Troubled countries usually cause troubled minds in their writers, as do troubled families or systems of belief: but while being so troubled may be a powerful incitement to literary production, it may equally get in the way of real achievement. Writers can find themselves facing a dilemma, a choice between fidelity to their own passionate confusions and the possibly spurious lucidity of analytic detachment. The duties of a citizen will clash with those of an artist when both realms seem to call for full-time devotion, and writing can be propelled towards propaganda in the desire to avoid political irrelevance or the accusation of it. To create further fictions, in a nation already infested with political lies, risks complicity and redundancy.

LRB 4 August 1988 | PDF Download