Review by Eleanor J. Bader
While the current spate of book bans and censorship attempts by Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education have received a great deal of attention, essayist Lyta Gold’s Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality reports that even in less politically-charged times, the books we read, the movies and television shows we watch, and the video games we play, are heavily controlled by market forces, fear of upsetting the status quo, and pressures from both the right and the left to influence our viewpoints and emotional responses.
This tendency, she writes, goes back to Plato, whose Republic warned that when people encounter tales of gods or heroes “behaving badly,” they sometimes emulate their negative traits. The Greeks called such imitation “mimesis” and many joined the famed philosopher to argue that society needed “to cut the heart out of fiction: all vice, all cruelty, anything that might tempt the masses by example.”
As is obvious, this was–and is–a fool’s errand.
Gold’s text is dense, but Dangerous Fictions is a soundly reasoned dive into how fictional representations are used and interpreted. “The problem isn’t that fiction contains the power to mobilize people for good or evil,” she writes, “but the deeper problem is simply power itself: who has it and who doesn’t…In the end, what fiction does, and what it’s capable of doing, is something quite different from political action.”
Take the emergent genre of climate fiction. “Only human beings can take political action: only human beings can dismantle the existent fossil fuel infrastructure and build the new structure of energy and mitigation that will be necessary to cope with temperatures that will keep rising,” she concludes.
Indeed, she’s right: Apocalyptic narratives will not save us. Likewise, while fiction can introduce readers to people and places they’d likely never otherwise encounter, expecting this exposure to eviscerate racism, homophobia, or sexism is unrealistic. In the end, fiction is neither dangerous nor safe. It just is.
Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality by Lyta Gold, Soft Skull Press, October 2024.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.