Political Writing, The Morally Dubious & The Morally Complex, Repression

Public Books' Literature: What to Make of Complicity? asks a question that might not seem pertinent to Americans.

“The problem that troubles the novelist [is] how to justify a concern with morally dubious people in a contemptible activity,” notes South African writer J. M. Coetzee, “ … how to treat something that, in truth, because it is offered like the Gorgon’s head to terrorize the populace and paralyze resistance, deserves to be ignored.” Here, in the essay “Into the Dark Chamber,” Coetzee points out that literature exposing political terror—in this case, torture, the existence of which is repeatedly denied by repressive regimes—can actually become an inadvertent tool of that terror.

We might assume that literature can be mobilized to resist oppression by exposing it. But, what Coetzee emphasizes is that, in exposing the crimes, literature can also replicate the terms of the “game” and intensify fear, quashing the possibility of resistance—in part what torture is designed to do. For Coetzee, then, the “true challenge” for the novelist becomes “how not to play the game by the rules of the state, how to establish one’s own authority, how to imagine torture and death on one’s own terms.”

We do not have torture and political killings here in America, do we? (Report: Black people are still killed by police at a higher rate than other groups; Buffalo shooting: How far-right killers are radicalised online)

In prison, I read Orhan Pamuk, and I think highly of his work. It is something I think Americans need to think about – the slipping away from a great imperial power to an important nation-state. The Public Books essay examines Pamuk and Bilge Karasu, in light of Turkey's oppressive government.

Twentieth-century Turkey shaped its history through a fraught relationship with both language and literature. To cut ties with its Ottoman past and become westernized, the Republic of Turkey introduced a language reform in 1928, which Geoffrey Lewis termed a “catastrophic success,” that deeply changed the Turkish language, altering its vocabulary, syntax, and alphabet. It then mobilized novelists to write a Turkish consciousness into being, turning literature into a tool of nation-building.

Perhaps more importantly, 20th-century Turkish history is filled with examples of language being used as a tool for oppression, wielded to deny countless identities and experiences. After the 1980 military coup, for instance, the Kurdish language became anathema and called “mountain Turkish,” supposedly named Kurdish because of the sounds of footsteps in the snow, kart-kurt.

Such examples might seem far-fetched (and ridiculous). Yet, they reveal the ways in which language and literature have been contorted to aid oppression. Karasu approaches language and literature, both passions of his, suspiciously, also with this history in mind.

I have history on my mind, too. American history is now fraught with politics - DeSantis vs. Harris on Florida's African American history curriculum: What to know. We have politicians mangled language as much as history: Why words no longer mean anything in politics: Thanks, Marjorie Taylor Greene.

I need to address politics because they affect the world my characters in habit. I had a valid objection with "Road Tripping" that I was too dismissive of one character's politics. These politics are ones that I think are pernicious, even malicious, but I did some correcting. It is not that the character's complaint are dismissed out of hand, but that the methods of MAGA are to be opposed. Whether I also made clear the MAGA characters are not at all malicious in themselves, but many are dupes of those unconcerned with fixing problems, only their retention of power. Anything less would make the character a strawman rather than a representation of a human being. 

That I cannot agree with a point of view does not mean that there is not sincerity in the POV. Insincerity will be treated differently. Making character with a sincerely held belief sound like a doofus just because I dislike the belief feels like an act of complicity -  a sensible reader will see the propaganda rather than an honest portrayal and discredit the whole story. Then there is the complicity where an honest representation becomes co-opted to normalize the oppression.

It is possible that Bilge Karasu was primarily an aesthete and Orhan Pamuk plays it too safe against the Turkish state. But their works are decidedly engaged with their milieu’s violence. They highlight indeterminacies in literature that are especially pertinent for political commitment, understood in the sense of giving voice to the oppressed. Karasu and Pamuk are committed to this project, if not to a clear political cause. Their perceived lack of commitment says less about their works and more about the binary between political commitment and aesthetic autonomy.

But especially when writing about political and ethical responsibility, literary experimentation seems to allow for a more nuanced political commitment, rather than being antithetical to it. Like Coetzee had suggested, fictional representations of political terror can always be co-opted by the terror they expose. As such, their only hope out of the conundrum might be to represent their vulnerable, complicit position.

So, what do I do with a character who sees the damage done by his own apathy to political (which I read as ethical) issues?

Amy Engel On Eschewing Judgement for Moral Complexity and Context I think is relevant here:

The second issue I wanted to highlight with this book is the ways in which violent crime and the death penalty impact not only the family of the victim, but also the family of the perpetrator. During my years as a lawyer, I worked on a variety of cases—embezzlement, health care fraud, drug trafficking, federal hate crimes, and one death penalty murder. When I think back on all the cases I worked on, it’s the death penalty trial that sticks with me the most. It wasn’t just the grueling, relentless hours of work or the frustration with the way death penalty trials are conducted in this country. It wasn’t even knowing that a few exhausted, over-worked lawyers were all that stood between a man and death. It was the impact the trial had on our client’s family that I can never forget.

I still vividly remember the moment the jury announced a sentence of life in prison rather than the death penalty. I watched my generally poker-faced colleagues burst into tears, all of us sobbing as we hugged one another and our client. But what I remember most clearly are the faces of our client’s family, the sheer relief that his life had been spared, tempered with the knowledge that they would never again see him outside of prison walls.

In the years since that trial, it is those family members my thoughts have turned to again and again. It’s their stories, their existence, that thread through my latest novel. They had done nothing wrong. Their only crime was raising and loving a man who would one day be involved in a criminal conspiracy that would end in murder. They weren’t guilty of any crime, but they were treated as an extension of the perpetrator, painted with the same broad brush. The family of the victim was treated with empathy and kindness, as they should have been. But the family of our client was looked at with scorn, their pain ignored by almost everyone in that courtroom. As if being related to someone on trial automatically meant their heartbreak wasn’t real or valid. When thinking about violent crime, we tend to only consider the victim and their family. The family of the accused is, at best, forgotten and, at worst, branded as guilty along with the defendant. I think it is easier for us that way. Viewing people in black and white, good and evil, right and wrong, is so much simpler than diving into the nuances, of forcing ourselves to confront all the murky grayness of real life.

Having come from the same profession, I know of what she writes. 

Another writer I like is James Lee Burke, I will close out here with him and bring the political/ethical issues back to America with this excerpt from James Lee Burke Reckons with History, the South, and the Hatred Burning Through America:

David Masciotra: Your recent work deals heavily with American history. What is the reason for shifting from contemporary stories to those that more closely scrutinize American history?

James Lee Burke: That’s a very good observation you make. My compulsion throughout my entire life has always been historical. I think that the past, as Faulkner said, is not even the past. We’re still in it. To try to block it from our lives, as we have a way of doing in this country, because we’re still a young Republic, is an invitation for disaster. American history is extraordinary. Much of it is beautiful, but much of it is horrible, and we try to deceive ourselves about the latter. Writing now, it is clear that we’ve recreated the 1840s. We’ve brought back the era of nativism. The Republican Party has become the Know Nothing Party. Donald Trump is just a vulgarian who has stumbled his way into darkness with the help of very angry people. Writing about history makes sense, because it is the same group.

sch 8/4