On Fri, 19 Mar 2010, Gail Brock wrote:
> Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Jungle seem to have advanced
> specific policies.
BTW, if anyone thinks a lot about the interaction of politics and literature, I can't resist a plug for a little known book of unique genius that I'd love to share: _Multituli_ by Max Havelaar. I'd love to discuss it with someone someday.
It was written in 1860 in Dutch by a guy who was not a novelist. And besides being tremendously great IMHO -- and deeply funny -- I think it's the only book I've met that successfully marries an *extremely* modernist/post-modernist form with an extremely didactic advocacy of policy at the end -- it's literally impossible to imagine a more direct plea. It's quite uncanny that a book this surpassingly modern and this anti-imperialist appeared at this time. And it's mind boggling to me that here the two aspects seem to reinforce each other rather than vitiate each other.
One reading note: the extreme postmodernism is not at all visible until the first page of chapter 5 (p 62. in the Penguin classic edition). Up until then it just seems like a satire of a pinched bourgeois Dutchman of long ago. When I thought that was going to be the only style, I began to get tired of it, and would have stopped had I not been warned that it changes. And not only does it change -- not only does it become suddenly a blend of literature, sociology, anthropology and economics of a very high order, and then flip back, and then become other things -- but when I personally went back midway through the book later and re-read the first pages in light of what comes later, I reacted to that first part very differently. It felt profoundly funny and rich.
I might have ordered it differently if I was his editor. But then again, it was his first and only book written, he said purely out of a desire to change things after he came back from the colonies. (And it did cause a huge political flap and get him made persona non grata in the Netherlands -- and a hero to this day in Indonesia.) And to be fair, there are other great books, where authors insist on doing that with their first pages, making them dense with meaning you can't appreciate until afterwards, so that you might mistake what they're worth if people hadn't told you beforehand they were great.
Michael