High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [94]
Now I know, and this is how I know: during the Gulf War some young friends of mine wanted to set up a table in the shopping mall and hand out information about the less cheerful aspects of the war. The administrators of the mall refused permission. My friends contended, “But you let people hand out yellow ribbons and flags and ‘We kick butt’ bumper stickers!” The mall administrators explained their charter forbids anything political. “Handing out yellow ribbons is public service,” they said, “but what you want to do is political.”
Now you know. This subterfuge use of the word “political,” which doesn’t show up in my Random House Unabridged, means only that a thing runs counter to prevailing assumptions. If 60 percent of us support the war, then the expressions of the other 40 percent are political—and can be disallowed in some contexts for that reason alone. The really bad news is that the charter of the shopping mall seems to be standing in as a national artistic standard. Cultural workers in the U.S. are prone to be bound and gagged by a dread of being called political, for that word implies the art is not quite pure. Real art, the story goes, does not endorse a point of view. This is utter nonsense, of course (try to imagine a story or a painting with no point of view), and also the most thorough and invisible form of censorship I’ve ever encountered. When I’m interviewed about writing, I spend a good deal of time defending the possibility that such things as environmental ruin, child abuse, or the hypocrisy of U.S. immigration policy are appropriate subjects for a novel. I keep waiting for the interviewer to bring up art things, like voice and metaphor; usually I’m still waiting for that when the cows come home.
In rural Greece some people believe that if you drink very cold water on a very hot day, you will die; here, we have that kind of superstition about mixing art with conscience. It’s a quaintly provincial belief that fades out fast at our borders. Most of the rest of the world considers social criticism to be, absolutely, the most legitimate domain of art. If you think I’m overstating this, look who’s been winning Nobel Prizes in literature for the last ninety years:
Nadine Gordimer, who has spent her life writing against racism and apartheid in South Africa. Joseph Brodsky, who spent some years in Siberia because of his criticism of Soviet society. Wole Soyinka, who has also logged time in jail because of his criticisms of colonialism in Africa. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who is possibly the most gifted social critic in a whole continent of social-critic-writers. Czeslaw Milosz, who was active in the anti-Nazi underground and whose poetry is thoroughly ideological. Pablo Neruda, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Miguel Asturias, Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw.
U.S. prizewinners do not dominate this list (as they do the Nobel categories of Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine), especially since the 1950s. It’s not for lack of great writers, but perhaps because we’ve learned to limit our own access to serious content. The fear of being perceived as ideologues runs so deep in writers of my generation it undoubtedly steers us away from certain subjects without our knowing it. The fear is that if you fall short of perfect execution, you’ll be called “preachy.” But falling short of perfection when you’ve plunged in to say what needs to be said—is that so much worse, really, than falling short when you’ve plunged in to say what didn’t need to be said?
And if you should by chance succeed—oh, then. Art has the power not only to soothe a savage breast, but to change a savage mind. A novel can make us weep over the same events that might hardly give us pause if we read them in a newspaper. Even though the tragedy in the newspaper happened to real people, while the one in the novel happened in an author’s imagination.
A novel works its magic by putting a reader inside another person’s life. The pace is as