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My friend was rather vicious about this on their blog, in an article about "Issues-based Fiction", but I'll post it here anyway as it seems as good an analysis as any, and maybe backs up what I was saying above. I don't think this is un-Lithable. After this I'll stop hijacking the thread.
Now I would like to present and discuss an example of Issue Based Fiction, that in fact won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000: Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies. Now, obviously, no piece is ever as uncomplicatedly bad as that which I present in my invectives, but, just consider the way the book is presented. Brown, crimson, and gold washey colours merge into one another. There is no capitalization. We see an image of An Oriental Woman, blurred, with definite dark hair and bare shoulders, perhaps naked. Below this, a tagline declaring it the winner of the Pulitzer, a positive quote from Amy Tan, and then an image of some jungle flower or other.
All this natural, exotic/mystical, but casual (uncapitalized) matter is concocted to sell to the female/'intellectual'/semi-intellectual/self-identifying 'liberal' market in any given Liberal Capitalist locale. Woman, you see, especially Oriental Woman, is a fountain of mystical knowledge and wise words, all of it cosily uncapitalized. “She was more heart than smart.” Of course, there is intelligence there as well as emotion – emotional intelligence, probably, not about any old books, you know, but nice little chats in big warm kitchens etcetera. It has all the potential to be a best-seller.
And no, you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. The author probably had no chance to affect its design. I merely want to use the above to point out that trying to write a book of fiction which is intended as some sort of weapon in the ideological war is an inherently flawed idea from the get go – not only for the reasons I gave in the first section, but because you see it can be made to fit straight into the little box the dominant ideology (Capital, Empire) gives it. It will be sold to the sort of people who might be concerned about this sort of thing to placate them and stop them from changing anything. Better to write a collection of serious essays or join a campaigning group, wearing the argument on your sleeve.
On to the book itself.
Thematically, it is a set of short stories about women who have some traumatic connection to India. Now that sounds like an interesting book, doesn't it? Particuarly as the Indian woman is a class of person whose voice is marginalised by several systems – class, race, ethnicity, gender.
Except the author is so entwined with the Issues, so little separate from the characters, that they cease to be characters and become simply interchangeable Top Trumps cards (Academic! Mother! Daughter!) around which are thrown stories designed to propel the reader, in a manner of extreme sincerity, from Issue to Issue – the description and dialogue, while adequate at what they do, are simply padding. The characters are not three-dimensional.
Now you could claim that this was an intentional effect: the author has created characters who are nothing but issues in order to show how real human beings become swallowed up, reified, by what they represent – how, for a British example, white people will either be directly racist towards an Indian (e.g. calling them 'a paki'), or alternatively expect an Indian to give them a talk on Hinduism, or to teach them how to make a curry, or to be somehow sexy and exotic. Perhaps this was the author's intention: to mimic with one-dimensional characters the one-dimensional stereotypes alloted by the dominant ideology to those who do not fit in.
Supposing this is true, the problem is, as with many literay ideas, that this one does not create a good piece of literature, however good it may sound in theory – rather like the idea of deciding to write poetry 'in the voice of a peasant', or all that bullshit about getting really stoned and writing a great novel that speaks for troubled youth everywhere. The book is simply not very good, for the reasons given above: one gets the feeling that those reviewers quoted in the frontpapers as saying wonderful things about “the simplicity of language and narrative”, or saying things like “Storytelling of surpassing kindness”, or that “Everything you wanted to know about the immigrant experience can be found in these pages” are trying rather hard to prove something: that they are good liberals, that they care, and so-on – and so the book is measured not in terms of its quality, but in terms of its niceness, in terms of, if it were a person, how much you would want to vote it in as president.
For the difference between 'quality' and 'niceness', and why it is incredibly important to distinguish between the two, consider, on the one hand, To the Lighthouse, A Clockwork Orange, The Fall, and Lolita. Then on the other consider a book of children's hymns, and a calendar of cute kittens produced by the RSPCA. Or indeed consider Prufrock and other observations against Big Words: An Anthology of Pro-curves poetry for women.
Now go and have a think. |
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