morality dysmorphia
bodily dysmorphic disorder (not to be confused with dysphoria, a different experience) is the mental condition of feeling detached and uncomfortable with one’s body out of a misperception of its actual shape and size. e.g., if i was to believe wholeheartedly that i am fat, when i am actually, objectively underweight.
The Conversation On Twitter today is an old one. What’s the ethical line for an author, stealing material from real life events in the atmosphere of the writer’s life that do not take place in the writer’s own experience? what is the purpose of fiction? why do we read and write fiction, anyway? is all fiction autofiction, is nonfiction a form of fiction… the conversation spirals out from here in unending loops, repeating drunken rants of MFA cohorts eternally throughout the ages.
Kaitlyn Greenidge, writer and editor, tweeted this in response to Today’s Discourse about the Slate piece about Cat Person (I’m not linking, go find it yourself), and I think this is the real issue:
But I would love a discussion about what fiction can do and why we read it–specifically fiction about abuse or oppression. The desire for a base, reductive morality in fiction is clouding what the art is actually designed for.
I think that it’s simplistic but not incorrect to say that we read fiction to experience proportionality in relation to our own lives. This is: I read fiction to feel less alone (to recognize my emotions and experiences in someone else and have them normalized). This is: I read fiction for escapism (to recognize that my circumstances are boring/hard/miserable and feel better about either what’s possible or that my life isn’t as bad as x). It’s a way of orienting our own experiences through narrative.
This is why fiction sometimes elicits the joke of “stop reading my diary goddammit!” from me: my personal experiences are particular and individual but they are not unique. There is no true originality, all stories come from some mass of repeated narrative that is collectively experienced. Jung, universality, whatever be damned, but most people have experienced the same things as some other people at some point in their lives and this is why the more specific a nonfiction writer is, the more it will resonate with readers. We’ll recognize it.
But my thoughts on this discussion, about what’s ethical to recycle from real life into fiction, and what’s ethical in fiction re: fucked up narrators or characters, arise out of my understanding of my upbringing in complicity with white supremacy and empire and colonialism. Stay with me.
When I joined Peace Corps, I thought I was divesting from the traditions of Christian missionary work that had squicked me out all my life. I thought that we weren’t forcing an agenda on the people we were working with, because we were invited. This, of course, was ridiculously naive and I’ve learned so much since then about globalism and empire and and and. But the thing that stood out to me about my peers was that they not only didn’t appear to have thought that element through, but they seemed to be seeking a kind of validation that they were good people by participating in this process. Like the missions trips my youth group friends had gone on, the act of “service” seemed to be designed to reassure privileged individuals that we were, actually, morally upstanding and good people. I quickly realized what I had gotten myself into, recognizing the repetition of attitudes and gestures from the missions talk and imagery of Beforetimes, but didn’t quit (complicated reasons) and spent the two years that followed butting heads with my peers about projects and methodology, almost always coming back to a conflict of my certainty that what we were doing was not only not a moral good but also not particularly helpful to the communities we were enbedded within vs their emotional, intuitive knowledge that this was true but their deep emotional need to continue to believe that it wasn’t so they didn’t have to look at their own motives and actions too closely. They were, most of them, desperate to believe that they were good people.
This is a tool of whiteness (and Christian supremacy, but mostly whiteness). White womanhood is complicit in evil but designed to feign ignorance about what privileges and power that status allows one to wield. The cry of dismay when injustice is undeniable to a white woman of “oh I had no idea, how awful” is a necessary traditional form of performance art to maintain plausible deniability, in order to still believe that one is morally pure even when one is absolutely participating in a system of oppression. (This is where the term “white fragility” stems from, btw.) If we look too closely at ourselves and realize that our primary identifying characteristic is not, in fact, “I am a good person,” we are forced to find an identity outside of white supremacy and dismantle a million assumptions that have been instilled in us since childhood.
The only reason I am aware of this is that I had to utterly dismantle everything I believed from the age of 21 onward, starting from scratch. If I had not been forced to rebuild my sense of self and my undersanding of the world from a razed earth experience, I’d be slow to figure this out, I think. I’d probably still be clinging to the idea that I am good, that I can be good, etc. I fucking mean well, but I’m not “good.” There’s no such thing as moral purity, thank god. (How boring!)
The writing world, it would appear, is in need of a similar reality check to the one I experienced. We cannot pretend we have the moral high ground, that writing is done to Better The World. It’s self-serving, and reading is self-serving, and we all want to feel less alone and escape and hear our emotions repeated back to us in elevated form. That’s not morally good or bad. It’s just human. But to pretend that writing can be a Purely Good Ethical Act is naive. (YES WE SHOULD BE CAREFUL AND INTEND WELL AND BE AWARE OF IMPACT AND BE CAUTIOUS, I’m not saying that.)
I wanna call this impulse to believe we are Good to the detriment of actually knowing ourselves “morality dysmorphia.” It causes harm to ourselves and to others and, like diet culture, is a lie designed to keep people busy hating themselves or investing in bullshit causes to distract from real systems of oppression and harm (it was capitalism all along, kids!).
If we can divest of the need to be morally pure while striving to do no harm and to know ourselves, I think we’ve got a chance of making good art. But centering one’s identity in Being A Good Person is a surefire way to run roughshod over the people around you, because you have to turn a blind eye to your own impact in order to believe that fairytale.
Besides, your characters will be more relatable and interesting if they’re not cosplaying as Good People, too. (Unless that’s the point, in which case, YES PLEASE.)
/// if you liked this and wanna help me stay afloat, my venmo is @haettinger. xo!