Influence Of Literature On Politics.docx

INFLUENCE OF LITERATURE ON POLITICS

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CHAPTER I

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION “Literature is necessary to politics above all when it gives a voice to the one who doesn’t have a voice, when it gives a name to the one who doesn’t have a name, and especially to all that political language excludes or tends to exclude…Literature is like an ear that can hear more than Politics; Literature is like an eye that can perceive beyond the chromatic scale to which Politics is sensitive.” – Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature. Long before human civilization started in this world, stories are found among the constellations, beneath the depths of the oceans, and within the woodland realm. Long before language was invented, stories were told and engraved upon stone tablets and wall carvings. Long before humans began to know how to read and write with the words that our ancestors created, literature already existed. Literature is the foundation of humanity’s cultures, beliefs, and traditions. It serves as a reflection of reality, a product of art, and a window to an ideology. Everything that happens within a society can be written, recorded in, and learned from a piece of literature. Whether it be poetry or prose, literature provides insight, knowledge or wisdom, and emotion towards the person who partakes it entirely. Life is manifested in the form of literature. Without literature, life ceases to exist. It is an embodiment of words based on human tragedies, desires, and feelings. It cultivates wonders, inspires a generation, and feeds information. Even though it is dynamic, endless, and multidimensional, literature contributes significant purposes to the world we live in. Literature is present during the era of the ancient world. Even without the invention of words and language, literature was already manifested in the earliest human civilizations.

3 Literature is also a tool for the foundation of a religion. The Holy Bible, one of the oldest written scriptures, is a compilation of tales, beliefs, and accounts that teach about Christianity and about Judaism. Within a span of more than a thousand years from the Prophet Moses to the Apostle Paul, the Bible was written by numerous authors believed to be inspired by God’s divine wisdom and tries to explain about the mysteries of life as well as setting rules for one’s personal faith. The same goes with the Qu’ran for Muslims, Torah for the Jews, and the Bhagavad-Gita, Ramayana and Veda for the Hindus. Literature explains human values. The works of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle (the most famous Greek philosophers) contain virtues that promote perfection to a society if only human beings have the willingness to uphold and practice them. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave speaks about the importance of human wisdom and the penalties that one would face to achieve a higher level of understanding. Through these philosophers’ contributions to literature, not only did they craft an artistic convergence of words, but exposed logic and ideas as well. Literature is an instrument of revolution. Political turmoil, societal injustice, and genocidal conquest can all be ended and resolved in the form of literature. A writer can be a warrior with his words as his weapon. He can be a revolutionist by writing a literary piece that exploits corruption in his nation yet fosters development for his fellow countrymen. Not all revolutions have to be fought in blood. Literature in the present generation still exists as an expression of art, a source of knowledge, and an instrument of entertainment. Books are being read seriously by readers who crave for information and recreationally by those who are passionate in exploring their imagination. Literature gives voice to the people who want to express their opinions about certain things in life – whether it be in politics, health, religion, and the like.

4 The 20th century opened with great hope but also with some apprehension, for the new century marked the final approach to a new millennium. For many, humankind was entering upon an unprecedented era. H.G. Wells’s utopian studies, the aptly titled Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901) and A Modern Utopia (1905), both captured and qualified this optimistic mood and gave expression to a common conviction that science and technology would transform the world in the century ahead. To achieve such transformation, outmoded institutions and ideals had to be replaced by ones more suited to the growth and liberation of the human spirit. The death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and the accession of Edward VII seemed to confirm that a franker, less inhibited era had begun. Many writers of the Edwardian period, drawing widely upon the realistic and naturalistic conventions of the 19th century and in tune with the anti-Aestheticism unleashed by the trial of the archetypal Aesthete, Oscar Wilde, saw their task in the new century to be an unashamedly didactic one. In a series of wittily iconoclastic plays, of which Man and Superman (performed 1905, published 1903) and Major Barbara (performed 1905, published 1907) are the most substantial, George Bernard Shaw turned the Edwardian theatre into an arena for debate upon the principal concerns of the day: the question of political organization, the morality of armaments and war, the function of class and of the professions, the validity of the family and of marriage, and the issue of female emancipation. Nor was he alone in this, even if he was alone in the brilliance of his comedy. John Galsworthy made use of the theatre in Strife (1909) to explore the conflict between capital and labour, and in Justice (1910) he lent his support to reform of the penal system, while Harley Granville-Barker, whose revolutionary approach to stage direction did much to change theatrical production in the period, dissected in The Voysey Inheritance and Waste (performed 1907, published 1909) the hypocrisies and deceit of upper-class and professional life.

5 Many Edwardian novelists were similarly eager to explore the shortcomings of English social life. Wells—in Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900); Kipps (1905); Ann Veronica (1909), his prosuffragist novel; and The History of Mr. Polly (1910)—captured the frustrations of lowerand middle-class existence, even though he relieved his accounts with many comic touches. In Anna of the Five Towns (1902), Arnold Bennett detailed the constrictions of provincial life among the self-made business classes in the area of England known as the Potteries; in The Man of Property (1906), the first volume of The Forsyte Saga, Galsworthy described the destructive possessiveness of the professional bourgeoisie; and, in Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and The Longest Journey (1907), E.M. Forster portrayed with irony the insensitivity, self-repression, and philistinism of the English middle classes. These novelists, however, wrote more memorably when they allowed themselves a larger perspective. In The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), Bennett showed the destructive effects of time on the lives of individuals and communities and evoked a quality of pathos that he never matched in his other literature; in Tono-Bungay (1909), Wells showed the ominous consequences of the uncontrolled developments taking place within a British society still dependent upon the institutions of a long-defunct landed aristocracy; and in Howards End (1910), Forster showed how little the rootless and self-important world of contemporary commerce cared for the more rooted world of culture, although he acknowledged that commerce was a necessary evil. Nevertheless, even as they perceived the difficulties of the present, most Edwardian novelists, like their counterparts in the theatre, held firmly to the belief not only that constructive change was possible but also that this change could in some measure be advanced by their writing. Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling, who had established their reputations during the previous century, and Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, and Edward Thomas, who established their reputations in the first decade of the new century, were less confident about the future and sought to revive the traditional forms.

6 The revival of traditional forms in the late 19th and early 20th century was not a unique event. There were many such revivals during the 20th century, and the traditional poetry of A.E. Housman (whose book A Shropshire Lad, originally published in 1896, enjoyed huge popular success during World War I), Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, Robert Graves, and Edmund Blunden represents an important and often neglected strand of English literature in the first half of the century. The most significant writing of the period, traditionalist or modern, was inspired by neither hope nor apprehension but by bleaker feelings that the new century would witness the collapse of a whole civilization. The new century had begun with Great Britain involved in the South African War (the Boer War; 1899–1902), and it seemed to some that the British Empire was as doomed to destruction, both from within and from without, as had been the Roman Empire. In his poems on the South African War, Hardy (whose achievement as a poet in the 20th century rivaled his achievement as a novelist in the 19th) questioned simply and sardonically the human cost of empire building and established a tone and style that many British poets were to use in the course of the century, while Kipling, who had done much to engender pride in empire, began to speak in his verse and short stories of the burden of empire and the tribulations it would bring. No one captured the sense of an imperial civilization in decline more fully or subtly than the expatriate American novelist Henry James. In The Portrait of a Lady (1881), he had briefly anatomized the fatal loss of energy of the English ruling class and, in The Princess Casamassima (1886), had described more directly the various instabilities that threatened its paternalistic rule. He did so with regret: the patrician American admired in the English upper class its sense of moral obligation to the community. By the turn of the century, however, he had noted a disturbing change.

7 In The Spoils of Poynton (1897) and What Maisie Knew (1897), members of the upper class no longer seem troubled by the means adopted to achieve their morally dubious ends. Great Britain had become indistinguishable from the other nations of the Old World, in which an ugly rapacity had never been far from the surface. James’s dismay at this condition gave to his subtle and compressed late literature, The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904), much of its gravity and air of disenchantment. James’s awareness of crisis affected the very form and style of his writing, for he was no longer assured that the world about which he wrote was either coherent in itself or unambiguously intelligible to its inhabitants. His literature still presented characters within an identifiable social world, but he found his characters and their world increasingly elusive and enigmatic and his own grasp upon them, as he made clear in The Sacred Fount (1901), the questionable consequence of artistic will. Another expatriate novelist, Joseph Conrad (pseudonym of Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, born in the Ukraine of Polish parents), shared James’s sense of crisis but attributed it less to the decline of a specific civilization than to human failings. Man was a solitary, romantic creature of will who at any cost imposed his meaning upon the world because he could not endure a world that did not reflect his central place within it. In Almayer’s Folly (1895) and Lord Jim (1900), he had seemed to sympathize with this predicament; but in Heart of Darkness (1902), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911), he detailed such imposition, and the psychological pathologies he increasingly associated with it, without sympathy. He did so as a philosophical novelist whose concern with the mocking limits of human knowledge affected not only the content of his literature but also its very structure.

8 Literature as such displays a two-fold politics, a twofold manner of reconfiguring sensitive data. On the one hand, it displays the power of literariness, the power of the "mute" letter that upsets not only the hierarchies of the representational system but also any principle of adequation between a way of being and a way of speaking. On the other hand, it sets in motion another politics of the mute letter: the side-politics or metapolitics that substitutes the deciphering of the mute meaning written on the body of things for the democratic chattering of the letter. The duplicity of the "mute letter" has two consequences. The first consequence regards the so-called "political" or "scientific" explanation of literature. Sartre's flawed argument about Flaubert is not a personal and casual mistake. More deeply, it bears witness to the strange status of critical discourse about literature. For at least 150 years, daring critics have purported to disclose the political import of literature, to spell out its unconscious discourse, to make it confess what it was hiding and reveal how its fictions or patterns of writing unwittingly ciphered the laws of the social structure, the market of symbolic goods and the structure of the literary field. But all those attempts to tell the truth about literature in Marxian or Freudian key, in Benjaminian or Bourdieusian key, raise the same problem that we have already encountered. The patterns of their critical explanation of "what literature says" relied on the same system of meaning that underpinned the practice of literature itself. Not surprisingly, they very often came upon the same problem as Sartre. In the same way, they endorsed as new critical insights on literature the "social" and "political" interpretations of nineteenth-century conservatives. Further, the patterns they had to use to reveal the truth on literature are the patterns framed by literature itself. Explaining close-to-hand realities as phantasmagorias bearing witness to the hidden truth of a society, this pattern of intelligibility was the invention of literature itself. Telling the truth on the surface by traveling in the underground, spelling out the unconscious social text lying underneath-that also was a plot invented by literature itself.

9 Literature had become a powerful machine of self-interpretation and selfpoeticzation of life, converting any scrap of everyday life into a sign of history and any sign of history into a poetical element. This politics of literature enhanced the dream of a new body that would give voice to this reappropriation of the power of common poetry and historicity written on any door panel or any silly refrain. But this power of the mute letter could not result in "bringing back" this living body. The "living body" voicing the collective hymn had to remain the utopia of writing. In the times of futurist poetry and Soviet revolution, the Rimbaldian project would be attuned to the idea of a new life where art and life would be more or less identical. After those days, it would come back to the poetry of the curiosity shop, the poetry of the outmoded Parisian passages celebrated by Aragon in his Paysan de Paris. Benjamin in turn would try to rewrite the poem, to have the Messiah emerge from the kingdom of the Death of outmoded commodities. But the poem of the future experienced the same contradiction as the novel of bourgeois life, and the hymn of the people experienced the same contradiction as the work of pure literature. The life of literature is the life of this contradiction. The "critical," "political' or "sociological" interpreters of literature who feel challenged by my analysis might reply that the contradiction of literature goes back to the old illusion of mistaking the interpretation of life for its transformation.

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CHAPTER II

11 CHAPTER II MAIN TOPIC Politics is the way that people living in groups make decisions. Politics is about making agreements between people so that they can live together in groups such as tribes, cities, or countries. In large groups, such as countries, some people may spend a lot of their time making such agreements. These people are called politicians. Politicians, and sometimes other people, may get together to form a government. The study of politics in universities is called political science, political studies, or public administration. In everyday life, the term "politics" refers to the way that countries are governed, and to the ways that governments make rules and laws. Politics can also be seen in other groups, such as in companies, clubs, schools, and churches. For if politics purports – at least in democratic politics – to be in the service of individual citizens, it tends to perceive these citizens as finally a part of a collectivity, its vision attuned to the broad sweep. And thus one is either a part of the Democrats or Republicans in the United States, belonging perhaps to the Jewish-American bloc, or the African-American demographic; in Malaysia, one may be seen by politicians as simply a member of the Chinese, Indian or Malay community. The individual derives significance from being a part of a whole. Indeed, in the perspective of politics, strength is gained in numbers: the collective counts for more, possesses a weightier presence than the individual, by dint of its size and thus ability to influence political outcomes in elections. The significance of a group within politics is commensurate with size, and the single individual is the smallest grouping of all. And even in exceptional instances whereby particular individuals are taken into account within politics, these invariably possess power of some sort, economic or political, rendering them therefore significant.

12 The ear of politics thus registers the roar of the gathered masses, and is sensitive to the whispers of the privileged; the lone voice of an ordinary individual belonging to no politically significant grouping often remains unheard. Understanding the link between literature and society is a pressing issue writers and literary experts need to address and juggle. A long time ago, a writer might deceive him or herself and follow the belief that art is separate from society. Now everything turns out to be unique as we are in the face of a fast-moving reality. Furthermore, a strong relation between literature and society is so much to do with the concept of freedom. Complete freedom cannot be achieved outside of the community. Human freedom is a matter of social conquest. As a part of society, the creative work of a writer is bound to his or her role as a person of action. Some literary experts have proposed the so-called political novel with a view to scaffolding an inseparable connection between the novel and society, particularly politics. George Orwell, known for his works 1984 and Animal Farm, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, a French novelist who offered the concept of the nouveau roman, asserted that the author must serve political causes. An author must only engage in one thing, that is to say, literature. In Indonesia, political novels remain few though various literary pieces deal greatly with society in general and politics in particular. Wenny Artha Lugina’s novels, The Blackside and Revival: Konspirasi Dua Sisi might be cited among the few novels representing the country’s political novels. In the past few decades, Muchtar Lubis, a great writer, is also known for writing fine political novels. In a political novel, politics play a major role. The problem with political novels is that they blend feelings and behavior with modern ideologies. The fear of inserting ideology into a novel is rampant among critics and authors, who believe politics have a detrimental effect on literary work. An author of political novels would find difficulty since he or she no longer uses “original” sources.

13 The idea of putting heavy political content into literary pieces is subject to controversy and resistance. Some believe that Littérature engagée seems and sounds too political, somehow not “healthy” and nothing more than a political propaganda pamphlet. The implication is that an author devoting to politics and setting aside literariness is not a literary person and will be unable to produce a work of great literature. The conflict between morality and ideology has a political inspiration. Every part of our life, whether individually or socially, reeks of politics. However, the content of engaged literature is not always political. Good litérature engagé only puts politics in the background despite its magnitude. First, social ideas are presented in a straightforward manner in a novel. An author can use the propaganda technique to reach the reader easily without demanding sophisticated interpretation. The idea is simple: “our” idea is truth and others’ ideas are false. This was frequently found during Dickens’ time in the form of serials in print media. Usually, their content came in the form of a grand moral lesson: the poor shouldn’t steal, should follow the straight path and should be obeisant servants. Second, a certain idea is not expressed in a straightforward manner but should clearly show the intention of luring people toward it. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, is a good example of propagandizing history. Third, a certain idea is proffered as a convention. It seems reasonable and is not seen as propaganda. Readers will judge it as common sense or universal human experience. An idea is no longer felt as the idea, because it was considered fair or conventional to assess human acts in a novel. Jane Austen’s works epitomize the idea as a convention. The complexity and diversity of human reality cannot be narrowed to just one or two interpretative systems. In fact, the analysis of any given political or historical affair is not only partial but incomplete and subjective, unless we make an attempt to understand different aspects of the human experience away from the rigid principles of the scientific method.

14 The myth of objectivity embedded in practically every rational and scientific attempt to explain or discuss political affairs must be eradicated from our efforts to develop comprehensive accounts of modern political systems. If, as Walter Benjamin wrote, “the essential is in the nuance” then we can always take more of the sum than of the subtraction, so the more nuances we have, the greater our chances are to discover essential things. The ‘scientific’ principle of reducing and simplifying variables for the goal of scientific accuracy is not only dangerous but obsolete. Modern political science should not expect to rely on its own scientific methodology to provide a complete–and accurate–understanding of political events, or else our political analysis will not only be incomplete but rather mediocre. This, I think, is the reason for which every analyst or studious of the Latin American reality should read Gunshots at the Fiesta. A critical reader of the work and novels of Latin America’s greatest writers, this extraordinary book offers a variety in nuances and enunciations that allow the informed reader of the Latin American reality to make a crucial distinction between works that advance narrow and dogmatic agendas to capture the complexity and open-endedness of human existence in historical time. Through a vast compilation of the most influential Latin American authors, literary critic Maarten van Delden and political scientist Yvon Grenier, study the relationship between the tumultuous and chaotic political reality of the continent, and the impressive literary production that the region has been able to generate during the last two hundred years, but specially since the second half of the twentieth century. Through the novels of Mario Vargas Llosa, Miguel Otero, Domingo Sarmiento, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Miguel Angel Asturias and Juan Bautista Alberdi, among others, Van Delden and Grenier–Tamayo’s two brothers–show the dangerous liaisons between literature and politics, and the multiple ways Latin American intellectuals have worked in closer proximity to the realm of political power than those writers in other parts of the world.

15 With an amazing ability to identify foundational trends among a vast variety of authors and novels, these two brothers do not only offer a conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between literature and politics, but a historical framework to determine the role of politics in contemporary Latin America. Well seen, modern history is not an attempt to explain the past but conscious and unconscious efforts to justify the present. If this is true, official versions of modern history just as much as scientific accounts of political regimes are not to be trusted without a parallel, complementary and comparative account of the literary work and other artistic or cultural manifestations of the people living in these communities, experiencing those realities and hoping for particular results while working on specific solutions. From the literary and historiographical representations to a form of “Romantic Liberalism” present in the writings of Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz, or the power of “Magic Realism” decorating the pages of the new Latin American novel, Gunshots at the Fiesta reflect on all the different ways Latin American authors have dealt with questions of multiculturalism and intercultural contact, while focusing on the idea of modernity and its relationship to the complex nexus between art and politics. Literature can say publicly what might otherwise appear unsayable, combating the coerced silence that is a favored weapon of those who have power. In Pakistan, for example, where numerous hatreds — including of Hindus, of atheists, of supposed sexual transgressors — have been actively promoted by the state for purposes of social control, we have seen Hindu characters, nonbelieving characters, sexually transgressive characters being humanized in literature. The political power of such literature is undeniable: “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” stoked the fires of European anti-Semitism in the decades before the Holocaust; American news coverage of the Gulf of Tonkin incident facilitated the escalation of American military involvement in Vietnam; supposedly true accounts about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction contributed to the disastrous invasion of that country 12 years ago.

16 Over half a century ago, Saadat Hasan Manto lampooned religious and nationalistic bigotry in Pakistan, opening up political and creative space for so many Pakistani writers, myself included, to enter. Reading his acerbic, wanton, irreverent short stories for the first time, I thought: “Wait, you can write that?” It was an electric experience for me, like reading James Baldwin and Toni Morrison would be, like reading Chinua Achebe would be. Politics is shaped by people. And people, sometimes, are shaped by the literature they read. Poetry makes nothing happen, Auden wrote, but occasionally literature can get things done. Sadly, it’s easier to chart the ways in which literature has changed politics for the worse than to make a case for its positive effect on the course of human events. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and “The Turner Diaries” have confirmed bigots in their bigotry and made new converts to the cause of racism and intolerance. The sacred texts of most religions (let’s call them narratives and leave others to debate the question whether they are fact or literature) have been used to justify unspeakable violence. But can literature change history for the better? Many of us have heard how Abraham Lincoln asked Harriet Beecher Stowe if she was the little lady whose big book started the great war. But the story is most likely apocryphal: a literary urban legend. Doubtless Stowe’s popular novel helped persuade its readers that slaves were human beings with feelings like those of their masters. But neither Lincoln nor Stowe could seriously have believed that her novel had functioned as an actual call to arms. Though the novels of Charles Dickens failed to radically improve the lot of poor children in Victorian England, they did raise public awareness of the Oliver Twists and Little Dorrits whom readers might otherwise have ignored: children suffering the humiliations that Dickens endured when, as a child, he worked in a boot-blacking factory and his father was sent to the debtors’ prison.

17 In an essay on John Ruskin, George Eliot wrote that “in making clear to ourselves what is best and noblest in art, we are making clear to ourselves what is best and noblest in morals; in learning how to estimate the artistic products of a particular age, we are widening our sympathy and deepening the basis of our tolerance and charity.” Certainly George Eliot can make us more charitable and patient. Politics is commonly viewed as the practice of power or the embodiment of collective wills and interests and the enactment of collective ideas. Now, such enactments or embodiments imply that you are taken into account as subject sharing in a common world, making statements and not simply noise, discussing things located in a common world and not in your own fantasy. What really deserves the name of politics is the cluster of perceptions and practices that shape this common world. Politics is first of all a way of framing, among sensory data, a specific sphere of experience. It is a partition of the sensible, of the visible and the say able, which allows (or does not allow) some specific data to appear; which allows or does not allow some specific subjects to designate them and speak about them. It is a specific intertwining of ways of being, ways of doing and ways of speaking. The politics of literature thus means that literature as literature is involved in this partition of the visible and the say able, in this intertwining of being, doing and saying that frames a polemical common world. Surprisingly, few among the political or social commentators of literature have paid attention to literature's own historicity. Literature did not act so much by expressing ideas and wills as it did by displaying the character of a time or a society. In this context, literature appeared at the same time as a new regime of writing, and another way of relating to politics, resting on this principle: writing is not imposing one will on another, in the fashion of the orator, the priest or the general. It is displaying and deciphering the symptoms of a state of things. It is revealing the signs of history, delving as the geologist does, into the seams and strata under the stage of the orators and politicians- the seams and strata that underlie its foundation.

18 Literature here is used to mean works of the creative imagination (poems, short stories, novels and so on). That literature is political is beyond dispute inasmuch as its production and consumption cannot occur in a societal vacuum. In Egypt, the very fundamentals of how, what and where one publishes are themselves political decisions in a culture industry that has been the site of successive battles between artists and the establishment. What is less clear is how closely literature is (or should be) tied to the service of a particular political agenda or connected to the masses, and to what extent literature can and does succeed in influencing political reality. Many pundits have attributed widespread failure to predict Egypt's revolution to the dearth of warning signs, but the seeds of revolution were apparent in cultural production in the years leading up to the events of 2011. Novels, poems, films and soap operas drove home the reality and consequences of pervasive corruption in a dysfunctional state. Creative works of the imagination have some advantages over factual forms of discourse. As art and as make-believe, they enjoy a greater capacity to circumvent the various kinds of censorship to which other forms of discourse are subject under authoritarian regimes; they have artistic license to distill, stress or exaggerate particular features of the world they choose to represent using myriad devices for extra effect, in addition to the simple power of selective presentation; and, finally, their aesthetical qualities have the power to speak to hearts as well as minds. The Afghan writer Atiq Rahimi has described the relationship between literature and politics as ‘the power of words against the words of power’.

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CHAPTER III

20 CHAPTER III SUMMING UP From the beginning, Canadian history has presented highly political subjects for our literature. European nations struggled for territorial possession and for favourable boundary decisions. Christian missionaries and settlers struggled with the aborigines for souls and space for settlement. Settlement groups disputed among themselves and with outsiders the nature of the society that was forming. Later, history and literature were shaped by tension between the individual and the community, between "authority" and "personal freedom," between imperial powers and the national will for self-determination. Finally the continuing global tension between socialist and liberal-capitalist ideologies is mirrored in Canadian literature. Since early times, relations between literature and politics have been manifested in the organization of many literary interest groups, formed to make members' work better known, to encourage production, to pressure governments and other patrons for support, and to secure an atmosphere in which writers can produce well and profitably. Such organizations have been born and have died according to the energy of their members and the liveliness of the political and social issues with which they have been engaged. In Canada, the claims of literature were often expressed in institutes, which appeared as early as the 1820s in many cities "to afford instruction in the principles of the arts and in the wonders of science and useful knowledge." Literary and historical societies also developed in Montréal, Toronto, Halifax, Saint John and Winnipeg as the century progressed. One of the most publicly volatile organizations in the 19th century was the CANADA FIRST movement. Formed in Ottawa in 1868, with a platform that united political nationalism and the encouragement of literature and culture, it eventually became a political party.

21 Unsuccessful in politics, it nevertheless had a significant effect on the production of literature and the establishment of a Canadian tradition in the arts. The grants, literary awards and support structures that have developed since 1957 have been criticized; however, some claim that public money is spent badly upon people who have little talent, and for the production of inferior works; others feel that public support of artists introduces political bias in the production of literary work and invites writers to censor themselves in order to please the governments of the day. Nevertheless, Canadian governments follow the pattern of governments elsewhere, actively supporting the production of literature through various agencies. Literary associations occupy themselves with many of these questions, and theories of literary creation in Canada tend to be closely associated with the political views of those who construct the theories. Indeed, the character of Canada's internal and external relations ensures that the literature of the country, which began in the midst of strong political tensions, will continue in a similar milieu. Our nation provides an especially clear argument that a country's literature and its politics are inseparable and affect each other on many visible and invisible levels. The idea of the political novel has remained ambiguous, vague and abstract even in the face of intense discussions and very absorbing intellectual debates for the last seventy-five years or more. There are many reasons for the state of affairs; chiefly two: primarily, the concept of 'politics', which a political novel is supposed to represent, is complex and unclear. Trying to conceptualize the idea, the American Heritage Dictionary defines 'politics' "as the methods or tactics involved in the managing of state or government". Further the political scientists have proposed 'power' as the basic dictum of politics and the acquisition of power as the motivation for the political man's actions.

22 For instance, as Harold Hasswell, a political scientist observes, "When we speak of the science of politics, we mean the science of power." Thus/politics' is normally explained as the 'art of state and government' and as the process of acquiring and retaining power. But obviously, these definitions are too generalized, vague and intend to focus on the superstructure and the broad framework of the idea of politics, overlooking the complex and the subtle human dimensions in the political operations. For instance, an individual, being a private citizen could influence or modulate the political process, by voting or such other grass root political acts. A society is at a safe distance from "active” politics could also directly or indirectly affect the functioning of the political system. The political processes might include people who are basically "apolitical' but who perform occasional, but significant political acts. Apart from these complexities involved, the psychological dimensions of politics like the human greed for the power and the glory defeat all attempts to explain "politics” satisfactorily. Being aware of these complexities, Joseph Blotner, a critic of political literature, tries to synthesize the individual human behaviour into the framework of politics revolutionizing our perception of the idea of politics. The other problem involved in the definition of the political novel relates to the complex nature of the human experience. Bifurcation of the mass of human experience into political, social, economic or into any other category is misinterpreting the human experience. In the complexity of human existence, all these varieties of experiences are inseparably inter-linked. The identification and separation of the political element out of the mass of human experience is not an easy affair. From another point of view, as is observed by the critics, "In a sense, all literature and indeed all of life, is political, if our definition of politics is broad enough. Even the lack of politics or political neutrality can be seen as a political stance."

23 No novelist can deliberately set out to be a political novelist, just as no novelist can set out to belong to any other of the labels under which literary critics tend to classify them. A work of art is a collage, in the creation of which many factors such as politics, social values, class and ethnic distinctions, personal prejudices, mystical visions and intellectual speculations combine in an intimate and at times in an explainable manner. Apart from these difficulties associated with the evolving of the meaning of the political novel, there is another difficulty, related to the identification of the 'political content' in a novel. As rightly noted by Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips, regardless of how the meaning of the content and form and of the relation of the two in a political novel is conceived, the question of how to identify the 'political' works still remains unresolved. This is because as observed by the critics the "political extremes are easier to identify and talk about. Edwin Muir's forays into political literature should draw critical attention, at least for the documentary value of it, if not for more. He classifies the entire, human race into 'natural' and 'political' beings. According to Muir, a natural man becomes a political man "when he strives to remove the conditions in society, which frustrates the development of his own personality through political action." In his subsequent explanations Muir implicitly suggests that the literary genre, that intends to portray this struggle for a better life, is the political novel. Muir's concept of the genre does provide some basic tenets of the political literature, though it does not go beyond that. The nature of the political novel and its relationship with the social sciences like History and Political Science bring fresh insights into the genre are studied. The parameters of the political novel are broadened by relating it to the entire political processes. Political literature here is defined as a corpus of novels, which offer a direct treatment of political process, inclusive of political incidents and traditions, institutions, practices and formations of change.

24 Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol shot, in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar, yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse attention. Political literature has traversed long distances from the unsure steps of the parodies and the satires of the 18th century. In the 19th and the 20th centuries mighty practitioners of the art have picked it up cutting across the continents. Association of big names such as Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Doestoevasky, Benjamin Disraeli Stendhal, Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, Mulk Raj Artand, Raja Rao, R. K. Narayan, Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul has made political novel a dominant form. Political themes are almost an obsession with many of the Indian writers like Nayantara Sahgal. That every Indian English writer of repute has at least one political novel to his credit goes to show the dominance of the form in Indian Literature. It is also significant to note that the form has been undergoing vast changes in the treatment of the political themes. An important aspect of the political novel of the 20th century is the break of sophisticated fiction in the post Doestoevasky era. The heavy stress on 'duex machina' in the resolution of issues is a thing of the past. The 20th century novels see politics in direct relationship to the human characters tracking a plethora of human complexities. The traditional notion of politics in India hence was broadly a power relationship, an 'administrative politics’ where the ruler provided indemnity against the external aggression in lieu of the revenue he received from the ruled. 'Political consciousness' in terms of the actual participation of people in the political process is conspicuous by its absence, in what can be called as the first phase of the Indian politics. These in-built paradoxes in the national movement and the inability of the Indian political leaders of the late 19th century to resolve some of these contradictions, result in the creation of political consciousness that can be described as 'fractured' consciousness, resulting in the absence of a single pan-Indian consciousness.

25 In fact, there is not one, but many 'nationalisms' in this phase of the Indian politics like, the Hindu nationalism, the Muslim nationalism, the reformist nationalism, the militant nationalism, etc. These 'nationalisms' broadly restrict the political loyalties of the people to the narrow regional, linguistic, or the communal groups. At this stage in Indian politics, there is a collective awareness of suffering from oppression amongst the people. But this awareness does not transform itself in a single, concrete plan of political action against the colonisers. A novelist and a pamphleteer belong to two different, irreconcilable categories. Literature, we must recognize, is not so directly concerned with finding answers to social problems that will be immediately embodied in action; and, furthermore, novelists and poets are not equipped to substitute for political or economic leaders. Their concern is not so much to act as recorders of life and events [but to] give them synthesis, to give them order and coherence. The successful writer transcends the incidents of his time and becomes a sage and prophet. Artistic revelation is his final responsibility to himself and his art. That sounds today like a fairly safe and sensible statement to make, but in 1958 it was merely the latest in a decades-old series of salvos and counter-salvos fired even before the Second World War by partisans of what, on the one hand, was called the “art for art’s sake” school of poet Jose Garcia Villa and, on the other, the “proletarian literature” bannered by Salvador P. Lopez. In the 1930s, Filipino writers had been torn by these adversarial positions, with Villa and Co. on the cutting edge of poetic modernism and Lopez and Co. harking back to a long tradition of revolutionary and subversive literature in the Philippines. Politics and literature have had a long and uneasy relationship in the Philippines, where creative writers and journalists have been the bane of an almost unbroken succession of colonial rulers, despots, autocrats, and dictators.

26 The country’s tortuous political history has given rise to many opportunities for direct engagement in political resistance by Filipino authors, from Francisco Balagtas’s antidespotic Florante at Laura and Jose Rizal’s novels in the 1800s to the anti-imperialist playwrights of the early 1900s and the anti-Marcos propagandists of the 1980s onwards. Beneath the larger and more obvious national political issues, of course, have lurked the politics of gender, religion, region, and – most importantly in our experience – of class. Literature students tend not to perceive English Literature as a particularly political subject to study, nor are most English departments seen as centres of political debate. Francis Mulhern, in his 1979 study of F.R. Leavis’s journal Scrutiny, has suggested that: ‘Literary criticism as it is mainly practiced in England is in reality the focal activity of a discourse whose foremost general cultural function is the repression of politics’. Nonetheless, as both Mulhern and Leavis knew full well, English as a subject area has long been used politically. Even in its naming and placing in an academic institution, a literature department has political implications: English Literature, Literature, English, English Language, English Studies or Humanities? Every variation represents a battle over definitions of and distinctions between ‘Literature’ and other academic subjects. The literary curriculum has always been subject to intervention in school and university departments, while politicians regularly invoke the English literary tradition for their own political agendas, and literary references are frequently employed in the promotion of political values. To edit a collection on literature and politics is thus fraught with difficulties. Politics and Literature could potentially point to a range of arenas: literature that directly addresses political subjects, to literary works that have a direct political purpose, to the politics of the curriculum.

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Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, put simply, is a story of an affair, but it is political to its core. The affair is presented within the context of the sociopolitical climate at the time. The story would go much differently if it was set in the US in the 21st century. Beyond that, there is much discussion of politics in Anna Karenina; Tolstoy used Levin to express various political views. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is also political literature, as one of its main themes is class, which is explored on many levels throughout the novel. Brontë explores relations between different English classes, the sexes, as well as foreigners and the English. In the sense that literature gives us a glimpse into the sociopolitical climate of the time it is written, it is always political in some sense. The writer could be reflecting or criticizing the political views held at that time. The themes the writer chooses also reflect the times. Although it is an introspective meditation on the subconscious vs. reality, even Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is political. Like most, if not all, Murakami novels, it reflects current culture in several ways – mainly through pop culture references and literary tropes. Also like many Murakami novels, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World touches something deep inside contemporary humans. The unity inherent in the good, the beautiful, and the true inevitably brings literature into contact with issues properly political: the pursuit of the good; man’s social nature; the patterns apparent in our public life, including actions and their consequences; the moral significance of choices; the inescapability of responsibility; the wisdom and folly of our predilections, both private and public. The relationship of politics and literature, by virtue of their natural affinity and common suppositions, means that literature will have political relevance even when not being overtly political. This is a key point, for if literature is to yield up the depths of wisdom it is capable of embodying, we must be prepared to look in the depths, so to speak. This is as true of political wisdom as of any other.

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CHAPTER IV

29 CHAPTER IV WORKS CITED 1. Lucien, T. W. (2015), Peer Group: Pre-Adolescent Culture and Identity, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 2. Handle, G. (2015), Childhood Socialization, Aldine Transaction Publisher, New York. 3. Budrich, B. (2014),Politics, Culture and SocializationVerlag Barbara Budrich Publishers, Canada. 4. Bimber, B. (2014), The Effect of Internet Use On Political Participation, Oxford University Press, New York. 5. Chaffee, S.H. (2014), Mass Communication and Political Socialization, Journalism Quarterly. 6. Graber, D.A. (2013), Political Socialization, Glencoe IL; The Free Press, Belgium. 7. Geva, S. (2011), Political Socialization as a Child Importance for Creating Informed Voting Adults, Sage P Review of Literature 102 11. Gimple, G. J. (2003), Cultivating Democracy: Civic environments and political socialization, America Brooking Institution Publisher, America. 12. Thorson, J. S. (2001), The Political socialization of Children and the Structure of the Elementary School, Canada. 13. Davis, C. J. (2012), The Family s’ Role in Political Socialization, Addison Welsey Publishing Company, London. 14. Agarwal, R.C. (2011), Political Theory, S. Chand and Companies, New Delhi. 15. Gonzalez, J. (2010), The Media as an Influence on Socialization, Pearson Allyn Bacon, New York 16. Boulianne, S. (2009), Does Internet Use Affect Engagement? A MetaAnalysis of Research Political Communication, Routledge part of the Taylor and Francis, London.

30 17. Devitt, Mc. M. (2007), Media Education, Political Socialization, Sage Publication, New Delhi. 18. Durkheim, E.( 2007),Moral Education, The University of Chicago Press, American. 19. Gupta, S. (2005), Education in Emerging India: Teachers Role in Society, Shipra Publication, New Delhi. 20. Parsons, T. (2001), The School as a Social System Harvard Education Review, England. 21. Nancy, B. (2001),The Private Roots of Public Action: Gender Equality and Political Participation, Harvard University Press, London. 22. Singh, M. (1998),Political Socialization of Students, Deep and Deep Publication, New Delhi. 23. Adoni, H.(1997), The Function of Mass Media in the Political Socialization of Adolescent Belgium. 24. Padhy, K.S. & Choudhary, S. (1981), Political Socialization of High School Students of an Orissa Town: An Empirical Study, Indian Journal of Political Science, Vol 5. 25. Ehsanul, Haq. (1981), Education and Political Culture: The Limits of the Schooling System and Political Socialization, Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd, Mumbai. 26. Singh, B.(1980), Democratic Socialization in India and Four Western Democracies: A Comparative Study, Indian Journal of Political Science, Vol 41. 27. Gupta, k. S. (1975), Citizens in the Making, National Publishing House, Delhi. 28. Verba, S. & Ni, H.N. (1972), Participation in America, Harper and Row Publisher, New York. 29. Torney, J.V. (1967), The Development of Political Attitudes In Children, Aldine Transaction Publisher, Chicago. 30. Grove, Petty. (2015), The Politics of Mate Choice Journal of Politics Vol 6, London.

31 31. Abdi, S. (2014), Society and Politics in India: Understanding Political Sociology, Anmol Publication, New Delhi. 32. Goldfarb, C. J. (2011), Reinventing Political Culture, Belgium. 33. Hooghe, M. (2008), Political socialization and the Future of Politics, Belgium. 34. Sinha, N.(2007),Empowerment of Women: Through Political Participation, Kalpaz Publication, New Delhi. 35. Nagaad, S. (2007), Political Socialization in the Family and Young People s’ Education Achievement and Ambition, Ajmer. 36. Faulks, K. (1999), Political Sociology, (Reprint) Rawat Publication and Edinburg University Press, Scotland.