In an eloquent praise of fiction that becomes a series of claims about the political potential of literary works, the late Mexican novelist and essayist Carlos Fuentes writes that

The novel , since the epoch of Cervantes , … has become a democratic vehicle, a space of free choice, of alternate interpretations of the self, of the world, and of the relationship between the self and the other, between you and me, between us and them. Religion is dogmatic. Politics is ideological. Reason obliges itself to be logical. But literature has the right to be equivocal. … The partial truths [vérités partielles] offered by a novel are a rampart against dogmatic abuses. Why else are writers, considered feeble and insignificant on the political plane, persecuted by totalitarian regimes as if they were truly important?¹

Fuentes’ apology for literature—and for the novel in particular—is emblematic of many twentieth-century defenses of literature which suggest that aesthetic practice is necessary to the functioning of a free society, or a thorn in the side of totalitarian regimes. These defenses regularly present art as the opponent of dogmatism understood in a patently political way.

One notes readily, though, that Fuentes’ sense of literature’s political potential has nothing to do with communicating unpleasant political verities through a realistic depiction of the world—the manner in which many understand the political role of literary works. Fuentes says nothing, in his essay, about literature’s ability to render concrete, recognizable images of an unjust world, so that, spurred on by the explicit content of a novel, readers will then act to change things for the better. He argues instead that literature resists the fundamental mindsets upon which political injustice might be built—dogmatism, authority—and that literature performs this resistance not through the content it delivers to us clearly but rather by virtue of its potential confusions, its ambiguous and uncertain form. Because a good novel says many things at once, Fuentes maintains, and because a good novel assumes nothing to be stable and truths to be only “partial”—half-formed as well as potentially biased—literature discourages paradigms invested with certainty and absolutes. In answering the unasked question of how, exactly, literature exerts a political force on the world—by stating that it is uncertain, “equivocal”—Fuentes steps into the very long debate whose origins and effects are the central focus of this book. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, this debate has pitted two aesthetics against each other in attempts to define the most effective shape for literature to assume, if it is to bring about political or social change. I call these two notions of political art the aesthetic of clarity and the aesthetic of confusion, using terms or stances—and the self-consciously reductive, even simplistic opposition between them—borrowed from Émile Zola and Friedrich Nietzsche , respectively.

The Aesthetics of Clarity and Confusion first explains these modes and their sources in rival ideas of the possibilities and employments of scientific knowledge in the second half of the nineteenth century. It then traces the ongoing impact that the opposition itself, and its complication, have had on a handful of key, visibly politicized writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These two aesthetics obviously do not represent a full picture of the various ways one might see literature as political, yet their terms are consistently evoked by later writers, who often describe their own turn to politics as a grappling with the legacies of clarity and confusion. The opposition itself thus becomes a point of departure for later political aesthetics. While the rivalry between these values is fully codified in the late nineteenth century, I begin in this introduction in medias res, so to speak, with a sort of exchange between Jean-Paul Sartre and Theodor Adorno in the 1940s and early 1960s. The views which Sartre and Adorno articulate are generally familiar to those who are invested in discussions of the political potential of texts, at least partly because they are so frequently cited by contemporary authors and theorists contextualizing the relationship between literature and political engagement. It is Adorno whom Judith Butler cites as a paradigm of engaged anti-realism , for example, and Sartre to whom J.M. Coetzee refers in order to designate an engaged realism. More importantly, it is Sartre whom Adorno calls out as his first opponent in “Commitment,” the essay on which I focus. Yet laying these differences out again and anew shows how often we have misread them in motivated ways, glossing over crucial specifics of both aesthetics as well as moments of unexpected overlap. The confrontation between Sartre and Adorno over the political potential of art simultaneously reveals the general framework of an aesthetic debate in a conveniently if deceptively straightforward way—the different theories or valuations of knowledge, the weighing of literary style against content, and the interventionist capacities of literature—and also betrays the influence of a much older disagreement from the nineteenth century.

Sartre and Adorno offer us the reductive opposition in concentrated form: Whereas some authors have sought to better the world by explicitly showing their readers what was wrong with it—racism, sexism, economic inequality, hazardous labor conditions—others have instead insisted that the only true social change would come by first changing the way we think, by operating at the level of what Adorno calls our “fundamental attitudes [Haltung] ”² (“Commitment” 180/412). Let me attempt a clumsy but pointed illustration of the difference between these approaches. This second, more Adornian sort of activist author might say, parroting the title of Funkadelic ’s 1970 album, “Free your mind…and your ass will follow.” Against this, the more overtly practical activist author would, to paraphrase Sartre , assert that your mind cannot ever be free if your ass is imprisoned. Critiquing the artistic claims to revolutionary activity made by André Breton and by Surrealism more generally, for example, Sartre writes that they are “condemned in advance, for [their approach] would amount to saying that a liberation of the mind [une libération de l’esprit] is conceivable in chains” (156/188). As one might expect, Sartre’s and Adorno’s diametrically opposed versions of how literature can contribute to social progress describe radically divergent approaches to writing and reading literature deemed “political.” Bruce Robbins , in “The Scholar in Society,” offers a wonderfully clear explanation of these two approaches to literature:

The working assumption in many acts of literary criticism seems to be that literature is set apart from ordinary discourse by virtue of its ability to frustrate or exceed direct, normal, instrumental communication, to do something other or more than merely express or represent. Yet the most effective working rationale that has been proposed for literary criticism by sympathetic outsiders (e.g. Martha Nussbaum ) remains the notion of literature as a vehicle for preserving, transmitting, and interpreting the experience of individuals and groups distanced from us in time and space. (“Epilogue” 316)

On one side is the idea of literature as the frustration of communication : confusion . On the other is the sponsorship of literature as communication: clarity . In contemporary literary thought, this divergence has often overlapped with distinctions between theory and practice. One stance prizes a literature that names names, depicts real political problems, and makes the audience more aware of those problems, in the tradition of the activist literary realism embodied by both reformist novels earlier in the nineteenth century and naturalist and documentary works later on. The other stance, in the tradition of avant-garde literature marked by formal experimentation and unintelligibility, engenders or sponsors confusion, ambiguity, and uncertainty in order to challenge a reader’s most basic assumptions about how and whether we understand the world. This challenge, Adorno claims in language also adopted by Fuentes , is deeply political, because it disarms the certainties on which political absolutism rests.

The dichotomy encapsulated by the terms clarity and confusion might appear overly simplistic and brutally reductive. Indeed, it is. Yet this is how it emerged, and this is how it is expressed and troubled by later figures. As I shall demonstrate, it is partly through these brutal reductions that Zola and Nietzsche articulate their own aesthetics and shore up their own positions. If this particular opposition seems similar to other perhaps overly simple aesthetic distinctions (like the one between realism and anti-realism ), the clarity/confusion dyad visible in Zola and Nietzsche—and on which I focus here—has a few additional advantages. As later chapters demonstrate repeatedly, “clarity ” as a term does a great deal of specific work in both the aesthetic tradition that espouses it and the tradition that disparages it; it is almost always either clarté, Klarheit, clarity, and so forth, in as tight a translation and as true a cognate as one could hope for.³ If clarté is a key, positive term for Zola, Klarheit is an equally useful negative term for Nietzsche. “Clarity” and “confusion” are thus vital as indices through which to trace historically two influential aesthetic tendencies. Finally, each term also contains within itself a number of elements crucial to the aesthetic it designates. In the case of “clarity,” for example, one has ready to hand an emphasis on vision (and thus on figurative or mimetic art); the idea of intelligibility and of the act of understanding; and the notion of explicability and of the act of clarifying. In the case of confusion, on the other hand, one has both the denotative meaning approaching bewilderment and the etymological traces of a melding-together, a fusion. This is obvious in the French and English confusion and visible as well in the German verb verwirren (to confuse) and the noun Wirrwarr (confusion), since Wirr goes etymologically to the idea of something’s being tangled rather than distinct. This second valence—fusion, entanglement—embraces authors whose political aesthetics attempt to undermine ideas of stable, separate subjectivity in the name of a more fundamental communal or ethical relation. In other words, confusion as it is repeatedly mobilized in this debate captures more than a being-stunned or being-cognitively-stopped. It also importantly implies a breaking-down of distinctions, separations, and so forth.

A few other terms ought to be clarified at this point, as they will name different but related practices. By literary activism , I should clarify, I mean the attempt explicitly to urge or implicitly to effect, within literary texts, tangible political or social change. I distinguish this from intellectual activism , which one might understand as textual engagement outside of literary texts (the sort of activism which takes the shape of lectures, essays, and theoretical advances). Both of these I see as further distinguishable from activism itself, which I understand as hands-on involvement in political organizations or causes. These terms describe certain ideal positions, but their borders become unstable in practice, in the view of many of the thinkers discussed below. If one sees the division between these types of activism crystallized in disagreements between the proponents of literary naturalism and those of various avant-gardes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the dispute soon comes to affect broader articulations of the role of intellectuals and literary theorists in the public sphere. The difference between the directly political aesthetic of Zola and the indirectly political aesthetic of Nietzsche has found itself filtered through debates over the merits of the directly political engagement of intellectuals and the indirectly political epistemological transformations of theorists. By the early twentieth century, as Mann and Benda argue in favor of an apolitical role for intellectuals in the public sphere, they deploy the same terminology already visible in these earlier debates over the proper shape of activist literature. And this lexicon persists in the late-twentieth-century permutations of this discussion, such as the exchange in the pages of The New Republic between Nussbaum and Butler . These more recent disagreements amplify the role of the dichotomy of “practice” and “theory” that arises also, I posit, in some of the stated differences between the aesthetic of clarity and that of confusion.

Alongside these developments, in literature throughout the twentieth century the demands of history make it increasingly incumbent upon writers to “politicize” their works, and major figures like Mann , Bertolt Brecht , Sartre , and Simone de Beauvoir find themselves navigating the terrain between the opposites of realistic and formal/theoretical literary engagement. Their careers—often allegorized within their own works—reveal a difficult conversion from “unpolitical” free agent to literary partisan or at least politically conscious writer. Against the backdrop of the fundamental disagreement between political aesthetics embodied by Adorno and Sartre, this book’s chapters re-read the above authors and their works as complex performances and explicit invocations of a struggle between the aesthetic of clarity and the aesthetic of confusion. In contemporary writers like Peter Handke , Toni Morrison , and J.M. Coetzee , too, this struggle helps to contextualize the expressions and intersections of literature, literary study, and political potential.