The "Uses" of Literature for Politics

How does reading fiction help us think better about politics?

David Garrick as King Lear, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Today I will be adapting a lecture I give in my course on Politics and Literature that focuses on two main readings: First, an article entitled “Literature and Politics” published in 3AM Magazine by an author named Yong Jie, and second, a publication in the Political Science Reviewer by

Lee Trepanier

entitled “What Can Political Science Learn from Literature?” I would highly recommend both for your reading, but I do a lot of (hopefully faithful) summary of them here.

To recap where we left off in my last post, we considered Robert Redfield’s lecture “Social Science Among the Humanities,” which argues for a unified view of the supposedly disparate groupings of disciplines. The social sciences and the humanities have a central unity, Redfield claims, because they are studying the same thing: human beings in community, in political society. And our goal in performing these studies in either case is to learn important things about human nature. The anthropologist, Redfield says, studies the root of the tree, what might have once been called more “primitive” cultures, while the scholar of English studies the flower, but, Redfield says, it’s all the same tree: humanity.

Perhaps the most controversial part of Redfield’s claim, at least among contemporary audiences, is the assumption that there is a constant human nature. That is, Redfield is confident that whether we are studying the religious practices of the Navajo or reading the religious works of Roman Stoics, we are learning something about humanity, not just one slice of humanity in history but humanity itself. In other words, we are learning true things about human nature. The claim is that we can in fact use “humane” studies in history, literature, art, etc. to learn useful things about politics, things that Redfield thinks are essential to the work of the social scientist. The social scientist, he says, can perhaps draw some of his research questions from these works, and certainly be capable of interpreting empirical data in a richer way with a better understanding of his human subjects.

But more than simply “useful” things, Redfield argues elsewhere that perhaps we can find something in these texts that appeal to longings inside all of us for an order and a purpose to our lives that may be missing in certain modern contexts where we are free to make our own designs for living, but often do so quite poorly. In other words, perhaps we can draw on the wisdom of those who have thought about what human beings need as human beings in literature and philosophy and history to aid our ongoing attempts to better ourselves as individuals in the here and now. In studying what he calls “folk” societies and the “expressive documents” they have produced, and by contrasting them to our own, we can see some of our deficiencies, things that leave us wanting more. These two essays for today push Redfield’s ideas a bit further and provide some useful tools for reading and understanding the authors and novels I will treat in more detail in future posts.

Yong Jie’s essay begins with a quote from Italo Calvino, from his book The Uses of Literature. Calvino makes the claim that “Literature is necessary to politics above all when it gives a voice to the one who doesn’t have a voice, when it gives a name to the one who doesn’t have a name, and especially to all that political language excludes or tends to exclude…Literature is like a ear that can hear more than Politics; Literature is like an eye that can perceive beyond the chromatic scale to which Politics is sensitive.”  

Jie uses his essay to unpack these three central claims that Calvino makes here: the first is that literature is important first and foremost when it represents someone who does not traditionally have voice or status in politics. The second and third are that literature has what Jie calls a “greater sensitivity of perception,” of “hearing” and “seeing” things that we typically don’t when “doing” politics proper (campaigning, electioneering, or even studying masses of humanity in empirical aggregates). So Jie says, let’s unpack exactly how literature could represent the excluded, and then talk about why that’s necessary and important, but then turn at the end to other reasons that literature is important and useful for politics.  

How might literature be able to represent the excluded in a way that normal political discourse doesn’t? Well, Jie says, perhaps it’s the focus on the individual in literature. There are characters, frequently main characters, frequently narrators that give us insight into one person, an individual. When we engage in political discourse, we frequently deal in the abstract. We talk about “republicans” or “trump voters” or “blue states” or “hispanic voters” as monoliths, or we speak of “Congress,” “elected officials,” “bureaucrats,” with little time for nuance in many cases. Where in politics we frequently get subsumed into abstract groups—our ethnicity, our party, our religion, our location—literature zooms in on the thoughts of one individual (the author) as presented in the characters our authors create (the subjects of literature).  

Thus, Jie argues,  

Literature then seeks to portray humanity in all its infinite variations. It celebrates individuality, diversity in being. And those at the margins of society, those who never quite fitted in, are those to whom writers have always been drawn, have always tried to depict… If writers crave variety, readers too share the addiction, glad of the opportunity to live the world through the consciousness of another, to listen to those who, though speaking in voices completely different to their own, somehow speak for them.

How does literature “hear” more than politics? Jie argues gives us the voice of an individual, where politics tends to drown out the individual in favor of the crowd.  

Jie goes on to argue that literature provides breadth and depth that politics frequently obscures. In literature, we can “see” shades of human belief, opinion, action, and psychology that are not obvious in our polarized political climate. In politics, we tend towards a “bipolarity of vision.” Students of political science will be familiar with the concept of “polarization,” where those aligned with the two major American parties are clustering together more, rather than “reaching across the aisle,” and are moving further apart on issues. When that sort of polarization drives our political conversation, nuance is frequently lost. Literature could perhaps provide an antidote to that. Perhaps. Literature, Jie says, “eschews such a binary vision, seeking instead to perceive and portray human reality in all its complexity. In so doing, it is able to enrich and illuminate political issues, highlighting the ambiguities and nuances that politics may overlook.”

Both of these points lead back to that first claim from Calvino: the idea that there are works of literature that give “voice to the voiceless.” Jie provides two specific examples, one a novel that shed light on the Sudanese civil war and brought it to international attention, and of course the classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin that some credit with inspiring concerted abolitionist movements. Both of these books, Jie argues, took the plight of an oppressed group who was being overlooked, and, by virtue of their popularity, brought that oppression and plight to the forefront of people’s minds.  

The proposition here, then, is that literature can do in some cases what “politics” ordinarily does or cannot. It can perhaps make readers as individuals sensitive to the sufferings of others in ways that political debates do not or cannot, and that it can do that on a large enough scale to matter politically. Jie seems to believe something that Russell Kirk will treat at length in the lecture I will discuss in my next post: that literature can serve to teach us how we ought to be. In other words, he seems to think it can help us to be better people. He says that literature facilitates the process of advancing the welfare of every citizen by “ensuring that all voices enter into the debate in society as to how we should live, and by what rules we should be governed. It allows the hitherto excluded the opportunity to assert themselves and be counted for, to say, ‘here I am, I matter, too.’”

There is some observable evidence that this actually works, Jie argues. In the case of reforms in the Congo, England, and America, we can point to particular works of literature that were popular enough to inspire outcry and movements for change. So literature succeeds, he says, in changing the world by “naming and portraying” it as it is for us who read to find. We see these examples of injustice in literature and our moral imaginations are awakened to the dire situation of those in need. Jie concludes that “Literature is necessary to politics above all when it represents the excluded because of its capacity to activate the emotional impulse required for ethical action, thereby compelling change.”  

But is that all literature is good for? Is that the only way politics “needs” literature? Jie says no.

Jie concludes his piece by arguing that it’s obvious that literature does other things for readers and for political communities that are politically important that go beyond precisely what Calvino helpfully highlights. For example, literature preserves and cultivates language. If you don’t already believe that language is important to politics, think of fraught battles, historical and contemporary, over “official languages,” naming conventions, anxiety about changing language norms, or efforts to preserve and teach dying native languages. Think, too, of the politics of language as portrayed in works like George Orwell’s 1984, which I will also devote a post to in the future: a large part of Orwell’s vision for a dystopian future is one where language is changed and forced upon people to change the way they think, where old ways of thinking, old books, old morals are purged, literally thrown down the memory hole, and thoughts are made unthinkable by a violent modification of language. As long as we can hold onto these old books, Jie argues, we can hold onto something critically important about our language: our shared moral vocabulary. 

On this subject of moral vocabulary, Jie argues further that broad reading gives us a richer vocabulary with which to understand, interpret, and explain our world. Think of the richness of an image that can be stirred up with just a simple reference to a major work of literature if both speaker and audience are familiar with the thing referenced. If I describe someone as “Achillean,” or describe a situation as “Kafkaesque,” if you recognize the character or the author I am referencing, I have just induced you to perform an imaginative exercise, recalling past reading and giving color and depth to whatever it is that I am describing. Literature that engages us in this way “stirs us from the sleepwalk of our lives,” according to Zadie Smith, it rouses us from our glazed over, zombified, Netflix binging slumber and asks us to encounter the world as it presents itself to us, and humanity as it exists in the world. Jie concludes that “a constructive engagement with politics presupposes… an active engagement with life, which literature does much to develop.” When we actively question the world around us, we become better at doing politics, at understanding and doing things aimed at preserving the good and the peace of our political communities.

Finally, Jie says, literature can just simply be good. We need not always search for some sort of utilitarian purpose for our reading. Good literature doesn’t need to be immediately “useful!” It ought to be able to be enjoyed on its own without justifying itself. In its essence, in its artistic quality, in its goodness, in its beauty, it can simply be delighted in rather than crassly co-opted. An example that always comes to mind for me, on the lighter side of literary enjoyment, is P.G. Wodehouse. He is a simply delightful writer. I would not expect readers of Wodehouse to emerge with any grand political theory, but I would expect them to enjoy themselves, and this, it turns out, is good enough.

Let me turn briefly now to Lee Trepanier’s excellent piece “What Can Political Science Learn from Literature?” The piece is a fairly dense tour of the history of political thought in many ways, and will reward close reading in its own right. Trepanier begins by arguing that there has been, for much of political philosophical history, a skepticism towards the idea that literature or poetry, “fiction” writing or storytelling, is the best avenue for telling truth or learning true things. This is most famously seen in Plato’s Republic, where Socrates asks, in constructing an ideal “City in Speech,” what sort of stories would we want our children to hear and learn, if they are to grow up to guard the city well? Do we want them to hear stories of the gods misbehaving (to put it mildly), or of heroes like Odysseus being praised for deception, or of people murdering and backstabbing and committing all sorts of crimes but being pardoned because of a god’s favor, or for a simple prayer and offering to the gods? No, of course not! These are horrible examples of virtue that we ought not teach to our children if we do not want to see them imitate them. So, Socrates reasons in the Republic, if we want to build the ideal city, we will only allow in those “poets” who tell stories that cultivate the virtues we want our children to possess, who tell tales that teach truth and cultivate virtue in both form and their content. This skepticism of the potential corrupting power of literature and poetry is a theme that, Trepanier argues, runs through Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas.  

But Trepanier suggests that there has been a modern turn, what he calls a “revitalization of literature as a source of legitimate knowledge” in the 20^th century. And political science as a discipline, Trepanier suggests, has taken advantage of this turn and begun looking at literature as a “source of political knowledge.”

There is a particular example Trepanier cites that I think is instructive for my purposes in this series, and for how I generally approach literature in my teaching and scholarship as someone in the discipline of political science. Trepanier recounts a case where a scholar of English challenged the use of Shakespeare for political lessons by two political theorists in a published academic piece, claiming that because they “were not literary scholars” they “lacked an explicit methodology to interpret Shakespeare.” Trepanier summarizes the response as follows:

In rebuttal, Bloom stated his assumptions and methodology for Burkhardt: (1) a number of authors in literature used their art to educate people into their political responsibility; (2) as the “architectonic science,” political philosophy was uniquely situated to examine literature because it investigated “the whole man in relation to the order of the whole”; (3) therefore, political philosophers were able to reproduce the authors’ teachings of political philosophy from their texts.

By “architectonic science,” Bloom meant that political philosophy, or political theory is the discipline that studies human beings as they exist in the real world: in political communities. Every other humane discipline (history, literature, etc) zooms in on a particular facet of man’s life in political community, while political theory tries to deal with it on the whole. So, in other words, more simply, the fact that we are social scientists doesn’t mean we can’t take perfectly good pieces of literature and use them for our own purposes in ways that would make my colleagues in the English literature department scream.

But here again, we’ve returned to that controversial claim we first saw from Redfield: the claim is that “certain phenomena and values, like human nature and natural rights, were transhistorical, thereby allowing the political philosopher to decipher and convey universal teachings from literature regardless of the period when it was written.”

It is here that I often encourage my students to reflect seriously about their own assumptions about human nature, if they have them. While students predictably fall on all sides of questions like “are human beings basically good,” many students also express skepticism that some sort of essential human nature exists at all. But, as Redfield has argued, many social scientists (perhaps unintentionally) seem to assume something about “human nature” when they try to understand, interpret, and explain human behavior, and perhaps someday hope to actually predict it. Social scientists are often making claims about what “people” do in certain situations, faced with certain choices, and why they do it. On Redfield’s argument, that itself is a key assumption about the presence of some kind of meaningful human nature.

Even for those social scientists who are more skeptical of the existence of such a constant human nature, there is much to be gained from the study of literature. Trepanier helpfully gives his readers a numbered list of “contributions” literature makes to the discipline of political science, things literature has taught us to do, along with particular examples of thinkers who have applied literature to their study of political thought. So, on Trepanier’s account, literature has been used:

1. To study aspects of politics that behavioralist methodology fails to describe and analyze

2. To broaden our understanding of politics by expanding our experiences vicariously with another political reality and world

3. To imagine what past and future political problems, situations, and values may or have emerged

4. To serve as a case study to test political science theories and Hypotheses 5. To have political scientists revisit the normative assumptions of their own methodologies and claims

6. To examine how literature, such as storytelling, is a form of political rhetoric to persuade people

7. To serve pedagogical purposes to teach politics more effectively to students

Furthermore, if we incorporate the findings from the “literary turn” in political science, we can add the following values that literature brings to political science:

1. To provide a type of protection from public persecution (Strauss)

2. To provide insight into political reality (Voegelin)

3. To educate people in questioning the nature and effect of one’s political regime (Zuckert)

4. To educate people in political responsibility (Bloom)

5. To create certain moral capacities in citizens to practice democratic governance (Nussbaum, Rorty)

6. To better identify ideological bias and power structures in society (Said, Eagleton, Butler, Botting)

7. To decipher the original purpose of a text during the time it was written (Skinner, Pocock)

Trepanier concludes, much like Jie, that “The top-down approach of the social sciences and philosophy, starting from first premises and principles, needs the bottom-up approach of literature, with its particularities and concreteness, to fully flesh out what constitutes political life.” What a politically-minded reader can gain from studying literature is exposure to “particularities” that challenge the reader’s thoughts and feelings, and ask the reader to consider new questions they may not have thought about before. While the particular answers arrived at may be important, what is in focus right now is the shaping power of literature on the mind, imagination, and morals of the reader. It is to that subject that I will turn in my next post, with Russell Kirk’s lecture on the Moral Imagination. Kirk will argue that we, as human beings, have a capacity or a faculty within us that allows us to recognize and appreciate human dignity, and that that capacity is sharpened and honed by good study of good literature. But, he will argue, we also risk having our moral imagination stunted or blunted or corrupted by works that spring from a “diabolical imagination.”