OUTSIDE THE WHALE OUTSIDE THE WHALE

the thought; now that we are babies fresh from the womb, we must find it possible to laugh and wonder as well as rage and weep. I ha v no wish to nail myself, let alone anyone else, to the tree of political literature for the rest of my writing life. Lewis Carroll and Laurence Sterne are as important to literature as Swift or Brecht. What I am sayirtg is that politics and literature, like sport and politics, do mix, are inextricably mixed, and that that mixture hs consequences. . The modem world lacks not only hiding places, but certainties. There is no consensus about reality between, for example, the natons of the North and of the South. What President Reagan says is happerng in Central America differs s radically from, say, the Sandinista version, that there is almost no common ground. It becomes necessary to take sides, to say whether or not one thinks of Nicargua as the United States's 'front yard'. (Vietnam, you will recall, was the 1>ack yard'.) It seems to me imperative that literature enter such arguments, because what is being disputed is nothing less than what is the case, what is truth and what untruth. If writers leave the business of making pictures of the world to politicians, it will be one of history's great and most abject abdications. Outside the whale is the unceasing storm, the continuai quarrel, the dialectic of history. Outside the whale there is a genuine need for political fiction, for books that draw new and better maps of reality, and make new languages with which we can understand the world. Outside the whale we see that we are ali irradiated by history, we are radioactive with history and politics; we see that it can be as false to create a politics-free fictional universe as to create one in which nobody needs to work or eat or hate or love or sleep, Outside the whale it becomes necessary, and even exhilarating, to grapple with the special problems created by the incorporation of political material, because politics is by turns farce and tragedy, and sometimes (e.g., Zia's Pakistan) both at once. Outside the whale the writer is pbliged to accept that he (or she) is part of the crowd, part of the ocean, part of the storm, s that objectivity becomes a great dream, like perfection, an 100

unattainable goal for which one must struggle in spite of the impossibility of success. Outside the whale is the world of Samuel Becketfs famous formula: cart go on, l'll go on. his is why (to end where I began) it really is necessary to make a fuss about Raj fiction and the zombie-like revival of the defunct Empire. The various films and TV shows and books I discussed earlier propagate a number of notions about history which must bequarrelled with, as loudly and as embarrassingly as possible. These include: The idea that non-violence makes successful revolutions; the peculiar notion that Kasturba Gandhi could have confided the secrets of her sex-life to Margaret Bourke-White; the bizarre implication that any Indians could look like or speak like Amy Irving or Christopher Lee; the view (which underlies many of these works) that the British and Indians actually understood eaeh other jolly well, and that the end of the Empire was a sort of gentleman's agreement between old pais at the club; the revisionist theorysee David Lean's interviewsthat we, the British, weren't as bad as people make out; the calumny, to which the use of rape-plots lends credence, that frail English roses were in constant sexual danger from lust-crazed wogs (just such a fear lay behind General Dyei^s Amritsar massacre); and, above ali, the fantasy that the British Empire represented something 'noble' or 'great' about Britain; that it was, in spite of ali its flaws and meannesses and bigotries, fundamentally glamorous. If books and films could be made and consumed in the belly of the whale, it might be possible to consider them merely as entertainment, or even, on occasion, as art. But in our whalless world, in this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss. 1984

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