The Agenda Novel

In recent times, the agenda novel has emerged as one of the easiest routes to literary stardom. Simply defined, it is a novel that is written for the sole purpose of projecting an idea or philosophy, quite often at the cost of everything that constitutes literary merit. Writing fiction is an art-form and I believe it is an injustice to use it simply to shove the writer’s philosophy down readers’ throats. It makes the writer no better than a pimp.

That is my biggest problem with the works of people like George Orwell, Ayn Rand and William Golding. They sacrifice plot and characterisation for the sake of underlining their ideology in every page. Be it Fountainhead or 1984 or Lord of the Flies, all of them read like textbooks masquerading as fiction. 1984 is three hundred odd pages of bleak, anti-Soviet hyperbole. Fountainhead is worse due to it’s sheer size. The characters are like card-board cutouts. Rand doesn’t let her characters exist, like normal human beings. She uses them as vehicles for doctrines and sermons. Lord of the Flies mocks Coral Island for it’s unabashed racism but falls into the same trap itself. You do not require the assistance of face paint and strange dances for the dark side of humanity to come to the fore, as Golding would have you believe. In many ways those ’savages’ are/were more humane than the civilisation he champions.

I do not say it is wrong for fiction to have underlying meanings. Ernest Hemingway once said in reference to The Old Man and the Sea, ‘I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things.’ Human existence and society is so complex that a simple, realistic representation of it will itself have many underlying meanings and it will not feel contrived or forced. Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird is an excellent example. It deals with serious issues like rape and racism but it does so in such a subtle, natural way that it does not feel preachy. The characters are multidimensional, real, breathing human beings; not ideas with arms, legs and a face. They inhabit an ever shifting matrix of grey, not two polar domains of black and white.

Meaningful writing stimulates the reader’s mind and encourages it to think. It doesn’t saturate the reader’s mind with the writer’s viewpoint or belief. That is literary despotism.

Why do these agenda books sell so much? Why do they become classics? It is because they give people a false sense of intelligence, of having had an original thought; when all they do is drill into their minds manufactured thoughts and ideas. No one dares to trash because criticism of such books is not seen as that but as criticism of the ideology at their core. One who criticises a book ‘depicting the poverty and oppression of the lower classes’ can be nothing but a cruel capitalist afterall.

I do not mean that writing should be a documentation of facts. It is necessary to make use of one’s imagination, invent characters and situations. There is, however, a threshold to preaching. One that many writers cross because they are too enamoured by their own cleverness and in love with the sound of their own voice.