Right-wingers in the replies are insisting “all fiction is political,” just like the lef
Right-wingers in the replies are insisting “all fiction is political,” just like the left-wing academics I knew for 20 years. And yes, all fiction is political: if you write a story about more than one person, you’re implying something about how you think people should live together in a society. But it’s only good art when the political perspective is immanent to the form. Or, in less academic terms, when it’s implied. Jane Austen doesn’t write a political treatise to exhort the professional class to marry into the nobility, she just has Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliott slowly realize that they “complete each other”—an emotional and erotic transaction able to be enjoyed on an emotional and erotic level even if you miss or are indifferent to the political implication. And let’s not lie to ourselves about the canon: great authors have marred their works with sermonizing, as in Dickens, Tolstoy, Lawrence. The closer the work gets to outright didacticism, as in the novel of ideas, the more the best writers immerse us in the concrete sensory and affective situation from which the ideas emerge, as in Crime and Punishment or The Magic Mountain or Herzog. Utterances of ideological stature are then experienced—as they aren’t in formal philosophy or political science or op-ed writing—as issuing in a fragile voice from a suffering body: here, speaking of Didion, I think of Play It as It Lays. Otherwise, the authorial voice had better be itself a pleasure to listen to: George Eliot comes to mind. I don’t expect anyone, I don’t even expect myself, to expend the effort of writing a whole book without some thesis in mind, but the pride and the humility of fiction is to make the thesis beautiful—complex, sensual, eloquent, ironic—so that the beauty will remain when the occasion for the thesis has evaporated. Hence my recurrent territorial rebuke to the political philosopher, which I issued again last week and renew today: the Republic sits at the head of my tradition, not yours. -- source link
#literary criticism#literary theory#fiction writing#creative writing#alex perez