Controlling writers is antithetical to a free society. And yet, governments like control. Everyday people like control, too, especially of the next generation, and so the moral panics of parents and governments often focus on the fiction children consume and what “other people” are trying to influence them into believing or doing. In her book Dangerous Fictions, Lyta Gold faces these moral panics around fiction head on.
After a concise overview of the history of moral panics in the U.S., Gold argues that fiction, while powerful for fueling the imagination, and thus considered dangerous by many, is perhaps not as powerful as our society likes to consider it. To borrow some religious language, fiction might not be the work of the devil, but it isn’t mighty enough to save either. Instead, it “provides the semblance of having done some kind of interior political work, without having to change external material conditions.”
Gold does some heavy lifting, criticizing leftist, liberal, and conservative politics around fiction and culture wars along with the capitalist underpinnings for why people keep trying to make fiction serve a purpose instead of just allowing it to be. Yet covering so much territory in an introduction does give the impression of a scatterplot—it contains meaning, but you have to let yourself see the whole and accept that it isn’t linear. Reading the book all the way to its conclusion, however, I realized that this structure, while different from the usual, was an intentional design that ultimately leads to Gold’s conclusion.
Dangerous Fictions takes its reader on a journey, using each point in the scatterplot to dig into different ways fiction has been viewed as something dangerous. Chapter one opens with book bans in Florida. In light of certain parents’ indifference to school shootings but fear over books, Gold aptly puts her finger right on the core fear. Some parents would rather their children be dead than changed.
The next three chapters were some of my favorites, acting something like a three-layered cake with a new flavor in each layer, all different tastes of how imagination and fiction can serve fascism and government control. Each one tastes great on its own, with the gatekeeping in the world of nerds, fascist delight in Lord of the Rings, and CIA propaganda in the film industry as delights to anticipate.
In a brief interview with the author, I followed up about a quote that stuck with me for days after reading it: “In an increasingly feminized literary profession, the writer is usually conceptualized as a woman and women are still responsible for other people’s feelings, impressions, and moral hygiene.” I asked what might get us all out of this mindset. Gold responded: “I think it starts with understanding that if you don’t like a book, if it upsets you, there are constructive and critically appropriate ways to express that hurt and that upset without tagging the writer on social media and demanding recompense.”
Later, I asked her what we can do to address the fears and anxieties many of us, on both ends of the political spectrum, have about how the world should be. Gold’s response is one I’ll be sharing with my creative writing students, with my son, and with myself.
“When it comes to ‘shaping how the world should be,’” Gold said, “we have to accept that there’s going to be a certain amount of weirdness and discomfort with other people’s behavior that we might find strange, but—as long as it’s not abusive—we might have to let it go. You might, say, find the existence of shapeshifter dragon romance novels weird and unsettling, and the people who are into them also potentially weird and unsettling. But however those books do shape their readers’ reality, it may not be any of your business.
“I think it’s important to separate between a humanistic ‘I want the world to be structured this way so that all people can be equal, happy, and safe’ and a conservative ‘I want all people to live recognizable social lifestyles and have normalized desires so that I—personally—never have to feel weirded out or uncomfortable,’” ends Gold. “It’s important to clock the difference between what elements of our current reality need to be changed, and what’s really none of our business.”
