Lionel Shriver, Fiction and Cultural Appropriation
Read Lionel Shriver’s original text here, then read one of the reactions here.
In general I take the point of Shriver is that writing from other people’s perspective is the bread and butter of fiction writing, and reading other people’s perspectives is to empathize and to understand such perspectives, rather than to ignore or to trivialize. And not all cases of a white author writing from the perspective of a marginalized group is cultural appropriation. The bad ones are cultural appropriation, the good ones are not. People should not generalize but judge each case on merit.
Now I don’t disagree with that, but I disagree with Shriver’s position that fictional writing should be put on the pedestal, as a device to further our understanding of other people’s experiences. I think people SHOULD NOT READ fiction to understand other people’s experiences and perspectives, because fiction is, by definition, not the truth. Granted a lot of good fiction is based on lived experiences. Nonetheless when it is presented in a fictional story, fact and fiction got so mixed up there is a clear danger in mistaking fiction from reality.
For example, if I read a piece of fiction depicting the sexual slavery in ancient Rome, which information I gleaned comes from actual, historical suffering and which is fictional that is the whims of the author? We should care about actual suffering, not hypothetical suffering, and fictional writing, by definition, blurs the line between the real and unreal. Therefore some of our sympathies and understanding to the slaves’ plight may be completely misguided.
Journalism, or good journalism, performs the role Shriver prescribed to fiction, but without (or with less) danger of misguided understanding. Take the reporting of one particular Syrian refugee crossing into Europe. Take the reporting of the difficulty of rape victims to be taken seriously. We can understand and empathize with the subjects of these reports. We can be outraged by the injustice. We can do all that without worrying (or worry less) about the veracity of these stories and misdirecting our outrage or sympathies because these reports purport to be about real subjects, not fictional subjects (however life-like fictional writers make them to be).
In short, my point is that using fiction to expand our understanding runs the danger of being divorced from reality. Instead we should use real people’s real testimony of their experiences to expand our understanding.
Originally published at fashionablyquestionable.com.
