It is a nonsensical equation. I'd say a more handy generalisation is
that the more a work adheres to an ideological standard, the less
interesting it is as art. It means a bureaucratic censor is at work,
shaping it to fit the party line. And this applies to to both right
and left. Writers of any quality are always in excess of their own
ideologies, which is why they tend to get into trouble. That goes for
Brecht as much as Pound. (Brecht most often wrote in rhyme, btw).
How politics works through language is a much more complex question
than those crude binaries anyway.
xA
On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 9:17 AM, Jon Corelis<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> if a form, however charming
>> and creative, is somewhat reactionary, the meaning it brings is, at least
>> in a great measure, also reactionary.
>
> I don't understand this. How can a literary form be reactionary? Is
> blank verse reactionary? Is a sonnet? Does that mean that it's
> impossible to write in those forms without validating aristocratic,
> conservative, or obsolete values? To turn it around, T. S. Eliot and
> Ezra Pound may fairly be said to be politically reactionary, yet
> though they wrote in traditional forms, they also were two of the
> major creators of modern free verse. So it seems that radical formal
> innovation is no guarantee of political progressiveness. In Italy, at
> least, leading-edge formal innovations such as Futurism were connected
> with fascism (Marinetti), and one of the major and most radically
> innovative of twentieth century French prose fiction was Celine. We
> could also on the other hand point to a strong strain in leftism
> against "decadent bourgeois" avant-gardism, as in Stalinist "social
> realism," which produced works the ethos of which seems to the
> unenlightened strangely similar to Nazi propaganda. In short, I don't
> see the historical justification for the equation "formally
> reactionary = politically reactionary/formally innovative =
> politically progressive."
>
> --
> ===============================================
>
> Jon Corelis http://jcorelis.googlepages.com/joncorelis
>
> ===============================================
>
--
Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
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