..may wrestle with this conundrum:
1. omitting marginalised voices, so centering those of privilege, is wrong
2, there’s many marginalised voices that we can’t write, even fictionally, and it’s wrong to try
What a pretty pass! What a bind we’re in!
Of course, I’m not complaining about this difficulty, not resentful of it, not robbed by it or suffering from it, nor would I afford myself or others in this plight an iota of sympathy. Rather, I’m sick at those of similar status and inheritance in our travesty of a civilisation who seem actually to feel, by a feat of incredible self-centredness that takes centuries-worth of privilege and doubles down on it, hard done by.
The little issue summarised above is well-earned, and it is nothing. If we didn’t want to end up here, well we shouldn’t have built, over centuries, a monumentally fucked up, piratical, genocidal, unfathomably destructive juggernaut of an anti-civilisation, its nervous system a tangle of varied and compounding modes of oppression. We did do this, though.*
Here we are, towards the end of this bleak chapter in human affairs, with the edifice of our civilisation crumbling at the edges, renaming this and that institution in hasty sanitisation (we don’t say ‘empire’ anymore), and the crumbling is nothing but justice. We’re only towards the end because by and large we still reap the benefits, hold the stolen land, slot easily into the positions in this flagging society that are the most comfortable and most secure.
We painted ourselves into this corner, and as a comeuppance, having bother writing fiction is negligible, a feather-light burden, far less than what we honestly deserve. If we’re looking at a blank page and immobilised by our heritage, we’re barely, just barely, encountering the flaw for the first time – that such systems of appalling privilege don’t (and shouldn’t) last.
We built an empire founded on every form of oppression that could possibly be written in – on slavery & racist oppression, on patriarchal, sex-and-gender-based oppression, on ableist oppression, even, down the list, oppressions of class tied up with all of the former. If struck mute by the position we find ourselves in, we’re paying an inconsequential price, one that falls far short of even beginning to touch our culture’s heinous crimes.
And it’s a further shame, an indication we haven’t begun to understand, to whatever extent that’s possible for us, if any of us indulges in even a moment’s self-pity or churlish backlash.
If we’re stymied, well, we should be. If it forces us into silence, well that’s what should happen. Maybe if we’re optimistic, this ‘problem’ is a small correction that’s working circumstantially: the condition we find ourselves in, which may produce momentary discomfiture, is a symptom of social mending, of wrongs righting themselves. If we’re very optimistic.
So, having set out what ails us, does the conundrum I began with (and which I haven’t seen articulated often elsewhere), mean we can’t or shouldn’t write at all?
A first response is that the less we write the better – we ought anyway to stand aside and make way for other writers of fiction who aren’t so crippled by being implicated in past and present wrongs. A failure to put pen to paper coincides neatly with what we ought not do anyway.
But what matters most is not so much writing but publishing, and in particular, where people publish. People will write, not quite involuntarily, and often badly. For many of us (and this response to gross comments from author Lionel Shriver today is an instance) it’s a compulsion, regardless of quality. But having written, what then? I can post this and other efforts to a blog, or to social media, I haven’t much chance beyond. But if or when I do, if I publish in journals, deliver papers at conferences, or aim to properly published fiction, it becomes more than posting into the extant near-infinite void of text noise, and starts taking up space, to the exclusion of other works. It’s not necessarily an all or nothing proposition, whether to try to be published, it shouldn’t be far from our minds that it matters how we go about it. The smallest of concessions to advantage to ensure that we don’t publish where that advantage is most egregious – instead seeking out a fairer chance of being knocked back.
A third consideration is that in the course of writing, compulsively or painstakingly, people will try to write try to their way out of difficulties, whether it’s this terribly trying conundrum of the legitimate voice, or an environment in which free expression brings with it real risk of harm. Admittedly , this comes about more often because people are oppressed than oppressor. But perhaps some of the devices used in those instances, when writing and disseminating words is properly dangerous, can be repurposed for less noble ends.
One such tool is allegory. A brilliant but savage exponent of this mode of fiction was Jonathon Swift, who was Irish, and so marginalised, but a pale man of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and so not marginalised in all the ways. Swift deserves extra credit for early and acerbic harangues against the rationale of the emergent Enlightenment, which despite his efforts went on to provide much of the justification for Western supremacy down to the present day.
In Swift’s great fictional, allegorical work Gulliver’s Travels, a privileged Englishman is shipwrecked, and so loses his place in Society. Instead he finds himself cast upon the tide, obliged to make the best, from native wit , of the improbable societies and peoples he finds. The first of these is a race of tiny, but self-possessed people, then a race of giants next to whom he is diminutive in the extreme, so taken for a toy, then others. It’s worth noting In each case, he sustains high expectation of decent treatment, and behaves very much as though any subjugation or disrespect is grounded in misunderstanding.
Tools such as allegory hint at a possible way out, and that’s to write those characters we are entitled to give voice to, but in such a way as to contribute to undermining the privilege of characters and ourselves to the extent both hail from the oppressor class. Let it be said, though, that this is tricky, because it runs a double risk. Allegory works because it depicts a situation something like reality, but not it. However, it only works if the situation is recognisable, with commonality as point of comparison. And in drawing a comparison to make a point, we might again overstep in placing ourselves in the minds of marginalised, or paint a picture of a world in which none of this exists – risking erasure. In writing from the vantage of the oppressor, we risk duplicating conditions here, in writing those of the oppressed of some other world, we again find ourselves attempting to inhabit the experience of those we, in our world can’t rightly understand and may misappropriate, even in terms of generalities.
Still, fiction that is allegorical or otherwise set at distant worlds, does escape the problems of trying to write to the particulars of other cultures and subcultures, the specifics of marginalised experience. Perhaps the surest hand I’ve seen engaged in this is Ursula K. Le Guin’s, in particular in the short story, The ones who walk away from Omelas.
What Swift does is vitriolic, ugly, hyperbolic denigration of privileged subjects, pen dripping with poison. Ursula K. Le Guin manages a depiction of the sickness of an oppressive society in a relatively dispassionate voice. The narrator’s vantage is from no strata of the society described – it’s that of onlooker, not omniscient (‘I do not know the rules and laws of their society’), as though at our world a window has opened up on another, and so no voice is directly assumed.
Le Guin exemplifies one approach to writing about oppressor consciousness (I suppose I’m trying the same with another) in such a way that it’s not bolstered, perpetuated or excused. If we’re not empowered by it, but instead, even incrementally, brought down, then we’ve found a way to write while only minimally transgressing the just mores of this time, hopefully without working against the constructive project, for the most part best left to others, of collapsing the system our culture wrought.
This all comes with a caveat. Naturally, it’s part and parcel of being steeped in oppressor consciousness that I’ll most likely get this wrong, at least most of the time. Well, though, that’s for others to judge.
It’s commonly understood now that we ought to punch down, not up, in enuncing, writing or performing any sort of critique, seriously or otherwise. No argument here. With this in mind, in fact, there might be hope. If we can manage to perform the tricky manoeuvre whereby we punch up but land ourselves a smack, it could be we have a fighting chance of double-sidestepping the curse: a confusing set of feints, managing against the odds to righteously lay ourselves out.
At the tail end of Gulliver’s Travels – a work that has itself been sanitised in treatments in the last century and this to diminish its heterodox elements – Gulliver returns home from his travels. He has weathered by this point the relatively harmless and so better known ignominies of relative scale in Lilliput and Brobdingnag. But he has also been subjected to the temporary diminution of his status as an erudite, well-travelled Englishman, by stints in Laputa, a floating island populated by overly-rational scientists, and in the land of the Houyhnhnms. The Houyhnhnms are horse-like beings who subjugate a group of animalistic humans, called the Yahoos, as their beasts of burden.
Gulliver has become accustomed to the natural order in the Houyhnhnms’ country by his time there. So when he returns home – to his own family – he has inherited a sense of equine hierarchy and disdain. At this point he, up to now an increasingly humbled narrator, suddenly becomes appalling. He cannot stomach cohabiting or even mingling with his wife and children. Here is a taste of his abruptly acquired bigotry:
‘I began last week to permit my wife to sit at dinner with me, at the farthest end of a long table; and to answer (but with the utmost brevity) the few questions I asked her. Yet, the smell of a Yahoo continuing very offensive, I always keep my nose well stopped with rue, lavender, or tobacco leaves. And, although it be hard for a man late in life to remove old habits, I am not altogether out of hopes, in some time, to suffer a neighbour Yahoo in my company, without the apprehensions I am yet under of his teeth or his claws.’
This hyperbole is – I think – ridiculous enough to lampoon prejudices of class and misogyny via portrayal of an insensate narcissist. With the preposterous image it conjures, and the sentiment of ferocious misanthropy it’s a test case in whether any man should ever take this turn. The response of the enlightened Englishman, Gulliver, to all of the indignities he experiences in the various lands he visits has been at once to work to elevate himself, to return himself in those foreign environs to a status he feels is his by rights. Having attained a kind of special status with the Houyhnhnms, his difficulty returning home is not so much about alienation, but snobbery, the sense, more than ever, that others are beneath him. Yet he considers that he is a good Englishman still: making a charitable effort to endure his family, occluding their stench by taking the trouble to plug up his nostrils. It doesn’t occur to him that he is odious, but it certainly seems Swift’s intention, in treating his main character, in the final pages of the text, that the reader knows it.
If it seems I’ve tied myself in knots in getting to these conclusions, well that speaks not only to individual confusion, but to the trouble in which we’re mired here at the grotesque wrap party for empire. This is effectively a ‘what can we do’ piece for white people, and apart from the recommendation to stand aside, immediately falls into a category of self-indulgence. But that first thought – take it on the chin – led to others while considering the problem I started with as a valid and interesting constraint.
I think that Swift, whose pen cut through the hierarchies of his day by portraying privilege as relentlessly disgusting, and Le Guin, whose cool tone laid bare the Janus-face of the comfortable oppressor, show at least that there are ways of working less offensively within the historical moment. By these devices we might partially escape our self-made trap. And if, out of disgust, few ever read the resulting, tortured output, well then we’ll have succeeded in another way.
*I say ‘we’ a lot in this, which assumes collective culpability. Some might balk at this – it wasn’t me, or our generation, that stole continents, murdered and subjugated populations, devastated cultures and so on. The obvious response is that we still benefit as legatees of empire, and the day that’s not the case is the day we can start to sleep easier. There’s a further point to make here with respect to producing literature, though, which is along the lines that it’s very much cherry-picking heritage to ‘stand on the shoulders’ of others in availing ourselves of a literary tradition, while denying the imperial and colonial tradition that goes with it.
Some pieces follow about the remarks of Lionel Shriver, as a counter to what seems to be the much easier availability of pieces by Shriver, and on literary appropriation:
Suki Kim What Happened in Brisbane https://newrepublic.com/article/136815/happened-brisbane
Whose life is it anyway? Novelists have their say on cultural appropriation
Clayton Childress – Cultural appropriation and the whiteness of book publishing
https://theconversation.com/cultural-appropriation-and-the-whiteness-of-book-publishing-79095
K. Tempest Bradford – Commentary: cultural appropriation is in fact, indefensible