Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Wednesday
I recently completed proofreading the galleys (if that’s what they’re still called) of my forthcoming book, which of course is tremendously exciting. Then I had the slightly unnerving experience of reading a New York Times essay about another soon-to-published book that explores some of the same themes and includes many of the same thinkers and ideas. Like my book, Lyta Gold’s Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality is concerned with the recent spate of book bannings, and we both note that there is a long history (2500 years long) of people freaking out over stories.
When similar books come out at the same time, it’s often because authors are tapping into the same zeitgeist or spirit of the times. Nor are Gold and I the only ones since in 2022 there was also Peter Brooks’s 2022 study Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative. Indeed, it’s good there’s a cluster of such books since they’re more likely to capture people’s attention that way. My book will be appearing (I think) sometime this summer whereas Gold’s is slated for an October release.
In today’s post I compare my ideas with Gold’s, especially noting how we arrive as almost diametrically opposite conclusions. Gold notes that the fear of fiction is a cyclical phenomenon, waxing and waning, and she points to various eruptions over the centuries. Then, as I do, she does a deep dive into Plato’s anxieties, which led him to ban the stories of Hesiod and Homer from his utopian republic. In my view, one reason why Plato banned Homer was because he himself was in love with the poet and was frightened over the effect that The Iliad and The Odyssey had over him. When he was in the grip of Homer’s mesmerizing fictions, he had difficulty exercising his “right reason,” which for Plato is philosophy’s highest aim.
Gold believes that fiction causes panic most commonly in democracies. That’s because
the inner lives and motives of others matter a great deal in a democracy, arguably more so than in other political systems where people have less direct control over their social experience — and less freedom of expression. In a democracy, your fellow citizens can organize for social progress or encourage the passage of draconian laws that terrorize minorities. Fear of other people, and how they might work together to shift reality, is the reason the contest over written language so often extends to the realm of make-believe — of fiction. Fiction is the story of other people; this is what makes it dangerous.
I agree with Gold’s point but approach from the opposing angle, seeing fiction as a powerful tool for progressives. Looking at how Romantics like Blake and Wordsworth celebrated the lives of chimney sweeps, shepherds, leech gatherers, and other lower class figures, I write that
the door had been opened for poets and writers to use the Imagination to step beyond their own narrow class boundaries in ways that would have been, well, unimaginable in earlier times. Through literature authors have entered the lives of the marginalized (Walt Whitman), the urban poor (Charles Dickens), American slaves (Harriet Beecher Stowe), Dorset dairy maids (Thomas Hardy), French coalminers (Émile Zola), Nebraska pioneers (Willa Cather), Harlem residents (Langston Hughes), African American sharecroppers (Jean Toomer), African American homosexuals (James Baldwin), bankrupted Oklahoma farmers (John Steinbeck), Laguna Pueblo war veterans (Leslie Marmon Silko), transplanted Pakistanis (Hanif Kureishi), West Indian immigrants (Zadie Smith), American lesbians (Alison Bechdel), and on and on.
Like Gold, however, I also examine why MAGA is attacking certain books. For instance, if they have repeatedly attacked the novel Beloved, it’s because Toni Morrison addresses two of their sore spots (to put it mildly), America’s dark racial past and a woman claiming control over her own body. (The slave owners steal Sethe’s breast milk and then whip her to an inch of her life.) In the 2021 Virginia governor’s race, a Republican operative complained that her son had been traumatized by being assigned the book in high school, and candidate Glenn Younkin used the story as the final argument in his successful bid.
Gold and I both look at two works that played a role in slave times and the Jim Crow south, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Clansman (which became Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation). Where we differ, however—and it’s a major difference—is that she wants to draw hard and fast lines between literature and life whereas I want to dismantle them. Gold writes,
Fiction writers can insist on having their work judged on its merits and not on whether it provides moral instruction or inculcates the right social value. This isn’t an anti-political stance but, rather, a highly political one. It tells readers to go get their values elsewhere, to stop demanding that fiction provide the difficult labor of soul-making — to do that work themselves.
Now, I agree that literature should not be yoked to an ideological agenda. In fact, a number of thinkers I explore argue specifically against doctrinaire literature, including Sir Philip Sidney, Karl Marx, Frederic Engels, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Terry Eagleton. But by potentially changing the way people see the world, literature (so I argue) sometimes changes history and so can hardly be separated from morality or social values.
Percy Shelley provides specific examples. The great poets of the past, he says, have sowed the seeds for the ending of slavery and the liberation of women. “It exceeds all imagination,” he writes, “to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place.”
“Poets,” the Romantic poet concludes, “are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
Or to quote someone who is not an activist poet, Harold Bloom makes a compelling case that Shakespeare changed the fundamental way that humans see themselves. Whereas fellow playwrights Marlowe produced “cartoons” and Ben Johnson “ideograms,” Bloom writes In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom writes that whereas that fellow playwrights Marlowe produced “cartoons” and Ben Jonson ideograms, the Bard created characters like Hamlet and Falstaff, thereby inventing “human inwardness.” Personality as we understand it, Bloom explains, is “a Shakespearean invention…Insofar as we ourselves value, and deplore, our own personalities, we are the heirs of Falstaff and of Hamlet, and of all the other persons who throng Shakespeare’s theater…”
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum, meanwhile, argues that literature is essential in a multicultural democracy for producing informed voters. How else are we to empathize with fellow citizens who are otherwise unlike us?
Sounds like soul-making to me.
Further thought: Gold appears to throw in her lot “art for art’s sake” crowd and elevate aesthetics above all, concluding her piece with Oscar Wilde’s contention, in his preface to Picture of Dorian Gray, that “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” But Wilde’s novel was profoundly moral, providing deep comfort to many closeted gay men when it came out, some of whom had it all but memorized. For that matter, the Aesthetic movement was itself a protest against capitalism, which dismissed anything (such as art) that could not be monetized. Wilde makes this clear in his essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism.”
In my own book, I describe a constant tension between literature as a fun activity (aesthetic delight) and literature as a practical tool. Matthew Arnold talks of lit as sweetness and light while John Stuart Mill makes it his goal to balance aestheticism and utilitarianism. The best literature, I contend, is always both/and, never either/or.