Worried about the future role of the book? Consider this tale of two novels. In France, disaffected voters have been defiantly reading La Princesse de Cleves, a tale of thwarted love by Madame de Lafayette first published in 1678. The book is taught in most French classrooms and is generally conceded to be a tough read.
However, badges inscribed with “I am reading La Princesse de Cleves” were one of the most popular items at the recent Paris book fair, with public readings of the novel in theaters and universities.
The explanation? La Princesse de Cleves has become the focus of opposition to an unpopular president for one simple reason: French President Nicolas Sarkozy hates it and has often expressed his dislike of the book.
A world away, in Egypt, another novel, The Yacoubian Building, has been attracting almost as much attention as its author, Alaa al-Aswany, one of the key players in Egypt’s pro-democracy movement. His novel, an allegory of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s regime, privately published in 2002 in defiance of state censorship, became an instant bestseller across the Arab world, a lightning rod for protest against a corrupt and dictatorial regime.
As much as Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union, Aswany has been hailed by some commentators as “the voice of Egyptian revolution.”
We’ll see. My guess is that this very private man, by profession a dentist whose first office was in Cairo’s Yacoubian Building, will return to his surgery and his writing desk. His books will be published more freely, but he will not become a spokesperson for the Nile revolution.
Literature and protest is a romantic theme, but surprisingly rare. In Britain, once the battle for the vernacular Bible had been fought and won, very few writers ended on the scaffold. Sir Walter Raleigh was executed for plotting against King James I, John Bunyan imprisoned and Daniel Defoe pilloried, but the biggest threat to most writers was the violence of literary rivals. Later, in parliamentary politics, only two prime ministers, Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill, can be said to have made a career out of authorship.
Anthony Trollope stood for parliament in 1868 as a Liberal and described the experience as “the most wretched fortnight of my manhood.” He came bottom of the poll. Graham Greene never ran for office, but loved to flirt with danger, in Vietnam, Nice, Central America and Haiti.
When Haitian president “Papa Doc” Duvalier denounced The Comedians, Greene boasted that “a writer is not so powerless as he usually feels, and a pen, as well as a silver bullet, can draw blood.”
In France, Victor Hugo stood for president in 1848, and Emile Zola’s J’Accuse sent shockwaves through the Third Republic during the Dreyfus affair, but mainly served to sell newspapers. Whatever the French like to believe to the contrary, Madame de Lafayette is the exception that proves the rule.
Crossing the Atlantic, it was then US president Abraham Lincoln who signalled the importance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe. He is reported to have said: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” Subsequently in the US there has been a lively, almost frivolous, tradition of literature and politics.
Gore Vidal ran for Congress in 1960 and lost. His rival, Norman Mailer, stood for mayor of New York City in 1969 with the slogan “No more bullshit” and came fourth. My personal favorite, the singer-crime writer Kinky Friedman, attempted to become Texas governor on the slogan: “Why the hell not?” He lost.
Even in Russia, the relationship between writers and revolution has its absurd as well as its heroic side. Solzhenitsyn fought against the Nazis in 1944 and became disillusioned with then Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Writing home, he made a joke about the leader’s mustache and, when the letter was intercepted by the NKVD (The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs or secret police), was arrested and sentenced to eight years’ hard labor for “disseminating anti-Soviet propaganda.”
There was no trial, and he spent the next several years as a prisoner. This was the inspiration for The Gulag Archipelago. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, he was living in exile in Vermont. Great novelists tend to avoid the barricades, whatever our fantasies of dissent.
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