Politics in Fiction

Stendhal famously observed that "Politics in a work of imagination is like a pistol shot in a concert, a crude affair but attention must be paid to it." He was wrong and Orwell was right: "All art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is art."

Last month I dug out a tape of a radio play I'd written in the early 1970s. It was an adaptation of my children's book Wonders, Inc., which the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had done a lovely job of producing. After not hearing it for decades, I was struck by all the political comment I'd slipped into it, mostly veiled gibes at Richard Nixon. (And to slip a political comment into this post, even Nixon looks better and better these days.)

The original children's book had its own (unconscious) politics: a boy bored by his small town discovers a huge new smoke-belching factory in the meadows (no environmental impact statement). The factory makes abstractions: space items like elbow room, time items like split seconds and good old days, and dots stretched into lines—hairlines, skylines, and so on. After various adventures, the entrepreneurial boy agrees to become the factory's sales rep in his town, and even manages to sell an occasional dream to the board of education.

The Politics of the Apolitical
Even a relatively apolitical work of fiction has a political argument to make: "Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, so the only concerns worth worrying about are finding the right mate and getting on with your private life."

That was certainly not a position I ever wanted to take. My novels are full of politics, whether the society is a time-traveling empire or a far-future tribe of naked fishers. Some people in those societies are pretty comfortable, and others are pretty miserable. Violence breaks out. But so does bargaining.

Re-reading my novel Tsunami the other day, I noticed how its themes reverberate in most of my other fiction: the bad guys tend to be individuals or societies that don't grant equality or respect to others. The good guys gain equality and respect by uniting in a community that overthrows the bad guys. The overthrowers may be a small group (as in Brother Jonathan) or a multi-species alliance (as in Eyas), but they include their beaten enemies in their new community.

The theme is emerging in Henderson's Tenants, where a handful of people gain enormous power through nanotechnology and use it to overthrow an oppressive militaristic government. But as usual I find myself sympathizing with the villains; they're good people in their own eyes, trying to keep a staggering society from collapsing in ruins. But they're prepared to do terrible things just to maintain a terrible status quo, while Mike Henderson and his friends are prepared to give everyone power...and to take their chances with the consequences.

The Failure of Propagandist Fiction
The fiction of the 20th century is full of propaganda, from the Socialist Realism of the Soviets to Hemingway's sentimental view of the Spanish Loyalists to Ayn Rand's Objectivist novels (which I confess I find unreadable). But fiction is a terrible vehicle for real political propaganda, at least the kind that wants to change minds and incite to action.

That's because relatively few people read fiction, and even fewer read fiction that seriously challenges their current political views. Once in a while someone stumbles across Atlas Shrugged and it changes their life. But such sudden conversions are rare enough to be scarcely worth the trouble of writing a novel to achieve. You'd reach more people by publishing a letter to the editor of the LA Times.

Successful propaganda in fiction tends to give a face (and a vocabulary) to ideas we already hold. Nineteen Eighty-Four gave us a vision of a Stalinist future just when the Stalinist present of 1949 was looking pretty ominous. But even Orwell's classic novel was really a very good literary work pressed into service as anti-communist pamphlet.

The London of Airstrip One is the London of 1944, hit by occasional rocket bombs and reeking of boiled cabbage and bad gin...a London ostensibly fighting for democracy and freedom, but quite prepared to tell lies in the service of those ideals. The real propaganda message of the novel is that if you wait until Big Brother has taken over, petty revolts like Winston Smith's are futile. (And indeed, Winston's "revolt" is entirely scripted by his nemesis O'Brien, with Winston just a manipulated stooge.)

In Henderson I'm consciously echoing some of Orwell's images; Winston had the telescreen always babbling away, and Mike Henderson has his pixelite computer screen, whose default setting is a view of Vancouver's Burrard Inlet as it would have appeared three centuries ago. Winston is hypnotized into his revolt by O'Brien's messages via telescreen while Winston sleeps (an idea Orwell probably cribbed from Huxley). Mike listens in his sleep to voices around the world on his implanted digital radio, while being deceived into inventing truly radical nanotechnology to serve the state that oppresses him.

The Purpose of Political Fiction
I don't expect for a moment that my humble novel (if it's ever even published) will cause readers to leap from their chairs exclaiming, "How could I have voted for Bush! Martha, pack my lunch while I load my shotgun and start a revolution." People who think Bush is a good guy will laugh at my extrapolation of a quarter-century of Bushism. People who hate him will feel vindicated. But they're sure not going to lift an additional finger to resist him. Such resistance will come out of real-life events, not out of satires: a hundred dead GIs in Baghdad will have more impact than a hundred books like mine.

(This is not to say that I'm yearning for GIs to die in Baghdad—quite the reverse, it's because good men and women are dying on a fool's mission that I oppose the war and its fomenters.)

So I write political fiction not to change minds but to try to dramatize what goes on in people's minds. Whether we vote or not, we're political. Whether we endorse the status quo or dream of red revolution, we're political. Even Romeo and Juliet were caught up in violent politics, and so were Frodo and Sam. As Aristotle pointed out, we are social animals. We are therefore political, and a work of fiction without politics would be a truly crude affair that even Stendhal would deplore.

Comments

[kevin]

I may be unusual in this, but a lot of my politics was shaped by thinking through the implications of spec fic I had read. 1984 and The Postman, in particular, stand out in that respect. A lot of people don't start out politically aware or active. Sometimes, goo fiction can have a result. Frnakly, I think that Tom Clancy is better at advancing right wing political views than a hundred policy papers.

[Davei]

I once asked Walker Evans if he had ever visited any of the poor farmers pictured Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to see if their lot had improved as a result of the book he and James Agee collaborated on. He said, "It was an assignment. Why would I go back to see them? The only work of art that ever accomplished anything of social value was Uncle Tom's Cabin, and I'm not even sure about it."

I think he protested too much.

I'm trying to think of a work of fiction that affected my politics. I think The Grapes of Wrath had an effect on me, but I read it when I was young. I still feel that the movie The Battle Of Algiers had a big political effect on me.

[Tony Christini]

Lots of people are affected by political fiction. So much so that Roland Barthes for one wondered:

“Then comes the modern question: why is there not today (or at least so it seems to me), why is there no longer an art of intellectual persuasion, or imagination? Why are we so slow, so indifferent about mobilizing narrative and the image? Can’t we see that it is, after all, works of fiction, no matter how mediocre they may be artistically, that best arouse political passion?”

[Shane]

I, too, have been working on a piece of political fiction. Though being young and with no experience, I doubt much will materialize of it for awhile, at least.

You raise many good points in this entry, and I agree with you. Few people read fiction, and take it seriously enough to allow it to change their perspective on the world. People see fiction as entertainment, and today's society does not consider thinking to be entertaining by any means.

What I would ask though, is if fiction is not a viable method of political communication, what is? I was moved to right a piece of fiction after reading and watching many non-fiction documentaries about the bush administration. Documentaries that people who agreed with the administration did not want to watch, and people who did watch, simply nodded their heads and continued to do nothing but complain and live in disgust.

Perhaps I should right a self-help book on how to insight a revolution. But I believe you need practical experience in order to get self help books published. What is one to do? 1984, Brave New World, even Stephen King’s The Stand, do a good job of portraying the horrors of what lies at the end of the path the world is going down now. But an attempt to point that out to anybody is retorted with a strong point that all of those works are “just fiction.” Quoting Orwell to demonstrate the horrors of Bush is like quoting Crichton’s Andromeda Strain to demonstrate the horrors of Ebola or Eastern Equine Encephalitis. By encapsulating a political message in a fictional tale, you pigeon hole yourself, and any credibility you might have is never evaluated.

But who reads non-fiction? People who are looking for ways to support the opinions they already have, and people that are spying the arsenal of others they might meet in debate. Non-fiction really doesn’t accomplish anything either. Really, all I see right now is a lot of preaching to choir, and very little action. I hear a lot of loud voices saying we are heading down the wrong path, but nobody is grabbing for the wheel to change course.