What do we mean when we call a novel “urgent?” Presumably, we do not mean that the novel urges us to commit a certain act, or even to align with an ideology or support a particular cause. Even the most overtly political fiction that I’ve enjoyed — say, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed — never caused me to join an anarcho-syndicalist organization or start my own commune. I take it I’m not alone in this. In my experience reading “urgent” novels, I would estimate that the term indicates less the verb “to urge,” but rather “urgency” as an emotional condition, generally with an implied political valence. I would hazard that this is a modern update on the famous Aristotelian formula that tragedy is pity plus fear. (If I got that wrong, you can blame the notes I took in ninth-grade English.)
Let’s return to that political valence, though. Is catharsis useful to inspire progressive or even revolutionary action? Or, to come at it from the other direction, what sort of novel would be politically useful?
The proper relationship (or lack thereof) between politics and art is in question presently. Last year, Dean Kissick published a scathing criticism of a Barbican art show in Harper’s, arguing that while it “pretended to be politically radical — even revolutionary — it didn’t seem to stand for much beyond liberal orthodoxy and feel-good ambient diversity. It offered fantasies of resistance, but had little to offer in terms of genuine, substantive social change or artistic experimentation.” This sentiment, and the rest of the notorious essay (which sparked many thorny responses) obviously struck a nerve. While the polemic goes on to defend a rather conventional “art for art’s sake” position, it raised in my mind the more self-evident and basic problem that purportedly political art — which has tended toward concerns of identity and representation — hasn’t served political means.
I would like to offer an intervention that doesn’t fall in the Kissick trap of either demanding art without politics or defending the status quo. Even Becca Rothfeld’s measured criticism “On the Old Romantics,” which disabuses us of the desirability of apolitical art, proposes a relationship between art and politics that is opaque, contradictory, and ultimately a bit squishy. The question in my mind remains: as someone with leftist politics, an interest in art and literature, and a belief that the first informs and is informed by the second, how would I go about writing or assessing a political novel?
Let’s take two examples:
Book A concerns a relatively prosperous working-class family man in Thatcherite Ireland. When he discovers a social ill in his community, he makes the difficult and courageous choice to combat that ill, even at the potential expense of his family’s well-being.
Book B concerns a middle-class mother in contemporary Ireland. When faced with a social ill in her community, she seeks first to preserve her family from the threat it poses. After her husband acts instead in the community’s interest, the family suffers progressively devastating losses and humiliations.
These two novels are both lauded recent releases that deal with explicitly political topics. Of the two, which is the more revolutionary?
One of the more lucid texts on this topic is Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Author as Producer.” He writes about Brecht’s epic theater, which becomes revolutionary insofar as it “obliges the spectator to take a position toward the action.” In Brechtian theater, the viewer perceives the plot as “real situations, not, as with naturalist theatre, with self-satisfaction, but with astonishment.” Implicit in the second quote is the suspicion that a certain type of art only addresses political questions with a diffusing and ironic distance. Perhaps all that fear and pity are merely narcissistic ends in themselves. What a play (or novel or movie or work of visual art) is “about” is secondary to the stance the viewer adopts toward it. The important question is whether it acquires that sense of reality that Benjamin is after. He writes that Brechtian theater “aims less at filling the public with emotion, even if it is that of revolt, than at making it consider thoughtfully, from a distance and over a period of time, the situations in which it lives.”
Returning to Kissick’s criticism, the supposedly lukewarm exhibition (and many before it) inspired in him a sort of dullness and exhaustion. It is easy to blame this on the topics, the “about-ness” of the given works, but even if the works themselves were more stirring, would they have achieved their political goals? Rothfeld suggests that good art might be a preparatory aesthetic experience that comes before politics, but this lets us off the hook too easily. A good novel can change how the reader thinks. Why not expect it to? As the Conspiracist Manifesto puts it: “We don’t imagine that a book is all it takes to free oneself from impotence, but we also remember that a few good books found on our road saved us from many forms of servitude.”
Back to our examples. Book A has many bien pensant gestures toward progressiveness. It takes for its subject a man who makes his living delivering firewood to his community (a properly materialist job). From the outset, it frames the conflict in terms of the historical conditions of austerity, and the protagonist juxtaposes his own good fortune with a vast majority who suffer through the period. From the comparison, he derives his sense of social responsibility. Just about every other character, including his wife, compels him to keep his head down, to not stir the pot, but he acts nonetheless to save a girl who is being tortured at a state-sanctioned institution.
Nevertheless, it is Book B, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, which better fulfills Benjamin’s ideals of revolutionary art.
Book A is Claire Keegan’s preposterously titled Small Things Like These (notably nota blink-182 Song), and it is regarded, in blurbs, as sparse, powerful, deeply moving, etc., etc. But for its pretensions toward leftist politics, it betrays its ultimately bourgeois ambitions by angling toward the heartwarming, the brave, the idealistic. Protagonist Bill Furlong is a community man, a worker, a man with good politics and well-behaved children. An orphan, he was able to achieve his relative prosperity largely because of the kindness of the wealthy woman who adopted him when he was twelve. Even from his own less-than-secure economic position, he still acts heroically to rescue the downtrodden. This runs counter to Walter Benjamin’s ideal, though, which demands less a plot dictated by “heroic virtue and resolution, but . . . strictly ordinary habitual actions.” Revolutionary fiction is in fact dialectical — it is not the protagonist who changes the world through the might of his ambition, but rather the world that changes before the protagonist.
I can hear the objections already: “I don’t go to literature to learn about politics — I just want a good story!” Kissick basically says as much, asking for an art that “move[s] us; it should make us weep; it should bring us to our knees.” More pity! More fear! I, too, expect a book to be first and foremost aesthetically satisfying. This is why Paul Lynch’s work is so telling, for the ways in which it adopts a dialectical and revolutionary approach are precisely what make it good as a work of art. As is often the case, it is from friction and difficulty that the highest aesthetic experience arrives to us. Not mere goosebumps, but that feeling of being stopped, of having to put the book down and think, as if for the very first time.
Prophet Song follows Eilish Stack — a middle-class Irish woman, a wife, and a mother of four — as a totalitarian state seizes control and Irish society spirals into chaos. The foregrounded question of the novel is “would you know when to get out?” A secondary question is, “‘Would you be able to?”’
At first glance, such a topic smacks of conservatism. There is the bourgeois setting, the emphasis on family preservation over social justice, and the rote admonishment to its characters that “‘you should have gotten out when you could.”’ The question of exit is the quieter, less noble cousin of questions of reform, rebellion, or revolt. Even within the novel, there are characters who engage in revolutionary struggles (Eilish’s husband and sons), but these struggles take place outside the narrative. The world we encounter is suburban — kitchens and grocery stores and office parks. Would a more revolutionary novel focus on Mark’s (Eilish’s eldest son) experience in the rebel army?
I imagine that, no, it wouldn’t, because that would be a less sophisticated work. It is precisely Eilish’s conservatism, her overriding concern for her family, that endows the novel with its tension, its complexity, and its political power. Early in the book, Eilish’s husband, Larry, prepares to leave home to attend a major labor action (he is a teacher and a trade unionist). With whispers of government repression, Eilish is rightly concerned and urges him to stay home. It is in these moments that the novel finds its core elegance: Eilish, perceiving the historical forces of which Larry is a part, and despite her intuition, tells him to go. She credits this reversal to a “‘trickster magpie,”’ swapping the interest of the family with what’s socially necessary and in fact inescapable. It is a moment that’s repeated in the novel, when the actions of the characters take a double vision —- the agent of the individual, and the agent of history.
It’s a tricky balancing act, but Lynch bakes it into the very texture of the book. From the very first page, the prose hums in a present-progressive close third person that suggests a reality that is occurring, or has just occurred. “Time was already on the march. Time had already marched past her,” Lynch writes. Sentences lack explicit subjects. Dialogue is folded in without attribution or quotation marks. As is the case in the best literature, the structure at the smallest level reflects the highest- order truths of the work, and these features become thematically essential. The present tense is blurred into dreams and memories. It is a sense of history both generational, as when Eilish sees Larry’s face in her children, sees herself as her mother, the sites of past joys identical to the sites of future griefs, and epochal, as when she perceives the events of the novel as the most ancient form of human drama, one that’s told in her very genes.
The novel properly problematizes the political aspect. The important protests are the ones most difficult to attend. It is not even clear if attending them is the correct thing to do in the context of the novel — Larry gets imprisoned and presumably murdered by the secret police. The agents of the state are menacing at times and strikingly prosaic at others. Even as Eilish feels the “‘stare of the state,”’ it is always coming from a human being who does or doesn’t look the part, who has their own dual identity as representative and individual. The weakest moments of the novel are when this complexity thins, as when cartoonish thugs vandalize the Stack family car.
Most effectively, the time-confusion is made literal in the character of Simon, Eilish’s father who is slowly succumbing to dementia. He frequently confuses Eilish with his long-dead wife, his disease leaving the present ajar to both the recent and distant past. “They are going to vote them in,” he tells Eilish when those in question (the National Party) have already used their elected power to imprison her husband. One of the main reasons she refuses to leave Ireland is that uprooting her father would condemn him to a sort of non-existence, untethered from his own private history. Simon’s time-addled position allows him to speak directly to the reader, putting into question our own timeline and our own historical role.
Why is it this book, and not Keegan’s, that I call progressive? It is Bill Furlong, Keegan’s working man, who bravely rejects his wife’s cowardice, rescuing a young girl from a Magdalene Laundry even though his own daughters might suffer as a result. It is precisely an aesthetic question — Keegan’s treatment of the problem is too simple. Furlong’s wife, Eileen, is right to think of the implications for their family. Bill seems utterly naive in his decision making, and the novel even ends with the “‘foolish”’ belief that his family somehow “‘would manage.”’ The happy ending cheapens the rich history the work deals with: the immiseration wrought by austerity and the lingering horrors of a Catholic conservative society. Furlong carries the fallen girl, almost Christlike in the final scene, and earns the glory of the hero. But it’s a hollow victory, and the emotion doesn’t linger.
One of the most insightful analyses of the tension between art and politics comes from Leon Trotsky’s book Literature and Revolution, a critique and survey of the major Russian authors at the beginning of the 20th century. Trotsky stakes out an “‘art for art’s sake”’ position while simultaneously maintaining that the best art is necessarily revolutionary. In between sharp and often devastating invective, he holds up several examples of how literature might take on the difficult task of politics while remaining artistic, not becoming mere propaganda. Of the works he praises, perhaps the most striking is Alexander Blok’s The Twelve. A bruising epic of a poem, it begins with a scene of prostitutes on strike and a woeful old woman worried over the waste of cloth on the political banners. In the second stanza, we meet twelve Red soldiers, marching into town and dealing out mob justice in a fashion equally brutal and stupid. And yet by the end of the poem, the soldiers march out of town in the direction of Christ himself: they are in fact his apostles.
It’s a poem equally beautiful and confounding, built to move you and trouble you and make you stop. I’ve seen it said that literature is an empathy-machine. I’d rather the framing that it is a thinking-machine. In fiction in particular, the reader experiences not exactly empathy, which implies a certain distance, but the immediacy of thinking: the novel hijacks our own internal monologue with that of another person or people. Whether or not a book is political or aims to be, the question of its success hinges on the execution of that thinking:, whether it can reach out and touch our own interiority, change the way we see the world.
Consider Vladimir Nabokov’s best novel, Pale Fire. This is an ur-dialectical work of modern literature, a 1,000- line poem followed by over 200 pages of commentary. Before the reader even perceives the bigger structure, they are enchanted by the poem, which they have no reason to question. It is through the commentary, which contradicts and discredits the poem, that the reader awakens to thought. They must adjudicate fact from fiction, beauty from falsity, John Shade from Charles Kinbote. In the final analysis, the reader becomes a true participant in the book, and their own act of interpretation is necessary to finish the artistic project Nabokov embarked on. Pale Fire might not be an explicitly political work, but it models the fashion by which a book can become meaningfully political.
Dialectical literature offers that friction that is necessary for thinking. It becomes revolutionary when it imparts its characters with the complexity that is their due —- as individuals, as members of communities, as participants in history. It affects the reader not through swells of cheap emotion, but through paradox and struggle. There is perhaps a reason that Keegan’s novel boasts the Oprah’s Book Club sticker and a Netflix adaptation. Lynch’s text is more difficult, more infuriating, less fair. That’s why I love it more.
Trotsky, outdoing even Kissick, writes, “Our life, cruel, violent, and disturbed to its very bottom, says: ‘I must have an artist of a single love. Whatever way you take hold of me, whatever tools and instruments created by the development of art you choose, I leave to you, to your temperament and your genius. But you must understand me as I will become, and there must be no one else besides me.’” To make art revolutionary is not to deform it, but to embrace it more fully. To write or paint or sculpt from the site of greatest tension, with the most fully developed sensitivity and devotion, is to steer past mere amusement and toward transformation. If you are reading this, perhaps you’ve been changed by literature. I have. Why deny, then, that it is possible?
Robbie Herbst is a violinist and writer based in Chicago.