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Ideology and Emotion – are the two incompatible?

Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

Unsubstantiated by research or reader surveys Thought for the Day: a truly great novel doesn’t just entertain, it is also an attempt to instruct, inform or enlighten readers about a real societal, political, ethical or other issue. But what of the novels whose overriding, original purpose is to instruct, the novels for whom entertainment is merely a tool to hook readers into receiving the author’s instruction – is, in such cases, the quality of the entertainment, the emotional connection to the characters, inevitable harmed?

This question came up following a recent book group discussion on Anna Segher’s resistance novel Das Siebte Kreuz, the story of a political prisoner who escapes from a concentration camp in 1930s Germany and, although his six fellow escapees are recaptured with fatal consequences, manages to flee to safety in Holland by eventually trusting to strangers, who themselves, in order to help him, must first overcome compelling desires for self-preservation through non-assistance and deep-rooted suspicions of everybody around them, including friends and family. Anna Segher’s message to her readers and communist comrades living under the oppression of fascist regimes, is that it is only by working together, and allowing ourselves to trust in the surviving goodness of people, that victories can be achieved.

In my opinion she communicated her vision of resistance well – the novel was as tense as any thriller, and the atmosphere of a society in which fear and mistrust are all pervasive was chillingly convincing. There was however, dissent in the group – some opined that the novel lacked heart, that there was no emotional connection to the hero, who was two-dimensional and not particularly likeable. As far as I was concerned that was precisely the point: the escaped man was not helped by strangers because he was a likeable human, but simply because he was a human.

Nevertheless, the argument stood: the characters were not emotionally engaging. Although in this instance the two-dimensionality ‘types’ that Segher’s employed for characters did not lessen my enjoyment of the novel, the discussion did prompt me to think of other agenda-driven novels which also arguably suffered from a lack of character development. George Orwell’s 1984, for all that is one of the landmark novels of the twentieth century, was too dry to make me really care about the characters. I was appalled by what happened to Winston, but I did not connect with him. And call me a barbarian if you will, but I didn’t really give a fig for his love affair. I was also similarly detached from the pantheon of characters in Sebastian Faulks’s social commentary A Week in December. It took me a while to get into this novel, and although I did become hooked as John Veals’ merciless financial plot unfolded, whether he, or indeed any of the sparsely drawn characters, were truly believable is questionable; nor, for instance, was the token romance of the lawyer and underground driver terribly convincing. I read A Week in December about seven months ago, and although I still remember the story in its broad outline, I cannot in any honesty say that the characters survive as people in my mind.

Which brings me back to my question – does a novel with an overriding, explicit political (or social, ethical, etc) message forsake the emotional connection with readers that good fiction ought to strive for? In illustrating political arguments, must characters revert to ‘types’? Or, to put it simply: does ideology supplant feeling?

Georgona Phipps, Editorial Administrator

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