Against Didactic Fiction
This picture has nothing to do with what I wanted to talk about. But I thought that if I started with text, then maybe I'd already lose a bunch of readers? So I'm hoping you'll like the picture -- I took it the other day on one of the various walks I have been doing to preserve (if that's the word) my sanity during this endless pandemic.
Regardless, up until the past few years I hadn't been reading a lot of fiction for reasons that aren't very clear to me. But I've now come to it. A year ago or so, I started reading a book that I heard had made a bit of a splash in Germany after the large wave of refugees had arrived in 2015. This sounded interesting, and I was curious how it had been dealt with in literature. All was well in the book until there was a passage that threw me off so much that I was wondering what was going on. At some stage in the book, the narrator changed voices completely and in the clumsiest and most obvious fashion explained something to, it seemed to me, make sure that everybody understood that she was on the right side of how to view things.
Everything about this bothered me. It's not that I want people to misunderstand the world or to come to the wrong conclusions, even as I realize that people are completely entitled to that. But it would seem to be a novelist's possibly worst decision to try to make sure that people understand her (or him) in that one way that she (or he) thinks things need to be understood. Why write fiction when you want to limit your reader's understanding this way? You might as well write non-fiction, right?
Just a little while ago, I had the same experience with a different book, a book that has been widely lauded in the US and that employs a small array of narrators, using the perspective of the two main characters as well as the book's itself (the latter device is done slightly clumsily). Just like in the case of the German book, a number of didactic sections slipped in, such as when, for example, when the world is described through the eyes of one of the characters, a 13 year old boy. Suddenly there's a huge shift, and the teenager analyzes an aspect of the world as if he were a New York Times op-ed writer, to then go back to being his immature normal self. As in the German case, there's a huge rupture in the narration, and the author's attempt to signal her virtue, trying to make sure that people understand that she sees social issues in the right fashion, is all you can think of.
This is something I have been thinking about in the world of photography as well. If you create something, you are possibly faced with the conundrum that some members of your audience will not see things the way you do. In fact, some of them might come to the wrong conclusions -- "wrong" here meaning: conclusions other than the ones you intended. Ignoring the world of documentary photography or photojournalism, where this can be an obvious and important problem, in general my advice for photographers is: don't try to shoehorn your audience towards that one conclusion that you think they need to come to. It's not the right approach.
The obvious risk is that someone will come to the wrong conclusions, or they will see something in your work that you either didn't see or don't want (them) to see. But that's the terrifying beauty of art making, isn't it? After all, art lives from the fact that it combines two senses of openness: the author's and the audience's (which in the latter case focuses on each member of that audience). That interplay between two sides is what makes art potent, what makes art what it is: art. The moment you remove it, whatever you arrive at isn't art any longer. I don't know what you want to call it, but it's not art. Or rather it's art in the sense of, let's say, public art (you know what I'm talking about) or agit prop, or something else.
The reality is that if as an artist you don't want your audience to learn anything (how can they if your art piece has more in common with an instruction manual than a riddle?), how are you going to learn anything? This is possibly the most important reason why I always caution photographers against being didactic. If you're teaching, being didactic is important. But as an artist, you're not a teacher. You can't assume that you know more than your audience. In fact, you don't want to assume that. Instead, you want to place yourself into your audience's midst and experience the world with them (but not in the didactic way I outlined above).
This is what had me stop reading those two novels. It's not that I disagreed with the politics that was so clumsily inserted into them. It was because I had decided to read fiction to (in some ways) test or challenge what I believe in. That, for me, is the role of the novel as much as that of any piece of art: I want it to challenge me, to test me, to make me feel that somehow I need to figure out yet again where I stand and who I am. This has to happen without a safety net. If there's a safety net, the exercise is pointless, and as a reader/viewer, I am being made part of an author's or photographer's virtue signalling. That can't be the role of art.
Just to make this clear: above, I'm not talking about art whose end result might be didactic. But I'm opposed to art that uses flat, didactic devices to try to achieve that end.
Unrelated, you might have heard that a school board in Tennessee decided to remove Maus from its curriculum for students (if you hadn't heard, yet, now you have). This is in line with similar moves in a lot of so-called "red" states, states governed by the increasingly authoritarian Republican Party, to remove anything that does not conform to a neatly sanitized version of US history (that obviously centers only on white people). Jeet Heer writes
The removal of Maus from the curriculum shows us the true face of censorship in a concerted effort to avoid painful historical realities like the Holocaust. Not surprisingly, it comes at the same time as the anti-CRT moral panic which is encouraging the banning of books about slavery and racism. Over the last year, there’s been an upsurge in books being challenged in schools and libraries in the United States, with graphic novels and books about LGBTQ people and people of color being particularly likely to be targeted.
These are deeply troubling times.
Thank you for reading!
-- Jörg