LITERATURE

WRITING & RIGHTING: LITERATURE IN THE AGE OF HUMAN RIGHTS
by Lyndsey Stonebridge

The connections between human rights and literature are profound and we ignore the humanities and reading at our peril, says Lyndsey Stonebridge, Interdisciplinary Professor of Humanities at the University of Birmingham. She recommends books that best show the complex relationship between literature and human rights, from Auschwitz to Manus Island.

Interview by Nigel Warburton

NW: Literature and human rights are not two things that obviously go together. I wonder if you could begin by explaining the connection.

LS: For me, it’s always been an intimate connection. If you look at the history of philosophy, the history of rights, and the history of literature together, the ways in which all three have mutually enforced or challenged each other has been, at least in the Western tradition since the 18th century, very strong. There are plenty of super-literary cultures that don’t have modern human rights, but I don’t think we’d have modern human rights without literature.

NW: When I think of modern human rights, I think of the Universal Declaration of 1948. You’re talking about the longer history of human rights, I assume.

LS: Yes. But my main interest is in the 20th century, the moments leading up to the mid-20th century, and what has happened since. If you go way back, the intersections between literature and human rights are so intimate. In the 18th century, for example, you have the development of ideas around natural law, which are really the pre-history of modern human rights: the belief that we have human dignity, and that we should respond to each other recognising natural human dignity. It’s no accident, as other scholars have pointed out, that the novel was born then. The novel helps make other people real to us. This is true whether it’s the sentimental novel, which was teaching readers to be sympathetic towards servant girls and other people who were not middle class, or whether it’s Rousseau’s Emile. Rousseau was a great advocate of natural rights and doing our own thing to make the world the best place. When he’s trying to think about how to bring up Emile he says that Emile shouldn’t read any philosophy because it is very bad for children’s young minds—he’s probably quite right there—but, instead, he should read novels. Indeed, he should just read one novel, Robinson Crusoe. So the great 18th century natural rights man learned how to be this man by reading a novel. That’s a tradition that goes all the way from the 18th century novel to Orwell in the 20th century: describing the lives of other people to make their entitlements to lives like ours, their entitlement to live according to natural law, seem natural. Then you have literature teaching us about moral law. Here, I think of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, George Eliot, those great 19th century moralists who teach us about the relationship between political democracy, and rights and entitlement. Then you have literature as resistance, writing itself as a kind of rights claim. In this genre, by telling my story, I’m claiming my role, my place in the human story, and my right to be recognized. Frederick Douglass’s Narrative is a classic tale of injury, oppression and violence, which in itself is a rights claim, made politically and historically. And then, going all the way from slavery to modern monstrosities, you have literature that exposes naked monstrosities for the moral and historical horrors they are. For example, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia Butler’s work, Primo Levi on Auschwitz. Once you start to think about it, the way we became a human rights culture and rediscovered human rights is, in some ways, intimately bound up with literary history, and the imagination, and form, and ultimately with storytelling. I find it very difficult to think of these things separately.

NW: That’s very persuasive. But there is this worry that some people overplay the role of decentering and empathy, and the development of empathy and conveniently forget that some of the perpetrators of the worst atrocities in the 20th century were reading Goethe, or immersed in German literature, for instance. Pol Pot studied philosophy with Jean-Paul Sartre. All these intellectual and literary pursuits don’t guarantee anything at all.

LS: That’s absolutely right. And I think one of the things that has troubled a lot of us is the overplaying of empathy in arguments about literature—it infuriates me, actually. I find the idea that we read literature primarily in order to feel empathy for people, and that’s why teaching literature is great for human rights, deeply troubling. If you need a book to tell you that there are other people in the world who have human rights, your baseline on human rights is pretty low. Empathy is always a hierarchical relationship. It implies there are people who are to be pitied, albeit by trying to see the world from their perspective. It’s an exchange economy, which is also a political economy (as eighteenth-century writers understood), which can be willfully blind to the absolute causes of human rights abuses and injustice. You can feel empathy for suffering. And it appears we have lots and lots of imaginative resources that allow us to do that all the time. But, as you say, there are different things here. I can share my imagination with you, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to share my money and my property, my ‘natural’ entitlement with you. You’re quite right to query that gap. On the other hand, I think what happened in literary studies as a discipline as it’s been taught in universities for a long time, is that we became highly critical of the normative function of literature, and as a result we threw the baby out with the bathwater. To be endlessly skeptical about the new imaginative terms reading can give you for looking at the world is the wrong approach. Just because you can read Goethe and be a commander in a death camp shouldn’t stop us going back to the fact that there is a strength that can come from reading literature, even if there is no guarantee that this will be the case. It’s an ambivalent strength, but don’t downplay the strength in terms of what reading can give us as it helps us imagine our lives. Many of the struggles for human rights have been about creating new norms—and sometimes undoing old norms. Law is brilliant for that, of course; philosophy has been brilliant too; I think literature has a role here as well. We underplay the treasures we have if we don’t see that.