Literary Freedom by McRobie Heather Katherine;

Author:McRobie, Heather Katherine; [McRobie, Heather Katharine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1566449
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing Limited
Published: 2013-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

3.3 The writer-society relationship

The figure of the writer in exile brings to the fore the symbiotic relationship between the individual writer and society/ societies. The novelist and poet Wole Soyinka, commenting on his own condition of exile, noted that, while many writers insist on “an exile persona that feeds on the community of the alienated” – and that celebrates the transgression of boundaries, such as national boundaries – a writer’s exile also brings with it “the weight of a distant cultural longing”,52 as the writer as an individual is inevitably from one society, one culture or group, in particular. Theorists who address the concept of ‘world literature’ also note that literature occupies a peculiar position of both belonging to a particular group, and belonging to humanity as a whole.

David Damrosch has shown how literary works “manifest differently abroad than at home”, but still nonetheless belong to a “global dialogue”53, while Pascale Casanova notes that all writers ‘inherit’ the traditions of the literary culture from which they emerge, and can only choose what to do in the face of this: “national literary and linguistic patrimony supplies a sort of a priori definition of the writer, one that he will transform (if need be, by rejecting it or, as in the case of [Samuel] Beckett, by conceiving himself in opposition to it) throughout his career.”54 In short, the role of the writer within society echoes and articulates the complexity of the the individual, especially the ‘transgressive’ or ‘subversive’ individual, within the culture that formed them and to which they belong.

Understanding the relationship between the writer and society is a key component of the argument that literary freedom is a cultural right, and clarifies the kinds of positive steps that states should take in order to ensure both access to culture (in this case, literature) and the freedom of the writer. As Chapter 2 made the case for the state funding of the arts and the capabilities approach’s defence of ‘high art’, the interrelated needs of the writer and society outlined in this Chapter indicate that state policies regarding literary freedom, must ensure that both ‘sides’ can fulfil their role in the relationship. Several concrete – although far from comprehensive – suggestions for how to navigate this relationship emerge from the analysis of the writer and society:

Firstly, it entails, most obviously, the negative liberty position that writers must not have their civil and political right to freedom of expression arbitrarily encroached upon by the state, although the gravity of this individual right (which could be seen as an ’Article 19 of the UDHR’ right) is now strengthened by the insight that the society also suffers, as in Czechoslovakia, when the civil and political rights of writers are violated.

Secondly, it entails that state policy on the arts in some sense protects the writer from the society, in the sense of societal pressure – as Orwell noted, self-censorship is the detrimental effect of ‘society’ on the individual writer’s freedom; and the symbiotic relationship sketched above

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