A bias against explicit, progressive political fiction is widespread among critics and commentators, publishers, editors, and many authors. This has led to a dearth of such fiction being published (and written, I assume), a serious lack hinted at in passing by Sean Wilentz in ‘The Rise of Illiterate Democracy’in the New York Times:

‘The nonfiction best-seller lists these days are often full of partisan screeds labeling Democrats as elitist traitors and Republicans as conniving plutocrats. But look over on the fiction side, and politics appears almost nowhere. Some critics read Philip Roth’s ‘Plot Against America’as an allegory of the current White House, and there have even been a few blunt and appalling political fantasies, like Nicholson Baker’s ‘Checkpoint,’a brief dialogue between a man who wants to assassinate George W. Bush and a friend who wants to talk him out of it. But unlike the ubiquitous nonfiction tub-thumpers, today’s novels rarely take the grubby business of ordinary politics, past or present, as a subject, let alone an activity in which their authors might participate. Contemporary party politics, which once inspired writers as different as James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain and Robert Penn Warren, is terra incognita. The separation of church and state is hotly contested; the separation of literature and state seems to have become absolute.’

Wilentz is scarcely referring to progressive political fiction here; however, his observations apply beyond party politics, since many crucial and enduring public issues are not taken up in fiction from much progressive perspective. ‘Multicultural’fiction is far more pronounced in recent decades than it has been traditionally and some of this is progressive or has progressive aspects, some even overt progressive and revolutionary aspects. But, for merely one example, how many recent anti-war novels can be named? The US has been smashing Iraq since 1991, taking a toll of over a million Iraqi lives through bombings and sanctions ‘ according to the former United Nations coordinator of humanitarian aid for Iraq, Denis Halliday, numerous reports, and many other individuals and organizations ‘ long before the years-old ground invasion and occupation. And the US for years has allowed corporations the use of patent laws, which have prevented HIV vaccines from reaching Africa resulting in millions of lives lost. Where are the exposé novels? Name the so-called muckraking novels or vivid polemic novels about the unconscionable US health care system. Or poverty rate. Or avoidable environmental catastrophes. Etc and so on. Not easy to do. It’s possible to come up with a few, including John le Carré (recently) in The Constant Gardner – exceptions to the rule.

 

Writing powerful quality political fiction appears to be in many ways unthinkable in the circles of literature. One author has suggested that fiction writers could ‘tithe’some part of their writing  time and talent to producing nonfiction political works. The notion of enlightening and moving and aesthetically accomplished political fiction of various sorts is that which cannot be thought. 

Suggest at a website of literary scholars the teaching and study of progressive political fiction and it will likely be said that you are advocating indoctrination. On the contrary, many imaginative writers write to stir and uplift and illuminate for all sorts of reasons, in all sorts of ways, not only the ‘political.’It doesn’t just magically happen – it’s an art. If a university isn’t an appropriate place to study such matters that are often so integral to an artist’s work, then no place is. It’s not a question of indoctrination any more than any class, or purposive experience, involves a form of indoctrination. It seems to me that politically progressive art (and criticism) is one of the most socially useful and socially healthy realms of art (and criticism), and one of the most lively and otherwise appealing realms, as is manifest in quite diverse ways: morally, psychologically, politically, aesthetically, and so on.

Other authors applaud political fiction in which ‘stories stand alone as stories and the political edge sneaks up on’readers. In other words there is supposedly a distinct divide between ‘story’and â&#

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