Callum Tilley . . ‘All good art is political!’ Toni Morrison, arguably one of America’s most eminent writers, was emphatic about the political nature of art.
In an interview with Poets & Writers , she reinforced the idea that art is, through its innate connection to the world in which it is created, inherently political. Morrison continued, ‘All of that art-for-art’s-sake stuff is BS [..
.] the [artists] that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.” An attempt to be apolitical is therefore, in itself, a political choice.
Not to tenuously tie Morrison to popular culture – although as a commentator on American politics and society, perhaps she would have appreciated the comparison – but this recalls Kamala Harris’ now-infamous line, ‘You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you’. Art is inextricable from its context, which is itself political. As such, all art is political.
This contextualism also applies to literature. Widely circulated and debated, novels perhaps represent the most commonly-circulated ‘pieces’ of art in the modern age. We buy them, borrow them, lend them, shelve them, and consume the words and stories contained within them.
We can ask the same questions of novels and literature relating to their political natures as we do of other art forms; are novels, as products of their contexts, political? Should they be? Or is it reductive to view art merely as an expression of politics? It is important to be clear that ‘politics’ does not refer purely to party politics, politicians, or political events – it also includes interpersonal power dynamics that stem from contemporary socio-political context. Sexism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of prejudice are themselves political, and external forces such as these shape the artist and therefore shape their work. The argument that we should ‘separate the art and the artist’ is often used to defend pieces, or artists, with problematic ties.
Within the philosophy of art, formalism – also known as aestheticism – contends that the value of an artwork (and its content) is formed entirely by its internal properties and the aesthetic experience that they might generate. External context does not matter, and it should not affect our experience of the artwork. However, the context of the art and the artist is both relevant and intrinsic to the work itself .
Pablo Picasso painted women that he sexually abused, and once told a lover that, ‘For me there are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats’. His granddaughter, Marina Picasso, recalled of his lovers that He submitted them to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence [.
..] he would dispose of them.
His undeniable misogyny influenced his work and in turn, his abuse influenced his depiction of these women. His works depicting women as objects, such as furniture and musical instruments, are products of his sexist understanding of women. Our knowledge of Picasso may influence our reaction, but on a base level his sexism arguably influenced his depiction of women as furniture; he never depicted men as objects.
The power dynamic in Picasso’s art therefore influenced both its production and our received aesthetic experience of it, showing how formalist ideas of absolute art do not explain the influence of politics external to the piece itself. As literature is an art form, this same idea – that political context affects aesthetic experience – can therefore be applied to novels. Anything written by somebody who has absorbed contextual ideas, events, and opinions, is influenced by that context.
While philosophers of art might argue that it should be appreciated in absolute terms, as art qua art (or in this case, literature qua literature), it is clear that, at a minimum, artists are influenced by the events surrounding them. This means that all novels – even those that prima facie appear apolitical – are imbued with their context. As Morrison argues, an apolitical stance can be read as an acceptance of the status quo , which in itself is a political choice.
The tension between politics and things people want to separate from it is old, divisive, and extends far beyond artistic media. While not related to literature, Hannah Arendt’s socio-political theory is illustrative of this false dichotomy between politics and apoliticality. In The Human Condition , Arendt distinguished between political and social spaces, arguing that the ‘politicisation’ of social spaces erodes their sanctity.
Her opinion on this was so strong that, in ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, she opposed the forcible desegregation of schools in Southern U.S. states because she saw it as a violation of their apolitical nature.
She believed, in the words of Samantha Rose Hill, that ‘political change must come through persuasion, not force’, favouring instead organic desegregation through public education about racial issues. This, of course, is a false choice; centralised policy was needed to overcome the legacy of Jim Crow and begin the march towards educational equity and equality. Failure to recognise this was undoubtedly a product of both Arendt’s unfamiliarity with the U.
S. political context and her understanding of the social versus the political being shaped by her experiences of Nazi Germany. To her, the Nazis violated supposedly apolitical spaces such as schools, libraries, shops, and other social spaces to promote their ideology.
Her opinion on this was not flexible when applying her idea to very different situation because she thought that schools – and African-American children – were being used as political tools, an assertion for which she remains controversial. However, in being segregated, schools were already politicised; for her, Arendt’s defence of their ‘social’ nature was actually in itself – as Morrison argues – an unwitting political choice to defend the status quo . While trying to avoid politics, Arendt stumbled into it.
The same can be said of those who reject the political nature of literature; politics pervades literature, even if some do not want it to. Some novels that do not appear to be political are infused with themes that render them so. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History , while on the surface a detective thriller in reverse and is currently known by a new generation of readers for inspiring the ‘Dark Academia’ trend, can be read as a discussion of class, socio-economic status, and belonging in elite colleges in the United States.
In the novel, Richard Papen longs to be accepted by his newfound wealthy friends and ends up shedding aspects of his own identity in order to endear himself and fit in. The visceral discomfort in social settings where he feels isolated is familiar to anyone who has experienced that type of exclusion, and this latent class dynamic renders the book – deliberately or not – a political commentary on American society. On the surface, Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait is far from a political novel, but stands as another example of a novel which shows how those narratives seemingly unrelated to politics are, in fact, political.
O’Farrell shows how women were devalued in Renaissance Florence with minimal autonomy, while also exploring social privilege through the fictionalised eyes of Lucrezia de’ Medici. By narrating the novel through Lucrezia’s eyes, O’Farrell recentres women in the narrative, elevating her voice in a way that non-fiction cannot. Many novels are more overtly political, deliberately setting narratives against socio-political contexts to explore social issues.
Zadie Smith’s novels can be seen as a commentary on race, society, and inter-generational conflicts and attitudes to social issues. Smith herself denies being a political writer; in an interview with This Cultural Life , she said that, ‘ I am not a political thinker, at all. That is not my set of talents.
I know that everyone on Earth thinks that they are a political thinker right now, I am the one person that doesn’t, I am not qualified. That’s not really what I’m interested in’. This is not to say that Smith is wrong about her own work – that would be ludicrous.
The contention is, however, that while her work might not be intended to be political, it can be read as such. It could also be reflective of an artistic tendency to favour the ‘social’ over the ‘political’, which itself can be a false choice. Taking a look at White Teeth shows that socio-politics influences her literature.
One protagonist, Irie’s identity as a mixed-race Briton in the 1980s allows Smith to depict the conflicting tensions of race and identity in British society. Through Samad Iqbal, Smith shows the pain of assimilation and devaluation of non-white success in Britain. When working as a waiter in his family’s restaurant, Samad ‘want[ed] desperately to be wearing a sign, a large white placard that said: I am not a waiter.
I have been a student, a scientist, a soldier’ . In Bangladesh, Samad was a university student and scientist, comfortably middle-class. Having immigrated to London, he is a waiter, working at his cousin’s restaurant, feeling invisible yet longing to prove to others that he is more than what British society has pigeonholed him to be.
Smith’s deeply personal characterisation of Samad as a disconsolate individual, sad at his perceived failure, illuminates the systemic prejudices that devalue his success based on his identity and ethnicity. While this political analysis of literature may be modern, the tendency to write politically certainly is not. Jane Austen dedicated her life to writing about the everyday lives, social interactions, and contexts women experienced, in a time when women could not vote and could rarely own property independently.
She shows us that, in an age when women theoretically had no agency, women could and did act independently in whatever ways they could. Whether it was Anne Elliot rejecting Frederick Wentworth under pressure to find a more ‘suitable’ (i.e.
wealthier) match – a commentary on women’s financial precarity and patriarchal dependence– or Elizabeth Bennet initially rejecting Mr Darcy’s marriage proposal because of his past conduct with regards to her sister as a show of female agency, Austen is being political. She is both illuminating the lives of women in Regency society – itself a political point – and exposing the socio-economic and gender dynamics that shape their existences, concurrently advocating for female agency in the process . Anne Elliot should have accepted Wentworth initially; if she was free to do so, she would have.
The argument that literature is inherently political does invite critiques. If self-proclaiming as apolitical is an advocation for the status quo , which is cast in a negative light, then surely the claim that good literature is political is inherently progressive? Judith Fetterley recognised that literature is political, yet her feminist stance supports the idea that this analysis lends itself to progressive tendencies. Indeed, Lydia Blanchard noted that ‘insistence on the political nature of both literature and the criticism of literature also informs the work of most other feminists currently writing about the novel’, further cementing the idea that progressive scholars see – or ‘insist’ – that literature is political.
This rings true for writers focusing on other social issues; Morrison used her work to analyse race and racism in the U.S. to influence political discourse surrounding these issues.
Could it be that seeing literature as political is inherently progressive, opening up the argument to conservative critiques? However, non-progressive critics have also seen literature as political. Republicans in the U.S.
seek to ban books from school libraries not for their literary standards, but because they are perceived to be political. This clearly speaks of a conservative recognition that literature can be, and is, political. However, in this instance, they seek to undermine the fundamental freedoms that the U.
S. so often claims to champion in order to restrict the representation of ideas with which they do not agree . As such, their recognition of the political nature of literature defeats the critique that this argument is inherently progressive, and also shows that the act of criticising literature is also a political act.
To ignore this by claiming literature as art is, or should be, apolitical, is to be ignorant of it. Failure to recognise the political nature or potential of literature creates a power imbalance within the debate; if conservatives seek to weaponise the politics of literature, progressive demurring creates an uneven plane of argument where one side is constantly on the defence. This is not a question of whether literature is political, but rather which politics can be represented in the classroom.
Asking whether literature should be political first requires accepting that it is – wittingly or unwittingly – imbued with political characteristics. Having established that it is, the debate about whether novels should be political is therefore a separate one . Arguably, setting a novel within a political context could lead to the exploitation of sensitive issues for narrative gain, and authors using political contexts to bolster their narratives have to be sensitive to this.
However, this criticism is perhaps nullified by the fact that the most successful novels that set personal narratives against political contexts are done so by authors with personal connections and experiences that turn their novels into explorations of issues that matter deeply and personally to them. This negates accusations of exploiting or using potentially sensitive situations for the purposes of writing a story, often rendering political novels exploratory socio-political works. Prime examples include the aforementioned Morrison, who explores the effects of race and racism on American society through deeply personal stories.
Her first novella, The Bluest Eye , explores white-centric beauty standards and their consequences on the individual through the story of Pecola Breedlove’s desperate wish for blue eyes, which she has equated with the apex of beauty. While not explicitly stating a political purpose, it would be untenable to argue that The Bluest Eye is not political. Morrison is making a point about whiteness and the devaluation of African-American beauty.
It is both a heartbreaking personal story and is more effective at making the political point by using this individual story to illustrate it. Two examples of novels that set deeply personal narratives against tense political contexts are Swimming in the Dark by Tomaz Jedrowski, and At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O’Neill. Swimming in the Dark is the love story of Ludwik and Janusz in Poland during the 1980s, at a time when homosexuality was not only socially unacceptable but used by the Communist state to blackmail individuals into compliance.
The intense political context of the narrative not only shapes the narrative by giving it a tension that would otherwise be absent, but it also sheds light on homosexuality in Communist Poland, and highlights political resistance through the ‘Solidarity’ labour and protest movement. It explores this political context through their personal story within an incredibly engaging novel, drawing attention to these issues in modern audiences. This dual purpose – literary success and political exfoliation – is partly what makes this book so effective.
At Swim, Two Boys explores similar themes of sexuality set against political history. O’Neill’s novel is, like Jedrowski’s, an intensely personal love story between two young men as they navigate a world in which being gay is not just socially unacceptable but illegal, punishable by hard labour sentences. At Swim also uses the political context of the Easter Rising to add tension to the narrative , yet it also acts as an engaging analysis of Irish republican and nationalist politics in an environment that was divided about British imperial rule.
Indeed, for anyone who has read the novel, the Rising plays a significant role in the love story, which itself would not be as engaging if not for the context in which it is set. Evidently, good books embrace their political nature. This is not only an argument that novels inevitably are political, but an assertion that the best novels embrace this.
All art is political, and the best art utilises it. Political art imbues a novel with tension and increases the stakes of the narrative, engaging readers with plot tension. Perhaps more interestingly, it facilitates a deeper understanding of the political context in which the narrative is set.
Entwining deeply personal stories into a tense political context allows for the exploration of the effects of this context at an individual level that, while fictionalised, is also infused with reality. Seeing literature as political can be seen as reductive , but the counter is that ignoring a piece’s full context, including its political nature, is both a disservice to the piece and in itself reductive. On an artistic level, how can you fully appreciate something, be it a painting or – in this case – a novel, without recognising its full context.
Without doing so, it is impossible to fully appreciate the ontology of literature. On a political level, claiming apoliticality merely renders the debate uneven; recognising literature as political allows authors to harness it. But beyond this, good books – novels that engage your interest and create narratives that evoke emotive responses – often blend the most personal of stories with tense socio-political context.
It is not reductive to recognise this, but the reverse. All art is political, and the best novels embrace that. .
. Callum Tilley is a History finalist at Durham University specialising in modern European and political history, intellectual history, and the history of political thought. He also has special interests in politics, and the intersection between politics, philosophy, and artistic media.
Callum’s essays and articles have been published in Palatinate (of which he is a Comment Editor), Wayzgoose Magazine , and Kleio Historical Journal . Outside of writing, he is a classical musician and enjoys playing in his college string quartet, and rows competitively for University College, Durham. To discover more content exclusive to our print and digital editions, subscribe here to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.
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