By the time he wrote The Death of Ivan Illych, Tolstoy was a monomaniacal puritanical prig, though one with the genius of a great writer. His protagonist's main pleasure in life is playing bridge with his friends and colleagues, which Tolstoy tries to get us to condemn as vicious because ... it is frivolous, artificial, and inauthentic. By all means let us recognize that playing bridge is not man's highest spiritual or cultural accomplishment, but we should hardly also recognize that it hardly registers on the scale of human wickedness. ... What should Ivan Illych have been doing in his spare time other than playing bridge? Or are we all to devote ourselves exclusively, not to taking in each other's washing but to taking in each other's suffering, and are we therefore never to enjoy ourselves?Before writing Ivan Illych, Tolstoy had quit literature for nearly 20 years to devote himself to becoming a moral philosopher. "How often we mistake the nature of our own gifts!" says Daniels. Indeed, why would an artist squander his natural gifts in favor of politics? It doesn't help, either, that his politics are most likely juvenile or self-righteous. And these days, anti-American.
Shortly before 9/11, I read The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. It was Roy's first and remains her only novel.
[S]he claims she never rewrites or revises. Her first novel, "The God of Small Things," has just won the English-speaking world's most premier honor, the Booker Prize, is published in more than 20 nations, has hit No. 1 on the Sunday Times of London's bestseller list and is climbing the New York Times list. It has earned her in excess of $1 million so far and international media attention as she faces obscenity charges in her native India for a sensual description of inter-caste lovemaking that serves as the novel's coda. And beyond all this, she's good. Real good. Butt-kicking good. So good, in fact, that John Updike, when reviewing "The God of Small Things" for the New Yorker, compares her mind-boggling debut to that of Tiger Woods.Updike wasn't joking. The God of Small Things is a tour de force. Naturally, I was interested in reading more of Roy's work. Then came 9/11 and this.
The message may have been written by Bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America's old wars. The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel backed by the US invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel's occupation of the West Bank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists whom the American government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied with arms. And this is far from being a comprehensive list.Now Roy has become an activist. (More of her writings are listed here.) I consider this a comedown. Why waste your literary gifts on something as transient as the politics of the day? Especially when your views are so puerile. Though I suppose Roy and her admirers don't feel that way about her particular insights. I remember reading once about someone visiting James Joyce in Trieste during (before?) World War II. The visitor, I can no longer recall who, said something about the war and Joyce professed to complete ignorance of the subject. As I recall, he wasn't even aware that there was a war going on! I cannot hope--or even desire--that every artist be encased in such a cocoon, but I wish more would ignore the siren call of the lecture circuit, in favor of application to their craft.
I don't know if Roy has any plans to resume fiction writing. I hope so. Yet, I may find myself wary of reading it. Back to Daniels again:
Tolstoy may be an ideologist, but unusually for an idelogist he has the greatest artistic mastery. This allows him to slip ideas past us that are either stupid or wicked or both.I am not putting Roy in the same class as Tolstoy but the same holds true for Roy or anyone who prizes ideology over art.
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