Art - or dull propaganda?

Published : Jun 12, 2022 18:00 IST On the 13th of May, 80 writers from across the world—Cameroon, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Brazil, among others—came together for the Emergency World Voices Congress of Writers at the United Nations. At the recent event in New York, Salman Rushdie eloquently claimed, “A poem will not stop a bullet, a novel cannot defuse a bomb”, but writers can still “sing the truth, and name the lies”, similar to what the author Amitava Kumar said while promoting his latest novel A Time Outside This Time:“You can’t save the world, but you must record it.” Luiza Fazio, a Brazilian screenwriter, blamed the bloodletting in Ukraine—the fulcral event being discussed—on superhero movies “glamorising violence… normalising war”. The German philosopher Theodor Adorno, in his posthumous tome Aesthetic Theory, writes, “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.” Then why are writers and readers so enthusiastic about labelling literature as a response to themes, as a vindication of narrow moral preoccupations, as though the connection between progressive thinking and powerful literature was implied and obvious? It feels like what the late Gary Indiana, gay American art critic and provocateur, called “the self-righteous revolutionary anger of those who toil in capitalism’s luxury industries.” Writers of political fiction—just in the past year Amitava Kumar, Kunal Basu, Anindita Ghose, and Pankaj Mishra have come up with novels whose purpose and palette is entirely derivative of our political discourse—seem to have assumed the role of some sort of moral crusader. Take Amitava Kumar and Kunal Basu’s vivid meaning-producing metaphors—“Reason was a dumb mule that could carry the load of any ideology or any fool with his eye on power”, “You are like the cork of a wine bottle—one side wet, the other bone dry”; or Pankaj Mishra’s muffled existential screams—“What I took to be normal life depended too much on a continuous exaggeration of my identity and significance.” It is when these sentences are in service of a project as opposed to the amoebic intensity with which we ebb and flow, one where we are not always sure even if we always seem sure, that the book’s tone assumes something of a teacher’s cane.