#Suzanne seems to love human nature within the novels and just she always writes characters that

[spideyhexx]

YES yeah you’re right sympathize was the wrong word you get me kit

ofc <3

[lligkv]

In a scene early in Susan Choi's novel My Education,* two grad students are talking about a protest against an elderly male professor for the racism in his latest book.

"They were chanting 'Joseph Conrad, Joseph Conrad!' I evoked, splashing beer as I mimed a hand waving a sign. 'Because, you know, of Conrad's Colonialist Agenda. So we're going to have an emergency meeting to decide if we should boycott his class, or stay and try to subvert it somehow from within."

"Can I ask a really idiotic question?" Dutra said, in a tone that suggested his question would reveal that all idiocy lay elsewhere. "With these people, is that name, Joseph Conrad, supposed to be an insult?"

"Well, yes!--obviously... I don't think they're talking about his writing so much as his politics. And the way his discourse perpetuates the status quo. The inequities in power between whites, who control the discourse, and nonwhites, who are controlled by it--"

"Who cares about his politics?" said Dutra, swinging out of the hammock... "Do you like his books or don't you?"

"Whose?"

"Joseph Conrad's."

Here was a question I hadn't expected. "I've only read Heart of Darkness but...I liked it," I acceded at last...

"Do you like the other guy's books?"

"Whose? My professor's?"

"Exactly."

"I've never read them." Strike three.

Dutra burst out hysterically laughing. "No wonder you're confused!" he exclaimed, in the exaggeratedly bemused, tenderly condescending manner I'd already learned was his method of shifting the mood... "You don't have any empirical evidence..."

It reminded me of something I'd read about a recent controversy in the Romance Writers of America over the novel At Love's Command. accused of glorifying a protagonist who participated in the massacre of Sioux people at Wounded Knee. Specifically, comments by the president of PEN America, Suzanne Nossel, about proportionality: "When the accountability is driven by a firestorm on social media, the notion of proportionality goes out the window because nothing short of a complete repudiation is going to satisfy an audience from afar that's really not immersed in the facts and can't really assess motives. It can mean a default to the most draconian outcome."

The facts of a situation and the motives of an artist being criticized are key ways to distinguish what harm may have been done and what restitution may be necessary. They're not the sum total of the case--but they do sometimes fall by the wayside in these sorts of controversies, at least in the way they're most often covered by outlets like the New York Times. The primary focus is so often trained on the other relevant aspect of these cases, which is the harm that can be done by representations of atrocity and those who are allied with atrocity--which so often isn't quantified as clearly as it could be. (In the case of At Love's Command, for instance, the harm that could be said to have been done is: 1) the book attempts to empathize with someone who participated in a racist atrocity, and 2) it does this in a cultural context in which authors of color are systemically disadvantaged--not given as many opportunities to publish or considered in equal proportion to White peers as having the merit granted their White peers--with representation for their stories reduced as a result, so 3) it should not be celebrated; it's taking an award that could have gone to an author of color, and perhaps should have, given the fact that the award it received was named for Vivian Stephens, a Black woman who cofounded the Romance Writers of America.) Add to this virality--how easy it is to see these conflicts as they emerge and weigh in--and particular facts of a situation and evaluations of potential motives of the participants become even more distant...

I've often thought of the controversies around representation in, say, romance or young adult literature as live looks at a cultural pendulum as it swings--which is something we ought to be patient with. A landscape of what we're willing to endorse and permit is changing, in tectonic ways. We ought to give the new earth some time to settle before we begin to walk it. And many of the onlookers who deride "cancel culture" don't seem to have the patience to understand in good faith why the people who are upset at a book like At Love's Command receiving awards or honors are reacting this way. But the arguable over-the-topness that the complaints can take on when the nature of the harm that's alleged isn't spelled out--and the facts of a situation aren't widely known by all who amplify the complaint, and the motives of an artist aren't always done justice in the complaint--isn't any more helpful... To represent the interiority of a person who commits an atrocity isn't to endorse what that person does; a character's actions or opinions aren't an author's: these are truisms basic to the creation and appreciation of art. And the seeming refusal to acknowledge them in cases like the At Love's Command--so that we can focus on the practical argument about representation and artistic honors and who's getting them that, to my mind, has the most merit--gives the hostile and the ignorant all the ammunition they need to shoot all such complaints down, as "hysteria," before they've even had any impact.

In the meantime, I appreciate the measured response of the author of At Love's Command, Karen Witemeyer, who "said in an email that she did not agree with the group’s decision to rescind the award but said, 'I understand why they felt compelled to take such action, and I harbor no resentment toward them.'" The statement's a bit crisp, and you could read some passive aggression in it. But taking it charitably, Witemeyer seems to grasp what so often falls by the wayside for people injured by accusations they've caused harm, which they cannot understand or bring themselves to agree with: there is a gap between the artist's intention and the art's effect; no artist can be in perfect control of the ways their work will be received, and no artist is immune from the social spirit of the times in which they're producing their work. Sometimes you've just got to accept what happens to that work. All the paratextual stuff--how it's received, how you're thought of as a result--is secondary to it, and much of it is beyond your control.

This is all pretty "basic." But the way these conversations happen online, it's hard to approach anything resembling a first principle. Every so often I want to sit down and figure out something that might interrupt the endless cycle of this same conflict bubbling up and fizzing out before we move to its next instantiation.

A little bit of patience is called for, from everyone involved, and a little bit of grace. And an expansion of the landscape of literature, where outcry over a book like At Love's Command seems to me to encode a belief that this landscape is zero sum--that any depiction of a participant in a racist system will take away literary territory that ought to belong to the victims of that system. Those who participate in atrocious systems, even gleefully, are also part of the human fabric, and it's not always glorifying them to depict their consciousnesses at work, or to celebrate such a depiction for what it reveals about our collective condition. What's more, how much does an award matter anyway? Granted awards say something about what the culture values--but they're snapshots of the values of a moment; for every celebrated text that stays in a "canon," there are tens or more that are discarded... And there are other ways to make a case for literary value than protesting a particular moment it isn't given. Just find more ways to talk about the books you love. As someone who works in publishing, I can say publishers are listening. (Though, you know, grain of salt here: publishing's desires to capitalize on trends are (obviously) cynical; if you want to be taken up by that establishment, you'll likely find it's not what you wanted it to be.) And beyond what publishers or literary establishments do or don't do, the love you have for a book in its moment is really all you've got. No future's guaranteed for any text.

I also think, there has to be some better way of adjudicating this than "give an award" -> "experience outcry by constituents" -> "rescind the honor given." The mechanics of popularity or brand management are at work there, rather than an organization's sincere engagement with the complaint being made, the elaboration of a principled stance for its response and the taking of action according to that stance, or the desire for true resolution or restitution on either side.

*It's somewhat ironic that I'm using My Education as my decorative lead-in for this little post about ethics in artistic representation. The stories of both the male protagonists in that novel--including Dutra--involve unproven allegations of sexual harassment, in a way that probably wouldn't fly in a novel published today as opposed to 2013. I'll admit I was expecting Choi to do more with the accusations than treat them, essentially, as ways to give those characters a bit of spice, a frisson of danger. And a barrier to loving them that only a woman like her protagonist, Regina, is brave enough to surmount.