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Welcome to Phiction, a newsletter about finding meaning in hyperreality. If you want to know more, read my first post, which is something like a mission statement. If you want to receive my monthly post in your inbox, sign up here:
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There is an urge to be good. To be seen to be good. To be seen. Also to be.
- Zadie Smith, “Now More Than Ever”
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing… Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.
- George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”
Think of a good person. Not a great person, not necessarily a kind person, but a good one. Someone who says the right things, even if they don’t always live up to their own standards. Someone aware of and open about their faults and biases, who avoids offending others, acknowledges their privilege, puts their waste in the right bin. You know this person, and you like them; their goodness is often displayed publicly, earning them the respect and approval of their peers. Or maybe you don’t like them. Maybe their goodness makes you feel inferior, even resentful. Still, you have to admit that they are good, since doing otherwise would invite a closer look into your own goodness.
Now, consider: is this the kind of person you want to read a novel about?
Becca Rothfeld, in her recent essay “Sanctimony Literature,” says no. Novels about good people which dominate contemporary American fiction, she argues, traffic in narrow, unsurprising politics of virtue. Rothfeld implicates Ben Lerner, Sally Rooney, Celeste Ng, and others for their reductive, moralistic fiction, as well as the cultural powers that celebrate it (legacy media, literary awards, commercial distributors, and New Yorker tote-bag owning readers like you and me):
A body of writing has emerged that we might call “sanctimony literature”… [which] is, in effect, an extension of social media: it is full of self-promotion and the airing of performatively righteous opinions. It exists largely to make posters-cum-authors look good and scrollers-cum-readers feel good for appreciating the poster-cum-authors’ goodness… Above all, sanctimony literature is defined by its efforts to demonstrate its Unimpeachably Good Politics in the manner of a child waving an impressive report card at her parents in hopes of a pat on the head.
As Rothfeld undoubtedly expected, her essay has drawn attention from the same very online crowd that it targets in its titular thesis.1
If long, dense literary criticism is your thing, I strongly recommend reading the entire essay. But if not, there is a particular question raised by the essay worth discussing more broadly. I also suspect it is the part of Rothfeld’s argument that struck a chord, positive or negative, with so many. She writes:
Heretical as it sounds, there are realms of life in which politics does not always belong.
Is this true? And if so, is fiction one of them?
Party Lines
A teacher of mine began a fiction writing workshop with the following dictum: all writing is political. What she meant, I think, is that all writing comes from a certain viewpoint, and the orientation of that viewpoint is a political statement. This is a popular refrain, and its adherents are especially keen to note that the choice to write from an apolitical viewpoint is itself a political statement.
It’s useful to further define “politics” in this context. In George Orwell’s legendary essay “Why I Write,” he lists “political purpose” as one of his primary motivations, then clarifies:
[U]sing the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.
Such an aspirational understanding of politics helps us understand the mind behind Animal Farm and 1984, books that are undoubtedly political without mentioning elections or policy agendas.
This is subtly different from my teacher’s use of the term, as well as Rothfeld’s. When they say politics they are speaking of power structures. This terminology, now popular among social justice advocates, is actually a very old way to think about politics (see Hobbes, Rousseau, etc.) Oxford dictionary might define political as “relating to the government or the public affairs of a country,” but this is both too narrow and too lofty to capture the role of politics in our lives. When we talk of workplace politics or classroom politics, we are already betraying that what we’re interested in is power: who has it, who lacks it, and what to do about it.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose 2015 novel The Sympathizer concerns a Vietnamese-American spy who immigrates to America, wrote a manifesto for overtly political fiction in a December 2020 NYT Op-Ed. He begins by establishing himself as one of Rothfeld’s good people:
Many writers, like me, texted voters, donated to activist causes, got into bitter fights on social media and wrote Op-Eds attacking the Trump administration.
What follows, like Rothfeld’s essay, is a sweeping indictment of the literary establishment, only it makes a polar opposite claim:
American literature has a troubled relationship to politics. The mainstream — poetry and fiction written by white, well-educated people and regulated by a reviewing, publishing and gate-keeping apparatus that is mostly white and privileged — tends to be apolitical.
Which is it? Is contemporary fiction too political or not political enough? One reason proponents of either argument tend to talk past each other is an increasingly blurred distinction between a work and its author. Jessica Winter recently lamented that the prevalence of autofiction has led to people who approach her at parties assuming that the details of her life match those of the characters in her novels. If the politics of a book just is the identity of its writer, then our morality fixation might be understood as skepticism toward anyone’s ability, especially if they’re white and/or privileged, to speak for people other than themselves.
Here is Jia Tolentino, writing in The New Yorker about the decline of the so-called “personal essay boom” in the context of the 2016 election2:
Put simply, the personal is no longer political in quite the same way that it was… Individual perspectives do not, at the moment, seem like a trustworthy way to get to the bottom of a subject.
Big, if true, and bad news for fiction writers. Rachel Cusk, whose autofictional Outline trilogy is passively apolitical, famously declared in an interview that “autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts.” From the same interview, in The Guardian:
More and more – like Karl Ove Knausgård, whom [Cusk] cites – she felt fiction was "fake and embarrassing. Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous.
The most extreme interpretation of this logic is a mandate against writing characters whose identity differs from your own, a view that Zadie Smith felt the need to rebuke in a lengthy defense of the tradition of writing experientially fictional characters.
To recap: all writing is political, all art is personal, but the personal is no longer political in quite the same way.
Do You Think of Yourself as a Good Person?
As a moral philosopher specializing in applied ethics, Peter Singer has spent much of his life thinking about what it means to be a good person. In his 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Singer placed the moral burden to alleviate global poverty on all individuals with the power and wealth to do something about it, founding the principles of effective altruism now popular among billionaires and nonprofits. He famously introduced the analogy of the drowning child: if you’re walking down the street and happen to see a child drowning in a shallow pond, aren’t you obligated to help? Formally:
[I]f it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.
In the modern world, Singer argued, it is just as easy to help someone starving on another continent as it is to save the hypothetical drowning child. For those who can afford it, the same guilt we ought to feel for ignoring the child applies to “spending money on new clothes or a new car instead of giving it to famine relief.” Or, as a teacher once put it to me, every morning we are faced with the choice of buying a five-dollar coffee or alleviating someone’s suffering.3
Singer’s demanding moral framework was a precursor to Rothfeld’s “politics of everything.” Should we be able to enjoy a hamburger without considering the animal cruelty and environmental degradation that brought it to our plates? Should we celebrate fast-fashion brands whose low prices are a direct result of labor exploitation?
Anything can be political, but does that mean everything should be? Consider me among the many who find Singer’s burden unrealistic, if generally pointing in the right direction. Remaining constantly attuned to the political implications of everyday life is demoralizing, and generally unpleasant for everyone involved. There is the valid objection that staying out of politics is a privilege of those who aren’t directly affected by it, although, it’s likely that a certain brand of sanctimonious politics is far more common among highly educated elites than the less fortunate people they claim to be in service of. To his credit, Singer admits as much in a recent interview with The New Yorker, referencing the money that he and his family spent on palliative care for their mother:
I don’t fully live up to the really high standard that you can see in “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” where I suggest that the only real stopping place is when, if you gave any more, you’d be harming yourself as much as you’d be benefiting the person. That’s an incredibly demanding line, and I’ve never claimed to live up to it.
The interview ends with dialogue straight out of sanctimony literature:
Do you think of yourself as a good person?
Yes, because that invites a comparison with other people, and I think by those standards I’m a good person. But do I think of myself as an ideally good, perfect person, the perfect person, a secular saint? Definitely not.
Ambiguous Conclusions
In a recent episode of the Chapo Trap House podcast, journalist and documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis justifies his choice of Jian Qing, actress, revolutionary, and the fourth wife of Mao Zedong, as a primary character in his latest film:
I’m fed up with the way we divide people these days into goodies and baddies. You’re either someone who is suffering from a warlord, in which case you’re a good person, or you’re a warlord, in which case you’re a bad person. I want to do a thing that is much more like one of those 19th century, multi-part novels, where you have characters who in themselves are completely ambiguous.
This lack of moral complexity is precisely why Rothfeld deems sanctimony literature “aesthetically wanting.” She draws from the critic Lionel Trilling:
Rich writing must display what [Trilling'] called “moral realism.” This, he clarifies, “is not the awareness of morality itself but of the contradictions, paradoxes, and dangers of living the moral life.” In a later essay he added that “to act against social injustice is right and noble” but “to choose to act so does not settle all moral problems but on the contrary generates new ones of an especially difficult sort.”
…
In a better literature than the sanctimonists’, the frequent distance between our ideals and our practices would itself be the subject of interesting novels.4
How long after a national tragedy can you resume normal social media posting? If you forget your Brooklinen tote, is it wrong to double bag your oat milk to make the walk home less stressful?
These are tongue-in-cheek examples, but such trivial concerns wear on us, and then we are faced with more serious tradeoffs, like Singer paying any price to keep his mother comfortable. People my age are constantly judging and being judged for the morality of their lifestyle; careers and consumer goods are arranged into hierarchies of goodness. Like Singer, we grudgingly acknowledge that morality is comparative. Imperfect characters dealing with morally ambiguous circumstances? That is the stuff of good fiction.
Literature occupies a strange place in the culture wars. Its evolution has been similar to academia’s, though on a smaller, more restrained scale. Both the canon and mainstream institutions – historically “progressive” but almost exclusively white and masculine – experienced a slow trickle of diversification until roughly the last decade, after which the pendulum swung, in certain respects, decisively in the other direction. But as the discourse around Rothfeld’s piece (including her own curt dismissal of Nguyen’s position) demonstrated, debates about the politicization of writing are too often bogged down in culture war binaries, when the real question is more nuanced and fundamental.
Namely: what is it all for? Why are we reading and writing literature in the first place?
Everyone seems to agree that it’s not about material change. Here’s Nguyen (who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Sympathizer):
It’s easier to give Charles Yu a National Book Award for “Interior Chinatown,” a hilarious and scathing critique of Hollywood’s racist representations of Asian-Americans, than it is to actually transform Hollywood.
And Rothfeld:
If books have to make a political difference in order to make any difference at all, then dedicated readers are left to stake out a losing position, for it is simply not plausible that literature will ever tank capitalism or keep the ice caps from melting.
Luckily, there are many other reasons to care about art. The most obvious is appreciating its beauty and profundity, what Rothfeld calls admitting that “aesthetic worth count[s] as such.” If all we get out of a novel is perfect sentences, that’s okay!
But after it draws you in with its beauty, good fiction expands its reader’s consciousness into a heightened awareness of the world that is decidedly political. In Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, followers of Mercerism subject themselves to the “empathy box” to access the thoughts and feelings of others. It’s a straightforward metaphor for fiction, and while Nguyen derides empathy as an end in itself, a more nuanced appreciation of disparate viewpoints is the payoff of engaging with my favorite works of fiction.
Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing is not “political fiction,” nor are its characters “good,” but it exposed me to African-American poverty in Mississippi in the familiar form of a ghost story. The same goes for Manuel Puig’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” which uses postmodern formal gimmicks to dramatize the relationship between a transgender woman and a revolutionary in an Argentinian jail cell. I adore the work of nearly every writer cited in this piece, despite their essential disagreements; a minor benefit of literature is realizing you can be fascinated and impressed by the writing of someone you disagree with, or even hate! (This, for me, is the best argument against the total collapse of artwork into the identity of its creator).
Reading does not make us better people in the sense of moral instruction – some of our best writers are notoriously bad people – but it might allow us to probe the vibrancy and complexity shimmering beneath the surface of everyday life. Fiction that embraces moral ambiguity alongside aesthetic excellence can raise political stakes without succumbing to the in-group moralizing of sanctimony literature. It can be moving and enjoyable on its own terms. And it can help us appreciate just how difficult it is to be truly good people.5
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Until next month,
Micah
We now live in a world where respected authors respond to criticism from random people on Twitter in real-time.
Singer is no darling of the activist left – the interview linked above presses him on his bias toward white male academics, controversial views on disability rights, and acceptance of billionaires, among other gripes – but he did formalize a prescient standard for progressives: regardless of individual culpability, those with sufficient privilege bear responsibility and consciousness for those suffering systemic oppression.
E.g., Sally Rooney inking lucrative TV adaptations of her anti-capitalist novels.
Thanks to Professors Antonia Peacocke and Tom Donaldson for introducing me to some of the ideas in this essay, and to Nick K. for edits and suggestions.