Didactic Fiction is Good, Actually
The center cannot hold...
Opinions are like poorly written books, everyone’s got one in them — often you’ll find that you have both! Or perhaps always. Read on to see David’s latest political screed on our inability to escape the political weeds.
Enjoy!
Didactic Fiction is Good, Actually
As children of modernity, we’re all raised with our mother’s milk on a steady faith that the world is neatly divided between massive economic, cultural, and political systems, which interact with one another at the output level (e.g. the stock market crashed, thus a political policy change will be called for in response). This is in opposition to Perlman’s Reproduction of Daily Life model which I’ve spoken on before, that supposes that all aspects of our daily habits uniformly construct the society we live in. It is a distinction of viewing society as a game one participates in, something external, rather than something one simply is.
I suspect the dominance of this “society of systems” perspective is largely due to the international market economy’s total dominance and integration into every major tribe of the earth. A Powhatan tribesman meeting an English colonist in the early 17th century would instantly recognize the many cultural assumptions in regards to gender, labor value, and spirituality that distinguished them, and the outcomes that necessarily arose from them, in a way that moderns are unable to distinguish themselves from one another.
Within the period of dominance of this “society of systems” perspective, there is a clear trend of fiction being labeled “politically didactic” as a kind of insult, and an accompanying elevation of realism in high prestige art. This phrasing came to prominence in the 20th century as the term didactic came to also be used as a criticism. The implication of this being that there is something inherently embarrassing about a clearly revealed worldview coming through in a cultural product. Points of comparison would be something like Dante’s Divine Comedy or even the later works of William Shakespeare (replete with ghosts, supernatural visions, and fairies), compared to Hemingway or anyone more modern that a professor of literature would confidently assign their class today. The former, grounded in a fearless moral certitude, the latter complex latticeworks of factual ambiguity and unstated character preferences.
To be clear, I am not saying that one form is inherently superior. Ambiguity and certitude can both be carefully crafted postures for a prose style to emphasize in order to produce a unique kind of story. What I would claim as a negative effect is being fearful of presenting moral certitude out of a false belief that doing so would be “reactionary” or a more primitive instantiation of the art form.
In all fairness to this modern trend, there is a place for criticism of works that are supposed to entertain but which instead become is overburdened with instructive, factual, or otherwise educational information. If overdone, this prioritization on certitude will grind the flow of storytelling to a halt. At its worst, this results in the “everyone I don't like is a child molester” fiction, or something akin to the works of Ayn Rand.
But very few works are literally didactic. What I am suggesting we reframe this question to is one of whether any given work has a clear moral epistemology or not.
Crude didacticism, like fanfiction, is like a flame to the moth-like brains of amateur writers. Unpracticed writers who are excited by ideas rush out to work in a frenzy and produce works that are fundamentally led astray by their attempt to convey an argument, writing craft be damned (or more often, ignored). Let us separate this branch of concern into a legitimate, but unique, category of something simply not being done well.
What I am specifically talking about here is whether works of equal craftsmanship are superior or inferior if one has a clear moral code which it is referencing.
A Tiny God’s Duty
Perhaps you can evade this dilemma, as I've seen some attempt, by simply adopting an old moral framework (90s liberalism should do nicely), or obscuring yourself in a definition — a callback to some sort of obscure new term that implies cultural perennialism of “youth” or “energy” as I see some of my contemporaries attempt with terms like “New Wave”; but I find something particularly pathetic and non-artistic in hiding behind the skirt of an abandoned goddess; in professing, however obliquely (or simply through intentional omission), that YOU are somehow the last acolyte of Bill Clinton and 2016 era Barack Obama (who the Obama of today would repudiate), or a member of some lost atavistic cult of true culture that was simultaneously embodied, but not represented by, every great artist of the past.
This is simply hiding in the shadows, and it is unbecoming of a god.
And a tiny god you are. To the small world of your fiction, whatever form it may take, you set the boundaries. This is both physical in the sense of the effects of gravity, which only you have the authority to inflict upon your characters and world, and metaphysically in the kind of moral chains of cause and effect you craft as the reality of that world.
Lest you make one of Tolkein’s “abortive little worlds”, you can only grant fiction verisimilitude by creating a world that you at some level believe in, that follows the rules you perceive as true, or an intentional inversion of those you see as true in the case of fantasy or science fiction. Thus, to every tiny god a miniscule tablet on which to write their commandments by which their world works.
This is not to say those commandments must be public. Tolkien, for example, does not open any of his books with a declaration on the nature of evil. Instead he let the work of fiction produce, through it’s unified presentation of a coherent reality, a stark argument for a very complex topic.
Art as Truth: Your Tribe’s Art, Your Tribe’s Truth
From the Reproduction of Daily Life perspective it is not what you profess, but what you believe and enact which is your morality.
The etymology of ‘culture’ itself is derived from perfect passive participle of colō (“till, cultivate, to grow, worship”), the same root as the much maligned term ‘cult’. The implication is again that culture is growing towards a specific goodness, an ideal endpoint. This kind of objective demands the decisiveness of a moral framework, to believe otherwise would be to pretend that art is a “marketplace of ideas” in the political sense, in which political tribes cross freely, which is manifestly not the case.
Several artists with different moralities are more akin to oxen pulling a cart in different directions, or perhaps several monkeys flinging feces in different directions, if you’ll allow an overabundance of animal metaphors on my part.
There is no satanist to Catholic art scene interfaith dialogue, just as there is no neoliberal loyalist to post-liberal order confederacy exchange. Most of the time when people claim they want "no politics" their real complaint is that they're tired of the very specific messages pushed forward by the current powers that be in the publishing and literary award circles. Since the the preferences of the powerful are what gets published and well advertised.
Any intellectually honest evaluation of the past decade will show that LGBT themes and DEI representation were prioritized and awarded within these circles. A reproduction of a certain kind of daily life that can be seen in a radical shift in youth sexuality.
In this way, “didacticism” is a frame game. For the elite it is a hammer with which to bash the disfavored, but the powerless many that ask for "less didactic" fiction (specifically because they know they aren't going to get their preferred message) will be reprimanded for not seeing through the modern realist complexity of obviously biased media. Ultimately, the people in positions of institutional power, such as major publishing houses and literary awards, consistently say they are in favor of didactic messaging so long as it’s "progressive and forward thinking”, and they still control many of the levers of mass exposure.
What I hope this makes clear is that the solution for creative people is not to mire ourselves in defensive realism or to obscure ourselves in the definitional word games of chasing ever newer labels. Both of these will reduce our ability to cohere around any set of values, and confuse our ability to identify friend and enemy to the point that a coherent interchange of art will not be able to take place.
We simply have to be ourselves. Chisel out your commandments. Live by them. Create by them, transparently, or simply by letting their certitude speak for itself.
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Yes, and the easy lessons of neolib mass fiction are causing us to crave real morality tales - but not the Victorian (though they were funny) cautionary tale type, but sOmething we believe represents our lives as well as envisions virtue. Ikr I'm always banging on about this, but Tolstoy figured morality as a kind of authenticity/good faith of the artist inherent in works. Thanks for writing!
I think I lost track of the argument somewhere in here, but am I correct in noting that you suggest that Shakespeare expresses a "fearless moral certitude"? What reading of Shakespeare is this? What textual evidence can be mobilized to prove this point? Is his portrayal of Caliban, for example, driven by moral certitude? I certainly don't think so. That's what makes it so interesting.
There are plenty of didactic pieces of literature that would serve as a clearer foil: Aesop's Fables, or Everyman, or Pilgrim's Progress, or Uncle Tom's Cabin, or The Jungle. Although some of these are shot through with ambiguities of their own, they might at least serve as coherent examples.
Your broader point seems to be that readers have good reason to consider didactic literature as good if they agree with the didactic message. I think this has two problems--first, didactic art is by definition aimed at those who either disagree with the teaching or waver in their moral commitments. "Didactic" means to teach, and there is no point in teaching the reader something they already know. The most famously didactic book of all time, Uncle Tom's Cabin, was geared toward an apathetic public that didn't really have a moral commitment to ending slavery.
Second, this model of literature (i.e. that people like what they read because it confirms what the reader believes) ignores the power of books to shock and transform their readers. It understands literature as little more than a solidarity-building exercise among identity groups. Surely that's one function of literature, but I am depressed at the idea that this is literature's only function.