Read the following passage carefully and answer questions 56 to 60 :
The literary distaste for politics, however, seems to be focused not so much on the largely
murky practice of politics in itself as a subject of literary representation but rather more on how
it is often depicted in literature, i.e., on the very politics of such representation. A political novel
often turns out to be not merely a novel about politics but a novel with a politics of its own, for
it seeks not merely to show us how things are but has fairly definite ideas about how things
should be, and precisely what one should think and do in order to make things move in that
desired direction. In short, it seeks to convert and enlist the reader to a particular cause or
ideology; it often is (in an only too familiar phrase) not literature but propaganda. This is said to
violate the very spirit of literature which is to broaden our understanding of the world and the
range of our sympathies rather than to narrow them down through partisan commitment. As
John Keats said, ‘We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us’.
Another reason why politics does not seem amenable to the highest kind of literary
representation seems to arise from the fact that politics by its very nature is constituted of ideas
and ideologies. If political situations do not lend themselves to happy literary treatment, political
ideas present perhaps an even greater problem in this regard. Literature, it is argued, is about
human experiences rather than about intellectual abstractions; it deals in what is called the ‘felt
reality’ of human flesh and blood, and in sap and savour (rasa) rather than in arid and lifeless
ideas. In an extensive discussion of the matter in her book Ideas and the Novel, the American
novelist Mary McCarthy observed that ‘ideas are still today felt to be unsightly in the novel’
though that was not so in ‘former days’, i.e., in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her formulation of
the precise nature of the incompatibility between ideas on the one hand and the novel on the
other betrays perhaps a divided conscience in the matter and a sense of dilemma shared by many
writers and readers : ‘An idea cannot have loose ends, but a novel, I almost think, needs them.
Nevertheless, there is enough in common for the novelists to feel… the attraction of ideas while
taking up arms against them – most often with weapons of mockery.’
question
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A political novel reveals