{"id":23013,"date":"2013-12-30T00:01:52","date_gmt":"2013-12-30T05:01:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=23013"},"modified":"2013-12-29T20:34:14","modified_gmt":"2013-12-30T01:34:14","slug":"qotd-yes-but-what-is-it-really-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/12\/30\/qotd-yes-but-what-is-it-really-about\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Yes, but what is it <em>really<\/em> about?"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>A very common way of thinking in literary criticism is not seen as a consequence of Communism, but it is. Every writer has the experience of being told that a novel, a story, is \u201cabout\u201d something or other. I wrote a story, \u201cThe Fifth Child,\u201d which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on.<\/p>\n<p>A journalist from France walked into my living room and before she had even sat down said, \u201cOf course \u2018The Fifth Child\u2019 is about AIDS.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>An effective conversation stopper, I assure you. But what is interesting is the habit of mind that has to analyze a literary work like this. If you say, \u201cHad I wanted to write about AIDS or the Palestinian problem I would have written a pamphlet,\u201d you tend to get baffled stares. That a work of the imagination has to be \u201creally\u201d about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary.<\/p>\n<p>The demand that stories must be \u201cabout\u201d something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers. <\/p>\n<p>Doris Lessing, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/10\/13\/opinion\/13lessing.html?ex=1350014400&#038;en=e065189878c17fdf&#038;ei=5124&#038;partner=permalink&#038;exprod=permalink&#038;_r=1&#038;\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Questions You Should Never Ask a Writer&#8221;, <em>New York Times<\/em><\/a>, 1992-06-26 (reprinted 2007-10-13)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A very common way of thinking in literary criticism is not seen as a consequence of Communism, but it is. Every writer has the experience of being told that a novel, a story, is \u201cabout\u201d something or other. I wrote a story, \u201cThe Fifth Child,\u201d which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,28,53,41],"tags":[780,86,294,134],"class_list":["post-23013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-communism","tag-criticism","tag-literature","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5Zb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23013"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23477,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23013\/revisions\/23477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}