Seeing Things As They Are

Robert Boyers considers the role of politics in the novelistic form:

Of course we do not require that novels dealing with politics refuse to make up their minds about anything. No one doubts that in Demons Dostoevsky mounts a savage attack on the political radicalism to which he himself had once subscribed. James’ portrait of Princess Casamassima in his 1885 novel is intended to reveal the false consciousness and posturing associated with radical chic, long before that term came into use nearly a century later. Even in Turgenev there is little question that the liberalism on offer, however gentle and humane, is ineffectual, hopeless, and that Bazarov’s nihilism is at most a compelling but half-baked idea, a mere rejectionist reflex with no prospect of altering society or mobilizing a mass movement. Novelists can see things as they are, even when they are consumed with ambivalence.