Politics and the Language of Literature
The Bitten Apple - Coffee in St. Pete’s
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The Bitten Apple
“Long Road Out of Eden” is a great example of literary language used in a popular and political mode. It’s conclusion is a brilliant mix of poetry and politics: “Behold the bitten apple, the power of the tools / But all the knowledge in the world is of no use to fools.” In this sense it’s very much in line with my notion that literature isn’t just an aesthetic or elite activity. I don’t go as far as Orwell in his famous essay, “Politics and the English Language,” yet much of what Orwell says about the distortion and manipulation of language, and about the importance of language in politics, is as true today as when he wrote it in 1946.
Personally, I don't see literature in terms of art for art's sake, nor in terms of a necessary political engagement — as in Orwell’s brilliant Nineteen Eighty-Four. Literature can be detached, engaged, or something in between. Personally, I’m most interested in writers like Romain Gary, Graham Greene, Albert Camus, Mikhail Bulgakov, Salman Rushdie, and Christopher Koch. These writers use literature to explore our geographical, historical, & political situations, yet also to delve deep into our psychological and aesthetic experiences, our philosophical and religious beliefs, and our sense of who and what we are.
For instance, in condemning the war waged by the West Pakistani generals against East Pakistan in the 1971 civil war, Rushdie in Midnight’s Children has his protagonist Saleem take on the persona of a dog, literally barking Yessir! to the orders of the generals. He wags his tale as they slaughter Bengalis, after which he flees into the jungle to escape the horrors to which he’s numbly acquiesced. In entering the Sundarbans Jungle, Saleem enters a Heart of Darkness afterlife that turns his self into a haunted shadow. His sister Jamila, a ghazal singer of renown, is also co-opted by the West Pakistani Army, this time to sing patriotic war songs. Prior to her singing for the generals, Jamila’s voice resembled that of thirty birds warbling their way into mystical infinity — as per Attar’s Sufi paradigm in The Conference of the Birds (1177). Now Jamila joins her brother in urging Pakistanis into the trenches of death.
In depicting the trajectory of these two characters, Rushdie doesn’t just condemn the surface destruction of war: he also suggests that war destroys the cultural and religious beauty of the society that wages it. War turns us from citizens who think for ourselves into dogs who follow their masters into Hell. It turns us from birds who sing of freedom and love into propagandists who urge our brothers to kill each other.
Like Rushdie, Koch, Greene, and Bulgakov, I see politics and history as liable to deep literary treatment. This is the direction I take in my book Stranger Gods (2001), in which I analyze the way Rushdie uses myth & mysticism to make political arguments for communal tolerance and liberal democracy. (Communalism in the Indian context refers to the often-fraught relations between Hindus and Muslims.) Rushdie’s arguments almost always have a political point, yet his methodology is literary, and much of the interest we find in his writing comes from his creative exploration of psychology & the strangeness of the human mind, sociology & the tension between individuals and within groups, culture & the way it determines our beliefs and actions, history & how to overcome the burdens of the past, and religion & the difficulty of belief.
For me, a playwright or novelist creates a world and a view of the world. The difference between Putin and a literary artist here is that the writer sees his view of the world as a view. His novel is a world, not the world. Putin on the other hand thinks his view of the world is the view of the world, that is, the right view of the world, the view that others must adopt — especially Ukrainians! Artists on the other hand present us with alternative views, ones that aren’t structured along platforms, action lists, or defined principles, but rather along the diversity and ambiguity of experience, be it the experience of thinking or feeling, coming together or falling apart, loving or hating, losing or winning, etc.
I find literature gives holistic perspectives that are hard to find elsewhere. As a result, it’s helpful in understanding intricate and complex political situations like the Cold War or the Ukraine Crisis. These situations are deeply rooted in personal experience & social interaction, identity & culture, geography & history, rhetoric & narrative, media & drama, philosophy & idealism, myth & religion, etc. Literature takes in this wide range of life, yet it brings together more than it scatters. It takes the chaotic diversity of life into its fiery depths, and forges a coherent work of unity and meaning — even if that meaning is as ambiguous or open-ended as life itself. It’s this type of wide understanding that I hope to bring to the Russian invasion and to the global situation it’s created.
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Coffee in St. Pete’s
Because my contribution is along the general lines of literature, I quote Gogol and Bulgakov more than Zelensky and Lavrov. Yet while I can interpret specific novels by Gogol and Bulgakov, I don’t claim any expertise in Russian culture or literature. In 2005 I spent a week in Moscow and three weeks in St. Petersburg, the hometown of both Dostoevsky and Putin. Yet playing Dostoevsky’s criminal Raskolnikov (about to open the apartment door and commit my terrible crime) doesn’t give me any special insight into what some call the Russian soul. Nor does sitting in a coffee shop reading The Petersburg Times — even if a shot of vodka comes with the coffee…
I’ve read some Russian novels and travelled a bit in the country (see ✈️ Dream Vacation 2005), but I don’t speak the language and I can’t pretend to define the way Russians think or feel.
Indeed, Crisis 22 is in part an attempt to come to terms with a way of thinking that turns political disagreement into cluster munitions and FAB-3000 glide bombs. What possessed the Americans to go to war this way in Vietnam? And what possessed Russia to go to war in this way? I look into this question on several pages (💥 Exceptional Violence, ✊ Fearless Leader of the Global South, 🎙️ Putin at Valdai — in progress, 🇺🇦 Golden Bridges, and 🇺🇸 / 🇷🇺 Exceptionalism), yet I’m not sure I’ve found a satisfactory answer. For this reason I call Crisis 22 a project and an exploration. It’s an attempt to explore some of the complexities involved, and to edge toward an understanding of what’s happening here.
There's battle lines being drawn
And nobody's right if everybody's wrong
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