What follows below are reading notes, not an essay nor even a blog post. They're unlikely to interest you. When and if I develop them into a blog post or other even less informal object, I'll post a link here.
Last night, reading Chapter 1 of
The Oak and the Calf, I was struck by how earnestly Solzhenitsyn believed in the practical value of writing the truth. I mean not the moral value of it; there's no great wonder in that; I easily see the moral value of seeing and writing the truth (as well as it may be given to me to see and write it). No, what what struck me was Solzhenitsyn's belief in the
practical value of telling the truth. He believed it would have an effect. He believed with sure confidence that people would listen and would change direction, would learn from the mistakes of other nations.
That is a most wonderful belief for anyone to hold; but since a man who suffered in the Soviet gulag for so many years believed it implicitly, I feel I must not dismiss it out of hand. I have to take it seriously. Solzhenitsyn and other writers who lived under extreme censorship might easily believe that books have political and cultural effects, since they wrote within an environment in which they could not publish, dared not speak, had to remain silent to stay alive (and even silence did not save them; more so it was blind luck). In such a dark and repressive civilization, (it was not civilization at all, but let the word alone for now), a writer could easily think that just a few words of truth let out into the light would destroy the evil, would convince millions. Such an isolated sincere and great writer might believe such a fairy tale fantasy (if it is a fairy tale fantasy) precisely because such a writer had never had occasion to see a thesis of truth tested in a real environment of public culture. In an open society, it is different. For us, the more familiar and blase truth is that of the scientist in War and Peace (or was it Anna Karenina?) who labored over a great book of truth, of reform, of fact, of plain common sense which would transform some sector of the Russian economy or society ... and when it was published ... it sank without a trace. These things happen daily in an open society. Yes, for a writer, or a publicist, or even a powerful politician of an open society, in the most powerful nation on earth ... well ... you can see where I'm going with this. Al Gore can tour the nation with a convincing slide show about an aptly named Inconvenient Truth. And he has some effect. But not nearly the effect such a truth deserves to have.
Other examples are too numerous to begin mentioning, or we'd have ourselves another book which would vanish without a trace. Truth is slow, if it convinces at all. The more important incentive in belief is perceived self-interest.
People prefer immediately self-interested lies to any truth, en masse. That's because they prefer self-interest to truth as individuals. It's a preference which is very difficult to give up. "It's difficult for a person to understand a truth when his salary depends on him not understanding it."
The only truths that have any political or historical effect?
The only truths that have any political or historical effect ... the only truth-telling that has any political or historical effect ... involves incremental truths. These truths must be told by men and women strong or enlightened enough to care relatively little for their own material self-interest: Socrates, Luther, Jefferson, MLK.
Yes, a great, free, democratic nation had incrementally to act upon the self-evident evil of slavery. It took almost a hundred years; and even then, a war had to be fought. And even then, it took another hundred for the federal government to make good on the promises of the 14th Amendment. And even then, even now, racism and discrimination smolder on.
The strictly moral value of literature
Morally, I repeat, it's valuable to see truths as well as one can and to tell them as well as one can. By "morally" I mean individually, for the salvation, or cultivation, of one's soul or one's personality. Or even merely one's integrity. You couldn't see that slavery is evil and then continue to prosper from it, and keep even your integrity. Much less could you prevent corruption and damage to your deepest self, your soul if that's not a word laden with too much hocus pocus. Slavery wasn't the only evil on which depend so many salaries. It was only the most flagrant. There is also corporate profits, or gun lobby political profits, or reductionist religious activism, or racism. The list could be long; and it is not necessary to make it long.
Back to the question: Can literature have political or historical effects?
So, to avoid being corrupted and damaged by supporting or not condemning such evils ... telling the truth is good. It's good for the soul, so to speak. But does it do any good collectively? Does it do any good politically? Is there any effect?
I think the answer is Yes -- but it is only incremental.
It's too bad, but a fact, that we as groups of people can't leap to the commonsense end of democracy and progress. We have to stumble along, a couple of steps at most per generation; and some generations may even slide back. And it may even be, as some very reasonable people can argue, that no political and moral progress is made; what seems to be progress is only from our point of view; if we were under the bombs dropped by killers over Cambodia, or Nagasaki, or in the Twin Towers when they were knocked down by killers, we wouldn't think much progress had been made since the pillaging of the Middle Ages, perhaps.
Tolstoy's longeurs in War and Peace are still more convincing to me than any idea of the Great Man, the Great Leader, whether that man (or woman) be a politician, a general, or a writer. (One exception: a great scientist; but this is a special technological exception; a new scientific truth, a transformative one, opens new channels in bedrock for human action. This doesn't imply leadership at all.) Tolstoy's vision of masses moving confusedly, driven by each individual's own mysterious urges and motivations, seems more correct than any idea of a Great Writer telling a truth that changes or saves a nation.
(In Tolstoy's very convincing understanding: a political shift, a war, a cultural change, are all the sum effect of millions of individuals' self-interested or even unaware actions. These mass events are waves formed by droplets of water and the interactions of current, wind, gravity, spin. Waves are not led, whether in the ocean or in geopolitics. They simply happen.)
Perhaps I'm thinking too small, or thinking in frames of time too short. So, Napoleon was just a chip of wood on a wave of water, fine. But what of greater men than the domineering faux-democratic bureaucrat Napoleon? Yes, what of Socrates? What of Jefferson? What of, in evil effects, Lenin? Well let's leave aside the evil example, and all evil examples. Did Socrates, did Jefferson, have any effect on the course of western civilization? or not? Would some other chip of wood have taken their places if Socrates and Jefferson had been stillborn babies, or had been killed by a random accident while young? As for Jefferson, I think I can say yes: as great and wonderful as he was, I don't doubt there were many who would have been greater, given a few changes in accidents in history. The forces that produced him really did produce him. He gave them form with his words. But he did not really create them.
About Socrates, the history for me is whitened out with more ignorance. I have no idea.
Well what of Whitman, then? (I know Whitman enters here out of left field, as it were; but bear with me.) No. No one would have taken his place. Impossible. Whether Whitman has had any political or historical effect would be very difficult for me to say. (And since this is the main question, Whitman must be ushered out as abruptly as he entered this blog posting.) But before he goes, let's give him a round of applause, lets give him hugs and claps on the back for having had an enormous moral effect on us as individuals. I've seen it with my own eyes, and in my own heart. I've seen it in friends, in new acquaintances. And I've read of others testifying to the same effects. Millions. There's no reason to disbelieve them, none at all.
Q. So Whitman has had a moral effect?
A. Yes, he has.
Q. But not necessarily a political, historical, or social effect?
A. I just don't know. He may have tempered U.S. culture, and may have inspired poets and writers in cultures around the world. So, yes but ... it seems vague.
Q. What about Tolstoy?
A. It seems clear to me that, for all his own doubts about the effects of any so-called great man, that Tolstoy may have had far reaching political effects. Ghandi learned from him. MLK learned from Ghandi. The U.S. people and government learned from MLK. (I understand how oversimplified and rickety that sketch of causation is; but entertain it for a moment.)
Q. Isn't it possible that Tolstoy, Ghandi, and MLK are all just chips of wood on the waves of history.
A. I have to admit it. Yes, that's not only possible but more probable than that Tolstoy began a chain of causation that resulted in the demolition of Jim Crow. Note how universal and simple "Tolstoy's" ideas are: you can find them in Jesus, in Buddha, in all the mystics of all religions and non-religions. In fact they are not even mystical. They are just democratic. So, with this clear-eyed view of matters, even the so-called Founding Fathers of the U.S. were just chips on the waves of history.
Q. If Tolstoy had not existed, had not written of nonviolence, would Ghandi have become Ghandi?
A. I have no idea.
Q. Well try to answer, since we're in the weeds here. You can't just leave us.
A. Well, if I had to answer ...
Q. Suppose that you do ..
A. I will suppose it, and attempt it. Supposing I had to answer, I would say ... I would say that I do not know.
Q. Well, it's good to know that one does not know.
A. It's the least one can do.
A. Is it even important that literature have some hope of a political, historical, or social effect?
B. Um, yes. It's important. For one thing, political, historical, and social effects are important. Or maybe we shouldn't call them "effects" but rather "movement".
A. I see. You don't want to call them effects because that would imply a cause or causes.
B. Exactly.
A. Is it necessary, for a writer or a reader?
B. No, it's not necessary, for a writer or a reader, to believe that writing or reading a particular work or body of literature will have some p0litical, historical, or social effect. It's enough that we writers and readers can believe that literature can have an individual moral effect. And we don't merely believe that; it's simply an experiential fact.
A. You say it's enough. You mean ...
B. I mean believing in the moral effects of serious literature upon an individual is enough to motivate a person to go the trouble to write or to read serious literature. For us who are writers or readers, it's prosaically, undramatically inconceivable to live without writing or reading serious literature. Why? Because it sustains us, if we can say that without seeming to be melodramatic.
A. You are not being melodramatic. That is, as long as you're simply saying what you mean to the best of your ability, without trying to overwhelm us with false emotion.
B. I am simply saying what I mean.
A. Please continue saying it.
B. I will do my best. This belief in, this acknowledgement of, the moral effect of literature is exactly what gives meaning to reading and writing. Knowing that it has a moral, individual, internal effect ... this gives meaning, provides us with an excuse, so to speak ironically, for writing, reading, living.
Politics and art as possible sources of salvation -- and what do we mean by "salvation"?
A. Is it necessary then to include political or historical themes? or are mere myths and parables production enough?
B. I've wondered about this for years, as I've stumbled around confused about how to live, how to read, how to write. The answer is now clear to me. Political work is necessary, but not sufficient. You can't write about reality, about human beings, without considering politics, economics, power. You can't ignore these essential realities; but neither can you stop with them as would a propagandist or partisan writer.
B. Politics won't save you, won't help you know at all how to live (which for us is the same as saying "how to write, how to read, how to live").
A. Can anything, any activity, save you?
B. Art can. Art contains all that is essential. Eventually it does. Solzhenitsyn lets drop an interesting remark on this score. He says something like, "Gulags and prison camps were not the whole of our existence then; but we couldn't describe our existence while ignoring them." It seems to me that this statement is true even if other forms of political power, including even benevolent forms, are substituted for "gulags and prison camps". The point is that politics, economics, history, can't be ignored as something tawdry and beneath ourselves. Artists, and especially literary artists, can't wash their hands of at least describing politics, economics, power. And in the real world, they cannot wash their hands of political activity. Politics has the potential, at least, to be moral. And inasmuch as political and economic choices can be more or less moral than other choices ... well, that is one basic definition of the moral potentiality of a given activity.
B. Thomas Mann said something like, "Politics is not going to save you." I used to wash my hands of politics based on that limited truth, on that truth only partly elaborated. But not any more. Politics won't save us, won't save ME, or any individual, most particularly. Art can, and will; but only if we give it free rein over even politics.
A. Well then how does art "save" anyone, if indeed it does? What are you talking about?
B. I mean salvation in the sense of understanding what is real, and in what sense you are real. You are not who or what you think you are. Art, done well, shows you this. Tolstoy is famous for insisting on this point of view of art. Art is the communication of emotion, for Tolstoy. The highest emotion, for Tolstoy, was the emotion of universal love, that sense of belonging to all, to the universe, to all mankind especially. Therefore, according to Tolstoy, the highest art and the only art worth doing or experiencing is the art which provokes this highest emotion.
And on this basis Tolstoy hated his own great novels. He condemned them as he condemned Shakespeare, whom he hated: much ado about nothing. A lot of potboiling. Melodrama. Distraction. Well, judging by his stated strict standards, he was mistaken, as far as I'm concerned, about War and Peace: that book did provoke in me, and not in me alone, a sense of wonder, of unity, of the smallness of the egotistical me. (It has thousands of other effects, to be sure.)
And that is the salvation of art, because in that state of mind one is ready to die calmly, or to suffer calmly. This is the "saving" I mean. You're ready not only to die (which is comparatively easy and can be cheap, witness the killer-martyrs of many armies), but also ready to live, to lose your egotism which has caused you so much unrest and pain.
This salvation is immediate, and it's commonsense, very common, repeated by mystics and sages and ordinary folk alike because it's the hard-to-define truth right in front of our noses all the time. That's what I mean when I say that art, that literature, can save while politics never can.
