Our Writers’ Failure? In the past I�ve often po…
Our Writers’ Failure?
In the past I�ve often posted links to John Pilger�s articles and left it at that. Usually, I agree with everything he says, even if I doubt the ultimate value of polemic. Instead of standing on a soapbox, we need to slow down, and to listen patiently to what is being said, particularly by ourselves. Chomsky does this, even if it is hard-going. Pilger�s tendency to demolish an argument with a stab of his pen is very welcome, but one imagines few people are converted.
A case in point is an article called Our Writers� Failure in which he laments the fact that �not a single English writer commanding the celebrity that provides an extraordinary public platform has written anything incisive and worthy of our memory about the meaning and exploitation of 11 September�. This is very true, with the admitted exception of the magnificent Harold Pinter. However, what Pilger doesn�t ask is why we should want a creative writer to comment on these events at all? After all, to write fiction requires a certain letting go of power, a commitment and trust to the bizarre logic of something outside the self. Why should this talent qualify anyone for a necessarily deeper understanding of anything? It would be worthwhile to investigate how and why we attribute authority to certain expressions and not to others. This is, in part, what artists do. For Pilger, an artist’s celebrity is all that matters. He refers to the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, as a fine example of what he wants. Darwish is an incontravertibly important voice for a battered people, but it does not follow that he is an important artist. And from the little quoted, it seems like his words are emotive expression rather than poetry. Pilger, I suspect, understands “poetry” to mean “expressing an opinion in heightened language”. Sadly, this is typical of journalists.
Thankfully, anyway, the British are admirably indifferent to the pronouncements of artists. We tend to laugh at them for their pretension; remember Jason Donovan on World Peace, or Poet Laureate Andrew Motion’s hilariously banal poems commemorating the upper class twits in Buckingham Palace? Perhaps this is why exiled European artists like Frank Auerbach, Lucien Freud and WG Sebald thrive and thrived in this country. They can disappear into their extraordinary work because they are not expected to provide us with their opinions on every issue subject to newspaper excitement. Instead, they let their art do the talking. And that, surely, is enough.
Other SpikeMagazine.com posts of interest:
- John Pilger Just seen John Pilger�s documentary…
- New Pilger film
- John Pilger - The other tsunami
- Correction required
- Alasdair Gray, A Poet
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