is too pure to engage in. Such liberatory lit is too "reductive" since we all know that literature deals in no particulars whatsoever. Such liberatory movements are impossible, for it must be that the poor will always be among us. And in any case "poetry makes nothing happen" nor fiction too – countless concrete and well documented examples to the contrary, which we must see as mere illusions, entirely unpredictable, forever uncertain, uncontrolled accidents, stemming from badly flawed and shallow literature. In reality, the great works of Victor Hugo and Jonathan Swift, for example, thoroughly disprove every aspect of this establishment line, this orthodoxy, this belief, this creed, so we soon run into sweeping problems of credibility, which are then ignored, rendered "studiedly irrelevant," exactly as the establishment knows very well how to do.
It has long since gotten to the point where even Victorian type work that is particularly socially engaged is far too threatening to the establishment, which has exerted pressure to kill such work for over a century now (let alone more revolutionary works). Why did Tolstoy not win a Nobel Prize? Likely because he had become far too much an activist, dissenter, too progressive in face of the status quo, as shown somewhat in his posthumous great short novel Hadji Murad (1904/1912), about a Chechen rebel leader in relation to Empire. It's a novel that should be front and center today, and of a sort we should be reading and writing, especially given the particulars of today's long-standing freshly-explosive crises, especially given the cultural and institutional bigotry of the US (and West) in this regard. Wood cites Hadji Murad in HFW merely for a stylistic brilliance. It's a novel Homeland Security and others should better read, along with contemporary liberatory novels.
Instead, both bizarre and predictable, as we've seen, is this recurring underlying theme in the criticism of James Wood, only slightly exaggerated: Don't bother to create great highly useful fiction of the world, dear contemporary novelists, the masters have done all your work for you. Go shuck peas, or do anything, but please don't presume to work at your art in relation to society. History ended more-or-less, at least in the novel – Dostoevsky and Conrad took it all down. There is no future direction or tendency we can remotely point to. Liberatory revolutionary – balderdash! Back to sleep with you now, dear writers. Or do run along and practice your style (whether "free indirect" or whatnot) on something less threatening or less difficult than sociopolitical, engaged fiction for an establishment critic to speak meaningfully about. The thought of which, after all, is "slightly depressing." The loafing about of fly-eyed young men has long represented "the classic novelistic activity" – the flaneur, you know. They are "traumatized" and "numb" so let us partake of their great visions.
Flaneuring – what else is there for those "who belong to the ruling class…those who [have] already won the battle and acquired the spoils…[who can] afford to be above the battle"? More typically, establishment critics intone the ostensible "extreme difficulty" of writing novels about ongoing events, especially in such supposedly "confusing" times. In any event, not for nothing today are Dostoevsky's novels Notes from the Underground and The Possessed and Conrad's novel The Secret Agent safe for the establishment, because they are studies more in retail pathology and retail violence, demonizing of easy targets, novels that fail to offer liberatory explorations of wholesale Western establishment oppressions and aggressions, blind to much progress and possibilities.
Misrepresentation 27 — 9-11 rallying cry for a turn inward, and worse: Less than a month after the terrorist attacks of 9-11-01, Wood speculated and hoped that the aftermath of the attack would "allow a space for the aesthetic, for the contemplative, for novels that tell us not 'how the world works' but 'how somebody felt about something' – indeed, how a lot of different people felt about a lot of different things (these are commonly called novels about human beings)." He then declared, "Who would dare to be knowledgeable [in a novel] about politics and society now?" One hardly needs socialist David Walsh to point out "Who would dare not to be knowledgeable about politics and society now? Wood's counterposing of 'human' versus 'social' novels is deeply false." Crucially, who should not have "dared" ever? Myriad people in general "dared" and have long proven to be sociopolitically discerning both within the US and without. Not the establishment though. Not its literary stars, or scarcely any of its stars, for that matter. Not then and not now. They can't dare, marginal exceptions aside. It would be dysfunctional to the ruling status quo. Thus, had they ever been publicly acute in this regard, they would not have been granted their positions of prominence. Get wise of a sudden, or even accidentally step out of line – they are quickly disciplined, sometimes by a pointed status quo critique, put "on notice," or, especially if they persist, simply "let go." Case studies abound (via reports in independent media and analyses by independent scholars).
Not only star critics, but leading liberal "political" novelists are atrocious in this regard (let alone conservative or reactionary writers). For example, in 2008, The Nation magazine published EL Doctorow's 2007 keynote address to a joint meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, in Washington DC, in which Doctorow states near its beginning that the leaders of "a religiously inspired criminal movement originated in the Middle East…[have] mentally transport[ed] their rank and file back into the darkness of tribal war and shrieking, life-contemptuous jihad. [This]…declared enemy with the mind-set of the Dark Ages throws his anachronistic shadow over us and awakens our dormant primeval instincts." In other words, until the terrorist attacks of 9-11, the primitive impulses of the US were sleeping soundly, only to be terrorized awake by those "criminal" and "tribal" and "shrieking" war-mongers from the lands of the richest oil fields. That's quite a story. It leaves something out. Reality. The reality of decades-long US hopes, plans and efforts to control those oil fields, including support for the state tyrants of those rich kingdoms, not least Saudi Arabia, from where nearly all the 9-11 terrorists originated, which was considered to be an occupied country by terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, due to the US military presence there, subsequently withdrawn. Doctorow sends down the memory hole the reality of the murderous US-UN imposed economic sanctions against Iraq that helped destroy that country and other inconvenient facts, such as decisive US support for the state of Israel and many of its militant endeavors against its regional neighbors, including longstanding invasions and occupations.
After carefully inverting cause and effect of the current ongoing crisis, Doctorow pronounces to his intellectual audience about "knowledge deniers. Their rationale is always political. And more often than not, they hold in their hand a sacred text for certification." Shortly thereafter he goes on with brazen (and ludicrous) hypocrisy to both romanticize and all but deify the "sacred text" of the US Constitution and its history:
The ratification parades were sacramental – symbolic venerations, acts of faith. From the beginning, people saw the Constitution as a kind of sacred text for a civil society. And with good reason: the ordaining voice of the Constitution is scriptural, but in resolutely keeping the authority for its dominion in the public consent, it presents itself as the sacred text of secular humanism.
Meanwhile, some of the founders and states viewed the Constitution as likely inherently tyrannical, and so several states barely ratified it, and did so only by attaching lists of amendments and rights. Doctorow refers to the "sacred text" of the US Constitution at a time when it contained none of its amendments, thus, no Bill of Rights protecting many of the most important freedoms of the people. The Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights are far greater texts of liberty than the original and still highly flawed US Constitution. Doctorow eventually levels some fairly strong criticism of US policy and acts generally but mostly confines his critique to Bush and the Bush regime. Along the way, he neglects to mention "oil" or "occupation" and rather haplessly refers to two iconic establishment novelists, Herman Melville and Henry James (see misrepresentation next). Near closing, Doctorow calls the US a "democracy that is given to a degree of free imaginative expression that few cultures in the world can tolerate, [in which] we can hope for the aroused witness, the manifold reportage, the flourishing of knowledge that will restore us to ourselves, awaken the dulled sense of our people to the public interest that is their interest…" The US surely is in many ways a very free society. All the greater then is the delinquency, however predictable, of an establishment literature that cannot be troubled to create and produce topical anti invasion-and-conquest novels of oil rich lands in the spirit of what liberatory scholar Edward Said calls "the urgent conjunction of art and politics." Nothing might stop the established authors and publishers in this "democracy" of the free but their investments and ideologies, their false realities and illusions, their misrepresentations of others and themselves. And how ever much they care.
Misrepresentation 28 — Henry James, TS Eliot, the CIA, and the cultural cold war: The establishment's ideological commitments render it unqualified to comment with much insight on vast sociopolitical domains both within fiction and without. It's incapable. This may or may not be why Wood feels at least "slightly depressed" at the thought of social novels representing the times. If he's truly a perceptive guy, widely aware, he knows he's handcuffed in what he can write. Establishment pressure against speaking out creates fear of job loss, isolation, obloquy, and other disincentives. On the other hand, status quo ideological constrictions may either be readily accepted by Wood and establishment writers, or may likely have been long since internalized as reality. If they were to write strong, comprehensive, perceptive analyses, they would be vilified, including by publishers and owners, or quietly cut off, effectively removed from history, as was, for example, once prominent literary critic Maxwell Geismar. Thus the need for independent writing and independent publishing houses. Currently: the few Davids against the many Goliaths.
Henry James – "a primary Cold War literary figure" – has been such a politically favored author of the establishment because he was a relatively prominent member of the privileged class whose stylistically accomplished sometimes labyrinthine writing hews to status quo lines at exhaustive length. Since, as famously noted, he chews more than he bites off, his novels function as elaborate upscale crossword puzzles for people of leisure and position. In a corrupt culture, the symptom of a corrupt system and vice versa, such fiction cannot fail to be revered for its charming, slight and "safe" qualities – ostensible or otherwise. Henry James and TS Eliot rate very high, or at the top, among the establishment's most admired American novelists, poets, critics. Both moved to England and became English citizens, as if geographically and geopolitically trying to go back in time, at least figuratively. They have been sort of wonderfully symbolic anti-revolutionaries, perfect for CIA purposes. The CIA in its propaganda efforts "airdropped translations of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets into Russia," and its cultural emissaries hastened to appear on national television to defend James, as we have seen.
TS Eliot is still highly revered in writing circles, in poetry workshops especially. Yet how many writers actually know and understand the faith based line of his full thought? At the end of Forces in American Criticism (1939), scholar Bernard Smith puts Eliot's views in perspective:
“[T.S. Eliot wrote,] ‘There are two and only two finally tenable hypotheses about life: the Catholic and the materialistic [i.e., Marxist]. It is quite possible, of course, that the future may bring neither a Christian nor a materialistic civilization. It is quite possible that the future may be nothing but chaos or torpor. In that event, I am not interested in the future; I am only interested in the two alternatives which seem to me worthier of interest….’
“Eliot chose not only the Catholic hypothesis, but also its political corollaries. His literary opinions were thus given a firm philosophical base to rest upon, and from that fact he drew the reasonable conclusions…[that] ‘Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint…. The ‘greatness’ of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.’
“To this has esthetic criticism at last come – to a realization that non-esthetic criteria are the ultimate tests of value. Whether they be called philosophical, moral, or social criteria, they are still the ideas that men have about the way human beings live together and the way they ought to live. The quest of beauty had become the quest of reality. It had become, in essence, literary criticism as socially conscious and as polemical as the criticism of the Marxists.
Eliot the partisan – but for the establishment.
Misrepresentation 29 — liberatory lit attacked, buried: This combined liberal/conservative and reactionary political literary attack against the increasingly progressive literary stalwart Maxwell Geismar, having occurred on national TV no less, is (in retrospect at least) one of the most significant moments in all of American literature in the second half of the twentieth century – and it remains virtually unknown. Details may be found in Geismar's decades-delayed, invaluable memoir, Reluctant Radical (2002).
Sometimes entire careers are buried, other times particular books. Similarly shot down the memory hole are landmark works of progressive or liberatory literary criticism from the first half of the twentieth century. Sheer scandal is the burial of Upton Sinclair's studied book of economic literary criticism, Mammonart (1924). Other inexcusable great losses include VF Calverton's The Liberation of American Literature (1932) and Bernard Smith's Forces in American Criticism (1939). It's difficult to be ignorant of these three momentous works and yet be able to fully appreciate Kenneth Burke's tremendous collection of 1930s essays, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), a book containing particular essays that consummate the progressive literary tradition, or liberatory tendency, of the preceding four decades at least.
Ignorance of these landmark books makes it more difficult to understand the significance, isolation, and persecution of the once prominent (when liberal) accomplished literary critic Maxwell Geismar, as he was marginalized and forgotten through the sixties and seventies and today. It's difficult to be ignorant of these books of criticism (still almost entirely disappeared, despite much renewed interest in the 1930s) and yet be able to make full sense of the vital socially engaged criticism prior to the 1940s that was forcefully curtailed in subsequent decades, with corrosive effects very much evident today, despite some progressive gains, not least by way of the multicultural expansion.
The problem remains that establishment ideology continues to enormously disfigure fiction and criticism, as James Petras remarked.
Scholar Terry Eagleton notes in "Only Pinter Remains" (2007):
For almost the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life. One might make an honourable exception of Harold Pinter, who has wisely decided that being a champagne socialist is better than being no socialist at all; but his most explicitly political work is also his most artistically dreary.
The knighting of Salman Rushdie is the establishment's reward for a man who moved from being a remorseless satirist of the west to cheering on its criminal adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. David Hare caved in to the blandishments of Buckingham Palace some years ago, moving from radical to reformist. Christopher Hitchens…[has] thrown in his lot with Washington's neocons. Martin Amis has written of the need to prevent Muslims travelling and to strip-search people "who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan". Deportation, he considers, may be essential further down the road.
The uniqueness of the situation is worth underlining. When Britain emerged as an industrial capitalist state, it had Shelley to urge the cause of the poor, Blake to dream of a communist utopia, and Byron to scourge the corruptions of the ruling class…
In the US, the situation is not much better, despite playwright Tony Kushner's writing in Theater:
I do not believe that a steadfast refusal to be partisan is, finally, a particularly brave or a moral or even interesting choice. Les Murray, an Australian poet, wrote a short poem called 'Politics and Art.' In its entirety: 'Brutal policy / like inferior art, knows / whose fault it all is.' This is as invaluable an admonishment as it is ultimately untrue.
What is James Wood's role in all this? Maybe aside from his relative prominence, it's very similar to the overwhelming flood of establishment writers and publishers – conservative, reactionary, and liberals not least. They bulwark the status quo, more or less, often even when they think they do not or think they are progressive. Meanwhile, "liberatory revolutionary" is virtually altogether out of the realm of thought, let alone comprehension.
Misrepresentation 30 — fiction shrunk: James Wood shows and tells quite a bit of quality in his criticism, and of course one can learn a lot from view and voice, style and character studies – purview. Though he shuns the forest for love of the wood in many ways, there's no denying that the wood, even a solitary tree, may be impressive. Noam Chomsky is far from alone in claiming:
If you want to learn about people's personalities and intentions, you would probably do better reading novels than reading psychology books. Maybe that's the best way to come to an understanding of human beings and the way they act and feel, but that's not science. Science isn't the only thing in the world, it is what it is...science is not the only way to come to an understanding of things…. If I am interested in learning about people, I'll read novels rather than psychology.
Moreover, fiction can be used to illuminate or engage what Chomsky calls "Orwell's problem": How is it that oppressive ideological systems are able to "instill beliefs that are firmly held and widely accepted although they are completely without foundation and often plainly at variance with the obvious facts about the world around us?" The political refrain, "What's the matter with Kansas?" means more expansively, What's the matter with the USA, and the world? As Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian author and political worker notes, "Criticism, like charity, starts at home."
Little may strike closer to home than the novel, a great and indispensable form for engaging Orwell's problem, terribly our own. Orwell's problem, in other words: How is it that people are persuaded to act against their own interests and values, often viciously, which they otherwise hold dear? Fiction can debunk harmful propaganda and taboos; it can help energize, motivate, inspire while maintaining vital literary and popular quality by staying focused on fiction's core strengths (and not excluding those emphasized by Wood and the establishment). Fiction can do, and does, far more than the establishment gives it credit for ad nauseam. Such novels, short stories, and satires intensely explore both the private and the public, those realities and their relations, not least but not only as revealed in the personal.
One cannot expect the status quo to abide liberatory fiction too far of course, for as Chomsky notes: "If Orwell, instead of writing 1984 - which was actually, in my opinion, his worst book, a kind of trivial caricature of the most totalitarian society in the world, which made him famous and everybody loved him, because it was the official enemy – if instead of doing that easy and relatively unimportant thing, he had done the hard and important thing, namely talk about Orwell's Problem [as pertains to the West], he would not have been famous and honored: he would have been hated and reviled and marginalized" by the establishment, by the civilized. Reporter: "What do you think of Western civilization?" Gandhi (supposedly): "I think it would be a good idea." Even the bright new prominent literary magazines and sites such as n+1, The Believer, and others distinguish themselves as little more than the flotsam and jetsam of the establishment. Meanwhile the overwhelming majority of academic literary magazine production is similarly tamed. It's not that they are of no value. It's that they primarily and essentially perpetuate the basic status quo. To gain at least a little more humanity and vitality, possibly they could create or far better augment "left" or particular "liberatory" sections. The establishment might tolerate that for some while.
Misrepresentation 31 — the partisan orthodox nature of status quo lit: If we are not also writing and reading novels "in order to benefit" practically, usefully, then surely it's long past time we started doing so. Wood may be depressed by the thought of a flood of novels that "explain the times" for any variety of reasons, but he has indirectly said as much for them in a quip (“Homeland Security should read”), maybe more, as he has argued repeatedly against. The ideological lines of establishment fiction and criticism are evident, revealing, and follow an instructive trajectory of plot. They sometimes appear (in Ngugi's words) as "tragedy that manifests itself as comedy." When not worse. Clearly detailed or not in the minds or writing of star critics who may or may not wish, after all, to matter too much, this too is how fiction works, for real – and how does it ever.
Even Sean Wilentz in "The Rise of Illiterate Democracy" in the New York Times notes that "The nonfiction best-seller lists these days are often full of partisan screeds labeling Democrats as elitist traitors and Republicans as conniving plutocrats. But look over on the fiction side, and politics appears almost nowhere. …the separation of literature and state seems to have become absolute." Wilentz is scarcely referring to progressive political fiction here; however, his observations apply beyond party politics, since many crucial and enduring public issues are not taken up in fiction from much explicit progressive let alone revolutionary perspective. Who would solicit or publish them? Who has? Hollywood? The publishing houses with money and clout? Even the liberal ones? The liberal magazines? The literary magazines? Many of these operations cannot beg off, as progressive operations often must, for not having resources.
One author has suggested that fiction writers could "tithe" some part of their writing time and talent to producing nonfiction political works. The notion of enlightening and moving and aesthetically accomplished political fiction of various sorts seems that which cannot be thought. Take award winning story writer Benjamin Percy, one of the first writers (sanctioned by the literary establishment, that is) to write in any way about the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, in "Refresh, Refresh" (which appeared in Best American Short Stories 2007 and was called the story of the year by novelist Anne Lamott):
I certainly have strong political feelings. But I try not to let them command my fiction. There is a difference between writing about a political issue — and writing politically — and I try not to cross that line in the sand. I don't want people to come away from my story as if they've come away from an editorial, with a ready-made message shoved down their throat. An audience should feel betrayed by such fiction, because it's so obviously fraudulent and manipulative, the characters hollow puppets the author crudely shoves his hands into. Part of the goal of Refresh, Refresh was to write a war story that didn't say, war is good, war is bad. I instead wanted to say, this is war. And in doing so, I tried to show both sides. I can't tell you how many emails I've received from people who have read Refresh, Refresh and called me A, a liberal pantywaist, or B, a right-wing nut job. When you piss off everybody, I guess you're doing something right. On the other hand, I've also received emails from soldiers, from vets, from protestors, from politicians, all of them moved by the story for completely different reasons.
What escapes Percy's regard here (and TC Boyle's and George Saunders' in similar comments, as well as that of central establishment writers like EL Doctorow and Philip Roth, and so on, who are often perceived as rather political) is the power and vitality, the value and art, of partisan fiction. Percy makes no note (and seems to imply the opposite) that "strong political feelings" can be expressed as liberatory overt partisan fiction in very accomplished and highly aesthetic ways far from "a ready-made message shoved down [a reader's] throat," as if ostensibly nonpartisan fiction is any less "ready-made," including Percy's own "Refresh, Refresh" given his decision to "show both sides": apparently meaning "war is good, war is bad." Partisan fiction, according to Percy, is "fraudulent and manipulative" but depictions of "war is good, war is bad" are even-handed, which must no doubt prove equally instructive and comforting to both the invaders and the invaded, occupied peoples of the smashed land of Iraq. And so it is that status quo fiction is far less upfront and often in denial – far less willing and capable of declaring what it actually is, ideologically. There are plenty of ways a literary subjective fiction can reveal objective criminal reality. Status quo art, however, avoids doing so, except marginally, in a great number of ways, even though it practically has to go out of its way to cheat reality, to vitiate it of urgent conditions, revelation or phenomena, let alone explore progressive or revolutionary realms and possibilities.
The criticism of James Wood further muddles the shallow sociopolitical component of the human condition as explored in fiction, and further impedes and discourages its badly needed engagement. Pathology in terrorism – Wood claims. In part, but it's largely tactical and rooted in injustice, the main problem by far. Jealousy of the West? Rather, justified outrage. Them as the West's "current problem"? Our (the West's) longstanding outlaw acts. How Fiction Works? How Purview Works, in Part. "Free indirect style"? Purview meld. The intimate human may be revealed in the novel? And the epic social and political too. Subtlety of analysis, nuance, limning – establishment sign language for toeing the line with style, for creating work nonthreatening to the interests (often criminal) of establishment power and control.
Misrepresentation 32 — basic public realities denied, distorted: The current crises of the US in the "Middle East" are widely misrepresented by the establishment – fiction and nonfiction both. Take the Iraq war for example…
