Towards a Conflict Free Fiction

 The following comes from Literature Versus Content: On Dubravka Ugrešić’s “Thank You for Not Reading”, a review published by The Los Angeles Review of Books:

Ugrešić aptly describes this conformist strain in her essay “Questions to an Answer,” writing that “we live in a cultural environment that tends towards being conflict-free,” an environment that favors monologue over dialogue. The new edition of Thank You for Not Reading itself furnishes an instance of conflict avoidance: the paragraph on the back of the 2003 Dalkey Archive edition describing this phenomenon was modified for the 2022 edition to render the list of culprits (“Oprah, the Today show, and Kelly Ripa”) into something generic and inoffensive (“listicles and celebrity book clubs”). To the extent that Google Books and Amazon’s preview function permit comparison of the two texts, the matter between the covers was not likewise defanged, but there remains something unsettling about the exchange of specificity for vagueness in the drive for a conflict-free tone in the new book’s promotion.

This drive seems motivated in part by the rise of identity politics, a trend Ugrešić noted at a crucial time. “Equality between a multitude of different literary expressions has replaced the monopoly,” a reappraisal of literary values of which Ugrešić approves for having permitted literature once considered trivial to be taken seriously. She wonders whether, as a consequence of these changes, literature “has been enriched with a multitude of individual statements,” whether “individual speech [has] become more individual” in such an environment. But she laments that “[t]he opposite has happened” in terms of literary marketing, since every new work “is slotted into the market niche of the moment” and labeled with “the buzzword of the moment”; as a result, the author is “more than ever before plastered with identity labels” that “determine his place in the literary market and the kind of understanding there can be between himself and his readers.” (Ugrešić herself bristles at being identified as a Croatian writer or as an émigré writer from the former Yugoslavia.) And there is also an increased reliance on stereotypes, which, she writes in “Questions to An Answer,” are now “the basic formula of communication,” the “language of politics, television, and mass culture.” “Identities,” she writes, can be useful markers, but they often “badly reduce the meaning of the text, impoverishing it or simply distorting it.” She further wonders whether the way the “global cultural market so rapidly and enthusiastically appropriates the intellectual trends of our time — postcolonialism, feminism, multiculturalism, identity politics” — suggests that “the market itself invents intellectual trends in order to make a profit.”

Her analysis of identity politics seems more relevant now than it did 20 years ago. Excessive focus on categorizing authors and their work gives rise to a second kind of nonreading that appears to be reading, whereby the text is merely an occasion for the repetition of a priori conclusions about the identity groups in question, really nothing more than exchanges of commonplaces. As Ugrešić writes in “Having Fun,” the “exchange of commonplaces is communication with no content other than the fact of communication itself.” Even more alarming than the dominance of identity labels is the rise of online public-shaming events in which self-appointed moral arbiters summon mobs to punish supposed transgressors. One wonders what Ugrešić, who left her native Yugoslavia amidst a war over identity and who herself resists being labeled, would have to say about the development and commercialization of identity politics over the last 20-odd years.

I do not understand this conflict free literature. If I pigeonhole myself as a Boomer, so be it.  How boring.

Also arriving today from LitHub was Must Sex Always Mean Death When it Comes to Horror Movies? decrying the neutered nature of modern horror. 

When Reagan won his second term, I said Americans wanted a teflon-coated, stainless steel world. Maybe we have always wanted such a safe life, but now we believe it is possible. Art cannot be safe - Jerry Lee Lewis was not safe, Van Gogh was not safe, Joyce Carol Oates is not safe. We do not have the luxury of being thumbsuckers, waiting for Mom and Dad to solve their problems, since Darwin will then have his way with Homo sapiens. Decide for yourself what kind of art you want in your life, but give the contradictory and the dangerous a fair chance.

sch 10/31/22