ABSTRACT
Philip Roth has suggested that politics and literature are not only in an inverse relation to each other, they are positively antagonistic. He wrote:
To politics, literature is decadent, soft, irrelevant, boring, wrong-headed, dull, something that makes no sense and really oughtn’t to be. Why? – because the particularizing impulse is literature. How can you be an artist and renounce the nuance? But how can you be a politician and allow the nuance? As an artist the nuance is your task. Your task is not to simplify. The task remains to impart the nuance, to elucidate the complication, to imply the contradiction.
