Anti-Climacus

Count me with Megan McArdle and against Alyssa Rosenberg on the subject of art and politics. Rosenberg's response to McArdle seems to be that literature about complicated moral and political questions can be useful in our attempt to understand those questions. That's certainly true.

I took McArdle's point to be slightly different, that the aesthetic purposes of literature do not correlate with the political purposes rhetoric, even if the two happen to coincide. This is why Rosenberg's list of books about the Holocaust is misleading: the problem is not Maus or Eichmann in Jerusalem, or At the Mind's Limits, or The Drowned and the Saved, Kaddish for a Child Not Born or whatever work of literature you might choose. The problem is that literary truth and actual truth can work against each other: look at the literature of the Spanish Civil War for an example of great works that lie about the actual political situation, or Latin American literature's famous and longstanding problem with writers who are too attached to fascism or communism.

I know about this problem from poetry, where I've written a little on how this appears in the work of W.H. Auden. He abandons the work that made him famous--"Spain 1937" and "September 1, 1939" do not appear in the ~900 page Collected Poems--because he found their most effective lines to be dishonest. One who is so inclined can trace his attempts to correct the problem in each of the poems and find that all attempts to salvage particular lines or stanzas are notably inferior to the original lines. But so it goes.

So the problem, in sum, is not that politics inherently and always corrupts literature, but that it does so sometimes, and if you are told a lie in beautiful language that flatters your already-existing beliefs, you are less likely to find it objectionable, or even notice something is wrong. Here, as everywhere else, caveat lector.