Forum / Writing Political Fiction

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 09, 10:42pm

The March/April Writer's Chronicle has an excellent and provocative article on the intersection of writing fiction and politics citing as examples George Orwell, Tim O'Brien, Nadine Gordimer, Milan Kundera and Virginia Woolf. What place do you think political writing has in Fictionaut, who do you think does it and does it well, if anyone and do you see any negatives?

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 09, 10:44pm

And does it interest you?

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 10, 04:35am

Quote from the article by Ellen Meeropol about Nadine Gordimer's philosophy of political fiction writing: "Write boldly without fearing public authorities, censorship, or public reprisals...We are witnessing our time not just for ourselves but for those who will come later."

Letitia Coyne
Mar 10, 12:23pm

I wonder if all that can be said in political fiction has been said. The same story can be retold, of course, for new audiences, but it will still be greedy old men manipulating angry young men. Fear, division and hatred. Religion and political ideology - different coloured shirts for the same cast of players. Making fine speeches and holding hands under the table.

Perhaps I need to read some inspiring new political fiction. :)

Lxx

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 10, 04:18pm

You definitely need some inspiring new political fiction. Each period of history is different. I'm trying to write inspiring political fiction about both nuclear energy and the medical establishment. But what you say explains to me why no one wants to read it and the pieces get ho-hum ignored non-reactions so thanks for your usual honesty. It actually inspires me to hear the truth.

Sturla Grey
Mar 12, 05:13pm

I wrote a piece of political fiction - warning it's more than 1000 words, I posted it today and I would relish any one of you reading it and sharing any thoughts or comments.

It's called MAIZE.

Warm Regards

Frankie Saxx
Mar 12, 09:04pm

Marcus Speh has occasionally talked about moral fiction. I feel like there's probably an intersection here somewhere, and I haven't thought about it enough yet to express it.

I think that much fiction is already political, though not always in the obvious way.

http://htmlgiant.com/random/to-write-as-a-woman-is-political/

Gessy Alvarez
Mar 12, 09:37pm

I have a problem with overt politics in fiction. Anything with a "preachy" tone turns me off. But, I love Delillo's, Pynchon's, and Atwood's take on political fiction (to name a few). It does boil down to taste and how the message is encapsulated. Subversion is key for me as well.

James Lloyd Davis
Mar 13, 12:22am

Politics is everywhere, though not immediately recognizable... Political fiction is often so subtle that the idea that it even entered the theme is only an afterthought. Such it is with all good writing, in that it insinuates rather than wields... opinion.

stephen hastings-king
Mar 13, 01:02am

Much depends on what you understand the political to entail. Personally, I am not interested by much writing that takes the existing spectrum of options as necessary points of departure for thinking in political terms. I'm more interested in tampering with basic epistemological relations, which perform underlying rule sets that are in themselves political...in putting a stick in the spinning wheel of ordinary perception.

It takes some skill to get away with that given the sedimentation of pasts made up of people whose work has tried to do the same kind of thing. It seems to me that you have to seduce readers into playing a slightly different game in order to get away with it. Presenting pretty surfaces is important in ways that perhaps it shouldn't be....but such is the situation created by inundation with these layers of the past.

For example, while the idea of working from a mode like, say, Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Englightenment might be appealing insofar as the everything sucks approach is concerned, you can't really get away with it because either it doesn't register at all or it registers as being like Horkheimer and Adorno. And while it may be important to say that everything sucks, it'd be better that folk be lead to see it rather than be told it, and this in ways that don't allow them to dismiss it because they've been told everything sucks in the same way already.

So it's a problem of style.

The other problem seems to be quite enormous, which is that there's no agreed-upon alternative imaginary to the dominant one. Folk ought to be taking on the range of tasks that Marx took on in from, say, 1840-1870. I include myself in this...I am not sure that writing strange little stories is a way to address the construction of a new counter-imaginary to the obviously problematic and one-dimensional capitalist imaginary that we all suffer under, one way or another. I like to think of the stories as a form of perception war. But sometimes I think they're just ways to avoid the main tasks that confront any radical politics...what do we want? why do we want it? what is it about contemporary capitalism that points toward a future? which future? what that one and not another? That kind of thing.

J. Mykell Collinz
Mar 13, 12:58pm

AlterNewt: Gingrich 'Alternate History' Novels Reveal Much On Present Politics

"Gingrich's penchant for techno-fix is on screaming display, both in his awed description of Nazi super-weapons throughout the book, and in his solutions to America's crisis. Unfortunately, what had been an entertaining tale most of the way turns into a Gingrich think tank seminar."

"We get the Newtonian solution for America's quandary: A skunk works for a techno-surge in which innovative mavericks follow their own direction to produce rapid-fire solutions. It's part of his vision of adhocracy instead of bureaucracy, complete with a war cabinet consisting of the president, his intelligence chief, two generals and an admiral, an aircraft designer, and two spies. Still, it's something of a classic, which actually ends with the phone line to Winston Churchill going dead, followed by: 'TO BE CONTINUED.'"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-bradley/newt-gingrich-alternate-history_b_1124161.html

strannikov
Mar 13, 02:21pm

In a characteristically loose contemporary sense, the genre "political fiction" resists tautology perhaps possibly maybe only to the extent that it consists of able satire.

Realistic and overtly political fiction has lost its grip on literary imagination: let's blame our political circumstance. We are well past the days of Stowe's UNCLE TOM'S CABIN and Dostoevsky's DEMONS, past the days of Conrad's UNDER WESTERN EYES and Steinbeck's GRAPES OF WRATH, past the days of Greene's THIRD MAN (both the original screenplay and the novella published subsequently: but cf. Greene's OUR MAN IN HAVANA), now even past the days of Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovich and Le Carre's cold and colder spies. We have a hard enough time, it seems, misapprehending our political circumstance in putatively non-fictional terms. (Not to say that we have surmounted politics: to say rather that to depict the political circumstances that we or our contemporaries face with any pretense of verisimilitude, the writer must be possessed of both a working literary apparatus and a suitable political orientation. Note also that to write credible and readable political fiction, fiction aspiring to delivery of "political punch" in its own right, a writer must possess "establishment credentials", because noteworthy or successful [meaning: actually read] political fiction is seldom written for the politically estranged and the politically disaffected, it is always aimed at readers in the mainstream, to provoke or discomfit.)

Because contemporary writers are loath to identify closely with whatever established order they find themselves party to, because current literary fashion dictates the disclaiming of official institutional affiliation, politics for most writers has become distastefully mundane: so a much easier approach is to take on the political realm satirically. Oddly, though, we do not find ourselves in a new "age of satire", which perhaps signals the decadence of both our politics and our literature.

James Lloyd Davis
Mar 13, 03:13pm

Politics need not be mundane... I often daydream of riding at the front of a wedge formation, a pointed line of roaring Harley hogs as it plows through an angry assembly of teabaggers.

But I don't. Instead, I write costume novels about the institutional excesses and political crimes of past generations with the hope that a moral lesson about parallel situations in contemporary times will emerge.

Sometimes political fiction sounds satirical only to an audience with a jaundiced eye. There's a fine madness to be experienced in a hopeful, even curiously innocent perspective.

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 13, 03:29pm

Kafka: now there is great political satire.

Jane Flett
Mar 13, 04:12pm

I'm not that interested in "political"* writing (or art, music, film, etc). Sometimes individual things grab me, but I think in those cases it is because the politics is beside the point. I feel like when politics gets a hold on things, story, language, rhythm, beauty all often take a back seat, because the point is The Point That is Being Made.

It also feels defeatist, like, "There is something ugly in the world, so let's showcase that!" Fuck that. I don't think art should be a torch to shine on the bad bits of reality and tell people to look at them. I think art has better stuff going on.

This is emphatically not to say that I think being political is unimportant. I would just rather go to a demo or volunteer or protest, and then go home and read a book.

Obviously it depends what you mean by political, though. I mean, I think some of Tom Robbins books are hugely political in that they describe a way of living in society that is subversive and fun, and I am 100% fascinated in that.

* Inverted commas, because YEAH! to everything in the article Frankie posted.

James Lloyd Davis
Mar 13, 04:47pm

"I feel like when politics gets a hold on things, story, language, rhythm, beauty all often take a back seat, because the point is The Point That is Being Made."

Only if the writer lacks artistic competence and sensibility. I detect exposure here to really bad fiction.

Try DeLillo's Libra or Point Omega, which are pretty much political in ThePointBeingMade.

Frankie Saxx
Mar 13, 05:12pm

(I really hated Point Omega. Please don't shun me.)

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 13, 05:33pm

James, if you expect exposure to really bad fiction, let the writer know why. Read Letitia's Lullabies.

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 13, 08:37pm

George Orwell in Why I Write wrote: Political purpose--using the word "Political" in the widest possible sense. Desire of the artist to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free of political bias. THE OPINION THAT ART SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH POLITICS IS ITSELF A POLITICAL ATTITUDE.;"

Sometimes we just have to kick readers in the ass!

James Lloyd Davis
Mar 13, 08:54pm

(Not shunning Frankie for not liking Point Omega. Not many did. I saw it as a thematic extension of ideas he played with in Falling Man, which I did not like.)

Letitia Coyne
Mar 14, 04:45am

I've changed my mind.

It doesn't matter if the message has been spread before by some of the most wonderful writers of all time. What matters is that these messages are kept alive. People drop off to sleep; they have short attention spans.

If they are thrown a hot potato, even one they've seen before, they at least have to decide how they will handle it. If it makes some drowsy sheep think occassionally, then yes, political discourse should be part of modern fiction.

Marcus Speh
Mar 14, 07:46am

@Letitia This attitude strikes me as very patronizing and rather disrespectful of the reader. A strong but it seems to me ultimately disagreeable and repulsive stance towards people that favors mission, messages, ideas. We've had too much of that in the 20th century. Just saying, perhaps I'm not awake enough yet to see the wisdom of thy words...I've always, by persons everywhere been accused of thinking too well of the masses though.

Letitia Coyne
Mar 14, 08:16am

Yes, perhaps you do think too well of the masses and I am undoubtably repulsive.

Readers are perhaps the most awake in the world because they choose to move away from the media opiates and to examine thoughts from all facets of society throughout history. Reader numbers are up, but the sources of their reading may not always be enlightening.

What I see is media/publishing edifice adept at undermining thought. Media practised at simple but effective means of reducing the impact of very important issues on the general public. Simple processes like raising an outcry, supporting the voices of dissent, allowing the public to have their fill of that argument and its adherents, and when they are sated and irritated by further debate, the media is silent as the changes which caused dissent are enacted without further public interest.

It might be that we perceive 'the masses' in light of our own experience of people. My experience is not of the educated or those who value education. My experience is of the rabble. It is not a social caste, it is a mindset across classes - preconceptualists, as I've heard them termed, who make up their minds what is true, and then willfully dismiss and are agravated by discussion of anything which challenges their belief. They prefer not to be disturbed.

They prefer not to hear from voices from outside thier own social networks; race, religion, gender, political persuasion, nationality, age, sexual orientation - these are all 'other' and to be feared and distrusted. Those voices are to be shunned by the rabble I am familiar with.

You may not experience them daily, but surely it is unwise to deny that they do exist in great numbers.

Marcus Speh
Mar 14, 08:28am

I don't deny it, and while your arguments might repel, you yourself could never repel! You argue most persuasively and simce we have this forum to ourselves for the day... I can see what you're saying. Also, there is a field effect, meaning that the more responsible thought you feed into a system, the more likely it is that the system learns, improves etc ... as for the "rabble", It is true that I don't experience them daily because I choose to avoid them. I don't think you can ever get near someone you describe but it seems worthy to try and keep the world disturbed and keep the reactionaries on their toes...

So you've convinced me! Now, please observe the DO NOT DISTURB sign at my door.... :-)

Marcus Speh
Mar 14, 08:48am

Just reading the Paris Review interview with Samuel Delaney-it contains the following quote ascribed to the author Octavia Butler (whose work I love): “What good is science fiction to black people?” Butler asks. “What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing?” - now this, political fiction in the form of Sci-Fi the way Butler and Delaney write it, I can get with!

Letitia Coyne
Mar 14, 09:52am

It is possible to get near to these people. We are all the product of our upbringing, genotype and phenotype, whether we fall into line or oppose the views of our predecessors. Understanding is key.

I'm not sure George Orwell's books are any less because he wields both mission and message like a blunt object. The wide ranging popularity of his work might even make it more effective at presenting an alternative view than more subtle but less accessible writing. Nothing James Joyce ever said or thought is of any consequence to a great number of readers; they will never read past page 3.

Yes, the more responsible thought you feed into a system the more likely it is that the system improves. Education is one source of fodder for thought. I cannot speak for schools and universities around the world, but here our institutions of higher learning are no longer that. They are trade schools, stripping anything unnecessary for career progression from the curriculum.

My niece, a brilliant and much sought after teacher of children deemed socially uneducable within the mainstream system, has said she could have completed her degree in 18months, not 4 years, if she could have cut out all the 'unnecessary bullshit'. That view comes from her working knowledge that a teacher's job is to march students through a set curriculum and to have a sufficient number of them attain a certain number of points at the end of each year. Education is a changed concept, here.

The notion that a teacher, above all else, might provide children with access to wonderful ways of thinking outside their own experience is considered laughable by most. That teachers should possess a wider knowledge of history and philosophy, a higher degree of literacy and numeracy, a greater interest in the accumulated knowledge of our societies that they might share, is a long past dream.

Science fiction itself is an intellectual genre. It relies on an understanding of science without which it is simply fiction. It appeals to a more intellectually inclined readership. Romance fiction, for decades the highest selling genre, relies only on tapping autonomic response. There is no intellectual capability needed to enjoy the rewards sought by dedicated Romance readers. Romances can easily accommodate political messages, or introduce alternative points of view, simply by portraying characters with differing views sympathetically.

Enough. Sorry. I obviously have too much time on my hands.
Lxx

Marcus Speh
Mar 14, 10:30am

Metoo. My current excuse, both for the extent and for the preliminarity od my contributions is that I'm at home with flu and should be recuperating. This leaves enough time for contemplation...

What you call a long past dream of teaching is what I, at university at least, am trying to bring to the show and most students accept it gracefully and gratefully no matter how clumsy my presentation may have been...and I see the same at my daughter's Waldorf school, so there's reason to hope.

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 14, 02:18pm

Great conversation. I'd like to read more like that.

Frankie Saxx
Mar 14, 02:50pm

"They prefer not to be disturbed."

One of my favorite political novels is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. For anyone who didn't pass through the American education system, Sinclair's novel merits mention in American history and social studies texts because it instigated federal investigation into the meat packing industry in the early 20th century. If you've never read it, you'll probably think that's what it was about because that's how it's remembered.

Sinclair later said, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”

But it did disturb people, and because they were disturbed enough, something was done. Though maybe not the something Sinclair was pointing at.

I wonder if it's not easier today, though, to keep from being disturbed, if that's what we want. To live in our own echo chambers. As expansive as our media and communications have become, they're also specialized. It seems to me that that problem in political writing isn't that of aggravating people who would rather not be disturbed and forcing them to willfully dismiss you, but rather reaching them in the first place.

James Lloyd Davis
Mar 14, 03:38pm

My current novel in progress is decidedly political by intent if not immediately discernible as such (it does not preach). I do hope it entertains, but I wanted to take events in recent American history (1950's) and present them in such a way as to show the incredible parallel to current events... hopefully in a subversive, intelligent, and artful camouflage with a moral core.

"...the play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King." (Shakespeare's Hamlet Act II, scene 2)

What works for a King could work for the people in a democratic society like the USA. I've always believed in an unstated moral imperative to art, in that it is subject to the same mandate that individuals should recognize. Call it morality, responsibility, duty, honor, compassion... whatever. Not everyone feels that way, but those who do have always managed to leave the world a little better for their having been there.

My opinion only, but it's my personal motivation. Bigotry and oppression are the less reasoned result of the human tendency for categorization, a trick of the mind, but they are decidedly not limited to 'the masses.' It takes a similar trick of the mind to elicit moral responses from intelligent people. I don't think biased individuals are fools and idiots, just people who haven't given thought to things they should. It's the purpose of political fiction to trigger that thought. Not to preach, but to make people think.

It's too easy to judge and in judgment to err. The smartest people do it.

stephen hastings-king
Mar 14, 11:49pm

There are some interesting questions raised here, yes? What is the extent of the political? What are the consequences of a repetition-based dominant media apparatus?
One could rattle on for a long time about either of them. Then there's the other question of the hoi polloi and where that comes from. Personally, I see all these as political questions--the last is a function of what my inner Marxist insists on calling the systems of social reproduction; the second as a matter of class domination. The first is the underlying matter, I think. So I shall rattle on about that for a little while.

(btw I like the word apparatus because it's a noun that makes what it ostensibly refer to seem bounded, makes a thing of it. Wittgenstein was right about the consequences of grammatical forms in triggering particular conceptions of the world and their arrangements...but even more in connecting the ways in which these triggers unfold back to a "form of life" (in the Investigations--this is kinda foreign to the Tractatus)---which one could equate with a more political-seeming synonym like "dominant ideology" in that kinda dorky academic way that follows on the conceit particular to graduate students, it seems, one that I'm quite familiar with for better or worse, that capitalism trembles each time you fuck with grammar and/or it's underlying ways of separating and staging conceptions of the world--which points back to the circular relation with the "form of life"---but which also points back to the belief, which may not be spoken, that anyone can imagine what they do to be quite "radical"---which assumes, whether one knows it or not, that the dispositions of others parallel your own----but I digress...)

I don't buy the idea that making fictions is an ethical action because I don't buy the idea of the ethical in the sense that the ethical is rooted in the internalization of social norms, or variants on social norms. So the source of the ethical is political, and the proper category for thinking ethical issues is the political as well.

This may be another digression.

But from where else does the idea that there are limits on individual actions come from? From where else does the conception of cause-effect derive if not from more general notions of collective life in particular social-historical contexts? O I know, I know ethical philosophy remains largely Kantian in it's recourse to a notion of transcendent categories, just as it remains largely Christian in it's assumption that everything will turn to shit absent ethicists...original sin and all that...

OK so this is definitely a digression.

I am pretty sure that this is nothing but digressions. Had the style question been resolved better, I could point to Laurence Sterne and say: See?

Here I take a moment to sigh.

Of course political critique routes itself through the discourse of ethics, which provides it a space to float above political discourse. So one can't really throw out the ethical as a register of speaking without the baby accompanying the bathwater.

Is that a mixed metaphor?

I'm digressing again.

Criminy.

OK, so the political differentiates from the ethical in its understanding of the origin of norms. That differentiation is a tactical matter more than one of fact.

This as a matter of general orientation. Of course it resolves nothing when it confronts a judgment that would equate the political with its effects on others.

Once I heard a quite lovely presentation by William Bennett, the main force behind the power electronics outfit called Whitehouse, which has alienated many people by way of it's "hits" on the order of "Wriggle Like a Fucking Eel" and it's predelection for playing around with the signifiers associated with fascism, about the subversive political content of romance novels in the matter of who controls the actual experience of them, so who is, in the end, appealed to by way of them. If anything like that is the case, then the political implications of that form would follow from its mode of address--how it interpellates, in the French Left language that still clangs about in my head for some reason. In that case, then, the politics of the form derive from a disposition, which is reflected in the ordering of signifiers, as much as from any particular explicit statement.

So maybe folk ingest (injest?) political statements all the time. And maybe the problem with such things is their banality.

That is a depressing conclusion, one that I had no intention of reaching.

I am not sure what to do with it.

Perhaps I will stop writing here.

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 15, 06:55am

Well, since I brought up the question, I will end with Orwell's four reasons for writing: Sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm (making sure the political doesn't overwhelm the beauty of the words and make for "bad fiction; keep this primary), historical impulse for posterity, and political purpose in the widest sense possible. That about sums it up for me.

Marcus Speh
Mar 15, 08:34am

@Stephen We've just spent considerable time re-watching the British "Yes, Minister" and "Yes, Prime Minister" series...irreplaceable education for my daughter, who now greets us as if home was Whitehall and gets around our every schemes with a scheme of her own... (sighs)

Sounds like another digression but isn't. It's to the point of banality of political statements: a simple truth long established, nothing depressing about it for me, rather humorous (if the local culture has humour to fall back upon—alas, in Germany political culture is humor-sterile).

But! I passionately disagree with your statement, Stephen, that making fictions is not an ethical action...the fact that ethics aren't eternal but rooted in the here and now of social discourse: what gives? What else do we have indeed? (Throws some Freud at you, e.g. "Civilization and its Discontents")

As I've said here before (I think): writing fiction is a moral activity so by implication it's an ethical action. The French don't understand it because, well, they're not ethical to begin with and feel, always felt, perfectly justified being that way. It makes them charming albeit in a deadly way. And don't mistake me for a French-hater: quite the opposite. I'm already by family loyalty obliged to love all things French. But ethics: no. The "philosophy" (rather: psychology) of deconstruction is the most recent expression of this malade. Sartre, Camus were aberrations...and now I AM digressing...awww, national literatures, what a feast!

Marcus Speh
Mar 15, 08:35am

Sorry, Gloria, I only read now that you wished to end the discussion. Couldn't help myself. Public space and all that.

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 15, 12:06pm

I've been misunderstood. I didn't mean to end it at all. I was just sort of summing up. This is one of the best discussions I've read on forum. It's not up to me to end it. Apologies. Keep talking.

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 15, 12:26pm

One answer I liked was that it was important not to compromise aesthetics. The feminist movement has a whole slew of political novels. Marge Piercy goes on these long boring political speeches that have no aesthetic value. Doris Lessing on the other hand, keeps the writing primary, yet is still very political. It's a balance, as Orwell says.Margaret Atwood artfully weaves in the political. That's just my opinion. If you forget the aesthetics, the politics will ruin the fiction.

stephen hastings-king
Mar 15, 12:52pm

@Marcus...I was wondering if the meander was going to cause a confusion because I wasn't clear about the way I was using the political as a category.

I see it as entailing the rule sets that orient people in fundamental ways, shaping their conceptions of themselves as individuals and parts of networks that shape their sense(s) of identity, notions of the world and their relations to it (extending to sensory arrangements, the relations of the visual to the auditory, say) etc...

All of that is a function of socialization, which is the fashioning of subjects in terms of the rules (most of which are informal) that obtain in a particular social-historical context.

So the ontology (-ies) that enable these conceptions and/or relations.

And their variations, one of which is the condition that enables a notion of the ethical as a transcendent register--one that traffics in a language of transcendent norms.

Which makes of even quite basic dispositions something variable.

This isn't to say that self-limitation is not a fundamental matter or that questions involving it are not important. It's more about the register through which one poses them.

So I am inclined to think of writing as a political action in the sense that it can point to and maybe alter basic relations to the world (there's more to this, but I am writing in the morning and have to leave to do stuff soon)...and I would imagine that this same capacity that writing can have is, for you, at or near the center of what you mean when you say writing is an ethical act.

This because fiction (and other forms) occupies a meta-register with respect to ordinary politics, one that enables critique as a function of it being recursive, basically. This sentence is about itself. That kind of thing.

To see basic norms as historically contingent is not to say that therefore it's a good idea to kill other people, or to be an asshole more generally. That tends to be the position ethicists take, one which I've long found curiously self-serving, as if they and they alone stand at the boundary which separates civilization from Bad Things. It's an aspect of another position concerning autonomy, collective control to the maximum extent over its ongoing self-institution, which I think of as a desirable political goal...collective self-limitation is basic to that, and is a collective process. Which it is anyway, despite what the ethicists may claim about themselves as the bulkwards defending Us from Chaos and other Bad Things.

So there's likely not much disagreement about the functions that writing can have. More one about how to think of the relation between ethics as a type of discourse and history. I prefer to think in terms of the second one because it keeps more things open to change, to argument etc. That's likely an aesthetic matter.

Or I may have just read too much Kierkegaard and internalized his notion of the ethical as an aspect of the religious, so a space of pure inwardness. It's hard to write from pure inwardness. As soon as you start writing, you move into the aesthetic. Which was a Bad Thing for Kierkegaard---irony, distance, the Interesting, all dissolved the sense of limitation that was of a piece with faith in that dimension of pure inwardness.

Meta-meta.

But I digress.

James Lloyd Davis
Mar 15, 02:07pm

Ethicists as egoists presents a dilemma, since an egoist would be better served by the rugged, individualistic nature of social darwinism. Ethics is the foundation of societal collectives... family, tribe, clan, nation, et al.

I believe the roots for ethics are much older than the likes of those who developed Western Philosophy, refined it to the point of confusion.

Ethics and some variant of 'do unto others...' exists in virtually every faith and every society, even among those who practice little or no religion. It is the primitive consideration that no one survives in a world filled with predators that drew the need for collectives in the first place.

Collectives require cooperation... cooperation requires rules. Rules demand logic.. voila, ethics.

Ethicists and moralists can be egotistical, but so can anyone. Ethics is not, however derived from an egotistical motivation, but from the notion of survival.

David Ackley
Mar 15, 02:23pm

To go back to the original question, what if it were recouched to ask Is political fiction necessary?

There is an abundance of non-fiction on politics, discursive, historical, opinionated, analytical, occasionally satirical--a lot of it tedious, some of it quite good ( in for example, The London Review of Books.) Given the abundance and range of work which takes politics as it subject, what exactly does fictionalizing political writing have to add? What niche does political fiction fill, or propose to fill? Understand, I'm asking from a position of ignorance, at least in the sense that I am not at all sure of the answer. But I would like to have the benefit of other views.

stephen hastings-king
Mar 15, 03:34pm

@james...I think I'm using ethics in a more narrow sense than you are. I'm referring mostly to ethics as a type of philosophy and then as a register of speaking or writing based either in that philosophy or in the Judeo-Christian tradition of moralizing texts (which ethics derives from in Western philosophy, for better or worse).

That's different from the rules themselves that limit actions within a collective...these rules originate from within the collective itself, varying with how self-institution is understood (so one way in a direct democracy like classical Athens and another in the modern common law tradition, say)...

Ethics is simply one way among others of talking/thinking about those rules...you could just as easily do the same thing via sociology or history or fiction...

Ethicists as egotistical is not really a problem to locate. Lots and lots of treatises about ethics make claims that they are as I said, the Desperately Important Bulkward against an Onslought of Bad Things, an idea which only makes sense given assumptions about human beings rooted in a notion of original sin, one way or another--which is a Judeo-Christian fiction and nothing more.

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 15, 03:36pm

I think politics is part of our lives, I think the personal is political, I think politics is inescapable, it just has to be done well and not in a lecturing way and not necessarily about some men in suit. Writing about poverty is political. Writing about terrorism and political oppression is political. Writing about schooling can be political. It's a broad and wide field interwoven in our lives. Living in the shadow of two nuclear power plants as I do, terrified every time we go to the beach where there is NO evacuation plan is political. I have no interest in men in suits.

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 15, 03:46pm

Another slant on politics is simply the uneven distribution of power in big ways and small ways. Most of us deal with politics at our jobs, some abusively. Those all count as writing about politics in fiction.

James Lloyd Davis
Mar 15, 05:38pm

Good point, Gloria. Power is the problem. Justice the solution. How you get from one to the other runs parallel courses through history and the human narrative. Fiction as art imitates life and, ultimately, vice versa... assuming you do it right.

Lemme go back to my favorite mensch poet and playwright, Billy Shakespeare:

"Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so o'erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure."

Hamlet, Act 3, scene 2

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 15, 07:56pm

I like that. Politics is about power and justice/injustice.

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 15, 09:18pm

John Lennon's Imagine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLgYAHHkPFs

Letitia Coyne
Mar 15, 09:54pm

@David. Perhaps fiction provides a more accessible form for many than non fiction. It is more likely that I Claudius will be read and enjoyed by a wider demographic than Gibbon's Decline and Fall.

I echo Gloria. Most decisions in our day to day are political in some form. Acknowledging that I write low-brow genre fiction unlikely to be considered for major literary awards, I am interested in the reasons people read and the payoffs they seek for the time they invest.

I would feel uncomfortable rewriting the standard masogynist righting the world's wrongs with a gun. Presenting an alternative fantasy wthin set genre markers is a political choice.

I wrote a series of articles on genre and the many reasons we select one or another, now sadly gone with the demise of the e-mag in which it was published. Even at the very base level where the literary skill of an author might be suspect, fiction, and with it its moral and ethical and political and spiritual burden, all wrapped in fantasy, is widely disseminated through an audience who have no interest in reading dry non-fiction.

Lxx

Susan Gibb
Mar 15, 10:08pm

There's a difference between political fiction using metaphor, satire, parody, creative scenarios, and subtlety versus political essays which only pose a position or statement on current events. Either are fine, but one shouldn't be mistaken as the other.

Frankie Saxx
Mar 15, 10:16pm

It occurred to me as I was skiing that Men Who Hate Women/Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was not only an über mega super bestseller, but also soaked in political commentary.

Dolemite
Mar 15, 10:46pm

Just tell me a good story.
(if you want to achieve something)

Tuck me in.
Entrance me.
Put me to sleep.
Wake me up.

Engage me.

Fictionally.

(or not)

Make an effort to understand
the difference between

purpose
and
result.

Frankie Saxx
Mar 15, 11:12pm

That's kind of sexy, Crime Dawg.

Dolemite
Mar 15, 11:24pm

Every act of creation is sexual.

(no matter your politics/concerns/worries/obsessions--which, for the record, don't make you better/more caring/more important/more *feeling*/more involved/more relevant/more *present*/more here/more now/more spAYshul/more caring... more anything than a dog sitting in the sun, eyes nodding off...than anyone else...)

Dolemite
Mar 15, 11:35pm

and the...

mind-numbing
thick slabs of
blah-blah
dear god...

(jesus, could these people even order a cheeseburger under duress?)

strannikov
Mar 15, 11:50pm

even served well-done
always rare in the center
poetry is steak.

James Lloyd Davis
Mar 15, 11:50pm

Thus spake Matt Dennison, lone arbiter of relevance in a world gone mad with opinion.

Dolemite
Mar 16, 12:02am

Tartare!

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 16, 12:43am

Some might say every act of creation was sexual and political. I'm not saying I'm that person.

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 16, 12:46am

Saying you want to be put to sleep like a baby with no political worries is a political position.

Dolemite
Mar 16, 01:01am

Just tell me a good story.
(if you want to achieve something)

Dolemite
Mar 16, 01:05am

"Saying you want to be put to sleep like a baby with no political worries"

Did you even read what I wrote?

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 16, 01:05am

That's quite clear.

Dolemite
Mar 16, 01:07am

The implication that you didn't?

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 16, 01:11am

Though I'm not sure you read what I wrote. It doesn't matter. It's trivial and not worth a debate. I understand your position. Story is all that matters. But story has many tentacles. Story alone is a box.

Dolemite
Mar 16, 01:16am

"Story is all that matters."

Exactly. Or else there is no motor to carry the reader along.

Politics (or anything( can be a Result of the story, when presented with grace and engaging skill, but when it is the PURPOSE, it clogs the engine with obviousness.

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 16, 01:19am

Actually, I completely agree with you. Totally.

Marcus Speh
Mar 16, 06:50am

Now, to paraphrase Mrs Gaskell: one of us is being silly, Sir Frank. I'm not saying you are silly, but it's not me.

Frankie Saxx
Mar 16, 11:29am

Politics in stories are like captions on cats. Used well, they give dimension to the whole. Used poorly, and the try to hard nature of the thing makes the reader uncomfortable and embarrassed for the writer. I can has cheezburger?

Letitia Coyne
Mar 16, 01:28pm

Cat without need of caption.

http://s33.beta.photobucket.com/user/trackingbeam/media/n683847090_976708_6991.jpg.html

Lxx

David Ackley
Mar 16, 02:50pm

"Poetry makes nothing happen..." famously wrote Auden, which rightly or wrongly states the crux question of the matter with regard to political art. If the object of political writing is to persuade to action, then how comparitively effective is political fiction in doing so? It can seem that the objectives of art and those of politics are at cross purposes, art seeking to be complete in itself, the political writer seeking to move to action, an enactment of an incompletion which the reader/audience is supposed to supply. Again I don't know the answer here, but am trying to frame the question around my own --incomplete--understanding.

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 16, 03:12pm

I think it is a constant riddle and tenuous balance to be solved by a fiction writer concerned with politics. According to Orwell, when there seems to be a contradiction, aesthetics should always win out.

stephen hastings-king
Mar 16, 03:59pm

I'm not sure that political writing can persuade others to action simply because it can't do the work of material organization.

But it can change the way you see things by tampering with how they're framed.

The frame-switch can be done in myriad ways, One might use journalistic approach if the idea is to reveal information previously hidden or re-organize things already partially known so that, in the United States for example, the despotic incompetence of the financial oligarchy is made evident, or the idiotic consequences of neo-liberal thinking are made plain.

But one can also experiment with form as a way of trying to shake conventional ways of ordering information, of "telling a nice story"---because a "nice story" is often at the level of its form a repetition of political dominant ways of limiting information.

There's no requirement that fiction participate in the circle-jerk of reassurance through repetition of the same, draping little variations around it so it appears to be something other than it is.

And I'm indifferent to whether people "like stories" just as I'm indifferent to whether people like chunky or smooth peanut butter or blue or yellow shirts.

You like what you like. That's nice.

If you don't like things that operate by different rules, don't read them.

No-one cares.

To think it matters is like imagining other consumers going oooh aaah as you heroically choose chunky peanut butter in a supermarket, with maybe a scattering of applause.

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 16, 04:04pm

And poetry can make things happen, just not predictably, by playing on emotions and ideas and changing them which then changes behavior in some cases. I know someone who said a poem saved her life by giving her hope. Hope is undervalued.

David Ackley
Mar 16, 06:19pm

Gloria,

I agree with you more than with Auden in thinking that "...poetry can make things happen, just not predictably..." The lack of predictability may undercut its effectiveness as political writing though.

But neither do I think that poetry has to defend itself if it happens to fall out that it is better as poetry than as political writing. Or that it has no political usefulness whatsoever.

But there are very sticky problems with the admixture of creative works and politics; Pound's and Celine's anti-semitism and fascist sympathies for example: What of works that are aesthetically worthwhile whose politics are, by most current standards, vicious? Letting aesthetics trump politics can risk implicating us in the vile sympathies and positions of authors. And extricating the politics from the aesthetics is not an easy proposition in something that is of an aesthetic piece.

Stephen,

Isn't doing "the material organization" a form of action by someone who was persuaded to it, perhaps, by political writing?

But, if one accepts "changing the way you see things," as either necessary to political action, or after all a kind of action in itself, are you saying "yes?"

Your notion that moving away from conventional forms is itself a useful political proposition is an appealing one. As writers we may be inclined to think that this has an effect beyond the literary community, but I don't know. The target is big and damp and able to absorb most blows with equanimity. I don't know how you epater les bourgoisie these days, so the question of political writing, poetry, fiction, or nonhas that to deal with as well.

Frankie Saxx
Mar 16, 08:32pm

@Letitia:

That's the same look I get on my face when I sit down to read a story and discover it's just a cardboard vehicle for the author's political opinions.

stephen hastings-king
Mar 16, 09:54pm

@David...

One thing I've learned in my travels is that you can't count on effects really. So you do what interests or pleases you and send it out to have its own life out there floating in the ocean of words. So whether one sees that work as a political or as some other kind of action ends up being part of the affect that keeps one invested in the process of making things.

I made a book about a group of Parisian revolutionary Marxists active from the late 40s through 1966 or so. The idea they had that what they were doing could impact on how others thought and saw and acted kept them going. What they did was really interesting work. The ways their journal got distributed militated against a direct relation between that doing and the outcomes they hoped to see. But they kept going. And it did have impacts, just not among the working-class audience they imagined they were writing for, and not in the ways they had hoped. But it was still a fundamental project for each of them. Meeting them and figuring out how to talk about what they were doing for an English speaking audience (whatever that means..it's the conceit of such projects that one addresses such a group) was a fundamental project for me.

What impact will it have? I have no idea. The nature and meaning of the project wasn't such that how others react to it, if they do, is that important. What was important was the making of it.

Nonetheless, it's nice that it is wending it's way through the publication process and in a few months will start on it's own life as yet another object floating around the ocean of words.

And it's nice, the idea that other people might read it. Does what they think about afterward matter? I suppose in a general way...I mean I'm interested in it, I guess. But having done music performances for a long time showed me that when people say things to you about what you do, it's mostly about the social situation in which they find themselves when they decide to talk to you after a gig. So you find out how they react to that sort of situation. You don't know what they think, necessarily.

It makes no sense to me that anyone who makes things would rely seriously on the responses of other people--except maybe a few who are close, who are inclined to be interested and will tell you things for real---in the evaluation of what you do. This not only insofar as the political content of a piece is concerned, but more generally.

To my mind, we are, in general, following various processes. You just do what you do. If people enjoy it, excellent.
If they don't, that's fine too.
You keep going anyway.

That seems to me to be the case, anyway.

Gloria Garfunkel
Mar 16, 10:44pm

David: In the case of fascist, anti-semitic writers, I will skim out of curiosity, as I did with Mein Kampf, but I don't give them much time and attention. There is too much else to read. Like Holocaust literature.

Letitia Coyne
Mar 17, 12:56am

@Fankie,

:) He is capable of changing behaviour. I look at him and he makes me laugh. Every time I see him. I'm easily pleased when it comes to pictures of cats.

Grumpy cat is a proponent of my strongest political views.

Lxx

David Ackley
Mar 17, 01:11am

Gloria;

Yes, I think that's best.

Stephen;

That's a project I'd be interested in knowing more about. I hope you'll alert us when the book comes out. And congratulations!
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