The Literary Blog Hop is a blogging activity hosted by the girls of The Blue Bookcase. This are unconditionally awesome and you should pay them a visit. You should also participate to the hop, which becomes more rich and complex with every edition. This week's prompt is...
Should literature have a social, political, or any other type of agenda? Does having a clear agenda enhance or detract from its literary value?
This is a trapped question as the answer doesn't lie in a clear yes or no. Yet, the answer is C, both of these answers are correct. Every book teaches in the sense that every book is trying to answer a difficult existential question and then can be read in a political/social regard. It's never "just a story". There is always a larger message planted by the writer and to me, the fun of literature is to decipher what it is. But you all know my stance on this already. Here's what I have to add this week about this though.
To have efficient, yet not overbearing political/social content, a novel has to bury his purpose to a certain extent. For example, you never want to hang out with the person who tried too much. The nut job who's climbing on podiums and yelling out loud is always a little startling. A writer like Ayn Rand often drowns her narrative in a political concern and alienates readers that are not already convinced. To me, a novel must be like the cool cat you want to hang out with. That guy/girl that acts and lives in a meaningful manner. A novel must make you want to change your life before giving you a political discourse. At least that's the way I see it.
Spitting ideas and ready-made formulas might make you look intelligent, but it's not going to change anything. The eternal Kurt Vonnegut once said: "Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia". The once great Chuck Palahniuk did just that when he wrote Fight Club. The story was narrated from a first person point of view and talked directly to a single interlocutor. That's where the power of literature comes into play. It might seem silly to try to convince one person instead of a million, but if your novel in convincing enough it will go change a million people, one person at the time. It's a highly philosophical novel that reached to millions of young men and ended up being a game changer in today's society. It gave young men around the globe (and maybe young girls too, but it struck me as being man lit.) the will to be responsible for their own destiny and I like to think it contributed to the end of this Generation X/Slacker thing*.
I say every novel has a political/social agenda, whether the writer is conscious or not about it. It can both enhance of detract from its literary value.To be efficient, it cannot be totally upfront with its claims. Even George Orwell's 1984 hit under the belt a little bit. There is no and there will not be a totalitarian government that will reinvent language. But there IS a very successful show named Big Brother on television and a generation of viewers so detached from their history that they don't even know where the term comes from. Orwell made everything literal and understandable, but you have to go a little beyond what is offered on the page to understand that it's not an upfront dictatorial government that Orwell warned about, but censorship and the alienation from one's culture and history through language. Of course, the novel goes further than that, but you get the point.
Literature is political, but not overly political. Don't let the screaming fools confuse you.
*Notice I don't make claims here, because I don't have empirical evidence. Nobody does because literature is not an exact science...Hell, it's not even a science to begin with.