Writers are individuals whose deepest attachment is not to their country or to a sociopolitical group but to art

ACADEMIC critics and nationalistic sentiments corral writers, who are an unruly, anarchic species, into neat lots where they may be dissected and evaluated, much as sheep are driven into a pen to be slaughtered before they are sold to a hungry public. Thus, the body of literature, which is an amorphous universal mass, is cut up into nationalistic categories from which then sprout such mutations as gender studies, post-colonial studies, etc.

However, a writer only incidentally belongs to a particular group at a particular time. For above everything else, a writer is an individual whose deepest attachment is not to his or her country but to art. Nationality, race, sex and sexual preference, religious persuasion, the biases peculiar to one’s brain that control our ideological choices, one’s unique perception of reality, are all accidental com-ponents that combine to make up the individual, and to belong to any one group confers no special merit on a writer.

Any artist’s compulsion to create is driven by an obsessive and tormented anxiety to discover what stubbornly remains a mystery within the individual self. That obsessively repeated attempt in a succession of works to probe what Milan Kundera calls “the enigma of the self” engages the artist in seeking that elusive form, executed in a style that is still a vague intimation in the mind, which, when arrived at by the probing artist, will appear as a revelation. In literature, success comes to a few writers, and their very names become the lens through which we perceive reality — Kafka, Conrad, Borges, T. S. Eliot, Beckett, for example. With each, any question of nationalism is an irrelevance.

Born in Ireland, living most of his life in France, Beckett wrote his early work in English, his later work in French, then translated his French into English, and we now call ‘Beckettian’ the world and the language in which he represented that world, and when we say, ‘Beckettian’, we mean something to be apprehended in the style unique to the individual named Beckett and not to someone we might refer to as an Irish writer. While people who have not read Beckett can have no comprehension of a Beckettian world, the instantaneously unique vision suggested by the names of some writers is experienced universally: you’ve only to say ‘Kafkaesque’ or ‘Orwellian’, and everyone knows what you mean. Again, the world they make us see comes from their individual self, and the fact that Kafka was born in Czechoslovakia and Orwell in India has nothing to do with it.

Except for those aggressive self-promoters who are eager to push themselves into prominence, and so will join some bandwagon, some ‘-ism’ that sometimes is no more than a fancy trend to catch the public eye, most writers struggle along with their individuality. With reference to ‘-isms’, everyone knows the important early 20th-century movement called Surrealism but who can name a single writer other than André Breton who wrote under that banner?

Early in the 20th-century a number of poets in London called themselves Imagists and attracted much attention, but the poets we continue to read from that period are three free-floating individuals: Yeats, Eliot and Auden. In mid-20th-century England, Philip Larkin emerged as the common man’s poet, the sort of decent chap who made no apology for being ordinary and was without the pretension of the poets who looked to the Continent to boost their inspiration. He wanted to remain plain English, see? Parochial poetry written in pedantic verse paraded across England and given a national standing ovation: an utter mediocrity.

Larkin received high estimation because a sentimental public loved what he flaunted as his Englishness, and it is only now, a good half a century later, that scholars are beginning to show that the real poets of that time were two who had quietly pursued the compulsions of their individuality, which had little to do with England and everything with the art of poetry: Basil Bunting and Christopher Middleton. This is what happens when literature is associated with gleeful nationalist sentiments: like the mob at a football match, people wave flags, and no matter how inferior the performance, remain drunk with nationalist pride, and keep loudly cheering on their hero though he keeps missing the goal with each shot.

One reason why inferior writers who are easily identified by their nationalist label are given an exaggerated status is that the professors of literature create narrowly thematic courses based on some sociopolitical context that happens to be the popular issue of the time. The discipline called black studies appeared at the height of the anti-segregation movement in America in the 1960s and 70s, and there were courses in African-American literature in which there was only one criterion for the inclusion of the literature to be studied, that it be written by an African-American, regardless of its quality. The next burning issue of the day was feminism that led to the founding of feminist studies, which produced its own narrowly defined courses, of which I remember one on Irish women writers. The only reason why you were taught in that course was because you were an Irish woman, and whether or not you were any good as a writer was utterly irrelevant. The next new wave was labelled post-colonial studies and courses popped up all over the world that established an exclusive niche for that category: it taught books written by people born in certain African and South Asian countries, with no questions asked about their literary worth, and certainly ignored the fact that most of the books were third-rate, if not absolutely worthless, as works of the imagination.

The academic industry and the publishing industry have become the tools of capitalism, which imposes statistical formulae in order to judge success, scornfully rejects any aesthetic consideration, has no interest in education’s long-term value, sees no intrinsic worth in literature if it does not produce a monetary return, and refers all questions demanding arbitration to its presiding chief who reads only the numbers on the balance sheet: the accountant. To appease this merciless god, academics and publishers have been pushed into justifying their downward slide by persuading themselves that mediocrity is excellence, that the mindless noise that comprises the majority of today’s popular culture is high art, and whoever flies the national flag is to be admitted to the halls of glory.

Most writers are quite happy to serve on the publishers’ assembly line to manufacture more of the product that sells because, as Flannery O’Connor put it, “They are interested in being a writer, not in writing. They are interested in their names at the top of something printed, it matters not what.” There are very few writers who, having experienced what the great tradition before them has achieved, acquire the ambition to be worthy of it. Most, instead, don’t even take a passing glimpse at that tradition but protect their ignorance as if it was a form of virginity their religion required they guard against in case the seductive beauty that the past had achieved penetrated their soul with a love of literature.

It takes a brave soul who so firmly believes in the primacy of the individual as artist as to refuse to be published if that individuality were to be compromised. One such was the poet Elizabeth Bishop. Although as a woman she agreed politically with the agenda of the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s, as a poet she rejected the idea of collections of poetry that contained only the work of women poets and refused to be published in them. In a letter to May Swenson, November 7, 1971, she wrote “I have always refused to be in any collections, or reviews, or special numbers of just women … Always”. Referring to the anthology she had been invited to be part of, Women Poets in English, she asks in capital letters: WHY, and adds, “Literature is literature, no matter who produces it … I don’t like things compartmentalised like that … I like black and white, yellow & red, young & old, rich & poor, and male & female, all mixed up … and see no reason for segregating them, for any reason at all.”

Wonderful that statement: Literature is literature, no matter who produces it.

An individual named Elizabeth Bishop produces it. Or an individual named Fernando Pessoa. Or Ivan Bunin. Or Hart Crane, Felisberto Hernández, Felipe Alfau, Georges Perec, these and many more of our recent contemporaries, each attempted to reshape language into an entrancingly new formal rendering of experience and produced a convincing new interpretation of reality which, when we had overcome our initial shock on seeing the new form, became our way of seeing.

On the subject of one’s individuality, Flaubert wrote in a letter to Louise Colet, August 26, 1846, “I am no more modern than I am ancient, no more French than Chinese: and the idea of la patrie, the fatherland … has always seemed to me narrow, restricted, and ferociously stupid. I am the brother in God of everything that lives, from the giraffe and the crocodile to man, and the fellow-citizen of everyone inhabiting the great furnished mansion called the universe”.

Other great writers have asserted the importance of the individual. In a letter to Alexander Pope, 29 Sep 1725, Jonathan Swift wrote, “I have ever hated all nations, professions and communities and all my love is towards individuals”.

When his Gulliver’s Travels was published in France with the translator skipping passages he considered not relevant for French readers, Swift wrote to the translator, L’Abbé des Fontaines, in July 1727: “We may concede that the taste of nations is not always the same. But we are inclined to believe that good taste is the same everywhere that there are people of wit, of judgment, and of learning. … The same vices and the same follies reign everywhere; at least, in all the civilised countries of Europe: and the author who writes only for a city, a province, a kingdom, or even an age, warrants so little to be translated, that he deserves not even to be read.”

The finest rejection of patriotic art is to be seen in one of the greatest works of art, the novel À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, (In Search of Lost Time), by Marcel Proust. In its final volume, Proust refers to Maurice Barrès, an eminent critic of his day, as having said that the artist must first and foremost serve the glory of his country. It was a familiar old reactionary demand that required the artist to produce work of which the subject matter projected a conspicuous nationalistic appeal. Proust strongly rejects Barrès by stating that the only way an artist can serve the glory of his country is “by being an artist, which means only on condition that, while in his own sphere he is studying laws, conducting experiments, making discoveries which are as delicate as those of science, he shall think of nothing — not even his country — but the truth which is before him.”

In the case of the literary artist, what I understand Proust to mean by “studying laws, conducting experiments” and “making discoveries” is that in order to understand the mystery of human existence through an analysis of the images accumulated in the storehouse of memory, the writer’s investigation entails testing psychological and philosophical hypotheses for which the changing colour of language in the test-tube of memory is the examining medium, and the writer searches, like a chemist, for new combinations of the elements of his essential material, experimenting with a variety of aesthetic approaches to find the one application that most convinces him as illuminating the subject with a hitherto unimagined clarity.

As for “the truth which is before him”, which Proust says is the artist’s principal preoccupation: what the writer always has before him is his vision of reality which being in a constant turmoil of instability, beclouded among shadows one day and blindingly lit up the next, demands the focus of his interpretive attention so that he can make one more attempt to assemble a series of newly shaped sentences that, at the very least, suggest the outline of a previously unseen and yet undeniably credible picture, and that, when the searching language pierces the obscuring static, hit on a wavelength where a beautiful new music is heard.

To show the error of people who reject aesthetic imperatives and demand an easily identifiable nationalist relevance, Proust reminds us of what happened at the time of the French Revolution when the revolutionaries flaunted their civic pride by condemning artists like Watteau and La Tour, who, with the passage of time, when the fury of the Revolution had subsided, brought, says Proust, “more honour upon France than all those of the Revolution”. One is reminded of how the Nazis and the Soviets similarly condemned as decadent and obscene any art and literature, even music, that did not meekly and obediently follow the official party line.

The Soviet ideal of art was stated by one of the Russian presidents, Khrushchev: “Creative activity in the domain of literature and art must be penetrated with the spirit of struggle for communism, must imbue hearts with buoyancy, with the strength of convictions, must develop socialist consciousness and group discipline.” This is quoted in the opening chapter of Nabokov’s Lectures on Russian Literature, where he also quotes Lenin as saying, “Every artist has the right to create freely; but we, Communists, must guide him according to plan.”

We, Communists, must guide him. Such priestly presumption, such religious arrogance!

And what was the result of these noble patriotic strictures that demanded the Russian writer possess socialist consciousness and group discipline, be religiously guided, and serve the party line or be banished to hard labour in Siberia or, like Nabokov, be exiled forever? In the literature that the Soviets permitted, Nabokov quotes this example from a 1957 novel called The Big Heart by Antonov:

“Olga was silent. ‘Ah,’ cried Vladimir. ‘Why can’t you love me as I love you.’ ‘I love my country,’ she said. ‘So do I,’ he exclaimed. ‘And there is something I love even more strongly, ‘ Olga continued, disengaging herself from the young man’s embrace. ‘And that is?’ he queried. Olga let her limpid eyes rest on him, and answered quickly: ‘It is the Party’.”

Having shown the imbecility that passes for literature, when the artist’s larger aesthetic vision is suppressed to be substituted by constrictions imposed by the state in the name of an absolutist religion called patriotism, Nabokov then declares: “the universal family of gifted writers transcends national barriers”. What is important for Nabokov is “the mind that conceived and composed” the work which is presented as “a specific world imagined and created by individual genius”, and not that the writer was a Russian or a Chinese. Again, it is that individual genius, says Nabokov, which we value in writers like Pushkin, Gogol, Shakespeare, Dante, Baudelaire, Poe, Flaubert, Homer, and we might add his own name to that list. It has nothing to do with nationality.

If you had read Lolita and The Heart of Darkness without knowing who had written them, you might have been surprised that of these two English novels the first had been written by a Russian, the second by a Pole, but knowing that fact would have made no difference at all to the extraordinary visions continuing to glow in your imagination after you had read them.

A writer’s aim should not be merely to produce what is acceptable to the current market but to create a work which astonishes the universal imagination with its shocking new restructuring of the phenomena of existence so that the audience is left staring amazedly at a strange, and until then incredulous, transformation of reality, as if the serene and mysteriously smiling face of Mona Lisa had suddenly morphed into a Cubist portrait by Picasso; the human face torn to pieces that yet, when the apparent fragmentation re-arranges itself as a new form, settles in our imagination as beauty.

ZULFIKAR GHOSE is a poet, novelist and literary critic. Apart from criticism and poetry, he has also penned many novels, including the trilogy The Incredible Brazilian. He is professor emeritus in the English department at the University of Texas at Austin.