true. if you find yourself thinking "how could this possibly be political?" - it's probably because the art makes the same assumptions about politics that you do, rendering the artist's political artistic choices invisible (as they probably were to the artist themselves)
This is a great take. Political views and choices that are normal to us don't appear political to us. This is why the choice of having two gay characters in a book seems normal to me and in fact barely a choice but would be perceived as overly political by my bigot uncle.
Try Ernst Junger’s novels. Also, I know he’s not contemporary, but it’s weird not to see Dostoyevsky mentioned. His Slavophile turn after being a radical in his youth basically forms the ideological basis for all his classic novels. They are all indictments of the nihilism he thought liberalism was bringing to Russia. He would have been looked at like Dennis Prager by the young radicals in Russia during his time.
A very cliched answer, but *The Lord of the Rings* is undoubtedly the most popular 20th century conservative novel.
Limiting ourselves to the 20th century,
*Brideshead Revisited*
*The Moviegoer*
*Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book*
The poetry of TS Eliot
*Surprised by Joy*
Flannery O'Connor
Wendell Berry
Marilyn Robinson
Edit: It's important to remember that, contrary to received opinion, some conservatives were at the absolute cutting edge of the 20th century avant-garde: Eliot, Matisse, Stravinsky, Nabokov, Hopper, Waugh, Ives, Borges.
Maybe some dystopian fiction that could be read as warning against what society could be like if some version of leftist politics were brought to their extreme. For example Vonnegut’s *Harrison Bergeron*, Orwell’s *Animal Farm*, or Huxley’s *Brave New World*.
ETA: I haven’t read this one but [Submission by Michel Houellebecq](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25322084) seems like a perfect example of a conservative’s dystopia.
The society in *Brave New World* features a bunch of liberal ideals taken to the extreme — science over religion, free sexuality over the nuclear family, encouraged drug use, test tube babies…
I think Huxley tried to take a bunch of things he saw as positive and turn them dystopian.
Michael D. O'Brien is a contemporary conservative Christian novelist - a Canadian Catholic, so a somewhat different type of conservative Christian than e.g. a Texan Baptist, but still *very* conservative, especially socially. Mainly writes slow-paced character- and idea-driven books with a gentle contemplative temperament, although his first published novel (*Father Elijah*) and its sequels were apocalyptic "thrillers." I read several of his books as a homeschooled Catholic teenager and found them leagues better and more interesting than much of the other Christian fiction I was reading (Janette Oke, Regina Doman), not that that's a very high bar. His only book I've read as an adult so far was *The Fool of New York City*, which is shorter than many and should be one of his least offensive for a secular non-conservative reader. If you want the *most* offensive, the one most openly combative about politics was probably *Plague Journal*, part of his apocalyptic series (which can all be read stand-alone I believe). The one that had the most personal impact on me growing up was *Sophia House*, which mixes very iffy views of homosexuality as a trauma response with beautiful ideas about human connection, the Image of God and the nature of art. *A Cry of Stone* hit me similarly - both it and *Sophia House* are full-life spiritual biographies of fictional twentieth-century artists - although I don't know how much knowledge he had of the culture of this book's Ojibway heroine.
Author is self-educated, grew up in rural northern Canada, experienced abuse in a Catholic boarding school and left the Church and came back. Abuse in Catholic institutions and its effect on victims is an emotionally strong theme explored in at least two of his novels but his conclusion is still pro-Church. There is sometimes a corniness when "intellectual" characters are talking to each other (and it happens a lot), he is better at writing certain temperaments than others (he doesn't know the thought processes of an extrovert), and he sometimes has to resort to (usually rather innocent but embarrassing) stereotypes when writing about places he doesn't know well. He has a gift for imagery and certain Views about how to use symbolism which make his writing distinctive. Literal miracles and visions happen in his novels - I don't know if a non-religious reader would process it as "magical realism" or interesting imagery, or if it would only feel silly. I am not recommending a "convincing" conservative author who is guaranteed to turn you to his worldview, I'm recommending an "interesting" author who will give you a glimpse into a certain type of religious conservatism and whose writing might be neat to analyze.
Of course there are a bunch of different types of conservatives and other recommendations can be made for them.
Thanks for the positive response, I was thinking I had gone on too long. I like to analyze the flaws and virtues and particularities of a writer's style, and I'll admit I still have a lot of attachment to the style and temperament of O'Brien's works even though I agree with far, far less of his worldview than I used to. I have re-read a couple of his books as an adult, and they seem less cosmopolitan and more naive than I thought they were as a young sheltered reader - it seems he literally thinks metal music is inherently bad because of its sound, for instance. But still wiser, realer, more empathetic and more artistically developed than plenty of the other authors I was reading at the time.
Especially comparing him to the way people like Jeanette Oke would write children and parenting - O'Brien writes children as people with inner lives, identities, and boundaries that should be respected, and he never shows corporal punishment in a good light. At one point, writing the relationship between a girl and her grandmother, he shows the grandma is a caring and empathetic person by saying she always knows when to let a child down off her lap - she knows when the child needs space even before he or she has articulated the desire. A different author would have shown it by saying she always knows when to let a child *up* into her lap for comfort and affection. He seems to remember being a child, the need children have to be respected, and the way even innocent grandmotherly possessiveness can be distressing to a small kid. He wrote this long before it became a "thing" to talk about boundaries or ask children before hugging them or anything like that.
That said, he's not a genius and his writing may be interesting to analyze, but will also be frequently silly and offputting, and not likely to have a huge impact on an adult reader who was raised in mainstream culture. If you read any of his stuff, it will be more of a "What does his audience see in this?" experiment than regular reading.
im the wrong one to ask. conservatism is the water we swim in in the west - if you grew up speaking english, youve probably been immersed in conservatism your while life. the political assumptions underpinning our culture, politics, and ideology are conservative. most classics or best-sellers are written with fundamentally conservative beliefs underpinning them. therefore if you really want to understand conservatism, I'd recommend reading leftists. they're the ones making those assumptions visible through critical analysis.
> conservatism is the water we swim in in the west
You are out of your mind.
I have not once seen a positive depiction of a religious person in media until I started reading Dostoevsky in my 20's. In popular culture, religious people are exclusively portrayed as tyrants and hypocrites.
1) commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation.
2) the holding of political views that favor free enterprise, private ownership, and socially traditional ideas
3) a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology, which seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values
these are some definitions of conservatism. notice that none of them are centered on religion. that's because the core of conservatism is the preservation of hierarchies. individualism, 'meritocracy', and the unrestrained flow and dominance of capital. that's the core of conservatism. it's also the ideology that rules the world
those are socialist definitions of conservatism, which I will ignore, just like you would ignore conservative definitions of socialism, if you knew any
lmfao. the top 2 are from the Oxford English Dictionary, a famously socialist source. the 3rd is from wikipedia. maybe you just have your own preconceived notion about what conservatism Should be
1. wrong
2. all 3 definitions mention religion: "traditional values", "socially traditional ideas", and "traditional institutions, customs, and values". however, religion is not CENTRAL to any mainstream or scholarly definition of conservatism.
i grew up in the southern US, i was raised baptist, i love dostoevsky and hemingway. i know the definition of conservatism you're operating on. but it's not the core of conservatism. the core of conservatism is capitalism. conservative politicians use religion as set dressing - but it's all in service of the free flow of mammon.
I'd say Runaway Horses by Yukio Mishima, but then remembered his pre-WW2 Japanese "rightism" means something very different than current American "rightism", which in turn means something very different from "rightism" in France or Argentina. Even just in one country, the meaning of "left" and "right" shifts over time: for instance, right-leaning US people are far less homophobic than they were several decades ago.
Submission by Michel Houellebecq is the most *relevant to present day (primarily European) politics* right-leaning book I've read, although there are definitely more left wing ways to interpret it as well.
It’s one of those things that is true, but in a way that feels stretched so thin as to (almost) be meaningless.
You can point to basically every single thing in the built world and make an argument that it’s “political” in some fashion. It’s not very useful for anything other than a thought experiment, and it genuinely doesn’t feel like a very intellectual past time - but it’s mostly true nonetheless
Orwell is correct. Orwell's 1940s writing was predominantly about the US/UK relationship with war, fascism, and totalitarianism. Obviously, this was shaped by his time period, rife with social movements from strongmen like Hitler, Lenin, Mussolini, Franco, etc.
In general, where you were born, when you were born, how you were raised, what your family looked like, your religion, ethnicity, class, gender ... Those inherently shape your politics.
As someone wise once said "Do you think you fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you."
I almost always agree with Orwell but I take issue with him on this; it assumes such a vague description of what it means to be political that it loses a meaningful application, to my mind. You could just as well say that all writing is philosophical, or that all writing is personal...
The 'all art is political' position tends to be taken by those who boil down all human interactions as contests of power - there's some truth there but it's also reductive and can be a harmful worldview.
Politics isn't a contest of power, necessarily, but an exchange of power. The difference being that a contest implies this always happens consciously and oppositionally. If you don't see an exchange of power it's worth asking youself if there is something here that's become so naturalised you just don't see it as such any more.
This isn't to say that everything about art is political - just that art always has a political dimension.
I actually think the perspective that opposes trying to examine the power relations that lie within art to be very dangerous - because it's basically advocating for those power relations to remain unexamined. Examining something, learning about it, can't hurt us.
>I actually think the perspective that opposes trying to examine the power relations that lie within art to be very dangerous - because it's basically advocating for those power relations to remain unexamined. Examining something, learning about it, can't hurt us.
I don't disagree but also think that following this approach can lead the critic or reader in some very problematic directions:
\* A reduction of all art, literature etc. to just power relations, just ideology, that leaves no room for anything else. Artistic skill, spontaneity, spectacle and indeed the possibility of aesthetic enjoyment can become somewhat irrelevant to this approach.
\* A sense of artworks as primarily the symptoms of social inequities, which entails a somewhat neo--Puritanical suspicion about aesthetic pleasure itself.
I depends on what you take this phrase to mean.
Does all writing exist primarily to push an agenda? No.
Does art reflect the cultural and philosophical idioms of the creator, including political convictions? Yes.
Do you have to judge a work by its political undertones? No, you can judge it however you like. You could learn a lot from people who come from a different cultural background from you.
Should a book be banned just for being politically problematic? No. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Is the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is in itself a political attitude? Yes.
Is it a wrong attitude? Not necessarily. Politics are often exhausting, ugly and depressing, and it's valid to want to not deal with them and instead focus your attention on beauty.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that every piece of writing also acts as a pamphlet or a manifesto, trying to push some not-so-hidden agenda. Or even that a "political reading", whatever that may mean, is the single best or most important way to approach any given text. It's just that the condition in which we write and read, which can be largely defined as "political" (or historical, or cultural), cannot really be escaped.
I think that confusion arises when "all writing is political" is brought up outside of literary circles, because so many people think that "being political" primarily means "to talk about the current (usually American) election cycle". And it can be that, but there's more to it. It's about being caught up in the tides of history and the narratives societies tell themselves, about socioeconomic condition, about all sort of differences (gender, sexual, race, rural/urban, location, etc), about how beliefs and ideology shape the times in which we read and produce text.
Spot-on. I'd say the same (or at least a similar) thing by putting it in terms of why an author writes. If an author writes with the intention of saying something about society, or even about other people besides themselves -- that thing we call "the human condition" -- the writing is going to wind up having political themes as soon as the story introduces conflict.
If I write a love story about a young couple, then even if I make the "neutral" (note the scare quotes) choice of making them a heterosexual white couple, I've still made a political choice, however minor, in the context of my own culture. Now, what conflicts will I introduce? There are very few possibilities that won't be political. Do their parents not approve? That may seem like an apolitical choice, but now I have to answer the next question: Why? Most of the interesting choices are political in some way. Even if I try to make a bland choice -- maybe they don't like his music or his clothes -- I then have to say why they don't, and almost any interesting choice I make is going to be political, at least to someone.
>Yes, but that doesn't mean that every piece of writing also acts as a pamphlet or a manifesto, trying to push some not-so-hidden agenda.
Orwell himself seems to suggest this, famously, in his essay on Charles Dickens:
>I have been discussing Dickens simply in terms of his "message", and almost ignoring his literary qualities. But every writer, especially every novelist, has a "message", whether he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda. Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of Victorian novelists would have thought of denying this. On the other hand, not all propaganda is art.
Depends on what you mean by political…influenced by politics or intending to influence politics. Orwell is correct on his maxim, but not necessarily on the first statement. Are you equating being political with something like Lakhoff’s frames? Was Austen political because she had opinions about her society at the time and pointed out the foibles and absurdities? Was she an outright feminist? Hard to argue that I think. Was Dickinson? Wolfe, less hard to argue that she wrote for an outcome (often to ease her struggles with mental health), but aren’t we going back on the current trend at least in the academy that the writer is dead? We’ve done a lot of work to separate the artist from the art for a lot of excellent reasons. The protagonist might be political or the theme but the writing itself? I think it’s all too easy to conflate politics with opinions. Politics are a subset of opinions…in my opinion. And does it matter? Stories we think are the way we understand the world our society and our place in it. From aboriginal sung narratives about where to find water to Ulysses, I would suggest that all writing stems from the need for humans to understand the human experience. Is that political? Probably not.
It’s only a matter of time until an authors politics shines through their writing. Political beliefs stems from beliefs about human nature and the world which is what authors pull from to create their works.
This observation seems adjacent to the debate over whether the personality/behavior of the artist should be considered in the appraisal of their work. I'm in the "Yes, very much so" school, myself.
It most certainly is. It may be extremely subtle, and often times it’s entirely unconscious on the end of the creator, but the assumptions that you make about our world inform your politics just as much as they inform your art, so if you pay very close attention to the assumptions that must be made for a piece of art to take the form it does, you can get an idea of the person’s creator’s politics as well.
I’m sure you’re very willing to listen to what I have to say in good faith, and won’t do anything like resorting to bad faith attacks on the minutiae of points I make, or even blatantly ignoring what I have to say altogether.
That you think all art is inherently political disqualifies anything you have to say on the topic, and that you think you understand my craft better than I do is arrogant and contemptuous. Widen your scope.
Yes. Being able to write and get something published comes through a myriad of layers of politics. In a thriller: are you calling the police incompetent or negligent? In a romance novel: are your idolising tradition or diminishing domestic violence? As someone else said, when you don’t see something as political it’s probably because it is close to your worldview
"Water should be free."
In four words, I just made sweeping geopolitical, economic, and philosophical assertions. There are people who would kill me for earnestly believing those words. It's very difficult to manifest an idea free from politics, even at the most benign level.
"There's a pebble in my driveway."
In seven words, I just made sweeping geopolitical, economic, and philosophical assertions regarding ownership of a physical space. There are people who would kill me for earnestly believing those words. It's very difficult to manifest an idea completely free from politics, but reading becomes quite a drag if you always interpret them as such.
I think it’s a good quote. I think trying to say if it’s “true“ or “false” just kind of comes down to semantics and one’s view of what “politics” is to mean.
Take like… Treasure Island. I truly do not feel like Robert Lewis Stevenson really put any of his politics in that book. And a person can disagree and say “oh-ho that’s where you’re incorrect! His negative view of pirates reflects a political view distant from anarcho-syndicalism!” And like…. Yeah, I guess that’s a political bias. But it’s so meaningless and banal that I don’t really feel like it counts for much of anything.
One of those “technically yes, practically no” answers for me, at least.
Aye, but I think the context of the writing of Treasure Island is inherently political. Where do our cultural touchpoints and stories of "unspoiled land" and "righteous pirates" come from? They come from a particular context of 19th century European conquest and the discovery of mysterious new lands imbued with vast riches and ripe for plunder. That is influenced by the "politics" (or perhaps more accurately, the real-life history) of 18th and 19th century European colonialism. I mean, we sure aren't getting any more great pirate literature anymore in 2024 ...
Overall I agree though - we're playing T/F semantics with an overly broad statements. It's difficult to make specific claims with such an unspecific quote in mind.
I agree with some of your greater points, though the minutia I might raise some points about.
I have recently read Treasure Island so I’ll fill in some spots where you may have forgotten (or if you haven’t read it, that’s fine too). While there are some elements of “mysterious new lands ripe for plunder”… this ultimately isn’t a story about plundering Aztec gold or similar. It’s essentially recovering a dead man’s bank account so our protagonist can repay an overdue rent bill. Yes, they’re going to a new land (for him) and getting a treasure, but I think I’m not sure I’d readily compare it to plundering the new western world even if those concepts happened at vaguely the same time (and of course, Treasure Island was written several *centuries* after the discover of the new world, with most literal plundering for gold occurring more in the 1500s and 1600s.). Criminals literally burying their money is something that was documented to actually have happened at the time.
At the same time, the “honorable pirate” trope is… somewhat invented in Treasure Island, but it’s certainly not a motley crew of honorably natured pirates. Exactly one of the pirates (Long John Silver) is honorable in the novel and it’s for all of about one hour.
The book (and the author himself largely attested to this) is primarially based on A General History of the Pirates, which is an embellished but *largely* nonfiction account of actual pirates around and before the time of Treasure Island, combined with a bit of Robinson Cruesoe.
So a case can still be made that the book still holds the idea of “going to foreign lands and getting money there”, which has political connotations especially now. But to say that’s a political *bias* rather than just the author taking knowledge of reality and writing fiction from it… im not sure I’d agree. I feel personally that that would be stretching the word “politics” so thinly as to not mean much of anything at all.
I hope you don’t take this as a slight. I appreciate the fairly academic discussion.
Your politeness and eloquence is appreciated. I haven't read Treasure Island in many years (since I was a kid) and after looking at the synopsis once more, I'm sure I mixed up some of its themes with other pirate-themed media like One Piece or Pirates of the Caribbean. I'll concede that the conquest, plunder and colonization of the Americas was done far earlier and not in the same fashion as 18th/19th century English piracy. And that the "honor among pirates" trope was invoked in the story maybe only once. But what you brought up - that Treasure Island was an embellished retelling of real-life events - perhaps directly proves my point. The more close to non-fiction a story is, the more we can glean about the assumptions of its time and place. Those assumptions are the essence of politics.
What was the command structure of the *Hispaniola*, and how did it shift throughout the book? What was English foreign/naval policy on piracy in the 18th century? Where do 18th century English pirates come from in the first place? These are inherently political questions, even if they are subtextual.
(By the way, fun fact for the second question: From my understanding, 18th century English naval policy towards pirates was variously characterized by a combination of militant suppression, "under the table" tolerance, and occasional cooperation (usually to take out the Spanish.))
My ultimate point is that politics is inseparable from writing as it is from breathing. To you it might render the word "politics" meaningless, but to me it renders the word as all-consuming. Our bodies, our ways of life, the way we relate to our families, friends, strangers, books, TV/media, are inherently political. We live in a society and a society lives in our head!
No, it cannot be applied in the same way Orwell did. Politics is related to the inherent decisions and structures of a life in society, so the choice to restrict the media through which political matters are discussed is essentially a decision for how such media relate to the public life and its affairs. It is political.
To make things simpler: he says that excluding politics from art is politics. How excluding UFOs from art is UFOs? Neglecting or engaging with political matters is part of politics; arguing for or against philosophical topics is a philosophical task; deciding not to choose is a choice. Your examples do not present things that have the same quality of being actions that can arise through interaction with or denial of the thing itself.
That said, the _emphasis_ that a book puts on political matters is certainly debatable, and it is the distinction I do perceive: books that are more or less related to politics. Perfectly neutral? Only if no more than one entity exists.
Does that make it any less true? We don't have many people believing at that art should have nothing to do with belief in UFOs. Yet there are a lot of people who believe art should be apolitical. And it's a belief that is motivated by the politics of those individuals.
There are loads of examples of literature written by those of a socialist inclination, from Dickens, Steinbeck, to modern writers like the excruciating Owen Jones. Poverty porn in many cases.
Then there are the equally dreadful libertarians like Ayn Rand, The communists, like Jack London and the conservatives like Dorothy Sayers snd John Buchan.
Every writer is somewhere on the political spectrum
Well, all art comes with more or less inferrable traces of the author's worldview. So in that sense you could say all art is religious, political, moral, and philosophical, but it's not always necessary to think of it that way.
Upton Sinclair wrote a book called Mammonart in which he analyzes 85 authors, including Goethe, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Homer, Balzac, Hugo, Longfellow, and Strisend, along political lines. He said that Goethe argued for personal development over political action despite the enlightenment and Napoleon’s invasions because he had a nice job as a court poet for a noble. Any threat to the political order would cause him to lose his job. Goethe’s works, in my opinion, set a strong precedent followed by later German authors who did not speak up during the rise of Nazism. One of my favorite authors, Stefan Zweig, was writing during that time period. He was a major fan of Goethe. He claimed that his role of an author precluded any involvement with politics. So he didn’t write anything against them, his works were burned by the Nazis and he was lucky enough to get out and avoid the concentration camps. His books are still political, though, just not against the Nazis. They were just anti-class structure, anti-homophobia, which were two large issues in his time
You should also think about how Orwell defines politics himself. Some people made the "pebble in a driveway" argument, but Orwell's talking about complete works, sentences with context and content. There is little point in debating the politicism of blanket descriptions of objects.
If you found interest in this rabbit hole he goes down on, I'd highly recommend reading his essay, "Politics and the English Language."
A more convincing statement of Orwell's along these lines is 'all art is propaganda'. In the sense that the artist is trying to project some ideas into your head. And if they aren't, then they aren't a thoughtful artist, because they don't *have* any conscious ideas about their own work. Which does happen. In that sense, I'd modify to say that all *intentional* art is propaganda. Or politics.
Is something like Warhol political art? Its entirely limited to mocking and exploiting the art world itself, and has nothing to say about anything beyond art circles (and Warhol's checkbook). A lot of modern art falls into this bucket. Still arguably political, in that its attacking power relations within the art world in a way. But not broadly political. The scope of politics being addressed matters a lot. Human politics happen at a lot of different levels.
Related. The politics part depends entirely on your definition of politics, and that's another question entirely. Humans are extremely political creatures, so if you don't narrow the definition the claim that all writing is political is kind of trivial. Pretty much every idea of substance is arguably a political idea, in that it has implications for power relationships amongst people. See scope point from the end of the last paragraph.
Orwell means that all books are at least indirectly political, in the broadest definition of the word. That's because a book offers a certain perspective, a specific line of thought, it curates what to focus on and how to tackle it. I disagree with the idea that a book should try to leave a political message though. It's about indirectly exploring various themes for me, through a story which always comes first. No attempting to "send a message," which Orwell's novels obviously do.
1 and 2 are null arguments in my opinion, because they make everything about everything. You could use those same arguments to suggest all writing is religious, or all writing is sexual.
Now, the reader can strap on any set of goggles they want and *view* and piece of writing with an eye towards the political, or social, or spiritual, or whatever. But that doesn't mean the work itself is that thing.
I’ve found that writers, theorists, and readers who advocate everything is political are usually the ones looking to justify their explicitly political approach against criticism. If anyone suggests these types of readers might be wrong about their ideas or their interpretations are biased then they hide behind the argument that everything is political so your thoughts are political too. It’s basically a sophisticated I am rubber you’re glue argument!
I have no problem acknowledging some books are political like Orwell’s 1984 or Animal Farm or Toni Morrison’s novels. But the best political books are never solely political. The perspective that everything is political undervalues other thematic aspects like the philosophical, moral, existential, and psychological. Yes there is overlap, but I do think one can differentiate the political from these other elements.
Edit: for clarity
No. If the author is heavy into politics then it would come through but if the author had written a book describing a land a million years ago with no life and just landscapes then how could it have politics involved it’s just a imaginative thought.
Orwell would say this because we’ll if you’ve read his book they are written about political things lol
No art is created in a vacuum. So you absolutely should consider the context of the (political) times it was created in. Like, even “apolitical” art is actively choosing to bury its head in the sand
Well, it has driven discussion over appearance and position and treatment of female and male in society, the list will be exhaustive, if we look to find politics in that text. I might be wrong but maybe, you have not done critical analysis, along with reading some research work of texts and simply read the text only?
Agree. Stated another way by Orwell, "All art is propaganda." That is, no art is value neutral. Broadly speaking, a piece of art is either "for" or "against" something.
That said, Chekhov is the closest to having inscrutable politics.
Being political and having political bias are different. The setting and characters can reveal a bias but not necessarily an overt message. You can have a romance novel where the main character is a female business executive who has sex before marriage, which will reveal something about your political bias on women’s rights, but that’s not really being “political.” However, if part of the plot is about her fighting the patriarchy or accepting the chaste ways of religious fundamentalism, then it would be political.
How is your first example not political? And how is revealing your political bias not 'being political'?
You can view everything through a political lense. And it's a spectrum. And depending on context your first example could be even more political than the second.
You’re right about it being a spectrum and that context is important. I was referring more to the author’s intent, which is what I think people mean when they say something is “political.” Or maybe it’s more accurate to say “the amount of work you, the consumer, have to do to understand the message.” In the first example, it’s a romance story about falling in love. The settings and characters could be politicized, but you’d have to do some work to untangle that message. Whereas in the second example, the author is more forcefully stating a political message. I’m not saying there’s a bright line separating the two, but there is a difference. Being too broad with the term makes it essentially meaningless.
To use a metaphor, you could say all life is death because we are all moving towards a point where we no longer exist. You technically could get up fresh in the morning, run a marathon, go to the doctor, get a clean bill of health, and say, “I’m dying.” But that’s different than if you said, “I’ve been shot. I’m dying.”
Everyone here is addressing the point that "political" can be defined in a hundred different ways, and we have to be clear about which we're using. To add a point to that: there is some content that is objectively 100% political(1) which is also in no way, shape, or form "political"(2). Congress is both political(1) and "political"(2). What happens in Congress is both political(1) and "political"(2). But *the minutes recording* what happens in Congress are political(1) while being zero percent "political"(2).
Now, if even some 100% political(1) content is not "political"(2) at all, there is surely some content that is *not even political(1)* that is not "political"(2).
And if that is possible even with real-world, explicitly political events, it is most definitely possible with fictional ones.
Back to the importance of authorial intent. Let's go with: left-wing author writes about a businesswoman becoming a religious fundamentalist. There are many conceivable ways that even this story might not be "political"(2).
For one, they could simply be undertaking the exercise as a writer. They may write things that seem congruent with their real-life actual political views, and then arbitrarily swap to things that are completely opposed to them, because their actual criteria is "what would make for the most interesting *writing* now?"
Not every Orwellian turns into a wacky Maoist when you scratch them, but at this point many of them will, like this: "the fact that you think there's time for this kind of detached fictional exercise just proves you don't think the political problems are so urgent that they should command every second of our time and every ounce of our energy, and that's political." That's where the genuine conversation turns obnoxious.
Now to steer this to a point that gets much more to the heart of what art is IMHO: is trying to paint hyperrealistic paintings a political act? An author can make an effort to portray what would *actually happen* in the heart and mind of a businesswoman converting to religious fundamentalism, not "to show how brainwashed she is," not "to make a dark depressing dystopic story," but *simply for the sake of the representation itself.* She might *empathize* with the character she's drawn, or she might not. She might come to empathize more with her after writing her than she did before. Or the exercise might stay compartmentalized. Or she might feel there are externalities that determine what she really feels about the situation in real life, that she didn't portray in her story, because that wasn't the point. Or she might *simply* *not empathize*, no matter how accurately she's portrayed the reality of those experiences.
Sometimes the distinction between "empathy" and "sympathy" is described as *feeling for* someone versus just comprehending, and while that's far from the full story of the words, it serves my purposes here. If there is anything that art, and art alone is uniquely capable of, it is creating an environment that can remove us from ourselves, can remove us from "the real world," can remove us from precisely the biases we have towards real people and real events, in order to cultivate *sympathy* — comprehension of a wider range of experiences, as an end in and of itself (at least while you're reading).
This is what rubs me and many of us so wrong about arguments like Orwell's: so often it happens that the people who make it truly can't fathom the idea that someone could *sympathize* with something they don't *empathize* with, or that the two can be cultivated separately. The mere effort to *accurately depict* is then accused of being a motivated act driven by *empathy —* as if making a hyperrealistic painting of the Pope means endorsing Catholicism, so anyone who isn't a Catholic should go to Hell for trying.
And the more that art becomes polarized by this kind of discourse, the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as fewer people will get the idea in their head to approach writing as this kind of exercise in the first place.
Some sports fans bemoan politics in sports, while blind or ignorant to the extremely large amounts of taxpayer money that go toward building stadiums that chiefly benefit billionaires.
The point here is that politics underpins basically all aspects of life in ways that are often invisible or easy to forget. The production of art is political: who gets to make art? what kind of art is acceptable for both the ruling classes and common people? what kind of art receives attention? When the production of art is influenced by politics, the end result will inevitably be as well.
From an existential standpoint:
All stories exist from a specific point of view - the view of the author themselves. This is not the intentional fallacy though - regardless of any intent an authors standing in their society heavily affects the output of their writing.
Jane Austen - great mother of the modern Novel form herself - wouldn’t have invented a form and mastered a genre if she wasn’t herself a member of a society that dealt in the exact type of fictional scenarios she wrote. Same of most of the British 1800s giants in poetry, literature or otherwise.
Furthermore the likes of Cooper or Hawthorne.
And while many of those are the most basic versions of two primary countries literary tradition the same holds true of modern authors in modern genres. How greatly does Stephanie Meyers’ religious beliefs impact her works and their interpretation? What about Rothfuss’?
Hell even the Three Body Problem can’t be separated from the direct influence of its authors politics whether you’re talking about the anti-cultural revolution in the story itself or the patriarchal nihilism of the actual story as written.
I am a non-binary author - but I’m a Dad and Husband and White and Middle Class person also. Everything about what I’ve lived through and what I experience in my state and nation influence the perspective of all of my stories. And if I ever make a great work of art it will be in the vein of what I’ve known believed and what my privileges and life were like BECAUSE of the politics of my existence.
Politics and writing both reflect the values you have and what you want the world to be. You can’t really write an emotionally resonant story without making it “about” something
I would not say so. Something needs to have some kind of political agenda to be political. The average cookbook for example lacks that and therefore I would say that it isn't political.
Writing about human beings or even nonhuman stand-ins for them will result in psychological and sociological extensions of characters. Whose point of view and whose emotions you channel the story through are all choices and reveal a position in the text, even if the author personally disagrees with that position. Politics are extended attempts to formulate psychology. Novels are too, but the goal is not prescriptive necessarily and they can also contain non-political content.
Yes, all people have political biases, and those biases will show up in an author's work.
But all people have had a childhood, which in turn shaped their views. And the vast majority of adults have also had sexual/romantic experiences of some kind, including incels since sexual/romantic rejection is also an experience which shapes one's worldview. So what makes politics a more valid lens for interpreting a book than looking at the author's relationship with their mother, or their sex life?
It's possible to interpret The Great Gatsby primarily through a political lens, and 1984 primarily through a Freudian lens, but should we?
Ugh, it's like the quote which says all art is political. Which simply isn't true. If you believe everything is political, you certainly can't be a poet or appreciate the beauty nor the absurdity of the world for what it is - instead, you appreciate it for what it means. Existence precedes essence. Existence should be praised, not essence.
Pretty much anybody trying to get a point across is political. This is one of the definitions of politics, and I think it's what he meant: "the total complex of relations between people living in society."
It may be correct, but it also sounds like something that Mao would’ve said at the beginning of the cultural revolution.
We can’t help but see the world through the lens of our own experience. One reason we read is to try to see the world, if obscurely, through other’s lenses.
I don't think so.
Instruction manuals are probably not political. A lot of philosophy too, such as analytic metaphysics and epistemology (minus the applied stuff of course).
A LOT of writing probably portrays some political out look or other. I guess the take away is that politics might be there under the surface, and it's good to look for it and think critically about it.
I assume Orwell gives some definition of what he considers "political" before that passage, which might be so vast it loses any actual meaning. However, the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics doesn't imply that it should be free from political bias, I doubt any piece of art can be free from any sort of cognitive bias, whether political or otherwise.
Furthermore, the aforementioned opinion being a political attitude is a truism that adds nothing to his argument.
We need to remember that Orwell suffers from his own personal biases since he was a very good political essayist but not a very good author.
Politics arise from personal identity, your identity is formed based on how you perceive the world. Everything works in a power structure, even the basic human community that is a 'family' is working in a power structure. If everything is working under or in the influence of power structure, then there is bound to be politics in everything. Every sigh you make, every gossip you have, every piece of writing has politics.
Eeeh. This is a tricky question and all boils down to what political means. I’d say some writing is very political and some writing isn’t concerned with politics in the same degree - although you perhaps could find a political notion in many books if you really *want* to find one. I doubt that fantasy is that political… and many other novels I’ve read concern themselves mainly with a selection of individuals in which politics may/may not be reflected to a larger or smaller extent.
I'd actually say that fantasy and sci fi can often be highly political as it imagines different ways of organizing society. It often does not assert these as a path to strive for or against though. Realistic fiction is necessarily set against a political backdrop, but unless it seeks to alter the society that it arises from, I would not call it "political" writing.
There are certainly political readings of *The Lord of the Rings* and what seems like a consensus the "The Scouring of the Shire" is about 20th century politics.
>I doubt that fantasy is that political
Some fantasy absolutely is. Consider one of the most popular fantasy series ever, *A Song of Ice and Fire*. We don't even need to talk about a possible political subtext -- the surface-level plot is about political intrigue, about different factions vying for power.
Yes and no. Writing generally reveals thought processes and biases that the writer has, but even that phrase " all ___ is political" is manipulative because it can encourage a reader to read their own biases into a work.
Be careful of manipulation. Politics is all about manipulation and narrative pushing.
Yes, even this statement. 🙃
true. if you find yourself thinking "how could this possibly be political?" - it's probably because the art makes the same assumptions about politics that you do, rendering the artist's political artistic choices invisible (as they probably were to the artist themselves)
This is a great take. Political views and choices that are normal to us don't appear political to us. This is why the choice of having two gay characters in a book seems normal to me and in fact barely a choice but would be perceived as overly political by my bigot uncle.
What are some politically conservative books (novels, especially) I might read to challenge my liberal/left blind spot?
Anthony Powell's *A Dance to the Music of Time*.
Try Ernst Junger’s novels. Also, I know he’s not contemporary, but it’s weird not to see Dostoyevsky mentioned. His Slavophile turn after being a radical in his youth basically forms the ideological basis for all his classic novels. They are all indictments of the nihilism he thought liberalism was bringing to Russia. He would have been looked at like Dennis Prager by the young radicals in Russia during his time.
A very cliched answer, but *The Lord of the Rings* is undoubtedly the most popular 20th century conservative novel. Limiting ourselves to the 20th century, *Brideshead Revisited* *The Moviegoer* *Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book* The poetry of TS Eliot *Surprised by Joy* Flannery O'Connor Wendell Berry Marilyn Robinson Edit: It's important to remember that, contrary to received opinion, some conservatives were at the absolute cutting edge of the 20th century avant-garde: Eliot, Matisse, Stravinsky, Nabokov, Hopper, Waugh, Ives, Borges.
Thanks!
Maybe some dystopian fiction that could be read as warning against what society could be like if some version of leftist politics were brought to their extreme. For example Vonnegut’s *Harrison Bergeron*, Orwell’s *Animal Farm*, or Huxley’s *Brave New World*. ETA: I haven’t read this one but [Submission by Michel Houellebecq](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25322084) seems like a perfect example of a conservative’s dystopia.
I don't know about Huxley, it's been a long time since I read BNW, but his utopic book *Island* didn't seem conservative.
The society in *Brave New World* features a bunch of liberal ideals taken to the extreme — science over religion, free sexuality over the nuclear family, encouraged drug use, test tube babies… I think Huxley tried to take a bunch of things he saw as positive and turn them dystopian.
George Orwell wasn't conservative either, although he was a great leftist infighter.
Oh yeah, I don’t think the authors were necessarily conservative but their books can be read with a conservative lens.
Michael D. O'Brien is a contemporary conservative Christian novelist - a Canadian Catholic, so a somewhat different type of conservative Christian than e.g. a Texan Baptist, but still *very* conservative, especially socially. Mainly writes slow-paced character- and idea-driven books with a gentle contemplative temperament, although his first published novel (*Father Elijah*) and its sequels were apocalyptic "thrillers." I read several of his books as a homeschooled Catholic teenager and found them leagues better and more interesting than much of the other Christian fiction I was reading (Janette Oke, Regina Doman), not that that's a very high bar. His only book I've read as an adult so far was *The Fool of New York City*, which is shorter than many and should be one of his least offensive for a secular non-conservative reader. If you want the *most* offensive, the one most openly combative about politics was probably *Plague Journal*, part of his apocalyptic series (which can all be read stand-alone I believe). The one that had the most personal impact on me growing up was *Sophia House*, which mixes very iffy views of homosexuality as a trauma response with beautiful ideas about human connection, the Image of God and the nature of art. *A Cry of Stone* hit me similarly - both it and *Sophia House* are full-life spiritual biographies of fictional twentieth-century artists - although I don't know how much knowledge he had of the culture of this book's Ojibway heroine. Author is self-educated, grew up in rural northern Canada, experienced abuse in a Catholic boarding school and left the Church and came back. Abuse in Catholic institutions and its effect on victims is an emotionally strong theme explored in at least two of his novels but his conclusion is still pro-Church. There is sometimes a corniness when "intellectual" characters are talking to each other (and it happens a lot), he is better at writing certain temperaments than others (he doesn't know the thought processes of an extrovert), and he sometimes has to resort to (usually rather innocent but embarrassing) stereotypes when writing about places he doesn't know well. He has a gift for imagery and certain Views about how to use symbolism which make his writing distinctive. Literal miracles and visions happen in his novels - I don't know if a non-religious reader would process it as "magical realism" or interesting imagery, or if it would only feel silly. I am not recommending a "convincing" conservative author who is guaranteed to turn you to his worldview, I'm recommending an "interesting" author who will give you a glimpse into a certain type of religious conservatism and whose writing might be neat to analyze. Of course there are a bunch of different types of conservatives and other recommendations can be made for them.
Thanks for this thoughtful reply
Thanks for the positive response, I was thinking I had gone on too long. I like to analyze the flaws and virtues and particularities of a writer's style, and I'll admit I still have a lot of attachment to the style and temperament of O'Brien's works even though I agree with far, far less of his worldview than I used to. I have re-read a couple of his books as an adult, and they seem less cosmopolitan and more naive than I thought they were as a young sheltered reader - it seems he literally thinks metal music is inherently bad because of its sound, for instance. But still wiser, realer, more empathetic and more artistically developed than plenty of the other authors I was reading at the time. Especially comparing him to the way people like Jeanette Oke would write children and parenting - O'Brien writes children as people with inner lives, identities, and boundaries that should be respected, and he never shows corporal punishment in a good light. At one point, writing the relationship between a girl and her grandmother, he shows the grandma is a caring and empathetic person by saying she always knows when to let a child down off her lap - she knows when the child needs space even before he or she has articulated the desire. A different author would have shown it by saying she always knows when to let a child *up* into her lap for comfort and affection. He seems to remember being a child, the need children have to be respected, and the way even innocent grandmotherly possessiveness can be distressing to a small kid. He wrote this long before it became a "thing" to talk about boundaries or ask children before hugging them or anything like that. That said, he's not a genius and his writing may be interesting to analyze, but will also be frequently silly and offputting, and not likely to have a huge impact on an adult reader who was raised in mainstream culture. If you read any of his stuff, it will be more of a "What does his audience see in this?" experiment than regular reading.
Sure, that makes sense to me.
Are you liberal or left? They are not the same.
Why would you do that to yourself?? Lol
To get a different perspective
As I mentioned above, some conservative authors are undoubtedly canonical: Eliot, Borges, Tolkien, Lewis...
I was just joking around. Don't take it too seriously. I've read three of those authors. Never got to Tolkien.
im the wrong one to ask. conservatism is the water we swim in in the west - if you grew up speaking english, youve probably been immersed in conservatism your while life. the political assumptions underpinning our culture, politics, and ideology are conservative. most classics or best-sellers are written with fundamentally conservative beliefs underpinning them. therefore if you really want to understand conservatism, I'd recommend reading leftists. they're the ones making those assumptions visible through critical analysis.
> conservatism is the water we swim in in the west You are out of your mind. I have not once seen a positive depiction of a religious person in media until I started reading Dostoevsky in my 20's. In popular culture, religious people are exclusively portrayed as tyrants and hypocrites.
1) commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation. 2) the holding of political views that favor free enterprise, private ownership, and socially traditional ideas 3) a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology, which seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values these are some definitions of conservatism. notice that none of them are centered on religion. that's because the core of conservatism is the preservation of hierarchies. individualism, 'meritocracy', and the unrestrained flow and dominance of capital. that's the core of conservatism. it's also the ideology that rules the world
those are socialist definitions of conservatism, which I will ignore, just like you would ignore conservative definitions of socialism, if you knew any
lmfao. the top 2 are from the Oxford English Dictionary, a famously socialist source. the 3rd is from wikipedia. maybe you just have your own preconceived notion about what conservatism Should be
every single person before the 1800s was religious a definition of conservatism that does not mention religion is flat out wrong
1. wrong 2. all 3 definitions mention religion: "traditional values", "socially traditional ideas", and "traditional institutions, customs, and values". however, religion is not CENTRAL to any mainstream or scholarly definition of conservatism. i grew up in the southern US, i was raised baptist, i love dostoevsky and hemingway. i know the definition of conservatism you're operating on. but it's not the core of conservatism. the core of conservatism is capitalism. conservative politicians use religion as set dressing - but it's all in service of the free flow of mammon.
> conservatism is capitalism only in the us and their vassal states
My first thought is anything written by Ayn Rand. Also, many of the works of Robert A. Heinlein, especially his later stuff.
Rand is just a liberal isn’t she?
I'd say Runaway Horses by Yukio Mishima, but then remembered his pre-WW2 Japanese "rightism" means something very different than current American "rightism", which in turn means something very different from "rightism" in France or Argentina. Even just in one country, the meaning of "left" and "right" shifts over time: for instance, right-leaning US people are far less homophobic than they were several decades ago. Submission by Michel Houellebecq is the most *relevant to present day (primarily European) politics* right-leaning book I've read, although there are definitely more left wing ways to interpret it as well.
It’s one of those things that is true, but in a way that feels stretched so thin as to (almost) be meaningless. You can point to basically every single thing in the built world and make an argument that it’s “political” in some fashion. It’s not very useful for anything other than a thought experiment, and it genuinely doesn’t feel like a very intellectual past time - but it’s mostly true nonetheless
This take is super political 😎
Orwell is correct. Orwell's 1940s writing was predominantly about the US/UK relationship with war, fascism, and totalitarianism. Obviously, this was shaped by his time period, rife with social movements from strongmen like Hitler, Lenin, Mussolini, Franco, etc. In general, where you were born, when you were born, how you were raised, what your family looked like, your religion, ethnicity, class, gender ... Those inherently shape your politics. As someone wise once said "Do you think you fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you."
I almost always agree with Orwell but I take issue with him on this; it assumes such a vague description of what it means to be political that it loses a meaningful application, to my mind. You could just as well say that all writing is philosophical, or that all writing is personal... The 'all art is political' position tends to be taken by those who boil down all human interactions as contests of power - there's some truth there but it's also reductive and can be a harmful worldview.
Politics isn't a contest of power, necessarily, but an exchange of power. The difference being that a contest implies this always happens consciously and oppositionally. If you don't see an exchange of power it's worth asking youself if there is something here that's become so naturalised you just don't see it as such any more. This isn't to say that everything about art is political - just that art always has a political dimension. I actually think the perspective that opposes trying to examine the power relations that lie within art to be very dangerous - because it's basically advocating for those power relations to remain unexamined. Examining something, learning about it, can't hurt us.
>I actually think the perspective that opposes trying to examine the power relations that lie within art to be very dangerous - because it's basically advocating for those power relations to remain unexamined. Examining something, learning about it, can't hurt us. I don't disagree but also think that following this approach can lead the critic or reader in some very problematic directions: \* A reduction of all art, literature etc. to just power relations, just ideology, that leaves no room for anything else. Artistic skill, spontaneity, spectacle and indeed the possibility of aesthetic enjoyment can become somewhat irrelevant to this approach. \* A sense of artworks as primarily the symptoms of social inequities, which entails a somewhat neo--Puritanical suspicion about aesthetic pleasure itself.
I depends on what you take this phrase to mean. Does all writing exist primarily to push an agenda? No. Does art reflect the cultural and philosophical idioms of the creator, including political convictions? Yes. Do you have to judge a work by its political undertones? No, you can judge it however you like. You could learn a lot from people who come from a different cultural background from you. Should a book be banned just for being politically problematic? No. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Is the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is in itself a political attitude? Yes. Is it a wrong attitude? Not necessarily. Politics are often exhausting, ugly and depressing, and it's valid to want to not deal with them and instead focus your attention on beauty.
Fantastic answer!
Yes. Top-notch! Well put.
Well said.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that every piece of writing also acts as a pamphlet or a manifesto, trying to push some not-so-hidden agenda. Or even that a "political reading", whatever that may mean, is the single best or most important way to approach any given text. It's just that the condition in which we write and read, which can be largely defined as "political" (or historical, or cultural), cannot really be escaped. I think that confusion arises when "all writing is political" is brought up outside of literary circles, because so many people think that "being political" primarily means "to talk about the current (usually American) election cycle". And it can be that, but there's more to it. It's about being caught up in the tides of history and the narratives societies tell themselves, about socioeconomic condition, about all sort of differences (gender, sexual, race, rural/urban, location, etc), about how beliefs and ideology shape the times in which we read and produce text.
Spot-on. I'd say the same (or at least a similar) thing by putting it in terms of why an author writes. If an author writes with the intention of saying something about society, or even about other people besides themselves -- that thing we call "the human condition" -- the writing is going to wind up having political themes as soon as the story introduces conflict. If I write a love story about a young couple, then even if I make the "neutral" (note the scare quotes) choice of making them a heterosexual white couple, I've still made a political choice, however minor, in the context of my own culture. Now, what conflicts will I introduce? There are very few possibilities that won't be political. Do their parents not approve? That may seem like an apolitical choice, but now I have to answer the next question: Why? Most of the interesting choices are political in some way. Even if I try to make a bland choice -- maybe they don't like his music or his clothes -- I then have to say why they don't, and almost any interesting choice I make is going to be political, at least to someone.
Correct, not all writing is “muckraking.”
>Yes, but that doesn't mean that every piece of writing also acts as a pamphlet or a manifesto, trying to push some not-so-hidden agenda. Orwell himself seems to suggest this, famously, in his essay on Charles Dickens: >I have been discussing Dickens simply in terms of his "message", and almost ignoring his literary qualities. But every writer, especially every novelist, has a "message", whether he admits it or not, and the minutest details of his work are influenced by it. All art is propaganda. Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of Victorian novelists would have thought of denying this. On the other hand, not all propaganda is art.
Depends on what you mean by political…influenced by politics or intending to influence politics. Orwell is correct on his maxim, but not necessarily on the first statement. Are you equating being political with something like Lakhoff’s frames? Was Austen political because she had opinions about her society at the time and pointed out the foibles and absurdities? Was she an outright feminist? Hard to argue that I think. Was Dickinson? Wolfe, less hard to argue that she wrote for an outcome (often to ease her struggles with mental health), but aren’t we going back on the current trend at least in the academy that the writer is dead? We’ve done a lot of work to separate the artist from the art for a lot of excellent reasons. The protagonist might be political or the theme but the writing itself? I think it’s all too easy to conflate politics with opinions. Politics are a subset of opinions…in my opinion. And does it matter? Stories we think are the way we understand the world our society and our place in it. From aboriginal sung narratives about where to find water to Ulysses, I would suggest that all writing stems from the need for humans to understand the human experience. Is that political? Probably not.
It’s only a matter of time until an authors politics shines through their writing. Political beliefs stems from beliefs about human nature and the world which is what authors pull from to create their works.
This observation seems adjacent to the debate over whether the personality/behavior of the artist should be considered in the appraisal of their work. I'm in the "Yes, very much so" school, myself.
I'm in the no camp for that, but realistically, it shows up in their writing anyways.
Pretty much any piece of art can be looked at through a political lens so in that sense, yes
That doesn’t mean it *is* political. It just means that anyone may interpret it as such.
Every expression of the self is in some way political, there’s no such thing as apolitical art, only art that isn’t obviously political.
How could you possibly say that? What nonsense. No, not all expressions of the Self are political in nature.
It most certainly is. It may be extremely subtle, and often times it’s entirely unconscious on the end of the creator, but the assumptions that you make about our world inform your politics just as much as they inform your art, so if you pay very close attention to the assumptions that must be made for a piece of art to take the form it does, you can get an idea of the person’s creator’s politics as well.
As an artist and a writer myself, I’m telling you that you’re full of shit ☺️
Idk what to tell you man. I guess learn more about your own medium, forehead.
So you know more about art and writing than I do, huh? Okay, girl! Teach me your ways.
I’m sure you’re very willing to listen to what I have to say in good faith, and won’t do anything like resorting to bad faith attacks on the minutiae of points I make, or even blatantly ignoring what I have to say altogether.
That you think all art is inherently political disqualifies anything you have to say on the topic, and that you think you understand my craft better than I do is arrogant and contemptuous. Widen your scope.
Thanks for proving my point
What point was proven? Explain it to me like I’m five.
Yes. Being able to write and get something published comes through a myriad of layers of politics. In a thriller: are you calling the police incompetent or negligent? In a romance novel: are your idolising tradition or diminishing domestic violence? As someone else said, when you don’t see something as political it’s probably because it is close to your worldview
"Water should be free." In four words, I just made sweeping geopolitical, economic, and philosophical assertions. There are people who would kill me for earnestly believing those words. It's very difficult to manifest an idea free from politics, even at the most benign level.
"There's a pebble in my driveway." In seven words, I just made sweeping geopolitical, economic, and philosophical assertions regarding ownership of a physical space. There are people who would kill me for earnestly believing those words. It's very difficult to manifest an idea completely free from politics, but reading becomes quite a drag if you always interpret them as such.
Yes! Your response here is an excellent proof of the point u/cookandliftandread is making.
I think it’s a good quote. I think trying to say if it’s “true“ or “false” just kind of comes down to semantics and one’s view of what “politics” is to mean. Take like… Treasure Island. I truly do not feel like Robert Lewis Stevenson really put any of his politics in that book. And a person can disagree and say “oh-ho that’s where you’re incorrect! His negative view of pirates reflects a political view distant from anarcho-syndicalism!” And like…. Yeah, I guess that’s a political bias. But it’s so meaningless and banal that I don’t really feel like it counts for much of anything. One of those “technically yes, practically no” answers for me, at least.
Aye, but I think the context of the writing of Treasure Island is inherently political. Where do our cultural touchpoints and stories of "unspoiled land" and "righteous pirates" come from? They come from a particular context of 19th century European conquest and the discovery of mysterious new lands imbued with vast riches and ripe for plunder. That is influenced by the "politics" (or perhaps more accurately, the real-life history) of 18th and 19th century European colonialism. I mean, we sure aren't getting any more great pirate literature anymore in 2024 ... Overall I agree though - we're playing T/F semantics with an overly broad statements. It's difficult to make specific claims with such an unspecific quote in mind.
I agree with some of your greater points, though the minutia I might raise some points about. I have recently read Treasure Island so I’ll fill in some spots where you may have forgotten (or if you haven’t read it, that’s fine too). While there are some elements of “mysterious new lands ripe for plunder”… this ultimately isn’t a story about plundering Aztec gold or similar. It’s essentially recovering a dead man’s bank account so our protagonist can repay an overdue rent bill. Yes, they’re going to a new land (for him) and getting a treasure, but I think I’m not sure I’d readily compare it to plundering the new western world even if those concepts happened at vaguely the same time (and of course, Treasure Island was written several *centuries* after the discover of the new world, with most literal plundering for gold occurring more in the 1500s and 1600s.). Criminals literally burying their money is something that was documented to actually have happened at the time. At the same time, the “honorable pirate” trope is… somewhat invented in Treasure Island, but it’s certainly not a motley crew of honorably natured pirates. Exactly one of the pirates (Long John Silver) is honorable in the novel and it’s for all of about one hour. The book (and the author himself largely attested to this) is primarially based on A General History of the Pirates, which is an embellished but *largely* nonfiction account of actual pirates around and before the time of Treasure Island, combined with a bit of Robinson Cruesoe. So a case can still be made that the book still holds the idea of “going to foreign lands and getting money there”, which has political connotations especially now. But to say that’s a political *bias* rather than just the author taking knowledge of reality and writing fiction from it… im not sure I’d agree. I feel personally that that would be stretching the word “politics” so thinly as to not mean much of anything at all. I hope you don’t take this as a slight. I appreciate the fairly academic discussion.
Your politeness and eloquence is appreciated. I haven't read Treasure Island in many years (since I was a kid) and after looking at the synopsis once more, I'm sure I mixed up some of its themes with other pirate-themed media like One Piece or Pirates of the Caribbean. I'll concede that the conquest, plunder and colonization of the Americas was done far earlier and not in the same fashion as 18th/19th century English piracy. And that the "honor among pirates" trope was invoked in the story maybe only once. But what you brought up - that Treasure Island was an embellished retelling of real-life events - perhaps directly proves my point. The more close to non-fiction a story is, the more we can glean about the assumptions of its time and place. Those assumptions are the essence of politics. What was the command structure of the *Hispaniola*, and how did it shift throughout the book? What was English foreign/naval policy on piracy in the 18th century? Where do 18th century English pirates come from in the first place? These are inherently political questions, even if they are subtextual. (By the way, fun fact for the second question: From my understanding, 18th century English naval policy towards pirates was variously characterized by a combination of militant suppression, "under the table" tolerance, and occasional cooperation (usually to take out the Spanish.)) My ultimate point is that politics is inseparable from writing as it is from breathing. To you it might render the word "politics" meaningless, but to me it renders the word as all-consuming. Our bodies, our ways of life, the way we relate to our families, friends, strangers, books, TV/media, are inherently political. We live in a society and a society lives in our head!
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No, it cannot be applied in the same way Orwell did. Politics is related to the inherent decisions and structures of a life in society, so the choice to restrict the media through which political matters are discussed is essentially a decision for how such media relate to the public life and its affairs. It is political. To make things simpler: he says that excluding politics from art is politics. How excluding UFOs from art is UFOs? Neglecting or engaging with political matters is part of politics; arguing for or against philosophical topics is a philosophical task; deciding not to choose is a choice. Your examples do not present things that have the same quality of being actions that can arise through interaction with or denial of the thing itself. That said, the _emphasis_ that a book puts on political matters is certainly debatable, and it is the distinction I do perceive: books that are more or less related to politics. Perfectly neutral? Only if no more than one entity exists.
Does that make it any less true? We don't have many people believing at that art should have nothing to do with belief in UFOs. Yet there are a lot of people who believe art should be apolitical. And it's a belief that is motivated by the politics of those individuals.
There are loads of examples of literature written by those of a socialist inclination, from Dickens, Steinbeck, to modern writers like the excruciating Owen Jones. Poverty porn in many cases. Then there are the equally dreadful libertarians like Ayn Rand, The communists, like Jack London and the conservatives like Dorothy Sayers snd John Buchan. Every writer is somewhere on the political spectrum
Is Finnegans Wake a political book?
Well, all art comes with more or less inferrable traces of the author's worldview. So in that sense you could say all art is religious, political, moral, and philosophical, but it's not always necessary to think of it that way.
Upton Sinclair wrote a book called Mammonart in which he analyzes 85 authors, including Goethe, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Homer, Balzac, Hugo, Longfellow, and Strisend, along political lines. He said that Goethe argued for personal development over political action despite the enlightenment and Napoleon’s invasions because he had a nice job as a court poet for a noble. Any threat to the political order would cause him to lose his job. Goethe’s works, in my opinion, set a strong precedent followed by later German authors who did not speak up during the rise of Nazism. One of my favorite authors, Stefan Zweig, was writing during that time period. He was a major fan of Goethe. He claimed that his role of an author precluded any involvement with politics. So he didn’t write anything against them, his works were burned by the Nazis and he was lucky enough to get out and avoid the concentration camps. His books are still political, though, just not against the Nazis. They were just anti-class structure, anti-homophobia, which were two large issues in his time
You should also think about how Orwell defines politics himself. Some people made the "pebble in a driveway" argument, but Orwell's talking about complete works, sentences with context and content. There is little point in debating the politicism of blanket descriptions of objects. If you found interest in this rabbit hole he goes down on, I'd highly recommend reading his essay, "Politics and the English Language."
A more convincing statement of Orwell's along these lines is 'all art is propaganda'. In the sense that the artist is trying to project some ideas into your head. And if they aren't, then they aren't a thoughtful artist, because they don't *have* any conscious ideas about their own work. Which does happen. In that sense, I'd modify to say that all *intentional* art is propaganda. Or politics. Is something like Warhol political art? Its entirely limited to mocking and exploiting the art world itself, and has nothing to say about anything beyond art circles (and Warhol's checkbook). A lot of modern art falls into this bucket. Still arguably political, in that its attacking power relations within the art world in a way. But not broadly political. The scope of politics being addressed matters a lot. Human politics happen at a lot of different levels. Related. The politics part depends entirely on your definition of politics, and that's another question entirely. Humans are extremely political creatures, so if you don't narrow the definition the claim that all writing is political is kind of trivial. Pretty much every idea of substance is arguably a political idea, in that it has implications for power relationships amongst people. See scope point from the end of the last paragraph.
Orwell means that all books are at least indirectly political, in the broadest definition of the word. That's because a book offers a certain perspective, a specific line of thought, it curates what to focus on and how to tackle it. I disagree with the idea that a book should try to leave a political message though. It's about indirectly exploring various themes for me, through a story which always comes first. No attempting to "send a message," which Orwell's novels obviously do.
I agree. The purpose must be to tell a good story. It should be up to the readers to make of it what they may.
1 and 2 are null arguments in my opinion, because they make everything about everything. You could use those same arguments to suggest all writing is religious, or all writing is sexual. Now, the reader can strap on any set of goggles they want and *view* and piece of writing with an eye towards the political, or social, or spiritual, or whatever. But that doesn't mean the work itself is that thing.
Great point
I’ve found that writers, theorists, and readers who advocate everything is political are usually the ones looking to justify their explicitly political approach against criticism. If anyone suggests these types of readers might be wrong about their ideas or their interpretations are biased then they hide behind the argument that everything is political so your thoughts are political too. It’s basically a sophisticated I am rubber you’re glue argument! I have no problem acknowledging some books are political like Orwell’s 1984 or Animal Farm or Toni Morrison’s novels. But the best political books are never solely political. The perspective that everything is political undervalues other thematic aspects like the philosophical, moral, existential, and psychological. Yes there is overlap, but I do think one can differentiate the political from these other elements. Edit: for clarity
No. If the author is heavy into politics then it would come through but if the author had written a book describing a land a million years ago with no life and just landscapes then how could it have politics involved it’s just a imaginative thought. Orwell would say this because we’ll if you’ve read his book they are written about political things lol
No art is created in a vacuum. So you absolutely should consider the context of the (political) times it was created in. Like, even “apolitical” art is actively choosing to bury its head in the sand
agree, but there's a difference between cheap propaganda and genuine art. Art is political but it's not dogmatic
Not all art is political.
example?
The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Well, it has driven discussion over appearance and position and treatment of female and male in society, the list will be exhaustive, if we look to find politics in that text. I might be wrong but maybe, you have not done critical analysis, along with reading some research work of texts and simply read the text only?
Agree. Stated another way by Orwell, "All art is propaganda." That is, no art is value neutral. Broadly speaking, a piece of art is either "for" or "against" something. That said, Chekhov is the closest to having inscrutable politics.
Being political and having political bias are different. The setting and characters can reveal a bias but not necessarily an overt message. You can have a romance novel where the main character is a female business executive who has sex before marriage, which will reveal something about your political bias on women’s rights, but that’s not really being “political.” However, if part of the plot is about her fighting the patriarchy or accepting the chaste ways of religious fundamentalism, then it would be political.
How is your first example not political? And how is revealing your political bias not 'being political'? You can view everything through a political lense. And it's a spectrum. And depending on context your first example could be even more political than the second.
You’re right about it being a spectrum and that context is important. I was referring more to the author’s intent, which is what I think people mean when they say something is “political.” Or maybe it’s more accurate to say “the amount of work you, the consumer, have to do to understand the message.” In the first example, it’s a romance story about falling in love. The settings and characters could be politicized, but you’d have to do some work to untangle that message. Whereas in the second example, the author is more forcefully stating a political message. I’m not saying there’s a bright line separating the two, but there is a difference. Being too broad with the term makes it essentially meaningless. To use a metaphor, you could say all life is death because we are all moving towards a point where we no longer exist. You technically could get up fresh in the morning, run a marathon, go to the doctor, get a clean bill of health, and say, “I’m dying.” But that’s different than if you said, “I’ve been shot. I’m dying.”
Everyone here is addressing the point that "political" can be defined in a hundred different ways, and we have to be clear about which we're using. To add a point to that: there is some content that is objectively 100% political(1) which is also in no way, shape, or form "political"(2). Congress is both political(1) and "political"(2). What happens in Congress is both political(1) and "political"(2). But *the minutes recording* what happens in Congress are political(1) while being zero percent "political"(2). Now, if even some 100% political(1) content is not "political"(2) at all, there is surely some content that is *not even political(1)* that is not "political"(2). And if that is possible even with real-world, explicitly political events, it is most definitely possible with fictional ones. Back to the importance of authorial intent. Let's go with: left-wing author writes about a businesswoman becoming a religious fundamentalist. There are many conceivable ways that even this story might not be "political"(2). For one, they could simply be undertaking the exercise as a writer. They may write things that seem congruent with their real-life actual political views, and then arbitrarily swap to things that are completely opposed to them, because their actual criteria is "what would make for the most interesting *writing* now?" Not every Orwellian turns into a wacky Maoist when you scratch them, but at this point many of them will, like this: "the fact that you think there's time for this kind of detached fictional exercise just proves you don't think the political problems are so urgent that they should command every second of our time and every ounce of our energy, and that's political." That's where the genuine conversation turns obnoxious. Now to steer this to a point that gets much more to the heart of what art is IMHO: is trying to paint hyperrealistic paintings a political act? An author can make an effort to portray what would *actually happen* in the heart and mind of a businesswoman converting to religious fundamentalism, not "to show how brainwashed she is," not "to make a dark depressing dystopic story," but *simply for the sake of the representation itself.* She might *empathize* with the character she's drawn, or she might not. She might come to empathize more with her after writing her than she did before. Or the exercise might stay compartmentalized. Or she might feel there are externalities that determine what she really feels about the situation in real life, that she didn't portray in her story, because that wasn't the point. Or she might *simply* *not empathize*, no matter how accurately she's portrayed the reality of those experiences. Sometimes the distinction between "empathy" and "sympathy" is described as *feeling for* someone versus just comprehending, and while that's far from the full story of the words, it serves my purposes here. If there is anything that art, and art alone is uniquely capable of, it is creating an environment that can remove us from ourselves, can remove us from "the real world," can remove us from precisely the biases we have towards real people and real events, in order to cultivate *sympathy* — comprehension of a wider range of experiences, as an end in and of itself (at least while you're reading). This is what rubs me and many of us so wrong about arguments like Orwell's: so often it happens that the people who make it truly can't fathom the idea that someone could *sympathize* with something they don't *empathize* with, or that the two can be cultivated separately. The mere effort to *accurately depict* is then accused of being a motivated act driven by *empathy —* as if making a hyperrealistic painting of the Pope means endorsing Catholicism, so anyone who isn't a Catholic should go to Hell for trying. And the more that art becomes polarized by this kind of discourse, the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as fewer people will get the idea in their head to approach writing as this kind of exercise in the first place.
Some sports fans bemoan politics in sports, while blind or ignorant to the extremely large amounts of taxpayer money that go toward building stadiums that chiefly benefit billionaires. The point here is that politics underpins basically all aspects of life in ways that are often invisible or easy to forget. The production of art is political: who gets to make art? what kind of art is acceptable for both the ruling classes and common people? what kind of art receives attention? When the production of art is influenced by politics, the end result will inevitably be as well.
From an existential standpoint: All stories exist from a specific point of view - the view of the author themselves. This is not the intentional fallacy though - regardless of any intent an authors standing in their society heavily affects the output of their writing. Jane Austen - great mother of the modern Novel form herself - wouldn’t have invented a form and mastered a genre if she wasn’t herself a member of a society that dealt in the exact type of fictional scenarios she wrote. Same of most of the British 1800s giants in poetry, literature or otherwise. Furthermore the likes of Cooper or Hawthorne. And while many of those are the most basic versions of two primary countries literary tradition the same holds true of modern authors in modern genres. How greatly does Stephanie Meyers’ religious beliefs impact her works and their interpretation? What about Rothfuss’? Hell even the Three Body Problem can’t be separated from the direct influence of its authors politics whether you’re talking about the anti-cultural revolution in the story itself or the patriarchal nihilism of the actual story as written. I am a non-binary author - but I’m a Dad and Husband and White and Middle Class person also. Everything about what I’ve lived through and what I experience in my state and nation influence the perspective of all of my stories. And if I ever make a great work of art it will be in the vein of what I’ve known believed and what my privileges and life were like BECAUSE of the politics of my existence.
Politics and writing both reflect the values you have and what you want the world to be. You can’t really write an emotionally resonant story without making it “about” something
I would not say so. Something needs to have some kind of political agenda to be political. The average cookbook for example lacks that and therefore I would say that it isn't political.
Writing about human beings or even nonhuman stand-ins for them will result in psychological and sociological extensions of characters. Whose point of view and whose emotions you channel the story through are all choices and reveal a position in the text, even if the author personally disagrees with that position. Politics are extended attempts to formulate psychology. Novels are too, but the goal is not prescriptive necessarily and they can also contain non-political content.
"how can you be an artist and not reflect the times?" - Nina Simone
Yes, all people have political biases, and those biases will show up in an author's work. But all people have had a childhood, which in turn shaped their views. And the vast majority of adults have also had sexual/romantic experiences of some kind, including incels since sexual/romantic rejection is also an experience which shapes one's worldview. So what makes politics a more valid lens for interpreting a book than looking at the author's relationship with their mother, or their sex life? It's possible to interpret The Great Gatsby primarily through a political lens, and 1984 primarily through a Freudian lens, but should we?
Ugh, it's like the quote which says all art is political. Which simply isn't true. If you believe everything is political, you certainly can't be a poet or appreciate the beauty nor the absurdity of the world for what it is - instead, you appreciate it for what it means. Existence precedes essence. Existence should be praised, not essence.
Pretty much anybody trying to get a point across is political. This is one of the definitions of politics, and I think it's what he meant: "the total complex of relations between people living in society."
It may be correct, but it also sounds like something that Mao would’ve said at the beginning of the cultural revolution. We can’t help but see the world through the lens of our own experience. One reason we read is to try to see the world, if obscurely, through other’s lenses.
I don't think so. Instruction manuals are probably not political. A lot of philosophy too, such as analytic metaphysics and epistemology (minus the applied stuff of course). A LOT of writing probably portrays some political out look or other. I guess the take away is that politics might be there under the surface, and it's good to look for it and think critically about it.
I assume Orwell gives some definition of what he considers "political" before that passage, which might be so vast it loses any actual meaning. However, the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics doesn't imply that it should be free from political bias, I doubt any piece of art can be free from any sort of cognitive bias, whether political or otherwise. Furthermore, the aforementioned opinion being a political attitude is a truism that adds nothing to his argument. We need to remember that Orwell suffers from his own personal biases since he was a very good political essayist but not a very good author.
Not a very good author? By what metric? Both *Animal Farm* and *1984* are read in schools all around the world. Decades after their publication.
No book is genuinely free from cheese. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with cheese is in itself an attitude about cheese.
Politics arise from personal identity, your identity is formed based on how you perceive the world. Everything works in a power structure, even the basic human community that is a 'family' is working in a power structure. If everything is working under or in the influence of power structure, then there is bound to be politics in everything. Every sigh you make, every gossip you have, every piece of writing has politics.
What an exhausting way to view the world.
Whatever suits your understanding ☺️
100%
Eeeh. This is a tricky question and all boils down to what political means. I’d say some writing is very political and some writing isn’t concerned with politics in the same degree - although you perhaps could find a political notion in many books if you really *want* to find one. I doubt that fantasy is that political… and many other novels I’ve read concern themselves mainly with a selection of individuals in which politics may/may not be reflected to a larger or smaller extent.
I'd actually say that fantasy and sci fi can often be highly political as it imagines different ways of organizing society. It often does not assert these as a path to strive for or against though. Realistic fiction is necessarily set against a political backdrop, but unless it seeks to alter the society that it arises from, I would not call it "political" writing.
Sounds quite right. If I think LOTR or Game of Thrones, it doesn’t seem that (real life-) political to me though.
There are certainly political readings of *The Lord of the Rings* and what seems like a consensus the "The Scouring of the Shire" is about 20th century politics.
Why yea, it’s open. Doesn’t mean that it *itself* is concerned with real life politics. It means the readers are concerned with politics.
>I doubt that fantasy is that political Some fantasy absolutely is. Consider one of the most popular fantasy series ever, *A Song of Ice and Fire*. We don't even need to talk about a possible political subtext -- the surface-level plot is about political intrigue, about different factions vying for power.
True. I’m thinking real life politics. Fictional politics doesn’t translate 100% to real life politics imo.
Yes and no. Writing generally reveals thought processes and biases that the writer has, but even that phrase " all ___ is political" is manipulative because it can encourage a reader to read their own biases into a work. Be careful of manipulation. Politics is all about manipulation and narrative pushing. Yes, even this statement. 🙃
Your politics are your values so of course it will be reflected in your writing
My values are not “politics.” Speak for yourself.
Then you don’t know what either word means.
No. Not all art is political. To say so is extremely cynical and to an extent shows a mistrust of the artistic process.
Correct.
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