When Literary Politics Mattered to Geopolitics

In late 2015, Joyce Carol Oates took a 140-character break between writing novels to post the following question via Twitter: “All we hear of ISIS is puritanical & punitive; is there nothing celebratory & joyous? Or is query naive?” (qtd. in Victor). Her contribution, coming soon after terrorist attacks in Egypt, Beirut, and Paris, was met, predictably, with strong reactions ranging from outrage to derision to disappointment. At least one more dispassionate observer—Randy Souther, a scholar of Oates’s work—offered a double contextualization for the tweet, pointing out that the sequencing structures of her writing on Twitter make problematic its capacity to offer an effective platform to advance her longstanding interest in questions of intentionality. This can all (all) be lamented and dismissed in any number of ways. I only noticed this exceedingly minor controversy because its source was so unexpected. Here was a major US writer taking a comparatively surprising public position on a signal geopolitical concern, simply by asking: How do we account for the enduring appeal of ISIS to its followers? No matter how opaque or ineffectual Oates’s effort was—and it was both of these—it was still something other than a writer assailing exclusively her own government’s actions, or expressing solidarity and sympathy with innocent victims, or obliquely addressing larger questions catalyzed by immediately related literary–political concerns (pace Charlie Hebdo).

In other words, when it comes to major questions of foreign affairs, US writers don’t take sides—anymore, that is. Regardless of any privately held positions on the most consequential foreign affairs questions of the day, most every contemporary US writer more or less publicly holds to a robust pacifism informed by a presumptive skepticism about any and all foreign policy efforts beyond securely left-progressive aid programs. This sensibility in turn is matched to an ardent globe-spanning concern for all victims of war, terrorism, and violence, alongside an intense sensitivity for the situation of the wrongfully accused, imprisoned, and targeted, and especially when individuals in these unjust categories are directly or indirectly affected by US military and state actions in the overlapping contexts of racial, gendered, and colonialist legacies, and also when these are informed by corporate–capitalist agendas. All of this is in many ways justified and persuasive, but also pointedly homogeneous when considered in light of the roles writers have historically played in sustaining a robust pluralist public discourse about pressing matters of national and international concern, particularly in the years leading up to World War II through the early years of the Cold War. With Christopher Hitchens dead, I can think of no major contemporary writer other than perhaps Salman Rushdie who is willing to look beyond the status quo writers’ side of things (never mind assail it) and also look beyond the US’s sprawling implication in so much disorder beyond its borders, and instead openly and directly describe and intellectually confront its self-nominated enemies in contemporary global affairs.¹

Rather, this work against Islamic radicalism and its many thousands of adherents in thought and word has been monopolized by the professional bloviators of predominantly rightward opinion pages and think tanks, who thereby contribute lavishly to the general coarsening of public discourse. The tautological nature of their success also only makes it harder for a writer to stake out a position that could bear any sympathy with the ideas and arguments mostly obscured by their proprietary shouters. Writers lament all of this but do little more than lament, restricting their own fights either to matters directly impacting them, again pace Charlie Hebdo, and this time more specifically regarding the May 2015 controversy, debates, and divisions that emerged when PEN America decided to award the magazine’s editors a prize. Or again, in plainly self-focused terms, writers are willing to advance conflicting positions in public debates involving easy ogres like Amazon, Big Publishing, and Bigger Technology, and, as ever, conduct extensive, endless inside arguments via small magazines and websites about formal and aesthetic and thematic matters relating directly to the craft and practice of their work, and likewise concerning the merits...