So I've been snooping around a few blogs by academics, and came up with several interesting posts - like here, and here, and here, here, and here - about the virtues, or lack thereof, of "political" fiction. This issue has been something of a lifetime bee in my bonnet, so I'll add some thoughts:
- Both sides of this debate appear to see politics and fiction as inherently antithetical. But that there's a different way to look at it - that politics and fiction are inherently made of the same stuff, and sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad. The idea of "activist fiction," or someone "incorporat[ing] the political shit that characterizes his nonfiction into his fiction", certainly fills me with a sense of dread. But it's really not because someone has had the temerity to mix fiction and politics. It's because I expect any political writing - yes, even raw, unincorporated "political shit" - to have some nuance and subtlety, and to leave some space for the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. Writing that does nothing but promote the author's narrow political passions is likely to be as intolerable in an Op-Ed piece as in a short story.
- In their irrationally acute need to prove themselves undogmatic fingernail-parers, many writers - particularly contemporary English-speaking writers - have managed to convince themselves that politics does not exist. (Perhaps this is why so much fiction today takes place in small towns, or in the past, or from the perspective of children.)
- Such writers often embrace the falsely bumpkinish, li'l-old-me view that writers are just storytellers, but of course there's nothing inherent in the definition of "story" that means that it can't be about politics or have political implications.
- I have long had a theory that it is the relative poverty and isolation of most writers that promotes this insularity. If you are a visiting writer making a crappy salary at a remote rural college, you have sort of by default opted out of mainstream American culture, and the preoccupations of mainstream American culture may therefore be less interesting to you.
- And of course writing may be a political act - though, for most residents of modern democracies (or even quasi-democracies), it's awfully pretentious to view it as one.
- I grant that there may be some irritable reaching after fact and reason involved in holding a political point of view that is perhaps mildly incompatible with a full range of sympathy for diverse human perspectives and experiences, though I'm not totally convinced the conflict is as great as all that. Moreover, I think most good fiction aims to affect people, but not in as specific a way as say, convincing them not to support Social Security privatization. Again, though, the idea is to avoid programmatic fiction, not political fiction per se.
That's it for now, although I'm sure I'll return to this topic.