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MN's avatar

I read your essay over the weekend and I don’t think you have anything to worry about. But I do find your response to these tweets a bit puzzling. Why even explain or over-explain yourself? Why not let the piece speak for itself which it does so forcefully. This post-response piece only adds a degree of nervousness to the piece, which it didn’t have by itself. People can toss a few tweets, but let them produce that kind of writing. A great piece of writing will always invite criticism and misunderstanding.

What you wrote in “Liberties” is a beautiful and deeply insightful piece of criticism. You wrote about “moralizing fiction” in America—and that has been a problem for a while (Nabokov spoke about it in the 60s), but recently this type of literature has taken the form of political activism disguised as contemporary or post-post modernism or whatever. I spent two years at Columbia doing an MFA and I was shocked by the campaign (both implicit in criticism and sometimes explicit) about the demand for a more “updated” or “correct” or “inclusive” representation of people in stories. Maybe I grew up in Eastern Europe and my aesthetics is “non-American” but for me great literature is an ideal to strive for, not a socio-economic or political project. This earnestness in fiction that your critics speak of is misplaced. We, fiction writers, (my own fiction is unpublishable these days in the US because it’s “gross” and “irredeemable” and “depressing”) have irony—the most potent, but underutilized technique in the US contemporary fiction— to make use of. Earnestness involves a high degree of deliberate and conscious moralizations of phenomena. When not done with a deft hand in fiction, it often comes (and is) cheap political activism. I’ve read a great deal of this at Columbia. That’s why essays exist where people can take their dead serious activism. Fiction is not political pamphleteering.

Thank you for writing the essay and please continue to provide this essential service on behalf of art and literature. Please pardon my language, but fuck Twitter.

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The Literarian Gazette's avatar

Tortorici misunderstood your essay, Oyler's too, and she looks pretty silly, frankly.

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