“Do writers have a responsibility to reflect and comment on the society in which they live? Or is it perverse to view “the writer” as some kind of shaman with unique insight and responsibility? And why does contemporary British fiction seem so little engaged with contemporary British life?” - LRB publicity blurb for a talk on 'The Politics of Writing'

Thursday January 26th. The London Review Bookshop is crammed. Just over a hundred people are sitting sipping wine, listening to - and sometimes participating in – a debate entitled 'The Politics of Writing'. Unsurprisingly, this started off with the writers' reflections on the responsibility they felt came with the job. For journalist and author Marina Benjamin, writing becomes political when it is "critically engaged". Researching the plight of Jews exiled from Iraq for her latest book, she became conscious of being on the search not only for her own roots, but also for the voice of an unheard community. She was, she said, “both personal and detached”, writing as an individual and as the representative of a collective.

Maggie Gee, meanwhile, whose novel The White Family was short listed for the 2003 Orange Prize for Fiction, predictably tried to argue for a wider definition of politics. Just as predictably, she was forced by this position into making vacuous statements such as "My duty is for the truth", and "Everything is political" (a maxim every Arts student will be familiar with; frequently invoked when attempting to justify the continued study of the Humanities). "Writers have responsibilities not necessarily as writers", she said, "but as citizens, like the rest of us." Well, clearly.

She argued that critics have created a false dichotomy between ‘the literary’ and ‘the personal’. “Pigeon English, Snowdrops, Half Blood Blues, all short-listed for the Man Booker prize, were extremely political. But the critics were so busy moaning that these books weren't culturally representative that they turned a blind eye to their political dimension." The critics apparently create an agenda that remains "blind" (a word Gee liked to repeat) to what is really happening in fiction. "There is political writing", she said forcefully. "You just have to see it."

So can writing change society? Should it simply be critical of society, or offer us alternatives? For Owen Jones, whose Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class was published last June, writing is "just a means to an end". "The writer is not accountable for what he says. He has not been elected, he does not represent anyone. Writing can reflect changes, it can explore what is happening, but it cannot cause change in society." A refreshingly realistic – if defeatist – perspective.

The major failing of the debate was that it only considered the issue from the point of view of writing: the act of reception was hardly touched on – and yet the politics of writing are finally realized in the act of reading. Jane Austen was a reactionary Tory to one generation; to another, a radical feminist. Peter Brook's world tour of his 1962 King Lear showed how painful political experience in Eastern Europe can turn into histrionic melodrama in New York. Not only writers, but readers and viewers, too, have their own agendas.

Gee argued that being a political writer means writing about the "polis", the society surrounding the author. "I have always written about the present, about the now", she said. Might historical fiction does fit the bill after all? The genre is arguably part of a growing interest in social history, which tries to recover voices from the margins. Presenting historical events from the point of view of individuals in the midst of them removes the false historical determinism that sees the present as the inevitable goal of the past. In the present, history can take many directions - for better or for worse - and the actions of all sorts of individuals relate to ‘history’ in ways as important as those of politicians, even if that relationship is a more subtle one.

The present is not inevitable: there are always alternatives. That is the point of dissent. What this evening unquestionably proved, however, was that writing can lead  to discussion, and that this discussion can lead to a shared feeling of dissent. Whether this feeling can lead to action that actually does any good remains, however, an open question. I should like to think that it is not pure fiction to hope so – but I may be an optimist.