forMeika on literature
The re-post below this introduction, was originally posted as The fable that is modern literature in 2021. It describes an experience from a decade before at Parables of Submission, Fables of Truth-Based Creativity.
Reposted here because it relates to literature and thus to world-building, and thus worlding and morality more generally.
Basically literature is always fantasy where it prefers non-flat characters and story of personal growth. Stereotypes are real people too. While an emotional realism eschews the reality of stereotypes in the flesh, how does that help us inthe world where we have to deal with narcissists and psychopaths?
Modern literature tends to kink-shame them at best, or pretend they are not real, like invert unicorns.
This is a good thing, literature too can change, be morally transformed into something better.
The fable that is modern literature
“There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human character is set, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. The American or Kubrickian Orange is a fable; the British or world one is a novel.”
Anthony Burgess’ Introduction to the 1986 American edition of A Clockwork Orange
This explains, again, why once, in response to a request for <quote>fables<unquote> that were clockpunk in theme, and I sent them clockpunk fables about ratchet chitons, they said no, and were happy to say why: they were not suitable because they didn’t show this very transformation.
Now I was miffed, as I had spent some time actually researching what fables actually were before writing them… —but I had failed to read the real request — mainstream tales where people go tick-tock as expected by the marketplace of moral transformation. No creativity here, please, where you actual do, what they literally asked for, please. Please, no.
Anyway that’s what modern fiction’s meta-expectations are, stories which fabulize how people change or can change. It happily ignores the facts of life where people refuse or cannot change. It’s fiction by definition because it tells the enjoyable (world-building) lie that people change. There are cries of two-dimensionality and flatness in the main characters otherwise. It supplies the drug that is some sort of empathy meth or pop-psy heroin for isolated readers in the economy.
So I say literature and thus fiction needs to change, it’s a fable that cannot think about context. Thus it is market driven, by a market managed to be like this…. it supplies escapist pseudo-psychology, which is itself a reincarnation of even older devotee-personal-god salvation stories about transformation, a soteriological pharma to readers who have empathy, and who dream of agency, romantic or otherwise. Even all that identitarian diversity stuff (pronouns/ethnicity/migration) reeks of this indulgence.
This sets readers up to fail when they meet narcissists in the real world. There are claims reading novels help learn/build/navigate life as a moral person but if you are devoid of empathy… it won’t change you. GEDDIT.
Apparently the self-centred end of the personality spectrum is increasing as a proportion of the whole population, so some statistics say narcissists are thus approaching 10% of the population, given that psychopaths are a 10% subset of that 10%…. and given how well grandiose narcissists do in systems they set up to suit themselves…. (modern business, party rooms, anything with a hierarchy), modern fiction is pulling the wool over peoples eyes. It’s not helping.
Dreaming/reading [dreadming] about personal transformation, however personally edifying, will not change the world to be more caring, it will not even maintain the progress that has been made.
I don’t see any hint of this changing much at the moment, thus modern literature is itself that which it perhaps most fears, a fable.
This re-post post first appeared on substack in November 2023.