At the launch a few years ago of a new collection of short stories, a collaboration between the Israeli Etgar Keret and the Palestinian Samir el Youssef, a gentleman in the audience sorrowfully asked where, in Israel, were the "writers of conscience." Not, evidently, on the platform: Keret's brief, slightly hallucinogenic prose focusing on the weird lives of Tel Aviv slackers was thought to be apolitical. The collaboration between the two authors from across the great divide of the Arab-Israeli conflict was not intended as a kind of literary peace camp; they had met at a conference of Palestinian
and Israeli writers and simply got on well. They were not political activists; they liked to laugh at slogans. Very occasionally, Keret would write a piece of polemic, usually at the request of a newspaper's op-ed pages, but it would read like one of his short stories, and make one conclude that politics, politicians and everyone who cared about "issues" were mad.
Unluckily for those of us who write fiction or poetry or plays for a living, the reading public's demand that every scribbler become a "writer of conscience" has sunk its teeth into our butts. There are few demands for accountants of conscience, or orthopaedic surgeons of conscience. So what is it about novelists and poets that make us qualified to analyse political trends and influence public opinion?
The writer's life consists of the following activities: staring in sick dread at a blank sheet of paper or Word document; typing something then deleting it; lying on the sofa daydreaming; staring out the window; making another cup of tea. Out of such banal conditions is literature made. Writers are foolish people who mistake their own interior worlds for reality, who exaggerate for effect, who believe they can make the truth sound better than it is in its raw form, and who feel their way clumsily in the darkness, operating without a plan.
Nonetheless, from time to time the writer turns on the television or reads a newspaper and discovers that wars are breaking out or that governments are about to be elected. Newspapers contact us to ask for our opinions. Are we for or against this war? How will we vote? We are flattered to be asked. The woman who runs the corner shop is not asked. Our bank managers are not asked. Our opinions must be of significance, and why not?
On the morning of 11th September 2001, I was doing a set of revisions to a novel. I was immersed in that dream-like absorption, a sense of the exterior world as shadowy, peopled by semi-transparent beings. Nothing outside the window had any solidity Then the phone rang, and I was told to turn on the television. Something subsequently disintegrated inside me: my capacity to concentrate on an interior reality that was more important than the external one.
I am not sure if my concentration has ever fully returned. It is now considerably harder to shut out the world. At a party the week after the attacks, I had my first political row with another writer, and heard my first post-9/11 slogan: "Don't forget, the government has already started lying to us." I have heard it said that the reason writers are uniquely qualified to address contemporary politics is our way with words, that we can lay bare the lies and spin of political language, and express more eloquently what the man in the street can only render in clichés—that we think more deeply.
In the weeks and months that followed 9/11, I was amazed to discover how many novelists possessed hitherto hidden expertise in the politics and theology of the Arab and Muslim world, and were able to speak confidently of the root causes of the atrocity. What some did was to revert to what novelists do best: the expression of feelings. Soon after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Margaret Drabble admitted in the Daily Telegraph that her hatred of the US had made her physically, if not psychologically, sick: "I knew that the wave of anti-Americanism that would swell up after the Iraq war would make me feel ill. And it has. It has made me much, much more ill than I had expected. My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease."
More recently, Martin Amis notoriously speculated, in an interview with the Times: "The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the middle east or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children." He would later excuse himself by saying that the feeling had passed in a few days. Others came to his defence, arguing that he was only expressing, as every writer must, the unpalatable, non-politically correct dark places in our minds (although such sentiments were the kind of thing you heard on radio phone-ins, and hardly needed a writer to give them expression). On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, one day after the interview was published, the Observer printed Amis's essay "The age of horrorism," which cruelly exposed the amateur attempts of a novelist to turn himself into a political scientist or expert in international relations.
The 20th-century preoccupation with writers of conscience begins with Emile Zola. When, on 13th January 1898, Zola's "J'accuse" appeared in the French magazine L'Aurore, a great novelist proved himself capable of writing not just polemical but factual journalism. "J'accuse" is considered to be the greatest newspaper article of all time; its author's intention was to inform the public of the facts of the Dreyfus case and mobilise opinion in defence of the captain. Zola also wanted to provoke the French government into prosecuting him so that, at his trial, new evidence could be produced. Three weeks later he was indeed in court on a charge of criminal libel. Across the channel, the Times hailed his courage. In Paris Zola was found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison. He fled to England. Public opinion did swing behind Dreyfus, but his case dragged on until 1906 when he was finally found innocent. Zola had been dead for four years, asphyxiated by a faulty chimney, which some historians think had been blocked by his right-wing enemies.
"J'accuse" began a rage for political engagement that the following decades offered writers plenty of opportunities to satisfy. In 1914, most British, German, Italian and Austrian writers signed up for the war. But the writer of conscience's true coming of age of the was the Spanish civil war. In 1937, the Left Review, house journal of British progressives, asked the leading writers of the day, "Are you for, or against, the legal Government and People of Republican Spain? Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism?" All but 21 of the 148 who replied declared themselves for the republicans and against Franco. (Orwell, who had actually fought in Spain, replied: "Will you please stop sending me this bloody rubbish… If I did compress what I know and think about the Spanish war into six lines you wouldn't print it.")
WH Auden had initiated the poll, but later renounced his communist sympathies, and forbade publication of "Spain 1937," his famous Spanish civil war poem. When asked 30 years later to take sides on Vietnam, Auden replied: "Why writers should be canvassed for their opinions on political issues, I cannot imagine." The Vietnam poll canvassed, among others, Kingsley Amis, Italo Calvino, Simone de Beauvoir, Allen Ginsberg, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, John Updike and Gore Vidal. Other big names apart from Auden refused to take part, and the Times Literary Supplement wrote, sniffily, that they represented "a retreat indeed from the sort of generous… involvement which led some writers to take sides in the Spanish war as well as on it." In 2002 the Independent repeated the exercise, this time on Israel-Palestine, with mixed results, throwing up a fair number of don't knows and refuseniks.
I fear that today's reading public is more thirsty for opinions than it is for literature. When David Grossman speaks abroad, you have to lay down the law with the audience, whose hands are clamorously raised to ask him not about books but about peace talks and suicide bombings. Taking a stand has become more interesting to readers of literary fiction than fiction itself.
Were I to take a stand, to say what I really believe in, I might, I suppose, talk about an innate repugnance for posturing politicians, for people pushing buttons which release bombs that will kill people the button-pusher never sees, for notions of honour as applied to war, and for a whole range of issues such as honour killings, the use of child labour in the manufacture of high street clothing and the gradual poisoning of the planet. The usual. But what I truly detest is the dehumanisation and demonisation of individuals, with their own complicated thoughts and feelings, buried under the weight of slogans. Slogans are the enemy of language.
I would stand up for Vasily Grossman's observation in Life and Fate: "The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and his right to these peculiarities." For literature is about the examination of human weakness, of our foibles and failings, of what we cannot say and long to express, of what we desire and cannot have. It is here that conscience develops in the first place.
