Literature and Politics

The reactionary Howard years engendered a political literature which provided a pathology and critical response to the perceived infringements of a political force bent on denying the principles of a universal humanism. Forged in the smithy of a left-liberal political ideology, a number of recent Australian writers have taken aim at a federal government which combined the principles of economic neo-liberalism and social conservatism into an assemblage which was perceived to cork the flow of Australian progressivism. Using the novel as a form which examines the material effects of a macro-political social policy on the everyday lives of individuals, this critical fiction has revived within the contemporary Australian literary sphere issues and debates surrounding the question of a literature of commitment.  

This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of two novels that fall within this category of new politically engaged fiction. On the one hand, Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist (2006) elicits a tragic narrative firmly rooted in a discourse of liberal humanism. Its protagonist suffers at the hands of both the suspension of the rule of law and the corruption of the tabloid media. On the other hand, Manfred Jurgensen’s The American Brother (2007), while positing a left-liberal stance, at the same time problematises that very position. Here the political self-certainty of the Kafkaesque protagonist flounders in the face of a secret bureaucratic security state that is beyond his liberal epistemological cognition. If The Unknown Terrorist can be defined by a kind of ideological tendentiousness, The American Brother takes a more sophisticated deconstructionist line. In terms of a logic of commitment, I argue that by virtue of its intellectual quality, the latter of these two works exhibits a more forceful and critical potential. As long as an engaged literature is caught within the conceptual confines of a liberal ideology, its capacity for radical critique will be rendered impotent by such a misrecognition of the political problems of the present.