What Is a Conservative Novel?

Hint: It won't bend to the current social or political conventions

Some time ago, I noticed the following headline for an article in the Federalist: “If You Don’t Buy Conservative Art, Ruthless Leftists Will Ensure Nobody Can.”

In his article, the author complained that leftists have shut down heretical artists who supported the Canadian truckers or freedom of speech or Donald Trump. He asked, “[W]hat is to be done? Are we to lie down and accept a fate of utter decimation in a world of inane, woke art?”

No, we aren’t. But the headline stumped me. I’m confused by the reference to “conservative” art. I don’t know what that is.

The headline author seems to assume that any art made by an artist with conservative politics qualifies as conservative art. But how does he know that?

And how does he know the art he’s defending is any good?

In the old Soviet Union, the Communist leaders knew which art was good. By good, they meant paintings or movies or novels which made themselves look good.

Early on, Stalin mandated what he called Proletarian Art, whatever that was, which he replaced with Socialist Realism. Socialist Realism exploited the techniques of realism and its capacity to misrepresent reality in order to sell the official Communist version of life, the universe and everything.

Stalin did give a nod to art from great pre-revolutionary Russian authors and composers like Tolstoy and Chekhov and Tchaikovsky. He touted his favored new communist hacks not as their replacements but as their successors.

Mao outdid Stalin. In his Cultural Revolution, Mao aimed to destroy all which came before, including what he called the "four olds": old ideas, old customs, old habits and old culture. His followers spearheaded the interrogation, humiliation and beatings of teachers and intellectuals, and travelled the country destroying cultural heritage.

Nowadays, the standard bearers of our own American Fascist Left go two better than Stalin and one better than Mao. Past artists must be condemned or canceled even if they only happened to live in societies which practiced colonialism or patriarchy or racism or whatever these culterati disapprove of. Everything from the past must be destroyed.

What’s going on?

Whatever it is, it’s been going on for a long time.

Back in the nineteen fifties, the American critic Robert Warshaw lamented what he called “The Legacy of the Thirties,” the era of the Communist-led Popular Front, in which the Communist Party controlled nearly all discourse. Warshaw called the nineteen thirties,

“an era of organized mass disingenuousness, when every act and every idea had behind it some ‘larger consideration’ which destroyed its honesty and its meaning. Everybody became a professional politician, acting within a framework that tended to make political activity an end in itself. The half-truth was elevated to the position of a principle, and in time the half-truth became more desirable than the whole-truth.”

From the 1930’s through Warshaw’s 1950’s and beyond, the “larger consideration” was the wellbeing of the thugs who operated the racket known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

“Larger considerations” live on today, only under new names.

Nowadays, anyone who creates a painting or novel or movie will have to deal with harassers who impose their current larger considerations like antiracism, sexism, cultural appropriation, homophobia and transphobia, coinages which didn’t exist until last week, and when halfway examined, make no sense.

Fiction writers who want to get their stories published at the few big houses—where the money is, or at least the illusion of its possibility—must anticipate a swarm of sensitivity readers and editors, the entire purpose of whose existence is to ambush writers, in part because those parasites lack useful skills from which to make a living.

Henry James: “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it competes with life.”

Because Hollywood screenwriters know ahead of time that any movie which might offend Chinese Communist censors will never get made, they no longer bother to write the forbidden scripts in the first place. They edit themselves in advance to save the communist censors the trouble.

Many of our culturati, by which word I mean people like museum curators and university academics, whose duty it is to protect the vast and irreplaceable artistic heritage of the West, are engaging in a self-destructive crusade to destroy it.

Like the stock market, what drives these phenomena are greed and fear.

The greed is for power, or maybe for status, or for money and sex, or for the sex that money and status bring. Or all of the above.

And it doesn’t take much to buy one of these people. As my wife has remarked to me many times, what’s surprising is not that people sell out, but that they sell out for so little.

The fear which accompanies the greed also makes sense, once you know what’s out there. It’s justifiable fear of the censorious ideologues, who in this historical moment happen to be from our Fascist Left.

These zealots crouch downwind from us in their hunting blinds and sniff out anyone who manifests creative freedom. If they smell a heretic, they hunt him down and shoot him and hang his carcass across the hood as a trophy. (Of course, this process is only metaphorical—for now.)

I have had personal experience with the phenomena I’m describing.

I used to write some for the theater. I had four plays produced. My minor success gave me the connections to get more produced. I wrote a play which features a young woman raised as the daughter of a famous leftist lawyer. Among other things which happen, she comes to realize that few of the leftist pieties she was raised to believe in are true.

Of course, my play was rejected, and with a hysteria amounting almost to TDS.

In conversation with a theater friend who had already read and liked my play, I commented that I could have written a very similar story about a young Christian who comes to reject the beliefs of the Christian world in which she was raised, and it would have been just as good.

He added, “And then it would be produced.”

This is true. The secular left has generated an entire industry of mediocre movies about Orthodox Jewish women who rebel against their supposedly suffocating upbringing in order to seek freedom, usually by having liberating sex with a forbidden person like an Arab or a black man or maybe a Puerto Rican lesbian.

Talk about boring. Not to mention contrary to all human experience. Does anyone out there still believe that sex with the wrong person will bring one happiness?

Evidently.

So what’s the positive alternative? Surely not to replace tendentious leftwing art with tendentious rightwing art, with novels, movies, paintings and songs which exist merely to promote what the Federalist headline called “conservative” art, by which its author may have meant conservative politics.

How can we define good fiction, for example? From here on, I’ll be talking about fiction, because these days I’m writing mostly novels, and like most people, I like to talk about me.

Maybe we should satisfy ourselves by copying the Rambam, Moshe ben Maimon, known to Christians as Maimonides. According to our great twelfth century rabbi and philosopher, one cannot describe God in positive terms, but only negative. God’s unity is beyond our comprehension or expression. We cannot say what God is, but only what God is not. For example, God is not corporeal, does not occupy space, is not finite in time or space, and so on.

Can I define a conservative novel by what it is not?

Among other attributes, a conservative novel will not:

• Be subordinated to post-modernism or even modernism or any other ism or any political or social or economic theory;

• Offend basic narrative logic;

• Contain clichés, or at least the most tiresome ones;

• Contain any extraneous appeal to some cultural fashion or faction. Recently we saw the Grammy for best song go to an extraordinarily mediocre song—even by Grammy standards—because its singers claim to be “nonbinary” and presented the song in as pornographic a manner as they could get away with on network television.

That’s just a starting list of nots. They are all valid, and there are hundreds more. But knowing what to avoid doesn’t help me as a writer all that much, does it?

Can I do better than the Rambam and come up with a positive definition of a conservative novel?

In 1885, Henry James wrote an essay called “The Art of Fiction.” James was responding to a now-forgotten writer named Besant who set out specific rules for writing novels.

Besant wrote that “the laws of fiction may be laid down and taught with as much precision and exactness as the laws of harmony, perspective and proportion.”

Henry James disagreed. He wrote, “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it competes with life.”

What did he mean by that? I suppose something like, “I could be out there experiencing life, but instead, I’m reading a book or watching a movie or listening to music.”

James added that the only obligation of a novel is to be interesting. (For those of us who have labored through certain Henry James novels, there’s potential irony in his assertion.)

James explained, “The ways in which it is at liberty to accomplish this result strike me as innumerable and such as can only suffer from being marked out or fenced in by prescription.”

Instead of Besant’s or any external rules, James insisted upon what he called “freedom to feel and say.”

James identified as a positive example the children’s novel Treasure Island, which he called “delightful.”

James’ praise gave the author of Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson, the excuse to write his own essay, which he called “A Humble Remonstrance.”

Stevenson denied that any art can successfully compete with life.

“Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant. A work of art is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate.”

According to Stevenson, the novel exists not as a competitor to life but by its immeasurable difference from life. The novel is “not a transcript of life, to be judged by its exactitude; but a simplification of some side or point of life, to stand or fall by its significant simplicity.”

The writer most often accused of success in portraying life is William Shakespeare. Shakespeare didn’t confine himself to the rules which governed drama before him, or seemingly any other time. He filled his plays with believable characters doing and saying amazing things. In his own phrase, he was “holding a mirror up to nature.”

The extent to which Shakespeare succeeded in competing with life is demonstrated by the fact that the world’s first psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud, wrote a paper in which he psychoanalyzed Shakespeare’s famous character Hamlet. Freud was apparently indifferent to the obvious fact that Hamlet was not a living human being but an entirely imaginary character.

Now, returning to my original question, is there something we can call a “conservative” novel?

If we mean by that, a novel which proclaims the wonderfulness of balanced budgets, reduced taxation, and a strong military, I’m sure the answer is no. It will be just as tendentious as the leftist movies we hate and the novels we never bother to read.

But if we mean a novel which is interesting, maybe because it avoids the “nots” I listed and consequent tendentiousness and instead brings the reader an experience closer to the immediate experience of life, maybe the answer is yes, even if it happens to be written by a political liberal.

The America we knew and grew up with is not the historic norm. It is a little window of light in a long dark history. It is a two-hundred-year-old exception to thousands of years of exploitation, victimization, and suppression.

Those who seek to censor and control our art do nothing new. Although they may have invented new terminology, they are doing the same old thing previous generations of oppressors did, as far back as the beginnings of civilization. They are also imitating the censorship governing most of the countries which surround us.

They reserve for themselves the power to decide what stories to tell, and how. To them, our role is to assent to and comply with their version of reality and otherwise to shut up.

The only sense in which writing a good novel or creating any good art might qualify as “conservative” is that it conserves our precious freedom of expression. It is an exercise of the freedom to feel and say Henry James wrote about.

Through mighty exertions, previous generations have handed us our freedom to feel and say.

If we exercise it, we thereby vindicate it and keep it alive for coming generations.

Put another way, use it or lose it. Let’s keep using it.

Max Cossack is an author, attorney, composer, and software architect (he can code). His most recent novel is High Jingo. He lives in a dusty little village in Arizona with his wife and no more cats.