{"id":118360,"date":"2017-11-21T11:00:31","date_gmt":"2017-11-21T16:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=118360"},"modified":"2017-11-21T17:19:33","modified_gmt":"2017-11-21T22:19:33","slug":"political-responsibility-artist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/11\/21\/political-responsibility-artist\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is the Political Responsibility of the Artist?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Armed women in one of the main squares in Tehran at the beginning of the Iranian Revolution.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Perhaps no modern writer has experienced as much political turmoil and upheaval as the great Polish storyteller Ryszard Kapuscinski. Take, for instance, his claim that during his time serving as a reporter and war correspondent, he witnessed twenty-seven coups and revolutions and was sentenced to death four times. One might expect Kapuscinski to have a particularly informed response to the question that seems to be on so many people\u2019s minds these days: What, if any, is the social or political responsibility of the artist? Or, to put it another way: Should writers be writing for a cause?<\/p>\n

Penned thirty-five years ago, Shah of Shahs<\/em> is Kapuscinski\u2019s retelling of the most notorious revolution that he ever experienced firsthand\u2014the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The book is a brilliant, nuanced portrait of a country and its corrupt leader in the tumultuous days leading up to and following his removal from power. Yet, upon close examination of the text, it seems that the author\u2019s allegiance isn\u2019t to any political party or ideology or cause\u2014he is as harsh a critic of the powers that toppled the Shah as he is of the Shah himself. Instead, his allegiance is simply to art, and to the truth.<\/p>\n

This is perhaps a strange statement to make about Kapuscinski, considering that, as a \u201cnonfiction\u201d author, his commitment to the truth has long been called into question. Throughout his career, he was often criticized for violating the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. Even Salman Rushdie, a good friend and great admirer of his work, took offense at the way Kapuscinski seemed to bend and twist the facts. Referencing Kapuscinski\u2019s The Emperor<\/em> (which he admitted was one of the best books he\u2019d ever read), Rushdie says, \u201cThe Emperor<\/em> ends with the tragic or poignant image of Haile Selassie dying in bed, believing he was still emperor of Ethiopia. And actually this is not how Haile Selassie died\u2014he was murdered in his bed, he was smothered to death by the Marxist regime that had succeeded him\u2014and I mentioned it to him, that it seemed to me to be a flaw in this otherwise great book, that the death of the emperor was romanticized, and Ryszard looked cross and refused to discuss it, and took the out of the artist\u2014that it\u2019s what worked best as a book. Which is fine, if you\u2019re not claiming to be telling the truth \u2026 \u201d<\/p>\n

While Rushdie\u2019s example of The Emperor<\/em>\u2019s dramatized death does indeed seem like a betrayal of the facts, and thus of the reader\u2019s trust, in Shah of Shahs<\/em>, Kapuscinski navigates the line between truth and fiction more deftly, and with more success. Still, readers in search of objective, fact-based reporting will no doubt find themselves disappointed here, too (readers in search of masterful literature will not). From the very first page, Kapuscinski\u2019s liberal use of the first person clues us into what kind of a work this is going to be\u2014not a dull history full of names and dates, but a subjective experience, one man\u2019s opinion, a memoir of sorts.<\/p>\n

And when there is an I, the question becomes not so much what are the facts and is the book staying true to them, but what is the narrator\u2019s truth and is he being true to that? Because as much as he stretches the boundaries of fact and fiction, we feel instinctively that he is staying faithful to his own sense of what is true. As he himself once said, \u201cIt is not the story that is not getting expressed: it\u2019s what surrounds the story. The climate, the atmosphere of the street, the feeling of the people, the gossip of the town, the smell; the thousand, thousand elements of reality that are a part of the event you read about in 600 words in your morning paper … You know, sometimes the critical response to my books is amusing. There are so many complaints: Kapuscinski never mentions dates, Kapuscinski never gives us the name of the minister, he has forgotten the order of events<\/em>. All that, of course, is exactly what I avoid. If those are the questions you want answered, you can visit your local library, where you will find everything you need: the newspapers of the time, the reference books, a dictionary.\u201d For \u00a0Kapuscinski, truth is bigger than the facts, and to get at it involves the tools not just of the reporter, but of the artist.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s really interesting is that Kapuscinski\u2019s imagination-based reporting may be the only<\/em> effective way to get at the underlying truth of the systems he\u2019s profiling. His fantastical style, a kind of nonfiction magical realism, fits the subject matter, captures its labyrinthine feel of the absurd: a secret police that is nowhere and everywhere at once, every face you see a potential informer; the unthinkable systems of torture, prisoners thrown into \u201chuge bags full of cats crazed with hunger\u201d; the boundless fear and terror; the ludicrous excess and decadence, the \u201cfairy-tale fortune\u201d that, in one of my favorite lines in the book, Kapuscinski reminds us the Shah can dispose of as he pleases: \u201cHe can throw it into the sea, spend it on ice cream, or lock it up in a golden safe.\u201d<\/p>\n

But what is the truth that Kapuscinski unearths? In a sense, he\u2019s profiled not just the Shah, but tyranny itself, anthropomorphized it, given it a personality, a life and breath of its own\u2014a method that\u00a0once again requires more creativity than journalistic rigor. But the real and most tragic truth he reveals to us is that tyranny does not end with the fall of a regime, but is almost inevitably continued on by the one that replaces it. \u201cA despot may go away, but no dictatorship comes to a complete end with his departure. It requires generations to change such a state of affairs, to let some light in. Before this can happen, however, those who have brought down a dictator often act, in spite of themselves, like his heirs, perpetuating the attitudes and thought patterns of the epoch they themselves have destroyed. This happens so involuntarily and subconsciously that they burst into righteous ire if anyone points it out to them. But can all this be blamed on the Shah? The Shah inherited an existing tradition, he moved within the bounds of a set of customs that had prevailed for centuries. It is one of the most difficult things in the world to cross such boundaries, to change the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

It would have been easy to simply blame the Shah, the figurehead, to point a finger at one side or the other, but as an artist\/author, Kapuscinski takes no sides\u2014he knows it is not that simple, that there are darker, more deeply engrained forces at work \u2026 In a moment of wonderful anticlimax\u2014after all, the whole book has been leading up to this point\u2014we see the Shah departing the palace, and he is in tears. Under the compassionate, unexpectedly objective gaze of Kapuscinski, even the greatest of monsters has become a man.<\/p>\n

Indeed, in Shah of Shahs<\/em>, the only characters for whom Kapuscinski seems to have no sympathy are the writers who do<\/em> take sides, who pen their words on behalf of one political ideology or another. We are given, for instance, vivid, stomach-turning descriptions of poets who sing praises of the Shah and of his \u201cgreat civilization:\u201d these men are portrayed as little more than political lackeys, spreaders of propaganda. There are rewards for such literary loyalty to the state, of course\u2014large villas, access to the palace, all their books published to wide acclaim and bound handsomely in leather\u2014and to gain such rewards, all they had to do was write hackle-raising poems about their leaders with titles such as, \u2018Where he casts his glance, flowers bloom,\u2019 and that contained lines like, \u2018And where longer his glance reposes, \/ there blossom roses.\u201d Reading that section of the book, I could not help but think of a Paris Review<\/em> interview with the great Ken Kesey, in which he relayed what he once told his creative writing class:<\/p>\n

\u201cSo you guys can write,\u201d he said, \u201cand well enough that one of these days you\u2019re going to have a visitation. You\u2019re going to be walking down the street and across the street you\u2019re going to look and see God standing over there on the street corner motioning to you, saying, Come to me, come to me. And you will know it\u2019s God, there will be no doubt in your mind\u2014he has slitty little eyes like Buddha, and he\u2019s got a long nice beard and blood on his hands. He\u2019s got a big Charlton Heston jaw like Moses, he\u2019s stacked like Venus, and he has a great jeweled scimitar like Mohammed. And God will tell you to come to him and sing his praises. And he will promise that if you do, all of the muses that ever visited Shakespeare will fly in your ear and out of your mouth like golden pennies. It\u2019s the job of the writer in America to say, Fuck you, God, fuck you and the Old Testament that you rode in on, fuck you. The job of the writer is to kiss no ass, no matter how big and holy and white and tempting and powerful. Anytime anybody comes to you and says, \u201cWrite my advertisement, be my ad manager,\u201d tell him, \u201cFuck you.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kapuscinski\u2019s take on the matter is more poetic than Kesey\u2019s, but strikes the same chord \u2026 Feeling depressed about the tragic, vicious cycles of tyranny, and the way that even after the revolution, nothing really has changed, Kapuscinski writes:<\/p>\n

When I want to cheer myself up, I head for Ferdousi street, where Mr. Ferdousi sells Persian carpets. Mr. Ferdousi, who has passed all his life in the familiar intercourse of art and beauty, looks upon the surrounding reality as if it were a B-film in a cheap, unswept cinema\u2026. In all horrors (for he does call them horrors), like lying, treachery, theft, and informing, he distinguishes a common denominator\u2014such things are done by people with no taste. He believes that the nation will survive everything and that beauty is indestructible. You must remember, he tells me as he unfolds another carpet (he knows I am not going to buy it, but he would like me to enjoy the sight of it), that what has made it possible for the Persians to remain themselves over two and a half millennia, what has made it possible for us to remain ourselves in spite of so many wars, invasions, and occupations, is our spiritual, not our material, strength\u2014our poetry, and not our technology; our religion, and not our factories. What have we given the world? We have given poetry, the miniature, and carpets. As you can see, these are all useless things from the productive viewpoint. But it is through such things that we have expressed our true selves. We have given the world this miraculous, unique uselessness. What we have given the world has not made life any easier, only adorned it\u2014if such distinction makes any sense. To us a carpet, for example, is a vital necessity. You spread a carpet on a wretched, parched desert, lie down on it, and feel you are lying in a green meadow. Yes, our carpets remind us of meadows in flower. You see before you flowers, you see a garden, a pool, a fountain. Peacocks are sauntering among the shrubs. And carpets are things that last\u2014a good carpet will retain its color for centuries. In this way, living in a bare, monotonous desert, you seem to be living in an eternal garden from which neither color nor freshness ever fades. Then you can continue imagining the fragrance of the garden, you can listen to the murmur of the stream and the song of the birds. And then you feel whole, you feel eminent, you are near paradise, you are a poet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You might think that, having witnessed all those revolutions, not to mention widespread poverty and injustice, Kapuscinski would argue that writers need to be more socially conscious in their work. But in this passage, we discover that he does not. He is for imagination, not facts, mystery, not answers, the beauty of art, not the grim realities of politics and war. And this book itself\u2014beautiful even in its depiction of the greatest evils\u2014is the clearest example of his own argument.<\/p>\n

Should a writer be socially engaged? Is it a part of our duty? I always return to the poet and teacher Marie Ponsot: \u201cThe duty of the writer is to the welfare of the work.\u201d Not to some political party or cause or ideal\u2014which through making our art more useful might somehow rob it of its integrity, its wonderful, vital uselessness\u2014but simply to the work itself. As Kesey and Kapuscinski and Ponsot hint, maybe it\u2019s dangerous to start writing for a cause, a slippery slope that cannot only contaminate the purity of the art but betray the readers\u2019 trust. After all, it is art\u2019s very uselessness that makes it so useful. When it has no hidden motive or intention but beauty, art soothes, it refreshes. Or, to put it another way, maybe art is at its most politically subversive when it is not \u201cpolitical\u201d at all.<\/p>\n

And so, what is<\/em> the responsibility of the artist? On the one hand: it is everything. Artists are the stewards of our species, the ones whose job it is to shed a little light in the darkness. On the other hand, their responsibility is simply to make art. And perhaps there\u2019s not such a difference between the two.
\nThis essay was adapted from a Master Lecture given at the Writer\u2019s Foundry M.F.A. Program at Saint\u00a0Joseph\u2019s College in Brooklyn, New York.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Taylor Plimpton is the author of\u00a0<\/em>Notes from the Night: A Life After Dark\u00a0and the co-editor of\u00a0<\/em>The Dreaded Feast: Writers on Enduring the Holidays.\u00a0He teaches at\u00a0the Writer’s Foundry.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Perhaps no modern writer has experienced as much political turmoil and upheaval as the great Polish storyteller Ryszard Kapuscinski. Take, for instance, his claim that during his time serving as a reporter and war correspondent, he witnessed twenty-seven coups and revolutions and was sentenced to death four times. One might expect Kapuscinski to have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1318,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[31791,7248,31794,13278,1856,31792,27591,31793],"class_list":["post-118360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-iranian-revolution","tag-ken-kesey","tag-marie-ponsot","tag-ryszard-kapuscinski","tag-salman-rushdie","tag-shah-of-shahs","tag-tehran","tag-the-emperor"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Is the Political Responsibility of the Artist? by Taylor Plimpton<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski has a particularly informed response to the question of whether artists should create for a cause.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/11\/21\/political-responsibility-artist\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What Is the Political Responsibility of the Artist? by Taylor Plimpton\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"November 21, 2017 \u2013   Perhaps no modern writer has experienced as much political turmoil and upheaval as the great Polish storyteller Ryszard Kapuscinski. 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