I am a poet, my friend says, not an activist. She is an excellent poet, and she writes movingly about subjects that call forth activism in others: climate change, colonialism, pollution. I understand her position; my own writing has been called “eco-fiction” and I have been invited to speak at events and performances expressing outrage and mourning on behalf of damaged landscapes and lost species. I have participated in public protest most of my life, but I make a distinction between activism in private life and my writing vocation. Writing fiction confers no authority beyond literature, and lasting art is more ambivalent and complex than agitation.
It’s obvious that literature, or any art, is never wholly separable from politics. To make art is to represent the world, and it’s not possible to represent without interpreting. Interpretation is inevitably shaped by experience, which is determined by the artist’s location in history and geography and also culture, social class, gender and faith. We can and should question and challenge the ways in which knowledge and experience are framed, but there is always a frame; you have to stand somewhere, and where you stand will always determine the view. So no artist can claim to be apolitical or to stand outside the structures of power.
At the same time, art is not activism. We make beauty for beauty’s sake, and this is not a trivial or luxurious undertaking but fundamental to being human. One of the many ways archaeologists of early hominids distinguish humans from animals is by the making of art (of all kinds, including music and the sort of language development associated with storytelling). It’s not the whole truth, but not untrue to say that humans are apes that make beautiful things on purpose.
That purpose would be part of my answer to the hoary question about what literature is for. Not, in any very direct way, to change the world. If you want to bring about world peace or reverse the climate crisis – probably closely related projects – writing novels is not the obvious way of going about it. I can think of no instance of a novel or even a novelist ending a war.
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There’s a more general case for Shelley’s dictum that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, based on the idea or hope that art shapes civilisation and elaborated by governments investing in “soft power”. Some 18th- and 19th-century novels about slavery and child labour supported campaigns for social justice, and you could make similar claims for films and TV about domestic violence, but as recent acts of destruction in Syria and Afghanistan show, bombs will always prevail over sculpture, bulldozers over architecture. The pen offers no protection from the sword.
Art is for beauty (which is of course in the eye of the beholder; you might or might not understand or appreciate any particular work). Art does not cure or prevent suffering. Any healing is incidental; if healing is the priority, make healthcare not books. Peace treaties are negotiated by diplomats and leaders, not singers or painters.
People who make art might in other capacities be activists, educators, healers, or indeed fighters or thieves; as a sometime scholar of 19th-century literature I take the traditional side of the argument about whether bad people can be good artists. I do not find that writing fiction makes me a better person (arguably the reverse, since writing fiction requires the kind of commitment that can look a lot like callousness under difficult circumstances). As a reader, I do not look to writers as saviours or moral exemplars. And at the same time, as a teacher I insist that nothing human is outside politics.
So as usual, and before I take a few weeks’ break from this column, I drift towards the conclusion that things – art, politics, war – are complicated. That’s a conclusion of privilege, because if you’re starving under bombs and bullets your preoccupations are simple. But as scholars and students in that situation keep telling us, part of the agony and indignity of their plight is the theft of complexity, the replacement of learning and intellectual endeavour – yes, and art – with the brutal and consuming need to survive.
Humans are more than animals that survive. We contain multitudes. We don’t have to be afraid of ambiguity and difficulty. Certainty is the justification for activism, obvious and necessary in some situations, and also rarely the basis of enduring art.
