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by
John Pilger
Dissident
Voice
November 13, 2003
For
the great writers of the 20th century, art could not be separated from
politics. Today, there is a disturbing silence on the dark matters that should
command our attention.
In
1935, the first Congress of American Writers was held at the Carnegie Hall in
New York, followed by another two years later. By one account, 3,500 crammed
into the auditorium and a thousand more were turned away. They were electric
events, with writers discussing how they could confront ominous events in
Abyssinia, China and Spain. Telegrams from Thomas Mann, C Day Lewis, Upton
Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out, reflecting the fear that great
power was now rampant and that it had become impossible to discuss art and
literature without politics.
"A
writer," Martha Gellhorn told the second congress, "must be a man of
action now... A man who has given a year of his life to steel strikes, or to
the unemployed, or to the problems of racial prejudice, has not lost or wasted
time. He is a man who has known where he belonged. If you should survive such
action, what you have to say about it afterwards is the truth, is necessary and
real, and it will last."
Her
words echo across the silence today. That the menace of great and violent power
in our own times is apparently accepted by celebrated writers, and by many of
those who guard the gates of literary criticism, is uncontroversial. Not for
them the impossibility of writing and promoting literature bereft of politics.
Not for them the responsibility to speak out - a responsibility felt by even the
unpolitical Ernest Hemingway. Today, realism is declared obsolete; an ironic
hauteur is affected; false symbolism is all. As for the readers, their
political imagination is to be pacified, not primed; after all, what do they
care? Martin Amis expressed this well in Visiting Mrs Nabokov: "The
dominance of the self is not a flaw, it is an evolutionary characteristic; it
is just how things are."
So
it is "evolution". We have evolved to the apolitical self; to the
introspection and squabbles of individuals divorced from any notion that their
self-obsession is less important and less interesting than an engagement with
how things really are for the rest of us. Some years ago, the then budding
literary critic D J Taylor wrote a rare piece called "When the pen sleeps".
He expanded this into a book, A Vain Conceit, in which he wondered why the
English novel so often degenerated into "drawing room twitter" and
why the urgent issues of the day were shunned by writers, unlike their
counterparts in, say, Latin America who felt an obligation to take up the
political essence in all our lives and which shapes our lives. Where, he asked,
were the George Orwells, the Upton Sinclairs, the John Steinbecks? (Taylor
recently seemed to be repudiating this; let's hope he has recovered his nerve.)
The
main literature prize shortlists bear out his original thesis. Yet according to
Claire Armistead, literary editor of the Guardian, "writers are
challenging any sort of parochialism". But what else do they challenge?
She describes "a real generic inventiveness" in the three non-fiction
nominations of the Guardian Book Award. One is about a neurologist who plays
with words in a "totally eccentric" way; another is about mountains;
another is about the former East Germany which, she says, "makes you
understand a little better what a funny old world we live in".
But
where are the contemporary works that go to the heart of this funny old world,
as the books of Steinbeck and Joseph Heller did? Where is the equivalent of
Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America, Jonathan Coe's What a Carve-Up!
and Timothy Mo's The Redundancy of Courage? There are, of course, honorable
exceptions. You can buy James Kelman's collection And the Judges Said... in W H
Smith, which proves that books that rescue true politics from the Westminster
media village's "bantering inconsequence" (to borrow from F Scott
Fitzgerald) are wanted very much by the public.
Indeed,
there are countless books by little-known authors, produced by ever-struggling
publishers such as Pluto and Zed, which illuminate, sometimes brilliantly, the
shadows of rapacious power and which are ignored in the so-called mainstream.
No doubt, they are deemed "political"; and unless politics can be
diminished to its stereotypes and, better still, turned into a TV drama, no
thank you. After all, as one critic who dominates the reviews of paperback
non-fiction, wrote: the suggestion that social democracy is threatened by the
insane march of George Bush and his attendant McCarthyism is, well, "silly".
No matter that when you fly to the United States you lose the basic civil
liberty of your privacy; that your name alone can lead to body searches, as
Edward Said frequently experienced; that the FBI now routinely inspects the
reading lists of public libraries.
These
are dangerous times, and surreal. Column after column is devoted to the Martin
Amis cult: he who describes politics as having "withered away in this
country, and that's a great tribute to its highly evolved character", and
who sneers at the great anti-capitalist and anti-war demonstrations as
"really [about] anti-politics; they're protesting about politics
itself".
While
the Guardian rejoices in the new-found humanity of the former US secretary of
state Madeleine Albright as she promotes her autobiography, Madam Secretary,
there is not a single reference to the fact that this same woman, when asked if
the deaths of 500,000 children in Iraq as a result of American-driven sanctions
were a price worth paying, replied: "We think the price is worth it."
The headline over her smiling face read: "I loved what I did."
"When
truth is replaced by silence," the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko
said, "the silence is a lie." No writers' congress today worries
about the lies and crimes of George Bush and Tony Blair. It is gratifying that
the playwright David Hare has broken his silence ("America provides the
firepower; we provide the bullshit") and joined the courageous dissident
Harold Pinter. There is an urgency now. A Downing Street document, circulated
among "progressive" European governments, wants a world order in
which western powers have the authority to attack any other sovereign country.
In six years, Blair has sent British troops to take part in five conflicts, and
he wants yet more bloodletting. The document echoes his views on "rights
and responsibilities" - to kill and devastate people in faraway places,
thereby endangering and diminishing all of us.
What
would George Orwell make of this? There is a series of Orwell events planned to
mark the centenary of his birth. Most of those participating are politically
safe or accredited liberal warriors. What if Orwell had turned Animal Farm and
Nineteen Eighty-Four into parables about thought control in relatively free
societies, in which he identified the disciplined minds of the corporate state
and the invisible boundaries of liberal control and the latest fashions in
emperor's clothes? Would they still celebrate him?
"They
won't say..." wrote Bertolt Brecht in "In Dark Times", "...
when the great wars were being prepared for... they won''t say: the times were
dark. Rather: why were their poets silent?"
John
Pilger is a renowned investigative journalist and documentary
filmmaker. His latest documentary film, “Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies
in the War on Terror,” from which this article was drawn from, was broadcast on
the ITV network in the UK, on September 22.
Earlier this year, Pilger was named the winner of the Sophie Prize, one of the world's most distinguished environmental and
development prizes. He was also named Media
Personality of the Year, at this year's EMMA awards. His latest book is The
New Rulers of the World (Verso, 2002). Visit John Pilger’s website at: http://www.johnpilger.com
* The
Fall and Rise of Liberal England
* The
Big Lie: WMDs Were Just a Pretext for Planned War on Iraq
* What Good
Friends Left Behind in Afghanistan
* Iraq's
Epic Suffering Is Made Invisible
* How
Britain Exports Weapons of Mass Destruction
* The
Unthinkable is Becoming Normal