You have so perfectly and elegantly articulated this Gen Zers feelings of ennui. With the whole created world at my fingertips (accessing a massive democratized pool of art), I find so little. It seems as if people are so tired of the deafening “black and white” of political/online discourse that cultural output has just become mere beige sludge to pacify us and distract us. I want to believe!!! Love your work!!!!
Are those novels not being written, or just not published and publicized, because most literary agents and sub-assistant acquiring editors reading the slush pile are the 28-year-old NYC woman with ennui?
It freaks me out to think that most of or the average of editors for published & effectively marketed fiction are cosmo women in their 20s -- I mean, I wish I lived in NYC and was an editor when I was in my 20s, too, instead of being a waitress in Richmond -- but it's scary to think of literature being poured through that thin funnel. Hopefully it's out there, as Brandon already replied.
It definitely is, but one has to search for it outside the "prestige" channels. I judge a self-published book contest and we get amazing books every year. Forgive me if I put in a plug for one of them -- it definitely has high moral stakes w/o being simplistic! https://winningwriters.com/past-winning-entries/the-evil-inclination
I loved this article! I really appreciate that it breaks down why I hate so much modern fiction. I don’t think that there is anything wrong with moral values and a belief system of some kind. So often, those are the things that do give meaning to our lives. And people in the world move through the world with cause and effect.
It feels like these days the goal is to excuse anything anyone has ever done by removing the blame from them and placing it on some other abstract, faceless being or concept. Something that can have -ist or -ism at the back, thereby removing the human from human behavior. Bring back villains. Even if they’re sympathetic villains they can still be villains. They can still be wrong. They can still be evil. Killmonger was a sympathetic-ish villain. We understood his motivation and his thought process. Yet at no time was his desire for mass genocide made out to be right or ok. He was still a villain. In seeking to break down the complexity of people to a minute level, all they’ve really done is remove the complexity altogether. Because sometimes people do evil, awful things just because they want to. Full stop.
Grey morality has come to mean disappearance of morality, and since life imitates art imitates life, it’s having a deleterious effect of everyone and everything. It’s removed our humanity and made us out to be no better than animals, who move based on instinct and feeling. It’s removed the concept of will or agency, while claiming to return both. “Nothing means anything and we’re all just out here passively surviving and being buffeted around by external, invisible forces.” I can’t think of a worse way to live, and I’ve gotten pretty sick and tired of reading about it/watching it.
On first gentle perusal this reminded me of points discerned in playwriting class via Dr Magidson’s exploring tensions between objective and subjective realities - not only within the actor/character super-objectives but also within the conflicting/harmonizing perceptions in audience/readers…
One note — not a critique, but a riff on your take — is:
Perhaps this moral ‘vector’ has also been replaced by an attempt to represent and world-build with a moral ‘field’? Not a single vector, a river of morality flowing from one way to another, but a kind of complex disturbed ocean, with localized currents, tiny whirlpools, strange currents-inside of currents? That the attempt of representing the interiority of minor or evil characters could also emerge from a desire to articulate the totality of the moral field — not to be mistaken for moral ambiguity or relativism, but of a compassion..
I’m not saying that compassion can be mistaken for complacency or acceptance. Let’s say that out there, in a world-built fiction, are characters who _do_ evil. And they are comprehendable, when one follows their own narrative. Unacceptable, harmful, evil.. and understandable with real meaning, at some scale, perhaps because in this fictional world, they replicate the trauma they have experienced, they did have that “bad childhood”, but not just as information but as a deeply meaningful narrative.
Is there a literary device or practice that allows the articulation of a moral argument without making the character “minor” — aka limiting our view into the interiority of the character? That of course also doesn’t involve some kind of bourgeois “lesson in disguise”, as you call it? I’m not entirely sure why the absence of compassion would reduce the very real stake for a protagonist, or would somehow reduce the get impact of a consequence. Wouldn’t this too be a capitulation to the logics of attention; that the “narrative punishment” for an evil character is an anti-fame, or at least a lack of true attention?
I wonder what it would mean for a writer really map out that field, to swim in its field. Maybe the kind of flat ennui presentness you’ve so clearly pointed out is a kind of ‘moral helplessness’ or overwhelm emerging after witnessing the vector-that-has-become-a-field, the hypercomplex system that has shaped in neoliberal capitalist life: to skate above it, and to avoid it entirely. Another approach might be to find a tidepool and to study the micro-ecology that emerges. I wonder what it would take to see the whole system - any system - and map it out.
If I remember correctly, Bruno Latour has this take about networks somewhere, where he argues that one of the truest ways to understand a network is not to try to see it in its totality, an impossible task, but rather to enter inside of it and traverse it from node to node, like an ant. It’s through meandering a system as a tiny actor that a highly partial yet deeply informative view is obtained. Also, when systems occasionally fail or break down, he says, you get to see the connectedness the system for a moment, like lightning illuminating through the sky.
Maybe my riff on your call for moral worldbuilding and moral vector is to wonder what it would look like to see an illumination of a moral system, a moral whirlpool, like a stroke of lightning — not through constraining a sense of interiority but maybe by channeling it? seeing how it jumps from place to place, traverses a landscape, through ant-like exploration or lighting-like devastation?
I’m not sure what this means; I’m not (yet) a fiction writer. But thanks for your writing, and for sharing your thoughts.
“I see this most often in the treatment of religion in contemporary fiction where no one prays, no one has any sort of deference for the spiritual life except as practiced by artists (usually writers), and where no one believes anything.”
I think about this constantly. In particular, or at least relatedly, I think a lot about how if I were to try to relate in fiction something of the lives of certain members of my family as they themselves have lived them and made meaning of their subjective experiences, I am not sure that it would be legible to many readers except either as a depiction of mental illness or as a work of magical realism. If I wrote a story based on any number of familial anecdotes I grew up hearing, I would be assumed to be making choices about genre in a way that someone writing a story inspired by their grandfather’s childhood in Maine or whatever is not, even though our relationships to the events we would be using for inspiration is the same.
Interestingly the only time I can recall seeing an author think about this out loud, so to speak (not that I’ve gone looking), is the YA author Justine Larbaliester, answering a question about why a certain character’s Christian faith was so important to her - she said that as an Australian writing a novel set in a country as religious as the US, it seemed dishonest not to include any religious characters! I don’t know that I agree with her assessment literally (especially given that her novel was set in NYC), but it was a fascinating cultural moment for me. (Now I’m wondering if some of what you talk about here has to do with what adults get out of reading YA - not a dig, I’m an occasional YA-enjoying adult myself, and on reflection I do think that part of what I tend to enjoy about it is that whatever else you could say about it, you can pretty much count on it to produce books that act like the stuff that happens in them matters a lot, even if you don’t have a taste for the speculative elements that might accompany some other genres more consistently interested in moral stakes.)
So much to think about here — everyone should read this and get what they get from it. In the world I’m building and deleting every day, I am the (astoundingly complex and sympathetic) protagonist trying to write a book about far right revisions of the American narrative — the second chapter is supposedly going to be all about this world-building project in the hands of the far right & white supremacists — there’s a lot here to help me think more deeply about this topic.
Here are some unedited thoughts I am building from Brandon’s post, starting with this premise about the false narrative of white supremacy: sustaining white supremacy relies on the mythologizing of history and the creation of definite villains (liberals, immigrants, politicians, Hollywood, big media, etc.) with the goal of destroying the “in group” (mainly Anglo men).
— perhaps the unfortunate growing success of the far right’s false narrative is related to their willingness to make sure there is a villain; that there be people out there in the dark margins of the visible narrative willing to do the worst; and that the authors (far right propagandists) very carefully construct and highlight what Brandon calls “organizing schemas to give it all any meaning.”
If much of our modern storytelling lacks those kinds of moral or value-oriented schemas, and the far right is providing them even though they are built on false premises, is this part of their success in radicalizing, converting, or fooling people?
If so, how can we alert those potential converts to the fact that these narrative structures are conning them?
What i love about D.H. Lawrence writing is he shares his lived experiences for example as a young man in Egypt and how he interacted with Coptic life and personalities. A learning experience for me.
Thank you so much for this - an absolutely extraordinary and moving talk. There is a beautiful interview that you might enjoy that I think reflects the nature of what you are saying and links it to ‘show not tell’ which in itself can be a way not to truly engage with the nature of the world https://orionmagazine.org/2019/11/ghosh/
Thank you just so much again - I feel as if my awareness has changed as a result of your wonderful piece.
Love this. All of it. But what you say here about raising the stakes, morally, in the world we're in, is particularly crucial.
Examining the stakes of the characters is so important in Austen discussions, as you show here. It requires bravery and risk on the part of the writer.
But also on the part of the publisher: Could this trend toward vacuous moral ambiguity in contemporary fiction reflect forces in publishing more than in writing, as publishing becomes more risk-averse.
And how much in all this is down to privilege, pure and simple. Maybe writers and readers from traditionally marginalized groups will - perhaps like Austen writing as a somewhat-disenfranchised young person in a harsh world - possess greater insight on this need to break through moral ambiguity, to land on clarity, to build moral worlds containing those high stakes and also the evil and also the joy contained in and reflecting our own harsh world.
Yes! Novelists should give their characters beliefs. Some characters/people do bad things and we can never really understand why and it's not just OK, but right, to judge the really bad things they do. Fictional worlds are not the real world. And now I'm off to do some moral world-building ... !
This has strong Brecht and Benjamin vibes. Brechts Five difficulties to anyone speaking the truth today nails exactly that as does Benjamins essay on melancholy. There is fiction that contains some truths but those truths are widely insignificant
You have so perfectly and elegantly articulated this Gen Zers feelings of ennui. With the whole created world at my fingertips (accessing a massive democratized pool of art), I find so little. It seems as if people are so tired of the deafening “black and white” of political/online discourse that cultural output has just become mere beige sludge to pacify us and distract us. I want to believe!!! Love your work!!!!
Yes, I also want to believe! 🙏😊
Are those novels not being written, or just not published and publicized, because most literary agents and sub-assistant acquiring editors reading the slush pile are the 28-year-old NYC woman with ennui?
Well, I am sure they are being written. And probably even published. The books of my dreams are out there, I just know it! I have to look harder.
But also, idk, publishing is so cyclical and it can feel like fate when it's actually just marketing, so maybe both things are true, lol.
It freaks me out to think that most of or the average of editors for published & effectively marketed fiction are cosmo women in their 20s -- I mean, I wish I lived in NYC and was an editor when I was in my 20s, too, instead of being a waitress in Richmond -- but it's scary to think of literature being poured through that thin funnel. Hopefully it's out there, as Brandon already replied.
It definitely is, but one has to search for it outside the "prestige" channels. I judge a self-published book contest and we get amazing books every year. Forgive me if I put in a plug for one of them -- it definitely has high moral stakes w/o being simplistic! https://winningwriters.com/past-winning-entries/the-evil-inclination
I loved this article! I really appreciate that it breaks down why I hate so much modern fiction. I don’t think that there is anything wrong with moral values and a belief system of some kind. So often, those are the things that do give meaning to our lives. And people in the world move through the world with cause and effect.
It feels like these days the goal is to excuse anything anyone has ever done by removing the blame from them and placing it on some other abstract, faceless being or concept. Something that can have -ist or -ism at the back, thereby removing the human from human behavior. Bring back villains. Even if they’re sympathetic villains they can still be villains. They can still be wrong. They can still be evil. Killmonger was a sympathetic-ish villain. We understood his motivation and his thought process. Yet at no time was his desire for mass genocide made out to be right or ok. He was still a villain. In seeking to break down the complexity of people to a minute level, all they’ve really done is remove the complexity altogether. Because sometimes people do evil, awful things just because they want to. Full stop.
Grey morality has come to mean disappearance of morality, and since life imitates art imitates life, it’s having a deleterious effect of everyone and everything. It’s removed our humanity and made us out to be no better than animals, who move based on instinct and feeling. It’s removed the concept of will or agency, while claiming to return both. “Nothing means anything and we’re all just out here passively surviving and being buffeted around by external, invisible forces.” I can’t think of a worse way to live, and I’ve gotten pretty sick and tired of reading about it/watching it.
On first gentle perusal this reminded me of points discerned in playwriting class via Dr Magidson’s exploring tensions between objective and subjective realities - not only within the actor/character super-objectives but also within the conflicting/harmonizing perceptions in audience/readers…
This was an incredible piece.
One note — not a critique, but a riff on your take — is:
Perhaps this moral ‘vector’ has also been replaced by an attempt to represent and world-build with a moral ‘field’? Not a single vector, a river of morality flowing from one way to another, but a kind of complex disturbed ocean, with localized currents, tiny whirlpools, strange currents-inside of currents? That the attempt of representing the interiority of minor or evil characters could also emerge from a desire to articulate the totality of the moral field — not to be mistaken for moral ambiguity or relativism, but of a compassion..
I’m not saying that compassion can be mistaken for complacency or acceptance. Let’s say that out there, in a world-built fiction, are characters who _do_ evil. And they are comprehendable, when one follows their own narrative. Unacceptable, harmful, evil.. and understandable with real meaning, at some scale, perhaps because in this fictional world, they replicate the trauma they have experienced, they did have that “bad childhood”, but not just as information but as a deeply meaningful narrative.
Is there a literary device or practice that allows the articulation of a moral argument without making the character “minor” — aka limiting our view into the interiority of the character? That of course also doesn’t involve some kind of bourgeois “lesson in disguise”, as you call it? I’m not entirely sure why the absence of compassion would reduce the very real stake for a protagonist, or would somehow reduce the get impact of a consequence. Wouldn’t this too be a capitulation to the logics of attention; that the “narrative punishment” for an evil character is an anti-fame, or at least a lack of true attention?
I wonder what it would mean for a writer really map out that field, to swim in its field. Maybe the kind of flat ennui presentness you’ve so clearly pointed out is a kind of ‘moral helplessness’ or overwhelm emerging after witnessing the vector-that-has-become-a-field, the hypercomplex system that has shaped in neoliberal capitalist life: to skate above it, and to avoid it entirely. Another approach might be to find a tidepool and to study the micro-ecology that emerges. I wonder what it would take to see the whole system - any system - and map it out.
If I remember correctly, Bruno Latour has this take about networks somewhere, where he argues that one of the truest ways to understand a network is not to try to see it in its totality, an impossible task, but rather to enter inside of it and traverse it from node to node, like an ant. It’s through meandering a system as a tiny actor that a highly partial yet deeply informative view is obtained. Also, when systems occasionally fail or break down, he says, you get to see the connectedness the system for a moment, like lightning illuminating through the sky.
Maybe my riff on your call for moral worldbuilding and moral vector is to wonder what it would look like to see an illumination of a moral system, a moral whirlpool, like a stroke of lightning — not through constraining a sense of interiority but maybe by channeling it? seeing how it jumps from place to place, traverses a landscape, through ant-like exploration or lighting-like devastation?
I’m not sure what this means; I’m not (yet) a fiction writer. But thanks for your writing, and for sharing your thoughts.
This piece banged, loved reading it and thinking about the modern artistic mood.
This makes me think of many books I love, Mystery and Manners, The People of the Lie, and especially A Passage to India.
A small part of this (fascinating) piece, but—
“I see this most often in the treatment of religion in contemporary fiction where no one prays, no one has any sort of deference for the spiritual life except as practiced by artists (usually writers), and where no one believes anything.”
I think about this constantly. In particular, or at least relatedly, I think a lot about how if I were to try to relate in fiction something of the lives of certain members of my family as they themselves have lived them and made meaning of their subjective experiences, I am not sure that it would be legible to many readers except either as a depiction of mental illness or as a work of magical realism. If I wrote a story based on any number of familial anecdotes I grew up hearing, I would be assumed to be making choices about genre in a way that someone writing a story inspired by their grandfather’s childhood in Maine or whatever is not, even though our relationships to the events we would be using for inspiration is the same.
Interestingly the only time I can recall seeing an author think about this out loud, so to speak (not that I’ve gone looking), is the YA author Justine Larbaliester, answering a question about why a certain character’s Christian faith was so important to her - she said that as an Australian writing a novel set in a country as religious as the US, it seemed dishonest not to include any religious characters! I don’t know that I agree with her assessment literally (especially given that her novel was set in NYC), but it was a fascinating cultural moment for me. (Now I’m wondering if some of what you talk about here has to do with what adults get out of reading YA - not a dig, I’m an occasional YA-enjoying adult myself, and on reflection I do think that part of what I tend to enjoy about it is that whatever else you could say about it, you can pretty much count on it to produce books that act like the stuff that happens in them matters a lot, even if you don’t have a taste for the speculative elements that might accompany some other genres more consistently interested in moral stakes.)
So much to think about here — everyone should read this and get what they get from it. In the world I’m building and deleting every day, I am the (astoundingly complex and sympathetic) protagonist trying to write a book about far right revisions of the American narrative — the second chapter is supposedly going to be all about this world-building project in the hands of the far right & white supremacists — there’s a lot here to help me think more deeply about this topic.
Here are some unedited thoughts I am building from Brandon’s post, starting with this premise about the false narrative of white supremacy: sustaining white supremacy relies on the mythologizing of history and the creation of definite villains (liberals, immigrants, politicians, Hollywood, big media, etc.) with the goal of destroying the “in group” (mainly Anglo men).
— perhaps the unfortunate growing success of the far right’s false narrative is related to their willingness to make sure there is a villain; that there be people out there in the dark margins of the visible narrative willing to do the worst; and that the authors (far right propagandists) very carefully construct and highlight what Brandon calls “organizing schemas to give it all any meaning.”
If much of our modern storytelling lacks those kinds of moral or value-oriented schemas, and the far right is providing them even though they are built on false premises, is this part of their success in radicalizing, converting, or fooling people?
If so, how can we alert those potential converts to the fact that these narrative structures are conning them?
What i love about D.H. Lawrence writing is he shares his lived experiences for example as a young man in Egypt and how he interacted with Coptic life and personalities. A learning experience for me.
I’ve been worrying about a character in my new book being too villainous. A good time to study this essay/talk, & to think.
Thank you so much for this - an absolutely extraordinary and moving talk. There is a beautiful interview that you might enjoy that I think reflects the nature of what you are saying and links it to ‘show not tell’ which in itself can be a way not to truly engage with the nature of the world https://orionmagazine.org/2019/11/ghosh/
Thank you just so much again - I feel as if my awareness has changed as a result of your wonderful piece.
Love this. All of it. But what you say here about raising the stakes, morally, in the world we're in, is particularly crucial.
Examining the stakes of the characters is so important in Austen discussions, as you show here. It requires bravery and risk on the part of the writer.
But also on the part of the publisher: Could this trend toward vacuous moral ambiguity in contemporary fiction reflect forces in publishing more than in writing, as publishing becomes more risk-averse.
And how much in all this is down to privilege, pure and simple. Maybe writers and readers from traditionally marginalized groups will - perhaps like Austen writing as a somewhat-disenfranchised young person in a harsh world - possess greater insight on this need to break through moral ambiguity, to land on clarity, to build moral worlds containing those high stakes and also the evil and also the joy contained in and reflecting our own harsh world.
Yes! Novelists should give their characters beliefs. Some characters/people do bad things and we can never really understand why and it's not just OK, but right, to judge the really bad things they do. Fictional worlds are not the real world. And now I'm off to do some moral world-building ... !
Not the dad who abandoned them to take up breakdancing. 😭
This has strong Brecht and Benjamin vibes. Brechts Five difficulties to anyone speaking the truth today nails exactly that as does Benjamins essay on melancholy. There is fiction that contains some truths but those truths are widely insignificant