One of my hang-ups as a writer has been this issue of politics and its role in fiction. Often, I come to the defense of politics in fiction, arguing that not only is it important, but an imperative. But let me be clear. No writer wants to be caged, to be told to write a certain kind of fiction. While not all fiction is, or should be, political, I think it’s a fallacy to argue that one can ignore the force that politics has on any given writer. It presses upon and wants to enter. Therefore, to ignore politics in fiction for the sake of ignoring politics, I think, becomes a form of escapism.

I’m thinking of all this because I just read an essay (“Outside the Whale”) by Salman Rushdie published in 1984 in his collection entitled, Imaginary Homelands. The essay, despite its peculiar introduction, uses George Orwell’s piece (from which Rushdie derives his own title) to introduce this question of politics and its role in literature. In Orwell’s essay (published in 1940), Orwell cites the work of Henry Miller and praises its ability to be ‘nonpolitical…non-ethical…non-literary…non-contemporary.’ In being so, Orwell argues, Miller’s work “can speak with the people’s voice.” Orwell than moves to dismiss the “politically committed generation” of Auden, Spender, and MacNeice. He writes, “On the whole, the literary history of the thirties seems to justify the opinion that a writer does well to keep out of politics.” He uses Miller’s comparison of Anais Nin to Jonah in the whale’s belly, writing “Miller himself is inside the whale,…a willing Jonah…He feels no impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting. It will be seen what this amounts to. It is a species of quietism.” Quietism, interestingly enough, becomes the crux of Orwell’s argument in Miller’s defense.

Rushdie argues that electing to ignore the world around him and retreating to the womb-like enclosure of the whale (the quietist worldview) is both impossible and a fallacy in our world. He asks us to remember the age in which Orwell lived, the age of Hitler and Stalin… “the overwhelming evils of exterminations and purges and fire-bombings, and all the appalling manifestations of politics-gone-wild.” And it is in response to this, Rushdie argues, that Orwell turned to escapism, to his notion of the ordinary man as victim and passive. It is odd, Rushdie goes on to argue, that the author of Animal Farm be “unwilling to concede that literature was best able to defend language, to do battle with the twisters, precisely by entering the political arena.” He writes, “The truth is that there is no whale. We live in a world without hiding places; the missiles have made sure of that. However much we may wish to return to the womb, we cannot be unborn…So, in place of Jonah’s womb, I am recommending the ancient tradition of making as big a fuss, as noisy a complaint about the world as is humanly possible. Where Orwell wished quietism, let there be rowdyism; the place of the whale, the protesting wail.” Rushdie’s point that we cannot isolate ourselves from the politics of our world therefore justifies the need for political fiction, for the “continual quarrel, the dialectic of history.” His argument that we are “radioactive” with history and politics is an important point to make, and a valid one, I feel. It forces each of us to ask ourselves what responsibility we have in addressing the political, in grappling with history. In making a fuss. Granted Rushdie is arguably on of our most political writers working today, I still think he makes an important point about politics and literature. A point that I believe is echoed in Sycamore’s mission statement.