For the past few weeks, ever since reading Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project, I've been ruminating on how to get artists and progressive activists engaged in a public dialogue. It seemed to me that while these two communities are very much part of the same continuum, over the past eight years there has been a kind of damaging divergence between art and life, for many progressive activists. I guess this thinking grew out of my personal experience in abandoning my own reading and writing of fiction for political activism when Bush invaded Iraq in my name. But, over time, I've also heard the stories of many other activists who turned away from art and literature as well, in favor of what they felt could have more immediate effect.
I wrote about how reading Hemon's book resurrected my belief in the power of literature earlier this week. For that piece, I also interviewed Hemon, and that discussion further opened my mind to what a resurgence of serious literature--reading and writing--could do for our wounded collective soul and our national imagination. Great literature creates a kind of empathy with other people's lives, with all its emotional, intellectual and philosophical complexities, in a way that no polemic or journalism, memoir--or warp-speed blogging--can do. Lazarus rocked my world because it magically weaves historical fact, autobiography, journalism, fictional narrative, and real and imagined characters into a work of art that draws haunting parallels between the anti-anarchist hysteria of 1908 Chicago, the violent nationalism and wars in the Balkans, and America's post-9/11xenophobia and politics of fear. More amazingly, it helped me to feel the struggles, as I sit here in lilly-white Marin County, of not only of the book's main characters, Lazarus Averbuch and Vladimir Brik, but of every Muslim, Mexican or dark-skinned immigrant--or citizen--in America today.
Chris Bowers reacted to my HuffPost piece here on Thursday, with his own tale of leaving literature behind for activism, but in doing so, I believe he missed the point of what I was saying. Chris interpreted his shift as being indicative of a rise of the non-fictional aesthetic, because--and I'm paraphrasing here--in the midst of the Bush assault, we can no longer ignore reality and spend our valuable time making up stories. Hemon had this response:
If it is true that eight years of crimes and depredation that have been inflicted upon the largely complicit, patriotic and complacent American populace lead to a greater need for "reality" than the ascendence of Reality TV fits into the picture perfectly. People on the left (and all over the place) are so disgusted with the ineffectuality of artifice that they had no choice but to turn to Project Runway or Big Brother, those beacons of non-fictional aesthetic...
Here is my guess: at the times of great societal changes there is a breakdown of reality-based aesthetics and a move toward the liberating properties of imagination. Witness the Romantics, or Russian art around the time of the Revolution, or Czech literature around 1968. Inversely, the powers-to-be insist on the unimpeachable value of self-evident reality. Scores of Eastern European writers were persecuted because, the accusation was, they had no respect for the reality constructed and maintained by the oppressive regimes. That is to say, they did not believe the lies and proposed different ways to interpret reality or, often, attacked its alleged self-evident qualities.
The Bush administration's attitude has always been that they can construct the most outrageous realities and then sell them as self-evident, much like Project Runway. That is what Karl Rove's famous remark dismissing journalists as a "reality-based community" referred to. Rove was--and still is--a reality creator, not a reality-interpreter. They have also taken over our language--I cannot say the word "freedom" any longer without retching, and "the war on terror" gives me hives. I cannot stand "freedom" and "the American people"--put me on the terror-watch list right now! The ascendence of "reality-based" aesthetic is not a form of resistance to the ideological and human atrocities orchestrated by the Bush regime. On the contrary, it is a symptom of the pressure against civic engagement which requires imagination and sovereignty of the mind. Citizens read books about other people. Subjects flip through channels and read about people like themselves because they cannot imagine a life different from this one. They cannot see that it does not have to be this way, that this is not the only available reality.
Which is all to say that if you want to organize a demonstration or establish a third political party or influence a legislation, reading a novel, let alone writing it, is not the way to go. But if you want to regain the sovereignty of your imagination and the right to resist the imposition of self-evident realities, if you want to restore the democracy of language, then you would be well advised to skip watching reality TV and read some novels. Say Jose Saramango's Blindness, which tells you a lot about the breakdown of a civic society, or Edward P. Jones's The Known World which tells you how the crime at the heart of a society corrupts everyone in it, or Junot Diaz's The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Way, which tells you how one carries history inside one's body. And once you have read these books, you go and kick some lying, oppressive, reactionary ass.
In my HuffPost piece, I was not arguing that we must "re-incorporate the fictional narrative back into our lives." I disagree with Chris's notion that all fiction involves an "inward-looking, confessional, disengaged, self-reflexive aesthetic of depression," but, like EmptyWheel wrote eloquently in this discussion, I also believe "fiction" is a very relative term (as does Hemon). Here's her take:
Human beings construct narratives. All narratives--whether they tell a story about an uppity black man running for President or about a prisoner who exacts the ultimate revenge--involve a great deal of artifice and linguistic craft. Further, the book Factual Fictions makes a compelling argument that the Anglo concept of "fiction" is a culturally contingent concept that arose out of a need to distinguish between "news"--that was subject to libel laws--and "fiction"--that could say whatever it wanted about people in power, so long as those people in power were not "real." Similar legally driven formulations of "fiction" exist in other cultures, and not every culture makes the distinction between "non-fiction" and "fiction." In other words, the terms "fiction" and "non-fiction" are really just convenient classifications for stories that helps people sort out library shelves and legal battles. Fundamentally, narratives are still narratives, which are necessary tools for the human creature to make sense of and interact with her world.
The point I was hoping to make in my HuffPost piece was that as activists, we must not lose sight of art or its value to the work we do and the sustenance and inspiration it can provide. It's not that we have to follow the "activist path" or the "artist path" either, which was another point that my conversation with Hemon drove home for me. We can do both. That realization made me want to have these issues discussed in public forums, particularly on the progressive political blogs, because I believe bringing more art into our mix will have a profound effect on our individual and collective imaginations.
In fact, I now believe that in much the same way that the progressive blogs have opened up the national discourse and increased civic and political engagement, these same blogs can help to usher in a very necessary resurgence of serious literature in this country.
During the Gilded Age, in America and Europe, newspapers ran short stories and serialized novels. The greatest novelists of the time, including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Mark Twain, William Thackeray and Joseph Conrad published their works of fiction in installments in daily newspapers. Because this format was more affordable, people outside of the upper class had access to books for the first time. The publishing phenomenon sparked a growth not only in the number of people desiring to read, but also in literacy rates.
With newspapers cutting book sections and reviews-and entire news operations shrinking by the day-progressive political blogs could help to integrate literature back into American life. We know the value of pulling people out of their consumer-driven television comas, and getting them reading, informed and connected. Bringing literature back into people's everyday lives will provide sustenance for the progressive soul and lead to more hope, engagement and action. Hemon is hopeful about this possibility as well:
Somehow, somewhere along the way thinking while reading became undesirable, a lot of readers started reading for comfort, not for doubt...To me, this is at some level definitely connected with the decrease in civic agency--people are afraid to think for themselves and then voice those thoughts in a public space. There is a loss of intellectual self-confidence all across the board, for capitalism prefers a non-thinking consumer to a thinking citizen. The restoration of public space in blogosphere, I think, alleviates that problem. I hope it can also provide space for a resurgence of serious literature.
There are many ways this could work. Certainly, political blogs that have book salons could be discussing more novels (I've seen a few discussed here and there, but I'm talking about a sustained effort). Political blogs could partner with literary blogs to have online forums to discuss the books and to dream up possible collaborations inspired by these novels. Progressive blogs could also serialize novels and run short stories. Literary blogs are doing some of this, but we need more cross-pollination between these disparate corners of the blogosphere. Perhaps literary blogs could be invited to join political blog communities, much like Jane Hamsher has brilliantly done at Firedoglake, with her stable of political blogs, to increase audience and amplify voices. Guest fiction editors from literary blogs, and literary critics from magazines, could introduce more literature on politics blogs, and guest political editors could introduce lit-blog readers to more political reporting and activism. Mixing it up will most certainly lead to new readers for both political and lit-blogs, and could help to democratize literature in American life once again.
If you have a political blog, and would like start featuring fiction, contact me via LiteraryOutpost. I can start you off with The Lazarus Project and can offer excerpts and art to run on your blog. I can also put you in touch with some literary blogs if you'd like to start a dialogue or partnership of your own. Let's open up the public space for serious literature again. It will help to build bigger blog communities, but more importantly, it will further awaken the country's imagination to new and better--and possible!--realities.
Won't that be refreshing after eight years of Bush?
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