The problem with modern fiction is that most writers lack artistic courage

our deficits are not in craft, but in cojones

Occasionally, I’ll find myself ranting about something and then, when I get to the end of my argument, I’ll realize that the reason I’m so angry about this thing is because what I’m actually doing is criticizing myself.

At some point, you get to an age in life when you’ve accumulated enough failures, enough data to see who you really are. And that mirror becomes less of a friend than it is a condemnation.

Today is one of those days.

Epiphanymaxxing is edging for literary theorycels

Most of the existing debate around /newwave/ vs. didactic fiction centers around the following framework:

There’s roughly two ways of looking at art: as an intrinsic good and as an instrumental good.

As an intrinsic good: an object of beauty that exists for its own sake.

As an instrumental good: as a tool for advancing toward a political, social, or ideological outcome.

Art made for intrinsic purposes is good because it trends toward intrinsic purity, art made for instrumental purposes is bad because it trends toward conformism.

Autistic literary geniuses > MFA-DEI intersectional points accumulators.

There are many valid critiques of this argument.

Recently, I heard David Herod of Tooky's Mag make a good counterargument around reframing literary “didacticism.” He thinks that was we decry as “didacticism” is merely an inelegant or crude implementation of something that is actually universal to any story: an implicit (or explicit) moral epistemology.

In this critique, a moral system is so deeply integrated into the literary world model of the book that it is better thought of as something akin to gravity; i.e., as an inescapable feature of any narrative without which a literary world cannot even be created.

By now, readers of this blog are well familiar with this debate, but are probably feeling a bit tired by my seemingly infinite capacity for taxonomies and denunciation. It’s not as if there’s zero great work that’s being out by prestige/traditional publishing houses (Hari Kunzru and Benjamin Labatut come to mind).

See—it’s not all bad, people might say! I could keep going on this front: Yaa Gyasi’s Transparent Kingdom was an interesting examination of losing your faith as a PMC-immigrant: a novel I quite enjoyed, even if it did lean into a sort of grimdark-tier retread of the opioid crisis.

Yes, I like to complain about the absolute state of things in the Wordcel Literary Universe (WLU). But I feel the need to point out that I still read a fair number of contemporary books.

And so, recently, I found myself re-examining the assumptions of what we’ve been arguing about online for the past year or more, particularly because I do think that a lot of modern stuff is often very well crafted (Gyasi, for example, has a great sense of voice).

So what tends to be missing from my existing model of cultural homogenization in prestige publishing?

What’s missing is more than mere transgression for transgression’s sake. It’s something so basic that we’ve almost completely forgotten about it as a cultural concept.

What’s missing, dear friends, is courage.

You’re telling me you’re not willing to blow up your entire life for *literary fiction*?

I can’t remember the last time anyone even mentioned the word courage to me in a general setting. More narrowly, I cannot even remember the last time I heard the word ‘courage’ used in an artistic setting in a way that wasn’t transparently ridiculous.

I’ve seen a lot of book blurbs where courage was hinted at with a more palatable euphemism: “so and so’s book is subversive.”

These little paragraphs are always so hilarious to me.

If you’re a literary figure and you’re acting as a true subversive against the prevailing order, no one is going to publish your book.

You are on your own.

Say you go on to win the attention lottery with your book and, despite being self-published, it goes on to gain success.

What, then, is your reward for achieving success on your own?

The reward for attaining prominent literary status as a genuine subversive is some combination of (1) a spatially distributed mob trying to trick SWAT teams into murdering you, (2) a sprawling network of alphabet-soup-adjacent NGO’s and press outlets doxxing you in an effort to increase the likelihood of (1), and (3) you instantly being fired from the soul-sucking normie corpo job you need in order to afford health insurance.¹

Equally ridiculous is this fantasy of “when I’m successful, I’ll say anything I want.”

This is the literary figure’s version of the tenure-based power-fantasy for the careerist academic.

“When I have achieved ______, I’ll write the book I truly want.”

What will actually happen is that you’ll turn into someone like Zadie Smith: convinced that you’re speaking to truth to power while wringing your hands about campus protests as the numba one son of the Global American Empire pours tens of thousands of children into a meatgrinder built out of F-35’s, Boeing bombs, and AI algorithms.

You cannot start out in chains and then promise yourself freedom somewhere down the line.

Your own success is what will compromise your artistic purity as every important literary relationship ossifies into an obligation. That’s exactly where the modern writer’s moral entrepreneurship hits a wall. In 10 years, will Zadie Smith be remembered for her fiction? Or will she be remembered for equivocating about an ongoing genocide?

There’s an exceedingly simple way to measure artistic courage: it’s what you expect to pay for saying the truth.

I’m not talking about monetary costs, although, of course, losing your shitty adjunct role teaching creative writing might be seen as costly (especially if you’re precariously employed in New York City).

Rather, it’s the reputational, social, and safety-related costs of putting out a novel that says something that is equally uncomfortable and true.

Are you going to lose your agent? Is your publishing house going to fire you? Are you going to get disinvited to literary panels? Will your peers shun you? This is the pain of ostracism, the pain that every writer, desperate for social validation, truly fears.

What are you going to pay for putting out your book? How much pain are you prepared to take?

Asian Americucks and the CHI that’s missing from contemporary Asian-American fiction

I recently read Tony Tulathimutte’s excellent collection, Rejection, but I felt myself becoming increasingly frustrated as the book went on.

The book starts strong, with two standout stories: The Feminist, a satirical take on male inceldom and radicalization, and Pics, a (much-darker) story about a woman’s romantic life falling apart.

Between the two of these stories, I think Pics is probably a generationally-great short story that vividly captures a spiral of self-destructive behavior that’s emblematic of the modal millennial’s speedrunning attempt to hit TFR-ZERO for the entire generation.

Tony is one of these guys who really is an absolute talent: when he’s in top form, he really reaches into the uppermost tier of excellence, and Pics feels like the work of a master hitting his stride: the pacing, dialogue, characterization, everything is stellar.

The reason it’s stellar is because it’s so brutal. The reason it’s so brutal is because it tells the truth.

And the reason it can tell the truth is because it happens to cover ground that remains inside of our current Aesthetic Overton Window.

The problem?

The rest of the book falls short of this threshold, and my theory is that it isn’t because of a deficit in skill.

What I felt while reading Tony’s book is that he was pulling his punches throughout the rest of it. At the end of the collection, where he writes a coda where he was counter-signaling his own protagonist, I wanted to grab him by the collar, and say, Godamnit, Tony! Just tell the fucking truth! Fuck! It’s not that fucking hard!!

And then I remembered that I had done exactly the same thing, because, like Tony, I am also a coward.

In fact, I am even more of a coward.

I’m running up points on the cowardice-competition even harder than anyone I know who’s playing the game.

Tony Tulathimutte’s ‘Rejection’ could’ve been so much more

It’s absolutely worth your time.

Let’s take a look at the first story in Tony’s collection: The Feminist.

This rightfully went viral when it was published on n+1 several years ago. It’s an exceedingly clever and entertaining story about a young incel’s romantic failures, and ends with a temporal skip and a sudden acceleration into a mass-casualty event.

Taken on its own terms, The Feminist is an exceptional short story. It captures a sort of hyperconscientitious, submissive neurosis that describes a broad swath of progressive American men.

I can’t help feeling, though, that this cleverness was in some way compensatory: a form of intellectual avoidance; a way to circumvent the psychic meltdown at the core of the male mind caught in an ideological and emotional spiral.

See, what this story does not do is delve into the genuine thought processes of an angrier, more realistic depiction of someone on the path to actual radicalization. Because of the time skip, it jumps from garden-variety loneliness satire into the moments before a mass shooting.

That is to say, it ultimately only presents a caricature of radicalization rather than anything approaching real psychological verisimilitude on the subject.

And the reason the story doesn’t do this is because (a) Tony knows that he could never get a story like that published, and (b), more importantly, because Tony is scared.

I feel for the guy. I can’t imagine the type of shitshow that would ensue in his personal and professional life if he were to go full tilt in the artistic sense.

He’d probably lose everything: his job, his connections, his friends, his girlfriend.

“Scared artists never win. And that’s why everything sucks right now. Everyone’s scared.”
- Hadrian Belove

Now—I can’t prove that Tony is scared. All I have is a bunch of evidence suggesting that is the case.

Consider the ending of the book, a metafictional chapter where Tony counter-signals his collection, trying to pre-empt his own cancellation. It’s a clever device, and it’s worked for him in the utilitarian sense (he hasn’t been cancelled!). This chapter didn’t irritate me so much as it felt like a skeleton key for understanding the rest of the book.

It’s Pilate washing his hands before the crucifixion.

Motherfucker, YOU’RE the guy crucifying these characters!!! Washing your hands isn’t gonna do it, buddy!

Consider another story in the collection: Our dope future.

This is nominally a satire of self-absorbed tech-bro, but it’s a dull knife. It doesn’t cut anywhere close to the bone of a substantive critique of these guys. There’s so much interesting ground you could cover here:

• Palo Alto’s legacy of deep integration with the American military-industrial-university complex and its various crimes against humanity → problem: literary writers often can’t effectively question Liberal imperialism because they still buy into Liberalism writ large.

• The sublimation of white nationalism and manifest destiny into militarized techno-accelerationist nationalism in the valley, supercharged by Sinophobia → problem: most Asian-American male literary figures find it impossible to advocate for their interests as this is seen as declassé or tankie-ism. Fundamentally, they’re embarrassed to be Chinese, Korean, etc.

• WMAF-culture in Silicon Valley, particularly its uncomfortable interface with Sinophobia and American imperialism in the setting of the valley. Orthogonal to that: predatory dynamics where certain VC’s prey on young gay men → problem: it’s almost impossible to write about the WMAF-question as an Asian-American male without being perceived as petty; it’s equally hard for a straight man to write about male-on-male predation for different reasons.

• American hegemony and Silicon Valley’s obsession with a suicide race toward AGI → problem: literary figures tend to navel-gaze and over-index on events in the literary or cultural spheres and miss important macro-trends in geopolitics.

None of that gets touched, and I think it’s because it just felt too risky.

All we get is the thinnest possible caricature of a techbro that isn’t particularly funny.

We can do better than this!

We should do better than this!

In which a faceless coward lectures you on artistic courage

A lot of you guys are going to rightfully call me out on not practicing what I preach.

I completely agree: I’m literally the last person who should be talking about artistic courage.

The thing is, that doesn’t make me wrong.

1. While the threat model I just described is certainly more true for political writers than it is of artistic figures, these two categories have a lot of overlap, and the boundaries are not so clear.