Doomed Quest: The Search for Stories Sans Politics

In a recent post I wrote about the politics of speculative fiction and explored in very basic terms why I thought that speculative fiction in particular was not only inherently political but also uniquely built for our times.

(If you haven’t read that piece, you can catch up on it here.)

When I finished it, however, I found that I had a lot more to say. Quite a lot in fact, if the length of this post is to be taken at face value. So strap in.

Go Woke Go Broke? Hardly.

Whether screeching about ‘wokeism” at each and every attempt to expand our perspectives or accusing authors of killing a favourite franchise by being too political, a noisy minority of people seem insistent on fiction that strips away politics. They want stories that don’t make them uncomfortable. Stories that feature people they’re used to. Storylines and faces they recognize. Perspectives they can stomach.

Just give us the escapism, they cry. “Go Woke Go Broke”. (Not a thing FYI. Lots of ‘woke’ product does exceedingly well. Who knew that white, male, cis gendered people weren’t the only consumers in the world?)

Which begs the question: Even if we think that removing politics from our stories is somehow desirable (which I clearly don’t), is it even possible? Could we do if we tried?

THE ANSWER IS No.

In Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler writes “God is change”, seeing change as a singular, inescapable force. I would say that politics is also change, and unsurprisingly Octavia Butler’s work was deeply political (a big reason why she is a giant of the speculative fiction genre).

But like the men who have convinced themselves that they are rational, unemotional creatures (only for us all to discover how deeply driven they are by their emotional shadows), denying the core political nature of the human animal is little more than wilful blindness.

All stories are political. Even the simplest adventure. Even the most vanilla picture book. Every choice we make about who we feature is political, starting with whose perspective we prioritise, who gets to be visible, who gets to speak, who should be empathised with, and who should be seen as the villain.

To pretend stories are not political is to squeeze them into the shadows, limiting them to the borderlands of the human psyche where their messages and morals fester and boil and damage our human community. It’s to leave our beliefs about the nature of the world unexamined, and to pretend confusion when the outcomes we create are perverse. It’s to tell ourselves that we are not what we are, and that what we’re doing is not what we’re doing. It is to bleed stories of their meaning. It is to lie to ourselves, and each other, over and over again, and imagine we are speaking the truth.

Book Bans and The Big Story Lie

In Florida and Texas today (and other parts of not only America but the world) politicians and right-wing agitators are creating their own fiction  – that there is such a thing as an apolitical book. It is leading to terrible outcomes for communities in the form of book bans and suppression of creative expression and exploration. In Florida, the law that recently took effect is so extreme that librarians and teachers have been told to lock up their books to avoid potential felony charges, leaving libraries with covered shelves and books behind lock and key. It’s as if those books contain not ideas that can enrich the imagination, expand horizons, and build empathy, but rather bullets that could kill.

They hide their right-wing terror behind a lie about caring for children, becoming fascistic in nature. They suppress freedom of expression and freedom of exploration. They police the right of children to explore their own interests, a thing that should be considered abhorrent and obscene in a community claiming democracy.

But even if all the books they hate were stripped from the shelves, and all the people they abhorred silenced, would they have stripped the politics out of their library?

Of course not. They would only have cemented a certain type of politics – theirs.

And they would not have managed to strip all the subversive or challenging content either, for that would be an impossible task – an ouroboros, a string without ends.

The right also misunderstands the nature of our interconnected, global community when it comes to book bans. If there’s a book you’ve told a child not to read, you can bet that the internet will provide. (You should start with these 50 most banned books and go from there).

In the end the book banning politicians and parents are not only lying to themselves but also to all of us, endangering the lives and wellbeing of librarians and educators, and the children they claim to be trying to protect. It’s time for progressives to take back the ‘freedom of expression’ stick that conservatives have been beating us with for years.

Humans are political and so are the stories we tell.

The first story was probably told orally thousands of years ago in a circle amongst a small group of proto-humans. Or perhaps it was crooned to a child at the breast of its mother. As far as we can tell, even Neanderthals might have told stories, since their rock art suggests a more cognitively and culturally advanced capacity what we thought.

The first recorded stories, like the Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, came some time after that. Each of these were great adventures but also moral and political tales. That is true both overtly – as with an oppressive King or tales of great civilisations at war – and indirectly, as stories of the consequences of abusive power, or warnings about the ego, power, and the fallibility of human pride.

It makes me wonder how far back people demanding apolitical fiction are willing to go. Are they willing to censure even Achilles and his bosom friend, and possible lover, Patroclus in order to ensure their fiction does not challenge the status-quo?

And while even the ancient Greeks weren’t immune to the occasional censorship, particularly of political or religiously dangerous ideas, they prided themselves on creative freedom. I think even they would find the modern attempts to censor and depoliticise our fiction, hilarious and contemptuous. Socrates himself was clear on this, believing storytelling to be a powerful tool for shaping people’s beliefs and values, and using stories in his own dialogues as a means of exploring ethical and political questions.

But perhaps that is ultimately the point.

Those who cry for narratives ‘stripped’ of politics are perhaps the most keenly aware of how stories shape and change us, how they move us and challenge the status quo. That – in the end – is what they are really afraid of.