This has not been an easy relationship, whether in the ghastly extreme of Salman Rushdie’s experience or, say, that of Gustave Flaubert, who, commenting on the indecency case against Madame Bovary after he won it in 1857, wrote of the establishment of spurious literary values and the devaluation of real literary values such a case implies for fiction. ‘My book is going to sell unusually well. . But I am infuriated when I think of the trial; it has deflected attention from the novel’s artistic success. . to such a point that all this row disquiets me profoundly. . I long to. . publish nothing; never to be talked of again.’
The relationship of fiction with politics has not had the kind of husband/fatherly authoritarian sanction that morals, with their religious origins, lingeringly have. No literary critic I know of suggests that moralizing as opposed to ‘immorality’ has no place in fiction, whereas many works of fiction are declared ‘spoiled’ by the writer’s recognition of politics as as great a motivation of character as sex or religion. Of course, this lack of sanction is charactistic of an affair, a wild love affair in which great tensions arise, embraces and repulsions succeed one another, distress and celebration are confused, loyalty and betrayal change place, accusations fly. And whether the fiction writer gets involved with politics initially through his/her convictions as a citizen pushing, within, against the necessary detachment of the writer, or whether the involvement comes about through the pressure of seduction from without, the same problems in the relationship occur and have to be dealt with in the fiction as well as in the life.
For when have writers not lived in time of political conflict? Whose Golden Age, whose Belle Epoch, whose Roaring Twenties were these so-named lovely times?
The time of slave and peasant misery, while sculptors sought perfect proportions of the human torso? The time of revolutionaries in Czar Alexander’s prisons, while Grand Dukes built mansions in Nice? The time of the hungry and unemployed, offered the salvation of growing Fascism while playboys and girls danced balancing glasses of pink champagne?
When, overtly or implicitly, could writers evade politics? Even those writers who have seen fiction as the pure exploration of language, as music is the exploration of sound, the babbling of Dada and the page-shuffling of Burroughs have been in reaction to what each revolted against in the politically-imposed spirit of their respective times; theirs were literary movements that were an act — however far-out — of acknowledgement of a relationship between politics and fiction.
It seems there is no getting away from the relationship. On the one hand, we live in what Seamus Heaney calls a world where the ‘undirected play of the imagination is regarded at best as luxury or licentiousness, at worst as heresy or treason. In ideal republics. . it is a common expectation that the writer will sign over his or her venturesome and potentially disruptive activity into the keeping of official doctrine, traditional system, a party line, whatever. .’ Gerard Manley Hopkins felt obliged to abandon poetry when he entered the Jesuits ‘as not having to do with my vocation’; a submission of the imagination to religious orthodoxy exactly comparable to that demanded of writers, in many instances in our time, by political orthodoxies.
We are shocked by such clear cases of creativity outlawed. But things are not always so drastically simple. Not every fiction writer entering a relation with politics trades imagination for the hair shirt of the party hack. There is also the case of the writer whose imaginative powers are genuinely roused by and involved with the spirit of politics as he or she personally experiences it. And it may not be the free choice of a Byron. It can be virtually inescapable in times and places of socially seismic upheaval. Society shakes, the walls of entities fall; the writer has known the evil, indifference, or cupidity of the old order, and the spirit of creativity naturally pushes towards new growth. The writer is moved to fashion an expression of a new order, accepted on trust as an advance in human freedom that therefore also will be the release of a greater creativity.
‘Russia became a garden of nightingales. Poets sprang up as never before. People barely had the strength to live but they were all singing’—so wrote Andrey Bely in the early days of the Russian Revolution. And one of Pasternak’s biographers, Peter Levi, notes that Pasternak — popularly known to the West, on the evidence of his disillusioned Dr. Zhivago, as the Russian anti-Communist writer — in his young days contributed manifestos to the ‘infighting of the day’. In his poem to Stalin he sang:
We want the glorious. We want the good.
We want to see things free from fear.
Unlike some fancy fop, the spendthrift
of his bright, brief span, we yearn
for labour shared by everyone,
for the common discipline of law.
This yearning is addressed by writers in different ways, as fiction seeks a proper relation with politics. In the Soviet Union of Pasternak’s day, some fell into what the Italian contemporary writer Claudio Magris, in a different context, calls with devastating cynicism, ‘A sincere but perverted passion for freedom, which led. . into mechanical servitude, as is the way with sin.’ The noble passion deteriorated to the tragically shabby, as in the 1930s the Writers Union turned on itself to beat out all but mediocrity-mouthing platitudes, driving Mayakovsky to suicide and turning down Pasternak’s plea to be granted a place where he would have somewhere other than a freezing partitioned slice of a room in which to write and live. Yet Pasternak had not abandoned belief — never did — in the original noble purpose of revolution. When Trotsky asked why he had begun to abstain from social themes, Pasternak wrote to a friend, ‘I told him My Sister, Life [his then recent book] was revolutionary in the best sense of the word. That the phase of the revolution closest to the heart. . the morning of the revolution, and its outburst when it returns man to the nature of man and looks at the state with the eyes of natural right.’ But for Pasternak the writing of this period had become, by the edicts of the state and the Writers Union, ‘a train derailed and lying at the bottom of an embankment’. And in this choice of an image there is a kind of desperate subconscious assertion of the creativity so threatened in himself and his fellow writers, since trains, in his era perhaps symbolic of the pace at which passes, fleetingly, the meaning of life the writer must catch, recur so often in his work.
Yeats’s ‘terrible beauty’ of the historic moments when people seek a new order to ‘return man to the nature of man, a state of natural right’, does not always make politics the murderer of fiction. The Brechts and Nerudas survive, keeping that vision. But the relation, like all vital ones, always implies some danger. The first dismaying discovery for the writer is once again best expressed by Magris’s cynicism: ‘The lie is quite as real as the truth, it works upon the world, transforms it’; whereas the fiction writer, in pursuit of truth beyond the guise of reasoning, has believed that truth, however elusive, is the only reality. Yet we have seen the lie transforming; we have had Goebbels. And his international descendents, practising that transformation on the people of a number of countries, including the white people of my own country, who accepted the lie that apartheid was both divinely decreed and secularly just, and created a society on its precepts.
To be aware that the lie also can transform the world places an enormous responsibility on art to counter this with its own transformations; the knowledge that the writer’s searching and intuition gain instinctively contradicts the lie.