Politics & literature
December 7, 2003 | 12:00am
In a time such as ours when politics, burlesque and buffoonery are spoken in the same breath, those who write political reflections gather nothing but an air of contrived tone that so easily stirs hostility rather than mindful consideration, sardonic remarks and distaste rather than critical attention and earnest analysis. Ours is a generation nurtured by this carnival of obstinacy and fluid convictions, where sobriety swims in the unavoidable currents of alienation, antipathy and apathy on the one hand, and the excesses of pop radicalism and the conceit of every messianic tendency on the other.
Here in this unredeemable landscape, polemics thrive and pass, without much hand wringing, as wisdom, reactionary pride and militant despair as the principled language of reason. In this pitiful age where controversies are engaged by intrigue and malice, ideas and energies of the more sensible among us are invested elsewhere. To Irving Howe, literature is where he sought refuge, offering its hospitality to his maverick and undeniably leftist slants, which are largely deprived of persuasive merits by the obscurantism, if not obscenities, of mainstream politics.
Yet in his literary works, Howe was constantly moved, compelled as if by necessity or temptation, to deliberately return to his political roots. And in doing so, he unfailingly delivered some of the most poignant and powerful literary appraisals of the 20th century. Through his incisive and, at times, merciless readings, literary criticism, once regarded simply as a scalpel to probe the author’s esthetic judgment, was elevated as a means to reveal the hidden political signatures and devices buried in every literary piece. As a Greek proverb so insightfully puts it, a man cannot hide behind his fingers. Indeed, no one can.
Interestingly in a time when everyone seemingly left the Left, Howe insisted to be called a democratic socialist not because he wanted a Soviet-style polity in the United States (he was a staunch anti-Stalinist figure), but because being a Jew and an immigrant son he saw and understood the urgency of forging a more fraternal and fairer society. His hopes, however, were constantly tempered by the realities of his surroundings, his ideological stand hounded with impunity by the specter of McCarthyism; and admittedly, his much-guarded convictions were repulsed by the fashionably skeptic Sixties hippies, whom he and other New York intellectuals saw as vanguard poseurs of suspect political ethos.
But the very same frustrations he bore equipped him with the virtuosity of technique and language to pen one of the most remarkable books in literary criticism, not only marking his place both as the doyen for the new wave of critics and as political gadfly for the near-extinct American leftist thinkers, but also showcasing the enviable quality and unsurpassed lucidity of his mind. With Politics and the Novel (1957), Howe cemented his name as a literatus, a flagship in literary and political studies inspiring generations thereafter to move beyond the gustatory trappings of plain literary reflection. A decade after his death, Howe still remains a highly influential figure not only in the American academe but in scholarship in general, an intellectual beacon who embraced moral responsibility with the same fieriness he pursued his academic passion.
The book Politics and the Novel is an exemplary manifesto. It avoids the crippling exhaustiveness of classification that so commonly afflicts the academic mind. For Howe, it seems, the line that separates political treatise and literature is gelatinous. Because the author is submerged in a world of expectations and perceptions, her work may be conceived as articles that necessarily respond to the inescapable questions about morals, motives, faith or apostasy whose resolution can only be phrased within the context of one’s inner struggles and manifest politics. From Stendhal and Doestoevsky to James and Koestler, such realization addresses the inadequacy of previous readings of a more innocent epoch, making it possible for Howe to deliver his sharp critiques with endowed cleverness and clarity, yet without the self-assuring bravado to be too endorsing of his own conviction.
Morally, he condemns; as a critic, his condemnation is calculated with an enormous dignity devoid of garrulous pontificating. Reflecting on Joseph Conrad’s intractable abhorrence of anarchists, Howe writes: "conservatism and anarchism… are not quite so distant as might be supposed. Conservatism is the anarchism of the fortunate, anarchism the conservatism of the deprived," as if loudly pointing to the similarity of the May 1riot of the great unwashed in Malacañang two years ago and the not-so-infrequent white collar crimes of the uber-moneyed folks bent on insider trading, tax evasion and creative accounting. As Leo Tolstoy once remarked, "there may be a world of difference between cat shit and dog shit. But I don’t like the smell of either."
Caustic may be Howe’s condemnation, his insight forthright and penetrating. Yet his essays on the great modern writers clearly exhibit an appreciation for the diversity of their ideological prejudices probing them with an unassuming openness and a delicate treatment of a true literary genius. Perhaps, no temptation can be so desirously succumbed to yet futilely resisted than the temptation to read through the pages of Crime and Punishment or 1984 as if insisting on the words written by dead men our own frustration, nostalgia, disenchantment and — indeed spiritual damnation: in short, the private betrayal felt by those who gather courage to ponder on the failed utopias not only of those who pose as messiahs but even of our much-cherished humanity.
At times, Howe slips and loses himself in the vicissitudes of the political tempest. That is understandable. As a lover of politics, Howe fights rather vainly in resisting the seduction and romance of struggles, of history, and strangely enough, of bloodshed and revolution. But as the importance of politics mounts and overwhelms his critiques, the fury of his appraisals becomes ever stronger reminding the readers of the centrality of ideology not as tangential curiosity of writers but as a full creative force in modern novels. Here lies Howe’s distinct brilliance. For where religion abandons its role as the purveyor of purpose, ideology, as Howe shows, offers itself as an alternative. Faith is then no longer professed to any god but to history. In its temple, the novelist is the new priesthood.
As the dust of metaphor and worded euphoria settle, one can indeed recognize the astonishing impact of ideology on the world’s finest writers by incarnating the aloof lumps of abstraction into life and in the process reflecting the foibles and frivolity of our puny existence. In hindsight, partly because of Howe’s superb take on literature and politics, I seriously consider the possibility that, had Marx collaborated with Dickens rather than with Engels, Das Kapital would have been far more accessible to the wider masses who find theoretical works painful and exasperating.
Admittedly, writing a critique on a book dedicated entirely on critiques produces much personal discomfort. Armed with nothing but a string of sophomoric qualifiers and often-convoluted thoughts, I have been taken aback by the magnitude and depth of Howe’s contribution to literary and political studies. The way he has phrased his sentences — seamless and free flowing like a stream on spring — seems to barricade his position as much as reveal his politics, constantly fending off the irritating spectacles of critics.
Notwithstanding this difficulty, I have decided to look deeper on the quality of Howe’s words and the revealing eccentricities of his thought for they insist the evocative passion of the man without the maudlin obviousness and concocted reverence of others when facing such literary giants as Orwell and Dostoevsky. In the 1950s when the book was published, Howe’s work might have been received as an irreverent spasm of political jargons and Trotskyite eloquence. But time has proven that the book is not so. On the contrary, such intelligently crafted set of literary appraisals breathes of candor and, alas, of erudition, giving form to the inordinately complex social dramas laid out in some of the world’s finest fictions.
Such magnificence is not so easily found in a book, lest a book of criticism. So, the Heavens might have smiled on me when I got the book from a garage sale at fifty pesos.
Life is good!
Here in this unredeemable landscape, polemics thrive and pass, without much hand wringing, as wisdom, reactionary pride and militant despair as the principled language of reason. In this pitiful age where controversies are engaged by intrigue and malice, ideas and energies of the more sensible among us are invested elsewhere. To Irving Howe, literature is where he sought refuge, offering its hospitality to his maverick and undeniably leftist slants, which are largely deprived of persuasive merits by the obscurantism, if not obscenities, of mainstream politics.
Yet in his literary works, Howe was constantly moved, compelled as if by necessity or temptation, to deliberately return to his political roots. And in doing so, he unfailingly delivered some of the most poignant and powerful literary appraisals of the 20th century. Through his incisive and, at times, merciless readings, literary criticism, once regarded simply as a scalpel to probe the author’s esthetic judgment, was elevated as a means to reveal the hidden political signatures and devices buried in every literary piece. As a Greek proverb so insightfully puts it, a man cannot hide behind his fingers. Indeed, no one can.
Interestingly in a time when everyone seemingly left the Left, Howe insisted to be called a democratic socialist not because he wanted a Soviet-style polity in the United States (he was a staunch anti-Stalinist figure), but because being a Jew and an immigrant son he saw and understood the urgency of forging a more fraternal and fairer society. His hopes, however, were constantly tempered by the realities of his surroundings, his ideological stand hounded with impunity by the specter of McCarthyism; and admittedly, his much-guarded convictions were repulsed by the fashionably skeptic Sixties hippies, whom he and other New York intellectuals saw as vanguard poseurs of suspect political ethos.
But the very same frustrations he bore equipped him with the virtuosity of technique and language to pen one of the most remarkable books in literary criticism, not only marking his place both as the doyen for the new wave of critics and as political gadfly for the near-extinct American leftist thinkers, but also showcasing the enviable quality and unsurpassed lucidity of his mind. With Politics and the Novel (1957), Howe cemented his name as a literatus, a flagship in literary and political studies inspiring generations thereafter to move beyond the gustatory trappings of plain literary reflection. A decade after his death, Howe still remains a highly influential figure not only in the American academe but in scholarship in general, an intellectual beacon who embraced moral responsibility with the same fieriness he pursued his academic passion.
The book Politics and the Novel is an exemplary manifesto. It avoids the crippling exhaustiveness of classification that so commonly afflicts the academic mind. For Howe, it seems, the line that separates political treatise and literature is gelatinous. Because the author is submerged in a world of expectations and perceptions, her work may be conceived as articles that necessarily respond to the inescapable questions about morals, motives, faith or apostasy whose resolution can only be phrased within the context of one’s inner struggles and manifest politics. From Stendhal and Doestoevsky to James and Koestler, such realization addresses the inadequacy of previous readings of a more innocent epoch, making it possible for Howe to deliver his sharp critiques with endowed cleverness and clarity, yet without the self-assuring bravado to be too endorsing of his own conviction.
Morally, he condemns; as a critic, his condemnation is calculated with an enormous dignity devoid of garrulous pontificating. Reflecting on Joseph Conrad’s intractable abhorrence of anarchists, Howe writes: "conservatism and anarchism… are not quite so distant as might be supposed. Conservatism is the anarchism of the fortunate, anarchism the conservatism of the deprived," as if loudly pointing to the similarity of the May 1riot of the great unwashed in Malacañang two years ago and the not-so-infrequent white collar crimes of the uber-moneyed folks bent on insider trading, tax evasion and creative accounting. As Leo Tolstoy once remarked, "there may be a world of difference between cat shit and dog shit. But I don’t like the smell of either."
Caustic may be Howe’s condemnation, his insight forthright and penetrating. Yet his essays on the great modern writers clearly exhibit an appreciation for the diversity of their ideological prejudices probing them with an unassuming openness and a delicate treatment of a true literary genius. Perhaps, no temptation can be so desirously succumbed to yet futilely resisted than the temptation to read through the pages of Crime and Punishment or 1984 as if insisting on the words written by dead men our own frustration, nostalgia, disenchantment and — indeed spiritual damnation: in short, the private betrayal felt by those who gather courage to ponder on the failed utopias not only of those who pose as messiahs but even of our much-cherished humanity.
At times, Howe slips and loses himself in the vicissitudes of the political tempest. That is understandable. As a lover of politics, Howe fights rather vainly in resisting the seduction and romance of struggles, of history, and strangely enough, of bloodshed and revolution. But as the importance of politics mounts and overwhelms his critiques, the fury of his appraisals becomes ever stronger reminding the readers of the centrality of ideology not as tangential curiosity of writers but as a full creative force in modern novels. Here lies Howe’s distinct brilliance. For where religion abandons its role as the purveyor of purpose, ideology, as Howe shows, offers itself as an alternative. Faith is then no longer professed to any god but to history. In its temple, the novelist is the new priesthood.
As the dust of metaphor and worded euphoria settle, one can indeed recognize the astonishing impact of ideology on the world’s finest writers by incarnating the aloof lumps of abstraction into life and in the process reflecting the foibles and frivolity of our puny existence. In hindsight, partly because of Howe’s superb take on literature and politics, I seriously consider the possibility that, had Marx collaborated with Dickens rather than with Engels, Das Kapital would have been far more accessible to the wider masses who find theoretical works painful and exasperating.
Admittedly, writing a critique on a book dedicated entirely on critiques produces much personal discomfort. Armed with nothing but a string of sophomoric qualifiers and often-convoluted thoughts, I have been taken aback by the magnitude and depth of Howe’s contribution to literary and political studies. The way he has phrased his sentences — seamless and free flowing like a stream on spring — seems to barricade his position as much as reveal his politics, constantly fending off the irritating spectacles of critics.
Notwithstanding this difficulty, I have decided to look deeper on the quality of Howe’s words and the revealing eccentricities of his thought for they insist the evocative passion of the man without the maudlin obviousness and concocted reverence of others when facing such literary giants as Orwell and Dostoevsky. In the 1950s when the book was published, Howe’s work might have been received as an irreverent spasm of political jargons and Trotskyite eloquence. But time has proven that the book is not so. On the contrary, such intelligently crafted set of literary appraisals breathes of candor and, alas, of erudition, giving form to the inordinately complex social dramas laid out in some of the world’s finest fictions.
Such magnificence is not so easily found in a book, lest a book of criticism. So, the Heavens might have smiled on me when I got the book from a garage sale at fifty pesos.
Life is good!
BrandSpace Articles
<
>