“Life aims to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously,
drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware. In this state of god-like awareness one
sings; in this realm the world exists as poem”
Henry Miller- The Wisdom of the Heart
“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it
without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a
great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all
kinds of perfidy and baseness.”
― Leon Trotsky, Diary in Exile, 1935
“The discovery of the art of reading is intimate, obscure,
secret, almost impossible to explain.”
― Alberto Manguel, Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions
"Art is 'the cognition of life.' It is therefore a form
of thinking about the world in which the symbols and signs of culture are
wielded in the expression of feelings, emotion and thoughts…"
Aleksandr Voronsky-Art as the Cognition of Life
Literature in an age of reaction
Alberto Manguel has spent much of his intellectual life
writing about reading, books, libraries and the preservation of cultural
memory. That is no small matter at a time when culture is increasingly
subordinated to commercial calculation; libraries and other public institutions
face financial pressure. Serious reading is forced to compete with a digital
environment organised overwhelmingly around speed, distraction and profit. His
latest work, Resistance, published in Yale University Press’s “Why I
Write” series, poses questions that should concern every serious reader and
writer. Can society be compelled to recognise the evidence? Can literature help
human beings see the world as it really is? Why have authoritarian regimes
repeatedly feared books, and what responsibility does the writer bear when
truth itself comes under political attack?
These are not abstract literary questions. Resistance
appears amid an increasingly visible crisis of capitalist society in which
governments manufacture narratives to justify war and repression, historical
falsification becomes integrated into political life, universities and cultural
institutions face financial and ideological pressures, and enormous
corporations exercise unprecedented influence over the production and
circulation of information. At the same time, the extraordinary development of
artificial intelligence has provoked understandable anxiety among writers,
artists and intellectuals about the future of creative labour and even the
distinction between genuine intellectual creation and mechanically generated
cultural material. In such circumstances, Manguel’s insistence on the written
word as a means of discovering and preserving truth has undeniable value.
The difficulty arises when the argument moves from the
defence of literature to the meaning of resistance itself. Manguel suggests
that literature may ultimately amount to an affirmation, a continuing refusal
to surrender before falsehood and barbarism, before arriving at the tentative
proposition that perhaps this is enough. That hesitation is significant. If the
statement means that literature cannot overthrow governments or substitute for
political organisation, it is obviously true. No serious conception of artistic
creation should demand that novels, poems and plays function as political
manifestos. But if literature as moral affirmation is proposed as an adequate
response to the social forces threatening culture and civilisation, then
Manguel has arrived at the limits of the liberal conception of resistance.
Literature can illuminate reality, but illumination is not transformation. It
can preserve historical consciousness, but consciousness becomes historically
decisive only when it enters into a relationship with social forces capable of
acting upon it.
Why censors fear books
Manguel is right that censors fear books, but the more
difficult question is why they fear them. Writing is not inherently subversive.
Libraries contain defences of monarchy alongside celebrations of revolution,
justifications of empire beside denunciations of colonial oppression, and
reactionary works beside the greatest expressions of human emancipation. The
censor does not fear paper and ink. What authoritarian governments fear is the
possibility that ideas may articulate suppressed social experiences, preserve
memories that official history attempts to obliterate, and give people concepts
through which they can understand their circumstances. A book becomes
politically dangerous when the truth it contains intersects with the
experiences and aspirations of living human beings.
Dante provides an instructive example because the Divine
Comedy is inseparable from the historical world in which it was created.
Dante does not speak from some timeless cultural realm standing above society.
He writes out of the intensely conflict-ridden civilisation of late medieval
Italy, from the standpoint of an exile whose personal fate had been intertwined
with the political convulsions of Florence. His poem achieves universality not
by escaping historical specificity but through it. Dante names individuals,
condemns political and ecclesiastical corruption, judges the powerful and
places popes and politicians within his moral universe. The enduring power of
the Commedia derives precisely from this extraordinary interpenetration
of the personal, political, historical and universal.
The contemporary vocabulary of “resistance” frequently moves
in the opposite direction. Resistance has become a characteristic term of
liberal cultural discourse because it can accommodate almost any form of
individual disapproval while leaving the social foundations of what is being
resisted unexplored. One can resist by reading, writing, purchasing a
particular book, attending an exhibition, making a film or declaring oneself
opposed to authoritarianism. The crucial questions gradually disappear:
resistance to what social forces, conducted by which social classes, and
directed towards what historical objective? Once stripped of these questions,
resistance ceases to describe a process through which society might actually be
transformed and instead becomes an ethical posture. The individual proves that they
have not inwardly submitted, while the conditions producing the catastrophe
continue largely undisturbed.
Argentina and the social roots of repression
Manguel’s connection with Argentina makes these questions
particularly significant. The savagery of the military dictatorship cannot
adequately be remembered merely as an assault upon writers, books and
intellectual freedom. The junta certainly censored literature, persecuted
intellectuals and attempted to suppress cultural opposition, but this formed
part of a far wider programme of social and political repression directed
against workers, students, left-wing organisations and all those regarded as
threatening the existing economic and political order. The burning of books
cannot therefore be separated from the suppression of the people who might read
them, distribute them and act upon their implications.
The great upheavals preceding the dictatorship demonstrate
why this distinction matters. The Cordobazo of 1969 revealed the explosive
potential of the Argentine working class and indicated the depth of the social
crisis confronting the ruling elite. What the Argentine state feared was not
literature conceived abstractly but the development of political consciousness
among social forces capable of challenging the established order. Books could
form part of that process because culture can preserve historical experience
and provide language through which previously isolated experiences become
understood collectively. The dictatorship therefore sought not simply to
silence writers but to destroy the political and social environment in which
radical ideas might gain mass influence.
Manguel’s later tenure as director of Argentina’s National
Library also raises, without requiring any question about his personal
sincerity, the broader relationship between cultural institutions and political
power. Libraries, museums, universities and publishing houses cannot hover
permanently above the economic conditions of the societies that sustain them. Political
decisions within a specific economic system ultimately shape their resources,
priorities, and accessibility. The defence of cultural institutions
consequently cannot be separated indefinitely from questions concerning who
possesses society’s wealth, how public resources are allocated and what
cultural activities are considered socially necessary. A government can praise
national culture while imposing economic policies that undermine the material
conditions required for its flourishing. The contradiction is social, not
personal.
Literature and objective reality
The strongest aspect of Manguel’s argument is the conviction
that literature can enable readers to see reality more clearly. This
proposition takes on particular importance after decades in which significant
tendencies within academic and cultural thought questioned whether objective
reality could be meaningfully represented at all. Postmodernism transformed
historical truth into competing narratives, displaced the analysis of social
structures in favour of discourse and increasingly treated claims to objective
knowledge with suspicion. Whatever Manguel’s differences with Marxism, his
insistence that literature participates in the discovery of truth opposes this
intellectual retreat.
The great tradition of realism rested precisely upon the
conviction that society possesses an objective character that art can
penetrate. Balzac and Thomas Mann remain perhaps the classic demonstration. His
own conscious political sympathies hardly made him a revolutionary. Yet the
artistic seriousness with which he examined post-revolutionary French society
compelled him to reproduce, with extraordinary insight, the social forces
transforming it. Marx and Engels admired Balzac not because he supplied an
approved political programme, but because his artistic honesty revealed the
movement of French society with a power that exceeded his conscious political
prejudices. Something similar can be said of Tolstoy’s relationship to Russian
society, Dickens’s exposure of Victorian England, Theodore Dreiser’s treatment
of American capitalism and Thomas Mann's treatment of German society.
Their achievements demonstrate why Marxist criticism cannot
be reduced to searching works of art for correct political opinions. The artist
who begins with predetermined conclusions and manipulates characters to
illustrate them is unlikely to produce significant art. Genuine realism demands
that the artist remain sufficiently open to reality for characters, situations
and contradictions to develop beyond preconceived ideological formulas.
Artistic truth may consequently collide with the writer’s own stated beliefs.
The deepest social significance of literature frequently emerges from precisely
this conflict between what an artist consciously intends and what an honest
confrontation with reality compels them to reveal.
Art is not a political manifesto.
This distinction is essential when considering the most
obvious objection to a Marxist criticism of Resistance. Manguel’s
defenders could reasonably argue that a meditative essay about literature
should not be condemned for failing to supply a revolutionary programme it
never intended to provide. They might add that affirmation has its own value:
preserving memory under dictatorship, maintaining intellectual independence
under censorship, and insisting on human solidarity when political life is
saturated with cruelty are not trivial accomplishments. This objection has
force, and any criticism that measures literature by its proximity to political
programme would be reductive.
But this is not the issue. Marxism does not require every
novelist to become a political organiser, every poet to formulate a programme
or every playwright to transform characters into spokespeople for socialism.
The disastrous experience of Stalinist “socialist realism” demonstrated where
such prescriptions lead. Art cannot flourish when reality is subordinated to a
bureaucratically predetermined conclusion. Characters become sociological
categories, conflicts become predictable and the independent discovery through
which serious artistic creation proceeds is replaced by propaganda. A Marxist
approach worthy of the name must defend artistic freedom precisely because
truth cannot be discovered by administrative instruction.
Manguel's criticism is therefore not that Resistance fails
to tell readers which political organisation to join. It is that the
increasingly abstract conception of resistance within liberal culture separates
moral opposition from the historical forces capable of overcoming the
conditions being opposed. The writer bears witness, the reader retains an
ethical consciousness, and civilisation somehow continues despite the
destruction occurring around it. Resistance progressively becomes consolation.
Marxism insists upon reconnecting culture with history without reducing the
former to the latter. Art has its own forms and problems, but artists, readers,
and cultural institutions nevertheless exist within a society structured by
definite relations of property and class.
The Reader and the World, Albert Manguel, Aleksandr
Voronsky and Art as the Cognition of Life
For Manguel, reading is never simply the mechanical decoding
of words. Across his writings on books, libraries and literary culture, reading
emerges as a means by which human beings organise experience, preserve memory
and discover possibilities beyond the limits of their immediate circumstances.
Yet the philosophical implications of this conception become clearer when
placed beside the Marxist aesthetics of Aleksandr Voronsky. In Art as the
Cognition of Life, Voronsky advances the remarkable proposition that art is not
merely a reflection upon life but one of the means through which life itself
becomes known.
The affinity between the two writers begins with their
refusal to reduce literature to information. A summary of its contents cannot
replace a novel because what literature communicates resides in the artistic
organisation of experience itself. Characters, situations, images, rhythm and
language enable the reader to perceive relationships that abstract propositions
cannot reproduce. Literature matters because it enlarges the field of human
experience.
But Voronsky gives this insight a more explicitly
materialist foundation. Art has cognitive significance because an objective
world exists and can be known. The artist does not simply construct an
arbitrary reality out of language. Nor does the reader possess unlimited
authority to manufacture whatever meaning they choose. Artist, work and reader
confront the accumulated substance of social and natural existence.
This conception distinguishes Voronsky sharply from much of
the theoretical thinking about literature that developed later in the twentieth
century. If reality becomes merely discourse and the literary work an endlessly
unstable network of signs, then literature's claim to disclose anything beyond
itself becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. Voronsky's aesthetics begins
from exactly the opposite direction. Human consciousness arose within the
material world and possesses the capacity, however imperfectly and historically
conditioned, to understand that world. Art constitutes one particular form of
this struggle for understanding.
Here Manguel's lifelong defence of reading takes on broader
significance. The library is not valuable simply because old books possess
cultural prestige. It represents an extraordinary accumulation of encounters
between human consciousness and historical experience. Each generation returns
to these works not simply to commemorate the dead but because earlier artistic
discoveries can suddenly illuminate circumstances that their creators could
never have anticipated.
This helps explain why great literature repeatedly escapes
the purposes institutions try to impose on it. Governments, markets,
universities and publishing industries classify works, construct canons and
transform cultural objects into commodities. Yet the experience contained
within a powerful work cannot finally be reduced to its market price, institutional
reputation or approved interpretation. The reader may encounter something
disturbing precisely because literature reveals contradictions that
conventional ideology conceals.
Voronsky's argument also challenges the crude assumption
that Marxist criticism demands politically obedient literature. The artistic
value of a novel cannot be measured simply by whether its author professes
progressive opinions. Reactionaries can perceive important aspects of social
life, while writers possessing admirable political convictions can produce
lifeless art. The decisive question is whether the artist has penetrated
beneath appearances and discovered something truthful about human beings and their
relations with one another.
This argument becomes especially important in an age when
literature is increasingly subjected to the logic of commodification. Books are
marketed through categories, algorithms, celebrity endorsements and demographic
niches. Reading itself can become another measurable consumption habit. Against
this environment, both Manguel and Voronsky, from very different intellectual
traditions, insist upon something considerably more demanding: the encounter
with literature changes the reader's relationship with reality.
Yet Voronsky supplies the deeper explanation of why this
should be possible. Literature matters because reality is richer than the
ideological abstractions imposed upon it. Genuine artists discover
contradictions, emotions and social relationships that they may not themselves
completely understand theoretically. Their works can therefore contain truths
exceeding their conscious intentions.
This also explains the continuing power of literature
written under historical conditions radically different from our own. We do not
read Shakespeare, Tolstoy or Dickens merely as documents belonging to vanished
societies. Their works disclose relationships between individuals and society,
aspiration and necessity, wealth and poverty, love and property, freedom and
constraint. The historical world changes, but the artistic cognition embodied
in such works becomes part of humanity's accumulated consciousness.
The encounter between Manguel and Voronsky therefore points
towards a defence of reading more radical than cultural nostalgia. Libraries
matter not because civilisation requires temples dedicated to books, but
because literature preserves something capitalism continually threatens to
diminish: the possibility of sustained attention to human experience outside
the immediate requirements of profit and utility.
To read seriously is consequently to engage with the world
rather than retreat from it. Manguel reminds us of the inexhaustible
relationship connecting books, memory and readers. Voronsky explains why that
relationship reaches beyond the private pleasures of reading. Art is a means of
cognition, an attempt to penetrate appearances and grasp something truthful
about life. The defence of literature therefore becomes inseparable from the
defence of humanity's capacity to know the world and, ultimately, to change it.
Artificial intelligence and the social question
The question becomes particularly sharp in relation to
artificial intelligence. Writers and artists have legitimate reasons to regard
the development of AI with anxiety. Intellectual and creative workers confront
the possibility that corporations will use technologies trained on enormous
quantities of existing cultural material to reduce costs, eliminate employment,
and transform creative production itself. The increasing capacity to
manufacture images, texts, music and synthetic media also creates obvious
problems concerning authenticity and the social status of creative work. But
none of these developments can adequately be understood by opposing human
creativity to technology as such.
The decisive issue is ownership. Artificial intelligence did
not descend upon society from outside history. It represents the accumulated
product of scientific discovery, technological development, social knowledge
and the labour of countless human beings. The contradiction is that socially
generated productive capacities become concentrated in the ownership and
control of private corporations and wealthy investors. The same technology that
might be used to reduce monotonous labour, expand access to knowledge,
translate vast bodies of literature, assist scientific research and increase
the cultural possibilities available to humanity can, within capitalism,
instead be employed to eliminate employment, intensify surveillance, strengthen
military systems and subordinate intellectual activity still further to profit.
Trotsky identified the essential contradiction long before
the development of digital computation when he discussed technology in Culture
and Socialism. Under capitalism, machinery becomes an instrument for
intensifying the exploitation of labour, but humanity cannot emancipate itself
by rejecting the machine. The productive forces created under capitalism
simultaneously establish the material possibilities for overcoming scarcity,
drudgery and cultural backwardness. The Marxist answer to technological
development is therefore neither corporate celebration nor romantic
repudiation. It asks which social class controls technology, what economic
principles guide its development, and what human purposes its capacities serve.
AI and humanity’s collective culture
Artificial intelligence makes this contradiction unusually
visible because the material many AI systems depend on demonstrates the
inherently collective character of culture itself. No writer invents the
language in which they write. No scientist independently creates the
accumulated body of knowledge upon which discovery depends. No historian
creates the archive. Every generation inherits an immense cultural and
scientific legacy produced by innumerable previous generations, and every
genuinely significant intellectual achievement, in turn, enters that developing
collective inheritance.
Digital technology has vastly enlarged the technical
possibilities for making this inherited culture available. Libraries,
historical archives, scientific research and enormous quantities of educational
material can potentially become accessible to populations across the planet on
a scale that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. Under rational
social arrangements, AI could help organise and navigate that information,
overcome linguistic boundaries, and extend access to intellectual resources far
beyond the institutions where they have traditionally been concentrated. The
genuinely revolutionary potential lies not in the fantasy that machines will
replace human thought, but in technologies that could extend human capacity to
think, learn, and create.
The obstacle is not technological but social. When
accumulated human knowledge becomes privately appropriated, the contradictions
surrounding AI become an expression of the contradiction between collective
production and private ownership that Marx identified as foundational to
capitalist society. A serious discussion of AI and culture therefore must go
beyond the fear that the machine threatens the writer. It must ask who owns the
machine and who controls access to the accumulated knowledge upon which it
operates. Without that transition, cultural criticism risks treating the
symptoms of technological change while leaving untouched the social structure
determining how technology will be used.
Trevor Griffiths and the writer’s social orientation
The 2008 discussion between playwright Trevor Griffiths and
WSWS arts editor David Walsh provides a useful contrast because it approaches
the relationship between artistic work and politics historically rather than
merely morally. Griffiths belonged to a generation shaped by the international
radicalisation of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when questions of Marxism,
revolution, the working class and political power entered cultural life with an
intensity that would become almost unimaginable during the succeeding decades.
Writers did not suddenly develop more courageous personalities. Their cultural
development occurred within a wider movement of millions of people whose
struggles transformed the intellectual atmosphere.
The importance of this experience lies precisely in the
connection between culture and social life. Radical writing did not develop
simply because writers chose to “resist”. A wider historical movement expanded
the possibilities available to culture and made questions that had previously
appeared marginal suddenly immediate. The subsequent defeats and betrayals of
the radicalisation did not leave cultural life unaffected either. The turn to
the right, the attacks associated with Thatcherism and Reaganism, the decline
of the old labour organisations and finally the dissolution of the Soviet Union
contributed to a profound transformation of intellectual life. Confidence in
collective social transformation retreated. Class increasingly disappeared from
cultural discussion, while politics became reinterpreted through personal
identity, language and individual experience.
“Resistance” fitted this changed intellectual climate
remarkably well. Revolution implies a social force, a historical objective and
a question of political power. Resistance does not necessarily require any of
them. One can resist indefinitely without confronting how society is to be
reconstructed. The word therefore captures both the sincerity and the political
limits of much contemporary cultural opposition.
From class politics to moral protest
This transformation did not arise merely from incorrect
theoretical choices. It followed major political defeats and social
transformations. The defeats of working-class movements during the closing
decades of the twentieth century strengthened the apparent dominance of
capitalism. They encouraged the conception that fundamental social
transformation had become impossible. Politics increasingly adjusted itself to
what was presented as an unalterable market order. In this environment,
opposition shifted from transformation to transgression, personal expression,
and symbolic protest. The language changed accordingly. Liberation gave way to
representation, revolution to resistance, social transformation to individual
empowerment.
None of these terms is necessarily meaningless. People
genuinely resist oppression, and defending democratic and cultural rights
remains essential. The problem arises when defensive resistance becomes an
entire conception of historical possibility. A political culture organised
merely around perpetual resistance tacitly assumes that the forces being
resisted will themselves remain permanent. The individual may refuse inward
submission, but the structure producing oppression survives. What appears
radical can consequently conceal a deeply pessimistic historical conception.
Manguel’s final “perhaps that is enough” unintentionally
expresses this pessimism. Literature preserves what is humane while the
surrounding world becomes increasingly inhuman. The library becomes a shelter
from barbarism rather than one element within humanity’s struggle to abolish
the social sources of barbarism. Such a conception contains dignity, but it
also embodies resignation.
Literature must disturb
Great literature has never confined itself comfortably to
affirmation. It affirms humanity frequently through merciless criticism of the
actual conditions under which human beings live. Its power lies partly in its
capacity to destabilise assumptions so deeply embedded in social existence that
they appear natural. The novelist can make visible relations that everyday
consciousness conceals; the playwright can expose the contradiction between
what individuals say and what their behaviour reveals; poetry can give
expressive form to needs and experiences that have not yet found an adequate
political vocabulary. Literature thereby does what political analysis alone
cannot accomplish.
This disturbing quality is essential. Chekhov’s observation
in “Gooseberries” that behind every contented person there ought to stand
someone with a hammer reminding him continually that unhappy people exist
captures something fundamental about serious art. Kafka’s celebrated image of
literature as an axe for the frozen sea within us expresses the same demand in
another form. Art should not merely confirm our existing morality. It should
penetrate the defences through which individuals reconcile themselves to
intolerable circumstances.
The greatest writing therefore does not simply inform
readers that injustice exists. Newspapers can do that. It transforms
perception. It makes previously accepted relationships strange and forces
readers to reconsider their own experience. This process need not produce an
immediately identifiable political conclusion. But it has enormous intellectual
potential because fundamental social change becomes possible only when people
stop treating the existing organisation of life as inevitable.
The reader is also a social being.
Nevertheless, there is a danger in turning reading itself
into resistance. Capitalism is remarkably capable of commodifying its own
criticism. Revolutionary imagery becomes advertising, rebellious music becomes
fashion, political radicalism becomes a publishing category, and resistance
becomes a marketable identity. The existence of radical books therefore proves
very little about the political health of a society. An economic system can
tolerate an enormous quantity of private dissent so long as that dissent
remains disconnected from collective action directed against the foundations of
social power.
The reader, moreover, is never simply a reader. The person
sitting with a novel is also a worker or employer, tenant or landlord, parent,
student, pensioner or unemployed person. They occupy a concrete position in
society and participate in relationships that extend far beyond the page.
Reading can alter how individuals understand these relationships, but the
movement from understanding to transformation requires another sphere of
activity. At some point the reader closes the book and re-enters the world.
This does not diminish reading. It identifies where its
greatest significance potentially lies. A book may articulate something
experienced by thousands or millions of individuals separately and thereby help
transform private experience into social understanding. Once individuals
recognise that what appeared to be a private misfortune is produced by
conditions shared with countless others, consciousness has already begun moving
beyond the individual. Literature can contribute powerfully to that process.
But collective understanding becomes historically transformative only through
collective action.
Seeing the world as it really is
Manguel therefore raises a considerably larger problem than
his own solution can contain when he asks whether literature enables humanity
to see the world as it really is. To confront reality today means recognising
that capitalism is not simply an economy within which occasional injustices
occur. It is a historically developed system of social relations characterised
fundamentally by private ownership of the productive forces, the exploitation
of wage labour and competition between corporations and nation-states. War,
inequality, austerity and cultural impoverishment cannot be understood
comprehensively as separate moral failures because they all arise within this
wider social structure.
The same applies to the conditions confronting literature
itself. The difficulties facing writers, libraries, publishing, arts education
and serious journalism are continually treated as discrete cultural problems.
Yet behind them stands the allocation of social resources. A society capable of
producing extraordinary quantities of wealth nevertheless claims that it cannot
adequately fund libraries, schools, museums, orchestras, theatres and other
institutions through which cultural life develops. Writers are urged to
accommodate themselves to market demands while publishers operate increasingly
according to commercial imperatives. The contradiction is not a lack of
technological or material resources, but their organisation around private
accumulation rather than social need.
To see the world as it really is consequently requires
seeing cultural decline as an expression of a broader social crisis. The
defence of literature ultimately confronts the same questions as the defence of
every other field of human activity: who owns society’s resources, who
determines how they are distributed, and whose interests does production serve?
The question of the working class
This brings the argument to the subject that liberal
theories of resistance generally avoid: the working class. Marxism did not
assign workers a revolutionary role because Marx had a sentimental preference
for industrial labour. The working class's revolutionary significance arises
from its position within capitalist production. Capital increasingly organises
production collectively across national boundaries while ownership remains
concentrated privately. Workers therefore participate every day in a highly
socialised system whose productive capacities contradict the private
appropriation of the wealth they create.
Modern technological development has intensified this
contradiction rather than removed it. The global systems underlying digital
communication, artificial intelligence, logistics, finance and scientific
research depend upon vast networks of collective labour. Technologies
celebrated as autonomous creations of entrepreneurs are actually impossible
without generations of publicly and privately employed scientists, programmers,
engineers, teachers, technicians and countless other workers, alongside
accumulated cultural and scientific knowledge inherited from the past.
For writers, this question is decisive because culture
itself increasingly depends upon the same globally integrated technical
infrastructure. The interests of the serious artist ultimately collide with the
same monopolistic relations that confront workers elsewhere. Intellectual
property, digital platforms, publishing corporations and AI systems cannot be
considered independently of the ownership structures controlling them. The
defence of culture therefore develops an objective connection with the broader
struggle over control of society’s productive and intellectual resources.
Literature is not a substitute for politics.
To argue this is not to demand politically obedient
literature. On the contrary, literature becomes artistically impoverished when
converted into political instruction. A novel organised to demonstrate
conclusions that the author already possesses ceases to discover reality and
becomes illustration. The greatness of art lies partly in its unpredictability,
its capacity to uncover contradictions that neither the artist nor the reader
initially anticipated.
But acknowledging the independence of artistic creation does
not require pretending that literature exists outside historical development.
The artist's task is not identical to that of a political party, yet both
confront the same objective world. Serious art and revolutionary politics
approach reality through different forms, methods and purposes, but neither can
indefinitely avoid the fundamental contradictions of its historical epoch.
The question is therefore one of orientation rather than
prescription. Does the writer look towards society and attempt to penetrate its
contradictions, or retreat from society into the assertion of individual moral
integrity? Does cultural opposition seek historical clarification, or does it
construct an enclave within which humane values can survive while the external
world becomes increasingly barbaric? At this level, Manguel’s conception of
resistance becomes inadequate.
Giving the argument against this criticism its due
There remains a serious counterargument. Admirers of Manguel
can reasonably insist that Resistance is a literary meditation rather
than a work of political economy. They may argue that the demand for cultural
affirmation itself possesses value when censorship, historical falsification
and political demoralisation threaten intellectual independence. Montaigne did
not need to formulate a revolutionary programme for his essays to enlarge human
self-understanding, nor must every contemporary writer transform reflections
upon books into an analysis of capitalist property relations. Literature has
moral, imaginative and aesthetic capacities that cannot be reduced to its
relationship with class struggle.
This warning against reductionism should be taken seriously.
A mechanical Marxism that treats every poem or novel simply as an ideological
document generated by class position would be incapable of explaining why works
produced in remote historical circumstances continue to move readers centuries
later. Human beings have emotional and intellectual experiences that cannot be
reduced to economic categories. Love, mortality, memory, betrayal, loneliness
and hope are genuine elements of human life, and literature’s exploration of
them possesses its own legitimacy.
But recognising this does not invalidate historical
materialism. The universal in art does not exist by eliminating the particular.
Human emotions themselves are experienced within historically developed social
forms. Love in feudal society is not socially identical to love in modern
capitalism, even though both contain recognisably human experiences. Literature
becomes universal not by escaping the historical world but by rendering
particular human experiences so truthfully that people living in different circumstances
can recognise themselves within them. Marxism at its best therefore enlarges
rather than diminishes the understanding of artistic universality.
Beyond “Perhaps that is enough”
Manguel’s hesitant conclusion can now be reconsidered.
Perhaps, he suggests, affirmation and continuing resistance are enough. But
enough for what? Enough to preserve personal integrity? Certainly. Enough to
maintain historical memory against those seeking to destroy it? Sometimes.
Enough to produce great literature? Possibly, because artists have never
required correct political theories as prerequisites for artistic achievement.
But enough to confront the social processes threatening culture, democratic
rights and human civilisation? No.
Books did not abolish slavery, overthrow feudalism or defeat
fascism. Yet intellectual and artistic culture played enormous roles in the
historical struggles through which people became conscious of these conditions
and acted against them. The distinction is fundamental. The Enlightenment
contributed to the intellectual preparation of bourgeois revolution because its
criticism of inherited authority intersected with major changes in European
society. Marxism acquired world-historical significance not simply because Marx
wrote extraordinarily penetrating books, but because those works articulated
the objective historical interests of a social force capitalism itself created.
Ideas become material forces when they enter into the
consciousness of masses of people. Literature forms part of this process
because it can transform perception long before political conclusions become
fully articulated. It can reveal what society tries to hide, recover what
official history seeks to forget, and show that apparently natural social
relationships have histories and therefore can have endings.
Literature is not enough, but it is necessary.
The conclusion should therefore be neither the liberal
celebration of literature as resistance nor a philistine dismissal of books as
politically powerless. Literature is not enough, but it is necessary. Books
constitute one of humanity’s greatest repositories of accumulated
consciousness. Through them, individuals separated by centuries enter into
conversation. The dead continue to participate in the living's intellectual
life. Historical experience survives the societies that created it, and readers
encounter modes of human existence radically different from their own.
No socialist movement worthy of the name can regard this
inheritance indifferently. The struggle for human liberation is inconceivable
without defending and expanding culture because socialism is not simply a
different mechanism for distributing goods. Its historical justification rests on
creating conditions in which the productive, intellectual, and creative
capacities of every human being can develop to a degree impossible in a society
dominated by exploitation, economic insecurity, and social inequality.
Manguel is consequently right to defend literature against
the forces seeking to diminish it. He is right to insist that books can
challenge falsehood and enlarge perception. He is right to regard cultural
memory as something worth preserving in an age increasingly characterised by
historical amnesia. But the logic of his own questions points beyond the
conclusion he offers. If literature teaches us to see the world as it really
is, then eventually it must help us confront the historical character of that world.
It must make visible not only suffering but the social relationships that
reproduce suffering, not merely authoritarianism but the forces giving rise to
it, not simply technological anxiety but the structures of ownership
determining the purposes towards which technology is directed.
The writer cannot transform society through writing, and it
would be disastrous for art to pretend otherwise. But the writer need not
accept a permanent separation between cultural truth and social action.
Literature reaches towards something greater than private consolation precisely
when the truth it discovers becomes part of humanity’s consciousness of itself.
At that point, the distinction between the library and the world does not
disappear, but their relationship becomes clearer. The reader carries
historical experience out of the book and back into society.
“Perhaps that is enough” expresses the honourable pessimism
of an intellectual determined to preserve culture while uncertain that society
itself can be transformed. The challenge confronting writers and readers in the
twenty-first century requires a more ambitious perspective. Literature should
not pretend to replace political struggle, but neither should it reconcile
humanity to a permanent condition of resistance. Its highest function is not to
reassure us that conscience survives. At the same time, the world deteriorates,
but it deepens our understanding of that world, disturbs our accommodation to
it, and enlarges our conception of what human beings might become.
Manguel asks whether society can be compelled to recognise
the evidence of facts. History suggests that it can, but never through books
alone. It requires human beings who have understood their circumstances,
recognised their collective interests and become determined to act upon that
understanding. Literature can profoundly help develop such consciousness. That
is why the answer to Manguel should not be that literature is powerless. It is
something more demanding: literature becomes historically powerful when the
truths it reveals encounter a social force capable of acting upon them.
The task, then, is to move beyond resistance as permanent
moral protest. The defence of culture must become inseparable from creating a
society in which culture, science, and technology cease to be subordinated to
private accumulation and become part of humanity's common inheritance.
Literature will not accomplish that transformation by itself. But the
literature worthy of the coming struggles will undoubtedly help human beings
understand why such a transformation is necessary.
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