Is All Literature Propaganda?

Yes, probably, I think

My dissertation tells the story, more or less, of how American novelists and critics came to see propagandistic novels—think antislavery novels, temperance novels, socialist novels, etc.—as aesthetically bad, instead prizing ambiguous, ironic, skeptical novels that show flawed characters encountering morally complex or indeterminate situations. Because I can’t research forever, it tells this story from a particular, limited perspective, but that’s the story it’s trying to tell.

I’ve written first drafts of over half of the dissertation, and I’m still wrestling with the best term to use to describe the kind of “propagandistic” literature I’m talking about.¹ Different literary critics have used a dizzying number of different words to refer to this kind of writing:

• Propaganda/propagandistic literature

• Rhetorical novel

• Protest novel

• Didactic novel

• Social novel

• Novel of commitment

• Roman-à-thèse

And each of these terms has been defined and redefined by successive generations of both scholars and artists, sometimes in confusing or counterintuitive ways.

But definitions are always slippery. How do you tell whether a novel is propaganda or not? Whether it counts as a protest novel? Is there some line that we can draw between protest novels and just…novels?

This is a particularly vexing question because, since the last half of the twentieth century, a series of literary theorists have been making the claim that all novels are, in one form or another, propagandistic. Every story can be interpreted as didactic, as imparting some moral lesson. Obviously, some stories really hit you over the head with their moral—Aesop’s fables, for example. But even narratives that don’t hit you over the head with a moral can impart lessons. This was known in the 1850s; one reviewer of Uncle Tom’s Cabin wrote that “there is an argument even in successive dramatic pictures designed to produce a given effect, as well as in successive syllogisms designed to establish a special conclusion.” Novels teach us to see the world in a particular way, and the way we see the world determines, to a large degree, how we think about morality and politics, even if novels don’t explicitly tell us how to think.

This insight has animated a good deal of postwar criticism, which often seeks to uncover implied political or moral messages contained in literary works. In the 1960s, Wayne C. Booth perhaps most prominently claimed that all literature is rhetoric, is trying to convince readers that the world is a particular way (the book is The Rhetoric of Fiction). Even novels that claim to represent the world in an “objective” way can be, covertly, trying to impart a moral or political message. Indeed, for the theorist A.P. Foulkes, among others, it is precisely when a novel claims to represent the world objectively that it is most invisibly and insidiously propagandistic. When literature represents the current political order (capitalism but also, for Foulkes, Soviet Communism) as natural, inevitable, simply the way things are, they reinforce the ways of looking at the world that support that political order. Foulkes calls this kind of subtle political persuasion “integrationist” propaganda.

To prove the point, Foulkes performs a reading of Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin. It’s a children’s book that does not seem, at first blush, to be particularly political in its outlook. In the story, squirrels bring offerings of food to a sleepy owl in return for permission to gather acorns on his island. But Foulkes sees in it a “Capitalist integration myth”: a story that works to subtly justify capitalist exploitation. By the end of the story, both little Squirrel Nutkin and “the young reader will have learned to accept the naturalness of a society in which a land-owning owl sleeps while squirrels work both for themselves and the owl.”

The reading seems silly on the surface—all of this political interrogation of a kid’s book?!—but it also seems pretty obvious to me that kid’s books do, in fact, teach kids moral and political lessons beyond the morals that are sometimes explicitly affirmed at the end, and that through a little bit of interpretation we can figure out what those messages are. You may disagree with Foulkes’ conclusion—or you may simply think that it’s good to teach kids that the capitalist owl must be obeyed—but I think the idea that kid’s books can serve as a kind of subtle, integrationist propaganda is pretty obviously true.

At the same time, though, this idea that all literature, even Squirrel Nutkin, is propaganda has limited use for comparing the relative degree to which different works of literature are propagandistic. If all literature is propaganda, how do we meaningfully distinguish between works that are really, overtly propagandistic and those that aren’t? This is the question that Susan Suleiman discusses in Authoritarian Fictions, a great work of literary theory. Even if we can detect traces of propaganda in any work of literature, writes Suleiman, “there exist nontrivial differences between and among texts…Novels that are roman à thèse have certain identifiable traits, which distinguish them from other novels and other genres.” Even if all literature is to some degree didactic, it still makes sense to identify particular works of literature as particularly didactic. To do otherwise is to fail to make obvious and useful distinctions between books.

the feathery ur-capitalist

So where’s the line? How do you distinguish whether a work of literature is a roman à thèse or a regular old roman? For Suleiman, the primary difference between the propagandistic novel (she uses the term roman à thèse, but I think her observations make sense if we use the term “propaganda”) and the non-propagandistic novel is that the roman à thèse tells you how to interpret it. It makes its point crystal clear—or at least as clear as it is possible to make a work of fiction. For stories always make their points indirectly, and “indirect communication always runs the risk of not being understood, or of being misunderstood. It is precisely in order to palliate this danger that didactic narratives usually propose, in more or less evident fashion, their own interpretation, which fixes the meaning of the story and eliminates (or tries to) the possibility of multiple interpretations and meanings.” She uses the example of Christ’s parables, which are often immediately followed by interpretive explanations that make the parable’s lessons explicit.

This rings true to me. Think of a propagandistic novel. Think of its ending. In many cases, there’s a long speech, either directly from the author to the reader or delivered by an obviously virtuous hero, fairly explicitly laying out the moral of the story! (Atlas Shrugged, The Jungle…) If you somehow managed to finish the plot of Uncle Tom’s Cabin without really understanding whether the book was pro- or anti-slavery (despite the fact that much of the novel is essentially a patchwork of slave narratives and antislavery rhetoric), you can read the final chapter, a thundering jeremiad against slavery, and be reassured that you should have interpreted the book as a withering critique against slavery the whole time. There’s really no honest way to interpret the novel except as a critique of slavery; yes, one might be intentionally perverse and attempt to fabulate a counterintuitive reading of the novel, but nobody’s really going to buy it if they’ve read the book. For Suleiman, this attempt by the author to limit the possible multiple ideological interpretations of a novel is what makes it a roman à thèse; it’s the most useful, and usable, definition that I’ve come across in my research so far. Reasonable people can disagree on the “main point” of a non-propaganda novel; but they can’t really disagree on the “main point” of a propaganda novel.

O wise and well-read reader, if you have any reading recommendations on this topic, I would love to hear them!

1. Face/voice reveal—This is film evidence of me losing a public-speaking contest wherein I tried to explain my dissertation to a “public audience,” a fraught and difficult, but very rewarding, process.