Literature and politics

There was an excellent piece by Ferdinand Mount in yesterday's Guardian newspaper. He discusses how literature and politics can work together. Running through a list of the usual suspects, from Henry James, HG Wells, Bertolt Brecht and Edith Wharton to Alice Munro, Jane Smiley, Anne Tyler and Annie Proulx, he makes the point that in literature 'politics works when it is lost in art'.

I agree with Mount, but would add that political debates are poorer if they are limited to Politics with a capital P. In other words, politicians tend to be more humane and more efficient when they engage in the world outside of the so-called corridors of power, when they engage in the minutiae of the lives of their constituents. This is one reason why after a long time in power many politicians lose touch with the needs of the people. And that's no good for anyone, a point emphasised by Catherine (in Terence Rattigan's Winslow Boy, just revived in a powerful, timely production starring Timothy West and directed by Stephen Unwin). It deals with fact-based case of a teenager, Ronnie Winslow, wrongly accused of stealing a postal order: 'If ever the time comes that the House of Commons has so much on its mind that it can't find time to discuss a Ronnie Winslow and his bally postal order, this country will be a far poorer place than it is now.'

The reverse is also true. There is no such thing as a divide between the political and the non political. Everything has a political dimension, art is not better merely because it tries to bang on about a political point, but any form of art shifts the feelings of the reader, viewer or listener and affects, sometimes in a minute way (the bad band heard at the local club) and sometimes in a huge way (Picassso's Guernica, Ibsen's Doll's House), her or his interaction with the world.