JUST KIDDING, I do not think I am being “cancelled,” or that I am suffering piteously, or that I am the victim of an injustice of any sort, but I do think it is odd to watch an involved “discourse” about a piece of my writing evolve on a social media platform I don’t use but clearly have no hopes of escaping. You may wonder, with excellent reason, why I left Twitter only to remain exquisitely attentive to my many haters. What a good question! The answer is that I’m human and I care about my writing and its reception, which makes me incapable of not caring what people think of my work, whether I especially like them (or their writing) or not. I will likely need to learn to outgrow this pathology to at least some extent before my books are published (and widely panned by my haters???)—but I haven’t outgrown it yet, and I’m not above
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.
I forgot to mention John Gardner’s 1978 “On Moral Fiction,” which might be more aligned with Becca’s argument about the role of morality in fiction. He calls cheap moralizing “cornball morality” and insists that whole serious fiction is moral, but the actual moralizing in fiction shouldn’t be didactic, but more like derivative of a serious engagement with values and norms in society.
Even though I sympathize with the impulse to respond and qualify and (over-)explain, I will second the sentiment, from Aleks, that it's okay, perhaps even desirable, to let the piece speak for itself.
The variety of potential misreadings and objections is unsurveyable, and you'll never preempt all of them in the piece itself. I think Bernard Williams was right to think that attempts to do such a thing have made elite journal philosophy monstrous and incomprehensible. It's what you leave alone that makes reading your stuff and other stuff like it so rewarding (among other things, of course).
I will add one more question: What does it say about our prevailing atmosphere that you must rehearse your political positions and/or political bona fides in response to criticism of your piece?
The way I tend to think about this issue is that, while a lot of good writing is political, the best writing is political or moralistic *on the way* towards another target (which can be thought of as something like "an honest examination of human nature/experience"). In other words, the politics happens as a by-product, not because it is the primary aim or primary object of examination. As a primary object it too easily becomes sanctimonious and simplistic.
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.
Tortorici misunderstood your essay, Oyler's too, and she looks pretty silly, frankly.
I forgot to mention John Gardner’s 1978 “On Moral Fiction,” which might be more aligned with Becca’s argument about the role of morality in fiction. He calls cheap moralizing “cornball morality” and insists that whole serious fiction is moral, but the actual moralizing in fiction shouldn’t be didactic, but more like derivative of a serious engagement with values and norms in society.
Even though I sympathize with the impulse to respond and qualify and (over-)explain, I will second the sentiment, from Aleks, that it's okay, perhaps even desirable, to let the piece speak for itself.
The variety of potential misreadings and objections is unsurveyable, and you'll never preempt all of them in the piece itself. I think Bernard Williams was right to think that attempts to do such a thing have made elite journal philosophy monstrous and incomprehensible. It's what you leave alone that makes reading your stuff and other stuff like it so rewarding (among other things, of course).
I will add one more question: What does it say about our prevailing atmosphere that you must rehearse your political positions and/or political bona fides in response to criticism of your piece?
Disagree about Lerner. See my review of The Topeka School.
https://newpoplit.com/opinion/ben-lerners-topeka-school-failure/
Curious if you had any comment/thoughts on the absence of John Gardner from the ‘moral fiction’ conversation as it is currently happening.
recycling probably is stupid though
The way I tend to think about this issue is that, while a lot of good writing is political, the best writing is political or moralistic *on the way* towards another target (which can be thought of as something like "an honest examination of human nature/experience"). In other words, the politics happens as a by-product, not because it is the primary aim or primary object of examination. As a primary object it too easily becomes sanctimonious and simplistic.