Literature as Political Commentary

It’s All Political
(From chapter 13 of Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor)

Nearly all writing is political on some level. D.H. Lawrence’s work is profoundly political even when it doesn’t look like it, even when he is less overt than in Women in Love, where he has a character say of a robin that it looks like a “little Lloyd-George of the air.” I’m not quite sure how a robin resembles the then prime minister, but it’s clear Lawrence didn’t approve, and the character clearly shared her creator’s politics. I also know that’s not the real political element in that novel. No, his real political contribution is in setting a radical individualism in conflict with established institutions. Lawrence’s people keep refusing to behave, to submit to convention, to act in a way that conforms to expectations, even expectations of other conformists. ...

So, is every literary work political?

I can’t go that far. Some of my more political colleagues may tell you yes, that every work is either part of the social problem or part of the solution (they’ll give it to you with rather more subtlety than that, but that’s the gist). I do think, though, that most works must engage with their own specific period in ways that can be called political. Let’s say this: writers tend to be men and women who are interested in the world around them. That world contains many things, and on the level of society, part of what it contains is the political reality of the time - power structures, relations among classes, issues of justice and rights, interactions between the sexes and among various racial and ethnic constituencies. That’s why political and social considerations often find their way onto the page in some guise, even when the result doesn’t look terribly “political”.

An example. When Sophocles is a very old man, he finally writes the middle third of his Theban trilogy of plays, Oedipus at Colonus (406 BC), in which the old and frail Oedipus arrives at Colonus and receives the protection of the Athenian king,Theseus. Theseus is everything we might want in a ruler: strong, wise, gentle, tough when necessary, determined, cool-headed, compassionate, loyal, honest. Theseus protects Oedipus from potential harm and guides him to the sacred spot where the old man is fated to die. Is that political? I think so. You see, Sophocles is writing this not only at the end of his life but at the end of the fifth century BC, which is to say at the end of the period of Athenian greatness. The city-state is threatened from the outside by Spartan aggression and from the inside by leaders who, whatever their virtues, sure aren’t Theseus. What he’s saying is, in effect, we could really use a leader like Theseus again; maybe he could get us out of this mess and keep Athens from total ruin. Then outsiders (Creon in the play, the Spartans in reality) wouldn’t be trying to overrun us. Then we’d still be strong and just and wise. Does Sophocles actually say any of these things? No, of course not. He’s old, not senile. You say these things openly, they give you hemlock or something. He doesn’t have to say them, though; everyone who sees the play can draw his own conclusions: look at Theseus, look at whatever leader you have near to hand, look at Theseus again - hmmm (or words to that effect). See? Political.

All this matters. Knowing a little something about the social and political milieu out of which a writer creates can only help us understand her work, not because that milieu controls her thinking but because that is the world she engages when she sits down to write. When Virginia Woolf writes about women of her time only being permitted a certain range of activities, we do her and ourselves a great disservice by not seeing the social criticism involved. For instance, in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Lady Bruton invites Richard Dalloway, a member of parliament, and Hugh Whitbread, who has a position at court, to luncheon. Her purpose is to dictate to them material she wants to see introduced into legislation and sent as a letter to the Times, all the while protesting that she’s merely a woman who doesn’t understand these matters as a man would. What Woolf shows us is a very capable, if not entirely lovable, woman using the fairly limited Richard and the completely doltish Hugh to make her point in a society which would not take the point seriously if it was seen coming directly from her. In the years after the Great War, the scene reminds us, ideas were judged on the basis of the class and gender of the person putting them forward. Woolf handles all of this so subtly that we may not think of it as political, but it is.

It always - or almost always - is.