The sixth Franco-Irish Literary Festival opened in Dublin yesterday, writes Arminta Wallace
Is literature more - or less - important at a time of moral and political confusion? Post September 11th, what ideological certainties will replace those of the Cold War? And how will identity be defined in the 21st century? Such were the topics under discussion at the opening session of the sixth Franco-Irish Literary Festival at the Coach House in Dublin Castle yesterday.
In his address the French ambassador to Ireland, Mr Frederic Grasset, recalled his student days in France when intellectuals were, by definition, political activists.
Chairing the round-table discussion which followed, Irish Times Paris Correspondent Lara Marlowe asked a panel of literary novelists, one French, one Irish, one from the Congo, whether they felt morally obliged to engage with subjects in the public domain.
Antrim-born Deirdre Madden said that while her most recent novel, Authenticity, dealt with personal artistic fulfilment, her previous book, One by One in the Darkness, was a deliberate attempt to give a woman's perspective on political events in the North.
"For an artist in contemporary society there's always a political element - be it with a small 'p'," she said. "But I don't think that simply by writing about what's happening today - about the problems of the hospital service, for instance, or about immigrant working conditions - you can actually change things."
The journalist and screenwriter Jacques-Pierre Amette, who won the Prix Goncourt for his novel La Maîtresse de Brecht (Brecht's Mistress), drew a distinction between "moral commitment" and "moralising".
Faced with the reality of Hitler's rise to power in the Germany of the 1930s, he said, Brecht was forced to create a new kind of theatre which could convey the atrocities of the 20th century - and did it by means of ironic distance and black humour.
Moral uncertainty in Western society, Amette added, is nothing new. "During the second World War, when people realised that a town of 600,000 people could be obliterated by bombs in just 15 minutes, it immediately changed how everyone thought."
Congolese writer Emmanuel Dongala, who had to flee Brazzaville with his family during the civil war in the Congo in 1997, said: "In Africa, reality is that you get up in the morning and the first thing you think is whether you'll be able to feed your children at lunch."
In French colonial Africa, he said, writers had concentrated on ejecting the oppressors and assumed that Maoism would take care of any remaining woes. But after independence it became obvious that problems such as political corruption had, if anything, worsened.
Reading an extract from Dongala's latest novel Johnny Chien Méchant (Johnny Bad Dog), Marlowe said that despite the terrible acts it depicts, the book's overall mood is optimistic. How did the author and his fellow-Africans keep their optimism intact?
Dongala said: "Say you go into a hospital in Africa, and you're given a prescription. Later, when you go to the pharmacy, if the medicine is actually available, you're delighted. In Africa we don't ask for a lot in order to have hope."