Goku vs Jesus: ideology in fiction

Hello friends—

In the fall, I am teaching a class on the ideological basis of fiction. The idea for the class began in the spring, when I taught a fiction workshop and brought in an essay by Georg Lukács titled, “The Intellectual Physiognomy of Characterization.” In the essay, Lukács is speaking about the importance of ideology or worldview (weltanschauung) in characterization. For Lukács, to deprive a character of the capacity for thoughts or to deprive a character of a scheme through which they make sense of their experience is to fail at the task of characterizing them in the first place. He writes of ideology, “Ideology is the highest form of consciousness; ignoring it, a writer eliminates what is most important in his delineation of a character.” When I brought this essay into my workshop, there were some bristles at the word ideology. I had forgotten that for generations, American writers had been trained to be deeply allergic to the notion of ideology in art. The very idea that their stories, novels, or films might contain ideological content sends the average North American running for fainting couches, dark rooms, and the cold compress of humanist liberalism (itself an ideology).

There is an idea that work which is ideological is some form of propaganda. Sloganeering. Bad art. I believed this myself for a long time. What I don’t understand is how people who are trained in the process and method of close reading and textual analysis—my hopeful goal for all of my students—can also somehow believe that the work they generate does not have an ideological basis. Why else are we bent over our table reading closely, making connections between the patterns of prose on the page and the deeper themes of the story if not to search for the largest pattern of all: what does this work tell us about the nature of experience? That what is an extension of an ideology. Anyway, my students didn’t like that word and we had a discussion about “art for art’s sake,” and I told them that that was an ideology. That all fiction has at bottom a worldview because we are humans and all humans have worldviews. And that they should consider this when writing their characters—what is their character’s worldview, their outlook—which was the point of the Lukács assignment.

But as we moved on to the other part of class, when we discuss the submissions and workshop them, I couldn’t shake the feeling that what I had wanted to explain to the students was that their work often feels extremely arbitrary because their characters and narrators and they themselves have abandoned the work of trying to integrate the events of their stories into experience and part of this is because they have lost the notion that their characters have outlooks, worldviews, attitudes. Rather, they have retreated into a kind of default disaffected “personality” from which issue recognizable observations that fail to cohere into a meaningful whole. That is why there are no more characters in contemporary literary fiction. Or at least, so few. Ideology, I wanted to tell them, is the glue that holds those observations together. Forget the social totality, we are facing the birth of a literature in which even the individual totality of a personality has utterly disintegrated.

By the end of the semester, I had come to the conclusion that I wanted to teach a class on the ideological basis and texture and content of fiction. Rather than training them to merely read closely and observe formal patterns in the prose or to do simple thematic readings, I would encourage them to make linkages between those formal patterns and themes and the worldviews of the characters in the storyworld and the worldview of the storyworld itself and then hopefully of the author. I would try to make ideology not such a scary word to them, so that they might begin to write thoughts again and make meaningful attempts at characterization beyond simple physicality.

I recently made a post on Substack Notes about this class I am teaching in the fall, and some people replied that sure, all fiction might have an ideological basis, but what matters is if the author pushes against their ideology because if they don’t, it’s mere propaganda. I mean. Okay. Some other people also raised the propaganda point. Others said that it doesn’t matter if the ideology doesn’t connect to ideology in the real world, who cares. Etc. Respectfully, like, what?

Even leaving aside the great realists of the 19^th Century or the Romantics or the social realism of the 20^th century, you still run into, well, the modernists, the post-modernists, the post-postmodernists, Bernhard, Sebald and their descendants, the magical realism of Europe and Latin America, and, like, millennial fiction. Like, I recently read three novels by three millennial-ish writers, and despite the great formal variety and the differences in tone, subject matter, genre, and content, what united them was a common ideological underpinning for the millennial generation. All of the novels ended in a kind of betrayal which itself affirmed what often preoccupies the minds and hearts of my fellow millennials and near-millennials, that the game is rigged, human connection is ultimately a game of betrayal, and in the end, it is better to stab in the back than be stabbed in the back. In fact, I recently read a book to write a review, and despite the book’s general air of sentimentality and insistence on the beauty in the “mundane,” it too possessed this cynical millennial worldview.

Now, I am not here to convince you to write slogans. I am not here to convince you to write a pamphlet. I’m not even here to convince you to wash your face. I have no desire whatsoever to make you do anything in your art. You can do what you want. But I would like to raise the question of what would happen if you considered what your characters believe about the world and their place in it? What do they believe period? What is the relationship between those organizing beliefs and the formal choices of your story? Do your characters argue with their friends over ideas? You might think, only elites argue with their friends over ideas. But that’s not true.

My most passionate, intensely ideological arguments occurred when I was maybe ten or eleven years old, arguing about who could win between Goku, from Dragon Ball Z, and Jesus. Some of the most amazing philosophical minds of our time are not in lecture halls or writing books. No, they are arguing about powerscaling in comment sections under YouTube videos about the Jujuitsu Kaisen manga series, Sukuna vs Gojo vs Megumi vs Yuji. Or they’re debating who wins between Gandalf and Dumbledore. Or they’re making Supreme Court cases for litigating who is superior among Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, and Rafael Nadal. These are ideological debates. And they are THRILLING.

An example from my own life is that the closest I have come to an argument with a particular friend is over whether or not Gohan, at the time he beat Cell, at the end of the Cell Saga in Dragon Ball Z, was the strongest character the series had ever seen, stronger even than Goku. My friend’s face got so RED. We had to take a break. At one point, I broke out Northrop Frye’s interpretation of William Blake and the great chain of being to make a case for Goku as a messianic figure, and things got HEATED. That was two years ago. I was 34.

Lukács makes this point in “The Intellectual Physiognomy,” basically saying that what makes compelling characterization is dramatizing the collision of different worldviews, allowing characters to demonstrate their beliefs through the full force of their lives. That when they argue about things, the arguments arrange to tell us something about this person’s particular outlook and worldview because their arguments stem from the direct material of their lives.

Of course my friend doesn’t see Goku as a messianic figure and I do. I grew up Baptist. He grew up Chinese-American in New Jersey. He had a very different interpretation of Goku’s then most powerful attack, the Spirit Bomb. The Spirit Bomb is an attack that draws energy from everything in creation, gathering it up into one huge blast that will destroy your foe. But it requires a willful surrender of one’s energy and lifeforce to the collective. You can’t just suck the energy out. My friend viewed it as a statement on the collective spirit of all living things. For me, it was Jesus on the cross, all of our hands thrown up in worship, willing him to redeem us all. There are many reasons I think that Goku is Jesus, or at least, he was Jesus through the completion of the Cell Saga, when Dragon Ball Z kind of turns into a different thing and the metaphor gets strained, but all of those reasons have much to do with my having grown up in a Baptist household in the Deep South. Whenever I encounter a messianic figure in literature, cinema, manga, anime, whatever, I think of Jesus. I am atheist, to be clear, but Jesus is the key signifier of my life. The thing through which I decode all the deep mysteries and integrate them into my worldview. I have an essentially messianic outlook, an apocalyptic outlook, as Frye would call it.

Why am I talking about Goku? He isn’t even my favorite character. That’s Gohan. My original AOL screenname when I was 12 was…blackgohan12, because…well, it’s obvious, anyway. My point is that ideology isn’t just “socialism” or “communism” or “bourgeois” or whatever. Ideology is outlook. It’s the organizing scheme of your life. It puts things into relation. Without that, what you have is a series of arbitrary phenomena.

Now, I am in agreement with what some of the people on Substack said. It is true that bad writing often results from people writing with some mission in mind. Some goal from the outset to feed the orphans or free the whales. But that is not an issue of ideology. That is an issue of bad writing. It directly contravenes Lukács’s directive to grant your characters ideology, which must be alive, responsive, dialectical.

Often, what people take as the overbearing presence of ideology in a work is in fact the overbearing presence of theme in a work. Writers who work from theme often do so with good intentions. Love in their hearts, as D.H. Lawrence warns us in “Morality and the Novel,” is a very dangerous thing for a writer. It prevents you from making the crucial choice, in much the same way that theme prevents you from making the crucial choices that might go against your theme or take you out and away from the narrow strip of possibilities embodied in your chosen theme.

It is also the case that writers sometimes pick inappropriate terms to express the ideologies of their characters. In the case of the playground arguments I had when I was ten with my friends over whether Goku was stronger than Jesus—if you had scripted us arguing about Jung and virtues of Eastern Philosophy, that would have been insane. Also, if you had made it the case that I was a wild, loose pagan who flaunted his anime action figure and tried to tear down old gods, then that would have also been equally insane. But no, it is entirely believable that among a group of kids, all Baptist, all of whom are enthralled by Dragon Ball Z, an argument might break out over who was stronger between Jesus and Goku, a Jesus-flavored character. And that the argument might end in the revelation that, oh, in fact Goku is a kind of Jesus, a resolution to this tension. There, you have an argument over ideology whose terms suit the people having it. And it feels believable. Natural. An extension of the lived reality of the people involved.

Furthermore, the argument over Goku vs Jesus serves as a byword for the unfolding reality of globalization and new forms of mass media (i.e. cable television channels, CartoonNetwork, and Toonami, specifically) and their effect(s) on the social and religious formation of children in America at that particular time. If I had told you that we were arguing about globalism in those precise terms, as children in a playground in Prattville, Alabama, you would be rightfully skeptical, no? But we were enacting ideological debate that itself was an aspect of larger ideological debates over the changing reality of the world we lived in. We were interpreting those broader social changes through the terms we had access to: Goku vs Jesus. What makes the situation rich for interpretation is that it becomes possible to draw connections between what we said and believed and our material and spiritual conditions. What we argued said something about how we saw the world and our experiences.

That is what I want to read in fiction. I want to be able to understand who these people are and how they live. I want to be able to arrange their actions and words and thoughts and come to some understanding of who they are, if only an ephemeral one (it is always ephemeral). Fiction that does not permit this is, well, not un-ideological. It is vague. And muddy. Incoherent. Arbitrary.

Inattention to how your character makes sense of themselves and their world does not make it art for art’s sake. It makes it bad writing. In the same way that writing from a theme or writing with an overly pronounced goal is bad writing. Both cases obliterate the meaningful relationships between characters and the world they live in and fail to render onto the reader a sense of how that character places themselves in their world. It’s bad writing because it effaces our understanding of the character’s self-concept.

So I am going to teach a class where I walk my students through the process of noticing the ideological basis and content of various novels. We will start with the 19^th century realists and naturalists and then take on Kafka. Then the Catholic writers. Then Sebald and Bernhard. Then we will do dystopias: Margaret Atwood and Lois Lowry. Then we will do Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson. Then the novels of racial satire of Paul Beatty and Percival Everett. Then we will do Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh.

This progression makes sense if you think of it as beginning with what most people think of as ideological fiction (the novels of the 19^th century) and terminating with what people think of as being “art for art’s sake” and what Lukács calls “bourgeois decadence.” It’s my hope that the class makes students less anxious about ideology, which is simply…an outlook. A worldview. An understanding of one’s relationship to the world. And in that, it’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s the whole reason we write, after all.

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