The Citizen's Voice: Twentieth-Century Politics and Literature

Tom Venetis is a professional journalist and editor in Toronto.

Focusing attention on novels by Mann, Huxley, Orwell, Golding, Camus,
and Kosinski, this book attempts to demonstrate that each writer was
passionately interested in politics and questions of what makes a
“good citizen.”

More often than not, the author refuses to pursue certain lines of
political and social inquiry that would have raised his work above the
pedestrian. For example, only at the end of his chapter on Mann’s
Magic Mountain does Keren allude to the ideological and spiritual
deadlock the novel examines and answers with the image of its
protagonist, Hans Castrop, marching into battle. Keren mentions in
passing that Mann, like many others at the time, saw the First World War
as a means of escaping the deadlock that resulted from the internal
contradictions of classical liberalism, selfhood, and the pressures for
complete societal and political change. But it is this image of a
“redemptive war” that makes the novel’s political and
philosophical underpinnings understandable, and it is curious that Keren
passes over it, especially in a work devoted to politics and the role of
the citizen.

Similarly, in his examinations of Kafka and Orwell, Keren reduces both
to prophets of totalitarianism and inhuman bureaucracy, themes that are
a holdover from the Cold War. He fails to address both Kafka’s use of
Hasidim and rabbinic courts as the models for many of his stories and
the limitations of Orwell’s version of socialism, especially its
middle-class prejudices toward the working class and women. Both writers
raise several vexing questions about citizenship and liberal politics
that Keren seems unwilling to examine in detail—perhaps because those
questions would undermine his own view of citizenship and individualism.