Literature as “Resistance”: Alberto Manguel and the limits of moral protest

 

“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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