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Does Fiction Have Power: A Short Review of Dangerous Fictions [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-16
Been a bit. Been writing more than I have been reading.
Should I Read This: Absolutely. Right now.
BookShop.org Link (non-affiliate): Dangerous Fictions by Lyta Gold
Author’s Website: Lyta’s List
I love this book.
That is likely not the way a professional review would start, but I don’t care: I love this book. Not that I agree with everything in it, mind you, but that does nothing to diminish my love.
Dangerous Fictions by Lyta Gold is a brilliant look at how fiction has been repressed in modern time. But it is also a study of how capitalism shapes what art is available, how the government used to try and use fiction for its Cold War ends and how that shapes what we see and hear today, and whether or not fiction should be useful. The book is fantastically written. Gold speaks to the reader as a person, not as if she was speaking at a symposium, an occupational hazard for non-fiction books. Reading it is like having a beer with your smartest friend.
The fantastic voice does nothing to dimmish the scholarship or arguments of the book. Gold knows her material and makes her points backed by that knowledge and solid logic. She traces the history of modern book banning and other repressions of fiction to the concept that fiction is “useful”. And it if it is useful, it has power. And it if it has power, it needs to be controlled, especially so that it does not infect the weaker minds of children and woman and minorities. And so, inevitably, one part or another of society attempts to control fiction.
She also highlights how much of fiction is limited by the capitalist system it is created under. More astutely, at least to me, she discusses how the performance of cancel culture is often played out amongst minority or otherwise disadvantaged authors, driven by, perhaps unconsciously, the capitalist imperative to outsell others. Writing is not a remunerative profession, and removing others makes your odds of winning the fiction lottery slightly higher. And cancel culture sems to hit minority writers harder than white writers — compare the trajectory of American Dirt, for example, with the trans writer of I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter who abandoned her transition and became suicidal.
As I mentioned, I am not sure I agree with everything that Gold argues. Her notion that thinking of art as useful makes it more susceptible to censorship and replacement by AI is well argued and at least thought provoking. But it is also a bit ragged at the edges. Gold does admit that fiction can move people to action, and that the weight of similar fiction can have an effect— copoganda (copoganda is art that glorifies police and police work and is present in many different forms — like the fact that my spellchecker does not recognize copoganda as a word) is the example she uses, but there’s no reason to think it could not or does not work for other subjects. But overall, she seems to think that people see what they want in art and that art is not a form of action, even if it inspires action occasionally. She worries, not without merit, that creating and consuming art takes the place of organizing and politics.
If art is not useful, then why should we indulge artists in their work? Isn’t it wasteful or indulgent to tell pretty stories while the world burns? Gold falls back on the idea that art is part of what makes humans human, that creativity is a part of the human experience and as such its creation is an inalienable right of all people. Maybe. I find that mostly persuasive, but then, isn’t it just another kind of usefulness? If it is necessary for humans, then by definition isn’t useful to them? And if it’s useful, then doesn’t that lead us back to the censorship question?
Gold doesn’t want to treat art as another commodity, I think, and she doesn’t want to make it easy for people to censor fiction. I am not entirely sure she succeeds, and the book might have benefited from a discussion of why democratic censorship is or is not appropriate. We don’t let kids access porn (or we didn’t before the internet), for example. How does that kind of decision-making advance or repress fiction?
Whatever the faults in her arguments I find, I want to re-emphasize that I love this book. Gold loves fiction, clearly, of all kinds, low and high, and she obviously wants to preserve its place in our lives. She has written the most intelligent, accessible, and thoughtful discussion of the meaning of art, its intersection with capitalism, and ultimately how society should interact with it that I have read in a long time, perhaps forever.
I cannot recommend it enough.
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