July 5, 2021
Do Writers Have Social Responsibility?
I don’t know; that’s the only honest answer to the question above. That’s also the reason why I phrased it as a question. Do writers have any social responsibility? I will try to get a bit closer to the truth during the process of composing this post. If it can help you, too, in some way, all the better.
As a first thing, we would need to lay down some important theoretical foundations. When we wonder whether writers have social responsibility, there are two elements we need to define or clarify:
- What do we mean by “writers”? Fiction writers? Nonfiction writers? Artists (who, remember, are not the same as writers)?
- What on earth is “social responsibility”?
Most misunderstandings arise from using the same word but meaning different things – think of “love” or “success” – so being as clear as possible about our definitions is important. So, I’ll begin with trying to clarify these terms in my own head first, and then I’ll try to see how (if at all) they play ball together.
Defining “Writers” and “Social Responsibility”
Obviously, a “writer” is someone who composes texts – from a mindless tweet to stunning novels of timeless beauty. But this broad definition isn’t too useful for our purposes. When we talk about writers and social responsibility (which we haven’t defined yet, I know), we ought to be talking about authors of fiction. The responsibility of e.g. journalists in terms of not spreading fake news or unintended misinformation is another matter, outside the scope of this post.
To be honest with you – and myself – the reason I approach the matter from this perspective is because I already have an idea of how to define social responsibility: It would be the responsibility of an author (of fiction) to produce artistic work that is inspiring, enlightening, offering a catalyst for betterment – individual and (consequently) social as well.
To use an example, when we think of the contributions of such authors as Sophocles, Shakespeare, or Lord Byron to humankind, these contributions are not solely literary. In other words, through their works, society has become cumulatively better. By reading such authors, we have a better understanding of timeless issues pertaining to life, relationships, societies themselves, and overall the human experience.
So, How Responsible Is an Author for Their Work?
There is an interesting paradox at the heart of each work of fiction: Meaning is not a prerogative of its author. You can have a work giving birth to a multitude of meanings – indeed, my poem shuffler revealed this very fact – that depend on the audience.
Can we, then, speak of writers and social responsibility when a writer doesn’t even control their own text?
I think we can, and I think the answer might indeed lie in the paradox itself: A writer’s social responsibility is to produce work that is interpretatively flexible. In other words, authors have a responsibility to do their utmost to produce poems and novels that are as independent as possible in terms of meaning.
The ideal such work I can think off the top of my head would be Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino. To put it simply, this “novel” is likely really close to having no meaning of its own, delegating full interpretative authority to its readers.
Yeah, that wasn’t “putting it simply”; let’s try again.
The less inflexible you are with your story, the more your readers will be forced to exercise their imagination and creativity. This, in turn, teaches people how to read.
Putting all elements together, embracing your writer’s social responsibility is to produce works that are interpretatively fluid, symbolic, and open-ended, because this way you help produce better thinkers. Your authorial IQ can produce better reader IQ.
Do Writers Have Social Responsibility?
Yes, the concluding section of this post features the same title as the whole post. This is once more to underline the fact that I’m thinking aloud here. Despite my apparent certainty in the section above, the answer remains: I’m not sure.
The problem isn’t so much about the method which, I am convinced, is solid: Writing interpretatively flexible narratives does produce better thinkers. But I’m having my doubts regarding the “social responsibility” part. In other words, I’m not sure it’s my (or any writer’s) social responsibility to do such a thing.
I write because I feel like it. I write because works such as The Perfect Gray or Illiterary Fiction needed to be written. In the end, I simply don’t care about society. Each one of us has their own journey to undertake, their own conclusions to draw.
I’m happy when people read my books (or this blog) and can find them meaningful of useful. But I don’t see it as my responsibility. Writers don’t have social responsibility. Their only responsibility is toward the art.
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I hate the concept of ‘responsibility’, just as I hate the concepts of ‘duty’ and ‘patriotism’. To quote from my memoir: “For me, the word ‘duty’ means that I had to obey, not because of a commitment I had made previously nor because I thought that the request was reasonable and just, but because someone held the word against my head like a loaded gun. I am fully determined to do the right and honorable things in life whenever I have a chance to do so, without someone forcing his ideas on me by words like ‘duty’ and ‘patriotism’.”
As far as human society is concerned, I have given up on it a long time ago. We are a species that is carried on an express train of evolution, following the logic of our genetic makeup and, seemingly, accelerating toward a not too distant end with either a bang or a whimper, whichever comes first.
The term “responsibility” is indeed disgusting (as Žižek would’ve perhaps put it), and – more pertinently – I feel troubled by the fact people don’t realize it’s sense-making only in a context of self-reflection; as a mystifying light cast against our own assumptions and thoughts, one that can never be imposed (not intellectually at least) on others. I hope my post made that clear 😉
Thanks for commenting!
Yes, your post did make it clear. 🙂
Incidentally, the Hungarian word for ‘duty’ is ‘kotelesseg’ – roughly translated as ‘rope-bound’ (‘kotel’ means rope in Hungarian). Do I need to say anything more?
How appropriate! 😀
In the sense that fiction lets us live other lives – if we had been born as one of the characters, had their experience – then the writer provides the natural consequences of that life, as interpreted by the writer. It can go either way, when the reader receives the story: they follow the author to the same consequences, or, for some reason (the author not making the case well enough), to different consequences.
On something the reader wasn’t even able to live in the first place.
My stories have morals: do this, this will happen to you. But my readers have sometimes surprised me by preferring the villain! Because she is so right. Of course, I’m not finished yet with the trilogy, but I figure if readers are going to spend a lot of time with characters, they ought to all be equally interesting – or the result is a straw person, easily knocked down.
A writer who wants to have a particular outcome in readers (among others, one of my aims is to make it much harder to pigeonhole disabled people as different, and THEREFORE not deserving of normal aspirations) has to be subtle in making that the only conclusion to reach. Even if, for that reader, it only applies to the one story character (and not to disabled people in general, the more desirable outcome), there is still a shift from ALL disabled people can be discounted automatically to SOME disabled people can’t. Still movement, but the writer only has so much control, so many arguments.
Regarding the “readers preferring the villain” part, it could reflect realistic characters. Of course I’m not familiar with your work, so I can’t be sure, but – generally speaking – the reason “villains” are preferred is precisely because they exist in a non-clear-cut relation with the protagonists. As you said yourself, black-and-white, straw characters are uninteresting because they don’t reflect reality. Thanks for your comment!
No text is devoid of its author’s traces, therefore of the society, the culture in which they were shaped and from which they drank, their unconscious conflicts, and the works that influenced them. However, it is impossible to deny, that is, one must admit, that the figurative language on which literature rests possesses a strange capacity to proliferate the senses beyond all control. What certainly fascinates me about this is that this language is not epistemic, that is, it is not guided either by the veracity of the information it transmits or by the accuracy of representing any reality. So what is it that such a peculiar, yet ubiquitous language transmits to us? What does it communicate? Because, we are certain, it does communicate something, we just can’t pinpoint what is it. I don’t know the answer, because the aesthetic is not exactly an epistemic category in the same sense that other categories are, because it does not produce specific knowledge, at most it does produce something like knowledge, but not knowledge itself. The late Harold Bloom used to call this wisdom. It is a good name, a very fine name. I wouldn’t call it that, I find that word too loaded to be a name for that, we hear a lot when one says “wisdom”, I prefer to speak in quieter terms. How to speak silently? It is a sincere question. In any case, around the turn to the 2000s, Bloom was saying that “mediocrity benefits no one”; with that I agree. The relationship between art and society is not an easy one, even more so today. Several times art sets itself against established society, whether by reviving a past long gone, even if tinged with stains of today, or by imagining an (im)possible future, or by simply not subordinating itself to the present in some way, or by the very nature of literature of not corresponding to any reality external to itself, but producing its own internal world to itself—and one doesn’t even have to go far to find a defence of this, in his Preface to Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson defends imagination against any realist ties. Yes, Shakespeare was once a heretic, a criminal against good taste and high art. Go figure! Putting it all together, I would say that the artist’s only responsibility is not to be mediocre. But even this has already been challenged by a friend of mine who asked why I didn’t sell and he did. Well, if writing for imbeciles and hairless monkeys pleases him, what can I do? He doesn’t love art, he loves money. But the illusion is strong. Althusser already taught: ideology moves in the unconscious. Go figure.
I can certainly relate to much of what you say, and particularly the “the artist’s only responsibility is not to be mediocre” part. I’d say it’s another way of expressing what I said in the post: “[an artist’s] only responsibility is toward the art.”
In regard to what language communicates… I won’t attempt to answer the question in terms of language in general (it goes above my proverbial paygrade), but in terms of literary language, I think we’re approximating the concept of negative capability. To quote from my relevant post:
It’s “something like knowledge”, as you mentioned, but not knowledge itself.
Harold Bloom, in a beautiful article published in 1975, “The Necessity of Misreading”, argues for self-contradiction in literary criticism. I mention the following passage taken from him because your blog entry on Negative Capability discusses self-contradiction as a meta-negative capability (subtitle of a section). This step back that retrieves the meta-level to which the problematic really belongs interests me greatly, as you well know, for it is usually the problematic of language. In any case, I’ll move on to Bloom’s quote so as not to dwell any further on my interminable comments:
This is fantastically interesting. For some strange – but likely not entirely irrelevant – reason, it reminded me of Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem – which, although related to mathematics, can be adapted to other fields as well: a system is either incomplete or inconsistent – that is, any system complex enough will always entail a proposition that is unprovable within the system.
Might not we consider a similar reality for literary criticism vis-à-vis literature? I think we must, otherwise we are left with a methodology that is incapable of properly understanding what the object of its method really is.
But do you see that there is a lot of distinction there? I begin with the obvious empirical fact which, because it is obvious, can easily be overlooked: Gödel’s theorems are all formulated in human languages. So mathematics does not even come close to being a sufficient reflection to deal with this infinite depthless mystery that is languages. Of course the reflection is good, I am not dismissing it, but I am paying attention to the fact that it can be formulated in another structure that precedes it and it is to this antecedent level that my attention turns. At the same time, one wonders whether literature and literary criticism form something of a system to perish under Gödel’s eternal gaze. I would insist no. The circulation of the literary text forms an economic subsystem, but that is a subject for political economy and sociology. I don’t think literature makes propositions, so it’s not even a question of there being unprovable propositions, let alone that these would be within some system. Method in the study of the literary thing will forever be a problem, for analysis and analysed are cut from the same cloth. And a final problem remains: if literature is not an epistemic practice, therefore if it does not produce knowledge (at all), as I argued earlier, then how can there be an (in)ability to “properly understand[ing] the object of its method”? An impossible task by default. To all this I remind Walter Benjamin’s remarks of his “Epistemo-Critical Foreword” [deu. Erkenntniskritische Vorrede], in his Origin of the German Trauerspiel [deu. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels], first in Howard Eiland’s translation for Harvard Univ. Press 2019:
Then in my translation comparing the original German with the Portuguese one: