Literature, politics and pedagogy.

Abstract

Political scientists tend to eschew works of fiction, preferring instead to concentrate on "hard data" when providing analysis of political behaviour. But "fact" and "fiction" are not necessarily exclusive categories. Works of fiction may provide insights into the cultural and social milieu that shapes the political process. Literature serves to "translate" the personal into the realm of the collectivity. Having students read a novel or play may be the most effective means of introducing them to a different political culture. Stories about the experience of particular people constitute an important corrective for the dehumanizing effects of abstract theory or generalization. Political scientists making use of literary texts therefore believe that the study of literature has something to add to our understanding of politics.

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University teachers who offer interdisciplinary courses in the culture, history and politics of a country or region have long included novels and short stories in their syllabi. Political scientists, on the other hand, have tended to eschew works of fiction, preferring instead to concentrate on "hard data" and the reportage of "actual events" when providing analysis of political behaviour. They have been especially concerned with the post-modern blurring of "fact" and "fiction." Classically, the genres of reporting in history and the social sciences relied on their ability to differentiate among facts, their representation, and their interpretation.

But facts, as Hannah Arendt suggested long ago, cannot be related without narrators and narratives. History, she wrote, is what historians have constructed, and causality is in the mind of the storyteller: "What the storyteller narrates must necessarily be hidden from the actor himself, at least as long as he is in the act or caught in its consequences ... Even though stories are the inevitable results of action, it is not the actor but the storyteller who perceives and `makes' the story."(1) Yet if narrators affix imprints of their own, then of course it follows that there is no representation without interpretation.

In the past century, when "truth" has indeed been stranger, and more horrific, than "fiction," the traditional distinctions between reality and fantasy have been questioned by those who contend that the truth-claims of factual genres are no longer tenable. "The slippage between the imagined and the real has allowed for bold crossings over and mingling--between fiction and autobiography, and between history and fiction," Judith Levy has written.(2) English literature professor Jay Parini, who has been "working in a curious, alluring space between fact and fiction" by writing novels about Tolstoy, Columbus and Walter Benjamin, calls upon us to remember that "fact" and "fiction" are not necessarily exclusive categories; the latter word derives from the Latin fictio, or "shaping," so novels, biographies and works of scholarship are really all placed along a continuum of "fruitful selectivities."(3)

Do political scientists, then, make too much of this dichotomy between reality and fiction? And, if we should decide to make use of fictional accounts of historical or political events, are we, untrained in literary theory or critical methodology, doing our students a disservice by ourselves blurring this line?

I realize that I am stepping on a lot of academic and literary toes. Professors of literature find themselves exasperated by students who are already inclined to regard any text as "mimetic," a simple reflection of political and social developments, and whose idea of literary criticism is to complain that the characters do not behave "realistically" (in so far as they are even able to discern "reality" in the cultures of peoples about whom they know very little). Am I not simply compounding the problems they face by, so it seems, encouraging students to take a simplistic view of works of art? Clearly, even apart from the debates that revolve around "expertise" and intellectual "accreditation," there are inherent dangers involved when historians and social scientists teach fictional texts.

In her book on Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Elleke Boehmer cautions us against "the mimetic view that literature simply reflected political and social developments."(4) The Yiddishist scholar Ruth Wisse, too, in her introduction to an anthology of works depicting the world of east European Jews, warns the reader to remember that, while these stories "enrich our understanding of East European Jewish life," fact has been filtered through fiction, "and the bias of the mediating imagination must be clearly understood." The reader must not "accept interpretation as fact, to read a story as sociology or anthropology rather than as the work of fiction it is. Even though they are `about' the shtetl," the Jewish small town of eastern Europe, their truth is "the self-referring truth of literature."(5)

Francoise Lionnet, who teaches comparative literature, has argued in Postcolonial Representations that the least we might do is discuss the symbolic significance of literary discourse and to stress to students that they should "situate each text in relation to a historical context whose function is not to make the novel more `authentic' but to highlight the symbolic interpenetrability of history and fiction, of the real and the mythic."(6)

And indeed such caveats should be heeded. As I do not pretend to be a literary theorist, nor a specialist in pedagogy or methodologies of teaching, mine can only be a very modest contribution to this dialogue. But I should like to mention at this point that it was a creative writer and broadcaster, not a social scientist, the Canadian author Adrienne Clarkson, who remarked that "Fiction, like all art, tells the truth from the inside."(7) And the well-known Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who has himself straddled the line between literary figure and political actor, has observed that "literature recounts the history that the history written by the historians would not know how, or be able, to write, because the deceptions, tricks, and exaggerations of narrative literature are used to express profound and unsettling truths which can only see the light of day in this oblique way."(8)

So I would suggest that, if properly selected, works of fiction may provide insights into the cultural and social milieu that shapes the political process. Literature serves to "translate" the personal into the realm of the collectivity. Having students read a novel or play may be the most effective means of introducing them to a different political culture. Stories about the experience of particular people constitute, as political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain reminds us, an important corrective for the dehumanizing effects of abstract theory or generalization.(9) She would, I think, endorse Catherine Zuckert's observation that works of art concern aspects of human life that are most difficult to study objectively--the attitudes, emotions and opinions that shape and are shaped by people's circumstances. "Works of literature," Zuckert has noted, "expand our experience vicariously by showing us what it is like to live in another fashion." They are an effective way of introducing readers to another culture, enabling them to see the world through the eyes of others, and to understand another world view. "Since they present the experiences of specific individuals in particular circumstances," she has written, "literary works are more immediately accessible to students and are more easily discussed than are general philosophical works." Those political scientists making use of literary texts are not making grandiose pronouncements about what ought to be studied or how; they simply believe the study of literature has something to add to our understanding of politics.(10) As John Horton and Andrea T. Baumeister, the editors of a collection of articles entitled Literature and the Political Imagination, note, "literature can make a valuable contribution to political understanding, theory and argument."(11). Political scientists seek knowledge about political things, and literature, at the very least, provides descriptive information. Indeed, political philosopher Werner J. Dannhauser has observed that lesser books, which reflect rather than transcend their times, sometimes are better at providing this kind of information than great works. But, he continues, the greatest of literature provides more than mere information; it can teach us things beyond the reach of political science, namely, how to become better human beings.(12) Paul Cantor, an English professor at the University of Virginia, concurs. He has stated that "the study of literature can indeed teach us a great deal about politics--about both the power of the regime to shape human thought and expression, and the power of individual minds to see beyond its limits and transcend them."(13)

Comedy, in particular, according to Wilson Carey McWilliams, exposes humbuggery, and hence is "radically dangerous" to those who would "drive us into community by necessity or terror." Throughout the ages, it has poked fun at the wholesale attempts to reshape people through social engineering and is, not surprisingly, the bane of all totalitarian leaders and political systems.(14) This is even more true, obviously, of satire.

In Writing and Being, Nadine Gordimer has also made note of the power of fiction in conditions of colonial repression. "The expression in art of what really exists beneath the surface is part of the transformation of a society. What is written, painted, sung, cannot remain ignored."(15) Perhaps some literary theorists find this use of literature for didactic purposes old-hat, "bleeding heart" humanism, but to instill in students a loathing of injustice remains, for many teachers of politics, a valid goal. "Put cruelty first" was the simple precept of the celebrated political theorist Judith Shklar; she often stated that her main goal was to counter through education the pervasiveness of human injustice. She came by her convictions in the most personal of ways: her Jewish family was forced to flee Latvia ahead of the Nazi invaders when she was barely 10 years old and she spent the next 15 years of her life as a refugee.(16) Shklar follows in a long and distinguished tradition in political philosophy dating back to Plato and Aristotle: the idea that human beings ought to consciously and effectively deliberate about what is good for the community.

Zuckert, too, maintains that novels and plays raise the central issues of political philosophy effectively: "What is the best way of organizing our common life, and how do individuals best find happiness within it?" The truly significant political events, those that raise profound questions of principle or value, can not be studied solely in quantitative or positivistic terms. It has been that desire, to investigate "values," an area proscribed by an earlier generation who made a fetish of empiricism, that has attracted political scientists to the study of literature.(17)

As Gordimer, like Shklar the child of a Latvian Jewish father, has stated, if literature is the search for truth, it strives for a truth grounded in experience, in defining one's place in the world, and in determining one's social responsibility. "If you want to read the facts of the retreat from Moscow in 1815, you may read a history book; if you want to know what war is like and how people of a certain time and background dealt with it as their personal situation, you must read War and Peace."(18)

For David Caute, living in a post-modern, post-positivist world means there is more to "history" than simply "the facts." In his study of McCarthyism in America, The Great Fear, he ends a chapter which describes the arrest, imprisonment and execution, in 1953, of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the American Jewish Communist couple alleged to have supplied "atomic bomb secrets" to the Soviet Union, by quoting a passage from E.L. Doctorow's fictional treatment of their plight, The Book of Daniel.(19) Caute knows that literary works often convey a more profound sense of the political culture and social structure of a country than do non-fictional accounts.

I have made use of many novels as guides to cultural interpretation in undergraduate courses on comparative politics and ethnic nationalism. They have been particularly useful since I teach at a small university located in a peripheral province of Canada, whose students are mostly local and who have rarely met, much less have had occasion to gain familiarity with, non-westerners.

The books I have selected over the years have treated themes such as the legacy of colonialism and the struggle for independence; race and poverty; technological development and modernization; class, ethnicity, gender and social stratification; the role of women in politics; religion and its strength in popular culture; the division of families by politics, generation and geography; human rights; protest movements, political violence and revolution as agents for change; and, of course, war. Those not originally written in English are translated editions.

Though these are fictional accounts of events and social situations that are set in the countries studied, but they provide insights into the cultural milieu that helps shape the political process. After all, literary works often convey a more profound sense of the political culture and social structure of a country than do non-fictional accounts. I explain to students that I am not looking for a literary treatment but rather a political analysis; how, in other words, has their reading of the work helped them make sense of politics in the country or countries in which it is set. They discuss the novel's significance in the context of our course.(20)

"Just as literary critics rejected an earlier tradition of criticism that ignored issues such as racism, sexism and war and ... viewed literary texts in isolation," observes Zuckert, so political scientists have repudiated an earlier generation's behaviouralism, which avoided the study of values and insisted "that only factual claims could be verified."(21) Like Zuckert, many political scientists have come to the conclusion that perhaps in fiction there is truth.

Endnotes

(1.) Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition: A Study of the Central Dilemmas Facing Modern Man (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), p. 171.

(2.) Judith Levy, V.S. Naipaul: Displacement and Autobiography (New York: Garland, 1995), p. 120.

(3.) Jay Parini, "Delving Into the World of Dreams by Blending Fact and Fiction," Chronicle of Higher Education, February 27, 1998, pp. B4-B5.

(4.) Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 5.

(5.) Ruth R. Wisse, ed., A Shtetl and Other Yiddish Novellas (New York: Behrman House, 1973), p.x.

(6.) Fran??oise Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 174.

(7.) Adrienne Clarkson, "Preface," in Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly, eds., Lucy Maud Montgomery and Canadian Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 3.

(8.) Mario Vargas Llosa, "The Truth of Lies," quoted in Parini, p. B5.

(9.) Jean Bethke Elshtain, "Stories and Political Life," PS: Political Science & Politics 28, 2 (June 1995): 196-197.

(10.) Catherine Zuckert, "Why Political Scientists Want to Study Literature," PS: Political Science & Politics 28, 2 (June 1995): 189; "Why Political Scientists Study Fiction," Chronicle of Higher Education, March 8, 1996, p. A48.

(11.) John Horton and Andrea T. Baumeister, eds., Literature and the Political Imagination (London: Routledge, 1996). The quote is on the back cover of the collection.

(12.) Werner J. Dannhauser, "Poetry vs. Philosophy," PS: Political Science & Politics 28, 2 (June 1995): 190-191.

(13.) Paul A. Cantor, "Literature and Politics: Understanding the Regime," PS: Political Science and Politics 28, 2 (June 1995): 195.

(14.) Wilson Carey McWilliams, "Poetry, Politics, and the Comic Spirit, PS: Political Science & Politics 28, 2 (June 1995): 198-199.

(15.) Nadine Gordimer, Writing and Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 131. Emphasis in original.

(16.) Stall Persky, "A Stellar Introduction to Judith Shklar," Globe and Mail, Toronto, March 16, 1996, p. C7.

(17.) Zuckert, "Why Political Scientists Study Fiction."

(18.) Gordimer, pp. 20-21.

(19.) David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 69.

(20.) Among the works I have used are:

   for the Americas: Peter Abrahams, The View from Coyaba (Jamaica);
   Mariano Azuela, The Underdogs (Mexico); Madison Bell, All Souls'
   Rising (Haiti); Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban (Cuba); Harold
   Sonny Ladoo, Yesterdays (Trinidad); Shiva Naipaul, Love and Death
   in a Hot Country (Guyana); V.S. Naipaul, The Suffrage of Elvira
   (Trinidad); Grace Nichols, Whole of a Morning Sky (Guyana); Mario
   Vargas Llosa, The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (Peru); and Victor
   Villasenor, Rain of Gold (Mexico)

   for south and southeast Asia: Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance
   (India); Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy (Sri Lanka); Bapsi Sidhwa,
   Cracking India (India and Pakistan); and Pramoedya Ananta Toer,
   House of Glass (Indonesia)

   for Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union: Chingiz Aitmatov,
   The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years (Kazakhstan); Vassily
   Aksyonov, The Burn (Russia); Yuri Dombrovsky, The Faculty of
   Useless Knowledge (Russia); Peter Esterhazy, The Book of Hrabal
   (Hungary); Janice Kulyk Keefer, The Green Library (Ukraine);
   Pavel Kohout, I Am Snowing (Czech Republic); and Yevgeny
   Zamyatin, We (Russia)

   for the Middle East: Salwa Bakr, The Golden Chariot (Egypt); Amos
   Kenan, The Road to Ein Harod (Israel); Amos Oz, Don't Call it
   Night (Israel); Hanan al-Shaykh, Beirut Blues (Lebanon).

(21.) Zuckert, "Why Political Scientists Study Fiction."

Henry Srebrnik, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada

Henry is a professor of political studies. He teaches comparative politics, and researches the impact of ethnically-based political conflict in states around the world.