Mike's Blog

The Second Oldest Profession

From an essay by Hans Koenig, a Dutch-American novelist, appearing in the collection Writers on Writing:

…“if you want to write a serious novel, you should not only be out to entertain but you should also, in a hidden way, reflect on the world’s justice and injustice, hope and illusion.

Trollope and Oscar Wilde agree with me here, not to mention Brect and Garcia Lorca, but the very idea makes many reviewers nervous. They think it makes a novel political, which in their vocabulary becomes synonymous with tendentious.

There is of course always the danger that all this committed ness turns your novel into a lengthy pamphlet that bores, and then loses, your readers. But that danger is a challenge to your writing, not to the idea as such. IN order for a novel to be engagé, (loosely, committed to the reader’s desire for entertainment as well as committed to exploring a social theme, I think) it isn’t in the least necessary that it deals with a momentous subject. It does not have to deal with war and peace, love and death. It may be about a lottery swindle in Brooklyn or a suburban academic whose sex life is a shambles.

What I believe it needs is evidence that the writer has gone through an awareness of the human condition, it’s comedy and melodrama, its mystery and tragedy. Isn’t it that awareness that can give the crucial dimension to the most banal occurrences we may want to describe? It is not an awareness tied to a specific ideology, and there is nothing specifically European about it, unless it be that so many American critics have expounded the thesis that “true art is above politics,” which is to say-although they won’t say it that way-that it is committed to the status quo.”

A friend of mine, who cares deeply about a number of political issues, once tried to tell me that he wasn’t political. I know he said this because of all the pejorative images and associations that politics conjures, but we are all political animals. Life is political, and art as a reflection of life is CERTAINLY political. Nothing gets me more riled than people who complain that a movie/book/painting/poem “shouldn’t be political.” These claims are usually made by people, who as Koenig points out, are committed to the status quo, which is in itself a political gesture.

Two small examples: One) The White House’s decision to cancel its annual poetry symposium last April out of fear that some of the entrants might recite “political” poems (read: critical of U.S. foreign policy. “Please guys, only poems about how flowers are nice and little children are beautiful, please.”) Jesus. Two) The U.S. decision to cover the mural of Picasso’s “Guernica” at the United Nations before Colin Powell spoke in front of the mural to announce why the United States had to fight Iraq. I guess a painting depicted the horrors of war might have clashed with Powell’s feel-good war message. I’ve been meaning to write something titled “The United States’ War on Irony,” for some time now but like many things, haven’t gotten around to it.

Politics is inextricable from life. That doesn’t mean you have to go out and join a party, put a sign on your lawn, or pick an argument with everyone you meet. It doesn’t even mean you have to vote. And “politics” is not synonymous with “inability to compromise.” In fact the two go together. Just recognize that nothing “is above politics,” and that it’s not a bad thing.

Posted by mike at November 15, 2003 11:59 PM