Went for a Swim

Nothing, writes Borges, is more secondary to a book’s achievement than the intentions of its author. And in the end novels, the great subversive medium, subvert not only what society thinks is right, but what the writer intends to write.

And why?

Because a novel, when it succeeds, takes the writer beyond his own history and character, escapes the shackles of his politics and opinions, and the alchemy of story makes of the writer’s soul that which joins one human being with all human beings. For this reason Kipling’s wonderful stories can never be reduced to his imperialism, nor Dostoevsky’s genius invalidated by his anti-Semitism.

Some writers are of course political beings, others are not, but this is a guide to little. Bad writers can have admirable politics, while Hamsun and Pound most certainly didn’t. Great books can be great campaigning vehicles: one thinks of Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook, said to have led to the decision to emancipate the serfs, or much of Dickens. Books that are written in opposition to politics, questioning its very basis, can in repressed and tyrannical societies become ironically freighted with enormous political significance: one thinks of Doctor Zhivago or Life and Fate (of the latter it was decreed by the head of the KGB that no-one was to read the book for two hundred years).

But Turgenev’s or Dickens’ political beliefs are no longer why we read these writers, nor is the persecution of Pasternak or the confiscation of Grossman’s masterpiece why these books matter. They continue to be read, perhaps, because we recognise them as simply being true to the chaos of life. If a novel can achieve this, it can never be reduced to an ideology, and will always remain the enemy of lies and oppression.

Writing does not excuse a writer from political choices and actions, but nor does it demand them of him. These are matters between a man and a soul, which a writer must face up to along with the plumber, the hairdresser and the executive. Paradoxically, the writers most concerned about making politics part of their work often write work that is autistic to the politics of its times; while writers with almost no interest sometimes write most perceptively of their era: amid the agitprop wastes of the 1920s, no-one more shrewdly foretold the political apocalypse looming than Kafka, the man who recorded the most historically significant event in his life, the start of the First World War, with a fine sense of human proportion: ‘Morning: war declared. Afternoon: went for a swim.’

There are so many forces in the world that divide us deeply and murderously. In recent times we have lived through not so much a crisis of politics as a collapse of that most human attribute, empathy—a collapse so catastrophic it sometimes appears to be a crisis of love, manifest in epidemics of loneliness and depression. This strange event seems most pronounced in the West in the United States, a country where pessimism about the future of the novel has become its most persistent literary tradition.

We cannot escape politics, history, religion, nationalism—for their sources lie as deep in our hearts as love and goodness, perhaps even deeper. But at its best, art reminds us of all that we share, of all that brings us together.

For this reason books matter. For this reason books aren’t just novelty items or celebrity frontlist accompaniments; one more marketing platform for the famous and the powerful. In a world where the road to the new tyrannies is paved with the fear of others, great books show us that we are neither alone nor in the end that different; that what joins us is always more important than what divides us; and that the price of division is ever the obscenity of oppression.

From And What Do You Do, Mr Gable?, 2011, Random House.