The rebellion and apathy

Posted by admin on June 16th, 2008 filed in Articles, The New Illiterati

I

Post-world and eventual accountability

A few months back I took a stroll through the neigborhood of Södermalm in Stockholm, and got the distinct feeling that I was passing through some sort of post-world – one of those sci-fi places you see in utopian movies, where war and poverty have been eradicated and everyone is free to engage in their own personal growth. I walked through the shopping centre on Medborgarplatsen square, and watched all the humidifiers rejuvenate shiny post-vegetables, and people walking around with post-sushi take-away and post-café lattes – everyone seemingly not rich, in globalist modern standards, but nevertheless so completely content that I could hardly imagine them ever lacking anything they truly wanted. Let alone what they needed. As if all the wealth had been equally distributed and now everyone could have all the sushi they could stomach. It’s a scary feeling, ‘cause you know it’s not true, and yet it would be so easy to believe it – it’s so enticing, so beautiful, to imagine a problem-free universe already here with nothing more  needing to be done, except leaning back and taking it all in.

I sometimes get the same feeling reading literature – especially modern prose work. Of course noone – or at least very few people – write novels without a dramatic angle. The basic formula of problem leads to problem-resolution is still the game to play in linear prose. But the dramatic angle is more and more, it seems to me, a personal story – protagonist A finds herself in an unfortunate circumstance, either because some other protagonist put her there, or because of a series of coincidences. This is all well and good – such things happen in the world, and they should be dealt with in literature – but the amount of this type of literature gives me this same post-world feeling I just mentioned. One could deduce from it that problems are not inherent in systems – that all the “big” political problems have been solved, the fundamentals, as if systematic, deliberate misery had been eradicated – and instead we focus on the particular within the social.

This feeling I get strikes a series of false chords in my soul, and I writhe – and I might even feel a certain anger towards my fellow writers (as a group, rather than as individuals). I may of course be mistaken, but I see our political world as being fundamentally wrong, repressive and cruel in a decidedly systematic way. It doesn’t allow for ethical decisions, the system being so overly complicated, all-encompassing and layered that noone can possibly be informed of the consequences of their actions – and the system has been built to use and abuse this fact in order to increase capital gains, the globalist wealth of the few, in particular, but also the contentment of any citizen lucky enough to have a western passport. Noone is eventually accountable for people dying in wars, or slave labour camps, refugee camps; or from easily preventable diseases – noone is eventually accountable for torture, political imprisonment, police brutality and other forms of state-run (and/or outsourced and privately run) violence.

But yes, of course, when caught we do arrest and imprison the low-level employee, the single soldier that steps out of line or the foreman who beats his worker to death, a politician may have to apologize or even step down – but we fail to make the system accountable, and we fail to notice that these things happen repeatedly and systematically and are not single coincidences of brutality, but rather intrinsic to competitional society and thereby just as systematic as in Soviet-socialism or other authoritarian systems, although masked with an idea of personal or individual responsibility. This responsibility is a façade, because those few that get “caught”, so to speak, are in most cases merely following the norms that society dictates, besides being only peripherally guilty – since responsibility is so decentralized that no one person is “wholly” guilty of anything.

The good thing about authoritarian systems is that you can see your abuser, you can point at him and cry for justice. One of the worst things about capitalist cruelty is that you can’t do this – responsibility has been decentralized. Nothing is the system’s fault, and yet the system breeds both sociopathy and apathy, feeds on war and massive (3rd world) poverty. Everybody’s simply doing their jobs. Capitalism having become a global crisis, makes this even harder.

In the Spanish movie Los Lunes al Sol (Mondays in the Sun), by Fernando Leon de Aranoa, the Russian character Sergei tells a joke that goes something like this: “When the Soviet Union crumbled, we properly realized what we already knew, that everything they had been telling us about socialism was a lie. A few years later we also realized that everything they had been telling us about capitalism was in fact true.”

II

Political writing in the post-world

In an interview with the Icelandic newspaper, Morgunblaðið, in 2002, Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jalloun was asked about the political dimensions in his work, and he answered thus:
“I come from a country that deals with many problems, not only in the economic sense, but also various types of injustice. In Morocco the demand is that writers cover these issues and take a clear stance. In all countries writers are citizens, but in Morocco a writer would never get away with thinking he was above the community and the issues that govern its debate. The public demands that he participates. The explanation for this important position that is held by writers and scholars in Morocco, is that only about 40% of the inhabitants are literate. This is changing rapidly but the people need someone to talk on their behalf and write about their hopes and suffering. A Moroccan writer really has no choice, he must take a stance. Such a stance is understandably not demanded of the nordic writers , because their communities have developed much further, here you have human rights, the rule of law and the foundations of your society are not up for immediate debate.” (1)

(Note: Italics are mine)

What I find interesting in this statement is the diagnosis of nordic writers, and noone demanding of them that they write political work – because not only is it obviously true, but there is also the tendency, in all of the western world (at least), to depoliticize art in general, and act as if one thing had nothing to do with the other, and even that they cast a dark shadow on each other. Indignant art-for-the-sake-of-beauty artists will point at Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens propogating national-socialism, or how Pound’s Pisan Cantos have had to suffer because of their political connection, as examples of the catastrophic effects of mixing politics with art. I would, in turn, point to the mountains upon mountains of unimportant, meaningless work – forgotten, of course – as examples of the catastrophic effects of not mixing art with politics – and George Orwell and Milan Kundera as examples of good political artwork (and I know I’m being particularly nasty in pinning those two together, since the latter has repeatedly critizised the former for not being any good as an artist).

Good work does not necessarily have good politics, and bad work can obviously be produced with the best of political intentions. But just as the maturity-plot of a Bildungsroman needs to make sense, needs to be done skillfully and artfully, so the politics of political artwork need to be thought out – there are no shortcuts. A banal work injected with current political trends, is nevertheless banal work. All of this should be self-evident – while a great portion of the literature debate ignores political work as gimmicks, and many political writers seem to think all it takes to make the work “important” is an injection of indignant moralism.

Because of literature’s tendency to imitate itself the world is ridden with so-called political authors, that show misery, violence, exploitation and injustice as individual cases, rather than the systematic rules that they are. The tendency in literature to represent through single examples – a part for a whole, a single worker for a working class – makes the literature fall through the cracks, in a world where the opposite is true. The single mother in the latest social realist drama is constantly portrayed as a victim of unfortunate circumstance, and I hate to be the one to say it but capitalism is not an unfortunate circumstance – it’s so-called side-effects are inherent to the system – while many writers wallow in political subject matter, reflecting little else than their own personal self-righteousness; at worst a nasty judgmental attitude of mostly ill intent towards the world (of which, I admit, I am not wholly innocent of) and at best a social commentary resembling the readers’ letters and editorials of newspapers. While certain writers may participate in the political debate, none try to reinvent it, none deal with the fundamentals that are nevertheless, in my mind, an inseperable part of the craft. We might write drama of individuals caught in the system – but it’s all revisionist in nature, as if all capitalism needs to make everyone happy is someone adjusting the buttons on the machine.

III

Antagonizing readers

The western world – at least – is inherently amoralist, and the most pressing political questions in that part of the world are not about our own suffering, or the suffering of our readers, but about the apathetic and sociopathetic conditions of our daily lives. I do not mean to say that there is nothing wrong in the western world itself, but we do find ourselves in need of dealing with juxtapositioning our own plights with those of the world in general – precisely because the world has become globalized. While Finnish students and Danish nurses may be facing bad conditions, we need to able to see that it’s hardly comparable to the disenfranchisement, exploitation and plain murder that the Finnish and Danish systems propogate abroad, without defusing the political struggles within our own welfare states, and thus allowing them to drift towards more libertarian fascist systems. We need to use the wealth amassed in the western world to ease suffering elsewhere – or that suffering will never end – without using that as an excuse to ignore local plights, such as the bad condition of Finnish students and Danish nurses.

Adressing the apathy/sociopathy of western people in general – from underpaid nurses to wealthy investment cowboys – is a potential career suicide, as instead of taking part in, and portraying, the “hopes and suffering” of the readers, it would inevitably be read as attacking them on political, ethical and moral grounds, and that reading would probably be justified, at least in part. It may very well sound like one was saying that Danish nurses shouldn’t fight for a better salary. This is a serious dilemma, not only because it requires more of the writers – perhaps more than they can do, or are willing to do – but also because, as anyone familiar with political debate can vouch for, antagonizing people doesn’t really get you anywhere. And a writer who is not read, or merely seen as an antagonistic moralist, can only hope to be discovered later as “having been right all along” – which might not be that important, however it may tickle the ego. It is proper to note though, that literature does not only occupy the present, but also the future, and “having been right all along” might have political meaning when that comes to pass. But it is naturally hard to say, if it will be so.

The demand that Ben Jelloun mentions, the demand that readers make of writers, that they portray and adress the readers’ problems, is non-existant in most western literature, and the political dimensions that need to be adressed in my opinion are probably not even welcome. The demand is only put forth in societies where suffering is great, and the suffering in western societies is mostly minor – if put into context with the harm these societies cause elsewhere. It is all too easy to ignore the more serious ethical problems of our societies – such as the near complete disassociation for human suffering in faraway countries – and turn to mirroring and remirroring our favorite 20th century novelists. Perhaps the obvious answer as to why this is so, is that, as Ben Jelloun mentions, writers are citizens and therefore suffering the same conditions as their readers – apathy and amoralism coming naturally – rather than them being populist, cowardly careerists pawning off their work as if it were any other consumer product.

IV

My excuses

This is a subject best broached in much longer texts than these – and yet a subject I feel should be broached, specifically by writers. I am not a monotheistic writer – I do not believe in absolutes, not even my own. I furthermore do not believe in any one direction of writing to be superior – neither morally, politically nor aesthetically – to another. To a great extent the maxim that literature simply is – that poetry should not should – rings true to me. My call for a new approach to political literature is neither fully thought out nor manifestic, and it is not meant to be. It is merely meant to propogate thought, through writing thoughts and subsequently speaking them aloud – for them to be digested with others. I do not say this to withdraw from my call for a new approach to political literature, but to emphasize that the nature of literature can not be easily defined – and it’s surely not mine to define alone. Literature can not be dogmatic, and must not be relegated to a space of political propaganda – despite it’s nature being, in my mind, political. It is within these borders – or rather, this borderlessness – that I would like to ponder, to throw these thoughts into the mix, these questions and calls, that I deem as greatly important, and see what comes of them.

I thank you for listening.

1: The Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun interviewed by Þröstur Helgason in the Icelandic newspaper, Morgunblaðið, april 13, 2002:

„Ég kem frá landi sem á við mörg vandamál að stríða, ekki bara efnahagsleg heldur og misrétti af ýmsu tagi. Í Marokkó er beinlínis gerð krafa um að rithöfundar fjalli um þessi mál og taki skýra afstöðu. Rithöfundar eru alls staðar borgarar en marokkóskur rithöfundur myndi aldrei komast upp með að telja sig hafinn yfir samfélagið og þau mál sem þar eru efst á baugi hverju sinni. Almenningur gerir kröfur um að hann taki þátt. Skýringin á þessari mikilvægu stöðu rithöfunda og menntamanna í Marokkó er sú að einungis um 40% þjóðarinnar eru læs og skrifandi. Þetta er að breytast mjög hratt en fólkið þarfnast þess að einhver tali máli þess og skrifi um vonir þess og þjáningar. Marokkóskur rithöfundur á því í raun og veru engan valkost, hann verður að taka afstöðu. Þessar skyldur hvíla skiljanlega ekki á norrænum höfundum þar sem samfélög þeirra eru mun lengra komin, hér eru mannréttindi, réttarfar og þjóðfélagsgerðin ekki knýjandi umfjöllunarefni.“