The name of Upton Sinclair recently cropped up in the media. Sinclair would have remained a half-forgotten classic of American literature if not for the recent film adaptation of his novel Oil!
After I watched the movie, I recalled the bookshelf in my mother’s house and the covers of the first edition of Sinclair’s Oil in Serbo-Croatian. The covers are embellished with scribbles, my first attempts at drawing a line or a circle. In those poor post-war days the book could serve as a note pad. Sinclair, Gorky and Dreiser might not have been my mother’s favorite writers, but their books appeared in half-empty bookstores in the post-war socialist Yugoslavia. With these books my young, newly married parents started to furnish their library.
I don’t remember if I ever read Oil. Even if I did, I would not have boasted of it in my student’s days. I was a promising student of comparative literature and inspired to defend the “autonomy of literature”. I saw myself somewhere on the first defense lines. In my students days the notion of “literary autonomy” had been closely tied to literary evaluation and literary taste. Simply said, good writers were not supposed to deal with politics, ideology, not even with (too much of) real life. “The literariness of literature” was what mattered. Although Yugoslav writers have never been seriously infected by the virus of socialist realism (the break with the brief ascendance of socialist realism was declared in 1953) resistance to any politicizing of literature lasted a long time, even when the “enemy” was long dead. Thanks to that fact many good writers wrote excellent books, while many bad writers were thought to be good only because they didn’t deal with any “political” issues, and the opposite is also true: the great Croatian writer Miroslav Krleza is still stigmatized for his friendship with former Yugoslav president Tito.
Today I know that the infatuation between literature and ideology started with the first human fingertip. The Bible, the cornerstone of European literature, is not only magnificent, but also a magnificently ideological piece of writing. The history of dangerous liaisons between literature and ideology is too complicated and dramatic to be treated with superficial ease. In the course of that long history many lives were lost because of the written word. The history of relationships between kings and poets, rulers and fools, “commissioners” and writers, patrons and artists is soaked in blood; episodes of book burning and censorship happened too often; the number of lives given for free words, an idea and a dream is too great to be ignored. The autonomy of literature has too often served as an excuse: when they have found it profitable there were writers who become politically engaged, but others chose political engagement even when it was suicidal; some writers when saving their skins have withdrawn into literary autonomy, others choose literary autonomy even when it leads to genuine or symbolic bankruptcy. The dynamic between the two poles — literary autonomy and literary engagement – has been particularly dramatic in the former East European literatures, and, although the political context had changed, it holds its relevance even now. East European literary environments are more rigid: there the writers may lose their careers for the written word or be named to ambassadorial posts. In some East European countries as they move from communism to nationalism, the writer is still expected to be the voice of his people, or his people’s traitor.
The first Serbo-Croatian edition of Sinclair’s Oil slumbers quietly on the bookshelf in my eighty-two-year old mother’s house. This one book tells several histories: the history of American literature, of the East European literatures, the history of the Yugoslav literatures, no longer Yugoslav, and so forth. My mother’s grandchildren do not know who Upton Sinclair is. My mother does. That’s why Granny is cool! True, Granny has no clue who Daniel Day-Lewis is.
Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac
Published in Bookforum, June/July/August 2008.
