Cuckoo's Nest is one of the greatest American novels, period, and it still holds a vital place in Native American culture for my generation and older Indians. Less so for younger Natives. Much less so for the 20something Indians. A lot of this acclaim has to do with the movie adaptation, of course, but the novel was also read by all sorts of bookish Indians, including my father and I when I was 10. I mean—the novel is far more radical than folks know or remember. The first person narrator, Chief Broom, is a schizophrenic Indian being wildly oppressed by every damn white institution—by the Machine. How is that not radical? On a personal note, I've had two stays in residential mental healthcare and, oh, boy, was Cuckoo's Nest ever on my mind. I was Chief Broom, except I'm a bipolar Indian who was treated very well at one place and psychologically battered at the other. And there's no way in hell that I could throw a 500-pound water fountain through a window.
Cuckoo's Nest is still a remarkable novel. I was entranced when I read it in HS. It is a radical book, and it's funny how it's made it so safely into curriculums (I actually was assigned Cuckoo's Nest not long after they had some author named Sherman Alexie on the syllabus, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven). I can't speak to it like you can, but I always thought Kesey did an excellent job of writing Chief Bromden with real empathy, getting into the psychology of the oppressed. I imagine, today, Kesey would be sloughed off as another white man writing on the Indians. But he did it well ...
You should give Sometimes a Great Notion a shot. It's what a very young, extremely talented writer at the height of his ambition and powers tries to do - it's the sort of reach you don't see as much anymore, and it is notable when you consider how successful his first novel was, the cash rolling in, yet he wanted to do something bigger. It's the great Oregon novel.
I do think acid in the end ruined Kesey. He never wrote much after 1964, and became a prophet/pundit type. But two wonderful novels are plenty - two more than most writers ever do.
Very nicely done, Ross. The idea that art and ideology are at odds is obvious, surely something we should have learned learned from Soviet Realism, or from the history of the word "iconoclast," but some things need to be said, again, in each generation.
You might want to look at Barett's discussion of Lionell Trilling vis-a-vis the leftist political commitments of the Partisan Review crowd, in a great but rather obscure book, The Truants: Among the Intellectuals. Trilling came to think, and I think I rather agree, that the novel's concerns skew to the right, the interplay among social differences. I would argue, perhaps more deeply, that poetry has a somewhat authoritarian core . . . endless discussion. For now, I look forward to your novel, kudos for writing something afield for you (yes, "freedom"), and keep up the very good work.
If only I could articulate such truths half as well. Instead, I'll offer a resounding, heart-throbbing Amen! To everything. Keep fighting the good fight for our literary culture, its transcendent potential, and the dire urgency to reorient ourselves/souls once more toward reality.
I too love SAGN, but Nguyen is less wrong than you think; you are proving his point quite well. I recommend that you read the immense and satisfying and ocean deep Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson. Also the Cold Millions by Jess Walter. It’s pointless to pretend that poets or novelists can make art that itself realizes activist goals because art in capitalism is fundamentally distraction and seduction, but it’s equally dismissive and foolish to pretend that you can’t be active and make art connected to that activism. Camus is still a good touchstone, as are Carolyn Forche, Roberto Bolano, Fela Kuti, Ngugi, Achebe, and Togarazcuk (sp?)
American artists have a peculiar decadence and desuetude born of affluence and hegemony. (I include Forche here though her work and Kingsolver’s straddle the line somewhat).
No doubt there's a long and healthy tradition of political novelists. The trouble is when those like Nguyen demand everyone get drafted into the Cause. You get a lot of lousy fiction that way, and bad thinking.
Glad you've read Sometimes a Great Notion. I meet so few who have.
Since you’ve invited me, Ross, here is my reply: I don't think anyone denies that great art can be made from political subject matter or that politically active writers can make great art. What I deny is Nguyen’s claim, derived from certain strains in Marxism, that art's task is mainly and programmatically political—or else complicit with evil and oppression. Camus, Bolaño, and I believe even Achebe have been accused of liberalism, anarchism, and other forms of crypto-bourgeois complacency by just such standards. "Art in capitalism" seems like too big and abstract a category to take on, but, for the sake of argument, "art outside of capitalism" has usually served as the ornament to the power structure, rather than being in some measure external to it and therefore able to contest it or just show an alternative to it, as in liberal societies. Marx and Engels, for their part, hated didactic art. Those of us who are not primarily conservative, who are sympathetic to some idea of universal human emancipation, but skeptical of the power of most current political arrangements to achieve this except in the most incremental ways—we, if I can say "we" here, tend to believe the goal is best served by works that, whatever narrowly political ideas of left or right can be inferred from them, expand the imagination and the sensibility. This at least is what I mean by "the politics of the apolitical," a disparaging phrase from Nguyen I would wear as a badge of honor. I agree that Camus is a good touchstone; the conflict between Camus and Sartre is exemplary of the whole debate. I’ll finish with Camus on the role of art from The Rebel:
"Every great reformer tries to create in history what Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, and Tolstoy knew how to create: a world always ready to satisfy the hunger for freedom and dignity which every man carries in his heart. Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty. The procedure of beauty, which is to contest reality while endowing it with unity, is also the procedure of rebellion. Is it possible eternally to reject injustice without ceasing to acclaim the nature of man and the beauty of the world? Our answer is yes. This ethic, at once unsubmissive and loyal, is in any event the only one that lights the way to a truly realistic revolution. In upholding beauty, we prepare the way for the day of regeneration when civilization will give first place—far ahead of the formal principles and degraded values of history—to this living virtue on which is founded the common dignity of man and the world he lives in, and which we must now define in the face of a world that insults it."
I love this. I read The Rebel many years ago, but this is a great reminder of that truth - revolutions need beauty.
I've been proselytizing Sometimes a Great Notion to the point where I fear overselling it to you, but it is to me the unsung great American novel, and it teems with the sort of ambition - romantic realism - you'd like. It's got these wonderful sentence-level flourishes, and experimentation taken right from Faulkner. Critics really didn't know what to do with it when it appeared, and it was quickly subsumed by the success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and then Kesey's own mythos. Kesey also was a mentor to the Grateful Dead. He got around ...
I'll chime in here since I'm currently serializing a Substack novel, "Most Revolutionary," that pushes back both explicitly and by example against much of the thinking here. "Most Revolutionary" comes complete with partisan liberatory lit criticism before each part - including the excerpt below from Kenneth Burke's “The Nature of Art Under Capitalism," The Philosophy of Literary Form.
It is precisely because a lot of badly needed "politics" cannot be quickly achieved in the political arena that artists throughout history attempt to realize such "politics" in their art. Partisan art, liberatory art, is made for all kinds of reasons both private and public, including that the creation of politically conscious culture, partisan culture, is a valuable and effective means for creating social and political change. It is so valuable and effective that reactionary political forces constantly ban books and otherwise wage culture war against it.
Meanwhile the literary and other institutions of liberal capitalism are extremely effective at marginalizing and smearing socialist threats - artistic and otherwise - to the status quo's ideological, cultural, political, and financial control.
Thus the glacial pace of progress and much backsliding, and thus Burke:
"...the contemporary emphasis must be placed largely upon propaganda, rather than upon “pure” art…. Since pure art makes for acceptance, it tends to become a social menace in so far as it assists us in tolerating the intolerable. And if it leads us to a state of acquiescence at a time when the very basis of moral integration is in question, we get a paradox whereby the soundest adjunct to ethics, the aesthetic, threatens to uphold an unethical condition. For this reason it seems that under conditions of competitive capitalism there must necessarily be a large corrective or propaganda element in art. ...much of the so-called “pure” art of the nineteenth century was of a pronouncedly propagandist or corrective coloring. In proportion as the conditions of economic warfare grew in intensity throughout the “century of progress,” and the church proper gradually adapted its doctrines to serve merely the protection of private gain and the upholding of manipulated law, the “priestly” function was carried on by the “secular” poets, often avowedly agnostic.
"Our thesis is by no means intended to imply that “pure” art or “acquiescent” art should be abandoned. There are two kinds of “toleration.” Even if a given state of affairs is found, on intellectualistic grounds, to be intolerable, the fact remains that as long as it is with us we must more or less contrive to “tolerate” it.... Hence, along with our efforts to alter it, must go the demand for an imaginative equipment that helps to make it tolerable while it lasts. Much of the “pure” or acquiescent art of today serves this invaluable psychological end. For this reason the great popular comedians or handsome movie stars are rightly the idols of the people. Likewise the literature of sentimentality, however annoying and self-deceptive it may seem to the hardened “intellectual,” is following in a direction basically so sound that one might wish more of our pretentious authors were attempting to do the same thing more pretentiously."
"works that, whatever narrowly political ideas of left or right can be inferred from them, expand the imagination and the sensibility" -- I don't think, from what else you write, that "apolitical" is the right word, and I think that the argument here might be better made with the use of that term and the widely held (and not incorrect in some ways) take developed from the old feminist phrase "the personal is the political." I don't think it is "apolitical" to write the kind of novel or work you discuss, but I do think there are people who think it is and those are the ones that need to be shown the error. "Apolitical" is a nonsense dodge that online lefties try to turn to an insult by simply changing what it means.
This kind of rhapsody sounds great, but I am left always wondering, what is "beauty"? It's like "liberty" or "freedom" in the mouths of the right-wing. Big word, capacious enough to hold everything, means nothing really. Sometimes I like Andre Breton's version, at least, from Nadja: "Beauty will be CONVULSIVE, or it will not be at all." Not more illuminating, but something about the idea of convulsion gets across the visceral quality he has in mind. That tactility is important, I think.
Have you read Nguyen's book? If you have not, doing so might affect the way you read the essay. If you have, and this is your reaction in that context, carry on. It's easily one of the best novels of the young century, and it covers a lot of the ground you discuss.
I read The Sympathizer and generally disliked it while admiring its energy and ambition. I wrote about it here, which may clarify some of what I'm talking about:
I agree with you that "beauty" and the like are just placeholders for what only gains meaning in the details—the details of particular works in particular conjunctures. Referring to Tardigrade_Sonata's comment below, 2666 is a good test case. It's a work of the radical left, even an unsubtle one, in all the ways T_S enumerates. What renders it "apolitical" in my no doubt problematic sense, to the point that a Marxist critic like Jean Franco hit it with the "romantic anarchist" slur—is its suggestion that the evil it depicts has a metaphysical dimension, and moreover a devilish way of beguiling us by resembling its opposite, hence everything from the novel's satirical depiction of the Soviet literary landscape to the unforgettable scene where the critics righteously beat the Middle Eastern cab driver to avenge his misogyny. Which is to say that these problems of the soul need to be adjusted, so far as they can be, alongside any actual material political reform, not that this is ruled out either. I'm not sure personal vs. political is the frame I'd choose, because it's not a question of social scale. Metaphysical vs. material seems to get more at what I'm talking about.
I wrote a long reply but then realized that nothing really matters and whether I exchange thoughts on this topic is only of interest to me, as I try to stave off the void.
I think your view of art and literature seems cramped and like a church edifice and this isn’t going to change. Neither will I, and I think the kind of heroic masculinity necessary to true art that is at least implied to me in your review is exactly what I’ve tried to reduce my belief in. But this could also just be my own priors infecting. I think I am just not able to be as uncynical as you sound and maybe that is why I think of the need to stave off the void rather than leaping in and writing novels myself like I used to think I would.
Just briefly: there's no reason you should know my work, but it makes no equation between masculinity and heroism, though I will admit to believing in some need for heroism. I reflect on the gender question and the novel here if you're interested; if not no problem:
I think Bolaño (and specifically 2666) might be an especially illustrative example of the political novel that’s not agitprop. It’s abundantly clear that Bolaño is criticizing “neoliberalism,” economic imperialism, whatever we want to call it, by fixating on the femicides in Santa Teresa (i.e., Juarez). The only American character (and one of the only “sympathetic” characters) is a reporter for a black nationalist newspaper. That the novel suggests the nephew of a reclusive European author *might* in fact be a rapacious serial killer of women coded as indigenous speaks for itself. Why doesn’t the novel feel like a polemic, then?
For one, its ambiguity: the sinking feeling that rather than a single perpetrator, it’s actually just a diffused misogyny and disruptive economic conditions (the women in the maquiladoras have financial independence from men) responsible for the murders. That this is what academics mean by “structural violence” should present as schematic or numbingly political, but Bolaño renders it an encounter with the borderline demonic, a detective story that turns metaphysical (not so different in fact than the ending of Alan Moore’s From Hell, which is somewhat more literal).
Thank you thank you THANK YOU for this one, Ross. That rejoinder from Phil Klay is another sign that hopefully we're ready to put this All Art Must Have the Correct Politics tendency to bed.
I want to have a political ideology that will make me admired by conservative Catholic political theorists, what novels should I read to help achieve this?
I feel like Balzac is an interesting model for the political novel. He’s just relentlessly devoted to tracing out how power and status work within the lives of his characters, who are usually set on some kind of upward mobility and therefore have to navigate hierarchies. It comes off more objective than didactic. Tom Wolfe was obviously very influenced by Balzac but just as clearly he had a didactic/ideological axe to grind and a sort of lecturey rhetorical style so it doesn’t come off the same way.
Cuckoo's Nest is one of the greatest American novels, period, and it still holds a vital place in Native American culture for my generation and older Indians. Less so for younger Natives. Much less so for the 20something Indians. A lot of this acclaim has to do with the movie adaptation, of course, but the novel was also read by all sorts of bookish Indians, including my father and I when I was 10. I mean—the novel is far more radical than folks know or remember. The first person narrator, Chief Broom, is a schizophrenic Indian being wildly oppressed by every damn white institution—by the Machine. How is that not radical? On a personal note, I've had two stays in residential mental healthcare and, oh, boy, was Cuckoo's Nest ever on my mind. I was Chief Broom, except I'm a bipolar Indian who was treated very well at one place and psychologically battered at the other. And there's no way in hell that I could throw a 500-pound water fountain through a window.
Cuckoo's Nest is still a remarkable novel. I was entranced when I read it in HS. It is a radical book, and it's funny how it's made it so safely into curriculums (I actually was assigned Cuckoo's Nest not long after they had some author named Sherman Alexie on the syllabus, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven). I can't speak to it like you can, but I always thought Kesey did an excellent job of writing Chief Bromden with real empathy, getting into the psychology of the oppressed. I imagine, today, Kesey would be sloughed off as another white man writing on the Indians. But he did it well ...
You should give Sometimes a Great Notion a shot. It's what a very young, extremely talented writer at the height of his ambition and powers tries to do - it's the sort of reach you don't see as much anymore, and it is notable when you consider how successful his first novel was, the cash rolling in, yet he wanted to do something bigger. It's the great Oregon novel.
I do think acid in the end ruined Kesey. He never wrote much after 1964, and became a prophet/pundit type. But two wonderful novels are plenty - two more than most writers ever do.
Yeah, I think fame was bad for Kesey. I'll give Notion a read.
Very nicely done, Ross. The idea that art and ideology are at odds is obvious, surely something we should have learned learned from Soviet Realism, or from the history of the word "iconoclast," but some things need to be said, again, in each generation.
You might want to look at Barett's discussion of Lionell Trilling vis-a-vis the leftist political commitments of the Partisan Review crowd, in a great but rather obscure book, The Truants: Among the Intellectuals. Trilling came to think, and I think I rather agree, that the novel's concerns skew to the right, the interplay among social differences. I would argue, perhaps more deeply, that poetry has a somewhat authoritarian core . . . endless discussion. For now, I look forward to your novel, kudos for writing something afield for you (yes, "freedom"), and keep up the very good work.
Love your stuff, Ross. This was terrific. Thanks.
Thank you!
"a powerful pastor and trailer park slumlord who lives in a small rural town in the Midwest"
I simply must read this! Dang publishing industry and its production cycles.
If only I could articulate such truths half as well. Instead, I'll offer a resounding, heart-throbbing Amen! To everything. Keep fighting the good fight for our literary culture, its transcendent potential, and the dire urgency to reorient ourselves/souls once more toward reality.
I too love SAGN, but Nguyen is less wrong than you think; you are proving his point quite well. I recommend that you read the immense and satisfying and ocean deep Anniversaries by Uwe Johnson. Also the Cold Millions by Jess Walter. It’s pointless to pretend that poets or novelists can make art that itself realizes activist goals because art in capitalism is fundamentally distraction and seduction, but it’s equally dismissive and foolish to pretend that you can’t be active and make art connected to that activism. Camus is still a good touchstone, as are Carolyn Forche, Roberto Bolano, Fela Kuti, Ngugi, Achebe, and Togarazcuk (sp?)
American artists have a peculiar decadence and desuetude born of affluence and hegemony. (I include Forche here though her work and Kingsolver’s straddle the line somewhat).
I'd like to tag John Pistelli here ....
No doubt there's a long and healthy tradition of political novelists. The trouble is when those like Nguyen demand everyone get drafted into the Cause. You get a lot of lousy fiction that way, and bad thinking.
Glad you've read Sometimes a Great Notion. I meet so few who have.
Since you’ve invited me, Ross, here is my reply: I don't think anyone denies that great art can be made from political subject matter or that politically active writers can make great art. What I deny is Nguyen’s claim, derived from certain strains in Marxism, that art's task is mainly and programmatically political—or else complicit with evil and oppression. Camus, Bolaño, and I believe even Achebe have been accused of liberalism, anarchism, and other forms of crypto-bourgeois complacency by just such standards. "Art in capitalism" seems like too big and abstract a category to take on, but, for the sake of argument, "art outside of capitalism" has usually served as the ornament to the power structure, rather than being in some measure external to it and therefore able to contest it or just show an alternative to it, as in liberal societies. Marx and Engels, for their part, hated didactic art. Those of us who are not primarily conservative, who are sympathetic to some idea of universal human emancipation, but skeptical of the power of most current political arrangements to achieve this except in the most incremental ways—we, if I can say "we" here, tend to believe the goal is best served by works that, whatever narrowly political ideas of left or right can be inferred from them, expand the imagination and the sensibility. This at least is what I mean by "the politics of the apolitical," a disparaging phrase from Nguyen I would wear as a badge of honor. I agree that Camus is a good touchstone; the conflict between Camus and Sartre is exemplary of the whole debate. I’ll finish with Camus on the role of art from The Rebel:
"Every great reformer tries to create in history what Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, and Tolstoy knew how to create: a world always ready to satisfy the hunger for freedom and dignity which every man carries in his heart. Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty. The procedure of beauty, which is to contest reality while endowing it with unity, is also the procedure of rebellion. Is it possible eternally to reject injustice without ceasing to acclaim the nature of man and the beauty of the world? Our answer is yes. This ethic, at once unsubmissive and loyal, is in any event the only one that lights the way to a truly realistic revolution. In upholding beauty, we prepare the way for the day of regeneration when civilization will give first place—far ahead of the formal principles and degraded values of history—to this living virtue on which is founded the common dignity of man and the world he lives in, and which we must now define in the face of a world that insults it."
Now I just need to read Ken Kesey…
I love this. I read The Rebel many years ago, but this is a great reminder of that truth - revolutions need beauty.
I've been proselytizing Sometimes a Great Notion to the point where I fear overselling it to you, but it is to me the unsung great American novel, and it teems with the sort of ambition - romantic realism - you'd like. It's got these wonderful sentence-level flourishes, and experimentation taken right from Faulkner. Critics really didn't know what to do with it when it appeared, and it was quickly subsumed by the success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and then Kesey's own mythos. Kesey also was a mentor to the Grateful Dead. He got around ...
I'll chime in here since I'm currently serializing a Substack novel, "Most Revolutionary," that pushes back both explicitly and by example against much of the thinking here. "Most Revolutionary" comes complete with partisan liberatory lit criticism before each part - including the excerpt below from Kenneth Burke's “The Nature of Art Under Capitalism," The Philosophy of Literary Form.
It is precisely because a lot of badly needed "politics" cannot be quickly achieved in the political arena that artists throughout history attempt to realize such "politics" in their art. Partisan art, liberatory art, is made for all kinds of reasons both private and public, including that the creation of politically conscious culture, partisan culture, is a valuable and effective means for creating social and political change. It is so valuable and effective that reactionary political forces constantly ban books and otherwise wage culture war against it.
Meanwhile the literary and other institutions of liberal capitalism are extremely effective at marginalizing and smearing socialist threats - artistic and otherwise - to the status quo's ideological, cultural, political, and financial control.
Thus the glacial pace of progress and much backsliding, and thus Burke:
"...the contemporary emphasis must be placed largely upon propaganda, rather than upon “pure” art…. Since pure art makes for acceptance, it tends to become a social menace in so far as it assists us in tolerating the intolerable. And if it leads us to a state of acquiescence at a time when the very basis of moral integration is in question, we get a paradox whereby the soundest adjunct to ethics, the aesthetic, threatens to uphold an unethical condition. For this reason it seems that under conditions of competitive capitalism there must necessarily be a large corrective or propaganda element in art. ...much of the so-called “pure” art of the nineteenth century was of a pronouncedly propagandist or corrective coloring. In proportion as the conditions of economic warfare grew in intensity throughout the “century of progress,” and the church proper gradually adapted its doctrines to serve merely the protection of private gain and the upholding of manipulated law, the “priestly” function was carried on by the “secular” poets, often avowedly agnostic.
"Our thesis is by no means intended to imply that “pure” art or “acquiescent” art should be abandoned. There are two kinds of “toleration.” Even if a given state of affairs is found, on intellectualistic grounds, to be intolerable, the fact remains that as long as it is with us we must more or less contrive to “tolerate” it.... Hence, along with our efforts to alter it, must go the demand for an imaginative equipment that helps to make it tolerable while it lasts. Much of the “pure” or acquiescent art of today serves this invaluable psychological end. For this reason the great popular comedians or handsome movie stars are rightly the idols of the people. Likewise the literature of sentimentality, however annoying and self-deceptive it may seem to the hardened “intellectual,” is following in a direction basically so sound that one might wish more of our pretentious authors were attempting to do the same thing more pretentiously."
I believe that SAGN was actually adapted as a film first, and was in its time a bestseller. Directed by Paul Newman, starring him and Henry Fonda.
"works that, whatever narrowly political ideas of left or right can be inferred from them, expand the imagination and the sensibility" -- I don't think, from what else you write, that "apolitical" is the right word, and I think that the argument here might be better made with the use of that term and the widely held (and not incorrect in some ways) take developed from the old feminist phrase "the personal is the political." I don't think it is "apolitical" to write the kind of novel or work you discuss, but I do think there are people who think it is and those are the ones that need to be shown the error. "Apolitical" is a nonsense dodge that online lefties try to turn to an insult by simply changing what it means.
This kind of rhapsody sounds great, but I am left always wondering, what is "beauty"? It's like "liberty" or "freedom" in the mouths of the right-wing. Big word, capacious enough to hold everything, means nothing really. Sometimes I like Andre Breton's version, at least, from Nadja: "Beauty will be CONVULSIVE, or it will not be at all." Not more illuminating, but something about the idea of convulsion gets across the visceral quality he has in mind. That tactility is important, I think.
Have you read Nguyen's book? If you have not, doing so might affect the way you read the essay. If you have, and this is your reaction in that context, carry on. It's easily one of the best novels of the young century, and it covers a lot of the ground you discuss.
I should clarify, I mean, his novel, the Sympathizer. I forgot he's since published another.
I read The Sympathizer and generally disliked it while admiring its energy and ambition. I wrote about it here, which may clarify some of what I'm talking about:
https://johnpistelli.com/2019/04/27/viet-thanh-nguyen-the-sympathizer/
I agree with you that "beauty" and the like are just placeholders for what only gains meaning in the details—the details of particular works in particular conjunctures. Referring to Tardigrade_Sonata's comment below, 2666 is a good test case. It's a work of the radical left, even an unsubtle one, in all the ways T_S enumerates. What renders it "apolitical" in my no doubt problematic sense, to the point that a Marxist critic like Jean Franco hit it with the "romantic anarchist" slur—is its suggestion that the evil it depicts has a metaphysical dimension, and moreover a devilish way of beguiling us by resembling its opposite, hence everything from the novel's satirical depiction of the Soviet literary landscape to the unforgettable scene where the critics righteously beat the Middle Eastern cab driver to avenge his misogyny. Which is to say that these problems of the soul need to be adjusted, so far as they can be, alongside any actual material political reform, not that this is ruled out either. I'm not sure personal vs. political is the frame I'd choose, because it's not a question of social scale. Metaphysical vs. material seems to get more at what I'm talking about.
I wrote a long reply but then realized that nothing really matters and whether I exchange thoughts on this topic is only of interest to me, as I try to stave off the void.
I think your view of art and literature seems cramped and like a church edifice and this isn’t going to change. Neither will I, and I think the kind of heroic masculinity necessary to true art that is at least implied to me in your review is exactly what I’ve tried to reduce my belief in. But this could also just be my own priors infecting. I think I am just not able to be as uncynical as you sound and maybe that is why I think of the need to stave off the void rather than leaping in and writing novels myself like I used to think I would.
Fair enough—I'll take "church edifice"!
Just briefly: there's no reason you should know my work, but it makes no equation between masculinity and heroism, though I will admit to believing in some need for heroism. I reflect on the gender question and the novel here if you're interested; if not no problem:
https://grandhotelabyss.substack.com/i/144554840/widows-wince-men-women-and-the-ends-of-the-novel
I think Bolaño (and specifically 2666) might be an especially illustrative example of the political novel that’s not agitprop. It’s abundantly clear that Bolaño is criticizing “neoliberalism,” economic imperialism, whatever we want to call it, by fixating on the femicides in Santa Teresa (i.e., Juarez). The only American character (and one of the only “sympathetic” characters) is a reporter for a black nationalist newspaper. That the novel suggests the nephew of a reclusive European author *might* in fact be a rapacious serial killer of women coded as indigenous speaks for itself. Why doesn’t the novel feel like a polemic, then?
For one, its ambiguity: the sinking feeling that rather than a single perpetrator, it’s actually just a diffused misogyny and disruptive economic conditions (the women in the maquiladoras have financial independence from men) responsible for the murders. That this is what academics mean by “structural violence” should present as schematic or numbingly political, but Bolaño renders it an encounter with the borderline demonic, a detective story that turns metaphysical (not so different in fact than the ending of Alan Moore’s From Hell, which is somewhat more literal).
Thank you thank you THANK YOU for this one, Ross. That rejoinder from Phil Klay is another sign that hopefully we're ready to put this All Art Must Have the Correct Politics tendency to bed.
I want to have a political ideology that will make me admired by conservative Catholic political theorists, what novels should I read to help achieve this?
I feel like Balzac is an interesting model for the political novel. He’s just relentlessly devoted to tracing out how power and status work within the lives of his characters, who are usually set on some kind of upward mobility and therefore have to navigate hierarchies. It comes off more objective than didactic. Tom Wolfe was obviously very influenced by Balzac but just as clearly he had a didactic/ideological axe to grind and a sort of lecturey rhetorical style so it doesn’t come off the same way.
Zola also was a faithful follower of how power is sought, and how it alters.
💯