i cannot for the life of me find that essay about how sterilized, approachable, “nice” literature was used in victorian england to create a cultural imaginary that wholeheartedly ignored the atrocities being committed by the state, but every time i see someone sincerely make the argument that escapist stories are the only moral form of storytelling it rings in my head like a bell. it haunts me. some of y’all actually think that wide-scale erasure is better that attempting to grapple with messy reality in fiction and it’s honestly so exhausting
ALSO can we stop evaluating stories solely based on their utility? Please? there is more to a narrative than whether it’s “harmful” or not, and it’ll be way better in the long run to be able to understand what the ideas being communicated are and how they’re communicated than sticking to just whether or not they’re objectively and universally Good.
The real problem, the kind of thing that would make De Niro in Casino groan, “Amateur night!”, starts when people imagine that they can stop immoral behavior by policing immoral characters, phrases, or scenes in literature.
They’re looking for the wrong thing. They’re sniffing for depictions of immorality, when they should be scanning the silences, the evasions.
There’s a very naïve theory of language at work here, roughly: “if people speak nicely, they’ll act nicely” — with the fatuous corollary, “If people mention bad things, they must like bad things.”
The simplest refutation of that is two words: Victorian Britain.
Victorian Britain carried out several of the biggest genocides in human history. It was also a high point of virtuous literature. […]
We took out student loans because we, as teenagers, literal children, were told that it was our only road toward a better life, and one that would more than pay itself off.
We were told that all we had to do was go to college and we would be guaranteed a high-paying job that would compensate for any loans, because in our parents’ generation that was the case.
We were told that if we didn’t do this, and chose to take any other job, that we were lazy and worthless and deserved whatever minimum wage was thrown our way.
And when it didn’t work out we were told that we should have known better when we were 16.
