Digesting Critical Fiction

Critical fictions effectively intervene and challenge dominant reading practices when they compel the uncritical reader to put aside set notions of what literature should be or do and enthusiastically grasp new and different approaches — bell hooks

Sometimes my brain wrestles with things, though I suppose of late my mind wrestles with many things fairly often as I work to comprehend and contextualize aspects of education theory, literature, literary theory, concepts, and more. Critical fiction is one of those items that I’ve struggled with, not because critical fiction as a concept is particularly difficult to understand (I think), but because I am struggling to separate what constitutes critical fiction from fiction indicting some entity or another for its transgressions (think E.M. Forster, Jonathan Swift, and so forth). I believe many fiction writers write because they are critical of something. But their texts don’t qualify necessarily as critical fiction. So I guess I was wrong to say just seconds ago that critical fiction is a straightforward concept.

Here is what I can say after digesting bell hooks’ “Narratives of Struggle” (1991) over the last few weeks: writers of critical fiction feel urgency and passion to interrogate and to challenge—and to represent countless silenced and fearful voices. That is not an endeavor without burdens. As hooks expresses, “paralyzed by the fear that I will to be able to name or speak words that fully articulate my experience or the collective reality of struggling black people, I am tempted to be silent… This dread surfaces as a forgotten scar, permanently inscribed on the body, a sign of past terror and torture, aggressively demanding recognition” (53). What a weight to shoulder. Is hooks suggesting she feels that she is required to be so articulate because she has a voice while so many were and continue to be silenced?

As I grapple with what critical literature is, I comb my bookshelves for some good examples. I think about My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok, a novel I read in an honors literature course in college. I think about The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, another novel I studied in college, this one in a course on literature of Vietnam.

If critical fiction could include non-fiction, then I’d want to include Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s memoir, Children of the Land. But I can’t because we’re talking about critical fiction—and also I’m not even sure if the fiction titles I mentioned qualify.

That is why this post is a few weeks overdue. I write it now not for a grade (that requirement passed in September) but for needing to process my thoughts through writing about critical fiction as I continue to digest the genre. And I still have some working and thinking to do.

Note: bell hooks’ essay is included in Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing, edited by Philomena Mariani (1991). Page numbers referenced above link to that text. The featured quote up top comes from page 57.