REVIEWS:POLITICS & FICTION

...The task that Boyers sets himself in his chapter on Grass, "Glinter Grass: Negativity and the Subversion of Paradigms," and that in my view might have been accomplished in prose considerably less thick with terminological abstraction, is to locate the existence in Grass of moral purposes and a preoccupation with politics and history which, incredibly enough, other critics seem routinely to deny...

...Robert Boyers, a professor of English at Skidmore College and editor of Salmagundi, an intellectual quarterly, offers in the first two chapters of this critical study what he calls a "fluid definition" of the political novel since 1945...

...The best chapters in this book are those in which Boyers confronts works and writers that seem to call for straightforward exposition, for example, the chapters examining the nature of political commitment in Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter, or the centrality of fact in Solzhenitsyn's imagination...

...It is, I think, an indication of the strain resulting from these obstacles that Boyers chooses to switch from the third to the second person in the last chapter of his book, "Between East and West: A Letter to Milan Kundera...

...379...

...Graham Greene, who seems too much the entertainer to be included in a critical study with so grim a title as this one, is allowed in (after expectable detraction) for having written The Quiet American, which Boyers pronounces to be "a minor classic in the genre of the modern political novel...

...The term always makes me think of the literal inscribing that takes place on the body of the convict in Kafka's great story "The Penal Colony"—could the critics who use this term so freely have some lurking idea of the experience of literature as a form of passive torture...

...BOYERS IS LESS PONDEROUSLY repetitive whenever he turns his attention from critics to the novels themselves, although it must be said that even here, despite his opposition to current academic modes, he never seems to break completely free of current academic style...

...Boyers does not say so, but I think we should then also have to revise our view of the human species...

...Whenever Boyers allows himself to keep these facts before him, Atrocity and Amnesia is a convincing testimonial to the many and varied ways that the modern political novel has contributed to the effort of memory—and resistance...

...CAUTIOUS NOT TO PRESCRIBE anything that might not fit one or another of the vastly different novelists in his purview—different in their methods, relation to tradition, formal ambitions, ideological perspectives, and much else—Boyers insists that his definition consists only of the "more or less constant" features of the political novel...

...He complains of the "striking disjunction between political intelligence and advanced literary thinking in the United States" and remarks that "had there been a dominant American political novel that would stand in relation to American culture in the way that The Book of Laughter and Forgetting stands to Czech culture I would, of course, have included it...

...Doctorow, Joseph Heller, Robert Coover, John Updike, and Robert Stone...

...Naipaul, Graham Greene, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nadine Gordimer, Jorge Semprun, George Steiner, Giinter Grass, and Milan Kundera...

...Without having read this novel, I cannot say that 377 the case Boyers makes for it convinced me that it belongs among the other works...

...His concluding praise of Alejo Carpentier's Reasons of State, that it "effectively communicates the sense that the world exists, that some things in it are more significant and desirable than others, and that the effort to see what exists is worth making," is an eloquent statement of Boyers at his best as a critic...

...Thus on a novel by Gunter Grass he can write, "Though we may rightly be uneasy about reducing the novel to an argument or about privileging one kind of paradigm at the expense of others, the novel instructs us in what are its intentions by dwelling even to excess on the exigencies and liabilities of narrative itself...

...George Steiner's elevation is due to his The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H...

...a pronounced attitude towards time...

...As he says, "if most political novels were unable to project some sense of a vital political culture, were wholly resistant to projections of hope, we should have to revise our view of the species...

...If not exactly jargon, this kind of language has a fuzzying effect...

...There are indeed moments when Boyers seems so bent on accommodating those whom he calls his "ostensi378 bly advanced" colleagues, that he is capable of writing sentences that mime the abstract ponderousness of the adepts of Theory: "A deconstructive emphasis on the diversity of codes inscribed within a single text and on the structural discontinuities even of works that labor to conceal the competition among the several narrative paradigms they contain will usefully remind us to beware of seductive unitary schemas...

...This task, never easy for a critic at any time, is today more formidable than ever...

...Finally, the political novel almost always includes a "capacity to project what an admirable political culture might be...

...His elucidation of the Latin American novel, and of the Latin American situation, " . . a compound of disaster, mass hysteria or delirium, and a brutal ignorance that issues alternately in melancholy, violent paroxysm or avoidance," has a life missing from the talk of Grass's "auto-critique," his "politics of negative dialectic...

...Addressing himself directly to the Czech novelist, Boyers wins through here to a number of important truths, including the observation that for Kundera the "struggle to remain human" is identical to "the struggle to remember...

...I am not comfortable with the construction Boyers appears to place on Kundera's impatience with the accounts of The Joke by Western journalists—it does not seem fair to suggest, as Boyers does, that because Kundera is annoyed at oversimplifications he is averse to having his books understood in political terms...

...This list includes some great along with some unexpected names...

...However sensible the definition he offers might seem, Boyers knows that such influential critical tendencies as deconstruction are likely to deny its validity, possibly on the grounds of its sensibleness, inevitably because of the animus between the genuinely political and the pseudo-political...

...And surely much could be said about the more recent and overtly political work of E.L...

...Not only is Boyers faced with the difficulty of communicating his belief in the public dimension of art at a time and in a culture which is increasingly fragmented and privatized, but when he turns to the academy, he must face the equal difficulty of getting through to colleagues increasingly under the sway of one or another theoretical absolutisms either hostile or indifferent to an effort such as his...

...But the letter to Kundera is of interest less for this than for the impulse from which it springs—the impulse to write as if we really lived in a world in which intellectuals addressed one another on matters of public concern...

...Judging by the sense Boyers manages to make out of complex political novels written beyond our shores, one may regret his omission of American political novels in two ways—for the interest of the novels themselves, and for the intelligence of the response they would have received...

...Boyers's list includes no Americans...

...Still, looking back to the very beginning of Boyers's period, I think it might fairly be said that Lionel Trilling's The Middle of the Journey, or Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, are political novels that stand in an important relation to American culture...

...a deep sense of the workings of change...

...a "highly developed sentiment of Being," that is, a commitment to representing things as they are in the world (this even if, as is often the case, the novelist is opposed to every condition of life in the present...

...He has to find ways of thinking about the political novel that will succeed in communicating his sense of what is valuable in these books...

...These include an ethical claim of some sort...

...As an ideal, this can be no more than the barest of possibilities, the most fragile of hopes—but it is this which seems most to move Boyers in the political novel...

...He then discusses novelists he deems to have contributed notable examples of the genre: V.S...

...It does seem broadly true that only rarely has the American novel accorded to politics the centrality it occupies in the works, say, of Stendhal or Dostoyevsky, or, as Boyers suggests, in the work of Milan Kundera, born out of an experience of politics more complete and painful than most Americans could know...

...Boyers, however, has enough to do without the Americans...

...The use of "inscribed" has a way of obscuring just who or what is doing the inscribing...

...and a concern with ideas, or with the relation between political ideas and the characters who hold them...

...The memory of these things, whether the Gulag, or the Final Solution, or the murder and torture campaigns of Latin American dictators, has been kept alive, in works of art or in more modest ways, against the suppression of memory by states and governments or the human impulse to censor what is too terrible to remember...

...In his preface he speaks of the "provincial element" in American fiction...

...Terrible things have happened in our time...