The Prevention of Literature Revisited
With the idea of intellectual liberty in disrepute, can good writing thrive?
Ideology is a mind virus. It ravages the intellect as polio ravages the body, inducing paralysis and atrophy, crippling the higher centers of thought. Sometimes this results in a world-historical catastrophe: the Stalinist Great Terror, the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide. And sometimes the result is merely an offense against common sense and good taste. For ideology is vulgar as well as dangerous.
The mind virus ran rampant during the just-concluded Democratic National Convention, producing one result with ominous implications for America and the world. Kamala Harris, a deeply mediocre political hack and DEI hire with a head empty of ideas or convictions, was suddenly found to be the female Obama and savior of the nation. This would be hilarious except for the fact that she has a good chance of winning in November.
On the vulgarity/bad taste front, the convention showcased a minor but telling offense: Angela Gorman’s reading of her poem, “This Sacred Scene,” an ode to the wonderfulness of Bratgirl Kamala and all she’s supposed to represent. I call it a poem but that’s a courtesy title because it isn’t one really, despite the occasional rhymes. “This Sacred Scene” is the transcription of a rambling stream of consciousness, with lines filched from Lincoln and Barack Obama punctuating yards of rhetorical boilerplate. Did you know, for example, that “We are one family”? Did you know that “Empathy emancipates”? Did you know that we must prove ourselves worthy of the American Dream? The banality’s so thick that you could cut it with a bread knife.
Gorman is our National Youth Poet Laureate, and “This Sacred Scene” is not her first venture into the poetics of politics. In 2021, at the invitation of Dr. Jill, she read her alleged poem “The Hill We Climb,” at the inauguration of Joe Biden. (You remember him, right? But I digress.) That one was just as embarrassingly lame as “This Sacred Space.”
I hear the objections. And yes, I agree, a poem can indeed be many things: a profound thought, gracefully expressed; a scene, a person, an episode, movingly evoked; even, as in the case of the limerick, a dirty joke well told. What a poem cannot be is a vulgar, blaring specimen of propaganda, which is what Gorman served up to her audience of semiliterate convention delegates.
As the sad example of Amanda Gorman shows, the influence of ideology reduces literature to a dead letter. Back in the Eighties, the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood had a pretty good idea for a novel: Suppose that in the near future, America fell under the control of a religious dictatorship? But Atwood was—still is—a leftist and a radical feminist with a streak of anti-Americanism, and she lacked the discipline to keep her politics out of The Handmaid’s Tale. The praise heaped upon it has not to do with its literary quality but with its political correctness, for without question, it’s one of the dumbest, laziest novels ever published. Atwood even had the gall to publish a sequel in 2019, The Testaments, that’s even worse than the original.
Another example that comes to mind is Our War, a novel by Craig DiLouie, also published in 2019. It tells of the civil war that breaks out in America when a president who is impeached and convicted refuses to leave the White House. Gee, I wonder what gave the author that idea?
As with The Handmaid’s Tale, DiLouie’s not-bad idea is ruined by ideology. Though he makes a gesture or two in the direction of nuance, his heart clearly isn’t in it. The heroes of his story are a redoubtable black female journalist, a saintly UNICEF aid worker, female and Canadian, and the ladies of a leftist militia that was organized from the staff and clients of a women’s shelter. The villains are embodied in an alliance of right-wing militias who specialize in ethnic cleansing and similar war crimes. We learn, for instance, that in Texas BIPOCs are being rounded up, gunned down, and dumped into mass graves. There’s even a fundamentalist Christian “American Taliban.”
All this progressive b.s. ruins what could have been a compelling tale, for one of DiLouie’s plot beats is the use of child soldiers by both sides. Now that was a good idea, but the author did little with it besides tugging at his readers’ heart strings. Yes, it’s horrible that an eleven-year-old girl is serving in a combat role with the leftist Free Women, while her teenaged brother is serving with the right-wing Liberty Tree militia. But we don’t need to be told by various adult characters that such things are horrible. Intellectually, we know that they are. The author’s job was to make us feel the horror of it. I felt like grabbing him by the shoulders and telling him: Just show it. Let the children drive the story.
To the limited extent that he permits this, DiLouie’s narrative does strike home. But he was not able—perhaps did not wish—to sustain the effect. His child soldier characters are interesting; he could have done a lot with them in a Lord of the Flies sort of way. But the adult characters are all stereotypes: the hard-bitten journalist with a heart of gold, for instance. Her tough-girl act got tiresome after a hundred pages or so.
Toward the end of Our War, I gathered the distinct impression that DiLouie had written himself up a blind alley. For the novel comes down with a thump: Suddenly the warring factions, presidential and congressional, agree to convene a second Constitutional Convention and just like that, the war is over. It was as if at the end of Nineteen Eighty-four, the Thought Police had released Winston Smith for lack of evidence. Assuming for the sake of argument that American unity was fractured by sanguinary civil strife, could the fragments be so easily pieced back together?
Googling Craig DiLouie, I discovered that he’s a bestselling author with a number of horror, apocalyptic, science fiction/fantasy and thriller military fiction to his credit. Having read nothing else by him, I’m not prepared to generalize about the overall quality of his fiction. For all I know, it’s good stuff. But Our War isn’t very good, and that’s not because he’s a lousy writer as such. It was his need to be politically correct that led him astray. DiLouie had some good ideas, but the need to stay in his ideological lane led him to slight them. His bias is not as blatant as Atwood’s and perhaps he struggled with it, but it’s there in the pages of his novel.
In his 1946 essay, “The Prevention of Literature,” George Orwell had this to say about the intersection of ideology and imaginative writing:
In the past, at any rate throughout the Protestant centuries, the idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up. A heretic—political, moral, religious, or aesthetic — was one who refused to outrage his own conscience. His outlook was summed up in the words of the Revivalist hymn:
Dare to be a Daniel
Dare to stand alone
Dare to have a purpose firm
Dare to make it knownTo bring this hymn up to date one would have to add a “Don’t” at the beginning of each line. For it is the peculiarity of our age that the rebels against the existing order, at any rate the most numerous and characteristic of them, are also rebelling against the idea of individual integrity. “Daring to stand alone” is ideologically criminal as well as practically dangerous.
As usual, Orwell was well ahead of the curve. Who can deny that today, among our cultural elites, the idea of intellectual liberty has fallen into disrepute? Who can deny that ideology has warped our very conception of the means and ends of artistic creation? I am not saying that a political point of view has no place in a novel, short story, or poem—it would be absurd to cite George Orwell, and then to make that argument. But ideology is a Theory of Everything that does our thinking for us, excluding heretical ideas for the sake of strict conformity. That is the process by which a poem like “This Sacred Scene” or novels like The Handmaid’s Tale and Our War get written.