Literature beyond the Political...

 There is a tendency to read literature as a means to an end beyond literature. The story contains a moral that must be translated into a change of attitude - but more specifically the story is a means to knowledge of a political kind and a knowledge that takes issue with the past, with tradition itself as deeply problematic. Seen through an ideological lens - the story becomes an unintentional confession of the author's hidden biases. The narrative itself is a hopelessly skewed rendering - fraught with underlying rationales or glaring oversights regarding a particular social order... [The author accepts in passing or else summarily fails to condemn such desiderata as:  militarism, imperialism, colonialism,  ruling elites, racism, male dominance, bourgeois triumphalism, jingoism, economic exploitation, class divisions, misogyny, marital inequities, homelessness, hunger, illiteracy. Or else - by the framing of the story-line the privileged main characters, their needs, their prerogatives, their aspirations come to drown out the "extras" and "also-rans" on the margins.] Despite the author's best intentions,  the narrative unwittingly prioritizes some characters and their well-being over that of other characters. Despite the author's best intentions, one group's interests are advanced at the expense of other groups.  The reader - out of a sense of both moral and political rectitude is obliged to notice these legacies of injustice and oppression, and to identify the hierarchies of power which dominate the undervalued, overlooked outliers in the narrative...The proper response is for the reader to take note of these inequities - and to develop a proper understanding of the author's limitations - in view of the both the wider historical context and the individual's writer's subjective outlook - i.e. prejudices. In response to these embedded "complacencies" and "acceptances" within the story - as part of our engagement with such material, the reader must fill in the missing sources of enlightenment - and thereby learn the lessons that have been left unarticulated. (It is not hard to imagine a simple process by which the minor characters and their muted or unspoken points-of-view are elevated in contrast with the overly-attended-to, so-called "sympathetic" or "principal" characters.) One can even imagine a checklist of various social issues and problems - all of which the author has proven insufficiently aware of - which the appropriate political understanding could serve to ameliorate...presumably by turning the "oppressive world" on its end and reversing the dynamic of power. This is one view of literature - an undertaking meant to spur us to raised-consciousness and political activism.  A revolutionary ethos, as applied to literature, however, tends to ignore the actual historical moments when such purported "overhauls of the existing order" have been attempted - usually to the detriment of all concerned, except for the self-appointed vanguards of the oppressed - who in effect, succeeded only in filling the void left by the previous "ruling elite." In other words, the criticism of the "embedded hierarchies" assumes too dogmatically that the "classless society" is a real possibility - and that hierarchies are in no way a necessary constituent part of politics...

Another view - entirely separate from this literature-reduced-to-politics approach would be that the story is meant to take us into a realm of uncertainty, uncanniness and confusion - a place of partial familiarity which is at the same time oddly unfamiliar - and which includes, unconscious, irrational, counter-intuitive, chaotic, destructive, somatic, emotive-instinctual elements - and which evokes from us as much fear and trepidation as at other times, wonder and awe, at the reality that cannot be entirely "fixed" or "solved" or even fully described. Whereas each writer no doubt has their set of prejudices and historical blinders - the story itself - if genuine and profound at least to some degree - succeeds in depicting a level of complexity - for which no political "set of solutions" can suffice to simplify. Granted - the reader will have numerous reactions - positive and negative - moral and political -  to various aspects of the narrative, (including anger, outrage, perplexity, distain)  but the overall reaction will be one of curiosity  or overwhelming openness to the sheer magnitude of a world. The wisdom of the story concerns both the injustice itself in all of its manifold appearances as well as the strategies available to react to that injustice - none of which are fully adequate. There is a difference between literature as a vehicle for inducing "ideological correctness" and literature as a vehicle for the cultivation of moral sensibilities - which incline people to act empathetically, if not in overt political ways. The first goes forth in search of activism; the second understands the limits to the options that are available to us, but also the need to ethically "push ahead" - to avoid complacency and stagnation.  The appreciation of art is a check upon the pretensions of politics... Art is a field that transcends these machinations of power - by showing us a "givenness" that must be inhabited - and therefore cannot be entirely overcome.