david wheatley
a literary converse to the Christianinjunctionto love our enemies, it must also be
possible to hate our simple-minded friends. For a conscientious writer on political
themes, it is practically a daily duty.
Another memorable statement of the dilemma ofengag ́ewriting can be found in
the work of one of the foremost twentieth-century aesthetic philosophers, Theodor
Adorno. Adorno published his essay ‘Commitment’ in 1962, in response to Jean-
Paul Sartre’sWhat is Literature?,andhadalreadyjoustedwithGeorgLukacs on this ́
theme, defending the political core of modernist writing against Lukacs’s disgust ́
for its anti-realist nihilism (as he saw it). He had also, in 1949, made his famous
declaration on poetry and Auschwitz, still widely misquoted as an assertion that
poetry was henceforth ‘impossible’. His exact words are more nuanced: ‘To write
poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why
ithasbecomeimpossibletowritepoetrytoday.’^7 The decent thing would be to
stop writing poetry after Auschwitz; but this is a barbaric age, and for poetry to
do it justice, it must internalize that barbarism, as Adorno thought Kafka, Beckett,
and Celan had done. In ‘Commitment’ he defends this stance against Sartre with
a robust attack on the political ‘obligation’ with which Sartre sought to trump the
aesthetic demands of writing: ‘motivations are irrelevant’.^8
With his vision of all-encompassing reification in contemporary society, Adorno
sees Sartre’s belief in the committed individual as not dissimilar to the Fascist cult of
personal sacrifice as an instrument of mystification. Even his long-time antagonist
Bertolt Brecht provides Adorno with ammunition against Sartre: ‘He once calmly
wrote that, to be honest, the theatre was more important to him than any changes in
the world it might promote.’^9 Adorno negotiates a way between commitment and
art for art’s sake by arguing that if Brecht’s theatre were simply politics, it would be
politically inadequate and untrue, leaving it defensible only on aesthetic grounds.
He notes the Western desire to reclaim Brecht from his Communist politics, but
condemns that too, refusing to neuter Brecht’s work by separating its artistic success
from its political dimension. The position of the artist remains paradoxical: if art
delivers a voice to the voiceless and some measure of aesthetic justice, it does so
only by commodifying suffering for the benefit of an amnesiac culture:
The moral of this art, not to forget for a single instant, slithers into the abyss of its
opposite....Even the sound of despair pays its tribute to a hideous affirmation. Works of
less than the highest rank are also willingly absorbed as contributions to clearing up the past.
When genocide becomes part of the cultural heritage in the themes of committed literature,
it becomes easier to continue to play along with the culture which gave birth to murder.^10
(^7) Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, inPrisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber
(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1981), 34.
(^8) Adorno, ‘Commitment’, trans. Francis McDonagh, in Ernst Blochet al.,Aesthetics and Politics
(London: NLB, 1977), 181.
(^9) Ibid. 185. (^10) Ibid. 189.