These are massive, complex, ambitious novels, elaborate efforts at taking a fix on the modern techno-industrial-military world. Difficult books, none were or ever will be very popular—but they prove that a concern with contemporary society combined with conscientious scrutiny through fiction results in works of high literary art, maximal not minimal. (The skies deluge us with cautious minimalists.) Their authors, if not heroes in the sense that Solzhenitsyn is a hero, were certainly heroic in the expenditure of effort, study and thought that went into the making of such books. They serve my point: the writer worthy of his calling must be more than an entertainer: he must be a seer, a prophet, the defender of life, freedom, openness and always—always!—a critic of society.

“Resist much, obey little,” said Walt Whitman. What contemporary American poet writes words like those? Whitman also wrote, in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass:

This is what you shall do. Love the earth and the sun and the animals. Despise riches. Give alms to everyone that asks. Stand up for the stupid and crazy. Devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or any number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and the young and with the mothers of families…. Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book and dismiss whatever insults your own soul….

Radical talk in 1855; subversive and “naive” today.

Think of Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn. Somewhere near the end of that greatest (so far) of American novels young Huck confronts a moral crisis: shall he or shall he not help return the runaway slave, Jim, to Jim’s rightful owner? Huck knows, based on everything he has been taught by church and state, that he is committing an awful sin in helping Jim escape. Burdened by his acculturated conscience, he writes a message to Jim’s owner, Miss Watson, giving away Jim’s location. But hesitates in sending the message. Trying to decide what to do, Huck stares at the piece of paper that will betray his comrade Jim but save his own official soul:

It was a close place [thinks Huck]. I took it up and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide forever betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“Alright then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words but they was said. And I let them stay said and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse I would do that too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog….