Jun 16, 2022·edited Jul 22, 2022Liked by Lincoln Michel
I wrote a similar essay years ago but in response to Thomas Frank's lamentation that literature (in this case journalism) had failed to spark political or economic movements. This was before Occupy Wall Street, of course. I agree 100% The job of any type of prose (fiction or non-fiction, political or non-political), if anything, helps open our eyes to the world and see things in new ways. Or they can just be great beach reads. The primary focus of novels is to remind readers that there's a lot more going on in life than work. The job of changing the world falls squarely on the shoulders of the people through collective organizing.
At best I think novels can influence the individual. I just thought of The Alchemist now. It seems to come in vogue at different times but I would say that it's not been very helpful during the past two years. And truthfully, not at all useful for fixing societal, economic and ecological woes.
“How could a millennial Balzac compete with a billion dollar MCU film?” — so true!!! I don’t think the novel has much influence on society, it’s influence is more local than that, on the reader!
I agree with most of this—agree particularly that novels don't have a job, they have a million; that looking at novels for politics leads to both bad novels and bad politics; and that novels are sufficiently marginal in our culture that even if you do think that art is an important influence on politics, it won't come from novels.
All that said, I disagree with this one bit: "When was the point in which novelists, bourgeois mimetic or otherwise, saved society?" Because novels were ONCE influential. Not necessarily good novels (I'm almost tempted to say: necessarily not good novels, but that's cute rather than true), but novels all the same. The best American example is UNCLE TOM'S CABIN— by all reports a bad novel (I've not read it, although I've read a lot about it), and obviously it's precise impact is hard to measure, but it did have a big impact on northern feelings and, therefore, on the eventual Civil War. For a more narrow example, Upton Sinclair's THE JUNGLE—not the impact he wanted, of course, influencing food regulation not a broader push towards socialism (he famously said "I aimed for America's heart and I hit its stomach"), but still: it affected things. My sense is that you could say the same thing of Dickens too, although I am less familiar with the British context. And so on.
Novels won't have this affect now (one might imagine a TV show or movie doing so, although our cultural is so much more fragmented now that even that seems unlikely); and, as I already said (paraphrasing you), it isn't even desirable, making for bad novels and bad politics. But once upon a time it made for at least pushing-in-the-right-direction politics; and once upon a time, it could have an effect.
I recently looked into the problem of current American literary novels with the emphasis on style over content. It was a surprise to discover how much influence the writing workshops have had, and that Iowa was essentially sponsored by the CIA in the 1950s. Sounds like a paranoid fantasy but it's true, the CIA website even boasts at the success of its program in the arts.
I’m increasingly disillusioned with the idea that art = activism. Partly because of the Celebrity Activist Industrial Complex that’s outlived its use. Partly because this idea is being regurgitated in the university system to convince trust fund babies that a radical photography practice can, somehow, cancel out their gentrification footprint.
Ben’s critique is…fine. A reflexive hot take that clearly gets repeated every few years, but still. My main question is why should he - or any of us - expect writers to uplift our intellectual and political culture when they’re the ones who benefit most from this very stagnation?
Very few people can make a sustainable living off of writing alone. Most authors - traditionally published or not - need day jobs or side gigs to stay alive (and heaven forbid you actually have dependents of any kind!). Because of these dismal economic prospects, a lot of the people who can *just* be writers are going to have family money to fall back on, or a working spouse. Traditional publishing itself is an ever-shifting web of wealth and connections. Again, the people most likely to foster these connections will already be proximate to a certain level of class and mobility. Not everyone can afford to go through the MFA programs that increasingly serve as an entry-level requirement for a certain career trajectory.
Successful authorship is increasingly the domain of the middle-class and higher. These are the people for whom society’s order is, mostly, functional. I’m not saying that these “politically anemic” novels are a direct reflection of their author’s beliefs and experiences; as you’ve pointed out, that’s another faulty extreme.
But it seems willfully naive to expect people for whom society works perfectly well to have some blazing, revolutionary vision.
Happy your newsletter was highlighted by Substack just now -- really fascinating reads! This is both insightful and thought provoking. It gives me a lot to think about as a novelist and reader. As a former teacher of literature, I do think it can change us. But as you say there is the danger of ambiguity. In fact I think this is the strength: by teaching great literature, we do not teach students a position but rather how to think and how to consider ethical dilemmas.
OT -- I have paid for my subscription but am having trouble getting on. This comment is through the one-time 24-hr.- only link in my email. It's just captcha after captcha and verify after verify. This is a great essay. Thought I'd throw that in along with my frustration.
The same accusation is leveled at poetry. Woe betide a poet writing about a mere flower rather than ranting about a Just Cause. And, if you think about it, visual artists, musicians, dancers--are also called upon to address Important Causes. I think what we are seeing here is the Commissar Impulse, in which non-creative people try to own and control creativity. But, wait! Isn't that one major reason the world is so messed up and threatened--the tyranny of those who have hijacked Good for their own questionable purposes? Hello, Puritans. Shut up and let creative people express their feelings, their ideas, their visions. Sometimes they will, showing the world in a sharper light, a greater perspective, spark change. Most times, humans being what we are, we will just continue scratching our behinds on the tree, like Auden's torturer's horse in the Breughel.
I think genre fiction is the place to look. Romancelandia raised $190k for voting rights in February, $50k for abortion rights in May -- authors donating their books and services to raise money for freedoms, fans bidding those up because it's for a good cause 😊 Sci-fi casts visions of the future, good and bad. Romance books are quietly showing worlds of hope and change -- and romance has a huge audience compared to literary books. (Still small compared to TV but 🤷♀️) These are stories where women have choices and their choices matter, where people of all genders and relationships between all genders are celebrated. (Sure, both romance and sci-fi have their conservative contingents, but the broader fanbase seems to be progressive.) I think change can start in a small but dedicated group and spread outwards.
Thank you for this, and I couldn't agree more -- there are countless excellent works of fiction out there addressing 'the massive issues of the days' if you know where to look. As you said, they are rarely tearing up the bestseller list. They feature brave protagonists willing to sacrifice their ego for the betterment of the world, and some of the dystopian or utopian tales might even spark progressive political movements or (scary thought) lead to ever more backlash -- if only more people were reading them. Looking at you, ELEUTHERA (by Allegra Hyde) - I hereby champion you!
I wrote a similar essay years ago but in response to Thomas Frank's lamentation that literature (in this case journalism) had failed to spark political or economic movements. This was before Occupy Wall Street, of course. I agree 100% The job of any type of prose (fiction or non-fiction, political or non-political), if anything, helps open our eyes to the world and see things in new ways. Or they can just be great beach reads. The primary focus of novels is to remind readers that there's a lot more going on in life than work. The job of changing the world falls squarely on the shoulders of the people through collective organizing.
REEDIT: I got one thing wrong in this comment. I wrote essay after OWS, not before. If anyone is interest in reading it, it's here https://mstie68.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/reporting-the-zeitgeist-journalism-literature-and-social-movements/
At best I think novels can influence the individual. I just thought of The Alchemist now. It seems to come in vogue at different times but I would say that it's not been very helpful during the past two years. And truthfully, not at all useful for fixing societal, economic and ecological woes.
“How could a millennial Balzac compete with a billion dollar MCU film?” — so true!!! I don’t think the novel has much influence on society, it’s influence is more local than that, on the reader!
If anyone is looking for a form of writing that can spur real change, may I suggest (and don't everyone freak out) journalism?
I agree with most of this—agree particularly that novels don't have a job, they have a million; that looking at novels for politics leads to both bad novels and bad politics; and that novels are sufficiently marginal in our culture that even if you do think that art is an important influence on politics, it won't come from novels.
All that said, I disagree with this one bit: "When was the point in which novelists, bourgeois mimetic or otherwise, saved society?" Because novels were ONCE influential. Not necessarily good novels (I'm almost tempted to say: necessarily not good novels, but that's cute rather than true), but novels all the same. The best American example is UNCLE TOM'S CABIN— by all reports a bad novel (I've not read it, although I've read a lot about it), and obviously it's precise impact is hard to measure, but it did have a big impact on northern feelings and, therefore, on the eventual Civil War. For a more narrow example, Upton Sinclair's THE JUNGLE—not the impact he wanted, of course, influencing food regulation not a broader push towards socialism (he famously said "I aimed for America's heart and I hit its stomach"), but still: it affected things. My sense is that you could say the same thing of Dickens too, although I am less familiar with the British context. And so on.
Novels won't have this affect now (one might imagine a TV show or movie doing so, although our cultural is so much more fragmented now that even that seems unlikely); and, as I already said (paraphrasing you), it isn't even desirable, making for bad novels and bad politics. But once upon a time it made for at least pushing-in-the-right-direction politics; and once upon a time, it could have an effect.
I recently looked into the problem of current American literary novels with the emphasis on style over content. It was a surprise to discover how much influence the writing workshops have had, and that Iowa was essentially sponsored by the CIA in the 1950s. Sounds like a paranoid fantasy but it's true, the CIA website even boasts at the success of its program in the arts.
My article can be found at https://shirleyfreitas.com/the-state-of-literature-2022
Shirley Freitas
I’m increasingly disillusioned with the idea that art = activism. Partly because of the Celebrity Activist Industrial Complex that’s outlived its use. Partly because this idea is being regurgitated in the university system to convince trust fund babies that a radical photography practice can, somehow, cancel out their gentrification footprint.
Ben’s critique is…fine. A reflexive hot take that clearly gets repeated every few years, but still. My main question is why should he - or any of us - expect writers to uplift our intellectual and political culture when they’re the ones who benefit most from this very stagnation?
Very few people can make a sustainable living off of writing alone. Most authors - traditionally published or not - need day jobs or side gigs to stay alive (and heaven forbid you actually have dependents of any kind!). Because of these dismal economic prospects, a lot of the people who can *just* be writers are going to have family money to fall back on, or a working spouse. Traditional publishing itself is an ever-shifting web of wealth and connections. Again, the people most likely to foster these connections will already be proximate to a certain level of class and mobility. Not everyone can afford to go through the MFA programs that increasingly serve as an entry-level requirement for a certain career trajectory.
Successful authorship is increasingly the domain of the middle-class and higher. These are the people for whom society’s order is, mostly, functional. I’m not saying that these “politically anemic” novels are a direct reflection of their author’s beliefs and experiences; as you’ve pointed out, that’s another faulty extreme.
But it seems willfully naive to expect people for whom society works perfectly well to have some blazing, revolutionary vision.
Happy your newsletter was highlighted by Substack just now -- really fascinating reads! This is both insightful and thought provoking. It gives me a lot to think about as a novelist and reader. As a former teacher of literature, I do think it can change us. But as you say there is the danger of ambiguity. In fact I think this is the strength: by teaching great literature, we do not teach students a position but rather how to think and how to consider ethical dilemmas.
OT -- I have paid for my subscription but am having trouble getting on. This comment is through the one-time 24-hr.- only link in my email. It's just captcha after captcha and verify after verify. This is a great essay. Thought I'd throw that in along with my frustration.
The same accusation is leveled at poetry. Woe betide a poet writing about a mere flower rather than ranting about a Just Cause. And, if you think about it, visual artists, musicians, dancers--are also called upon to address Important Causes. I think what we are seeing here is the Commissar Impulse, in which non-creative people try to own and control creativity. But, wait! Isn't that one major reason the world is so messed up and threatened--the tyranny of those who have hijacked Good for their own questionable purposes? Hello, Puritans. Shut up and let creative people express their feelings, their ideas, their visions. Sometimes they will, showing the world in a sharper light, a greater perspective, spark change. Most times, humans being what we are, we will just continue scratching our behinds on the tree, like Auden's torturer's horse in the Breughel.
1. why must art do anything? Artists create. we have reactions to the work.
2. I read library books. I'm in the minority. This Pew article says 75% Americans have read a book this year. I doubt it.
3. The plague will continue to impact more lives than climate change and the other woes you mention, but everyone's done with covid.
4. Vonnegut's assessment of the power of fiction to spark revolution is spot on..
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/01/06/three-in-ten-americans-now-read-e-books/
I think genre fiction is the place to look. Romancelandia raised $190k for voting rights in February, $50k for abortion rights in May -- authors donating their books and services to raise money for freedoms, fans bidding those up because it's for a good cause 😊 Sci-fi casts visions of the future, good and bad. Romance books are quietly showing worlds of hope and change -- and romance has a huge audience compared to literary books. (Still small compared to TV but 🤷♀️) These are stories where women have choices and their choices matter, where people of all genders and relationships between all genders are celebrated. (Sure, both romance and sci-fi have their conservative contingents, but the broader fanbase seems to be progressive.) I think change can start in a small but dedicated group and spread outwards.
Thank you for this, and I couldn't agree more -- there are countless excellent works of fiction out there addressing 'the massive issues of the days' if you know where to look. As you said, they are rarely tearing up the bestseller list. They feature brave protagonists willing to sacrifice their ego for the betterment of the world, and some of the dystopian or utopian tales might even spark progressive political movements or (scary thought) lead to ever more backlash -- if only more people were reading them. Looking at you, ELEUTHERA (by Allegra Hyde) - I hereby champion you!