The New York Times last week announced that Vargas Llosa had won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Said the subhead: "The Peruvian writer’s deeply political work examines the perils of power and corruption in Latin America."
What's the difference between "political literature" and "deeply political literature"?
My best answer: "Political literature" is literature whose subtle political messages we don't agree with.
"Deeply political literature" is literature that supports ideas that we do agree with.
Who can tell me I'm oversimplifying?
No way. If anything, you’re putting more thought into that phrase than the reporter and editors of this article. Shame on NYT. His works aren’t deeply political, his subjects are.
The NYT wouldn’t agree with his politics. Leftist when he was younger, he veered sharply to the center politically. He wrote about politics, in his novels, yes, but he also wrote love stories, comedy and the apocalyptic. To write fiction about poltical subjects doesn’t mean an author is political, or deeply political. He could just mean he has a keen eye for pretense, hypocrisy and how dictatorships lie to themselves most of all.
Thanks for that perspective, Glynn. I continue to think at least that “deeply” is a dumb adjective that writers-about-literature use without asking themselves what it would mean to write “shallowly” political fiction.