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the
current
Monday
Report
below!
This week's report by Tony Christini, Mainstay Press
Write A Political Novel?
The time is ripe to write a political novel says Christopher Lehmann
in his recent article “Why Americans Can’t Write Political Fiction.”
On the other hand it seems that you would have to be a fool or a
masochist to write a political novel in the US, because to write one
that bears anything like a close relation to reality, given the US
political climate, would be like someone in a fundamentalist church
congregation standing up in the middle of a religious service and
suggesting that everyone discuss the merits of being a good atheist.
You would be lucky if you were merely ignored rather than vilified
or worse. Doubtless though, writing a political novel in the US that
actually bears serious relation to reality is a hard and important
thing to do.
The time is ripe to write a political novel, Lehmann claims, if only
US political novelists would not be “ultra-earnest” and not engage
in “stubborn moralizing” or render “a vision of politics as the
squalid self-interested manipulation of events beneath the dignity
of any sane moral actor.” That would seem to rule out the
incorporation (as crucial context) in a novel of the merest facts
about the US invasion of Iraq. Do so, and see how many publishers
would be willing to consider accepting your work. As the Nobel
Prize winning playwright Harold Pinter points out, the US invasion
of Iraq is –
“A bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating
absolute contempt for the concept of International Law. An arbitrary
military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross
manipulation of the media and therefore of the public. An act intended
to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle
East masquerading - as a last resort (all other justifications having
failed to justify themselves) - as liberation. A formidable assertion of
military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands
upon thousands of innocent people.”
Lehmann suggests that novelists would do well to follow the lead of
author Billy Lee Brammer, who while declaring himself to be “pro-
politician” managed to render in fiction, Lehmann claims, a
politician like Lyndon Baines Johnson with some real complexity.
Sounds plausible in theory, though in practice Lehmann’s
ideological distortion is such that he is then led to render LBJ as
someone who “masterminded both the Gulf of Tonkin resolution
and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts” – in other words, as
someone who was both quintessentially a liar and quintessentially
a human rights advocate. And this essentially falsifies who LBJ was.
For LBJ was a key agent in leading the US slaughter of perhaps 4
million Indo-Chinese, mostly civilians, during the Vietnam War.
And so just like Bush and Blair today, LBJ was on the one hand
quintessentially a state terrorist mass murderer, as Pinter spells it
out, while on the other hand he was whatever else is nice that might
be attributed to him.
It takes work to muster the aesthetic skill and other knowledge
needed to write a typical novel of quality. If the ability to overcome
ideology is added to these basic requirements, then a powerful
political novel may be written as well. Lehmann is correct to insist
that politics - broadly understood - should be engaged and not fled
from, but ideological distortions like his and others must be
overcome before real and full engagement can occur. The US
political system oftentimes operates in a manner analogous to that
of the "mafia" - a form of power that needs to be put in check from
the outside, because there exist no superheroes who might
dismantle it from within. Of course figures of "innocence" - to use
Lehmann's term - will avoid joining a "mafia," just as they may
appropriately flee it as well however much he may object to such
fictive renderings, and even greater figures of "innocence" will
attempt to stop all such forms of illegitimate government and
replace them with more democratic structures wherever they find
themselves.
Getting such a clear-eyed novel published in the US, given its social
and political and corporate climate, is another story altogether.
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For political novels that overcome official ideology, see the
new fiction from Mainstay Press, including Andre Vltchek's
Point of No Return and Tony Christini's Homefront and Glory.
Mainstay Press: http://www.mainstaypress.org/
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