Politics and Literature: Means and Ends in Koestler
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00203 |
| Date | 01 June 1999 |
| Published date | 01 June 1999 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Politics and Literature: Means and Ends
in Koestler
STEPHEN INGLE1
University of Stirling
The fruitfulness of imaginative literatureas source material for the student of politics
has been a subject for much debate over recent years, though the impactof literature
on the teaching of politics remains limited. This paper addresses by means of an
example (that of the relationship between means and ends) some of the fundamental
problems involved in the relationship and some of the advantages whichimaginative
literature might bring to our understanding of political issue and concepts. Following
introductory comments about the relationship between politics and literature in
general we consider the treatment of means and ends in political theory, especially
Machiavelli's claim that when the `act accuses, the result excuses'. Finally and
substantively we consider the treatmentof the means/end theme in Arthur Koestler's
Darkness at Noon and The Gladiators and conclude with some general comments
about the relationship between the study of politics and imaginative literature.
Shelley may have been thinking wishfully when he declared poets to be the
unacknowledged legislators of the world, Solzhenitsyn exaggerating when he
identi®ed writers as the ocial opposition in despotic states, but they and many
others at least acknowledged the importance to politics of imaginative literature.
Why is it, then, that imaginative literature ± novels, drama, poetry ± plays so
little part in the formal study of politics? True, there is a growing body of
scholars working in the area where politics and imaginative literature overlap
but few institutions of higher education include this area within their teaching
programme. Students and teachers of literature, on the other hand, have
frequently paid scrupulous attention to the political context within which
writers they are studying had to work and also, where they have considered it
important, to the nature of the ideological disposition of those writers. Students
of politics, however, particularly in the English-speaking countries, have felt
little obligation to explore the world of imaginative literature in order to assess
the contribution that writers might make to their understanding of politics.
Politics and Literature
Whitebrook, in a concise `State of the Art'2sets out the various ways in which
students of politics may approach the study of literature. They may study
literature as a process, considering the economic forcesthat shape its production
#Political Studies Association 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 CowleyRoad, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Political Studies (1999), XLVII, 329±344
1I should like to thank my colleagues Andrea Baumeister and Stanley Kleinberg who read and
commented helpfully on an earlier draft of this paper.
2M. Whitebrook, `Politics and literature?', Politics 15, 1 (1955), 55±62.
and the cultural forces that shape its style. They maystudy literature as illustra-
tion ± of certain political conditions or dilemmas. She cites here Koestler's
Darkness at Noon on the nature of totalitarianism or Melville's Billy Budd on
law versus liberty. They may study literature as (in Whitebrook's words)
moral education ± how to lead the good life. They may turn to literature to
understand historical processes or events better (as for example Barker does
when outlining the theory and practice of distributism by means of the novels of
G. K. Chesterton3or when Arblaster4uses Eliot's Felix Holt to exemplify the
nineteenth-century fear of the mob). Politics students may also study literature
as political theory. Whitebrook cites Johnson's Politics, Innocence and the
Limits of Goodness5as an example of the function of plays and novels in this
enterprise. Whitebrook, in conclusion, is aware that her `literature project' is
a risky business: `the case for taking literature into Politics . . . disturbs a
dependence on reason and rationality; it expands the concept of ``reality''; it
enlarges the vocabulary of politics .. . it provides the occasion for . . . the
imaginative contemplation of political possibilities'. She is surely right,
incidentally, to suggest that these categories may well blur into each other in
practice, but they each stand more or less independently as reasons why politics
students might bene®t from the study of literature.
If we want to understand the relationship between politics and literature we
really need some handle on what literature is. Quin tackles just this topic in How
Literature Works.6`We expect poets or novelists [for example] to be particular
about the words they use', he begins, `but there is more to it than that. A bad
novel is still a novel of sorts .. . all such texts have something in common: they
work in a particular way . . . it is because they work that reading them becomes a
literary experience'.7Recognizing a text as literature means recognizing that we
are being oered a literary experience, so we read a novel in preference to, say, a
Do-It-Yourself manual. Getting the most out of literature is an acquired skill
and the more we work at it the more it works on us; as T. S. Eliot remarked,8
every new novel we readmodi®es our recollected understanding of all the novels
we read previously. The reverse is also true, thanks to the `law of primacy',
which holds that earlier experiences are usually more formative because they
form a frame for later ones. To understand this is to appreciate that, almost by
de®nition, reading imaginative literature must be a processof interpretation and
what the reader takes from a novel will only coincidentally be just what the
author intended. The reader cannot help taking a sense of a word that the author
would not have had, indeed could not have had, since historyalte rsthe meaning
of words and phrases. And not just history. Eagleton argues that the reader has
a `socially structured way of seeing the world'.9What Eagleton wishes to
underline is that literature is part of the superstructure of social oppression and
thus `literary works are . . . forms of perception . . . and as such they have a
relation to the dominant way of seeing theworld which is the ``social mentality''
3R. Barker, Political Ideas in Modern Britain (London, Methuen, 1978).
4A. Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (Oxford, Blackwell, 1984).
5P. Johnson, Politics, Innocence and Goodness (London, Routledge, 1989).
6K. Quin, How Literature Works (London, Macmillan, 1992).
7Quin, How Literature Works,p.9.
8Quoted in Quin, How Literature Works, p. 16.
9T. Eagleton, `The Rise of English', in D. Walder (ed.), Literaturein the Modern World (London,
Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 25.
330 Politics and Literature
#Political Studies Association, 1999
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