(first published August 1998 in the Trinidad and Tobago Review)
2359 words
I am not a betting man, but I'll lay ten to one odds that nobody has ever posed the above question in any form or fashion in any issue of the Trinidad and Tobago Review.
In the technical sense, of course, it is a silly query. Books obviously matter as repositories of information. But even the technical question may become relevant in a hundred years, if not sooner, when computers and diskettes are more widespread. Right now, though, I am using the word "matter" in the ideological sense and, therefore, the books I refer to are novels and didactic non-fiction.
It is usual among academics and other intellectual people to assume that books influence the world. This is mostly because, being bookish persons themselves, they think it impossible that lesser mortals could fail to be swayed by what they consider so important in their own lives. Dennis Craig, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Guyana, expressed the typical view in his opening remarks at the 1994 presentation of the Guyana prize for Literature: "The creators of...good literature are those among us who...have the habit of holding up the mirror to nature and by so doing they show us who, what and how we are." Funso Aiyejina in the1996 Xmas issue of the T&T Review opined, "In a complex multi-cultural society like the Caribbean, wholesome morally responsible stories and willed choices are mandatory in order for the society to engage itself in any meaningful self-interrogation." And one of the United States' foremost literary critics, feels entirely comfortable writing, "The Canon is the true art of memory, the authentic foundation for cultural thinking. Without the Canon, we cease to think."
This kind of egg-headedness is almost charming. The question of how the ideas contained in books are supposed to show people who do not read "who what and how" they are, let alone make them make them interrogate themselves, never occurs to academics. It is almost as though books are supposed to influence the masses of human beings by some sort of literary osmosis. What these intellectuals have failed to realize is that their assumption about the ideo-political importance of books is based on social systems which have been largely superseded in this century.
In the first place, people - both intellectual and otherwise - assume that books have extraordinary power mainly for religious reasons, in both the historical and psychological senses of the term. Historically, religion has been a major influence in shaping political structures and those religions which have had the most influence are those which have had books to confer authority - the Bhagavadgita, the Torah, the Bible, and the Qu'ran. People, being basically idolatrous, came to venerate these books as holy objects in themselves. In the Western world, as Greek logic permeated Jewish theology, religion became extended to non-spiritual arenas such as philosophy and politics, as well as to the books containing their ideas. Communism and capitalism thus became religions, psychologically speaking, in their own rights. Nowadays, science has begin to suffer a similar fate, though fortunately its own rigor has so far kept it a few steps ahead of its zealots.
In the second place, even after Gutenberg invented the printing press and books became more widespread, the social structures which gave prestige to books did not start to wither until four centuries later. Thus, the assumption that books did indeed matter was in fact quite true until this century, although essayists and even poets were probably always more influential than novelists. This is because, before mass education and the Industrial Revolution resulted in widespread literacy, the people who could read and write were an elite in all senses of the term. Not only were they a small educated minority, but they also had economic and political power. There was thus a much shorter distance between ideas in books and the institutions of the world. (One should note that, historically, this has had as many bad as good effects.) But, as democracy and education became more widespread, the bridging structures which made the transformation from ideas to sociopolitical reality possible began to change and collapse.
Now, on the brink of the new millennium, we have a situation which our intellectual forbears of even the last 100 years would never have imagined in their wildest dreams: a mostly literate culture where most of the people who can read do not read. Not books, at any rate, and often not anything they don't have to.
Now in order for literature or any other sort of art to have practical consequences, it must affect persons with political or social clout. If books only help to shape a person's attitudes, this may have psychological effects on the particular individual. Indeed, I am sure that nearly every avid reader would be able to cite a book or books which have had a major impact on their life. But books can only have social consequences if they influence either a few powerful individuals, or so great a number of average persons that the ideas expressed become generally accepted. And that, in turn, can happen only if people read the books in the first place. As Mark Twain once said, "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
There may still be societies where books actually exert sociopolitical influence. France and Britain perhaps; maybe the United State; and definitely in Iran, Egypt and Nigeria, where novels can get their authors murdered. But not the Anglophone Caribbean. The only Caribbean nation where novelists seem to receive sociopolitical recognition is Guyana and, if that is so, the state of that country does not reflect well on its writers' ideas. I doubt very much that Prime Minister Basdeo Panday or Clico president Lawrence Duprey or Archbishop Anthony Pantin read West Indian novels or that, if they do, it affects their conduct in any significant way.
Insofar as authors have sociopolitical influence, it is not directly because of their books. Especially not in the Caribbean. Here, the influence of literary work is often separate from the work itself. What really matters is the intellectual reputation conferred upon writers by their books. The political and literary value of books are thus connected but separate, like the rails of a track. While this phenomenon is not unique to post-colonial cultures, it is certainly more the case for us. But since nearly all West Indian writers live and work out of the Caribbean, the literary-cum-political train is naturally derailed.
Besides, the intellectual authority a person might get from writing a few novels may not be justified by the books themselves. Just because someone can write a socially perceptive novel does not necessarily make their political ideas practical, as with the reparation-for-enslaved-Africans theme in Earl Lovelace's Salt. Psychologically speaking, too, a high level of creative intelligence usually means a low level of analytical intelligence and vice-versa (hence the reason literary critics are often execrable fiction writers.)
What exacerbates the situation is the elitism which underlies all Caribbean literature and, indeed, all Caribbean institutions. All societies have such elitist divisions and only a minority of nations - mainly European and a few Oriental ones - have solved most of the problems which arise from non-meritocratic hierarchies. (The interesting exception is the United States, where the top one percent of the population owns more than the last 90 percent. That the US is also the world's only industrialized country with such high crime statistics and such low educational scores is probably not coincidental.)
You might say that our situation in the Caribbean is a little worse because of colonialism and our historical youthfulness. But we are not unique in this problem of class/elite/caste divisiveness, though all our pseudo-intellectuals like to blame history for our woes and not ourselves. And this institutional elitism, and the psychological insecurity of the individuals who represent the institutions, leads to parallel divisions in art and literature.
Perhaps because of such intellectual inferiority complexes, there has been little attempt to create a tradition of popular literature in the region. Instead, authors have always gone for the critical kudos. Admittedly, our socioeconomic situation makes it difficult for a writer to do otherwise - critical kudos get you university jobs - but difficult is not impossible. With perhaps the sole exceptions of Miguel Street, The Lonely Londoners and The Duppy, no Caribbean novels straddle that wide canyon between entertainment and erudition. This is a serious failure of both creativity and willpower, especially if one takes the position that literary fiction is crucial to our development as a people. Although I am myself a novelist, I don't take that position, but I do think that fiction which truly entertains inevitably educates, whereas educational fiction that fails to entertain educates poorly. Not incidentally, our writers' output of highly literary novels has also ensured that only a tiny intellectual elite reads Caribbean novels, even in Trinidad where popular novels like Mills&Boon romances and John Grisham thrillers have thriving sales.
The French novelist, essayist, playwright and philosopher Jean Paul Sartre held that a writer should be measured by the direct action of his work upon the public. This view seems to me to have more validity than the alternatives. To assume anything else leads to the conclusion that art has some value independent of human beings, which is a problematical position.
If we adopt Sartre's view, then the most important writer in Trinidad now is not V.S. Naipaul or Earl Lovelace, but Keith Smith. After all, the Trinidadian public, which is the most literate one in the West Indies, reads newspapers rather than novels. And, even by other standards, there is little doubt that Smith is a writer of very high calibre. He may not be able to write novels, but this is no reflection on his ability to tell a story or convey ideas effectively. The difference between novelists and other writers is not usually creativity or intelligence, but plain stick-to-itiveness - i.e. the discipline to stay with the work till you have written about 60,000 words.
But you won't hear Caribbean critics acknowledging Smith as the equal of Lovelace in literary terms, let alone postulating that he is a more important Trinidadian writer than Naipaul. But Naipaul himself has suggested more than once that the novel is dead and that real writing is taking place elsewhere. I wouldn't go so far as Naipaul, because the sales figures don't support his contention and because he considers the only real novels to be literary ones. But certainly if one takes 'real' writing to be writing that effectively reaches people, which is part of what Naipaul meant, one would have to look at film scripts and magazine and newspapers for such work.
It is a hard task for literary people in the Caribbean to admit any such thing, though. Doing so would interfere with their elite self-image. For all their talk about 'transforming' our societies through literature, our intellectual elite rejects any sort of work which might actually have an effect. Sartre again becomes relevant: "Our critics are Cathars: they don't want to have anything to do with the real world except eat and drink in it...They get excited only about classified matters, closed quarrels, stories whose ends are known."
The small controversy in July over the use of obscene language in the play Jean and Dinah by Errol Hall illustrated this perfectly. Junior Telfer, director of the Little Carib Theatre where the play was staged, said, "My duty as a member of the board is to preserve everything that the Little Carib and Beryl McBurnie stand for. The Little Carib has never been associated with any controversial play." In other words, the Little Carib has never hosted a relevant play in its entire existence; and this, which should be a source of shame for Telfer, is apparently a source of pride. It is thus no cause for wonder that drama is pretty much ignored in our society.
Let's turn to Sartre again: "Art, of its essence, is opposed to that which exists...its value is one of terrorism; it is a weapon against traditional value and morality." But when local dramatists and other writers insist they are revealing us to ourselves, they are usually confusing metaphysics for analytical philosophy. This is also true of many Caribbean novelists, in particular Wilson Harris. And, since literary critics and other intellectuals usually buy into this confusion, Harris is naturally praised as though he has some deeper mystic insight into reality, whereas what he mostly has is a really obscure prose style.
This, I think, is the sticking point: books in the modern world can matter only if they are written in a readable fashion. Except for the early Naipaul, Selvon, Michael Anthony, Anthony Winkler and CLR James, all our writers have failed to do this. "One is not a writer for having chosen to say certain things, but for having chosen to say them in a certain way," wrote Sartre. "And, to be sure, the style makes the value of the prose. But it should pass unnoticed...In prose, the aesthetic pleasure is pure only if it is thrown into the bargain."
CLR in particular reveals the truth of this. James's ideas are all the more convincing because of the clarity of his prose - a clarity which adds to, rather than detracts, from his eloquence. But even CLR's ideas could only influence the society if many people read his books, or if the political and economic elites were persuaded by him. That didn't happen and still isn't happening.
As far as novels go, their value usually lies in the humanistic attitudes they express. But, again, such attitudes can become social reality only if sufficient numbers of people read the novels and are influenced by them. And that can only happen if Caribbean writers start writing good popular fiction and if academics get the confidence to mash up their own ivory towers. Until then, though, the assertion that books do matter will remain a fond illusion.
Copyright ©1999 Kevin Baldeosingh