Alta Ifland's Blog: Notes on Books - Posts Tagged "academia"
Politics & Literature: Aleksandar Hemon in The Writer’s Chronicle
In a very interesting interview conducted by Jeanie Chung in The Writer’s Chronicle (March/April 2011), Aleksandar Hemon talks about the role of imagination in literature, memoir—in particular the confessional memoir—versus fiction, and the relationship between politics and literature.
I wasn’t surprised at all to hear Hemon, a Bosnian-born American writer, declare that “politics should be kept out of literature.” Anyone who has grown up in a country where everything was political or politicized, and where the regime tried to infiltrate itself in every aspect of people’s lives, knows only too well how easily “politics” can become propaganda. That’s why I’ve always been surprised that so many American intellectuals—scholars, writers, and academics in particular—aren’t bothered by the presence of political jargon in works that claim to be literary, or that they read works of literature within the frame of whatever political ideology they happen to favor.
To be clear, Hemon doesn’t say that a writer shouldn’t be interested in politics; on the contrary. But he makes an essential distinction between the person who writes as a citizen, and as a writer. If politics is present in Hemon’s work it’s not as some kind of “political statement:” “I don’t think of it as politics. It’s just social context.”
If a writer wants to be literally involved in politics, then the writer acts as a citizen:
“If I am pissed as a citizen, I’m going to act as a citizen, not as a writer. If it’s about politics, I’ll submit it to a newspaper: I write about it on Monday, it comes out Tuesday, rather than write about it in a book that takes six years to come out. There’s politics in this book (The Lazarus Project), but not because I wanted to change the world by writing about it. The world has changed while it was getting printed.”
Indeed, Hemon writes a column for a paper in Sarajevo, and in the States he hasn’t shied away from expressing strong political opinions. But he does this in a public space that is different from the space itself of literature—i.e., interviews, articles, etc.
What I am trying to get at is that many academics are today under the impression that they “are doing” politics because they (safely) apply their “politics” to some white male who died four or five hundred ears ago. Some of them even believe that they are “changing the world.” When I taught in academia I was surrounded by people who “changed the world” by fighting some dead people in their comfortable armchairs. And what I found puzzling was that whenever a serious political event happened around us, none of these people felt compelled to speak publicly. Their “politics” was confined to the space of literature, which they usually read as an “interplay of ideological forces”—to use one their favorite expressions. But, curiously, the space where politics is supposed to take place, the public space we all inhabit in the present, was out of their “political” statements. It is, of course, a lot easier to call Shakespeare a white male chauvinist—it’s not like he’s going to answer back—than to speak publicly against the Iraq war at a time when no one dares to do so (and now that everybody is against this war, we have conveniently forgotten that at the very beginning of it very few dissident voices were heard).
When I was a student in France in the mid-nineties, for about three months the students and some of the teachers were on strike. The strike had been started by the students and many of the teachers joined them. The professors I took classes with didn’t stop teaching because they had many foreign students who were there for a short time, but every single one of them started his class with a personal statement about the political situation and presented his position in relation to the strike. They took questions from the students about the current events, and answered them candidly. After the discussion about the political situation of the country, we went back to our close reading of Hegel or Derrida or Diderot or Descartes or Stendhal. These professors were very leftists, yet they never imposed their ideologies on whatever we were reading. When we read literature every writer was read in his own context. Unlike the discussions in today’s American academia in which both instructors and students often feel obligated to “subvert” the “canon” by faulting the writers of the past because they don’t think like us—something they call “politics”—those discussions made a clear distinction between the sphere of the “political” and the sphere of literature. The professors I had then acted as citizens by speaking publicly about the political situation of the day, and not by projecting their ideology on some dead writer of the past.
I wasn’t surprised at all to hear Hemon, a Bosnian-born American writer, declare that “politics should be kept out of literature.” Anyone who has grown up in a country where everything was political or politicized, and where the regime tried to infiltrate itself in every aspect of people’s lives, knows only too well how easily “politics” can become propaganda. That’s why I’ve always been surprised that so many American intellectuals—scholars, writers, and academics in particular—aren’t bothered by the presence of political jargon in works that claim to be literary, or that they read works of literature within the frame of whatever political ideology they happen to favor.
To be clear, Hemon doesn’t say that a writer shouldn’t be interested in politics; on the contrary. But he makes an essential distinction between the person who writes as a citizen, and as a writer. If politics is present in Hemon’s work it’s not as some kind of “political statement:” “I don’t think of it as politics. It’s just social context.”
If a writer wants to be literally involved in politics, then the writer acts as a citizen:
“If I am pissed as a citizen, I’m going to act as a citizen, not as a writer. If it’s about politics, I’ll submit it to a newspaper: I write about it on Monday, it comes out Tuesday, rather than write about it in a book that takes six years to come out. There’s politics in this book (The Lazarus Project), but not because I wanted to change the world by writing about it. The world has changed while it was getting printed.”
Indeed, Hemon writes a column for a paper in Sarajevo, and in the States he hasn’t shied away from expressing strong political opinions. But he does this in a public space that is different from the space itself of literature—i.e., interviews, articles, etc.
What I am trying to get at is that many academics are today under the impression that they “are doing” politics because they (safely) apply their “politics” to some white male who died four or five hundred ears ago. Some of them even believe that they are “changing the world.” When I taught in academia I was surrounded by people who “changed the world” by fighting some dead people in their comfortable armchairs. And what I found puzzling was that whenever a serious political event happened around us, none of these people felt compelled to speak publicly. Their “politics” was confined to the space of literature, which they usually read as an “interplay of ideological forces”—to use one their favorite expressions. But, curiously, the space where politics is supposed to take place, the public space we all inhabit in the present, was out of their “political” statements. It is, of course, a lot easier to call Shakespeare a white male chauvinist—it’s not like he’s going to answer back—than to speak publicly against the Iraq war at a time when no one dares to do so (and now that everybody is against this war, we have conveniently forgotten that at the very beginning of it very few dissident voices were heard).
When I was a student in France in the mid-nineties, for about three months the students and some of the teachers were on strike. The strike had been started by the students and many of the teachers joined them. The professors I took classes with didn’t stop teaching because they had many foreign students who were there for a short time, but every single one of them started his class with a personal statement about the political situation and presented his position in relation to the strike. They took questions from the students about the current events, and answered them candidly. After the discussion about the political situation of the country, we went back to our close reading of Hegel or Derrida or Diderot or Descartes or Stendhal. These professors were very leftists, yet they never imposed their ideologies on whatever we were reading. When we read literature every writer was read in his own context. Unlike the discussions in today’s American academia in which both instructors and students often feel obligated to “subvert” the “canon” by faulting the writers of the past because they don’t think like us—something they call “politics”—those discussions made a clear distinction between the sphere of the “political” and the sphere of literature. The professors I had then acted as citizens by speaking publicly about the political situation of the day, and not by projecting their ideology on some dead writer of the past.
Notes on Books
Book reviews and occasional notes and thoughts on world literature and writers by an American writer of Eastern European origin.
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