In an essay for Lit Hub, A. Natasha Joukovsky says that writers aren’t obligated to resolve the world’s woes with their fiction, but in fact are free to be quite useless.
Joukovsky responds to an essay suggesting that novels are “useful” only to the extent they inspire social change and so authors are obligated to adhere to historical accuracy and progressive politics. “Not only do writers of fiction bear no such albatross, but the misplaced anxiety that they do imposes undue artistic limits on authors that displace and undermine the actual responsibilities novelists do have: aesthetically to beauty, and ethically to truth,” Joukovsky says.
Hear, hear.
Joukovsky distinguishes novelistic truth from fact. In contrast to the essay writer – who suggests that contemporary novels must acknowledge the COVID-19 pandemic or be dismissed as alt-history – Joukovsky says a novel can capture emotional truth without reflecting literal reality and yet remain fiction. “Insofar as a contemporary novel begins to diverge from reality, it becomes less realistic, but not any more or less fictive,” Joukovsky writes. “It is not novelists who owe a responsibility to history then, but journalists and historians and citizens in their real-world capacities.” A responsibility to fact in the real world does not translate to an author’s obligation to their fiction.
“Why would any novelist, let alone the lion’s share of contemporary writers, want to foist such patently unwarranted restrictions onto their art?” Joukovsky asks. She suggests the culprits are genuine sentiment, guilt, and sheer survival in the current literary environment.
A writer may feel genuinely concerned about climate change, but suggesting that all nature poetry must address it is ridiculous, Joukovsky writes. “If writers of fiction could solve the problem of climate change, I can promise you that the problem would already be solved,” she says. “Literature’s potential for influence is not derived from a moral purity test—it is derived from aesthetic success.” In other words, novels can influence social change only if they are artistically successful, not the other way around.
Writers may also turn to social topics out of guilt, a sense that their story must be useful to have merit. In this light, writing becomes a craft – a tool of labor – rather than art, a snobbish luxury. “Unfortunately, novels crafted to avoid historico-political guilt—and, increasingly, accusation—also tend to be even less aesthetically successful than those springing from genuine feeling alone,” Joukovsky says. “When the raison d’être of a novel is to signal the author’s real-world virtue, this cannot help but become visible to its readers.”
With publishing now more competitive than ever, writers may feel an ever greater incentive to write something “useful” to catch the attention of agents, publishers, and readers. “Nothing ignites passionate support like the nexus of moral belief and personal benefit,” Joukovsky writes. “The logic here often rests on another failure of nuance though, conflating the privilege of writing with privileged identities, élite talent with entrenched power, to promote progressive fiction as some kind of real-world victory for marginalized people when it’s not.”
Great writing is not egalitarian, Joukovsky says, but akin to an elite sport. “While there are certain fundamentals that can be taught and learned, effort alone won’t turn you into Toni Morrison any more than it will make you Steph Curry,” she says. “Great novelists also have a gift, harder to define but every bit as unteachable as height, and perhaps even rarer.”
Joukovsky offers some tips for writing aesthetic fiction:
- Study the great novels you desire to imitate; a classroom may be helpful, but is certainly not required.
- Steal a little bit from everyone and you’ll never be a plagiarist.
- Traditional novels are often the most original.
- Twitter can be helpful in marketing a book, but it is usually not helpful in writing one.
