Creative writing

I launched my literary magazine last week. Here it is! My almost relative just made us some lovely art so it looks higher grade now. I hope you will read some of the writing. I am against party reports so I will say nothing about the launch except that it was very crowded and very nice and I almost froze to death.

A very fashionable writer just published a longform essay about Émile Zola in a very fashionable literary magazine. The actual dissection of Zola’s canon, a cycle called Les Rougon-Macquart, is the most interesting aspect of the essay, even if you disagree with some of his conclusions. But it feels secondary in the piece to his diagnosis of the contemporary novel, an evergreen and endlessly recyclable source of complaint for a few thousand words. This diagnosis is familiar. The contemporary realist novel has become debilitatingly embroiled in identitarianism. Novelists cannot imagine their way out of the structures by which they feel oppressed or beaten down. If they could think more creatively, their writing would be less structurally conformist. It would cease to replicate the dreary conditions under which we live.

There is obviously some truth to this. A lot of novels do engage in an anxiety-driven and ultimately nihilistic feedback loop, which is incapable of imagining a better or more interesting world. Intimate relationships flounder. Work is a miserable and alienating maze that will crush you. The family is a site of misery and trauma. “Why is mutiny not engaged more often as a fictional possibility, especially in new works of purportedly feminist literature?” wonders Kameel Mir, in an essay about work I have already linked to at once before on this newsletter. In another essay I am constantly linking, Noor Qasim describes a slough of “masochistic novels” in which “desire is a sort of black hole, which by its nature, must always suck and always swallow.” Our scripts to describe our experiences are stilted and unimaginative, but the scripts by which we actually chart experiences are also. The problem runs deeper. “Eroticism,” writes Becca Rothfeld in a very beautiful essay about frenetic and life-transforming sexual desire, “occurs only when someone rewrites us so completely that she rewrites even the quality and content of our appetites, and only when this radical rewriting is reciprocal.” Short of this kind of utopianism, what we are left with is simply rote performance at best; life-denying cruelty at worst.

This is not exactly the kind of visionary thinking the Zola essay purports is lacking. Above all, it is a critique of the very notion of predetermined class structures and that they are capable of shaping our lives. For many contemporary novelists, it claims,“The effort of imagining a person sufficiently free to exercise agency within a traditional plot is beyond their powers to such an extent that they’ve resorted to dramatising the act of imagination itself.” This ideological superstructure works as a damper. Instead of going about their lives, the characters in contemporary novels sit around and think about their oppression. In a heterodox reading of Rachel Cusk, the essay describes the narrator of her Outline trilogy as literally erased from the narrative because she feels so strongly “that her life has been overdetermined by her gender.” Cusk, who writes autofiction, described the absence in the novels as a result of her experience of “creative death.” She is trying to literalize the divergence between reader and narrator in the mode of Karl Ove Knausgaard, who may also be said to suffer from overdetermination of his identity although he is not mentioned in the essay for obvious reasons.

In other words, the crux of this critique of the “naturalist” novel is not really that it is overly unimaginative but more that it is overly moralistic. And again, it is true that much contemporary fiction and the lineage it traces is littered with a kind of intense shame and self-loathing and priggishness, a fabric of repression and bourgeois deprecation. Domesticity, the explorations of the ego, are understood to be minor concerns, the subject of a minor literature. Novelists retrace these well-trodden grooves almost apologetically, at once defensive and dismissive of the emotional life they evoke.

Is this moralism? There is another, richer tradition of moralism, characterized by writers such as Natalia Ginzburg, one of the most clear-eyed and undersung writers of the 20th century, or by that ultimate utopian, Leo Tolstoy. Morality, for these writers, is not a small concern. It is not restricted to interpersonal behavior or the willfulness of the id or reflections on how a person should be, although all of those come up. Instead, it is precisely a structural scaffolding for fiction to make it a ladder for articulating the world. The novel is not a space of escapism or individualism or romanticism for these writers nor is it a bleak and distorted mirror for our own worst tendencies. Instead it is a form of exploration. Less how a person should be and more how a world should be, a cosmic reframing of the role of person.

There’s a famous fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen called “The Snow Queen” that I think about a lot when I read this kind of criticism (and in general). In it, the Devil makes a magic mirror which magnifies all the ugly qualities of a person and makes them look ridiculous and contemptible. The mirror drops and shatters and bits of it fall all over the world including into a little boy’s eye. He can only see ugliness. He reviles all his nearest and dearest.

The story is a metaphor for Christianity. In the end, he is saved by the purity and prayers of his sister whose wholesome tears can wash away the glass. But from a different perspective, it is a vehicle for enlightenment, for understanding what our world often actually looks like, its darkness, its ugliness, the seamy underside of history that is described as a march of progress and looks more like a horror story. Finding faith and beauty and resilience and a purpose for fiction in all of this is a moral project. A kind of novel they should bring back if anyone wants to undertake writing one.