Statement of Purpose

If I had to justify my writing to a complete stranger (such as, for example, a heckler on the Internet), my first reaction would probably be that it doesn’t need to be justified. It exists because I wrote it and I had to put it somewhere. And what good is writing something that you intend to be read if nobody ever reads it?

But I guess that’s the crux of the issue, that I intend my writing to be read by somebody. The gall, amirite!? So I figure that, to appease this imaginary challenger, I’d lay out here why I bother writing in the first place, and why I would be happy if you were to read what I write.

Thinking on Paper

I don’t really think of my thoughts on a particular piece of work, fictional or otherwise, as “complete” unless I’ve written about it. Until the point at which I’ve completed my own writing about it, my thoughts are more or less permanently in flux, always liable to alter in important ways. This isn’t to say I stop thinking about a piece of fiction after I write about it. It’s more just a way of scratching an itch.

But this, as I see it, brings up an important point about all writing; in the same way somebody might think out loud, people often stimulate their thoughts by putting them to paper. In some deeper way than that writing just enables thought in order to solve a problem, writing is one way that we think about anything, even idly. It’s true of my writing, as I described above. But more than that, it is true of all writing, and all storytelling more generally.

So the important question to me when approaching any work of storytelling or rhetoric critically is, “what is this piece thinking about?” In my view, basically any other question you could ask about a polemic or narrative is somehow subordinate to this question. For example, the “moral” of a story is often just the most concrete thing it has to say about its implicit or explicit subject matter, as is the thesis for polemic writing.

I think approaching fiction, in particular, in this way opens up a huge array of interpretative avenues and possibilities. It helps us avoid treating critical analysis as only the process of tallying up the ways in which a piece of fiction is or is not “problematic”, which, although sometimes necessary, is a pretty paltry subset of what critical writing can offer. Most of all, in a way that the aforementioned tallying approach categorically does not, it encourages us to extend some generosity to authors that might produce more interesting and compelling insights about the subject matter than we could glean otherwise.

Spoiled for Choice

The next most obvious question this raises is what subject matter to write (or think) about. To be honest, this is a pretty difficult question to answer.

It’s not hard to answer because there’s any huge moral dilemma involved in picking what to write about, or because there’s some many-dimensional pragmatic calculation involved. It’s just that there’s so much stuff to write (or think) about. The problem is one of setting priorities.

So I’ve settled on the extremely scientific system of writing about more or less whatever comes into view (literally) first. Be it a book, a movie, a video game, or a TV show, I just queue things up and try to scratch the associated itches in the order they come up. Some itches are harder to scratch than others, and require more rigorous tools, which is where some relevant theory or history comes into consideration. But for the most part, I’m just screwing around here, thinking whatever thoughts come to mind and then announcing them in public.

All the Stories to Be Told

But in the process of describing how I write and what I write about, I haven’t really answered the question of why I’m writing and why I think you should bother reading, so, by way of answer…

Shit’s pretty fucked up.

I mean, let’s be real, things are dire.

No individual story is going to single-handedly bring about any sweeping utopian change, and neither is any piece of criticism. But there are lots of pretty serious problems that humanity, collectively, needs to think about and, as I mentioned earlier, stories are one of the (in my view, extremely important and prolific) ways that those thoughts are clarified and expressed. By approaching stories as thought, and as rhetoric about that thought, we unearth a vast range of symbolic and narrative language with which to grapple with the problems we face.

This is especially important because we already use narrative and symbolic language to express cultural norms and ideological positions all the time. As is shown in critical work like Orientalism by Edward Said, vast swathes of “Western” culture are founded on (and plied to) the task of othering and dominating other human beings. But the relevant point is that culture, in the form of narratives and rhetoric, is absolutely indispensable to the process of domination. It literally creates and legitimizes it in the mind.

Similarly, works of speculative fiction like Lilith’s Brood and Fullmetal Alchemist grapple with the realities of oppression and answer them often by imagining ways out of them. In the first case, Octavia Butler imagines a confrontation between the human race and its own fear of human/bodily difference, and shows us how the human race survives the apocalypse it has brought on itself by accepting that difference. In the latter, Hiromi Arakawa portrays a society wracked with the nauseatingly familiar ills of imperialism, technocracy, and genocide, and then declares the crucial moral point that these systems deserve to be forcibly overthrown. And that is the other crucial point about storytelling; it is not simply the product of the imagination, it is indispensable to our moral and political imaginations as well.

Another important point here is that, while very few stories get canonized as classic literature (like Heart of Darkness, Things Fall Apart, or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) or ever reach a sufficiently large or influential audience (like the works I mentioned above), the vast majority of cultural artifacts are “lowbrow” works that, however wide their reception actually is, will not be remembered for very long or as particularly influential. In other words, there’s just so much storytelling going on that most will slip through the cracks and be forgotten some day soon.

The upshot of this is that the vast majority of the culture we come across in out lives will not be canonized alongside the likes of Mansfield Park or Journey to the West. And yet, all these ‘lowbrow’ stories are still thinking, and in real time, so to speak. Some of these stories are good, some are bad. Some are very serious, some are frivolous. Some are thoughtful, and some are very stupid.

Crucially, we won’t know which stories are canonical and which ones are lowbrow and forgotten until well after the fact.

The point is not that we need to be thoughtful about deciding which story should be canonized, but that we cannot depend on this distinction to tell us which stories are worth paying attention to, and which ones to think about. In addition, we know that all these stories are thinking, morally and politically. And so, we’re left with the fact that if we have any interest in contesting cultural norms in order to change them for the better, we have to approach all these artifacts of culture with a critical eye and be discerning about what they’re saying.

I make no claim that my essays are exhaustive or definitive criticism of the works I talk about. But I aim to make these posts a place that show how storytelling is a resource not just for our technical imaginations, but for our moral and political imaginations too. I want to write about how stories shape our principles. When they shape them for the worse, I want to push back on that force. When they shape them for the better, I want to elevate and reproduce that force. I want to think about all this thinking and talk about all this talking that we are doing because it brings me satisfaction and joy to do so and because it’s important.

And maybe in the process, my writing will contribute to our collective effort to unfuck this dire world we find ourselves in. I hope you find some joy, strength, and clarity in my writing, and I hope you stick around to talk about stories with me.