Among numerous cohorts of people whose life and work the election of Donald Trump threw into chaos, the challenge for fiction writers seems more existential than many others: what to do with the administration that weaponizes fiction, heedlessly gives out “alternative facts”, unashamedly lies for political gain?



To fiction writers, Trump is like an invasive species, an uninvited guest set to take over their territory by obliterating the line between facts and fiction. This is a crisis of sorts, for sure. But like many other crises, it is also an opportunity.

Trump ran a campaign on horror stories about America: job-stealing immigrants, vengeful Muslims, treasonous liberals, landscape dotted with tombstone-looking factories, the age of American carnage. That is fiction. Tasteless, badly articulated, poorly crafted fiction.



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One way to combat that is to lay out the facts, as beleaguered journalists keep pointing out. But in the current political climate, the age of the social media and unbridled political rage, we kid ourselves to think presenting facts is a potent strategy.

Trump has installed his canons in the territory of fiction writers, taking shots at truth from there. Because of this territorial overlap, the capacity of writers to combat him is more than it seems.

This claim may well sound incredulously optimistic, given the tiny number of people who read fiction. It is not: the effect of fiction is slow and quiet, but substantial. It leaks into the foundation of society over years, and leaves an invisible, yet decisive impact.

No one has demonstrated the profound influence of reading better than novelists. Long before postmodernism turns writing about reading into a narrative conceit, 19th-century authors narrated this effect compellingly: in Emil Zola’s Germinal, voracious reading turns Etienne Lantier from a middle-class naive boy into the leader of a strike in a mining community. Reading novels cultivates in Emma Bovary the desire to escape her suffocatingly boring life. Before setting out to question the social roles long-established for women, Jo March in Lousa May Alcott’s Little Women lived amid piles of books.

Leaders of authoritarian regimes have long been aware of the power of fiction. Relative to population, the portion of fiction readers has never been great anywhere in the world, yet there is a reason closed societies censor books and crack down on writers.

Mario Vargas Llosa explains it well in a short essay: authoritarian leaders do not suffice to control bodies and movements. They want to occupy imagination, to instill their own fictional version of history in minds. That attitude sets off an unavoidable battle over public imagination, and puts politicians in conflict with artists. Since politicians’ main tool is language, their method making up ostensibly believable stories, novelists naturally become their primary rivals.

When an authoritarian leader emerges, it is ill-informed to discuss the importance of fiction in terms of numbers. In those times, fiction is already embroiled in a momentous battle over public imagination.

Relative to many other authoritarian figures, Trump’s fiction is rather crude and unsubtle, hence easier to call out. His fiction makes no bones about its intention: it wants to sow chaos and fear. Writers, novelists in particular, often engage in the opposite. Novel is a rational form: it processes the chaos of reality into narrative, gives it structure and form. By narrativizing the intractability of the world, novels give us tools for unraveling and understanding it.

Trump’s fiction, moreover, is all about certainty. It comes out in brief, stunted bits, claiming to hold the absolute truth about everything. It presents false, simplified images of Mexicans, Muslims, women, as indisputable truth. Writers, by contrast, construct a zone of ambiguity. Fiction is, among other things, an everlasting quest for truth. Powerful fiction, novels in particular, take on those profound, inaccessible truths that never succumb to simple utterances.

In his review of Shahriar Mandanipour’s “Censoring an Iranian love story”, James Wood talks about a tacit longing among western writers for prohibition, for being deemed dangerous by the powerful, so that the western literary culture grows “serious”. It sounds like a wish you make only when you are certain it is never going to be fulfilled. At the moment though, the literary prohibition in America is no longer an impossibility.



The president of the United States has taken many leafs out of authoritarianism playbook, one of them being an effort to occupy public imagination by his fictionalized history and reality. That puts him in inevitable conflict with American writers. They have serious things to do.