The Dictator's Dictation: The Politics of Novels and Novelists

by Robert Boyers

Overview

In these elegant essays, many of them originally written for The New Republic and Harper's, Robert Boyers examines the role of the political imagination in shaping the works of such important contemporary writers as W. G. Sebald and Philip Roth, Nadine Gordimer and Mario Vargas Llosa, Natalia Ginzburg and Pat Barker, J. M. Coetzee and John Updike, V. S. Naipaul and Anita Desai. Occasionally he finds that politics actually figures very little in works that only pretend to be interested in politics. Elsewhere he discovers that certain writers are not equal to the political issues they take on or that their work is fatally compromised by complacency or wishful thinking.

In the main, though, Boyers writes as a lover of great literature who wishes to understand how the best writers do justice to their own political obsessions without suggesting that everything is reducible to politics. Resisting the notion that novels can be effectively translated into ideas or positions, he resists as well the notion that art and politics must be held apart, lest works of fiction somehow be contaminated by their association with "real life" or public issues. The essays offer a combination of close reading, argument, and assessment.

What, Boyers asks, is the relationship between form and substance in a work whose formal properties are particularly striking? Is it reasonable to think of a particular writer as "reactionary" merely because he presents an unflattering portrait of revolutionary activists or because he is less than optimistic about the future of newly independent societies? What is the status of private life in works set in politically tumultuous times? Can the novelist be "responsible" if he consistently refuses to engage the conditions that affect even the intimate lives of his characters?

Such questions inform these essays, which strive to be true to the essential spirit of the works they discuss and to interrogate, as sympathetically as possible, the imagination of writers who negotiate the unstable relationships between society and the individual, art and ideas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231136747
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	10/26/2005
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Robert Boyers is Tisch Professor of Arts and Letters at Skidmore College, editor of Salmagundi, and director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute. He is the author of eight previous books, including Atrocity and Amnesia: The Political Novel Since 1945, and a book of stories, Excitable Women, Damaged Men. Boyers is also a frequent contributor to Harper's, The New Republic, and other journals.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Thinking About Politics and the Novel
1. The Indigenous Berserk: Philip Roth
2. Identity and Diffidence: Seamus Deane
3. A Generous Mind: Natalia Ginzburg
4. Clear Light and Shadow: Anita Desai
5. Bullets of Milk: John Updike
6. Politics and Postmodernism: Mario Vargas Llosa
7. In Exile from Exile: Norman Manea
8. The Normality Blues: Peter Schneider
9. Discipline and Punish: Fleur Jaeggy
10. Primacies and Politics: Nadine Gordimer
11. Thinking About Evil: Kafka, Naipaul, Coetzee
12. Pathos and Resignation: Pat Barker
13. Stiflings: László Krasnahorkai
14. The Dictator's Dictation: Augusto Roa Bastos
15. Many Types of Ambiguity: Ingeborg Bachmann
16. Rubble and Ice: W. G. Sebald
Selected Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

Mark Shechner

Boyers writes in a tradition that had its origins outside the academy: that of the independent, or New York, intellectual. The marks of that tradition in Boyers's own writing are abundant: a balance of fearless opinion and intellectual decorum; the positioning of literature within a web of historical and political circumstances; an affection for abrasive imaginations; and a prose style that is based in common speech but is never blandly conversational.... An excellent, original, provocative book.

— Mark Shechner, The State University of New York, Buffalo, author of Up Society's Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth

Caryl Phillips

A truly outstanding collection of essays. As a writer, I give thanks that we have the astute critical mind of Robert Boyers on our side. He seems to be able to peer into the heart and soul of the novelist, irrespective of gender, class, race, or nationality, and in this seminal volume he continually reminds us that great fiction can never merely serve ideas or dogma.

— Caryl Phillips, Yale University, author of A Distant Shore

Robert Stone

Robert Boyers's insightful reflections on political literature display his customary subtlety and grace of apprehension. His book of essays is a most readable, enlightening work, the best book of contemporary criticism we've seen in a very long time.

Editorial Reviews

It's refreshing to see a book of literary criticism devoted to writers, past and present, from countries and cultures as divergent as Hungary, Switzerland and Peru. Unfortunately, in these reviews, taken primarily from the New Republic, Boyers comes not to praise international literature but to bury it. His appraisals are resolutely negative; even commendation is parceled out negatively-in reviewing the late Natalia Ginzburg, he opens with a lengthy look at her apparent pleasure in criticizing the works of friends. Boyers also has a tendency to begin an essay with a more general idea and then focus on the writer at hand. This technique works well only once, in a thought-provoking treatment of evil in the works of Kafka, Naipaul and Coetzee. More often, the yoking of subjects is forced and artificial, as when he uses the work of Nadine Gordimer to launch an attack on postmodern criticism, which relegates the work of the great South African to the position of a mere prop. This is a shame, since Americans know so little of international writing. But in the pursuit of academic considerations, Boyers does little to make a reader want to pick up any of the writers he spends so much time critiquing. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly