Humane confrontation

The stock image of the engaged artist is someone who speaks truth to power, rouses the masses and becomes a public participant in political discourse. But with the exception of serious reportage by a handful of authors, in free societies such attempts at direct engagement stir only the world of books and letters. It takes a celebrity to change public consciousness.

However, when I met the Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist in his apartment in Stockholm, I realised that there were other ways for artists and writers to have political impact. No one has been more damning of the moral failings of western civilisation than Lindqvist, who in books such as Exterminate All The Brutes, his most famous work in English translation, has revealed how the achievements of the west have depended on genocide, destruction, exploitation and plunder.

Yet his work’s power has little to do with commanding the attention of society at large. Lindqvist does not have much opportunity to address authority, nor does he rouse the crowds from the podium. Rather he takes each reader aside, looks her in the eye and tells her bluntly why she is part of the problem.

Lindqvist told me that he writes, “as if the words were directed towards a certain person, to a certain you.” The result is that the reader feels Lindqvist to be “as close as even to touch him and be touched by him.” When he does draw his stark conclusions, you feel that you—and not the abstraction known as western civilisation—are being accused. So a sentence like “global violence is the hard core of our existence” in A History of Bombing becomes not so much an indictment of society as a reminder of our complicity in its guilt.

This approach can be very discomforting indeed, and Lindqvist does not spare himself. Explaining why American soldiers razed villages and killed civilians in the Korean War, he writes, “If I myself had been sent to fight in Korea, I would certainly have demanded that the war carry as little risk as possible for me personally.” Which invites the awkward question: wouldn't you?

Such writing does not change the world directly; it changes the consciousness of the reader. This is a very specific task which doesn't demand that the artist has the most astute political judgement, but that she asks the right questions, provokes the right response.

Take, for instance, The Myth of Wu Tao-Tzu, the book he is most famous for in his home country and which has just been published in the UK for the first time. Lindqvist told me that when it first appeared in Swedish in 1967, the left criticised him for the end of the book, where he said that social and economic liberation was not possible, with or without violence. That might not have been true, but the reader needed that stark challenge. “I thought that slamming the door like that in the reader's face would be more activating than if I'd plastered some solution on it,” he said.

It is the policy-maker's job to work out solutions to problems. The writer's role is to direct the reader to the most important problems and make them worry about them. So it does not matter that some of his past pessimism, about third-world debt and ozone depletion for instance, have not been borne out. “I am not a fortune teller,” he said, and nor should any artist pretend to be.

If the political task of writers is to unsettle and accuse the bourgeois reader, one can understand why serious literature is rarely upbeat. Although Lindqvist is undoubtedly a humane writer, his books contain a dark vision of human nature that is at odds with the optimism of enlightenment humanism. What Lindqvist suggests, I put it to him, is that the only way to be truly humane is not to celebrate the best in us but to see the worst of us. He nodded. “I think that might be a very good ending to your interview.” And a very good start for any writer who truly desires to be politically engaged.

Pen International Day of the Imprisoned Writer is on 15^th November