A Critic of Literature and Politics (Writers and Politics, by Conor Cruise O'Brien)
Boyers, Robert
WRrrERS AND POLITICS, by Conor Cruise O'Brien. New York: Pantheon. 259 pp. $4.95. Conor Cruise O'Brien, at least on the international scene the radical-liberal intellectual par excellence,...
...The following passage illustrates O'Brien's brilliant gift for analysis: If we take an intellectual to be a person who prefers to try to do histhinking for himself...
...What makes O'Brien's example all the more salutary is that he is not merely a diplomat, not merely a political scientist, nor a mandarin in the international movements for progressive education...
...The truth which O'Brien, as a critic of society and ideas, seeks to explore leads him neither to quietism nor resolute intransigence...
...As Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana, he then worked persistently behind the scenes to stem the government's unwarranted intrusion into the university's afairs...
...He acquires in the process special capabilities and special limitations...
...O'Brien may somewhat overstate his case, but his point is in general well taken...
...This conclusion unfairly suggests a deliberate evasion or distortion on Lewis' part...
...O'Brien, who originally entered the UN in the service of Ireland, is deep ly concerned with Irish history and intellectual life...
...In Ghana, for example, political imprisonment became an accepted facet of government policy...
...This is not to suggest that he has no reservations about the political situations in which he is involved...
...he will take an almost morbid interest in hypocrisy...
...It might be naively optimistic to expect that this acknowledgement could provoke a widespread conversion to political activism, but it may help us to arrive at a new and challenging literary criticism...
...Conor Cruise O'Brien, at least on the international scene the radical-liberal intellectual par excellence, has recently published a new collection of articles and speeches, Writers and Politics...
...O'Brien adds that Western criticism, which systematically ignores unmistakeable political implications in the material it treats, indicates...
...In his introduction he examines the peculiar relationship between Ireland's orthodox institutions and the characteristic stance of her intellectual avant-garde...
...the ingratiating moral mask which a toughly acquisitive society wears before the world it robs...
...In a few pieces, O'Brien moves from topical criticism into literary history...
...a dangerously close intellectual atmosphere...
...The banality of liberalism, as the intellectual from Asia or Africa has long recognized, resides in its quietism with respect to putting its own house in order, and in the smugness with which liberal literati manage to separate the spiritual and moral from the immediately political...
...He quotes Lewis' suggestion that "'the form or soul of the modern epoch .. is the shape of individual experience during a period when political history affects all experience.' " He charges that Lewis subsequently fails to examine sufficiently the writers' relation to the general political experience...
...He is not an ideologue...
...Of course, literature is not always, nor even predominantly, involved with politics, and the critic who spuriously indulges his appetite for political advocacy at the expense of literary relevance and taste will be doing no service to his profession...
...O'Brien's book includes important articles on James Baldwin, George Orwell, Dwight Macdonald and The New Yorker, and on varieties of the contemporary political experience...
...As a man deeply commited to liberal values, including freedom of press and speech, O'Brien could not help being dismayed by what he saw...
...O'Brien's book demonstrates, then, that political advocacy is not tantamount to doctrinaire denial of complexities...
...He prefers to work for meaningful change rather than to permit an appreciation of nuances and complexities to paralyze his will...
...New York: Pantheon...
...The book concludes with a moving address to the academic community, in which he defends the idea of academic freedom even while recogniz ing the central importance of the university in the social and political framework of Ghana...
...As a United Nations official effectively in charge of the UN's Congo operation, and later as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana during a period of great unrest, he has been intimately involved in activities usually unfamiliar to Western intellectuals...
...He discusses R. W. B. Lewis' critical study The Picaresque Saint, which treats a distinguished group of modern novelists...
...O'Brien concludes that "the critic, like the turtle, is a specialist in fertile ambiguity: it is useful for survival...
...On the other hand, he describes the face of the late Adlai Stevenson as...
...He can tolerate and understand the needs of peoples in underdeveloped areas who must embrace drastic measures in order to project any future at all...
...For too long, the liberal's compulsive addiction to fashionable nuance has resulted in the attenuation of those militant elements which make liberalism worthy of endorsement...
...The implication also blurs the important point, that the habitual, virtually unconscious orientation prevents anyone from thinking the unthinkable as efficiently as any overt restriction...
...He is likely to setgreat store by irony, the versatile, durable, and easily camouflaged weapon of every ideological guer rilla...
...cause of the natural targets it presents to irony, and perhaps above all because of its peculiar social function in subordinating the meaning of words to the practical needs of the moment...
...It is both the weakness and the strength of the intellectual brought up in a Catholic tradition that he finds it peculiarly hard to accept such pragmatic intimations...
...Nor is O'Brien a dupe of the perennial party line...
...If this book r-, z, hes people in the literary community, it may stimulate a reexamination of political and literary orthodoxies...
...The two oustanding features of the book are O'Brien's exposure of the intellectual evasion practiced by Western critics and commentators—and his own passionate commitment to radical politics...
...That the Western critic resembles his Soviet counterpart more closely than he would like to suppose, "...by the way in which he acquiesces in the orthodoxy which prevails in his society," is far from a gratuitous indictment...
...He appealed to President Nkrumah without success...
...What O'Brien laments is the deterioration of public discourse in Western societies, largely due to the myopia which seems to afflict men of letters when they confront ugly political details...
...His book includes several long studies of Irish historical figures...
...then wesee that the intellectual, in a priestled community, must develop strengthened means of defendinghimself...
...he is also a literary man—a distinguished critic and literary historian...
...He accuses Lewis of a crucial failure to discharge the duties implicit in his subject...
Vol. 13 • March 1966 • No. 2
