At the launch a few years ago of a new collection of short stories, a collaboration between the Israeli Etgar Keret and the Palestinian Samir el Youssef, a gentleman in the audience sorrowfully asked where, in Israel, were the “writers of conscience.” Not, evidently, on the platform: Keret’s brief, slightly hallucinogenic prose focusing on the weird lives of Tel Aviv slackers was thought to be apolitical. The collaboration between the two authors from across the great divide of the Arab-Israeli conflict was not intended as a kind of literary peace camp; they had met at a conference of Palestinian
and Israeli writers and simply got on well. They were not political activists; they liked to laugh at slogans. Very occasionally, Keret would write a piece of polemic, usually at the request of a newspaper’s op-ed pages, but it would read like one of his short stories, and make one conclude that politics, politicians and everyone who cared about “issues” were mad.
Unluckily for those of us who write fiction or poetry or plays for a living, the reading public’s demand that every scribbler become a “writer of conscience” has sunk its teeth into our butts. There are few demands for accountants of conscience, or orthopaedic surgeons of conscience. So what is it about novelists and poets that make us qualified to analyse political trends and influence public opinion?
The writer’s life consists of the following activities: staring in sick dread at a blank sheet of paper or Word document; typing something then deleting it; lying on the sofa daydreaming; staring out the window; making another cup of tea. Out of such banal conditions is literature made. Writers are foolish people who mistake their own interior worlds for reality, who exaggerate for effect, who believe they can make the truth sound better than it is in its raw form, and who feel their way clumsily in the darkness, operating without a plan.
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