Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination

by Adam Shatz

What does it mean to be a politically committed writer?

Through a close reading of the lives and works of some of the greatest intellectuals of recent times, Adam Shatz do writers have an ethical imperative to question injustice? How can one remain a dispassionate thinker when involved in the cut and thrust of politics? And, in an age of horror and crisis, what does it mean to be a committed writer?

Shatz interrogates the major figures of twentieth and twenty-first century thought and finds within their lives and work the roots of our present intellectual and geopolitical situation.
 
Charting the role of the committed intellectual through the work of Jean-Paul Sartre on the Algerian War and Edward Said's lifelong solidarity with the Palestinian people, to Fouad Ajami's role as the "native informant" for pro-intervention cause in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, alongside philosophers and critics Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Claude Lévi-Strauss and the novelists Michel Houllebecq and Richard Wright, each struggled to reconcile their writing and their politics, their thought and their commitments. 
 
Writers and Missionaries is an erudite and incisive work of intellectual elucidation and biographical enquiry that demands that we interrogate anew the relation of thought and action in the struggle for a more just world.

Genres: Politics, Essays, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Writing

368 pages, Hardcover

First published February 2, 2016

About the author

Adam Shatz is the US editor of The London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. He is also the host of the podcast “Myself with Others,” produced by the pianist Richard Sears. Adam has been a visiting professor at Bard College and New York University and a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars. Raised in Massachusetts, he studied history at Columbia University and has lived in New York City since 1990.

Reviews

[Randy Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have long admired Shatz as a compelling and engaging essayist.This volume is a collection of his pieces from the London Review of Books. His subjects as the title says are mostly writers with a few missionaries thrown in for good measure.

His subject is broadly the dismantling of colonialism and more narrowly the Middle East. Many of the essays made me want to read more about some of the men (the subjects are all men) such as Edward Said, Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. However, only if the writing is as riveting as Shatz which is unlikely.

His final essay is a personal one about his childhood and teen years as a rabid practitioner of cooking. It gives color to his intensity and could have been useful as the opener.

[Katrinka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Totally enjoyable; can't say more than that.

[Algirdas Kraunaitis · Rating 4 out of 5]

An impressive collection of essays.Would be of particular value to those interested in 20th century authors and thinkers. (It inspired me to read the Native Son and Orientalism!) Many essays indirectly touch on the situation in Palestine, but since most of the essays are pre-2024 they might seem somewhat outdated (the author has recently published a most direct essay on the topic in LRB June issue and it discusses briefly how his views have changed over time).

[Glenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The good stuff.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Title comes from what VS Naipaul (who I am sorry to say I have not read) told the author once in an interview: that you can be one or the other, but you can't be both. Fair play, I suppose, though of course it's so much more complex than that. R

Plus, it's not like art is always going to get you where you want the audience to be. Remember that The Jungle is about as much of a pamphlet as it is an actual story, and it didn't foment the socialist revolution, as Sinclair hoped: all it did was get people want to increase their efficiency of meat inspections.

In general, I agree with the sentiment. You can't really do justice to the whole human shmear without recognizing that people are so much more multifaceted and contradictory and surprising than whatever ideological categorizing would otherwise allow them to be. We are so much more than our categories.

Same time, the more you look around at the world today the more it's clear (same it ever was) that it's important to stake out a position, have opinions, and take sides. I have always agreed with Camus that it's the job of thinking people NOT to be on the side of the executioners. That's pretty clear on a superficial level, but at the same time not as easy to do as it looks. Questions and facts and assumptions become slippery-- did X person or people really do this/that/the other thing? would it change our moral calculation or judgment of them if they did?

And so when you're talking about writers, creative people, you are always going to want to try and see them in toto-- all their different sides, their ugly or squeamish sides, and Shatz does a very good job of that in these pages, especially since he's been thinking about these intellectuals in terms of their angle on society, the political, and it's been too long since we've had an easy answer about any of this stuff, if we ever did.

He's examining eminent writers like Edward Said, Roland Barthes, Chester Himes, Robbe-Grillet, Claude Lanzmann, the lesser-known William Gardner Smith, and some really interesting examples of artists/ activists like the mercurial Juliano Mer- Kamis, "100% Israeli and 100% Arab," who tried to make a politically provocative theater work in the West Bank, and damn near succeeded until finding himself on the business end of a gun.

It's not so much that he agrees with them, or that he wants to evangelize their ideas, it's that he thinks they were walking the line between being a writer and essentially being an activist and he wants to show us what that looked like, both on the page and in the person's life. Said was tormented by the fact of exile and being Other his whole life, though he revered the literary and classical music canon, Himes wanted to escape the hot house of American life by only going deeper into the psychosexual fryer in Europe. Smith also found that leaving the states, as a Black man and as a writer, wasn't an automatic ticket to Shangri-la.

I really liked, in the sense of not being able to put the book down, the engaging honest nuanced way in which Shatz wrestles with the work and life of these characters, and I think there's a honest and respectable contrast that he is always ready to make between what they believe in and how they live their lives.

[M. C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

So fucking good. If I did it again I’d maybe read essays one at a time at different points rather than all in a row, so things don’t blur together so much. Shatz is a master of the form.

[Murtaza · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great collection from my favorite essayist. Every one is worth reading, especially the timeless title one.