On the value of directionless imagination

The best fiction leads both its readers and its author astray

Relentlessly haunted by the fictional powers of advertisement and social media, no one knows what to believe anymore. People wish to be shown right from wrong, and since no one else will — not the influencers, not the politicians, not the big corporations —, the demand is that writers do. This overload of fiction, it’s been concluded, can only be countered by identifying the truth and telling it. And there is no better teller than the story-teller; only, from now on, let him be a truth-teller instead.

But how great a responsibility, how heavy a load this commitment to a pitilessly rational approach to life poses writers; how antithetical it is to literature, whose foremost virtue is lightness. Without lightness, or freedom from responsibility, Dostoevsky could not have relished the Grand Inquisitor’s damning words in the same breath as he mustered the calm certitude of Christ’s kiss; without Wonderland, Alice would only have this world to tread.

Such reliance on writers to point us in the right direction (and tendency to discredit them when they fail) is born out of deeply false assumptions. It assumes, first, that they know what the right way is. What’s more, it assumes that the right way is all they care to know. As it happens, writers have a history of showing terrible judgement; this hasn’t precluded them, however, from generating stories told and retold across generations and languages. If good conduct was really a prerequisite of literary genius, how could a womanising braggart prone to senseless fits of temper have managed to encapsulate the pain of loss so completely in only six words?

“Baby shoes: for sale. Never worn”.

The politics of Hemingway — like that of Hughes, Plath, and Shakespeare, Roth, Walker, Tolstoy, Pound and Woolf (and so on and so forth) — is far from impeccable. But sinless writers don’t always make for good writers. Good writers perform best not when following a straight path, as it were, but when going down a windy road and stumbling in all sorts of unforeseen dilemmas.

Not for nothing are so many of the stories we read and reread about losing one’s way, and realising that there is more than one, or about trudging in the dark, and resigning to uncertainty. We are bored by stories that never take a bend - in fact, when examining them in the frame of history, we are cautious of them as dogma. Forcing the writer to watch her step, or, worse, expecting that she should keep exclusively within familiar routes, is to commit the first exorcism of the literary imagination.

Today’s philistines, who hold the reins of the political consensus and infiltrate every aspect of culture, have posited that beauty lays right at the bottom of the scale of values, and that art should be shackled to the yoke of utility, the only meter through which to assess the world and the end which every human activity should tend towards. All that diverges from what matters - namely, reaching an equality for all people - is discarded as trivial, or as a distraction. More and more often, it is presented as a danger.

Let’s imagine we had written a story about the regrets of a man on the brink of death with extraordinary eloquence and an exquisite tenderness to human frailty. In the current climate, no matter how many hearts it had to speak to, or outlooks on life it had to change; it’d still be liable to charges of irrelevance for not being inclusive of the few. Works that would otherwise be widely celebrated for their immanence are exposed by publishers-backed activists to disparagement if not produced instrumentally, with inclusivity in view.

There is nothing surer to drive out a writer’s imaginative powers than editors paid to police his words, those squeamish despots known as sensitivity readers. But in taking matters in their own hands, writers of today only make matters worse: instead of gracefully relinquishing control upon writing “The End”, they find every way they can to exert their influence on what meaning should be taken away from their texts. Inevitably, point of view becomes bleary and poliphony is condensed by the ultra-prescriptive voice of the author in a single, shouty injunction.

Alice Albinia’s Cwen, an obscure novel I was assigned to review some time ago, frames minorities as invariably virtuous but oppressed, labels global warming as exclusively “MAN-made”, and proposes to disbar Shakespeare from the curriculum for having forgotten “to write good female parts”. Perhaps for fear of diverting attention from the serious question of how to live liberally in modern society, Albinia sacrifices humour and subtlety completely in favour of a nervous didacticism. And so do many popular authors: best-selling sensations Sally Rooney and Rupi Kaur are so disinclined to stray from the ideological path lay down for them that they write compilations of pretty banalities, packaged either in clever turns of phrases (Rooney) or accessory images (Kaur), very easily quoted, but not so easily questioned.

Painter and writer Primo Levi said somewhere that language is the mirror of historical conditions. Judging from Rooney’s symmetric syntax—not for nothing touted as “the voice of a generation”—, we have entered a deeply religious period similar to the 1930s in Italy. Just like then, political entities are given a status of sacredness aimed at providing people with a totalising life experience. The custodians of language, writers and artists, are bestowed with the role of pastors, responsible for shepherding the flock. But this again raises the common fallacy that mistakes rectitude, rigour, and incorruptibility, the qualities of the good shepherd, for literary genius.

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Anna Karenina is the story of a woman’s adultery. This comes at a price: 19th century Petersburg’s polite society recoils at too flashy expressions of individuality and conscience has a special way of spoiling even the most sweeping of passions. Anna's selfish actions and resulting decline into social ruin and madness intimate a cautionary tale. But what compels us to pick up the book time and time again is that Tolstoy’s tragic heroine is no depthless cheating whore archetype, flattened by the author’s crushing judgement: she is endlessly complex and completely likeable. Irreducible to the morally opportune, if Anna didn’t take all the wrong turns her resonance would be diminished.

Against all precautions, even Tolstoy succumbs to her spell - after carefully weaving her story over eight hundred page, a quick killing must be the least painful avenue; and so Anna’s suicide is skated over in a lip curled monologue from Countess Vronksy, whose sentence that Anna’s “death was the death of a bad woman, a woman without religion” we find woefully unconvicing. Anna Karenina lives, breathes, and comes alive in spite of the author, one of the most powerful instances of magic in literature.

Anna’s antithesis is Levin, a progressive country-owner whose path to spiritual enlightenment, reminiscent to some of Tolstoy’s own, forms the parallel to Anna’s plot-line. If Anna’s story teaches a moral lesson by negative example, Levin embodies a role model. But with some coaxing here and cajoling there, readers of Tolstoy will eventually come clean: not without first scanning the area for prying eyes, most will have at least once furtively skimmed through, or altogether skipped the bits on Levin to keep poring over Anna’s tale.

For all his moral rigour, Levin annoys us — in general, Mr. Nice Guy always has a hard time winning readers’ hearts. Rather, we are mesmerised by the tortured villain, whose erring we do not enjoy out of a form of sadism, but we share in ourselves. Anna moves us because she is us: like her, we are fallible and capable of moral ugliness. What already makes good literature inherently for everyone, is that it neither repudiates nor does it simply tolerate our ugliness; instead, it claims it for itself as a thing of beauty, and thus frees us from our shame.

That we could never come up with a theory of beauty proves that both the act of understanding it and the act of bringing it into being require a leap of the imagination. Right now, our freedom to imagine is threatened by pressure to live under an excess of circumscribed reality. But if we reduce ourselves to see by way of nothing else but our two eyes, how awfully restricted a vision of the world and other people we confine ourselves to. Without imagination, a daffodil is just a daffodil, ugly is just ugly, and different remains hopelessly different — if anything, we are more, and not less, at odds with other people than when we use it to try and penetrate the unremitting mystery of their, and therefore also our, existence. Let us, then, reconsider beauty for what it is: not a corrupting force, but a common experience for people across time and space that has no clear direction, and that is all the more enriching for it.