Dangerous Fictions

In fiction we set the parameters of reality… we imagine what can't be known. What we imagine—or, more specifically, what the publishing and film and TV and comic and video game development industry will fiscally allow to be perceived in the public sphere—separates what is taken to be reality and what must remain a dream.

The Greek word for imitative behavior is "mimesis," and most of the time, when we get anxious about the effects of fiction, we're worried about mimetic responses—not so much from ourselves but from other people.

Dropping the usefulness/uselessness framework restores us to the living purpose of fiction, which is for it to exist: for people to tell stories because they want to tell them. And it also puts artists in the same uncomfortable seat as everybody else; it's our job to save ourselves, and not to use art as a substitute for doing politics.

The quickest way to kill many grown-ups' interest in a work of art is to label it as healthy and useful, to turn it into another productive chore. And the quickest way to kill fiction more generally is to declare that it exists to make you a better person, to train you into shape.

I was supposed to write about my immediate sensory experiences, my social mistakes and my small depressions, to imagine nothing outside myself and my feelings. Our teachers (who were mostly white women, teaching classes mostly composed of young white women) encouraged us to write what we knew, and we were supposed to know as little as possible.

Fiction, even of the most "realistic" kind, represents what never happened, what isn't, but what maybe yet could be, in a different world than this. It's always moving in opposition to reality. All art is motion, and in motion. A good story goes in a direction that we were unable, previously, to see.

The problem, as Ghosh sees it, is that the parameters of reality demanded by the western novel—parameters that have been adopted worldwide, including in India, where he grew up—have always been deliberately, excessively narrow. At the birth of the western novel, the literary imagination was reconstructed around the idea of bourgeois stability and t

in the fascist imagination, there must be a victim to be protected and an invasive enemy on the attack: if young people are adopting beliefs in multiculturalism, gender fluidity, and socialism, then someone must be forcing these ideas on their innocence.

The absolute dominance of the market isn't solely an ideological problem: it's also a practical, material impediment to storytelling, including the kind of stories that might be dangerous in a good way, or at least aesthetically interesting and worth having around. All we have is what the market gives us; all the art we enjoy was determined at some