politics vs aesthetics: the ultimate showdown

My book comes out in less than three weeks, so naturally I’m obsessing about what I wrote and whether I could have been clearer. At several points I bring up the relationship between politics and aesthetics, and early on I state something like “politics are often inextricable from aesthetics.”¹ I want to go into more detail about what I mean, because it’s a tricky topic, and because the people who love fiction for its beauty, and the people who love fiction for its power, are often at odds over what I think is rarely a meaningful difference.

An example: let’s say I read a novel and I think the women characters are flat and poorly-written. I can express my critique in a number of ways:

1. “Some of the characters in this book are flat and poorly-written.”

2. “The women in this book are flat and poorly-written.”

3. “This book is misogynist.”

All three statements make effectively the same argument. The first, however, is usually perceived as an aesthetic complaint—I dislike the writing because it’s bad—while the second shades into a political complaint and the third is definitely perceived as political.² But the first statement—the supposed purely aesthetic one—is also a statement of a political idea: that women are human beings, and ought to be rendered in literature as full human beings, just like men; in fact it’s so important that everybody is treated as human that I don’t need to specify which characters in the novel were badly written. I might avoid specifying “women” in my argument because I don’t want to be accused of bringing up politics (ew!), or because I don’t think it should have to be a discussion. Women’s humanity shouldn’t be political, it shouldn’t be a spicy take: it should just be an apolitical truth that everybody accepts forever and never questions again. I fully believe this. I also believe that we should stop climate change, and that I should have a pet dragon.³

The myth of the “apolitical” is often invoked in defense of pure aesthetic criticism: the “apolitical” is really the status quo, or the portions of reality which are held to be exempt from politics because there’s no current debate over them. “Current” is very important here: it’s why work that is perceived as apolitical at the time of its writing ends up being highly political—and dated—decades later. A lot of what we accept as apolitical facts of life are, in fact, highly debatable. (And not just progressive ideas, but queasy reactionary ones too). Nothing is ever really settled.

But okay, let’s consider aesthetics purely as a matter of style, and not content (the one’s not really divorceable from the other, but bear with me.) Surely a book might be aesthetically interesting, and aesthetically worthy, even if it fails to render all of its characters as human beings. Maybe the above-imagined novelist still describes his undeveloped women characters in lovely language. Beauty too is a choice, and a meaningful one. All elements of writing are a choice. Every word is a choice.

And—sorry, I know this is an annoying thing to say—choices are not made in the absence of politics. For example, T.S. Eliot choosing to open The Waste Land with a double quotation in Greek and Latin—the Greek in Greek characters and not transliterated, no less—is an obvious statement about his expected and preferred reader. It’s indicative of what kind of people he finds interesting and worth addressing; that is, it gives insight into his politics. On the other end, a declared Marxist like Sally Rooney writes novels in deceptively plain language, so that they end up being readable by a mass audience (and some critics think they’re more akin to artless “chick lit” than real literature, partly because so many normal working women like them). These are two easy examples of writers with known political affiliations; still, you could probably read a political stance into any writer’s style, if you stared at it hard enough.

But this is also where we wind up in the cul-de-sac of so much contemporary criticism: if all art is political, and the purpose of art is to send a message, then isn’t style a mere affectation: why shouldn’t fiction send its message as plainly and obviously as possible, so that it can’t possibly be misinterpreted? Why have subtlety, or nuance; shouldn’t good characters just be good, and bad characters be bad, so we know who to emulate, and who to despise? Or—from this point of view—maybe the only reason to write beautifully and with subtlety and nuance is to convince readers of a writer’s political purposes: and therefore beautiful language is at worst suspicious and should be avoided, and is at best a useful tool to be wielded only for utilitarian purposes. These arguments are annoying, but they’re also narrow-minded. If the political is inextricable from the aesthetic, then the aesthetic is also inextricable from the political. Beauty might make its own arguments, assert its own right to exist. Characters in fiction ought to be fully developed because all human beings are human beings but also because stories are just better that way, and the betterment of art—the increasing power and beauty of fiction—is a meaningful end in itself.

Or at least, I try to conclude the book by making this sort of argument. We’ll see how well I did.

1. Am I going to crack the pages to find the exact quote? Not a chance. Is that because I’m scared, or because I’m lazy? The one is often inextricable from the other.

2. Not only is “this book is misogynist” perceived as a political statement, it’s perceived as a definitionally unaesthetic one. The immediate defense—including from those who haven’t read the book in question—is usually “well maybe the misogyny was the point.” And maybe, depending on the situation, it was. But even then, choosing to render women in misogynist ways to make a point about the patriarchy or whatever might be done inartfully—that is, poorly, stupidly, badly. “This book is misogynist” is still an aesthetic critique; it’s just more obviously a political one.

3. I would be a VERY good dragon parent. This is a political statement about how I don’t care if my neighbors’ houses get burned down, and an aesthetic statement about how dragons rule.