Literature and Totalitarianism (19. Juni 1941)
I said at the beginning of my first talk that
this is not a critical age. It is an age of partisanship and not of
detachment, an age in which it is especially difficult to see literary
merit in a book with whose conclusions you disagree. Politics — politics
in the most general sense — have invaded literature, to an extent that
does not normally happen, and this has brought to the surface of our
consciousness the struggle that always goes on between the individual
and the community. It is when one considers the difficulty of writing
honest unbiased criticism in a time like ours that one begins to grasp
the nature of the threat that hangs over the whole of literature in the
coming age.
We live in an age which the autonomous individual is ceasing to exist
— or perhaps one ought to say, in which the individual is ceasing to
have the illusion of being autonomous. Now, in all that we say about
literature, and (above all) in all that we say about criticism, we
instinctively take the autonomous individual for granted. The whole of
modern European literature — I am speaking of the literature of the past
four hundred years — is built on the concept of intellectual honesty,
or, if you like to put it that way, on Shakespeare’s maxim, ‘To thine
own self be true’. The first thing that we ask of a writer is that he
shall not tell lies, that he shall say what he really thinks, what he
really feels. The worst thing we can say about a work of art is that it
is insincere. And this is even truer of criticism than of creative
literature, in which a certain amount of posing and mannerism, and even a
certain amount of downright humbug, doesn’t matter, so long as the
writer is fundamentally sincere. Modern literature is essentially an
individual thing. It is either the truthful expression of what one man
thinks and feels, or it is nothing.
As I say, we take this notion for granted, and yet as soon as one
puts it into words one realizes how literature is menaced. For this is
the age of the totalitarian state, which does not and probably cannot
allow the individual any freedom what ever. When one mentions
totalitarianism one thinks immediately of Germany, Russia, Italy, but I
think one must face the risk that this phenomenon is going to be
world-wide. It is obvious that the period of free capitalism is coming
to an end and that one country after another is adopting a centralized
economy that one can call Socialism or state capitalism according as one
prefers. With that the economic liberty of the individual, and to a
great extent his liberty to do what he likes, to choose his own work, to
move to and fro across the surface of the earth, comes to an end. Now,
till recently the implications of this were not foreseen. It was never
fully realized that the disappearance of economic liberty would have any
effect on intellectual liberty. Socialism was usually thought of as a
sort of moralized liberalism. The state would take charge of your
economic life and set you free from the fear of poverty, unemployment
and so forth, but it would have no need to interfere with your private
intellectual life. Art could flourish just as it had done in the
liberal-capitalist age, only a little more so, because the artist would
not any longer be under economic compulsions.
Now, on the existing evidence, one must admit that these ideas have
been falsified. Totalitarianism has abolished freedom of thought to an
extent unheard of in any previous age. And it is important to realize
that its control of thought is not only negative, but positive. It not
only forbids you to express — even to think — certain thoughts, but it
dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it
tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a code of
conduct. And as far as possible it isolates you from the outside world,
it shuts you up in an artificial universe in which you have no standards
of comparison. The totalitarian state tries, at any rate, to control
the thoughts and emotions of its subjects at least as completely as it
controls their actions.
The question that is important for us is: can literature survive in
such an atmosphere? I think one must answer shortly that it cannot. If
totalitarianism becomes world-wide and permanent, what we have known as
literature must come to an end. And it will not do — as may appear
plausible at first — to say that what will come to an end is merely the
literature of post-Renaissance Europe.
There are several vital differences between totalitarianism and all
the orthodoxies of the past, either in Europe or in the East. The most
important is that the orthodoxies of the past did not change, or at
least did not change rapidly. In medieval Europe the Church dictated
what you should believe, but at least it allowed you to retain the same
beliefs from birth to death. It did not tell you to believe one thing on
Monday and another on Tuesday. And the same is more or less true of any
orthodox Christian, Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim today. In a sense his
thoughts are circumscribed, but he passed his whole life within the same
framework of thought. His emotions are not tampered with.
Now, with totalitarianism, exactly the opposite is true. The
peculiarity of the totalitarian state is that though it controls
thought, it does not fix it. It sets up unquestionable dogmas, and it
alters them from day to day. It needs the dogmas, because it needs
absolute obedience from its subjects, but cannot avoid the changes,
which are dictated by the needs of power politics. It declared itself
infallible, and at the same time it attacks the very concept of
objective truth. To take a crude, obvious example, every German up to
September 1939 had to regard Russian Bolshevism with horror and
aversion, and since September 1939 he had to regard it with admiration
and affection. If Russia and Germany go to war, as they may well do
within the next few years [tatsächlich begann der deutsche Angriff auf die Sowjetunion drei Tage später!], another equally violent change will have to
take place. The German’s emotional life, his loves and hatreds, are
expected, when necessary, to reverse themselves overnight. I hardly need
to point out the effect of this kind of thing upon literature. For
writing is largely a matter of feeling, which cannot always be
controlled from outside. It is easy to pay lip-service to the orthodoxy
of the moment, but writing of any consequence can only be produced when a
man feels the truth of what he is saying; without that, the
creative impulse is lacking. All the evidence we have suggests that the
sudden emotional changes which totalitarianism demands of its followers
are psychologically impossible. And that is the chief reason why I
suggest that if totalitarianism triumphs throughout the world,
literature, as we have known it, is at an end. And, in fact,
totalitarianism does seem to have had that effect so far. In Italy
literature has been crippled, and in Germany it seems almost to have
ceased. The most characteristic activity of the Nazis is burning books.
And even in Russia the literary renaissance we once expected has not
happened, and the most promising Russian writers show a marked tendency
to commit suicide or disappear into prison.
I said earlier that liberal capitalism is obviously coming to an end,
and therefore I may have seemed to suggest that freedom of thought is
also inevitably doomed. But I do not believe this to be so, and I will
simply say in conclusion that I believe the hope of literature’s
survival lies in those countries in which liberalism has struck its
deepest roots, the non-military countries, western Europe and the
Americas, India and China. I believe — it may be no more than a pious
hope — that though a collectivized economy is bound to come, those
countries will know how to evolve a form of Socialism which is not
totalitarian, in which freedom of thought can survive the disappearance
of economic individualism. That, at any rate, is the only hope to which
anyone who cares for literature can cling. Whoever feels the value of
literature, whoever sees the central part it plays in the development of
human history, must also see the life and death necessity of resisting
totalitarianism, whether it is imposed on us from without or from
within.
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