I’m thinking about social context as it relates to the novelist and the ways we rely on it when we discuss fiction. The way we situate fiction in time and place, the way we relate it to other works by genre, or culture, or psychology, or influence. The way we position it to “fit” into the architecture of our literary knowledge. The way we do this even when we discuss the literature of now, even when we are obviously standing too close to see patterns clearly because we exist within the same context ourselves.
I’m thinking about the ways in which context relates to style and how we move in spirals from demanding more intimacy or more distance from our writers. Or more symbolism. Or more realism. More anger, more peace, more humour, more darkness, more arrogance, more humility, more pain, more joy. I’m thinking about how we have always had enough of this or enough of that and how writers “get it wrong”.
I’m thinking about how much these ongoing conversations – when the ability to publish is somewhat contingent in taking part in them – might interfere with the organic creation of fiction; the kind that writers might give birth to in a vacuum of now.
And I wonder… What would that literature taste like?