Thinking lately about the relationship between art and politics.

The subject came up recently on an sf-writing-related listserv I'm on, and it crystallized a lot of what I think about this. So, a few scattered thoughts:

If the purpose of a story/novel is to provide a vehicle for some Message, whether that be a feminist sermon on the fludity of gender roles or a Henleinian one on the folly of pacifism, I get irritated, whether I agree or disagree with the contents of the particular sermon being preached. If it's clever and subtle enough, or if its a good enough story in other respects, I might forgive it, but as a general rule it does irritate me.

I'd like to say that my agreement or disagreement doesn't play in at all, but that would probably be a lie. I get more irritated by being beaten over the head with messages I disagree with. I suppose this kind of mild hypocrisy is inevitable--human condition, yadayadayada--but it's worth admitting.

But. Still. I'm not crazy about it in either variation.

Both because, like most people, I don't particularly like discovering sermons in what is packaged as entertainment, and because it seems silly to me to be convinced of some substantive view as a result of reading a work of fiction. If some moral atittude or political view or generalization about human behavior or Universal Truth of whatever kind is on offer, I'd rather see it in the form of an essay where I could see things like evidence and logical arguments. The fact that some moral attitude or political view or generalization about human behavior or Universal Truth is vindicated in a gerrymandered fictional universe is, well, pretty uninteresting if the question is whether it makes sense in the actual world.

People with the contrary view sometimes talk as if putting up "barriers between art and politics" is a luxury of the privileged, that a victim of [fill in your favorite injustice here] can't afford to do so. My view is exactly the opposite.

Nick Mamatas sums it up beautifully here:

"When writing does have a single moral or ethical message, it either doesn't get read simply because people don't like being preached to, or misfires. This is true even of the classic examples of didactic fiction.....Want to change the world? Unionize your workplace, or send money to the Zapatistas."

(He's also got some nice stuff in that discussion about the "just universe" assumptions behind many criticisms of the alleged political implications of fictional representation of things. Interesting particularly from him in particular since Mamatas is so hard-core politically that he makes me look like a Young Republican by contrast.)

Fiction in general and speculative fiction in particular can provide all sorts of wonderful and precious things--aesthetic pleasure, intellectual stimulation, momentary transcendence, etc.--but it is incapable of doing anything to alter [fill in your favorite injustice here.] If you want to do something about *that,* you need to actually leave your writing desk.....

...you know, that one in your study where you've got things all comfortable and arranged the way you like them and you've got music on in the background and you get all irritated if anyone comes in while you're working.....

....and go out and do something in the actual external world.

You can no more combine the two activites effectively than can plumbers somewhow plunge toilets in some special way whereby their plunging will have stopped the war in Iraq or trained battered women in self-defense or eradicated racial prejudice.

Now, having said all that, here's a pretty dramatic qualification:

As anyone who's read my stuff would probably be able to guess, I absolutely don't believe in running away from political themes or filtering your own moral, social or political worldview out of the picture when writing about innately political subjects. I think that good writing comes from (among other things) pouring yourself, as many of your passions and fixations as possible, into your fiction. Which means that your own outlook will probably be present or at least inferrable, and to some extent this is a natural and healthy byproduct of pouring as much of yourself as possible into the fiction.

Anyone who reads those stories I write where the subjects in any way come up (they don't, always, but sometimes they do) will probably correctly guess that I'm not a fan of the war in Iraq or similar interventions real or fictional, that I find fascism, authoritarianism and racial prejudice disturbing, etc., etc., etc.

Not because I think stories I write are going to bring people around to my own political outlook (more or less Chomsky-esque, for the sake of full disclosure) but because somehow trying to filter all that stuff out dulls the blade too much, removes too much of my own personality, passions, fixations and voice, because I don't think a "fair and balanced" absolute nuetrality in representation is possible or desirable, and because I don't think innately political subjects are less worth exploring in fiction than any other aspect of life.

One of the problems with didactic fiction is that characters are coerced into doing what the author wants them to do (e.g., illustrate points of view that will then be rewarded or punished), but fiction that artifically filters out the political stuff commits the same sins, not letting the characters do what they want to do and say what they want to say, since it might be controversial.

Take an analogy: Most people, I think, would be turned off by a didactic story whose purpose was a thinly disguised attempt to, say, convert readers to the truth of one particular religion, but that doesn't mean that fiction can or should avoid directly or indirectly exploring religious or spiritual subject matter in so far as those subjects naturally come up in stories, and are innately interesting, worth exploring, generate good stories, etc.

Of course, since here as anywhere else, writerly input is a very different subject than readerly output, it's not always unambiguously clear from *reading* something whether you have a case of someone's worldview naturally finding an echo in their fiction or whether the story itself is just a vessel for the message, but even accepting that there will always be gray areas, it seems to me like a distinction worth making.