One of the most important ideas I’ve encountered in life is the concept of the framing.
There’s all kinds of ways to think about framing in literature, but in some sense the most essential layer is how writers frame the set of possible options for the value-loaded layer of a story: what is the latent moral “order” of a story? What implicit values does it affirm or deny by virtue of events that do happen or events that don’t happen?
A writer may present an is, but he or she is always laden with an ought.
I think of a story as a kind of simulated world. The simulation is first imagined by the writer and then transcribed into textual form.
When you as a writer craft a story, “the way the world should be” naturally exerts a kind of gravitational force, inflecting the narrative structure in the direction of affirming your values. This is an instinct that can only be managed, not suppressed, since your agentic tendency it to collapse the distinction between the way the world is and the way the world ought to be. This why “the good guys” tend to win in most stories.
To be fair to human nature, this is only to be expected. As the sole author of a given narrative universe, the writer acts in their role as a creator—as a miniature god—and it is the nature of all gods to dictate morality.
Crude implementations of this natural tendency regress into power fantasies of different varieties. In this scenario, the protagonist acts as a surrogate stand-in for the writer, who is rewarded in proportion to their embodied alignment with the writer’s values. We can insert huge swathes of YA or contemporary “woke” literature here (but also anti-woke art as well, as Perez points out in the example above).
This is where the concept of “framing”—in particular, of “false framing”—comes in.
The idea of a “frame” is that it’s a mental model of the particular options that are available in a given situation. Of course, this mental model doesn’t necessarily capture all of the available options, but rather, reflects the limits of our own imagination. These limits are effectively determined by the boundaries of our present cultural discourse.
In contemporary literary fiction, there are two moral frames that seem to be available to writers:
“Based/anti-woke.” We all have an instinctive feeling of what this “is,” but strict definitions are hard to pin down. The use of the term “based” varies in meaning a fair amount and appears to capture a spectrum of thought that spans multiracial semi-inclusive social conservatism all the way up to much more maximalist flavors of European identitarianism.
I think the true distillation of this term comes down to something akin to (a) HBD-interpretations of group differences contra blank-slate liberalism, and (b), in its more intense formulations, a secondary ought that privileges ethnocentrism as a universally valid foundational moral axiom.
“Woke.” Most of us are probably more familiar with this definition, which feels intuitively easier to pin down, but I tend to summarize it as something like “leading edge secular progressive morality.” I think of this as kind of continuously mutating set of normative beliefs that evolve in a decentralized fashion out of interconnected nodes in the prestige academia-media-NGO complex, with the nucleus being some form of axiomatic egalitarianism.
The easy move here is to pick one of these two sides, to pick your preferred “intensity-level”/risk-tolerance, and to run with that positioning within the frame of these two binary poles.
Following that, you then align with literary figures and magazines who match your position and you build up a writer’s network with those people where they shill your novels and you shill theirs. Networking in this sense is always of substantial value and probably the decisive factor that determines your eventual success.
In practice, this means that if you’re a “based” novelist, you affiliate with (and shill) other “based novelists,” and if you’re a “woke” novelist, you affiliate with (and shill) other “woke novelists.”
This is a fairly basic description of how social networks work, and we are all continuously making and evaluating our choices in this respect.
If we zoom out by one layer of abstraction, the easy “meta” move here is for me as a commentator to say that I’m “above” these considerations.1 This kind of escape valve is basically a meme-tier position at this point, because the culture war has become so totalizing that the mere act of attempting to move past it gets categorized as a kind of obfuscation of evasive maneuver. I’m sympathetic to the argument in that we all have to live in the world and are inevitably making a series of moral judgments about what is and isn’t normative, so it feels dishonest.
The essential reason this move typically fails is because God is Dead and all morality is now effectively a form of secular morality. Because wokeness (and the reaction to it) exists on a secular plane, even novels that don’t overtly engage with any religious or ethical themes are now definitionally captured as existing somewhere on the “woke/anti-woke” spectrum because the category itself has expanded to become so definitionally totalizing.2 This is why it’s possible to retcon books from totally different historical eras as “problematic” and so on.
I recently appeared on the Book Club from Hell podcast, where I discussed how this bipolar framing between the “woke” and “anti-woke” is a false dichotomy, riffing on Perez’s critique that he made in this tweet (but has mentioned other times).
Perez correctly identifies that the core problem with consciously situating a literary work on the “woke/anti-woke” spectrum is that the book is going to lapse into moral didacticism by default. It’s just an enormously strong force that tends to bleed into every page and every interaction, fusing each individual narrative beat with an embedded “teachable lesson.”
This is bad because the act of trying to convince a reader of your story about the correctness of your moral values creates continuous friction when they try to ingest your narrative. It’s like eating a hamburger coated in sand. It almost always diminishes the verisimilitude of the story because realistic life situations almost inevitably tend to have elements of moral ambiguity and don’t cleanly map onto notions of correctness, which get erased anytime you as the “simulation-builder” (writer) start getting involved in the act of convincing.3 Worst of all, it’s draining. It sucks the vitality out of a story and turns it into an op-ed. Nobody wants to read op-eds; they’ve already made up their minds.
I almost always hate it when literary writers start to sneak some convincing in my stories; I can smell that shit a mile away and I can feel the warping of the reality distortion field that the ideologically charged writer is trying to impose on the literary world-model as presented in the text I’m reading. Some are skilled enough to execute this with the level of sophistication required, but that sophistication tends to create more ambiguously-coded works that are more flexible to differing modes of moral or ideological interpretation (Submission is quite clever in the way that it does this vis-a-vis the subject of Islam in Europe, for example).
Now, that’s not to say that a story can’t have themes that engage with moral themes, but something about the contemporary discourse around these topic almost inevitably lends itself to narrative didacticism, probably because it interfaces with ongoing political conflicts which in turns activates a sort of “politics-mode” as a counter-reaction. It’s possible to integrate overt discussions of politics into literary fiction, but it’s extremely difficult to do it well and I rarely encounter works where it’s improved rather than diminished the story.
New Wave fiction: an orthogonal escape hatch from the culture wars
Gabriel K. Sinclair coined the term “New Wave fiction” to describe the recent wave of self-published fiction coming out of the Dissident Right /DR-adjacent online spheres, and I love the term so much I’m going to attempt to do my own inverse cultural appropriation and tweak his ocean-based literary metaphor to my own ends.
Here’s the definition I’d like to propose:
New Wave fiction is a category of literary fiction that is not concerned with constructing a didactic “woke/anti-woke” normative moral framing, choosing instead to bypass it altogether. By virtue of this disregard, it naturally tends to fail to land cleanly in one category or the other, organically incorporating seemingly contradictory positions because it wasn’t crafted with didactisim as its underlying purpose. It’s a post-2020 mix of self-published and traditionally group of authors who tend to be fairly active online.
Some books that fit the definition
Dan Baltic’s Nutcrankr. The thing that I find most interesting about this novel is that it’s actually agnostic in terms of its politics. The third-person narration doesn’t take any particularly overt view of its character, and instead elevates the purely comic aspect of his engagement with politics as if it were any other activity.
Andrew Boryga’s Victim. I’m partway through Victim and have yet to formulate an opinion on it, but it doesn’t read to me as an “anti-woke” novel, but rather, as a sort of orthogonal comedy of manners around ascending out of your class that lightly satirizes wokeness. That is to say, it’s not about wokeness as such, but about the experience of migrating from one class stratum of social signifiers to another. I’ll be writing up a review of this down the line.
Mattp969’s The Black Album. I think Pegas is an underrated and interesting writer and I’ll have a lot more to say about his fiction/non-fiction combination book in a separate review, but my view of the basic framing of this book is as an attempt to define a positive version of white masculinity that doesn’t self-escalate into genocidal interracial violence. I know this is somewhat of an atypical interpretation but I’ll be expanding on it later.
Adem Luz Rienspect’s Mixtape Hyperborea. Represents multiracial masculinity as a positive alternative model of interracial relations among mixed-race groups of men. While I don’t engage in this kind of racial banter as a middle-aged male, it’s something that was a part of my youth and in that sense represented my life experience as an older millennial.
My own novel, INCEL. While I think my novel has fairly clear moral themes around rejecting scientism-driven nihilism, I think this narrative through-line is almost entirely orthogonal to contemporary woke/anti-woke discourse around incels.
Honor Levy’s My First Book, which lightly satirizes wokeness but not in any substantive or forceful manner, and is mostly a persona-driven comedy that could’ve been written in the early aughts era of NYC-autofiction.
I’ve previously written about androgenic fiction as a new literary category, and I’d place a lot of those books as a sub-category within New Wave fiction (a categorization which is somewhat complicated by the fact that a lot of androgenic fiction pre-dates the new wave stuff). At this point some of you might be rolling your eyes at my perceived autistic literary world-building and may be questioning why I like to spend so much time thinking about literary fiction at the systems level of taxonomy and categorization.
The reason I do this is threefold:
I think it’s inherently interesting to escape the object-level discourse around charged topics, because it unlocks a deeper way of thinking about the ontology of different things in the world.
Categorization is just another form of branding and can help to drive awareness of a certain type of novel, and in so doing, fuel the writing of books of a similar nature. Hype-cycles are a subset of branding which is a subset of categorization.
Categorization can affiliate books and writers of a similar stripe and draw in cultural energy that propels the creation of similar (and better) works of this type through mimetic inspiration.
I look forward to seeing more works and more names in this genre, and I hope to continue adding to the list above. I am optimistic that we may see a real Cambrian explosion of writers in this niche and that the energy here is building in the best possible way. I’ve been very encouraged by DM’s from other writers like Alex Muka who are working on (or have released) their own novels and it pleases me greatly to know that we may be at an turning point that yields compounding returns.
All things move in cycles. This includes the Aesthetic Overton window, which adheres to an almost sinusoidal pattern, oscillating between phases of moral opprobrium and phases of chaotic experimentation. Syncretic and original works fall into the latter category. It’s not just markets that go boom and bust, but aesthetic eras too. Let’s hope we’re about to experience a bull market in new and exciting writers of fiction.
I don’t actually think Perez is saying this, by the way. I think he’s making a more nuanced point, which I build on later here.
Note that the fittest memeplexes that comprise moral systems are the ones which are the most universalist, the most totalizing, the most evangelical in nature.
As a side note, this is why Netflix is so unwatchable. Audiences aren’t stupid, they know the difference between a story and a sermon.
The most offensive aspect of consciously 'woke'/'anti-woke' art is how boring it is. All of human experience gets compressed into one of two categories. Satire is killed, because it becomes a positive recitation of your team's beliefs, and a negative recitation of the other team's. Fortunately, interesting work is always being done, it just needs to be found.
This gives me hope. I'm entirely exhausted from playing moral teacher in my fiction and essays--something I never wanted to do. I think I was very afraid of readers placing me on the wrong side of an issue, thus "cancelling" me, and so I took this role on. It's only made my writing and voice worse. I appreciate this post very much. Btw, "Incel" is a fantastic novel title. I look forward to reading.