Incompatibilities: the possibility of engagement in contemporary literary theory

To relate question of literature, or art in general, to any notion of engagement represents a number of problems. Probably the first is the problem, manifested in the development of the avant-garde, that engagement no matter how openly defined would nevertheless end in a subordination of art to politics, accompanied by politics usurping the right to define what is art. As Theda Shapiro in her account of the relation between politics and avant-garde art points out, at the beginning: "Many artists tacitly and somewhat naively assumed that, since art has been revolutionary before the Revolution, avant-garde artists would intuitively understand what was now needed and respond to the new economic and social situation."l However, this did not prove to be the case. To a certain surprise, the initial belief that "The fine phrase 'free, unpolitical art' is not meant for you"2 has not lead to a natural and spontaneous co-operation of artists and politicians. Instead, the claim of art being necessarily part of politics in a very wide sense was soon seen to be seized by the increasingly bureaucratic apparatus pursuing "ideological needs of the moment,"3 only to be in the end transformed into a doctrine by the "1932 proclamation of 'socialist realism' as the only officially accepted art form."4 To relate literature to..