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Learning to Rage
(or Why I Write Revisited)
D.Y. Béchard
In 2006, while at a writers’ retreat, I made plans to travel the short distance to New York City so that I could participate in a protest against the Iraq War. That evening, when the ten writers in residence dined together, my forthcoming trip quickly became the subject of table conversation. Didn’t I think–one of my fellow residents pointed out–that writers should avoid political involvement? In response, I explained that I saw no reason why that might be the case. As the discussion progressed, most of those at the table agreed that writers should be political neither in their writing nor in their actions but should focus on “the larger questions” as well as on craft. Only one, an English novelist, strongly sided with me, asking the others how an individual could even distinguish these larger questions from current political issues. By the time dessert was finished and the plates and wineglasses were taken away, we had not managed to have much of a discussion. The writers who felt themselves exempt and unaccountable had remained smugly dismissive, as if dealing with idealistic children or those who had yet to understand the value of true art.
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Recently, thinking back on that conversation at the writers’ retreat, I reread George Orwell’s “Why I Write,” an essay in which he tries to reconcile his aesthetic and political goals. He states: “… the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity.” But presupposed by, and virtually unexamined in this statement is the question of why politics and aesthetics have to be reconciled in the first place–why affluent Western cultures have so diligently separated the two.
The answer that I hear most frequently–one no doubt of Soviet-era vintage–is that political writing is usually propaganda, devoid of any true insight about human nature or the writerly work of creating beautiful things. But as a writer who meets many other writers, I think that the answer is not so obvious. Rather, our culture increasingly privileges fiction that does not deal with imminent political issues–that, by not doing so, limits the scope of our concerns and even pacifies us. Orwell puts his finger on the problem when he says, “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” It is “political” only in that it enables power structures to remain unquestioned and reinforces the status quo.
In regards to fiction, our culture seems to have a strong political bias of non-implication despite the military and economic attitudes of our governments. Over the last ten years and the process of completing one book as well as of working on a new one (processes that, by their arduous nature, demand the question “Why do I write?”), I have noted the growing prevalence of certain very comfortable assumptions about literature’s role. And yet, as urgently as at any other crucial period in our history, the political realities at the beginning of the twenty-first century should compel us to challenge our passivity and investigate our artistic shortcomings.
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Fifteen years ago, when I began studying literature in university, the attitude that Orwell describes prevailed among the writers I met. Allegory and symbolism were aspersions cast on idea-driven work. Young writers sought to portray “the world” (what was in fact their domestic world) honestly: the daily shuffle of worries, the petty anxieties that appropriately betray our very pettiness. I found astounding the sheer quantity of depressed, bed-ridden and anguished protagonists (if they can deserve such a designation) who could not act or choose or who, at best, enjoyed a brief epiphany (usually suggesting the meaningless of their lives) before returning to their suburban family or office job. Many felt that using conventional speech and offering a simple vision of life was, in itself, an act of rebellion–though one primarily aimed at the ivory tower. Urgent global politics, though acknowledged in headlines, did not appear to figure largely in the lives of many, and whether people wanted to admit it or not, the 1990s was a time when the majority behaved as if the influence of Western democratic capitalism would inevitably convert the entire world into one large, happy-go-lucky free market. Politics had been relegated to remote places where people insisted on fighting for absurd and anachronistic reasons. Of course, a clement September morning dispelled those illusions.
Yet since then I have seen few of the most artistic and educated people I know in any way change their approaches to writing. I have read the same coming-of-age stories, the same immortal suburban dramas that hardly describe our changing and volatile culture. Even our entertainment-oriented media cannot entirely avoid the pressing issues of government and corporate corruption, Christian and Muslim fundamentalism at home and abroad, nation-building and the mythologizing of power, or the expansion of corporate mass media with strong government interests. I do not mean to say that there is suddenly more injustice in the world, but when the injustice is revealed through calamity and bellicose acts of greed, our culture hardly acknowledges either these problems or their causes. In fact, it grows accustomed to iniquity at an alarming rate, and we see with increasing clarity that we gave little attention to the source of the problems because we were comfortable in our daily lives. We might note that even now, with the results of our choices looming over us, we continue to give insufficient attention to new sources of conflict.
If I write this essay now, it is not to denounce the bad books–there has always been a vast majority of self-indulgent, disengaged writers–but rather to begin a process of careful self-examination and vigilance. We, as authors, must resist the comfortable versions of ourselves we could become, making sure that exterior factors, such as the pressure on literature to serve the entertainment industry, do not define us.
The first decade of the twenty-first century should present a challenge to artists. How do we investigate the comfortable indifference of the West, the acceptance and even the preference that the machinery of power be kept hidden from us, and the belief that individual agency cannot create change in the world? If we might answer “Why do I write?” by saying that we do so to create meaning (or face the lack thereof) in our world, then we have to ask why we privilege certain experiences over others. In seeking to examine the world, staying entirely within the realm of the familiar seems counter-intuitive. We should work to understand what lies beneath and motivates not just our daily lives but our cultural identities. Unthreatened, they seem absolute–the norm. But a writer’s job, as I see it, is to challenge the norm, to provoke questions in the most stable identity. If we can accept this as a starting point, then the real question is not “Why” but “How do we write?”
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In 1966, Susan Sontag published “Against Interpretation,” an essay in which she calls the academic interpretation of art “the revenge of the intellect upon art … [and] upon the world.” I tend to agree with Sontag in that she wants art not to subjugate itself to interpretation, not to contrive messages that, once interpreted, make the work of art seem secondary. She writes: “By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.”
I mention Sontag here because, as an intellectual force, she influenced many writers who went on to influence others around the world. The residue of that message is not her original, vibrant concern but a fear of being reduced, of having one’s work simplified or called topical. (Many might consider writing about war to be topical whereas they would see writing about a spousal argument as honest and natural.) The solution that Sontag finds is what she calls transparence: “Transparence is the highest, most-liberating value in art–and in criticism–today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are.” As an example of transparence, she cites Renoir’s La Règle du jeu. Of all of the films that I have seen, Renoir’s is among those that I have most often heard subject to interpretation. This is, of course, not the approach that Sontag would privilege. Rather, Renoir’s film resists interpretation through the power of its immediacy–the transparency that makes it real and compelling and far more than the sum of its symbols. Its form and images evoke conflicting values, drawing our attention to the dynamics of a class-based society but making interpretation a constant struggle. It is no wonder that, not having found an easy answer, the film’s original audience booed it, the critics dismissed it, and the government banned it because it was “demoralizing” for a country at war.
If anything, the audience at that first showing in 1939 did not find Renoir’s film “manageable or conformable,” or comfortable. And yet when was the last time that fiction or film created such an outrage here? We can say that the means of artistic distribution limit all that is uncomfortable (and no doubt many political novels are written that publishers deem “unmarketable,” i.e., “not pleasant to read”). Some might even think that our society has been so thoroughly liberated that uncomfortable material is unnecessary or impossible. I believe, and would hope, that most serious artists do not think this to be true.
Here I return to the question: “How do I write?” I wrote my first novel in my twenties, at a time when I had personal questions and wanted to reexamine North American history, to follow the movements of the various peoples across the continent. But the questions that haunted me during the writing of that book have changed. I write with the same love of language and story, but I am more aware of our history and questionable future. I have written drafts of several projects only to set them aside while my ideas mature and to further question my intentions and vision. I find myself more and more bothered by our sanitized culture that has taught us to believe that we are different and better, that social upheaval is ephemeral and that the world will remain as it is. Our self-assurance is a blip on the roadmap of history. If, therefore, I have found one good answer to my question, it lies in representation, in seeing and showing. As Orwell pointed out, much of the passive, self-obsessed literature we encounter is “political” in its value but not its intent; that is to say, its very passivity enables systems of power though the writer does not intend to create any lasting political awareness. Such writing reaffirms what can and cannot be shown, for, as Foucault might have said, it must “say, for the first time, what has already been said, and repeat tirelessly what was, nevertheless, never said.”
Composing messages or moral tales is not the primary job of the artist, at least as I see it (though, if passionate, he might find himself writing the occasional manifesto). Rather, the difficult job is seeing and then showing. How little is shown, revealed, examined in much contemporary fiction (with the exception of some post-colonial literature and some novels written in the “third world”). There are a few major authors who do struggle with these questions, but the majority of fiction is complicit in the process of covering and hiding without examining the mechanisms of that compulsive dissimulation. The art of writing is that of looking closely at the world around us, at the institutions that control and enable us, and of describing the mechanisms of power and belief within our intimate relationships as well as within the public sphere. Rarely, however, do I see fiction examining the normalized state of our double lives: the quiet streets beyond our windows in contrast to the neatly televised images of corruption, inequity and constant, dramatized war. I do not ask that fiction rants and raves against injustice but that it turns its gaze and presents images–the images that encircle us: of strife and social change, of violent passion and brutal indifference, and of the grotesque military forms that are meant to represent security. The glorious illusion of our age is that we don’t believe in anything and that we are free. Nothing can limit our questioning of our assumptions more than these beliefs.
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In one last digression, let me elucidate the nature of self-indulgent writing with the following quotation from Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments:
Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would, too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him than this paltry misfortune of his own.