WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

by James Lincoln Warren

Indulge me this week. After getting over last week’s bout with Eastern cultural mysticism, this week I’ve been infected with a virulent strain of Western social intellectualism.

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded last week to Doris Lessing. On Saturday, in celebration of her triumph, the New York Times reprinted an essay she wrote for them which appeared on June 26, 1992, just over six months after the demise of the Soviet Union. Her primary topic was the pernicious intellectual baggage of Communism. Here’s a sample:

Every writer has the experience of being told that a novel, a story, is “about” something or other. I wrote a story, “The Fifth Child,” which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on.

A journalist from France walked into my living room and before she had even sat down said, “Of course ‘The Fifth Child’ is about AIDS.”

An effective conversation stopper, I assure you. But what is interesting is the habit of mind that has to analyze a literary work like this. If you say, “Had I wanted to write about AIDS or the Palestinian problem I would have written a pamphlet,” you tend to get baffled stares. That a work of the imagination has to be “really” about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary.

The demand that stories must be “about” something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers.

One of the things Lessing complains about Communist rhetoric is its deadly, pedantic prose, which she claims survives in the modernist groves of Academe. Be that as it may, her point might be a little clearer after considering a quote from Vladimir Ilyich Lenin:

In what, then, does this principle of party literature consist? Apart from the fact that a socialist, proletarian literature cannot be a means of profit for persons or groups, it cannot altogether be the concern of an individual, independent of the proletarian cause. Down with the non-party littérateurs; down with littérateurs-supermen. Literature should become a part of the all-proletarian cause.

In other words, according to Lenin, literature should only exist to perform a political purpose. This requires that it contain some didactic content, which in Lenin’s view, must serve to advance the “material dialectic”, the history-driven conflict between the oppressive forces of capitalism and the liberating forces of Communism as manifested in actual events — hence “the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on.”

Lessing, of course, was being more than a little disingenuous in taking the “art for art’s sake” high ground, given that one of the reason the Nobel Committee gave her the Prize was because of her stature as an “epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny”, i.e., her deep identification with political feminism. And stories have been used as vehicles for didactic purposes since Gilgamesh without aesthetic compromise.

So, you might very well ask: isn’t this just a little too highfalutin for a writer of genre fiction to be worried about?

Well, no, it ain’t. Not from where I’m standing.

It is one thing to only write stories that are veiled references to real events, although that doesn’t rule them out as good literature: think 1984. On the other hand, Tolkien strongly denied that The Lord of the Rings was informed by fascism. But even stories that contain their own universe of facts, like my historical yarns, have to deal with behavior relevant to the experience of their audience — especially crime fiction, which by its very nature deals with violations of societally imposed norms designed to protect the innocent, both as individuals and as a class.

The bottom line is that stories worth reading have to be informed by a social moral authority, as far as I’m concerned, anyway. If a story does nothing to illuminate the human condition, even if it’s nothing more an entertaining bauble like most of mine, then what the hell is it for? All right, there is a certain mental beauty to fair-play puzzle stories, but the emotional satisfaction comes from seeing Justice served according to our sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. Without a social context, it’s impossible to assign any value to it at all.

Literature is the art of communication, not of sensation. You can’t taste it or feel it or smell it. All right, you can hear it if it’s spoken, and reading is seeing — but you get my point. You can’t even dance to it.

Just call me Jamie the Red.1

1. With apologies to Gordon R. Dickson. [↩]