The Reduction of Modern Fiction, or, Politics, My Dear Watson

in which I discuss how fiction has been co-opted as a tool for political soapboxing

Something that is impossible to miss when picking up a new release from the fiction shelf at the bookstore (if, like me, you read for enjoyment) is the incessant droning on about one Current Thing or another. And, of course, there’s zero diversity of perspective when it comes to any of these things—zero nuance to make it interesting; it’s all preaching The Message, but you get to pick the packaging your sermon comes in. So, there’s that.

Nothing is about story anymore. Nothing is about imagination. Nothing is about the fundamental idea of being human. Everything is about what we call “being relevant.”

“In giving our children what is ‘relevant,’ we want to ensure that it is rooted in this time, in this place, in these platitudes. If you can, give them books so caked with topical references that they won’t be understandable in thirty years. Such works, calling for automatic responses, are often little more than political propaganda with a little bit of storyline.” – Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

And there you have it: politics, my dear Watson!

The reduction of fiction—indeed, the reduction of art—can be seen in nearly everything produced within the last ten years, to be conservative. You’re no longer allowed to have female characters; they must be Strong Female Characters. You can’t just have minority characters; they must be the Correct Minority Characters doing the Correct Minority Things. And God forbid you have male characters doing anything masculine—unless, of course, they’re the villain, or otherwise shown to be unconsciously oppressing those around them (which still makes them fundamentally awful people, naturally).

As Anthony Esolen goes on to say in Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: “We should substitute for the wonder of imagination the irritable flush of political partisanship. We should accept the maxim that all human endeavor is ultimately about power. Therefore, education is about power. So is art.”

Power, yes. And, as authors and artists, we’re meant to feed this machine.

The grip of Modernity on art—on fiction—is so intense that, if people but glimpse for a second something that isn’t in lockstep with the dogma—or, as we now call it, “polite society”—they’re apt to recoil from it, muttering something about how it’s “problematic,” or “offensive.” It simply can’t be tolerated, they tell themselves as they clutch at their pearls. Furthermore, whoever wrote it must be a monstrous person indeed, or perhaps they’re merely backwards—poor dear; they really ought to educate themselves.

However, as Stephen King put in in On Writing: “If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”

The only trouble with what King said is that it assumes the publishing industry agrees—which, I suppose it might have, once, before the Reduction, back when stories were about story and messy, nuanced truth and all that unrefined rubbish. There was a time, I can imagine, when the publishing industry was fair and unbiased. When, if you wrote a piece of fiction that was good—good meaning well written—you would get a contract. Now, if you don’t follow the rules, if you don’t feed the machine, you’re out of the club. Because the publishing industry has become a gatekeeper for Polite Society. Burst that bubble and decades of hard work would be lost!

Politics, my dear Watson. Politics.