I recently finished a book called Literary Feuds by Anthony Arthur, which detailed the history of some famous author versus author squabbles, like Ernest Hemingway against Gertrude Stein, Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal, and recently Tom Wolfe and John Updike. Part of our interest in these feuds has more to do with gossip than serious literary study, yet interestingly, the disagreements between these writers was almost always related to their conflicting visions of what makes for good literature.
The other week in the New York Times Book Review, essayist Wendy Shalit laid down the gauntlet for a new literary feud in her opinion piece attacking Jewish fiction writers like Nathan Englander and Tova Mirvis, whom she labels as "insider outsiders." Her complaint was that these writers make their living by portraying themselves as dissidents who were once in the fold of Orthodox Judaism, but have now broken away and are explosing the dirty laundry of extremist religious freaks. Shalit argues that Mirvis and Englander not only fail to paint a full and true portrait of observant Jews but also have no right to claim any special knowledge of that world because they themselves are not part of the community.
To read Shalit's essay, click here.
Writing in the Forward, Mirvis composed a rather brilliant response to Shalit's critique. First, she points out that a writer need not share the lives of the characters she's writing about to understand them. "Since when must one be a murderer to write Crime and Punishment, a pedophile to write Lolita, a hermaphrodite to write Middlesex, a boy on a boat with a tiger to write Life of Pi? Yes, it seems, Shalit has outed the whole tawdry lot of us. She's revealed to the public the terrible truth: Fiction writers make up things."
Second, Mirvis says that experience and opinion are unique to the individual. Since writing fiction is an individual act, it necessitates an individualized point of view that should not be judged by its verisimilitude. Novels should not be confused with documentary films. "People like Shalit attack a story by saying, "But not everyone is like this." Of course not. But the fiction writer is saying, "Let's imagine one person who is.""
To read Mirvis's response, click here.
Frankly, Shalit's take on what a book ought to be is simplistic and dangerous. [Full disclosure: I know both Mirvis and Englander and admire their work.] However, there's an undercurrent in Shalit's essay that's worth exploring. It's her argument that works that attack religious people are celebrated by the literary community while works that celebrate religious people are attacked, or even more devastatingly, overlooked. Why? Because of the prejudices of the literary intelligentsia, who are more likely to be secular than religious, liberal rather than conservative, blue state rather than red state.
These days, I myself would probably be categorized as "secular," though I have a deeply spiritual outlook on the world that's informed by my religious upbringing. I am also a dyed-in-the-wool blue state liberal who's never voted for a Republican, though I don't rule out doing so. I admire several Republican politicians as well as despise many thoughtless Big-Government Democrats who believe the free market is the root of all evil (just as simpletons like our president believe the free market is the cure for all evil).
Do I believe an author must share my political opinions to write a great work? Definitely not. Knut Hamsun was a Nazi sympathizer, yet I loved his novel Pan. I do not share Toni Morrison's views on race in literature (as expressed in her book Playing in the Dark), yet I would gladly trade a limb to have written Beloved. And I can't count the number of times I've read books where writers make wink-wink, nod-nod anti-Semitic or homophobic asides that briefly jolt my reading experience. It's as if by continuing to read their works, I'm buying into their views of simpering gays and greedy Jews, though of course that's not true.
The books above focus more on story than political agendas. However, there are books that are intentionally political, that are meant to jolt us with their views. Can we enjoy them even if we don't agree with their politics? And can a book be ruined by its moral or political failings? Could I enjoy a book that featured a Bush-loving general who recounted his exploits in building democracy in Iraq? (That would have to be science fiction, since an election in which the majority of voters shows up to the polls to support an Iran-style theocracy because they've been told by their religious leaders they'll go to hell if they don't is not an example of Jeffersonian democracy.) Or how about a book about a religious leader who succeeds in converting gay people into straights? A book by a racist? A book about how ignorant and dirty poor people are? About how immigrants ought to be vaporized, and women put back in their place?
My answer is an emphatic yes. If you go to the recommended books section of this site, you'll find one book I'm recommending is by the French writer Michel Houellebecq, whose politics I often find repugnant. His fiction, however, is brilliant. I wouldn't want to be stranded on a desert island with this man. I also wouldn't want to live in a world in which he couldn't continue to write his vital and brilliant screeds that bristle with resentment against p.c. pieties and puritanical dishonesty about gender roles. When I read, I want to taste life, and life includes Eminem as well as Pollyanna, George Bush as well as John Kerry, Pope John Paul II as well as Sinead O'Connor. I don't mind reading a "biased" or political work of fiction. The test for me is whether I believe the book is honest (not to reality, but to the writer's own voice and vision), urgent, and above all, magical (which unfortunately is not a quantifiable quality). I don't want "fair and balanced" portraits all the time. Sometimes I want a slant. Yes, the world is complex, but why does fiction always need to recreate that complexity? It doesn't. Not if you're a curious reader.
