Literary culture is purity culture: On the Verso books piece and the state of literary fiction

Or how to hammer the borders of the Aesthetic Overton Window

Won’t you please get into the purity coffin, sirs?

I recently read J. Arthur Boyle’s takedown of the contemporary alt-lit space in New York, and friends—I confess to having enjoyed it—quite a bit, actually. Partly this is because I love to read this type of hit piece, there’s a certain aggressive energy to it, a secularized Deus Vult invigorating the memetic commons with the thrill of a holy war. Any artifact of the culture war is charged with the sublimated impulse to conquer and destroy: it is memetic competition at its most savage, something like a turn-based strategy game conducted with words.

Also, pieces like this are usually not as well written—maybe I’m lacking in sufficient literary refinement, but for me, Boyle’s prose is a real pleasure to read. Overall, I’m of the opinion that he is a fine rhetoritician, and rarely have I seen the argument for the “Aesthetic Overton Window” articulated so clearly (usually, it’s only gestured at, implied; part of “the work” for the reader in a piece like this is to complete the bulk of the moral argument in their own mind, further investing them in the correctness of the inevitable conclusion). After reading the piece, I checked out the author’s personal website, it’s a photo of him looking pretty cool; he’s apparently taught at Columbia’s MFA program, my general impression was something along the lines of this guy fucks.

New York seems to produce a lot of guys with this aesthetico-political orientation, it is, after all, the site of the Anglo-American imperium’s premiere cohort of wordcel aesthetes.

Whenever I’m here—as I am now, for a short while—I am reminded that this centrality is in fact a palpable psychic force, and frankly, it gets me kind of hyped. So naturally, it makes sense that it is the site of some of the most pitched battles. It is a perfect arena for word-based combat between different varieties of word supremacists.

Here’s how I would summarize his core argument:

1. The right-wing avant garde in American fiction is composed of two groups: (a) opportunistic edgelords without substantive ideological or political beliefs (“small and curdled people trading on transgression for attention”), and (b) a harder core of serious, politically committed protofascists like BAP and Yarvin who are Thiel-affiliated and part of a more expansive long-term political project aiming the whole of the culture towards reaction.

2. Group (b) “make angular forays into the aesthetic Overton window.”

3. Then, group (a), “moderate sympathizers with opportunistic bents,” “repackage it for a wider audience.”

4. This constitutes a form of mutually beneficial symbiosis. “The angular forays grab attention, the wider audience provides ideological support. Each benefits from both: the reach gets bigger, more people show up, the new influence entrenches, and the cycle repeats. This works.”

Now, the remainder of the argument—the conclusion—he leaves to the reader. It’s the last little bit that is the most important.

I submit to you that two conclusions arrive naturally, albeit implictly:

1. Anything that is affiliated, directly or indirectly, with group (a) is irrevocably tainted by moral impurity. It is worse than worthless, it is actively harmful.

2. This corruption can only be cleansed by wholesale excision between the fascists and the fascist-adjacent: psychologically, interpersonally, and aesthetically. The break must be total.

It’s the second conclusion that is the most interesting. In part, a piece like this can be read as instilling contamination fear—its functional effect is to target what he describes as the moderates. It is this group—the group that repackages and scales the distribution of alternative literature—who the message is for. Whether deliberate or not, its effect is to point a laser on the literary artists who have traces of impurity within their work.

It is, in short, acting as a purity ritual.

A piece like this isn’t a political argument. It’s a moral argument, and you are making a category mistake if you’re thinking of it as political instead of moral. We live in a pious era; because God is dead, naturally, our piousness is couched in political terms.

It is to say: “Don't be instrumentalized, don't be a sympathizer, don't be an associate of fascists, and cleanse yourself of sin—and especially your art, and especially your peer to peer affiliations—then, you will be right with god.”

The Aesthetic Overton Window

I was pleased to see the term used so openly. I myself am a writer of literary fiction, and contemporary literary fiction is the apex example of the Aesthetic Overton Window in practice.

It is functionally impossible to get anything through the publishing system that is not thoroughly purified, and every layer in the system—authors, agents, publishers, marketers—live in perpetual fear of contamination. Contamination, of course, is what leads to cancellation, and no matter where you are in the hierarchy, cancellation can be a fatal event for any one actor in the system. This is how you get insane purity spirals like Amelia Zhao’s cancellation: a thoroughly anodyne YA book somehow inciting a cancellation mob based on the absolute thinnest of pretexts. Incentive gradients orient individual actors toward conformity; to this extent, fear is adapative insofar as it is a survival strategy. The worst place for a purity filter to be constructed is within the network of a spatially-distributed Twitter mob. The best place for a purity filter to be constructed is right at home—directly inside of the artist’s brain.

If you want to see an example of what a system optimized for purity looks like in practice, look to the art resulting from modern literary fiction—by and large, it is staid, boring, endlessly recycled consensus-approved pablum. In a climate of pervasive fear, we are all reduced to memetic regurgitators—I vomit into your mouth, you vomit into mine; afterward, we shake hands, satisfied by our own oppobrium.

So what, dear friends, is a purity ritual?

It is, in short, a religious exercise.

It exists to purify art of sin; it exists to enact a vision of the future—a world cleansed of sin entire.

Boyle then goes through a list of literary artists, critiquing their work for being implicitly or obliquely reactionary. Honor Levy—contaminated with the “brutal honesty” of a reactionary bourgeoisie. Madeline Cash—contaminated with a “reactionary aesthetic,” whose “stories don't just deploy brutality, they often end up passively siding with it, resigned to preventable atrocities, making them palatable through a degree of victimhood.” The idea being Cash apprently lacks sufficient didactic rigor with regard to lessons of morality implied by her stories, and so on. The author wants you to know that they have sinned, and that everyone should be aware of it. They have exceeded the permissible threshold of direct or indirect association with The Very Bad People And Their Ideas.

(As an aside, there’s also a brief pejorative reference to The Mars Review of Books throw in for good measure. I’ve not read any of these authors, but I have read the Mars Review of Books—which is both (a) excellent & (b) easily the most interesting literary magazine of the current era).

Let’s ask a question, then: what is the implicit message to this list of writers?

It is, in my view, to paint them as contaminated. To urge them toward purity & righteousness, based on what I feel are essentially vague associations. To me, his purported linkages do not feel substantive at all; his precise definition of what is and is not reactionary seems diffuse, with soft and expansive borders.

Here’s another question: what is the implicit message to an observer of this feud? To any prospective fiction author who likes this strain of work and wants to engage in broadly similar artistic impulses?

It is to warn them.

It is to say—you, too, may end up on a list.

Like you, dear reader, I am similarly averse to ending up on lists of any kind. That, of course, is the whole point, because this is the Aesthetic Overton Window in action. It is a constant battle between two countervailing forces: between the actors trying to expand the window in a particular direction, and the actors trying to hammer it into a narrower, more constricted configuration. The author’s job is made easier by the fact that so much of the work he critiques is autofiction, and insofar as that is true, it does strengthen the logic of his argument vis-a-vis moral normalization vs. condemnation in what largely amounts to thinly veiled memoirs.

Now, admittedly, not all of his cited examples can be so easily defended, and it’s not unreasonable for him to point all of them out. But I am less interested litigating his entire list of examples than I am in litigating the broader cultural dynamic at play and his larger framing.

Decentralized conformity and the purity coffin

Erik Hoel, a writer and neuroscientist, has one of the one most interesting arguments for the value of fiction in our televisual era. His argument, basically, is that fiction is uniquely capable of capturing the interiority of conscious experience. A novel, then, is essentially an instance of bottled consciousness. It is a particular stream of consciousness captured into textual form. I very much like this framing because it elevates the special aspect of the medium.

In this model, it’s easy to see how an excessive focus on purity is damaging to the production of literary fiction. It takes this enormous diversity in human consciousness, this enormous tumbling river of human psychologies, and it narrows it through a purity filter that extinguishes a wide swath of art that is otherwise intrinsically valuable. Tony Tulathimutte has made a somewhat similar argument.

Here, dear friend, I will make another confession: I am omnivarous. I like to read stories written by all kinds of writers, even writers who I think are deeply broken, morally corrupted, or otherwise deranged. I am not particularly afraid of any type of narrative fiction; I do not see it as contaminating myself or any other person. I am interested in all parts of the world, even the ugly parts. I want to understand the broadest possible range of human experiences; it doesn’t mean I categorically endorse all of the fictional protagonists I encounter. The truth is everyone is transgressive because every mind is sovereign. You can only fully impose a filter externally, you can only subordinate your internal self part of the way; your soul will always yearn for freedom; it will always think bad thoughts, from time to time.

The effect of the prevailing Aesthetic Overton Window is, in my view, similar to that of being placed in a coffin. The reality is that “fascist sympathizers” are not the only people who find the current consensus norms in literary fiction to be overly constricting. It is likely that the author would dispute this, but I am not alone in thinking that the current system of publishing aggressively selects for the purest of the pure. In my view, there is such a thing as too much purity in the aesthetic domain.

To wit, contamination fear is abundant and omnipresent in the literary ecosystem. It is, to cite one of many examples, incredibly hard to write sincerely about maleness and even moreso about the pathological aspects of maleness (even satirically). Rather, it is functionally impossible.

In general, you absolutely cannot say anything that is deemed even partly difficult. We don’t have a publishing system so much as we have a nominally decentralized, functionally centralized conformity system. As Jordan Castro and many others have pointed out, such a system is only capable of producing homogenity. That’s a feature, not a bug. I have sat in modern creative writing workshops; they are circular panopticons. Everyone around you is a cop, everyone wants to stuff you into the coffin; every eyebrow is waiting to be raised.

In which I must now necessarily qualify all of this commentary with my opposition to fascism because of this reductive framing

I think Boyle’s opposition to what he deems as reactionary and fascistic is sincere; I think he has no doubt that his message is virtuous, and there is no contradiction from within the inside of his moral system and its base of axioms. I just think he’s mistaken.

Let’s descend another level and ask even more fundamental questions:

1. Should literary fiction be subordinated to moral concerns?

2. If yes, then whose morality should it subordinated to?

3. And who gets to decide?

I will not answer these questions—that would be beyond the scope of this article—but I do want to say that while I disagree with Boyle, I believe his disagreement is in good faith, and his answers are not a priori unreasonable. But in the context of the publishing as it currently is, his implicit answers reify existing structures of institutional power—the same institutions are are optimizing for purity, and by extension, for homoegenity.

So, rather than answer questions 1-3, I will only say that the answers need not be binary, they can exist in gradations. We can admit all sorts of ambiguity into a working literary system.

Let me arrive at this topic somewhat tangentially. I am a Chinese-American who is opposed to the seemingly-inevitable-but-totally-needless war in the Pacific; I do not support Anglo-American imperialism; I am publicly willing to acknowledge some of the obvious strengths of the PRC’s political and economic model; given these basic details, I’m probably well on my way into some Palantir database or whatever. I think Sinophobia and a US-China war are a direct pathway into a global nuclear holocaust (nobody is talking about this). Seemingly every day there is some news story about some elderly or vulnerable Asian-American being brutally slaughtered or beaten to death in the streets of America. Shit is real out here—no doubt (my man Boyle is right about that).

HOWEVER—that doesn’t mean I don’t like to read interesting novels, even if sometimes they are written by my enemies. And that doesn’t mean that it’s fair to tar young up and coming writers with no obvious fascist predilections whatsoever as crypto-fascists hiding under the cloak of gender.

(I’ll go on).

I have no love for Thiel or his various political projects, particularly the project of advancing a new era of intense enmity with China, which I think is guaranteed to be disastrous. I have no interest in defending BAP whatsoever. Like Castro, I disagree that Yarvin has the ability or capacity to architect a decentralized artistic movement when this type of non-institutional entity is, by its very nature, fundamentally decentralized. Apart from Thiel, all of these figures are politically marginal, and even Thiel’s influence in the halls of power is probably overstated. There are many other richer, more powerful oligarchs.

Let’s zoom out, then: purity sees the world in black of white; I am inclined, at least sometimes, to see things in shades of gray. I am comfortable with some degree of contradiction; not everything needs to be in perfect alignment all of the time. We can tolerate some degree of chaos and messiness in the arts, and to an extent it is arguably necessary to the vitality of the overall ecosystem. It’s not always 1930’s Germany everywhere and all the time (although maybe that is the case for Asians in America living up to start of a war over Taiwan).

But I digress—the argument here is not about object-level debate about Thiel or BAP or Yarvin or whatever. It’s about the effect that this type of discourse has on literary fiction, on art.

Let’s agree to disagree about tradeoffs

So here is my conclusion—a relatively simple disagreement with the author.

I think that there is an inherent tradeoff between the following two things:

• (A) Optimizing for moral purity in literary fiction, where moral purity is defined by the emergent consensus achieved by the most powerful literary institutions and figures (result: increased homogeneity).

• (B) Optimizing for general openness to aesthetic experience in literary fiction (result: increased diversity).

The “Purity” vs. “Diversity” tradeoff, visualized.

I am not a fascist—I have literally written a novel satirizing fascist psychology—but I think that modern literary culture has gone too far in the direction of (A) and that this has come at the expense of (B). Think of it as a single sliding scale that shapes the size of a filter which determines the overall output. Boyle is essentially arguing that we should keep doing (A), and this practice is fine as is. I am arguging the opposite.

So here is my plan of action, for all parties involved—to resolve this debate, I would suggest walking into a bookstore, looking at the set of contemporary offerings in literary fiction, and reflecting on whether or not you feel satisfied by what’s on the table.

I can tell you, dear friend, that I am most certainly not.