Politics & Power Quote by Jonathan Coe

Coe’s line lands like a shrug that’s also an indictment: you don’t get to narrate social life and pretend you stayed “above” politics. The rhetorical question does the work of cornering the reader. “As soon as” suggests a trapdoor beneath any claim of neutrality; the moment you describe who gets heard, who gets shamed, who gets paid, who gets left out, you’re mapping power. And power is politics, whether you call it that or dress it up as “just character.”

The intent is less to announce Coe as a partisan than to puncture a comforting alibi often granted to novelists: that fiction is private, psychological, purely aesthetic. His phrasing is casual, almost conversational, but it’s a scalpel. “Interact” and “socially” sound like mild sociology, yet they smuggle in class, race, gender, institutions, and the invisible rules that make some interactions feel natural and others impossible. The line argues that the social novel is inherently a political act because it stages the terms of belonging.

Context matters: Coe’s career sits in a Britain where “political” is frequently used as a slur against art, especially since Thatcher-era culture wars hardened the idea that politics contaminates creativity. Coe flips that: politics isn’t a contaminant, it’s the medium. The subtext is a dare to writers and readers alike: stop pretending the personal is apolitical, stop mistaking the default setting of society for nature. Fiction, in his view, doesn’t escape the polis; it reports from inside it.