Nothing wrong with Ngugi’s change of heart

Just as the pure formalism of America’s avant-guard-ists once upon a time  is a negation of art, so is the pure “messagism” into which Ngugi wa Thiong’o plunged in the 1970s.

Condemning both explicitly, Fischer tells us directly that a work of art is naturally a mutual interpenetration between form and content.

That is why every effort must be made never to falsify today’s realities in an attempt to achieve a preconceived future.

Maxim Gorky’s coinage can be vulgarised precisely in the same way as Ngugi did with his deformation of reality in his children’s stories in an attempt to achieve a partisan aim, bandying about Marxist phrases quite out of context and quite needlessly for children.

That is what Ng’weno means when he claims that socialists, ipso facto, seek to slant the truth in order to achieve purely sectarian ends.

Socialist realism, however, as Fischer points out, is not an artistic style, but only an attitude, an example of John Ciardi’s “sympathetic contract” by which a writer secures rapport with his audience.

SOCIALIST REALISM

Since the central “purpose” of the artist’s attitude is to create a more vital truth out of today’s relative truth, he commits himself to avoiding all disingenuous propaganda of the kind which liberalism itself is the real practitioner.

Fischer emphasises that socialist realism is an ideological outlook, not an artistic realist method, not a skill. He writes:  “’Critical realism”, and, even more widely, (liberal)  literature and art as a whole (that is to say, all great (liberal) literature and art) (on the other hand) imply criticism of the surrounding social reality.

“‘Socialist realism’ and, even more widely, socialist art and literature as a whole, imply the artist’s and writer’s fundamental agreement with the aims of the (movement).

The fact that the distinction is the result of a new attitude, not simply of the new stylistic standards, was often obscured by the methods of administrative interference in the arts practised during Stalin’s lifetime.”

He adds: “A ... rigid adherence to a ‘monolithic’ Marxist theory of the arts was no longer obligatory, and although the conservative tendencies are still strong, (there is) variety of different artistic concepts now.”

For the same reason that even Lenin dismissed all preoccupation with sparkling phrases as “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, a Leninist like Maxim Gorky would have rejected as a violation of realism in art all of Ngugi’s erstwhile habit of putting such propaganda words and phrases in the mouth of a mere stripling like Njamba Nene.

To be sure, quite early, Ngugi  had begun to express the view that a political activist can produce perfectly objective art. In The Necessity of Art, Fischer ordains that only from an angle  can you see the reality  of any object or phenomenon.

That is where Mazrui and other liberal critics part company with Fischer.

FANONIST VIOLENCE

Indeed, Mazrui’s criticism of Okigbo is fundamental. It is that, by embroiling himself in person in Nigeria’s civil war on Biafra’s side, Okigbo could no longer observe accurately any of the elements of the war and had, therefore, ceased to be an artist.

For Mazrui, Ng’weno and other typical liberals, the normative critical postulate is that, while taking part in a political activity, the artist must lay down his pen or brush or chisel; and while working on an artistic piece, he or she must momentarily drop all political partisanship. That, the liberal claims, is the only way the art producer can see things “impartially”.

But the scientist – by far the most objective reporter of our world – immediately retorts that he must stand closely and look only from a certain angle if he wants to see with accuracy and objectivity any of the natural objects and phenomena of his experimentation and observation.

To recap, in his book Land, Freedom and Fiction, David Maughan-Brown comments: “This disparity between Fanonist ‘violence’ ... in non-fiction ... and the antipathy to violence in the  (liberal’s) fictional work ... is attributable to two factors. First, (in the latter) the fiction is clearly rendering visible residual ideological affiliation (namely, to liberalism).

“Secondly, Ngugi’s notion of good fiction, based on an aesthetic ideology derived from his literary education in the English departments (both at Makerere and at Leeds in the UK) oriented towards traditional critical orthodoxies, demanded a balance which prevented the fictional expression of certain positions (particularly those tending towards the deconstruction of concepts like violence) articulated outside only with the 1977 publication of Petals of Blood.

DRAMATIC CHANGE

But “(we) are ... astonished to see a sudden and dramatic change of attitude, where the audience is no longer allowed to discover for itself the content of his art through the actions, plots and utterances of the various characters; where the characters are now made to spoon-feed the audience with a great deal of ‘revolutionary’ cant and dialectic of the classical Greek kind.”

That was where, as Omuholo Omushibungo, as a liberalistic critic,  puts it – Ngugi allowed himself to get drunk with  phrases  from a newly discovered ideology and that this was what played havoc with his art. 

But to talk like Omushibungo is to claim that you cannot be an artist unless you are a liberal.

The claim is that the socialist artist is too preoccupied with the social message of his art  (the  content of it) to pay any attention to its form (its container).

Art message

A “committed” artist, Ng’weno once alleged repeatedly, will even falsify the realities of his situation in order to promote the distribution of his message in art.

The claim, then, is that such artists are completely oblivious to form, to beauty, to aesthetics in general. Yet what we find from the field of practice is the very opposite.

Even liberal students have acclaimed as great art the fiction of Jack London, Maxim Gorky himself and Robert Tressell; and the poetry of Breyten Breytenbach, Heinrich Heine, Agostinho Neto, Pablo Neruda, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Mao Zedong.

I know nothing more captivating in form alone than the theatre of Bertolt Brecht, Chiang Ching, Ferdinand Lassalle, Vladimir Mayakovsky and George Bernard Shaw; the music of Kurt Weill; the didactics of Amilcar Cabral, Paulo Freire, Antonio Gramsci and Ivan Illich; the polemics of Rosa Luxemburg, Armand Mattelart, Georgi Plekhanov and Seth Siglaub; the journalism of James Aronson, Cedric Belfrage, Wilfred Burchett, John Reed and Emile Zola.

Few things are more exciting just in their forms than the personal letters of Minna Kautsky, Nadezda Krupskaya, Wilhelm Liebknecht and Clara Zetkin; the speeches of Angela Davis, Franz Mehring, Marcelino dos Santos and Joe Slovo. These were socialists of all ideological nuances, many of them even virulently opposed to Marx, Engels and Lenin.

Yet one theme runs like a thread through the works of all of them.

To reconcile the individual with his or her society is the basic moral content of all their art works.

NEW IDEOLOGY

That, indeed, is what distinguishes these artists from their liberal counterparts, for whom  the individual and society stand in rigid  and permanent opposition to each other; for whom, indeed, the state must take sides with the individual in opposition to all interests of the collective.

No, Ngugi’s problem did not lie in his sudden discovery of Marxism. Art can be a vehicle of any ideology.

That is why there are excellent artists in all ideological camps. Even in an ideology as anti-human as fascism might have produced exquisite art.

Ngugi’s problem was personal only. He allowed the impact of the new ideology to enthuse him with such impatience as to seem to say that art was now a luxury, waste of time and energy, to be thrown overboard with as much excess baggage from a sinking ship.

The urgency of a revolution seemed to require the artist to ignore all the postulates of art.

Liberal critics were beside themselves with fury. Omushibungo wrote in a Nairobi newspaper article: “(Ngugi’s) works for children’s reading, Njamba Nene’s Pistol and Njamba Nene and the Flying Bus ... are not any different (from Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto).

“Here is a case where a little boy in Standard Three spends all his time in school lecturing his colleagues and teachers about “exploitation of the masses, foreign capitalists and their lackeys’ and  an ‘imminent workers’ revolution’.