Watch for the Paper Cities Airstream, coming soon to your neighborhood!!
As to your real question . . . hm. This should be interesting, because I'm not sure what I believe. My gut instinct is to say no, or at least that it's a personal decision. If you're asking whether I think fiction should be polemical in some way--even if it's just to the point of providing positive examples--then it's definitely a No. I don't believe that such things should be mandatory. I think it's too easy to run into trouble with, say, allegory, or even heavy symbolism, because you start to write not about people, but types; and even if those are ideal types, you can do damage with them. I'm also not of the social realism school (which now that I am looking at it may be the most obvious thing I have ever typed in my life) in that I don't think fiction should exhort the reader to improve the world in some way. I admire writers who are unafraid to show people at their worst, making terrible mistakes and unkind choices, because that is a very real thing. That said, I'm not very good at doing that myself. If I'm not working in more or less surrealistic territory, I'm usually trying to show people struggling to do the right thing, even if they end up doing the wrong one. I don't know that I do that out of a responsibility to anyone but myself, although I do spend a fair amount of energy (possibly too much) thinking about my audience.
So possibly my answer is: only if the fiction writer in question feels that responsibility him- or herself.
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Date: 2008-02-19 07:37 pm (UTC)As to your real question . . . hm. This should be interesting, because I'm not sure what I believe. My gut instinct is to say no, or at least that it's a personal decision. If you're asking whether I think fiction should be polemical in some way--even if it's just to the point of providing positive examples--then it's definitely a No. I don't believe that such things should be mandatory. I think it's too easy to run into trouble with, say, allegory, or even heavy symbolism, because you start to write not about people, but types; and even if those are ideal types, you can do damage with them. I'm also not of the social realism school (which now that I am looking at it may be the most obvious thing I have ever typed in my life) in that I don't think fiction should exhort the reader to improve the world in some way. I admire writers who are unafraid to show people at their worst, making terrible mistakes and unkind choices, because that is a very real thing. That said, I'm not very good at doing that myself. If I'm not working in more or less surrealistic territory, I'm usually trying to show people struggling to do the right thing, even if they end up doing the wrong one. I don't know that I do that out of a responsibility to anyone but myself, although I do spend a fair amount of energy (possibly too much) thinking about my audience.
So possibly my answer is: only if the fiction writer in question feels that responsibility him- or herself.