In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

229 Conclusion A Dialogue on Literature and Politics Power/Literature Grenier: According to Max Weber’s definition, power is “the chance of a man or of a number of men to realize their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action.”1 The resources used in a relation of power belong to either of two main types: influence and coercion. Other concepts are often used (power or authority instead of influence; force in lieu of coercion, and the like), and indeed one could add some resources or types of resources. But basically political scientists agree that power typically involves some combination of the carrot and the stick. Politics concerns the use of power in society, and indeed most political scientists are concerned with that particular use of power, rather than with power in the broader sense. Political literature usually refers to literature with political content, but it also encompasses (if more elusively and ambiguously) literature that explores a larger and more fundamental phenomenon—the use of power in human relations either in the private or the public domain. Literature seems to have a distinctive ability to explore power from the private angle, even in the public domain. The novel, said Balzac, explores the “private history of nations”; in the same way, Fuentes conceives politics as “la actuación pública de pasiones privadas” [the public expression of private passions]. In these quotes, both authors capture the possible contribution of literature to a better understanding of public activities. It is indeed possible to posit that literature is, by virtue of its capacity to examine the use of power in a broader sample of spheres, a necessary and unduly neglected complement to political science in the analysis of politics. Van Delden: Political scientists view politics in a very practical manner. The study of politics is the study of how people make things happen. Now, it is probably correct to say that very few critics these days believe that “poetry makes nothing happen,” as W. H. Auden once said. Ever since the passing of the New Critics, we have become more and more trained to focus on the social and ideological dimensions of literature, but when we study these dimensions in literature, are we doing something that resembles what political scientists do 230 Gunshots at the Fiesta when they study the workings of power in society? I suspect not. In spite of the brief rise of reception theory in the 1980s, little work has been done on the actual effects literary works have on their readers. When literary critics discuss the political dimension of literature, they are, in essence, talking about the political ideas contained in a work of literature. This strikes me as being the case even when critics discuss the ideological implications of certain rhetorical or representational strategies. How such ideas are linked to power is a much more difficult matter to discern. When D. A. Miller wrote a book titled The Novel and the Police (1988), he was asking us to look at the nineteenth-century novel as a disciplinary formation in the Foucauldian sense. But whereas Foucault could document the real-world effects of prisons and insane asylums on their inhabitants, Miller had no such evidence to present about the social impact of the genre of the novel. In essence, he was speculating on the probable effects of the rhetorical strategies of the works he analyzed. A similar argument could be made about Edward Said’s work on the links between culture and imperialism. In demonstrating that certain works display an imperialist ideology, does one also prove that these works “made imperialism happen”? The long and unresolved debate about whether Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness gave support to imperialism or undermined it suggests that the actual political effects of literary works remain elusive. So how should the recognition of such elusiveness inform our approach to literature? To begin, it would be helpful if we placed less emphasis on the links between literature and power. In recent times, “political” criticism has come to be equated with criticism that looks at literature’s complicity with practices of domination and subordination, or at literature’s resistance to such practices. I am not claiming that such complicity or resistance does not exist; only that it is extraordinarily difficult to demonstrate its existence. At the same time, I would like to go a step further and suggest that the exclusive focus on these...

Share