He was religiously conservative.
He was religiously conservative.
He may have been a socialist, but he was conservative in many of his positions.Originally Posted by Virgil
Ry, it’s not that easy to label a writer either conservative or liberal. First of all if a writer is just dramatizing political opinions, those works have no longevity. They are boring, whichever side of the political divide you may be. When you go back fifty years or more, it’s even harder to classify. Issues that are conservative now were either not imagined then or may have had a different perspective. For instance Tolstoy was mentioned as a conservative. Well, he believed that serfs should be freed and educated. Is that conservative? Some might think that would be progressive. But he certainly believed in a strict interpretation of moral values too. So how does one determine?
But writers do have some affinities, similarities, or tendencies that may classify them either on the right or the left. Conservative or liberal are too politically charged terms. In fact, the word liberal was coined by John Stewart Mill, who as I read him has much more in sympathy with today’s conservatism than with liberalism. For me there are several dividing lines that incline me to think of a writer as more sympathetic with the right or the left. Writers who are cynical about social values I tend to see on the left, while writers who believe in a certain continuity with established values/traditions I see as on the right. Tolstoy may straddle on some issues, but I fundamentally agree he’s on the right. Another dividing line is a writer’s conception of human nature. Writers who see human nature as inherently flawed (endowed with original sin) but with the potential to do good I see as conservative; on the flip side writers who see human nature as inherently good but corrupted by society or whatever I see as liberal. So here I would see Joseph Conrad as conservative and George Bernard Shaw as liberal. And still another dividing line is over the concept of identity. Writers who establish links with social identities and build upon them I see as on the right; writers who rebel against common identities I see as on the left. So I would classify William Faulkner as on the right while James Joyce as on the left. There are other dividing lines, but they escape me right now.
Now I just came across a fine essay by David Mamet, a contemporary playwright, who switched sympathies from liberal to conservative, and documents his reasoning and the process of his change. This is a must read, here: http://www.villagevoice.com/news/081...64,1.html/full.
So who are some of the writers, besides the ones I’ve already mentioned, I think can be classified as on the right are William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Burgess, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Ayn Rand, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkein. Current writers that I classify as on the right: Cormac McCarthy, Mark Helprin, even possibly Toni Morrison (I know she’s a radical liberal, but I see a lot conservative values in her work). Poets: Alexander Pope, John Milton, Tennyson, TS Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost.
LET THERE BE LIGHT
"Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena
My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/
TRUTH!
I can't help but wonder why your professor is teaching literature, asking such a question, making such a statement...
Was he making some kind of point?
No,there is alot of stuff that goes on in that class that is questionable to me.I don't want to get into specifics,due to the rare chance he frequents these forums.As long as I receive a good grade,I'm usually indifferent to his rants.If I was a nobler man,I would stand up for my beliefs,but at a hundred something bucks per credit hour,I'd rather just be quiet in the back row.
Thanks,that's a very helpful bit of info.Conservatism is often defined as a resistance to change,and I think this is applicable to your theory of establishing social identities.Faulkner was quite fond of the past,and his social identity was at odds with modernity.
And though I never particularly enjoyed her work,Ayn Rand has become somewhat of a cult figure amongst young conservatives.Dinesh D'Souza even states she must be mandatory reading for young conservatives.
Like what? I'm open to it. His conception of human nature might be more closer to the right. But it's hard to get over his socialism.
LET THERE BE LIGHT
"Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena
My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/
Robert Frost to me seems quite Conservative in many ways.
Tolstoy seems conservative, although outlandish at times. Therefore a liberal conservative?
Joseph Conrad also seems conservative. He thought Ford Maddox Ford was living too wild a life, and told him so.
Nice analysis, but it leaves the impression as if right and conservative (left and liberal) were synonymous.
Good thread too. Left me thinking about several authors.
Gun ownership, personal liberty
I'll think of others. These days I suspect that he would support Ron Paul for President, certainly not Hillary, and he would see right through Obama.
That is a major problem with political labels; the parties slide around and so do the labels. An 18th century liberal would be disgusted at the things that are called liberal now.
In the late 19th century, the Republican party was liberal and supported additional freedoms. At the same time, the party that championed limited central government in the U.S. in the 1780's and '90's had become the champion of ideals that were no longer in vogue and was backed by people who had supported slavery (the Democrat Party). Fast forward a hundred twenty years and the relative roles are completely reversed. This is a gross oversimplification, but the basics are correct. Left and right have shifted as much. The relative positions indicated on the World's Smallest Political Quiz are easier to understand. http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html
[QUOTE=Virgil;549897]
Not true, liberal has been in the English since 1387, and it has had a meaning in regard to politics since 1801 (Mill was born in 1806). http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?l=l&p=6In fact, the word liberal was coined by John Stewart Mill, who as I read him has much more in sympathy with today’s conservatism than with liberalism.
Those are not the definitions that I would use, but they make your selections for conservative writers make a little more sense.For me there are several dividing lines that incline me to think of a writer as more sympathetic with the right or the left. Writers who are cynical about social values I tend to see on the left, while writers who believe in a certain continuity with established values/traditions I see as on the right. Tolstoy may straddle on some issues, but I fundamentally agree he’s on the right. Another dividing line is a writer’s conception of human nature. Writers who see human nature as inherently flawed (endowed with original sin) but with the potential to do good I see as conservative; on the flip side writers who see human nature as inherently good but corrupted by society or whatever I see as liberal. So here I would see Joseph Conrad as conservative and George Bernard Shaw as liberal. And still another dividing line is over the concept of identity. Writers who establish links with social identities and build upon them I see as on the right; writers who rebel against common identities I see as on the left. So I would classify William Faulkner as on the right while James Joyce as on the left. There are other dividing lines, but they escape me right now.
Jonathan Swift was not a conservative in any sense of the word that I know. He favored freedom, free institutions, and he favored changes in the established order. Kipling was a fence-sitter; some of his values favored the established order, but he had a view of people that was free and egalitarian. Pope was as liberal as Swift was.So who are some of the writers, besides the ones I’ve already mentioned, I think can be classified as on the right are William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Burgess, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Ayn Rand, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkein. Current writers that I classify as on the right: Cormac McCarthy, Mark Helprin, even possibly Toni Morrison (I know she’s a radical liberal, but I see a lot conservative values in her work). Poets: Alexander Pope, John Milton, Tennyson, TS Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost.
I am unsure as to the exact motives of your teacher, in claiming that all great writers are 'liberal', that 'liberal' (or left wing) writers have some kind of monopoly on creative thought, and that people who hold conservative political opinions are either not creative or not great writers.
In a strictly non-political sense his statement has some truth to it, in the sense that the act of writing, the act of creation, is, in a sense, revolutionary, and therefore the antithesis of Conservativism (maintain the status quo, culture, political institutions etc,) and governments in general, as the government is often the main upholder and proselytiser of the dominant cultural values of the time, even if the government is itself ‘radical’ or ‘liberal’-all governments are in a sense Conservative otherwise they would not exist. Radical views are bad for any government, and unfortunately for most governments, writing, in and of itself, is a kind of a rebellion, an act of individuality and thus all great writers are, in a sense, radicals. Harry Lime was right when he stated that Switzerland produced nothing except cuckoo clocks (well, and Robert Walser) and that totalitarian or despotic regimes often produced the greatest writers, even if the writers themselves were politically ambivalent, they would still feel stifled by the political, moral and social restraints imposed by that government on ‘art’.
Take Robbe-Grillet, for example. Although his writing were not 'political' in the sense that they dealt with or talked about political issues, his writing was still revolutionary in that he wanted to transform how we read, analyse and write books. Conservatives are, in general, not myopically opposed to 'change', change is, after all, a natural part of human nature, they however favoured a slow-paced organic change, rather than a more radical, revolutionary change and one which upset or challenged the mainstream norms and values of society. In this sense, Robbe-Grillet could be a considered a radical as he wanted to change the face of writing, even if he was 'politically' a conservative. (I am no expert on Robbe-Grillet's political views, and I am not saying he was a conservative, just using an example.) Another good example would be Anthony Burgess, who, according to one poster here was a conservative, but whose writing and thus cultural impact was highly original and revolutionary.
Once again, we come to the rather arbitrary nature of political labels. Writers sometimes live long lives and their political opinions often change. Also, it also depends on the situations which writers find themselves in. Could the Russian writers who opposed the revolution, such as Bely, Blok, Bunin and Nabokov be considered 'conservative' in that they opposed the revolution, despite sometimes holding politically radical views of their own?
As a kind of irrelevant irreverence, discussing the political views of writers and can be fun-but only as a piece of fun, and if treated seriously, and if you establish a writers importance on the basis of his political views, or hold the inane view that only people who hold left-wing political views can be great artists, then you set a dangerous precedent, the kind of precedence which has led to monstrosities such as the Nobel Prize for Literature.
More "right-wing" writers:
Gogol
Mario Vargas Llosa (Used to be 'on the left', but actually ran for the Presidency of Peru 'on the right' though not as a Conservative)
Chateaubriand (sided with the royalist forces in the revolution)
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.-Vladimir Nabokov
human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars-Flaubert
I think every human being in general and creative human beings in particular are extremely complex folks. Everybody has contradictory tendencies:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
as Whitman's very famous lines go. Writers put their complex contradictions on display in their works and these complexities are further highlighted by their biographies and autobiographies. TS Eliot, a God-fearing C of E man, a loyalist, a naturalised British citizen whose writing echoes of the ancient priesthoods in style and shows a dark future in its content, a good ol' Nobel Prize winner, on the other hand, this same man revolutionised literature for good. My kids gawk at me when I tell them that their beloved creator of Growltiger, Macavity, Griddlebone, Rumpleteazer, Cat Morgan (the door-cat at Faber & Faber!!!) and the Gumbie Cat also created some of the darkest, most gloomy and at the same time the grandest poetry of the last century. I find these lines incredibly funny:
So if you 'ave business with Faber - or Faber -
I'll give you this tip, and it's worth a lot more:
You'll save yourself time, and you'll spare yourself labour
If just you make friends with the Cat at the door.
and these lines are as much full of horror as any poetry could be:
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.
You will find these contradictions in any human being. Human nature and human personality is a complex mixture of different and even contradictory qualities. The American definition of 'liberalism' is notoriously inadequate and simplistic. Unfortunately this simplistic vocabulary is increasing instead of diminishing. New simplistic definitions of freedom, patriotism, and even democracy, are putting the very foundations of these self-same concepts at risk.
"The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the sh1t the more I am grateful to him..."
-- Harold Pinter on Samuel Beckett
[QUOTE=PeterL;550158]Hmm, thanks, I didn't realize it went even further back than Mill.
Swift was associated with the Tory party and was on the conservative side of the 18th century right/left divide. You can look that up. He was good friends with Alxander Pope and they and other writers formed a clique of writers sympathetic to Toryism. I associate him on the right because of his of understanding of human nature as flawed. What makes you say that conservatives don't favor freedom? Perhaps the definition of freedom has evolved over the ages, but everyone lays claim, even socalists, to freedom.Jonathan Swift was not a conservative in any sense of the word that I know. He favored freedom, free institutions, and he favored changes in the established order. Kipling was a fence-sitter; some of his values favored the established order, but he had a view of people that was free and egalitarian. Pope was as liberal as Swift was.
LET THERE BE LIGHT
"Love follows knowledge." – St. Catherine of Siena
My literature blog: http://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
