SOME DO IT WITH A SIX-GUN, SOME WITH A FOUNTAIN PEN: MLY writes: “Your political art post made me think of Hugo’s Last Day of a Condemned Man and the movie ‘Dead Man Walking.’ Is the former better than the latter, according to your criteria? Do they both succeed? Might be interesting to give examples of successful and failed political art.”

Unfortunately, I haven’t read the Hugo nor seen DMW. And it’s hard to think of examples of successful political art–in part because it is, you know, very hard to do without falling into caricature, or assuming that your audience already knows the score so you needn’t be surprising, or exploiting our desire to feel superior to others. Here are some artworks–narrative art, since I think the rules are different for something like (an example brought up at Teachout’s talk) the song “Strange Fruit”–that I think are both political and great. You all should feel free to comment if so moved.

In rough order of how quickly they came to mind:
Pat Barker, REGENERATION and THE EYE IN THE DOOR: Anti-war novels, basically. Flawed, and the flaws are often those specific to political art; but nonetheless, I’ll recommend these books to anybody. See this post for more commentary on what succeeds and what fails here.

Ralph Ellison, INVISIBLE MAN. Succeeds because it’s stylistically brilliant, and because it hooks the experience of being black in America into universal human experiences of rage and alienation without ever abstracting or moving away from the particulars of race. I had a high-school English teacher who said this book reminded him of some of the writings of Soviet dissidents. That distressed some of the other students. I don’t think the point was, “OMG America is as bad as Soviet Russia!!!” I think the point was more that if literature is about human experience, one of those experiences is what it’s like to be oppressed; there are different kinds and degrees of oppression, just like there are different kinds and degrees of sexual jealousy, ambition, self-sacrifice, or any of the other themes of literature.

I think part of my point here may be that where Teachout draws a bright(ish?) line between religious art and political art, I don’t; something like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (novel, not movie) is going to knock against and perhaps change your views of criminal justice, I think, as well as your views of free will and moral evil (Burgess at one point described his book as “a sort of allegory of Christian free will“). That’s because the latter subjects have implications for the former.

There are other possible examples–I don’t think you can watch FAREWELL, MY CONCUBINE without coming away with a visceral sense of the ferocity of the Cultural Revolution, even though that’s more the setting of the movie than what the movie is “about.” I’m not sure whether satire shouldn’t get its own category; but then, most great political works are salted with satire. How much really separates INVISIBLE MAN from DR STRANGELOVE there? There are political artworks with lower (ON THE WATERFRONT maybe?) and higher (RICHARD II) levels of ambivalence. There’s the fact that almost all narrative art has a political context, and thus political implications–Chandler, not just CHINATOWN; BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, not just GRAND ILLUSION. (This corresponds to the fact that even artworks that are trying to be “just” political necessarily also have a moral and a metaphysical, religious context.) So in the end, I think I’m less interested in categorizing than in saying, Look, I don’t care what you do–do whatever works–but realize that these are the big dangers. Please try not to caricature; or dehumanize; or refuse to challenge or surprise or even implicate your audience. I think those cautions hold for political art only because they hold for all art.