Last week a couple of readers questioned, quite rightly, my sympathetic posting of the following quotation by Polish poet and essayist Zbigniew Herbert:
History does not know a single example of art or an artist anywhere ever exerting a direct influence on the world’s destiny – and from this sad truth follows the conclusion that we should be modest, conscious of our limited role and strength.
I now see my original response to one reader (“the Student”) as inadequate. I argued that Herbert’s assertion should be used as a corrective to simplistic notions of literature’s power. But what use is a corrective if relatively few people believe what is being corrected?
Rather than claiming that artists impact the world’s destiny, most people believe that they have no effect at all. I’m not sure in which year Herbert wrote his words, but maybe it was when there were hippies thinking that Alan Ginsberg’s poetry and Bob Dylan’s songs would usher in the Age of Aquarius. If so, those days are well past and the correction should be headed in the other direction. I should be going out of my way to show that literature plays a vital role in our destinies.
Of course, I try to make that case almost every day on this website.
But correcting a position that doesn’t need correcting was not the only mistake I made in this post. I also claimed that literature, unlike politics, “enbiggens us” (the verb is that of cartoon character Lisa Simpson). I fell back into the view, prevalent at the time that I first began studying literature, that the arts are more noble than politics. For a moment I appeared to be gazing down with disdain upon the nitty gritty work of working to improve the world.
As a number have noted, this is a self-defeating stance to take. If artists are above the world, then they are also irrelevant to the world. In her response to my original post, author Rachel Kranz notes that, when she writes, she tries to engage with historical movements. Indeed, in her novel Leaps of Faith (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), Rachel takes on same sex marriage, interracial relationships, racism, workplace exploitation, union politics, media images, and a host of other issues. In fact, some readers, falling in love with the gay couple who are at the center of the novel, want the book to just be a romance and are put off by other parts of the novel. But Rachel’s point is that relationships don’t transcend the world but are very much bound up in it.
Rachel challenges the contrast between art and politics. Rather, she says, we should be distinguishing between good art and good politics on the one hand and bad art and bad politics on the other. A great political leader or life affirming movement (say, the Civil Rights movement) can enbiggen us no less than art can enbiggen us whereas, on the other hand, both bad art and bad politics can encourage shallow wishes and paranoid fantasies. If a novel leaves us thinking that love will solve all our problems, it is similar to political figures who leave us thinking that they will solve all our problems (and better yet, without any sacrifices on our part!).
If one grants this refined distinction, then both politics and art face comparable challenges. Politics has to figure out how to move from vision to implementation, from (in Mario Cuomo’s articulation), the poetry of campaigning to the prose of governing. Empty political vision and visionless politics are both insufficient.
Similarly, literature that doesn’t engage substantively with life is just fluff while literature that tries to speak to the issues of the day without having a concomitant commitment to truth is one-dimensional pamphleteering.
Some of our greatest political leaders (Elizabeth I, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill in 1940*, Martin Luther King) have written effective speeches that doubled as literature. Some of our greatest political leaders have been well-read. Whether or not Obama grows into a great leader, I am reassured by the books that he is reading. (See last week’s post on this subject) They indicate a mind that acknowledges that people are deep, that issues are complex, and that one must move constantly between big vision and individual lives, between generality and particularity.
Having said all that, however, we must acknowledge that the relationship between an artist with political vision and a politician with a literary sensibility is still be fraught with difficulty. To take an example from Rachel’s Leaps of Faith, while I know that she believes deeply in the unionizing and collective action, for the sake of truth she also shows the blemishes of unions. It is possible to focus only on her depiction of these blemishes and use the book to club unions. Great artists do not give us the black and white visions that politicians, even the best, desire. Versions of this drama have occurred throughout history as writers have felt misunderstood by the movements they believed in and politicians have felt betrayed by artists who told inconvenient truths that they claimed were for the greater good of the movement.
Well, enough theorizing. It was useful to float the prospect of art’s irrelevance to history, even if just to elicit Student’s and Rachel’s replies and force myself to rethink some of the issues. If history keeps revisiting certain works, whether they be Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Huckleberry Finn or Catch 22, it’s because we use stories and characters and images to process the world that we encounter. Rachel questions whether “direct” vs. “indirect” influence is the most useful way to talk about anything, and who is to say what the final impact of a work may be? Can the election of Obama as president be traced back to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s work? Perhaps the influence can’t be measured and perhaps we can never know for sure, but anything that reaches as deeply within us as literature does is bound to work itself out in the world somehow.
*Adam Gopnik’s recent article in the New Yorker on Churchill is fascinating. Here’s his description of Churchill’s style:
Churchill was a cavalier statesman who could never survive roundhead strictures on ornament and theatrical excess in speaking. That’s why he could supply what everyone needed in 1940: a style that would mark emphatic ends (there is no good news), conventional ideas (we are an ancient nation), and old-fashioned emphasis (we will fight). Perhaps the style never suited the time. It suited the moment. The archaic poetic allusions in the June 4th speech—the reference to King Arthur’s knights, the echoes of Shakespeare and John of Gaunt’s oration on England—are there to say, “What’s to fear? We’ve been here before.” The images are stale, the metaphors are violent, the atmosphere is dramatic—and the moment justifies them all.
