Lyta Gold’s Dangerous Fictions opens with a gross scene: a mother bakes brownies laced with dog shit that she gives to her son. It’s not fiction; the woman, Monica Brown, proudly documented the dessert, which was meant to symbolize a sinful film her son had watched, and posted her stunt to Facebook. The son later came out as gay and was disowned, and Brown became a major figure in the conservative movement to ban certain books from schools and libraries.
Brown believed her son was in danger of being “seduced by a fictional story into doing something disgusting and terrible,” so much that she did something disgusting and terrible herself. From book bans to online rage over representation in YA novels or TV shows, Dangerous Fictions asks why fiction can engender so much fear and controversy in the public, when it is “definitionally not real.”
Moral panics over fictional stories aren’t new: Gold notes that in the 1980s, conservatives freaked out about the satanic influence of Dungeons and Dragons; in the 1920s and ’30s, “the fictional culprits were sexy Hollywood movies and modernist novels such as Ulysses,” and so on and so on all the way back to Plato. This “fear of fiction,” she writes, ultimately boils down to a “fear of other people, and how they might work together to shift reality.”
Behind such arguments is the idea that fictional stories possess inherent power which, when referenced, is usually amorphous, undefined, and inexorable. Gold attempts to materially define and locate such power, examining a range of texts and their concerned reception from left or right. (She vows not to engage in “false equivalencies.” There can be no comparison whatsoever, she says, “between the organized, coordinated, and highly lucrative censorship drives of the religious right and the loose collection of internet anecdotes generally referred to as ‘cancel culture.’”) Does the literature of the far right — such as 1970s dystopian novel Camp of the Saints, a favorite of Steven Miller — actually make its readers hate immigrants? Are books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, widely credited as advancing the cause of abolition in the U.S., capable of triggering empathy? Do writers have an obligation to create stories with political or social messages? Do the conditions of our work determine the kind of stories we produce? The answers to these questions are often unclear and at times contradictory, but the act of testing these assumptions is itself important and, in Gold’s book, fruitful.
“Fiction may represent and inform a changing reality, but it can’t change reality on its own, by itself.”
Like many creators, I’ve long relied on the vague assumption that storytelling possesses inherent power. Reading Dangerous Fictions challenged that admittedly romantic notion, at times uncomfortably so. By the end, I was left with more clarity about my role as an artist. Gold and I spoke over Zoom about her book, our shared interest in imagining alternate realities, and her challenging conclusion that we shouldn’t reduce art to its political usage, to its usefulness or uselessness, but that doesn’t mean that artists or their publics are off the hook. Stories can have power, and so can artists — as workers, as organizers, as community members. It’s an unconventional argument for art for art’s sake, which “puts artists in the same uncomfortable seat as everybody else; it’s our job to save ourselves, and not to use art as a substitute for doing politics.”
Zinzi Clemmons How did you hit upon this concept of the “fear of fiction” and then decide to turn it into a book?
Lyta Gold I wrote this book because I found this fear annoying. People are always scared about what other people are thinking. There are all these ad nauseam online conversations about how someone’s going to get the wrong message from a certain movie, someone is going to suffer because of a certain passage in a book. They seem to be expressing a fear that someone else is threatened. That somebody else is vulnerable. I noticed that the people who try to ban books are not worried about how stories will affect them — they’re only worried how they’re going to affect other people. Plato was saying these exact same things. He was worried about “children and foolish people”; that’s how he phrases it. As the West develops a popular culture and writing becomes very prominent, there’s suddenly this anxiety about what people are reading. [Plato] wonders, how is this affecting people? How is this affecting society? How is it affecting democracy?
[Researching this book], I read Camp of the Saints and I felt horrible afterward. But it’s hard to imagine that a normal person would encounter Camp of the Saints and all of a sudden start hating immigrants. You have to partially believe it in order to be turned. Literature, whether good or bad, does affect us in these strong ways, but the idea that you’re always going to react in the way the writer intends is incorrect.
ZC That brings us to your conclusion, a powerful, very materialist argument. You say, “Fiction may represent and inform a changing reality, but it can’t change reality on its own, by itself.” I’ve always been an evangelist for the power of fiction to create social change, and your book put some of my ideas to the test. Did you come to that conclusion as you were writing the book, or had you already decided it before you began, or both? What can fiction do?
LG I think it was more of a journey to answer the question. When I started the book I was in much more of a negative head space where I felt that fiction had no power. But throughout the book, I bring up all these various anecdotes of people who are very moved in one way or another by fiction. I think there’s a reason that writers like you believe in the power of fiction, because it’s what we do and it has power over us while writing and it has power over our readers. But it’s not black and white. I bring in the quote from Ursula K. Le Guin at the end: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” Such power begins in the art of fiction, but it doesn’t end there. That is the point I wanted to emphasize.
“Contemporary literary writers are depoliticized, professionalized, and institutionalized.”
ZC You cite a Tweet from Quinta Brunson, where she complains about people asking her to produce a school shooting episode for Abbott Elementary. She wrote, “people are that deeply removed from demanding more from the politicians they’ve elected and are instead demanding ‘entertainment.’”
LG It was such an inappropriate ask, and it’s a good example of the culture I’m describing. She writes a fun, sweet TV show about an adorable character. It is not a place for heavy topics. Apparently, one person actually told her that she had an obligation to produce a school shooting episode. Do writers have any obligation to have good political messages or to model good behavior in their characters? It’s a strange ask.
ZC One chapter in Dangerous Fictions traces the history of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and how its goals aligned with those of the U.S. during the Cold War, to counter the influence of Soviet communism in American culture. The result of the boom in MFA programs like Iowa, you argue, is that contemporary literary writers are depoliticized, professionalized, and institutionalized — instead of writing novels of ideas, they create stories centered on themselves (reflected in the workshop adage of “write what you know”). Have you thought about what fiction might look like had those changes not occurred? Are there any writers past or present who work against that model that you enjoy?
LG It’s complicated. There’s plenty of literary fiction that is highly individualized and very personal and very good, and a lot of the social realism of the past [with its explicit political agenda] was also kind of bad. So it’s not necessarily a quality question. It’s about what is allowed and what is not. What are you told to write, and to not? One book I just read and loved the hell out of was Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford. It’s an alternate history where the Native population of America isn’t totally wiped out, and there’s an independent Native city called Cahokia that is now part of the United States. It’s speculative fiction that also pays homage to noir. I have read very little like it, and I don’t know what category it belongs to.
A lot of people are doing crossovers between genre and literary fiction. But if you try to write genre fiction in an MFA program, they’ll tell you to stop. I think part of what qualifies a literary novel as such is that it depicts few possibilities of change and growth. I think any novel that’s looking to things getting better, or that considers that human beings have power together, rather than just being individuals who are dying alone, is not something we see very much. What do you think?
ZC That’s the direction my own work is moving in. I’ve been thinking about new societies that are beyond or after (or before) racialization. A lot of what I’ve been reading recently is nonfiction, honestly, because I’ve been disappointed with a lot of contemporary fiction for the reasons you name, so I find myself digging into the past.
LG It’s not that what’s being published are all bad novels, or that reading them makes you a bad person. There’s just an intellectual and imaginative limitation that is starting to make them feel irrelevant. A lot has been changing very rapidly in the last decade. I talk a lot about climate change in the last chapter because it’s really weird to have a contemporary novel that has no mention of it. One of the reasons I like genre fiction so much is that you can reimagine society as a whole. One of the premises is that the world is capable of change. Writing about a collective is hard, writing about societies is hard. That is a tough way to write a novel, to be sure. But it can be very interesting.
ZC That takes us back to the idea of market forces. Why is there so much of one type of literature out there? Why are these individualist, fatalistic stories being demanded of writers? Why is that type of literature held on a pedestal and genre fiction is not? These are extremely important questions to ask.
I always try to get my students to test their assumptions. Whenever a critique or suggestion is raised, I try to get the class to go back and think about why, and oftentimes the answer is political. There’s a strong movement within creative writing pedagogy to de-colonize and de-hierarchize workshop spaces. Those discussions are very important, and the history of MFA programs really delineates why.
LG There are good things about MFA programs because, you know, being a poor bohemian writer means you do not get paid at all. And MFA programs allow some people to enroll in a funded program, and maybe they can get published because of the connections they make there. But they have also erased the independent art scene. There is just not a lot of independent space to be a writer, except on Amazon, the biggest and evilest corporation there is. I think there are a lot of really great books that aren’t getting published at all.
Zinzi Clemmons is the author of the novel What We Lose, published in 2017. An essay collection, Freedom, is forthcoming from Viking. She is assistant professor of English at the University of California, Davis.
Photo illustration by Sharanya Durvasula. Original photograph by Nikita Artinian.
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