The Novel As Soap Box

Using Ayn Rand as a jumping-off point, Ari Kohen casts a critical eye on the practice of philosophizing through fiction:

[N]ovels present their commentary and their conclusions without argument. Philosophy, conversely, is built on argument rather than simple assertion. Whether or not you ultimately agree with them, philosophers from Plato to Rawls make arguments in order to sway the way a reader thinks. Novelists, on the other hand, craft characters and situations that are intended to play on readers’ emotions. My problem with Rand is that she attempts to shape the way that people think about and interact with the world around them — to do political philosophy — without actually making any arguments for what are, ultimately, policy preferences with serious personal and societal consequences.

Will Wilkinson makes a related point:

This guy, who complains that the contemporary Anglophone novel fails to combat injustice, is the enemy of art. The story may well be the most powerful weapon in the propagandist’s arsenal, but it is rarely to the aesthetic credit of a piece of fiction that it functions as propaganda. Stories don’t need non-aesthetic justification, even if it turns out there are moral dimensions to literary quality. “Art is good for you” arguments almost always get my hackles up. Because what if it isn’t?