The panel on Faith and Fiction was the one I most wanted to attend. I disagree with the premise that fiction is make-believe and faith is must believe. Fiction is far more than make-believe. Some fiction presents a truer picture of the world than television, movies or newspapers. When Marlon James asked a German historian the source for his description of life in 19th Century Germany, the historian said it was from novels.
Some fiction requires suspension of belief, as does a fable or parable, but fiction goes to the dark side to test, identify, clarify with the ultimate purpose of redemption. Hamlet is must-believe at the end. So is Crime and Punishment, the parables of Jesus, the fables of Aesop, the stories of Franz Kafka....
Quick! Who were the pro-slavery writers of the 19th Century? Who were the writers who supported the Confederacy during the Civil War? What about the great Nazi writers? Schopenhauer and Nietzche might have influenced German thinkers but it’s not certain that either would have supported Hitler. Film maker Leni Riefenstahl did support the Nazi party.
Almost all writers from the Allied countries supported the war effort of the Allies and many were employed in it, with the exception of American poet, Ezra Pound, who lived in Italy during the war, wrote propaganda for the Fascist government, was arrested and tried for treason after the war. He was found incompetent to face trial and spent 12 years in an asylum. After release he returned to Italy...
Il tema proposto, indubbiamente stimolante, è quello del rapporto tra scrittori e potere, e l’assunto che storicamente essi si sono schierati su entrambi i lati della classica divisione tra destra e sinistra. Ma poi questo panel si è naturalmente orientato in una direzione diversa rispetto a quella prevista, e...
WRITERS AND POLITICS AT PEN WORLD VOICES
Featuring Nadeem Aslam, Norbert Gstrein, Mariken Jongman, Khet Mar, Domenico Starnone, and Larry Siems.
With politicians becoming writers (Obama, Nixon), and writers becoming politicians (Mario Vargas Llosa, Vaclav Havel, Shashi Tharoor), is it possible to draw a line between politics and literature, and declare that one should never include the other?
Art as neutral to and indifferent to and above politics: it is an appealing self-deception, a bit more prevalent in the West, with writers whose professed stance, “I am not my brother’s keeper; I’m an artist, and that is all I am” seemingly carries this subtext: "I’ve got to look out for Number One,...
It’s an issue authors have wrestled with through the ages: what responsibility do they have to respond to the political struggles of their community, their country, their world? The answer suggested during Friday’s panel was: if you can even ask that question, you’re damn lucky.
Award-winning Pakistani-born author Nadeem Aslam (The Wasted Vigil, Maps for Lost Lovers) said for him, ignoring political issues would be impossible. “It is possible in a place like America to live a life with no interest in politics,” he said. “But in some parts of the world, politics is visceral; politics is real. Even if I wanted to, I could not separate my personal life from my political life in the place I come from.”
Ask a room full of writers whether they have a responsibility to write about politics, and you will get a negative response. Writing should be unfettered by responsibilities, they will assert, while a few liberal types might mutter a defense before being shouted down. I know this because I have asked this question to a room full of writers several times. It turns out I was merely in the wrong room.
From Words to Nations
The panel Left/Right Literature: The Politics of Taking Up the Pen, featured in the chilly Nordic basement of the Scandinavian Society, addressed these questions at length. These writers asserted that the responsibility to engage in political discussion varies from focusing on singular words, to the empowering stories of...
