Literature can't and shouldn't ignore the turbulence of the times

Half a century ago, luminaries such as Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman Mailer and Muriel Spark debated the prospects and purpose of literature in an often far from measured way, stories of which have entered the annals of writers behaving badly.

This year's conference promises to be more sober, in every sense, but the five debates will nevertheless throw up fierce arguments. How could they not, when they cover such thistly themes as Style Vs Content, Is There A National Literature?, Censorship and The Future Of The Novel.

The opening discussion on Friday takes its premise from the 1962 conference's statement that "Many believe the novelist has the duty to further by his writing the causes in which he believes. Others think literature must be above the problems of the day."

Obviously non-fiction, be it essays, histories or biographies, is by definition political, either in subject or in the angle it takes. Without that trigger, what would George Orwell, say, or Tom Devine, Raja Shehadeh or Joan Didion have written about? But in the realms of fiction and poetry, the answer is less clear-cut.

I bridle whenever told what duties writers ought to have. Like any artist, the writer owes nothing to anyone or anything but his own imagination. The only obligation is to write about what he or she wants to write about. Interestingly, though, I doubt any art form has proved more consistently political than fiction. From the days of Chaucer and Cervantes through Dickens and Eliot to Solzenitsyn, Achebe and Coetzee, the novel has been a powerful expression of social and political beliefs, sometimes dangerously so, as the many writers imprisoned today for their work will testify.

Literature needn't espouse any cause, of course. Anita Brookner's cameos of loneliness are entirely solipsistic, for instance, but no less affecting for that. And much of the finest, most memorable poetry is, or at least appears, entirely unrooted from current affairs, concentrating instead on the inner life, the tangible outer world, and the echoes from one to the other. Perhaps its detached reflectiveness is why so many turn to poetry for solace and escape.

For writers living through turbulent times, however, it must be almost impossible to stay distant from the trouble and drama around them. Some, like the Libyan Hisham Matar, manage to absorb recent events and conflicts into their work, without it feeling clumsy or contrived. Many, sadly, do not. In this respect novelists are like historians: eye-witnesses to a small corner of what's going on around them, but with no deeper or broader perspective than a news reporter or, indeed, the man in the street.

Serious current political situations and passionately espoused causes do not lend themselves to the novel, except perhaps as a form of reportage. Immediate reactions, even in fictional form, often read like thinly veiled proselytising. Usually it takes time and distance from events for profound and meaningful fiction, or history, to be written.

Yet the idea that literature should be above such things is repellent, even sinister. It suggests artists are not of this world, but occupy an elevated plane beyond the common ruck. Thankfully if nothing else, the past 50 years have demonstrated what a force for social, ethical, environmental and religious change contemporary literature can be. Whether it's the voice that novelists have given to those previously ignored or reviled, the flood of writers from so-called ordinary or disadvantaged backgrounds, the flourishing of women novelists, or the wealth of world-class literature for children, modern fiction could be seen as a political party all of its own – but one that everybody can and will want to join.