From the Themes Files: political novels

In his inaugural Substack post last month, Tim Powers recounted this story:

I was on a panel about vampire stories one time, and one of the panelists said, “Well you know, Dracula is actually about the plight of 19th century women.” And I said, “No, it’s actually about a guy who lives forever by drinking other people’s blood. Don’t take my word for it, check it out.”

“Dracula wasn’t a metaphor,” Powers continues. “He was a vampire.”

That’s been on my mind because, earlier this week, a Substack note by novelist Aaron Gwyn—whose novella The Cannibal Owl I read last week and loved—turned into yet another Substack tempest in a teapot. Gwyn’s claim:

The political novelist is a fiction writer in diminished form. The great novelist’s intentions, motivations, and biases are forever obscured behind a rhetorical mask. The great novelist doesn’t aspire to be a political actor, but a ventriloquist.

I would tend to agree. See this post from last year about “the novel of ideas,” in which the novelist as artist becomes subservient to his message.

Well, Gwyn’s note got a lot of Substack litterateurs huffing and puffing. When Gwyn supplied a list of novelists who didn’t “engage politically,” one scandalized response read “You can tell someone hasn’t read Proust when he’s included on a list of writers who didn’t ‘engage politically.’” This observation is only slightly marred by the fact that no one should read Proust.*

More to my point, consider these comments by others:

Blood Meridian is about the military conquest of the west, whats more political than that?

Gilead is about religion and war and race and how all the above affect a family and has characters openly discussing whether or not they support Eisenhower.

The core conceit of Moby-Dick is treating the disrespected working class with the same dignity as the nobility. . . . it’s explicitly an interrogation of American society and values.

Is it, though? Is that actually what any of these—novels in which ill-fated filibusters and scalphunters kill and are killed in the desert, in which an old man faces his mortality and yearns to leave something behind for his son, in which an obsessed sea captain dooms his entire crew—is “about”?

This topic sits squarely at the intersection of several of my driving interests and concerns, including two I’ve written about several times this year already: themes and specificity. Back in the spring I wrote about the overemphasis on “themes” in the study of literature, and this is what I mean. These particular examples, provoked by what I suspect is a bit of trolling on Gwyn’s part, are politically inflected and therefore even less tolerable than the usual.

Take Moby-Dick. Is that really “about” the working class and is it really “interrogating” anything? Or is it about one man’s obsession? To ask a question I asked back in the spring again with Moby-Dick in mind, would you rather read a novel about “treating the disrespected working class with the same dignity as the nobility” or a novel about a maimed captain so bent on revenge against one whale that he drives his entire crew to their deaths in a round-the-world hunt? Which one of those sounds more interesting as a novel?

Let me put it this way: Visit Barnes & Noble and look at the many different editions of Moby-Dick that they will have in stock. What’s on the cover? Socioeconomic interrogation? Or a white whale large enough to endanger a ship?

Perhaps Melville, to stick with this example, really is doing what Gwyn’s politically-minded commenters say he is—though his thematic interests strike me as much more theological than economic or political. I don’t know. But whether Moby-Dick is actually “about” anything political, it would fail if it were not first about the captain and the whale. Specificity.

This is what I think Gwyn meant in his original note. A respectable theme must emerge organically from what is purposefully, deliberately a novel, a work of art. Approaching the work with a programmatic message in mind simplifies or sells out the art. It is “diminished” and “obscured” behind the rhetorical pose required of the message. Politics is the Procrustean bed of any form of art. It imposes on stories a shape that requires distortion.

Perhaps the paradigmatic example is Ayn Rand. Read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged with an open mind and you can’t help but be struck by 1) the talent she had in imagining and constructing vast stories and 2) the way she contorted and butchered her own art in the service of her risible messaging.

Gwyn, puckishly pressing one critic for his definition of a “political novel,” was answered with: “Presenting a view of how society and culture is organized through power structures, war, socioeconomics.” Gwyn rightly replied that “If you define ‘politics’ in that way, you’ve constructed a definition that’s sufficiently broad enough to encompass everything. In other words, you’ve emptied the term of all meaning.”

That’s what theme talk, especially of a political variety, does. Its vagueness as much an enemy of good interpretation as the political is of honest art.

* What I have written, I have written.