The Guardian view on truth and art: fiction as a guide
In a letter of 1817, John Keats wrote: “It struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” One thing in this quotation stands out: the notion that negative capability, the ability to hold complexity and ambiguity in the mind, without requiring a clear resolution, is the mark of true greatness, especially, but not only, in writers. Keats was arguing that negative capability is a quality desirable in all of us, the mark of the greatest in any field of endeavour.
Later in the letter, Keats criticised his peer Samuel Taylor Coleridge. That poet, he wrote, would fail to discern a “fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery”, because he was “incapable of remaining content with half knowledge”. The argument is that fine-grained, delicate verisimilitude can be captured from the most apparently mysterious context, if only one has the eyes to see it. There is, one might add, verisimilitude to be discovered in fiction, and art of all kinds, that will never be discerned in the pages of an official report.
Candice Carty-Williams’s debut novel Queenie, for example, which was shortlisted for the Costa first novel award last Tuesday, may convey to the reader more truth about life as it is lived than any dry statistical summation. It has been hailed as “the black Bridget Jones’s Diary”, but it is much more than that. Reviewing the book in the Guardian, Diana Evans hailed it as “an important political tome of black womanhood and black British life”. Yes, politics can and does reside in the texture of stories about vaginal examinations, bad flatshares and ill-fated love affairs.
Or take Jay Bernard’s remarkable Surge, shortlisted for the Costa poetry award, about the 1981 New Cross fire in which 13 black teenagers were killed. It is a poetic account of a disaster that sees a young writer discovering anew an episode that has fed into a bleak history of racism in Britain, and that resonates all too clearly in the fallout from the Grenfell Tower fire.
Negative capability is not a quality often associated with dominant political economy today, which has a natural tendency in its forms and rhetoric towards the concrete answer, the bold assertion, the plan of definite action. That’s quite natural, necessary and indeed desirable – at least when answers, assertions and plans have their basis in reality. Fact and reason are essential to challenge dogma and bigotry. But so are the more fugitive qualities of ambiguity, imagination and
complexity. Few of our current prominent politicians engage deeply with art
– or at least admit to so doing. (Nicola Sturgeon, who is a lifelong reader and whose shelves are stacked with the works of Ali Smith and Muriel Spark, may be the exception.) In pursuit of the truth, more of them should.