INFLUENCE OF

LITERATURE ON
POLITICS
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CHAPTER I
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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

“Literature is necessary to politics above all when it gives a voice to the one who doesn’t

have a voice, when it gives a name to the one who doesn’t have a name, and especially to all

that political language excludes or tends to exclude…Literature is like an ear that can hear

more than Politics; Literature is like an eye that can perceive beyond the chromatic scale to

which Politics is sensitive.” – Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature.

Long before human civilization started in this world, stories are found among the

constellations, beneath the depths of the oceans, and within the woodland realm. Long before

language was invented, stories were told and engraved upon stone tablets and wall carvings.

Long before humans began to know how to read and write with the words that our ancestors

created, literature already existed.

Literature is the foundation of humanity’s cultures, beliefs, and traditions. It serves as a

reflection of reality, a product of art, and a window to an ideology. Everything that happens

within a society can be written, recorded in, and learned from a piece of literature. Whether it

be poetry or prose, literature provides insight, knowledge or wisdom, and emotion towards

the person who partakes it entirely.

Life is manifested in the form of literature. Without literature, life ceases to exist. It is an

embodiment of words based on human tragedies, desires, and feelings. It cultivates wonders,

inspires a generation, and feeds information. Even though it is dynamic, endless, and multi-

dimensional, literature contributes significant purposes to the world we live in. Literature is

present during the era of the ancient world. Even without the invention of words and

language, literature was already manifested in the earliest human civilizations.

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Literature is also a tool for the foundation of a religion. The Holy Bible, one of the oldest

written scriptures, is a compilation of tales, beliefs, and accounts that teach about Christianity

and about Judaism. Within a span of more than a thousand years from the Prophet Moses to

the Apostle Paul, the Bible was written by numerous authors believed to be inspired by God’s

divine wisdom and tries to explain about the mysteries of life as well as setting rules for one’s

personal faith. The same goes with the Qu’ran for Muslims, Torah for the Jews, and the

Bhagavad-Gita, Ramayana and Veda for the Hindus.

Literature explains human values. The works of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle (the most

famous Greek philosophers) contain virtues that promote perfection to a society if only

human beings have the willingness to uphold and practice them. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

speaks about the importance of human wisdom and the penalties that one would face to

achieve a higher level of understanding. Through these philosophers’ contributions to

literature, not only did they craft an artistic convergence of words, but exposed logic and

ideas as well.

Literature is an instrument of revolution. Political turmoil, societal injustice, and genocidal

conquest can all be ended and resolved in the form of literature. A writer can be a warrior

with his words as his weapon. He can be a revolutionist by writing a literary piece that

exploits corruption in his nation yet fosters development for his fellow countrymen. Not all

revolutions have to be fought in blood. Literature in the present generation still exists as an

expression of art, a source of knowledge, and an instrument of entertainment. Books are

being read seriously by readers who crave for information and recreationally by those who

are passionate in exploring their imagination. Literature gives voice to the people who want

to express their opinions about certain things in life – whether it be in politics, health,

religion, and the like.

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The 20th century opened with great hope but also with some apprehension, for the new

century marked the final approach to a new millennium. For many, humankind was entering

upon an unprecedented era. H.G. Wells’s utopian studies, the aptly titled Anticipations of the

Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901) and A

Modern Utopia (1905), both captured and qualified this optimistic mood and gave expression

to a common conviction that science and technology would transform the world in the

century ahead. To achieve such transformation, outmoded institutions and ideals had to be

replaced by ones more suited to the growth and liberation of the human spirit. The death of

Queen Victoria in 1901 and the accession of Edward VII seemed to confirm that a franker,

less inhibited era had begun.

Many writers of the Edwardian period, drawing widely upon the realistic and naturalistic

conventions of the 19th century and in tune with the anti-Aestheticism unleashed by the trial

of the archetypal Aesthete, Oscar Wilde, saw their task in the new century to be an

unashamedly didactic one. In a series of wittily iconoclastic plays, of which Man and

Superman (performed 1905, published 1903) and Major Barbara (performed 1905, published

1907) are the most substantial, George Bernard Shaw turned the Edwardian theatre into an

arena for debate upon the principal concerns of the day: the question of political organization,

the morality of armaments and war, the function of class and of the professions, the validity

of the family and of marriage, and the issue of female emancipation. Nor was he alone in this,

even if he was alone in the brilliance of his comedy. John Galsworthy made use of the theatre

in Strife (1909) to explore the conflict between capital and labour, and in Justice (1910) he

lent his support to reform of the penal system, while Harley Granville-Barker, whose

revolutionary approach to stage direction did much to change theatrical production in the

period, dissected in The Voysey Inheritance and Waste (performed 1907, published 1909) the

hypocrisies and deceit of upper-class and professional life.

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Many Edwardian novelists were similarly eager to explore the shortcomings of English social

life. Wells—in Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900); Kipps (1905); Ann Veronica (1909), his pro-

suffragist novel; and The History of Mr. Polly (1910)—captured the frustrations of lower-

and middle-class existence, even though he relieved his accounts with many comic touches.

In Anna of the Five Towns (1902), Arnold Bennett detailed the constrictions of provincial

life among the self-made business classes in the area of England known as the Potteries; in

The Man of Property (1906), the first volume of The Forsyte Saga, Galsworthy described the

destructive possessiveness of the professional bourgeoisie; and, in Where Angels Fear to

Tread (1905) and The Longest Journey (1907), E.M. Forster portrayed with irony the

insensitivity, self-repression, and philistinism of the English middle classes.

These novelists, however, wrote more memorably when they allowed themselves a larger

perspective. In The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), Bennett showed the destructive effects of time

on the lives of individuals and communities and evoked a quality of pathos that he never

matched in his other literature; in Tono-Bungay (1909), Wells showed the ominous

consequences of the uncontrolled developments taking place within a British society still

dependent upon the institutions of a long-defunct landed aristocracy; and in Howards End

(1910), Forster showed how little the rootless and self-important world of contemporary

commerce cared for the more rooted world of culture, although he acknowledged that

commerce was a necessary evil. Nevertheless, even as they perceived the difficulties of the

present, most Edwardian novelists, like their counterparts in the theatre, held firmly to the

belief not only that constructive change was possible but also that this change could in some

measure be advanced by their writing. Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling, who had

established their reputations during the previous century, and Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton,

and Edward Thomas, who established their reputations in the first decade of the new century,

were less confident about the future and sought to revive the traditional forms.
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The revival of traditional forms in the late 19th and early 20th century was not a unique

event. There were many such revivals during the 20th century, and the traditional poetry of

A.E. Housman (whose book A Shropshire Lad, originally published in 1896, enjoyed huge

popular success during World War I), Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, Robert Graves, and

Edmund Blunden represents an important and often neglected strand of English literature in

the first half of the century.

The most significant writing of the period, traditionalist or modern, was inspired by neither

hope nor apprehension but by bleaker feelings that the new century would witness the

collapse of a whole civilization. The new century had begun with Great Britain involved in

the South African War (the Boer War; 1899–1902), and it seemed to some that the British

Empire was as doomed to destruction, both from within and from without, as had been the

Roman Empire. In his poems on the South African War, Hardy (whose achievement as a poet

in the 20th century rivaled his achievement as a novelist in the 19th) questioned simply and

sardonically the human cost of empire building and established a tone and style that many

British poets were to use in the course of the century, while Kipling, who had done much to

engender pride in empire, began to speak in his verse and short stories of the burden of

empire and the tribulations it would bring.

No one captured the sense of an imperial civilization in decline more fully or subtly than the

expatriate American novelist Henry James. In The Portrait of a Lady (1881), he had briefly

anatomized the fatal loss of energy of the English ruling class and, in The Princess

Casamassima (1886), had described more directly the various instabilities that threatened its

paternalistic rule. He did so with regret: the patrician American admired in the English upper

class its sense of moral obligation to the community. By the turn of the century, however, he

had noted a disturbing change.

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In The Spoils of Poynton (1897) and What Maisie Knew (1897), members of the upper class

no longer seem troubled by the means adopted to achieve their morally dubious ends. Great

Britain had become indistinguishable from the other nations of the Old World, in which an

ugly rapacity had never been far from the surface. James’s dismay at this condition gave to

his subtle and compressed late literature, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors

(1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904), much of its gravity and air of disenchantment.

James’s awareness of crisis affected the very form and style of his writing, for he was no

longer assured that the world about which he wrote was either coherent in itself or

unambiguously intelligible to its inhabitants. His literature still presented characters within an

identifiable social world, but he found his characters and their world increasingly elusive and

enigmatic and his own grasp upon them, as he made clear in The Sacred Fount (1901), the

questionable consequence of artistic will.

Another expatriate novelist, Joseph Conrad (pseudonym of Józef Teodor Konrad

Korzeniowski, born in the Ukraine of Polish parents), shared James’s sense of crisis but

attributed it less to the decline of a specific civilization than to human failings. Man was a

solitary, romantic creature of will who at any cost imposed his meaning upon the world

because he could not endure a world that did not reflect his central place within it. In

Almayer’s Folly (1895) and Lord Jim (1900), he had seemed to sympathize with this

predicament; but in Heart of Darkness (1902), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907),

and Under Western Eyes (1911), he detailed such imposition, and the psychological

pathologies he increasingly associated with it, without sympathy. He did so as a philosophical

novelist whose concern with the mocking limits of human knowledge affected not only the

content of his literature but also its very structure.

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Literature as such displays a two-fold politics, a twofold manner of reconfiguring sensitive

data. On the one hand, it displays the power of literariness, the power of the "mute" letter that

upsets not only the hierarchies of the representational system but also any principle of

adequation between a way of being and a way of speaking. On the other hand, it sets in

motion another politics of the mute letter: the side-politics or metapolitics that substitutes the

deciphering of the mute meaning written on the body of things for the democratic chattering

of the letter. The duplicity of the "mute letter" has two consequences. The first consequence

regards the so-called "political" or "scientific" explanation of literature. Sartre's flawed

argument about Flaubert is not a personal and casual mistake. More deeply, it bears witness

to the strange status of critical discourse about literature. For at least 150 years, daring critics

have purported to disclose the political import of literature, to spell out its unconscious

discourse, to make it confess what it was hiding and reveal how its fictions or patterns of

writing unwittingly ciphered the laws of the social structure, the market of symbolic goods

and the structure of the literary field. But all those attempts to tell the truth about literature in

Marxian or Freudian key, in Benjaminian or Bourdieusian key, raise the same problem that

we have already encountered. The patterns of their critical explanation of "what literature

says" relied on the same system of meaning that underpinned the practice of literature itself.

Not surprisingly, they very often came upon the same problem as Sartre. In the same way,

they endorsed as new critical insights on literature the "social" and "political" interpretations

of nineteenth-century conservatives. Further, the patterns they had to use to reveal the truth

on literature are the patterns framed by literature itself. Explaining close-to-hand realities as

phantasmagorias bearing witness to the hidden truth of a society, this pattern of intelligibility

was the invention of literature itself. Telling the truth on the surface by traveling in the

underground, spelling out the unconscious social text lying underneath-that also was a plot

invented by literature itself.

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Literature had become a powerful machine of self-interpretation and selfpoeticzation of life,

converting any scrap of everyday life into a sign of history and any sign of history into a

poetical element. This politics of literature enhanced the dream of a new body that would

give voice to this reappropriation of the power of common poetry and historicity written on

any door panel or any silly refrain. But this power of the mute letter could not result in

"bringing back" this living body. The "living body" voicing the collective hymn had to

remain the utopia of writing. In the times of futurist poetry and Soviet revolution, the

Rimbaldian project would be attuned to the idea of a new life where art and life would be

more or less identical. After those days, it would come back to the poetry of the curiosity

shop, the poetry of the outmoded Parisian passages celebrated by Aragon in his Paysan de

Paris. Benjamin in turn would try to rewrite the poem, to have the Messiah emerge from the

kingdom of the Death of outmoded commodities. But the poem of the future experienced the

same contradiction as the novel of bourgeois life, and the hymn of the people experienced the

same contradiction as the work of pure literature. The life of literature is the life of this

contradiction. The "critical," "political' or "sociological" interpreters of literature who feel

challenged by my analysis might reply that the contradiction of literature goes back to the old

illusion of mistaking the interpretation of life for its transformation.

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CHAPTER II
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CHAPTER II

MAIN TOPIC

Politics is the way that people living in groups make decisions. Politics is about making

agreements between people so that they can live together in groups such as tribes, cities, or

countries. In large groups, such as countries, some people may spend a lot of their time

making such agreements. These people are called politicians. Politicians, and sometimes

other people, may get together to form a government. The study of politics in universities is

called political science, political studies, or public administration. In everyday life, the term

"politics" refers to the way that countries are governed, and to the ways that governments

make rules and laws. Politics can also be seen in other groups, such as in companies, clubs,

schools, and churches.

For if politics purports – at least in democratic politics – to be in the service of individual

citizens, it tends to perceive these citizens as finally a part of a collectivity, its vision attuned

to the broad sweep. And thus one is either a part of the Democrats or Republicans in the

United States, belonging perhaps to the Jewish-American bloc, or the African-American

demographic; in Malaysia, one may be seen by politicians as simply a member of the

Chinese, Indian or Malay community. The individual derives significance from being a part

of a whole. Indeed, in the perspective of politics, strength is gained in numbers: the collective

counts for more, possesses a weightier presence than the individual, by dint of its size and

thus ability to influence political outcomes in elections. The significance of a group within

politics is commensurate with size, and the single individual is the smallest grouping of all.

And even in exceptional instances whereby particular individuals are taken into account

within politics, these invariably possess power of some sort, economic or political, rendering

them therefore significant.

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The ear of politics thus registers the roar of the gathered masses, and is sensitive to the

whispers of the privileged; the lone voice of an ordinary individual belonging to no politically

significant grouping often remains unheard. Understanding the link between literature and

society is a pressing issue writers and literary experts need to address and juggle. A long time

ago, a writer might deceive him or herself and follow the belief that art is separate from

society. Now everything turns out to be unique as we are in the face of a fast-moving reality.

Furthermore, a strong relation between literature and society is so much to do with the

concept of freedom. Complete freedom cannot be achieved outside of the community. Human

freedom is a matter of social conquest. As a part of society, the creative work of a writer is

bound to his or her role as a person of action.

Some literary experts have proposed the so-called political novel with a view to scaffolding

an inseparable connection between the novel and society, particularly politics. George

Orwell, known for his works 1984 and Animal Farm, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, a French

novelist who offered the concept of the nouveau roman, asserted that the author must serve

political causes. An author must only engage in one thing, that is to say, literature.

In Indonesia, political novels remain few though various literary pieces deal greatly with

society in general and politics in particular. Wenny Artha Lugina’s novels, The Blackside and

Revival: Konspirasi Dua Sisi might be cited among the few novels representing the country’s

political novels. In the past few decades, Muchtar Lubis, a great writer, is also known for

writing fine political novels. In a political novel, politics play a major role. The problem with

political novels is that they blend feelings and behavior with modern ideologies. The fear of

inserting ideology into a novel is rampant among critics and authors, who believe politics

have a detrimental effect on literary work. An author of political novels would find difficulty

since he or she no longer uses “original” sources.

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The idea of putting heavy political content into literary pieces is subject to controversy and

resistance. Some believe that Littérature engagée seems and sounds too political, somehow

not “healthy” and nothing more than a political propaganda pamphlet. The implication is that

an author devoting to politics and setting aside literariness is not a literary person and will be

unable to produce a work of great literature. The conflict between morality and ideology has

a political inspiration. Every part of our life, whether individually or socially, reeks of

politics. However, the content of engaged literature is not always political. Good litérature

engagé only puts politics in the background despite its magnitude.

First, social ideas are presented in a straightforward manner in a novel. An author can use the

propaganda technique to reach the reader easily without demanding sophisticated

interpretation. The idea is simple: “our” idea is truth and others’ ideas are false. This was

frequently found during Dickens’ time in the form of serials in print media. Usually, their

content came in the form of a grand moral lesson: the poor shouldn’t steal, should follow the

straight path and should be obeisant servants. Second, a certain idea is not expressed in a

straightforward manner but should clearly show the intention of luring people toward it. Leo

Tolstoy’s War and Peace, is a good example of propagandizing history.

Third, a certain idea is proffered as a convention. It seems reasonable and is not seen as

propaganda. Readers will judge it as common sense or universal human experience. An idea

is no longer felt as the idea, because it was considered fair or conventional to assess human

acts in a novel. Jane Austen’s works epitomize the idea as a convention. The complexity and

diversity of human reality cannot be narrowed to just one or two interpretative systems. In

fact, the analysis of any given political or historical affair is not only partial but incomplete

and subjective, unless we make an attempt to understand different aspects of the human

experience away from the rigid principles of the scientific method.

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The myth of objectivity embedded in practically every rational and scientific attempt to

explain or discuss political affairs must be eradicated from our efforts to develop

comprehensive accounts of modern political systems. If, as Walter Benjamin wrote, “the

essential is in the nuance” then we can always take more of the sum than of the subtraction,

so the more nuances we have, the greater our chances are to discover essential things. The

‘scientific’ principle of reducing and simplifying variables for the goal of scientific accuracy

is not only dangerous but obsolete.

Modern political science should not expect to rely on its own scientific methodology to

provide a complete–and accurate–understanding of political events, or else our political

analysis will not only be incomplete but rather mediocre. This, I think, is the reason for which

every analyst or studious of the Latin American reality should read Gunshots at the Fiesta. A

critical reader of the work and novels of Latin America’s greatest writers, this extraordinary

book offers a variety in nuances and enunciations that allow the informed reader of the Latin

American reality to make a crucial distinction between works that advance narrow and

dogmatic agendas to capture the complexity and open-endedness of human existence in

historical time. Through a vast compilation of the most influential Latin American authors,

literary critic Maarten van Delden and political scientist Yvon Grenier, study the relationship

between the tumultuous and chaotic political reality of the continent, and the impressive

literary production that the region has been able to generate during the last two hundred

years, but specially since the second half of the twentieth century. Through the novels of

Mario Vargas Llosa, Miguel Otero, Domingo Sarmiento, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos

Fuentes, Miguel Angel Asturias and Juan Bautista Alberdi, among others, Van Delden and

Grenier–Tamayo’s two brothers–show the dangerous liaisons between literature and politics,

and the multiple ways Latin American intellectuals have worked in closer proximity to the

realm of political power than those writers in other parts of the world.
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With an amazing ability to identify foundational trends among a vast variety of authors and

novels, these two brothers do not only offer a conceptual framework for understanding the

relationship between literature and politics, but a historical framework to determine the role

of politics in contemporary Latin America. Well seen, modern history is not an attempt to

explain the past but conscious and unconscious efforts to justify the present. If this is true,

official versions of modern history just as much as scientific accounts of political regimes are

not to be trusted without a parallel, complementary and comparative account of the literary

work and other artistic or cultural manifestations of the people living in these communities,

experiencing those realities and hoping for particular results while working on specific

solutions. From the literary and historiographical representations to a form of “Romantic

Liberalism” present in the writings of Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz, or the power of

“Magic Realism” decorating the pages of the new Latin American novel, Gunshots at the

Fiesta reflect on all the different ways Latin American authors have dealt with questions of

multiculturalism and intercultural contact, while focusing on the idea of modernity and its

relationship to the complex nexus between art and politics.

Literature can say publicly what might otherwise appear unsayable, combating the coerced

silence that is a favored weapon of those who have power. In Pakistan, for example, where

numerous hatreds — including of Hindus, of atheists, of supposed sexual transgressors —

have been actively promoted by the state for purposes of social control, we have seen Hindu

characters, nonbelieving characters, sexually transgressive characters being humanized in

literature. The political power of such literature is undeniable: “The Protocols of the Elders of

Zion” stoked the fires of European anti-Semitism in the decades before the Holocaust;

American news coverage of the Gulf of Tonkin incident facilitated the escalation of

American military involvement in Vietnam; supposedly true accounts about Iraq’s weapons

of mass destruction contributed to the disastrous invasion of that country 12 years ago.
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Over half a century ago, Saadat Hasan Manto lampooned religious and nationalistic bigotry

in Pakistan, opening up political and creative space for so many Pakistani writers, myself

included, to enter. Reading his acerbic, wanton, irreverent short stories for the first time, I

thought: “Wait, you can write that?” It was an electric experience for me, like reading James

Baldwin and Toni Morrison would be, like reading Chinua Achebe would be. Politics is

shaped by people. And people, sometimes, are shaped by the literature they read.

Poetry makes nothing happen, Auden wrote, but occasionally literature can get things done.

Sadly, it’s easier to chart the ways in which literature has changed politics for the worse than

to make a case for its positive effect on the course of human events. “The Protocols of the

Elders of Zion” and “The Turner Diaries” have confirmed bigots in their bigotry and made

new converts to the cause of racism and intolerance. The sacred texts of most religions (let’s

call them narratives and leave others to debate the question whether they are fact or literature)

have been used to justify unspeakable violence. But can literature change history for the

better? Many of us have heard how Abraham Lincoln asked Harriet Beecher Stowe if she was

the little lady whose big book started the great war. But the story is most likely apocryphal: a

literary urban legend.

Doubtless Stowe’s popular novel helped persuade its readers that slaves were human beings

with feelings like those of their masters. But neither Lincoln nor Stowe could seriously have

believed that her novel had functioned as an actual call to arms. Though the novels of Charles

Dickens failed to radically improve the lot of poor children in Victorian England, they did

raise public awareness of the Oliver Twists and Little Dorrits whom readers might otherwise

have ignored: children suffering the humiliations that Dickens endured when, as a child, he

worked in a boot-blacking factory and his father was sent to the debtors’ prison.
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In an essay on John Ruskin, George Eliot wrote that “in making clear to ourselves what is

best and noblest in art, we are making clear to ourselves what is best and noblest in morals; in

learning how to estimate the artistic products of a particular age, we are widening our

sympathy and deepening the basis of our tolerance and charity.” Certainly George Eliot can

make us more charitable and patient.

Politics is commonly viewed as the practice of power or the embodiment of collective wills

and interests and the enactment of collective ideas. Now, such enactments or embodiments

imply that you are taken into account as subject sharing in a common world, making

statements and not simply noise, discussing things located in a common world and not in

your own fantasy. What really deserves the name of politics is the cluster of perceptions and

practices that shape this common world. Politics is first of all a way of framing, among

sensory data, a specific sphere of experience. It is a partition of the sensible, of the visible and

the say able, which allows (or does not allow) some specific data to appear; which allows or

does not allow some specific subjects to designate them and speak about them. It is a specific

intertwining of ways of being, ways of doing and ways of speaking. The politics of literature

thus means that literature as literature is involved in this partition of the visible and the say

able, in this intertwining of being, doing and saying that frames a polemical common world.

Surprisingly, few among the political or social commentators of literature have paid attention

to literature's own historicity. Literature did not act so much by expressing ideas and wills as

it did by displaying the character of a time or a society. In this context, literature appeared at

the same time as a new regime of writing, and another way of relating to politics, resting on

this principle: writing is not imposing one will on another, in the fashion of the orator, the

priest or the general. It is displaying and deciphering the symptoms of a state of things. It is

revealing the signs of history, delving as the geologist does, into the seams and strata under

the stage of the orators and politicians- the seams and strata that underlie its foundation.
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Literature here is used to mean works of the creative imagination (poems, short stories,

novels and so on). That literature is political is beyond dispute inasmuch as its production and

consumption cannot occur in a societal vacuum. In Egypt, the very fundamentals of how,

what and where one publishes are themselves political decisions in a culture industry that has

been the site of successive battles between artists and the establishment. What is less clear is

how closely literature is (or should be) tied to the service of a particular political agenda or

connected to the masses, and to what extent literature can and does succeed in influencing

political reality. Many pundits have attributed widespread failure to predict Egypt's

revolution to the dearth of warning signs, but the seeds of revolution were apparent in cultural

production in the years leading up to the events of 2011.

Novels, poems, films and soap operas drove home the reality and consequences of pervasive

corruption in a dysfunctional state. Creative works of the imagination have some advantages

over factual forms of discourse. As art and as make-believe, they enjoy a greater capacity to

circumvent the various kinds of censorship to which other forms of discourse are subject

under authoritarian regimes; they have artistic license to distill, stress or exaggerate particular

features of the world they choose to represent using myriad devices for extra effect, in

addition to the simple power of selective presentation; and, finally, their aesthetical qualities

have the power to speak to hearts as well as minds. The Afghan writer Atiq Rahimi has

described the relationship between literature and politics as ‘the power of words against the

words of power’.
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CHAPTER III
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CHAPTER III

SUMMING UP

From the beginning, Canadian history has presented highly political subjects for our

literature. European nations struggled for territorial possession and for favourable boundary

decisions. Christian missionaries and settlers struggled with the aborigines for souls and

space for settlement. Settlement groups disputed among themselves and with outsiders the

nature of the society that was forming. Later, history and literature were shaped by tension

between the individual and the community, between "authority" and "personal freedom,"

between imperial powers and the national will for self-determination. Finally the continuing

global tension between socialist and liberal-capitalist ideologies is mirrored in Canadian

literature.

Since early times, relations between literature and politics have been manifested in the

organization of many literary interest groups, formed to make members' work better known,

to encourage production, to pressure governments and other patrons for support, and to

secure an atmosphere in which writers can produce well and profitably. Such organizations

have been born and have died according to the energy of their members and the liveliness of

the political and social issues with which they have been engaged. In Canada, the claims of

literature were often expressed in institutes, which appeared as early as the 1820s in many

cities "to afford instruction in the principles of the arts and in the wonders of science and

useful knowledge." Literary and historical societies also developed in Montréal, Toronto,

Halifax, Saint John and Winnipeg as the century progressed. One of the most publicly

volatile organizations in the 19th century was the CANADA FIRST movement. Formed in

Ottawa in 1868, with a platform that united political nationalism and the encouragement of

literature and culture, it eventually became a political party.

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Unsuccessful in politics, it nevertheless had a significant effect on the production of literature

and the establishment of a Canadian tradition in the arts. The grants, literary awards and

support structures that have developed since 1957 have been criticized; however, some claim

that public money is spent badly upon people who have little talent, and for the production of

inferior works; others feel that public support of artists introduces political bias in the

production of literary work and invites writers to censor themselves in order to please the

governments of the day. Nevertheless, Canadian governments follow the pattern of

governments elsewhere, actively supporting the production of literature through various

agencies.

Literary associations occupy themselves with many of these questions, and theories of

literary creation in Canada tend to be closely associated with the political views of those who

construct the theories. Indeed, the character of Canada's internal and external relations

ensures that the literature of the country, which began in the midst of strong political

tensions, will continue in a similar milieu. Our nation provides an especially clear argument

that a country's literature and its politics are inseparable and affect each other on many visible

and invisible levels.

The idea of the political novel has remained ambiguous, vague and abstract even in the face

of intense discussions and very absorbing intellectual debates for the last seventy-five years

or more. There are many reasons for the state of affairs; chiefly two: primarily, the concept of

'politics', which a political novel is supposed to represent, is complex and unclear. Trying to

conceptualize the idea, the American Heritage Dictionary defines 'politics' "as the methods or

tactics involved in the managing of state or government". Further the political scientists have

proposed 'power' as the basic dictum of politics and the acquisition of power as the

motivation for the political man's actions.

 22

For instance, as Harold Hasswell, a political scientist observes, "When we speak of the

science of politics, we mean the science of power." Thus/politics' is normally explained as the

'art of state and government' and as the process of acquiring and retaining power. But

obviously, these definitions are too generalized, vague and intend to focus on the

superstructure and the broad framework of the idea of politics, overlooking the complex and

the subtle human dimensions in the political operations. For instance, an individual, being a

private citizen could influence or modulate the political process, by voting or such other grass

root political acts.

A society is at a safe distance from "active” politics could also directly or indirectly affect the

functioning of the political system. The political processes might include people who are

basically "apolitical' but who perform occasional, but significant political acts. Apart from

these complexities involved, the psychological dimensions of politics like the human greed

for the power and the glory defeat all attempts to explain "politics” satisfactorily. Being

aware of these complexities, Joseph Blotner, a critic of political literature, tries to synthesize

the individual human behaviour into the framework of politics revolutionizing our perception

of the idea of politics.

The other problem involved in the definition of the political novel relates to the complex

nature of the human experience. Bifurcation of the mass of human experience into political,

social, economic or into any other category is misinterpreting the human experience. In the

complexity of human existence, all these varieties of experiences are inseparably inter-linked.

The identification and separation of the political element out of the mass of human

experience is not an easy affair. From another point of view, as is observed by the critics, "In

a sense, all literature and indeed all of life, is political, if our definition of politics is broad

enough. Even the lack of politics or political neutrality can be seen as a political stance."
 23

No novelist can deliberately set out to be a political novelist, just as no novelist can set out to

belong to any other of the labels under which literary critics tend to classify them. A work of

art is a collage, in the creation of which many factors such as politics, social values, class and

ethnic distinctions, personal prejudices, mystical visions and intellectual speculations

combine in an intimate and at times in an explainable manner. Apart from these difficulties

associated with the evolving of the meaning of the political novel, there is another difficulty,

related to the identification of the 'political content' in a novel. As rightly noted by Edith

Kurzweil and William Phillips, regardless of how the meaning of the content and form and of

the relation of the two in a political novel is conceived, the question of how to identify the

'political' works still remains unresolved. This is because as observed by the critics the

"political extremes are easier to identify and talk about.

Edwin Muir's forays into political literature should draw critical attention, at least for the

documentary value of it, if not for more. He classifies the entire, human race into 'natural' and

'political' beings. According to Muir, a natural man becomes a political man "when he strives

to remove the conditions in society, which frustrates the development of his own personality

through political action." In his subsequent explanations Muir implicitly suggests that the

literary genre, that intends to portray this struggle for a better life, is the political novel.

Muir's concept of the genre does provide some basic tenets of the political literature, though

it does not go beyond that. The nature of the political novel and its relationship with the

social sciences like History and Political Science bring fresh insights into the genre are

studied. The parameters of the political novel are broadened by relating it to the entire

political processes. Political literature here is defined as a corpus of novels, which offer a

direct treatment of political process, inclusive of political incidents and traditions,

institutions, practices and formations of change.

 24

Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol shot, in the middle of a concert, something loud

and vulgar, yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse attention. Political literature has

traversed long distances from the unsure steps of the parodies and the satires of the 18th

century. In the 19th and the 20th centuries mighty practitioners of the art have picked it up

cutting across the continents. Association of big names such as Ernest Hemingway, Joseph

Conrad, Doestoevasky, Benjamin Disraeli Stendhal, Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler, George

Orwell, Mulk Raj Artand, Raja Rao, R. K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul has

made political novel a dominant form. Political themes are almost an obsession with many of

the Indian writers like Nayantara Sahgal. That every Indian English writer of repute has at

least one political novel to his credit goes to show the dominance of the form in Indian

Literature.

It is also significant to note that the form has been undergoing vast changes in the treatment

of the political themes. An important aspect of the political novel of the 20th century is the

break of sophisticated fiction in the post Doestoevasky era. The heavy stress on 'duex

machina' in the resolution of issues is a thing of the past. The 20th century novels see politics

in direct relationship to the human characters tracking a plethora of human complexities. The

traditional notion of politics in India hence was broadly a power relationship, an

'administrative politics’ where the ruler provided indemnity against the external aggression in

lieu of the revenue he received from the ruled. 'Political consciousness' in terms of the actual

participation of people in the political process is conspicuous by its absence, in what can be

called as the first phase of the Indian politics. These in-built paradoxes in the national

movement and the inability of the Indian political leaders of the late 19th century to resolve

some of these contradictions, result in the creation of political consciousness that can be

described as 'fractured' consciousness, resulting in the absence of a single pan-Indian

consciousness.
 25

In fact, there is not one, but many 'nationalisms' in this phase of the Indian politics like, the

Hindu nationalism, the Muslim nationalism, the reformist nationalism, the militant

nationalism, etc. These 'nationalisms' broadly restrict the political loyalties of the people to

the narrow regional, linguistic, or the communal groups. At this stage in Indian politics, there

is a collective awareness of suffering from oppression amongst the people. But this awareness

does not transform itself in a single, concrete plan of political action against the colonisers.

A novelist and a pamphleteer belong to two different, irreconcilable categories. Literature, we

must recognize, is not so directly concerned with finding answers to social problems that will

be immediately embodied in action; and, furthermore, novelists and poets are not equipped to

substitute for political or economic leaders. Their concern is not so much to act as recorders

of life and events [but to] give them synthesis, to give them order and coherence. The

successful writer transcends the incidents of his time and becomes a sage and prophet.

Artistic revelation is his final responsibility to himself and his art.

That sounds today like a fairly safe and sensible statement to make, but in 1958 it was merely

the latest in a decades-old series of salvos and counter-salvos fired even before the Second

World War by partisans of what, on the one hand, was called the “art for art’s sake” school of

poet Jose Garcia Villa and, on the other, the “proletarian literature” bannered by Salvador P.

Lopez. In the 1930s, Filipino writers had been torn by these adversarial positions, with Villa

and Co. on the cutting edge of poetic modernism and Lopez and Co. harking back to a long

tradition of revolutionary and subversive literature in the Philippines. Politics and literature

have had a long and uneasy relationship in the Philippines, where creative writers and

journalists have been the bane of an almost unbroken succession of colonial rulers, despots,

autocrats, and dictators.

 26

The country’s tortuous political history has given rise to many opportunities for direct

engagement in political resistance by Filipino authors, from Francisco Balagtas’s anti-

despotic Florante at Laura and Jose Rizal’s novels in the 1800s to the anti-imperialist

playwrights of the early 1900s and the anti-Marcos propagandists of the 1980s onwards.

Beneath the larger and more obvious national political issues, of course, have lurked the

politics of gender, religion, region, and – most importantly in our experience – of class.

Literature students tend not to perceive English Literature as a particularly political subject to

study, nor are most English departments seen as centres of political debate. Francis Mulhern,

in his 1979 study of F.R. Leavis’s journal Scrutiny, has suggested that: ‘Literary criticism as

it is mainly practiced in England is in reality the focal activity of a discourse whose foremost

general cultural function is the repression of politics’. Nonetheless, as both Mulhern and

Leavis knew full well, English as a subject area has long been used politically. Even in its

naming and placing in an academic institution, a literature department has political

implications: English Literature, Literature, English, English Language, English Studies or

Humanities? Every variation represents a battle over definitions of and distinctions between

‘Literature’ and other academic subjects.

The literary curriculum has always been subject to intervention in school and university

departments, while politicians regularly invoke the English literary tradition for their own

political agendas, and literary references are frequently employed in the promotion of

political values. To edit a collection on literature and politics is thus fraught with difficulties.

Politics and Literature could potentially point to a range of arenas: literature that directly

addresses political subjects, to literary works that have a direct political purpose, to the

politics of the curriculum.

 27

Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, put simply, is a story of an affair, but it is political to its core.

The affair is presented within the context of the sociopolitical climate at the time. The story

would go much differently if it was set in the US in the 21st century. Beyond that, there is

much discussion of politics in Anna Karenina; Tolstoy used Levin to express various political

views. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is also political literature, as one of its main themes is

class, which is explored on many levels throughout the novel. Brontë explores relations

between different English classes, the sexes, as well as foreigners and the English.

In the sense that literature gives us a glimpse into the sociopolitical climate of the time it is

written, it is always political in some sense. The writer could be reflecting or criticizing the

political views held at that time. The themes the writer chooses also reflect the times.

Although it is an introspective meditation on the subconscious vs. reality, even Haruki

Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is political. Like most, if not

all, Murakami novels, it reflects current culture in several ways – mainly through pop culture

references and literary tropes. Also like many Murakami novels, Hard-Boiled Wonderland

and the End of the World touches something deep inside contemporary humans. The unity

inherent in the good, the beautiful, and the true inevitably brings literature into contact with

issues properly political: the pursuit of the good; man’s social nature; the patterns apparent in

our public life, including actions and their consequences; the moral significance of choices;

the inescapability of responsibility; the wisdom and folly of our predilections, both private

and public. The relationship of politics and literature, by virtue of their natural affinity and

common suppositions, means that literature will have political relevance even when not being

overtly political. This is a key point, for if literature is to yield up the depths of wisdom it is

capable of embodying, we must be prepared to look in the depths, so to speak. This is as true

of political wisdom as of any other.

 28

CHAPTER IV
 29

CHAPTER IV

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