Sense and sensibility

In a book I was reading recently, The Boat Boys, written by Papa Jeng, the historian Hassoum Ceesay, had this to say about African writers in the book’s introduction: “African writers must be responsive to the burning issues of their times, our writers should not crave for the time to be able to afford to pen odes to flowers or rivers while the continent burns! Writers must write about

the issues affecting the people, immediately.” First, let us clear up a particular point screaming for attention. The term ‘writer’ is quite vague: it includes poets, novelists, playwrights, journalists, and a whole medley of scribblers. But in its stricter application, we use it to refer to those who write literature: poets, novelists and playwrights fairly easily suggest themselves, and some journalism aspires to literature; still, the main distinction of literary works is that they are works of the imagination.

If Mr Ceesay’s introduction had been to, let’s say, a collection of political or sociological essays, then I would not have had any reason for my essay; but, as it happened, his was to a novel, and that got my wrist all twitchy and bristly.

Mr Ceesay’s view is an old one, and is of a literary credo which, restless with ‘beseiged intensity’, seeks to hold literature or art generally to a kind of ‘moral audit’. its tone of seriousness, insinuating, as it does, the idea of an “armoured pen” in the service of the moral majority, makes it easy fodder for the majority of us to unquestioningly swallow..And once swallowed, it turned into a fetish, a mantra, and like all mantras, this one came fully armed with a name: engagé.

Literary critics usually contrast this creed with “art for art’s sake”, or ‘degage’, if you like: the notion that an artist’s sensibility should be the sole spring of this art. This view though never had a wide appeal, and i imagine that in “oppressed” societies, such as ours, the doctrine of engage will get the nod each time -and it isn’t difficult to see why: when interests are near and pressing, art for art’s sake does rather look frivolous and tangential, like a luxury, you know, as if “language had gone on holiday”. Besides, who can resist the earnestness, the standing-on-the-moral-highground posturings, the slightly overdone maquillage, of engage? I was en-spelled by the doctrine, once.

When I was at high school in Banjul, in the mid - 1980s, engage was a word hot on every self-styled radical’s lips.  In fact, those with the hottest lips (not necessarily the deepest radicals), sought to conflate the doctrine with nationalism or patriotism. It was a most unfortunate confusion, for it allowed some to perch themselves on Mount Kilimanjaro, so to speak, and work their sophistical witchcraft on young impressionable minds. And it worked! the mixture got us all dislocatingly giddy with oppressed pride.

But that was then - our critical faculties were barely learning to crawl - and this is now, but now the faculties are tottering, (in confidence) with humility; and a lesson or two, learnt from all that tripping over, wrapped up the tiny feet.And here is an example of a lesson: If wanting a totally “committed” art is engage’s shortsightedness, not wanting any commitment at all might be degage’s. Neither is capable of giving us a balanced expression of any society.

The opposition here, then, is an artificial one, for it could be said that the doctrines are more complementary than antithetical, as each has its just emphasis in the creative process. True art, we are told, is born of the encounter, on equal terms, between the artist and his society. Any slave/master relationship will not only defraud us of the truly educative value of art, but art then wouldn’t be even able to deliver the ends to which it was perverted. Here, we get a lose, lose situation. For that reson, we had better understood the nature of art, give it its optimal condition of folurishing, and let it do what, at the best of times, it has always done: prefigure a future for man.

you would have noticed that I’ve been using “literature” and ‘art’ interchangeably. Well, I’ve been doing so because what is true of one is largely true of the other, in fact, literature is also referred to as the narrative art - so to my pedantic reader, please, grant me the licence, though I’m not writing poetry (was that pedantic?) anyway, back to the point. Works of literature are “representations or imitations of reality as it might be and perhaps is”.

This definition quite clearly covers art generally, because any piece of imaginative work is a ‘representation of something. A representation though is, by definition, not the thing itself: a work of art will therefore always stand at a “slight angle to reality”.

This raises all kinds of troublesome issues. For one, it reflects the long-noticed crack between language and reality - which is a whole subject of its own - but for our purposes, it raises the prospect that a work’s angle on reality might be ‘mistaken’ or indeed ‘faked’.(Yes, reader, a work of literature, like the famous “ah”, can be faked!) Hesiod’s Muses, I’ve been told, were wont to tease humans on the subject: “we know how to tell falsehoods that seem real, but we also know how to speak truth when we wish to”. In this, as in most things, an “interpretative patience” is what the doctor ordered.

If great works appear to stand “well-angled”, such that they seem to “lengthen their shadow” across centureis, they do so, I believe, propped up on the twin towers of “autonomy” and “disinterestedness”. My point should become clearer after we’ve trekked into the nature of our understanding and of the creative imagination itself. It’s all quite certain to me that we can never fully grasp the mysterious nature of art without such a trek.

“The understanding”, according to the Engligh philosopher, John Locke, “like the eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself. It requires art to set it at a distance and make it its own object”. In other words, the mind doesn’t have a mind of its own, but through our imagination, art can become its mind.

Art can set the mind at a distance, make it its own object of study, and thereby see it when it doesn’t think that anyone was looking. “Thought trying to catch its tail” amidst all the anxieties, vanities, blind-spots, and everything else that makes up a mind. When art succeeds in putting before our eyes the understandings (or misunderstandings) of the mind, that creates a space in us for authentic self-awareness; which is quite, quite indispensible to evolving, uncertain, and hopeful people, such as we are.

And this is where the notion of disinterestedness is particularly important: without it we can never obtain true authenticity; for the needs of reality lie in patient study, a sense of truth and sincerity. “Things near us are seen of the size of life: things at a distance are diminished to the size of the understanding.” It goes then without saying, that the less deceived are really the people of the future.

The creative imagination is a most baffling feature of the human set up. And the first thing to be said about it is that no writer can determine what appeals to his. I call it nature’s ambassador or representative in man. I think it bears a relationship more to nature than to society. It resembles nature more in its autonomy, freedom, contradictions and variety; and in its play of chance, accident, fortune and adventure.

Only on its grounds, can we re-imagine the boundaries of our lifes. If there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any philosophy, it is so because, art, not philosophy, does such ‘impossible’ dreamings. What was once strange and erroneous may very well become normal and acceptable: it is art which discovers the undiscovered, and dreams up the unprepared-for and the unheard-of. So when give it its autonomy we are really giving ourselves a chance to discover “another way to authenticity”.

The American essayist, Cynthia Ozick, got there first, in her book, What Henry James Knew, suggesting, rather seductively I think, that a “book may know more than its author does, or it may know different things”: more about its own matter, more about its own mood and motives, and certainly more about the author’s thread of thought. Literature, the argument goes, is written neither by the brain nor by the mind, but by the sensibility; and each discovery by the sensibility is in fact a discovery of theme, though the author might not be aware of it. True art then bears a relationship not to society per se, but to society’s vitality.

I also want our writers to write about the ‘burning issues’, but I do not believe that the indirections of art can serve the immediacy of our need, in any direct way.

Practical reason, rational concepts, organised and systematic  frameworks of discourse - these are the tools and processes which stand the best chance of solving the “burning issues”. Politics, sociology, or the social sciences generally, to which the burning issues properly belong, have adapted mathematical techniques - “deduction from ‘self-evident’ axioms according to fixed rules, tests of internal consistency, a priori methods, standards of clarity and rigour proper to mathematics” - as their favoured method of discovery.

These techniques discover quantifiable properties of what is revealed to the senses, whereas art discovers immeasurable ‘qualities’ revealed only by the sensibility. The great novelist may moonlight as a pamphleteer, but he will never confuse the two. He would have known that “journalism is the first draft of history”, not fiction. And that great literature takes its rise from the depth of memory, as only memory writes deep. “We find the inner future in the past in which so much that is eternal was enclosed.” The present is never around long enough; hence any art inspired by the merely ‘present’ can rest assured of a speedy ride to oblivion.

Now, to the creature, the creature which has been fluttering about for attention, in all this: what is the role of the artist in a time of struggle? The answer is quite simple, really; and i’ll begin my answer by posing another question: What is the point of asking art to do what it patently cannot do, thereby giving us less, where we should expect more? If the artist succeeds in producing genuine art, the question resolves itself, indeed it does not even arise. Art can contribute successfully, efficiently, to the struggle by being itself; rather than its looking over its shoulder, to politics or ideology or any of the various ‘ologies’ and ‘isms’ which, as if playing musical chairs, take turns, one becoming fasihonable today, another, tomorrow; ism upon ology upon ism ad nauseum, while the great works will outlive all of them.

Art is not so much in the loftiness of the subject matter as in the “artistic modulation and balance” of that matter. Its formal and technical patterning undercut any simple congruence between it and life. The poet, on being told of the death of his daughter, cannot burst into a poem - after the man has shed his tears, the poet will have to knuckle down to his rhymes. And his rhymes when fizzing with life will almost always lead him to unscheduled detours. The creative process is always a voyage of discovery.

In the end, the “test of greatness is the page of history”. There are books being written today that would be read in a hundred years from now, and others which would be “still-born at press”. Only Judge Time will decide. But when literature is working successfully as such, it gives us a means “to withdraw from the details of our lives and to understand existence in terms of its general significance”.


Occupied with morality, it certainly is, but not necessarily with moralising. By its method of obliquity, its by-indirections-find-directions-out kind of stealthiness, and in the autonomous “play of wit, ideas and language”, literature keeps our certanties dizzy all the time; for it creates a realm where doubting never ends. And the lessons we learn from great books will run through the fabric of our growth, educating the emotions. In fact, the great lyric poet, Rilke, believes that the future enters into us that way; in order to transform itself in us long before it hapens.

“Knowledge is coarse, life is subtle, and literature corrects for the distance”: it lets us live with the distance, ie, its charms and incantations creep into our souls and lay upon our wounds. And as if performing a religious rite, the charms purify the wounds; and slowly, tiny flowers of faith will begin to grow on the wounds, in time. Then with this faith, we can wear our “tattered dress”, head held high, and walk into the “perpetual overhang” we call the future.