On Fiction Writing and Appropriation

[Robert Maxwell]

Thank you for your very exhaustive response. I agree with some of your points and disagree with others. I hope you don't mind that I only limit this response to one of your points:



She presents this wife of one of her white characters as a very normal person. Dementia doesn't select it's victims based on skin color. Suffering from dementia also does not turn the person into a freak.
But perhaps you could explain what Shriver's problem is when she decided to have one part of an interracial marriage suffer from dementia?

I must use the caveat that I haven't read the book, so my knowledge is only second-hand. But from what I understand, the issue is not that she has dementia--there's nothing wrong with a character having a mental disorder--but rather that her entire purpose in the book is to embody a white male character's comeuppance. Her decline, disability, and humiliation are never presented to share anything meaningful about her, but to embarrass and degrade another character for his poor decisions. Seems kinda shitty for her to only exist as a plot device in service of a white character's arc.

The critic whom Shriver alluded to for calling her racist took the time to respond, and I'll quote the salient pieces of that response:

Shriver’s 12th novel is set in a near-future American dystopia where many of the concerns currently expressed by conservatives finally have been realized. After an immigration amnesty, the country is flooded with “Lats” who elect a Mexican-born president who presides over a devastating economic collapse, in part created by runaway entitlements. Shriver observes President Alvarado’s “baby-faced softness only emphasized by the palatalized consonants of a Mexican accent,” a stereotypical image of a pudgy, lisping Mexican that links his perfidy to his ethnicity as would an elliptically described hooked nose on a loathsome Jewish character.

The two black characters are similarly ill-treated. One, a social worker, is the novel’s only character who speaks sub-standard English. After Alvarado renounces the national debt, she says, “I don’t see why the gubment ever pay anything back. Pass a law say, ‘We don’t got to.’ ” It was once common in newspapers, fiction and nonfiction to report the speech of “ordinary” people in standard English, while voicing minorities in dialect or vernacular, as they might sound to white ears; this still happens from time to time, unfortunately. By recording only the speech of minority characters in sub-standard English, you stigmatize the entire ethnic group as something other than normal. No one speaks perfectly. Respect for your characters suggests that if you record one’s solecisms, dropped consonants, drawl or brogue, you will faithfully record everybody else’s, too.

The most problematic of Shriver’s minority characters is an African American woman who has married into the white family at the heart of the novel. She suffers from early-onset dementia and is a danger to herself and to others. As the economy collapses, the family loses its home and treks across Brooklyn with the woman at the end of a leash. A plot development that features an uncontrollable black person who has to be kept under restraint like a dog seems guaranteed to hurt and provoke outrage. I wrote, “If ‘The Mandibles’ is ever made into a film, my suggestion is that this image not be employed for the movie poster.” I was thinking of ads in bus shelters and, honestly, I imagined they’d be wrecked.

I don't necessarily take this to assume that Shriver is racist. The actions of characters in a work of fiction obviously don't have to be a representation of the author's politics. Authors can include racist elements in order to critique them or highlight the illogic and hurtfulness of racism.

But I think it's telling that Shriver chose not to engage with any of the criticism on that basis. She just got upset that anyone might suggest she had racist portrayals in her book. As the saying goes, hit dogs holler. She could have engaged meaningfully with such criticism and explained her motives better. Instead, she took umbrage and used her platform to rail against critics and letter writers who dared to suggest she might have a been a bit insensitive. It's not like she was receiving death threats or otherwise being treated viciously. She was getting fairly run of the mill criticism, as any writer should expect.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Came across another post that makes some interesting points, which I'll pull out for your benefit:

If I wanted to give myself a tension headache, I could waste several hours of my evening going through the dreadful bulk of it line by line and pointing out the various strawmen: the information purposely elided here, the conflation of the trivial and the serious there, the overall privileged rudeness of taking a valuable platform given you for a stated purpose and turning it to another. But what really stands out to me is the utter dissonance between Shriver’s two key arguments, and the bigotry that dissonance reveals: on the one hand, fury at the very idea of “cultural appropriation”, which Shriver sees as a pox on artistic freedom; on the other, her lamentation of particular types of diversity as “tokenistic”.

I’d ask Lionel Shriver to explain to me how the presence of queer characters can “distract from the central subject matter”, but I don’t need to: the answer is right there in the construction of her statement. Queerness can distract from the central subject matter because, to an obliviously straight writer like Shriver, queerness is only ever present as another type of subject matter, never as a background detail or a simple normative human variation. Straightness doesn’t distract her, because it’s held to be thematically neutral, an assumed default. But put a queer character in the story for reasons other than to discuss their queerness – include them for variety, for honesty, because the world just looks like that – and it’s a tiresome, tokenistic attempt to be “hip” or “fashionable”. In Shriver’s world, such non-default characters can only “pertain to [the] story” if the story is, to whatever extent, about their identity. The idea that it might simply be about them does not compute.

Identity informs personhood, but personhood is not synonymous with identity. By treating particular identities as “subject matter”instead of facets of personhood – by claiming that queer characters can “distract” from a central story, as though queerness is only ever a focus, and not a fact – you’re acting as though the actual living people with those identities have no value, presence or personhood beyond them. But neither can you construct a tangible personhood without giving thought to the character’s identity; without acknowledging that particular identities exist within their own contexts, and that these contexts will shift and change depending on various factors, many of which will likely exceed your personal experience. This is what we in the writing business call doing the fucking research, which concept astonishingly doesn’t apply only to looking up property values, Googling the Large Hadron Collider and working out average summer temperatures in Maine.

To put it simply, what Shriver and others are angry about isn’t the nebulous threat of “restrictions [being placed] on what belongs to us” – it’s the prospect of being fact-checked about details they assumed could be fictionalised entirely, despite being about real things.

If Shriver, in a fit of crass commercialism, were ever to write a forensics-heavy crime procedural without doing any research whatsoever into actual forensic pathology, readers and critics who noticed the lapse would be entirely justified in criticising it. If she took the extra step of marketing the book as a riveting insight into the lives of real forensic pathologists, however – if the validity of what she’d written was held up as a selling point, a definitive glimpse into the lives of real people as expressed through the milieu of fiction – then actual forensic pathologistswould certainly be within their rights to heap scorn on her book, to say nothing of feeling insulted. None of which would prevent this hypothetical book from being technically well-written or neatly characterised otherwise, of course; it might well have a cracker of a plot. But when you get a thing wrong – when you misrepresent a concept or experience that actually exists, such that people with greater personal knowledge of or investment in the material can point out why it doesn’t work – you’re going to hear about it.

That is how criticism works. It always has done, and always will do, and I am absolutely baffled that a grown adult like Shriver, who presumably accepts the inevitability of every other aspect of her writing being put under the twin lenses of subjective opinion and objective knowledge, thinks this one specific element should be somehow immune from external judgement.

 

[psCargile]

People can still choose not to read Lionel Shriver, right? I mean I found Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 offensive to my Southern, conservative leanings, so I'm not buying and reading his novels. And I certainly would not demand he cater to me. But then again, I'm not trying to coerce thought and score political points.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Yes, nobody is being forced to read her books, as far as I know.

People have every right to criticize her work, though.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

People can still choose not to read Lionel Shriver, right? I mean I found Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 offensive to my Southern, conservative leanings, so I'm not buying and reading his novels. And I certainly would not demand he cater to me. But then again, I'm not trying to coerce thought and score political points.

Of course. Just as you still have the right to needlessly point out blindingly obvious things that never were in question and completely miss the point.

 

[rRico]

I must use the caveat that I haven't read the book, so my knowledge is only second-hand. But from what I understand, the issue is not that she has dementia--there's nothing wrong with a character having a mental disorder--but rather that her entire purpose in the book is to embody a white male character's comeuppance. Her decline, disability, and humiliation are never presented to share anything meaningful about her, but to embarrass and degrade another character for his poor decisions. Seems kinda shitty for her to only exist as a plot device in service of a white character's arc.

The critic whom Shriver alluded to for calling her racist took the time to respond, and I'll quote the salient pieces of that response:



I don't necessarily take this to assume that Shriver is racist. The actions of characters in a work of fiction obviously don't have to be a representation of the author's politics. Authors can include racist elements in order to critique them or highlight the illogic and hurtfulness of racism.

But I think it's telling that Shriver chose not to engage with any of the criticism on that basis. She just got upset that anyone might suggest she had racist portrayals in her book. As the saying goes, hit dogs holler. She could have engaged meaningfully with such criticism and explained her motives better. Instead, she took umbrage and used her platform to rail against critics and letter writers who dared to suggest she might have a been a bit insensitive. It's not like she was receiving death threats or otherwise being treated viciously. She was getting fairly run of the mill criticism, as any writer should expect.

People tend to react in a negative way when they are accused of being a racist. The reviewer implies a troubling flaw in Shriver's character because the group and identity he is most interested in isn't treated in a manner he would have liked. If that is run of the mill for this reviewer his reviews aren't worth much.
As characters are always plot devices in service of the story that is being told, nothing can meaningfully change if her skin color were lighter. There would only be one less black woman in this book.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

People tend to react in a negative way when they are accused of being a racist. The reviewer implies a troubling flaw in Shriver's character because the group and identity he is most interested in isn't treated in a manner he would have liked. If that is run of the mill for this reviewer his reviews aren't worth much.
As characters are always plot devices in service of the story that is being told, nothing can meaningfully change if her skin color were lighter. There would only be one less black woman in this book.

"This portrayal is racist" is not the same as "you are a racist." I have noticed that people confuse the two constantly, and it seems Shriver has made the same mistake.

 

[psCargile]

I think it pretty clear Shriver's critics are politically motivated. There is nothing wrong with being influenced by other cultures. That's an act of inclusion. But if you want to divide people, call it "appropriation" and now it sounds like theft, or use without permission, which is how the accusations are presented. It's one thing to critique an author and his or her work, quite another to harm or end their livelihood with charged accusations of societal taboo.

The answer to my rhetorical question is no, they can't just not read Shriver, she must be destroyed for thinking wrong-headed.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I think it pretty clear Shriver's critics are politically motivated. There is nothing wrong with being influenced by other cultures. That's an act of inclusion. But if you want to divide people, call it "appropriation" and now it sounds like theft, or use without permission, which is how the accusations are presented. It's one thing to critique an author and his or her work, quite another to harm or end their livelihood with charged accusations of societal taboo.

The answer to my rhetorical question is no, they can't just not read Shriver, she must be destroyed for thinking wrong-headed.

Persecution complexes sound very exhausting.

 

[rRico]

"This portrayal is racist" is not the same as "you are a racist." I have noticed that people confuse the two constantly, and it seems Shriver has made the same mistake.

Having read "The Mandibles" during my vacation recently I can now say that the portrayal of the second Mrs. Mandible senior is not racist. That character is only the victim of circumstances she can't control. Her husband does not leave her when her mind goes. He gets the best care for her his money can buy, and they live in rather posh rest home.
Nothing about portraying a black woman suffering from dementia is racist.
Perhaps Shriver should have made one of the other secondary characters black too? Lowell, the economics professor, so far removed from reality that he doesn't smell the shit rubbed under his nose. Esteban, the hard working son of illegal immigrants who couldn't be prouder to be an American if he tried. Savannah, who turn to prostitution and abandons her family when things get really tough. Or Willing, who is not above stealing food from the houses of other people or threatening violence on small children for food.
"This portrayal is racist" here is nothing but code for "I don't like that you've portrayed a person of group x y or z in not the shiniest of lights". It is a baseless criticism and strips the characters of her characters and reduces her down to skin color.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Having read "The Mandibles" during my vacation recently I can now say that the portrayal of the second Mrs. Mandible senior is not racist. That character is only the victim of circumstances she can't control. Her husband does not leave her when her mind goes. He gets the best care for her his money can buy, and they live in rather posh rest home.
Nothing about portraying a black woman suffering from dementia is racist.
Perhaps Shriver should have made one of the other secondary characters black too? Lowell, the economics professor, so far removed from reality that he doesn't smell the shit rubbed under his nose. Esteban, the hard working son of illegal immigrants who couldn't be prouder to be an American if he tried. Savannah, who turn to prostitution and abandons her family when things get really tough. Or Willing, who is not above stealing food from the houses of other people or threatening violence on small children for food.
"This portrayal is racist" here is nothing but code for "I don't like that you've portrayed a person of group x y or z in not the shiniest of lights". It is a baseless criticism and strips the characters of her characters and reduces her down to skin color.

"This book isn't racist, it hates everyone" has got to be one of the oldest tricks out there.

 

[rRico]

"This book isn't racist, it hates everyone" has got to be one of the oldest tricks out there.

A trick doing what? Was there a suggestion there to say this book hates anyone?