Rebecca F. Kuang, "Goodness, Beauty, and Truth: The Value of Art in Times of Crisis," 2022
Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature
44,320 views May 26, 2022 PEMBROKE COLLEGE
The 2022 Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature, delivered by Rebecca F. Kuang on May 23 at Pembroke College, Oxford.
00:00 Lecture
32:16 Questions
Rebecca F. Kuang is a Marshall Scholar, translator, and the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award nominated author of the Poppy War trilogy and the forthcoming Babel. She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford; she is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale.
More about Rebecca F. Kuang: https://rfkuang.com
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Lecture
[Applause]
thank you so much for that
introduction and thank you to the entire tolkien lecture committee for putting this event together
and also the harpercollins team for the incredible exhibit of tolkien archives outside which i highly recommend you go
have a look at if you haven't already i was supposed to give this lecture back in 2020
and i kept putting it off and being very frustrating about it because i really
wanted to be back in person at oxford when i gave it and this is the first time i'm back in oxford since i
evacuated in the middle of the night in march 2020 and it feels really wonderful to be here so thank you all so much for
joining me here today um the topic of this lecture is goodness
beauty and truth the value of art in times of crisis
i've broken the powerpoint so i hope you entered the giveaway on time
um most writers i know suffered some kind of creative depression during those
first darkest months of the pandemic some felt their wells emptied by
isolation cut off from the conversations and sights and sounds and experiences
that one normally channels into storytelling some were crushed by the grief and exhaustion of shouldering entire
households where loved ones were sick or dying and some just couldn't see the purpose
of it at all i think we all lost our light then we couldn't see the point of scribbling
away our fake narratives about fake people in fake places while the world
was in shambles that was the start of my creative crisis and it's something i haven't stopped
struggling with since writing often feels indulgent and pointless the same way that pursuing a
phd in humanities feels indulgent and pointless i am a novelist who reads all day
studying literature and at no point have i felt more strongly that my parents were right i should have become a doctor
in the summer of 2020 all the common defensives of storytelling felt stale
people need some way to escape but there is no escape people need stories to inspire and give
them hope i felt no hope i felt like it was lying to give it to others
neil gaiman has written beautifully that escapist fiction can give us weapons give us armor give us real skills and
tools that we can take back and use to escape our real-life prisons and i think his essay is beautiful and i
agree theoretically but at the height of the pandemic my usual affair of healing
spells and mithril vests and legendary swords all felt so frivolous in the face
of this mounting collective pain and most of all i was convinced in 2020
and i'm still a little convinced of this that consuming stories just didn't in the long run make societies any better
or kinder i felt that the people drawn to my stories already agreed with me on
everything important and the people who didn't share my values were never going to pick up my work in the first place
it felt completely pointless to sit down and spin a yarn when in all likelihood the only person that story was going to
benefit materially was me we talk a lot about how stories generate
empathy but the trajectory of our world and the years i've been alive
highlight how little that empathy has done against the balance of stories that instead promulgate hate and division
i think that bigotry is infinitely more commercially appealing than tolerance and anyhow i don't think that bigots
read novels about hate and oppression and see themselves as the bad guys i think they always see themselves as the
victims i told a friend during this time that writing just felt like preaching to
a choir and he said well all right then you're revving up your congregation
sometimes you just need to rev up your congregation so i've been sitting with
that over the past two years as i figure out what i want to say and how i want to say it using the platform i've been
given i've been thinking about the novelist as an activist as a public intellectual
as someone who uses fiction not as a means to escape but as a means to directly grapple with the problems of
our lifetime i've been thinking about utilitarian uses of fiction and whether that comes
with a necessary trade-off to literariness and artistic value so the subject of this lecture is what i
will call the ideological novel if we're being nice and the propaganda novel if
we're being honest i want to discuss how we create and interpret socially motivated literature
and more fundamentally i want to ask what a novel is good for especially in times of crisis
so first let me take you back to china in the first decades of the 20th century a period also of terrifying change of
war and what then felt like one existential crisis after another the qing empire was crumbling western
powers were shooting cannons at the doorstep civil war was breaking out constantly and
china's intellectuals felt that unless it modernized and developed it would be doomed forever to be the sick man of asia a
dominated colony of the west during this time the reformist liang chichao wrote in a seminal 1902 essay
that if one intends to renovate the people of a nation one must first renovate its fiction
to renovate even the human mind and mold its character one must renovate fiction
why is this so because fiction has profound power over the way of man
this sentiment was later echoed by lu xin the father of modern chinese literature now known for his scathing
polemics on his contemporary chinese society and culture as a youth lucian famously went to japan
to study medicine and one day he saw a photographic slide of a bound chinese man being executed for spying during the
russo-japanese war and this spectacle convinced him that his motherland's sickness was spiritual
and not just physical solution wanted to doctor the chinese spirit and he decided the pen not the
scalpel would be the tools of his trade but the single the singular voice of the
novelist finds an immense challenge in swaying what he found the ignorant minds
of millions and unsurprisingly lucian's most famous earlier stories are written from the
perspective of a madman one who is horrified by the hypocrisy and social decay around him but who can do little
else but scream in shanghai in 1930 lucian helped found
and later chaired the league of left-wing riders which was a group of writers which aimed to respond to
national crises like kmt repression increasing japanese militarism and western semicolonialism with the power
of the pen this cohort was quite utilitarian about the purposes of literature they aim to use their stories
to wake up the chinese population from feudal and imperialist mindsets and for
these writers good literature just was ideological literature art for art's sake indeed was bourgeois
and indulgent and worth nothing at all the cultural and political churning in
china from the may 4th movement of 1919 onward saw the birth of many movements
but the one of perhaps the most contemporary consequence is the 1920 founding of the chinese communist party
and it's not hard to draw a straight line from the league of left-wing writers discourse of literature to save
the nation and mao zedong's remarks at the yen on conference a decade later where he
echoing lenin argued that literature and art should serve the millions and tens of millions of working people
art was for the proletariat and art should advance the cause of the socialist revolution
but here we start to feel a little uncomfortable because we can all get on board with literature to rejuvenate the
nation but not when it's couched as propaganda we want our art to send an important
message but we don't like it when that message becomes too obvious why is that
susan rubin suleiman in her study of the french ideological novel has drawn a useful working definition of the kind of
literature i'm talking about the romano tesse or ideological novel is
a novel written in the realistic mode that is based on an aesthetic of verisimilitude and representation which
signals itself to the reader as primarily didactic an intent seeking to demonstrate the validity of a
political philosophical or religious doctrine but sometime over the 20th century we
have become convinced that any art that tries too hard to send a message is bad
certainly this has a lot to do with the propaganda novels the propaganda battles of the cold war and notions that
anything put out by the communists was brainwashing it also has a lot to do with the cia's
influence on the iowa writers workshop and wilbur schramm's theories of mass communication and the way that the
advice show don't tell is really meant to discourage abstract theorizing and social critique
i did a research paper on the us state department's book translation program in
hong kong this year and i was immensely tickled by how u.s officials defined propaganda by arguing
it was only manipulative when the communists did it when americans do it they are just telling
the truth propaganda is the work of the russians and the chinese but real literature is
hemingway and faulkner and emerson but i won't get into all of that here i
will simply refer back to suleiman who i think summarizes nicely are distaste for
the ideological novel it is a perishable genre she argues and it loses its potency once the historical
crisis it is referring to has passed it ignores artistic refinement and seeks
an audience on the basis of political brownie points rather than literary merit it is preachy and it is annoying
plato who takes art as merely memetic of the forms concludes that art is at best
useless because it merely imitates what it already is and at worst a bad influence because it distorts and
misrepresents things like the gods iris murdoch humorously recounts that in
book three of the republic plato writes that should a dramatic poet attempt to visit the ideal state who would be
politely escorted to the border plato's memetic theory of art if we
accept it explains well why we don't need the ideological novel it is
redundant at best and misleading at worst we don't like propaganda we don't like
anything that is too didactic pamphlets and political parties and campaign ads exist we don't need novels
to fulfill the same function we don't like books that tell us what to think because we are adults and we can
make up our own minds thank you very much and that's all well and fair
and to be quite honest the socialist novels of 1960s china are horrendously
difficult to read i am still traumatized by my first semester of graduate school during which
my advisor had us reading at least one socialist novel a week and i can attest
that they are laughably cheesy and melodramatic my classmates family still makes fun of
her for what they call her grain production novels meanwhile i will forever be scarred by
the novel chinchinjiger by yangmo which involves a love triangle between the main character and her lame ugly
bourgeois fiancee and the hot dashing doomed revolutionary
very few aspiring writers now would happily label themselves propagandist and that is probably a good thing
but i will argue that in our current climate we do a terrible lot of reading books as propaganda by which i mean we
reduce them to didactic moralistic and memetic interpretations we expect them to tell us precisely how
to speak and act and think and behave because we've fallen into the habit of reading and critiquing books solely for
their themes and messages or what we think are their themes and messages rather than reading them as explorations
of all the infinite ways that one can be human this is how we get negative reviews of
novels for a bad representation simply because they don't manage to portray in their entirety cultures that weren't
monolithic in the first place this is how we get mind-blowingly silly
condemnations of grimdark fiction for endorsing mass murder
or reviews of sally rooney's work that are upset because her characters aren't sufficiently marxist
or and it's a sore topic i know but surface level critiques of vladimir nabokov's lolita which argue it espouses
pedophilia i will not venture too deeply into what caused this reading culture because i
think probably a whole lot of things are at fault i think that one root cause is likely
the elite capture and this is a term coined by the philosopher of me taiwo
a vocabulary's invented to talk about oppression and their reconfiguration to neoliberal and capitalist ends
another is the failure of high school english curriculums and their emphasis on themes and messages and authorial
intent compounding all of this probably is the way that social media has demolished our attention spans and
fractured the kind of conversations we're capable of having i ran into an interesting paper by karen
boyer the other day which argues that twitter memes of victorian novels by authors like dickens and elliot and
trollope actually managed to be more sentimental and didactic than the victorian novels they target
in part because of misattribution and reading out of context and in part because of the grammatical conventions
of viral tweets i think that this is a horrible way to read i think that otisha mashfaye puts it
best art is not media a novel is a literary work of art meant to expand
consciousness reading novels that live in an amoral universe pass the political agenda described on social media we need
characters and novels to be free to range into the dark and the wrong
i think that here we can also pull in susan sontag whose seminal essay against interpretation
argues that interpretation specifically a kind of interpretation that excavates destroys digs behind the text to find a
subtext which is the true one is the revenge of the intellect upon art
this kind of reading for sontag makes art into an article for use for arrangement into a mental scheme of
categories and i think that one need to look no further for proof than the goodreads review that reads three stars
but bumping it up because of its powerful themes i don't go quite as far as moshfay whose
work has always existed very comfortably in grayness and darkness i do love her work though i think there are writers
who do want to write for the betterment of society who would like their political themes to be quite explicit
and i do not think that is incompatible with creating good art but i do think it's bad criticism to read novels in
this way it is lazy uncharitable and unimaginative and i will argue now that it has had
particularly bad effects on how we receive marginalized writers by which i mean non-white writers queer writers and
broadly writers who have historically had no platform in mainstream publishing
to begin with i am not the first or last writer of color who has received hate mail decrying my work for being woke
liberal snowflake self-victimizing anti-white reverse racist propaganda uh reader my sin is looking the way i do
while writing about a protagonist who doesn't look like aragorn son of aerothorn
but that kind of criticism is an easy target more nefarious i think is the interpretation imposed by a reader who
imagines themselves ideologically aligned with the novel i mean here readers who celebrate and
recommend books just because they are diverse i hate the marketing label diverse
i think the reading culture that it's symptomatic of is bad for literature for several reasons
first for one thing it defangs what novels are trying to say by imposing
very blunt labels on what they actually say we lose a lot when we argue that tony
morrison's the bluest eye for example it's merely about the evils of racism
instead of say specifically property ownership and dispossession and beauty and internalized hatred
we lose when we lump all fiction by chinese-american authors into the category of immigrant story about making
it in america in the style of amy tan and maxine honkingston which is a frame of reference i think
that publishing still has not moved past this method of interpretation is
infantilizing and patronizing it makes false equivocations and it obliterates nuance and i hate it
second it reduces novelists to ethnographers historians and tourist
guides anything but artists pascal casanova in the world republic of
letters argues that a writer from an impoverished minor literature is often doomed to act as a representative of his
people to the cultural center i argue similarly that we now have a
reading culture which is fueled by marketing copy and advertisements and well-meaning listicles
which authors like coulson whitehead and jhumpa lahiri and menjen lee are recommended because they will explain
black and brown and yellow people to the liberal reader who really just wants to expand their world view
read these five novels during aapi heritage month so that you can decide asians are
actually people i mean god help us third in turn it pigeonholes writers to
restrict the boundaries of what they could write about in favor of selling something they think publishing wants
from them after all in a kind of sick and sordid way such didactic labels have been
reconfigured as selling points ways to make ourselves attractive i find emerging writers pressured to do
what i have become allergic to in the last few years which is to perform a kind of token minority for the reading
public so that white publishing can act like they rescued them i find writers like me reduced to
identitarian selling points like ownvoices chinese american
immigrant diaspora hashtag woman of color where white writers are just sold on the
strength of their craft and imagination i think fourth and most distressingly
the view of all marginalized writers as mere lecturers has become a reason to ban books
the phenomena i have just described are not identical to but certainly causally
related to the current spate of book banning legislation being passed across the united states wherein books are
categorized solely by supposedly hand-fisted messaging and ideology
books are accused of being about critical race theory just for having black characters books are being banned
for spreading a pedophilic agenda just for having queer characters and children's books are being deemed
unamerican for featuring protagonists that are immigrants i think that the people banning books
are probably not the same people treating diverse novels as travel guides to other cultures but we all lose when
we treat fiction as equivalent to propaganda and when we forget that there is the craft of the story involved
so where does that leave the writer who really does want to use their work to make a difference
and what tools are available to the inquisitive and generous reader who would like to meet texts where
they're at i want to go back to sontag's discontents with critical
interpretations focused solely on content sontag's solution is to pay more
attention to form though she doesn't mean that we ought to ignore content altogether in any case i don't think that we can do
that with books i think very few people read only for the vibes and even the genres that are
so often maligned for being frivolous and pointless in here i mean romance and
women's fiction appeal to their readers because they actually say so much about autonomy and
desire and love and self-worth i think every book is trying to say something even if that's something is
merely that certain bodies have the right to feel joy sontag writes that the function of
criticism should be to show how it is what it is even that it is what it is rather than
to show what it means her argument is that content or analysis of content should be dissolved into
discussions of forum though i would amend that to argue that content and form are inextricably
related how it is what it is has everything to do with what it means
the craft of the novel is part and parcel of the message and we cannot look at what a book's themes are without also
asking how it articulates those themes i think novels can function as clarifying exercises
the text is an argument and the mechanics of the story let us explore caveats and exceptions and logical
implications and unexpected consequences all the tools of craft voice imagery
tense pacing perspective points of view character arcs the rise and fall of plot these are tools we use to chisel at the
stone face of representation until it takes sharper and clearer shape we need novels to complicate interrogate
and turn over what looks like boring rocks and examine all the dirty weird and unexpected undergrowth on the other
side contrary to plato i think that art helps us to see the world as it is because the
technical tools of art can in fact break down illusions can force us to examine ethical dilemmas from new perspective
and illuminate invisible structures of power and domination at play
i think art can also just help us see the wonder in ordinary things
tolkien in his 1947 lecture on fairy stories argues that fairy stories helps us in
the recovery of a clear perspective that we need to clean our windows so
that the thing seemed clearly may be freed from the drab blurb of triteness or familiarity
from possessiveness he writes also that it was in fairy stories that i first defined the potency
of the words and the wonder of the things such as stone and wood and iron
tree and grass house and fire bread and wine i think anyone who has ever read lord of
the rings will agree i don't mean for us to pull our punches
i get the occasional review saying that they wish my work was more subtle more
nuanced when it's clear that what they really mean is that they wish i would fritter away everything i meant to say
in the first place sometimes folks will not listen until you're beating them over the head with
the point but that doesn't mean we have to resort the blunt and artless instruction
of the chinese grain production novels instead we can make our words sting so
much sharper we can hone the edge of our prose until it hurts
the purpose of fiction then is to help us think on our conditions past present
and future in the case of the past the novel can do what the historian cannot
for jim downes imaginative reconstruction is a solution to quagmires where the archives are
insufficient or have been deliberately destroyed in the case of the future the
speculative novel becomes the test ground for the worlds we want to live in and the worlds we might find ourselves
in if we're not careful as ruja benjamin writes here fictions are not falsehoods but refashionings
through which analysts experiment with different scenarios trajectories and reversals elaborating new values and
testing different possibilities for creating more livable worlds and in the case of the present
i think that speaks for itself to write is to give a definite shape to our pain and confusion and hope and joy
it doesn't just leave a record it names what needs naming it gives us the vocabulary to understand
what we are going through and for understanding everyone else around us and i think absent any other greater
utilitarian impact that's a worthy exercise in and of itself
well that's all very good how does it work if i can be self-centered for a moment
i'd love to illustrate everything i've just said by explaining the intersections between form and content
in my upcoming novel babble or babel if you're british but i'm not british and i won't pretend to
be babel is a pastiche of the victorian classics and it uses the tools of
conscious imitation in order to deconstruct the literature it's inspired by it adopts the structure of the victorian
buildings roman which is a genre focused on identity formation and development of a subject within the civic and moral
order of bourgeois english society only babel takes as its main character a subject who can
never be a good citizen by virtue of his race and background it consciously adopts the very proper
english diction of dickens and austin and zachary because this as we have been told since high school is real english
it's good writing is what constitutes a classic only because my protagonist is an
outsider a boy born in china who comes to england unfamiliar with the culture and language his observations emphasize
the strangeness of this entire social system rather than the strangeness of those born outside of it
i also employ footnotes that pedantic and occasionally patronizing way of
whispering tidbits to the reader to emphasize the ways that the sufferings of colonized territories have been for
so long relegated to the footnotes of official british histories babel is a book about languages and
subversions and turning things upside down and the way i wrote it has everything to do with what it says
so let me bring it all back to tolkien these past few weeks i've delighted in
re-reading the lord of the rings which is just as beautiful and absorbing to me as an adult as it was when i was a child
i think it is precisely the best antidote for the writer who feels words no longer hold power
j.r.r tolkien or as we affectionately call him in our household donald ronald
ronald tolkien lived through a second world war and gave us lived watched his friends die in
world war one lived through a second world war and gave us a work of immense beauty and resilience and hope
and no one could argue that the themes of his work are subtle they burst from the page his christian faith his moral
messaging the goodness of his heroes the badness of his villains
our current literary climate prizes nuance and ambiguity and anti-heroes and
sometimes i think the underlying sentiment of such criticism is to say keep your politics off the page
but tolkien never shied from telling us that one ought to try their best to be brave to seek light in our friends and
to never give up hope when the world seems like it's at its darkest in the pen of a less talented writer
and there have been many since tolkien this easily comes off as a silly morality tale
but no one could call the lord of the rings a silly morality tale it succeeds because it is so rich so
fully imagined so weird and wild and cool it succeeds in part because middle earth
feels truly realized because tolkien combining the best of both his professions employs appendices
and textbook-like exposition and long digressions into ancient song and poems to convince us that this place really
exists and has a history and in making middle earth feel true tolkien has emphasized what is at stake
and engaged the reader in the fight for its survival and in combining epic and biblical prose
with plain straightforward english he creates both a sense of immediate accessibility and also grandness
he has created a myth that feels ancient and alive to us both at once
and i will spend my whole career chasing that level of craft so
bad to those who say that art should only exist for art's sake artistry and ideology ideology do not
have to stand in opposition i want us to write our whole hearts out and not to shy from claims that we are
being too political or didactic or too ideological say what you mean and use the tools of
fabulation to clarify what you mean to say as of six days ago i am engaged to a
philosopher
one might call him my philosopher king which is why plato and aristotle so
often make their way into my work and in a happy coincidence bennett and i
are both fans of the novelist and philosopher iris murdoch who was a fellow here at oxford and who in turn
was very fond of tolkien and his work so it all comes full circle and it seemed natural that i should turn to
murdoch in preparing this lecture in her essay art is the imitation of nature murdoch writes imagination is a
kind of freedom a renewed ability to perceive and express the truth
the artist must tell the truth about something which he has understood and i think this to me is the only
answer to the question that plagued me at the start of the pandemic what is a novel good for
the novel might have possible contingent and instrumental effects as an opiate as
an energizer as a motivator and as propaganda but it seems to me that all art needs to
have value is to search relentlessly for truth to expose reframe reconfigure to
speculate frodo says to gandalf in the fellowship of the ring that he wished all of this
had not happened in his lifetime and gandalf famously responds so do i and so do all who live to see
such times but that is not for them to decide all we have to decide is what we do with
the time that has given us the artist chooses to write and as long as we are using our words to
seek truth beauty and goodness i think it all will have been worth it
thank you [Applause]
um so uh when reading the pokemon things i thought really stood out for me was the fact
that a lot of fantasy war stories have a very neat wrapped up ending and it kind of
you've got a winner and you've got a loser and bernie god doesn't feel like that at all
at the end so i was wondering how much of that was a conscious decision to kind of really try and reflect the historical influences of
the novel and how much features have happened organically with the story yeah i think that the problem with
studying 20th century history and colonialism specifically is that you
learn pretty early on that there are no easy endings to any sort of armed
conflict even all of the great tales of decolonial victories of the 20th century
don't end in successful free thriving nations they end in continued warfare and power
struggles and uh basically postcolonialism is a concept that doesn't really exist so
when i was drafting the burning god i mean the the whole argument of the
trilogy has been the dilemma between the rise of communist movements um following
the end of world war ii that were both anti-imperialist but also deeply violent and authoritarian which
is a central dilemma for anyone who thinks about chinese history and chinese
politics and the future of china and it felt like lying in the opposite of the truth to wrap up the burning god in this
cute little victory where either you know wren wins and rolls happily over a nation that has no food and no crops and
frankly a very bleak future so it felt like the only honest answer was to write a book in which nobody won
um i mean plug your ears if you haven't read the burning god uh
nuja wins in theory but his future looks horrible and it's a future that he doesn't want so
in search of the truth i sought complications and i think that means that the burning god
is not a book for everybody but it's the only book that i could have written
how important was it for you to make sure that rin was very flawed as a
protagonist because i feel like she's very flawed in comparison to a lot
of modern day protagonists and it added a real edge to the character you just don't see in a lot of other novels
it's really funny to me when people come away from the poppy war and think oh my
god this character's horrible i would never want to get to know her she's the worst
person i've ever read about because when i was writing the popular word trilogy i
would make some very bad decisions i mean there was some there were some wrong ones in there but
i wanted at every critical juncture to give her very good reasons for making
those decisions and to emphasize that any one of us in those positions might have made the same choice so i never had
rin make a decision that i theoretically if i were in her shoes if i'd been through everything she had been through
that i would not make and i think that readers have resonated with that it's very different to read a
story about just a ruthless mass murderer who doesn't care about anything and wants to inflict suffering and evil
because there's there's nothing that you're rooting for but when you have a character like rin who is not seeking
destruction but cares deeply about her friends cares deeply about her country and and her people and is genuinely
trying to save them i think it's much more interesting to see how those good
motives can turn into horrific consequences and i think that's also a
large part of the study of the chinese communist party so it was always on my mind the way that
villains can be flawed and not think of themselves as villains
yes yeah
um so coming back to kind of what you said at the start of the lecture about like the uh nuances and subtlety of
literature and it's almost desire to find them how what operation do we take to
literature as a subject because if we have to like as we always get rid of this desired by the literature there's
such that we want i'm out of a degree which is a bit of an issue because i'm already 27 grand down
well i i do think we are looking for subtlety i i'm not arguing that
we shouldn't read literature uh for what it's trying to say my argument is that
there are a lot more interesting things going on in texts that the majority of readers are willing to afford them
i think subtlety is good i think that subtlety is used as an
excuse to criticize a book when the reader feels that the book is making an argument they don't like and i've seen
this a lot in reviews of books that are quite expressively about race and
racism and you'll get your average reader who says i was just looking for a fun rom-com i mean these themes i'm not
a racist i don't disagree with these themes i just wish that they had been handled with more subtlety
and there are some things which people just won't hear unless you're screaming it at them and i think that as scholars of
literature we can analyze the very smart ways that a lot of contemporary novelists are making their argument
in much more complicated ways that marketing coffee like this book is about racism doesn't do justice too
so your literature your degree still has
um value gonna ask a probably silly question especially after the answer you just gave there um given that you kind
of destroyed me and my friends when we read the trilogy we're scared now to read babble
do you think you'll ever write a book that is maybe on the lighters
yeah i was just talking to my editor about this
my sixth novel will be a rom-com um it will be about love and probably have
a happy ending um because i am in love and i would like to write a happy ending so
uh i think that novel will be a lot lighter i mean it largely takes place in
hell so but you know that's like
just the background um there's but there's love in the air in
hell more on that soon um
[Music] practices are kind of instead of like
one field where like history is a huge source of wisdom um and as someone who also writes a historical
fantasy i was wondering how you constructed like the empirical background for the coffee more and babble um like did you go into it with
an eye like i'm going to look for these things for my novel or did you treat history just like
dude like on what grounds did you like your historical sources and like how did you choose how to handle your subject
matters and like process that into fiction i think i'm just naturally
inclined to write about whatever i'm studying at the moment so when i started writing the poppy war it was because i
just gone to beijing on a gap year and was fluent in chinese for the first time learning all this family history from my
grandparents for the first time and i was an economics major before i went to beijing and i was very bad at economics
so once i got there i was like i'm going to do history i'm going to start reading all the history that i can in part
because i felt like i finally had access to all this stuff about me and my family
that i was never taught in high school and hadn't studied yet in college
so when i came back i wrote a senior thesis on the public narrative
about the rape of nanjing and the different ways in which it's been commemorated and politicized and i was
working on this dissertation at the same time that i was writing the popular trilogy so there's a really nice synergy
there in which all my academic work just is the research for the books and
with babel i was here um and realizing all the things that had
made me fall in love with it and also all the things that make this a very terrible place in many regards um and i
also do translation and i think about languages a lot and i was reading about histories of colonialism so it it all
just happens at the same time which i find very fruitful and is is
like a cheat code to having interesting things to write about because what i would do when i was at
cambridge in oxford is go to class and have my notebook open and on the right side write down like actual nonfiction
class notes and on the left side write down the ways in which these cool tidbits could be turned into fiction so
when we were talking about things like military logistics and cool stratagems that generals had used and like
nitty-gritty details like grain production i'd be like okay that's a great paragraph that is a great
paragraph not just going to say that on like page 673. um
so it it's also great because it gives me ideas for research papers and areas that
i want to pursue academically so it's all part of one big project
in what ways did you tackle or avoid or have conversations with your publisher
your editor and your agent about avoiding the asian american cliches and the hashtags
that you just spoke about in your speech what kinds of conversations did you have and were you able to at the beginning or
is that something that's happened as you become a successful published author yeah i could talk about this for hours
um but when i queried the poppy war in
2015 either 2015 or 2016. publishing looked
very different than it did today and it's only been like seven six seven years um and i had grown up
never reading fantasy novels by asian american authors or fantasy novels that
featured asian protagonists because they just did not exist and i was very lucky in that during my
year in beijing ken liu's the grace of kings had just come out and it was the first novel by a
chinese-american author to come out from a big five plus publisher the first fantasy novel so it was literally ken
liu and then fonda lee whose jade city came out shortly afterwards that convinced me that there was space for my
work on bookshelves and that publishers might take a chance on what i was writing so the querying process and then the
submission process went pretty smoothly for me i was acquired by my current home harper voyager where i think i'll stay
for a while [Music] my editor is so relieved
but i was also very young when the poppy work came out and i didn't know how to talk about myself and i think that
i wasn't speaking up for myself or willing to push back against ways in which my book was being marketed and
talked about we leaned pretty hard into it's a diaspora novel it's chinese-american it's diverse which
again are labels that i really dislike now i think they have uses in that they they
help books find their target audiences and i had a lot of part of the reason why the popular succeeded is that it
found a lot of on the ground word of mouth support from readers of color
but it the marketing for those early books really did feel like this is you
know a big diverse fantasy and um you should read it because it's diverse and it's on lists of like five novels by
asian authors you should read five non-white novels etc and i've grown less and less comfortable with that as time
has moved on and more comfortable in my relationship with my editors in which i feel
confident able to speak frankly with them about what i like and what i don't like and
it's been one big maturation process and i'm really happy with the way we're talking about babel it's um
you know there have been ups and downs and my relationship with publishing and with my publisher but it there's just
been a lot of great communication and growth and learning on both sides and it obviously helps right that now like my
books are pretty successful so i i can say what i want and how i want to be marketed and
um and i try really hard to like help that advice trickle down to debut
writers of color i don't know i think slowly things are getting better i think slowly publishers
are are learning um and not pulling the same moves of oh this is our token
non-white writer of the season etc but but there's still a long way to go so again i could talk about this for a long
time we have a question from the livestream yes we've got a few comments on youtube
and one question is from jar full of bubbles who asks did you always know
when you started writing the popular war what discussions you wanted to spark oh definitely
i'm a very argument driven writer i did debate in high school and i think of everything in terms of arguments before
i start a novel i think about what argument i want to make with the text sorry i'm staring at you
as if you asked the question um so i always anticipate exactly what
discussions the novels are supposed to sparkle though i'm often very surprised by the discussions they actually spark
um i can't think of a great example right now but sometimes people just take away
these crazy things about characters and scenarios that like never even crossed my mind and it's not uncommon for me to
do a public event and then a reader will be like i i had this like very articulate sophisticated interpretation
of this like imagery that you used and i'm like yeah that was on purpose i'm
so glad you picked up on that but in general i i know exactly what i
want my readers to think the book is about yeah
um first i just want to say uh thank you i used to work at the waterstones you made my job considerably easier
but um i wanted to ask them you know now that you are you know you're obviously a
very successful published writer is it easier to write now because you know a lot of you know new writers they always
talk about how difficult it is to get stuff on the page is it easier now
yes and no um the ways in which it's harder are that i want to challenge myself with
every project and i get very bored doing the same thing over and over again so i probably won't do a secondary world epic
fantasy again and i'm always looking for new structural rules to break and genres to
hop into and types of stories to tell i mean a rom-com is going to be a very big
move for me and i think that's a good thing every new project should feel like a bigger
challenge otherwise you're just spinning your wheels and writing the same thing over and over again
so i appreciate things being difficult i appreciate having to start over and learn the mechanics of a new genre
before i enter it the way in which it's easier is that i have a sense of scope and project
management it used to be at the start of a novel i think there's no way this
turns into a finished book um there's just so many words to go and there's so much blank text and stuff i don't know
about and this plot will never make sense um and having done this
four five times now um i i've learned to trust the process so i
know that two months in i'm just going to have like 10 000 words of gibberish and i know that four months then i'll
have more words but still no plot structure and no clear way to link it all together and i know that somewhere
at the forty thousand fifty thousand word mark i will do a reset and map out what the plot really is and reconfigure
a lot of things delete at least 20 000 words like give the characters consistent names um and then
do a rewrite from start to finish and and i know that at the first draft mark
that it will one day stop looking so ugly so i think i have more faith in myself and my ability to finish the
process even if you know it's it's the writing is still very bad in early drafts and i
feel very bad for my agent who has to read those early drafts and offer thoughts on them because like my
sentences don't really come together until the very end that's where the polish comes in and and i mean literally
come together like i will just turn in unfinished sentences and paragraphs to my agent
but now i know one day all those uh sentences will have periods
and all those paragraphs will have structure and and the book will be done
thank you so much for that lecture um i wanted to ask you about um kind of the dynamic between your
academic work and your creative work because i'm also a phd student and aspiring writer and they're such intense
things to do a phd into writing novelis i was kind of wondering if you have any thoughts about how you manage
both of those things at the same time the kind of practical difficulties and what each thing talks to you about the
other thing if that makes sense yeah it's really hard to balance both um
i had a really wonderful visit to the bodleian today where we got to look at
some things from the tolkien archive and catherine the archivist was explaining
that every time his publisher wanted something from him like illustrations or
maps he'd be like wait until the holidays i have papers to grade and then during the holidays he would
produce these beautiful watercolor illustrations that would go into the hobbit um
and and that's how i balance it logistically i'm like we can't uh
we we're literally um negotiating the dates of the babel uk tour because it
coincides with the start of term next year and i was like i can't miss class
um but i am going to miss class to be here um but that's okay because on the first
day you just go over the syllabus and nothing happens um [Music] but i think uh
i think culturally it's tricky because i don't think that academia especially in
the humanities takes creative work very seriously for example like in in my field
translation doesn't count as work that really counts for tenure if you produce like
significant contributions to the fields by making all these texts available for readers in english to read that that's
not considered groundbreaking work because it's considered you know just pedantic oh you just you know borrowed
somebody else's work and similarly i i still get a little bit embarrassed when i talk about my creative work in
academic circles because i don't want them to think that anything is taking my
attention away from the academic work i want them to think i'm a serious scholar who is wholly committed to my research
and i am and i think that has a lot to do with the insecurities also of being an early
career academic and not having the confidence to just be like and i'm a novelist too um
but frankly like being a novelist doesn't help you get a job and it is not something you put on a cv so it it's
something that i feel like needs to be my second life that needs to remain in the background while i'm on
campus which is fine for now it helps me to focus but i i hope that one day there's
there's more interdisciplinary recognition and and talking back and forth between
novelists and academics because iris murdock was both a novelist and a philosopher and tolkien was a novelist
and a professor so we exist it's possible
i think um i guess my question would be the ending has some ambiguity to it and
do you know where it goes and would you ever tell us i'm going to try to talk about this in
the vaguest way possible babel is a standalone there is not a
sequel in the planning and if i ever write a sequel it would be at least a decade
from now my philosopher king really wants me to
write like a godfather two type prequel sequel combination
um that explores interwoven timelines between one dead
character and one living character which would be crazy
maybe i'll do that one day it is not something that i'm going to work on in the immediate future but
babel as it's written is supposed to have a very satisfying definite ending and there is no to be continued in the
works well this will be our final question again you know you've talked a lot about how publishing
is learning but it's learning relatively slowly as someone i've worked in marketing for five years and i i and a
lot of other young people in publishing but we're banging our heads against the wall trying to get usually older people and publishing to listen and either
listen or retire i just do have if you have any advice
for the young people um the people who are sick of using the word diverse in
every single marketing copy and for the people at the top of it marked publicity marketing food chain who won't like them
well i've never worked in publishing but i'm very aware of the stress and constant mismanagement going on
i feel really bad for younger people in publishing especially people who are not white trying to make
it in publishing it seems like it is not just not an environment where they're able to survive
um so i really don't know because i i'm not an insider what can be
done in terms of talking to higher-ups who really should just retire but i will say uh
the most fruitful conversations i've had about publishing and the times when i
felt like things were truly changing were when my editors sat down and actually talked things through and
talked about why i was upset and what i wasn't happy with and there's been follow through on that
between the publication of the burning god and babel which i'm thrilled about and
i think just a willingness to listen to authors i think that authors very often feel very insecure
with their relationships with their editors we we feel always that we don't want to get anybody mad at us and that
we don't want our publisher to get irritated because then we'll get the cold shoulder and be blown off and not
receive any marketing or publicity which i don't know if that's how it works it just is how it feels all the time and
having the confidence to actually speak with my editors has been huge i'm also very aware that i'm able to do this
because i'm not a debut writer and i know my editors well and there's a relationship there so i think
making it clear to new writers that if they speak they will be heard is something that i wish publishing at all
levels would do um just before we get back to one more round of thanks uh the committee would
like to thank the uh pembroke annual fund um and the cadas family trust who have been supporting lecture now for 10
years and we are very grateful for them allowing us to have all this fun uh so
given that you have for so many years of being so kind to this lecture series including
joining our uh covert special uh symposium we would like to give you
a small gift from the committee and so we have the pembroke mug
thank you
it's beautiful
so yeah thank you once again um such an incredible event i'm so glad that it was in person we now have the drink
reception outside uh we'll run for around about an hour please make your
way out help yourself to drinks complimentary and please take a look
[Applause]
[Applause]
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The speaker, Rebecca F. Kuang, delivers a lecture titled "Goodness, Beauty, and Truth: The Value of Art in Times of Crisis" at the 2022 Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature. She discusses her personal creative crisis during the pandemic, where she questioned the purpose of writing fiction in a world in "shambles". Kuang felt that common defenses of storytelling, such as providing escape or hope, were "stale". She also believed that consuming stories didn't necessarily make societies "better or kinder".
Kuang explores the concept of the "ideological novel" or "propaganda novel," drawing parallels to early 20th-century Chinese intellectuals like Liang Qichao and Lu Xun, who believed fiction could "renovate the people of a nation" and "doctor the Chinese spirit". She notes that this utilitarian view of literature evolved into Mao Zedong's idea that art should "serve the millions and tens of millions of working people" and "advance the cause of the socialist revolution".
Kuang then critiques the modern distaste for overtly didactic art, suggesting it stems from Cold War propaganda battles and a misinterpretation of literary criticism, leading to a reading culture that reduces novels to "didactic moralistic and memetic interpretations". She argues that this approach is "lazy, uncharitable and unimaginative" and has particularly negative effects on how marginalized writers are received, often pigeonholing them as mere "lecturers" or "ethnographers".
Instead, Kuang advocates for a focus on how content and form are "inextricably related". She believes novels can function as "clarifying exercises" that use the "tools of craft" to "complicate, interrogate, and turn over" seemingly simple ideas. She echoes Tolkien's idea that "fairy stories helps us in the recovery of a clear perspective". For Kuang, the purpose of fiction is to help us "think on our conditions past, present, and future" and to "give a definite shape to our pain and confusion and hope and joy". She concludes by asserting that artistry and ideology do not have to be in opposition, and that as long as artists "seek truth, beauty, and goodness," their work will be "worth it".
Rebecca F. Kuang's "Goodness, Beauty, and Truth: The Value of Art in Times of Crisis" is a compelling and timely lecture that adeptly navigates the complex relationship between art, purpose, and societal impact. Kuang's personal journey through a creative crisis during the pandemic provides a relatable entry point into a broader discussion about the perceived "pointlessness" of art in the face of real-world suffering. Her candor about feeling her "wells emptied by isolation" and being "crushed by the grief and exhaustion" resonates deeply, particularly for anyone who has grappled with the relevance of creative pursuits during difficult times.
One of the lecture's strengths lies in its historical context, drawing parallels between contemporary anxieties about "propaganda novels" and early 20th-century Chinese intellectual movements. By introducing figures like Liang Qichao and Lu Xun, Kuang effectively demonstrates that the debate around art's didactic function is far from new. This historical grounding enriches her argument and provides a nuanced understanding of how political and cultural shifts influence artistic reception.
Kuang's critique of the current reading culture is particularly incisive. Her assertion that many readers reduce novels to "didactic moralistic and memetic interpretations" and treat them as "propaganda" or "travel guides to other cultures" is a powerful commentary on the simplistic ways in which literature, especially by marginalized authors, is often consumed and judged. The examples she provides, such as critiques of grimdark fiction for "endorsing mass murder" or Sally Rooney's work for not being "sufficiently marxist," highlight the absurdity of this reductive approach.
The core of Kuang's argument – that "artistry and ideology do not have to stand in opposition" and that novels should "clarify, interrogate, and turn over" ideas through their craft – is both inspiring and practical. Her emphasis on the interplay between form and content, exemplified by her discussion of "Babel," provides a valuable framework for both creators and readers. The idea that "how it is what it is has everything to do with what it means" is a crucial insight for appreciating the depth and complexity of literary works.
Furthermore, her defense of overtly political themes, while advocating for refined craft, challenges the notion that subtlety is always superior. Her point that "sometimes folks will not listen until you're screaming it at them" is a bold and necessary acknowledgment of the urgent messages some art aims to convey.
The Q&A session further enhances the lecture, offering insights into Kuang's writing process and her experiences as a successful author of color navigating the publishing industry. Her candidness about the challenges of balancing academic and creative work, and her critique of how "diverse" labels are used in marketing, add further layers of depth and authenticity to her presentation.
Overall, Kuang delivers a thought-provoking and passionately articulated argument for the enduring value of art, particularly in times of crisis. She champions a more engaged and sophisticated approach to reading and writing, one that embraces both intellectual rigor and emotional impact. --- 한글로 적어주세요.
R. F. 쿠앙
1996년 중국 광저우에서 태어나 네 살 때 가족과 함께 미국으로 이주했다. 조지타운대학에서 중국사를 전공한 후 마셜 장학생에 선발되어 케임브리지대학과 옥스퍼드대학에서 중국학 연구로 석사학위를 받았으며, 현재 예일대학에서 동아시아 어문학 박사과정을 공부하고 있다.
스물두 살 때 펴낸 첫 소설 『양귀비 전쟁』이 네뷸러상, 로커스상, 세계판타지상 최종 후보에 오르며 화려하게 데뷔했다. 스물여섯 살 때 펴낸 네 번째 소설 『바벨, 혹은 폭력의 필요성』이 《뉴욕타임스》 베스트셀러 1위에 오른 데 이어 네뷸러상, 로커스상, 영국도서상 등을 휩쓸면서 영미권에서 가장 핫한 스타 작가의 대열에 합류했다. 작가가 “경쟁이 치열한 출판업계 내의 외로움에 관한 공포소설”이라고 자평한 『옐로페이스』 역시 아마존 올해의 책, 《타임》 선정 2023년 꼭 읽어야 할 책 100권, 굿리즈 초이스 어워드 2023년 최고의 소설, 굿리즈 독서 챌린지: ‘2024년에 가장 많이 읽은 책’ 1위, 리즈 위더스푼 북클럽 추천도서에 선정되는 등 자신이 반짝 스타가 아니라 대중성과 문학성을 겸비한 차세대 작가임을 전 세계 독서계에 강렬하게 각인시켰다.
최근작 : <옐로페이스>,<양귀비 전쟁 2 : 출루 코리크>,<양귀비 전쟁 1 : 시네가드> … 총 65종 (모두보기)
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이 강연에서 강연자 레베카 F. 콰앙은 "선함, 아름다움, 진실: 위기 시대 예술의 가치"라는 제목으로 2022년 톨킨 판타지 문학 강연에서 발표했습니다.
콰앙은 팬데믹 기간 동안 자신이 겪었던 창작의 위기에 대해 이야기하며, 세상이 "난장판"이 된 상황에서 소설을 쓰는 목적에 의문을 제기했습니다. 콰앙은 스토리텔링의 일반적인 방어 논리, 즉 탈출이나 희망을 제공한다는 것이 "진부하다"고 느꼈습니다. 그녀는 또한 이야기를 소비하는 것이 사회를 "더 좋게 만들거나 더 친절하게 만드는" 데 반드시 기여하지는 않는다고 생각했습니다.
콰앙은 량치차오와 루쉰과 같은 20세기 초 중국 지식인들과의 유사점을 언급하며 "이데올로기 소설" 또는 "선전 소설"의 개념을 탐구합니다. 이들은 소설이 "국민을 개혁"하고 "중국 정신을 치료"할 수 있다고 믿었습니다. 그녀는 문학에 대한 이러한 공리주의적 관점이 마오쩌둥의 "수백만 노동자들에게 봉사"하고 "사회주의 혁명의 대의를 발전시켜야 한다"는 예술 개념으로 발전했다고 지적합니다.
콰앙은 노골적으로 교훈적인 예술에 대한 현대의 반감을 비판하며, 이는 냉전 시대의 선전 전쟁과 문학 비평의 오해에서 비롯된 것이라고 주장합니다. 이는 소설을 "교훈적이고 도덕적이며 모방적인 해석"으로 축소하는 독서 문화를 초래하며, 이러한 접근 방식은 "게으르고 비인도적이며 상상력이 부족하다"고 말합니다. 또한 소외된 작가들이 "강사"나 "민족지학자"로만 인식되는 데 특히 부정적인 영향을 미친다고 주장합니다.
대신 콰앙은 내용과 형식이 "분리할 수 없을 정도로 관련되어 있다"는 점에 집중할 것을 주장합니다. 그녀는 소설이 "명료화하는 연습"으로 기능할 수 있으며, "작품의 도구"를 사용하여 겉보기에는 단순한 아이디어를 "복잡하게 만들고, 탐구하고, 뒤집을 수 있다"고 믿습니다. 그녀는 "요정 이야기가 명확한 관점을 회복하는 데 도움이 된다"는 톨킨의 생각에 공감합니다. 콰앙에게 소설의 목적은 "과거, 현재, 미래의 우리의 조건에 대해 생각"하고 "우리의 고통과 혼란, 희망과 기쁨에 명확한 형태를 부여하는" 데 도움이 되는 것입니다. 그녀는 예술성과 이데올로기가 대립할 필요가 없으며, 예술가들이 "진실, 아름다움, 선함을 추구"하는 한 그들의 작품은 "가치 있을 것"이라고 결론짓습니다.
레베카 F. 콰앙의 "선함, 아름다움, 진실: 위기 시대 예술의 가치"는
예술, 목적, 사회적 영향 사이의 복잡한 관계를 능숙하게 다루는 설득력 있고 시의적절한 강연입니다. 콰앙이 팬데믹 기간 동안 창작 위기를 겪으면서 현실 세계의 고통 앞에서 예술의 인지된 "무의미함"에 대해 의문을 제기했던 개인적인 여정은 더 넓은 논의로 들어가는 공감대를 형성합니다. 그녀가 "고립으로 인해 우물이 비워지고" "비탄과 피로에 짓눌렸다"고 솔직하게 고백하는 부분은 특히 어려운 시기에 창의적인 추구의 관련성을 고민했던 모든 사람들에게 깊은 공감을 불러일으킵니다.
이 강연의 강점 중 하나는 "선전 소설"에 대한 현대적 불안감과 20세기 초 중국 지식인 운동 사이의 유사점을 통해 역사적 맥락을 제공한다는 점입니다. 량치차오와 루쉰과 같은 인물들을 소개함으로써 콰앙은 예술의 교훈적 기능에 대한 논쟁이 결코 새로운 것이 아님을 효과적으로 보여줍니다. 이러한 역사적 기반은 그녀의 주장을 풍부하게 하고 정치적, 문화적 변화가 예술적 수용에 어떻게 영향을 미치는지에 대한 미묘한 이해를 제공합니다.
콰앙의 현재 독서 문화에 대한 비판은 특히 날카롭습니다. 그녀의 주장, 즉 많은 독자들이 소설을 "교훈적이고 도덕적이며 모방적인 해석"으로 축소하고 "선전"이나 "다른 문화로의 여행 가이드"로 취급한다는 것은 문학, 특히 소외된 작가들의 작품이 종종 단순하게 소비되고 판단되는 방식에 대한 강력한 논평입니다. 그녀가 제공하는 예시, 예를 들어 그림다크 소설에 대한 "대량 살인을 지지한다"는 비판이나 샐리 루니의 작품이 "충분히 마르크스주의적이지 않다"는 비판은 이러한 환원주의적 접근 방식의 부조리함을 강조합니다.
콰앙 주장의 핵심은 "예술성과 이데올로기가 대립할 필요가 없다"는 것과 소설이 "작품의 도구"를 통해 아이디어를 "명확하게 하고, 탐구하고, 뒤집어야 한다"는 것입니다. 이는 고무적이고 실용적입니다. "바벨"에 대한 논의에서 예시된 내용과 형식의 상호 작용에 대한 그녀의 강조는 창작자와 독자 모두에게 귀중한 틀을 제공합니다. "그것이 무엇인지는 그것이 의미하는 것과 모든 관련이 있다"는 생각은 문학 작품의 깊이와 복잡성을 이해하는 데 중요한 통찰입니다.
더 나아가, 세련된 기술을 옹호하면서 노골적인 정치적 주제를 옹호하는 그녀의 태도는 미묘함이 항상 우월하다는 생각에 도전합니다. 그녀의 "때로는 소리를 지르지 않으면 사람들이 듣지 않을 것"이라는 지적은 일부 예술이 전달하려는 긴급한 메시지를 대담하고 필요한 인정입니다.
질의응답 시간은 강연을 더욱 풍성하게 만들며, 콰앙의 글쓰기 과정과 출판 업계를 헤쳐나가는 성공적인 유색인종 작가로서의 경험에 대한 통찰을 제공합니다. 학문적 작업과 창작 작업의 균형을 맞추는 데 따르는 어려움에 대한 그녀의 솔직함과 마케팅에서 "다양한" 라벨이 사용되는 방식에 대한 비판은 그녀의 발표에 깊이와 진정성을 더합니다.
전반적으로 콰앙은 특히 위기 상황에서 예술의 지속적인 가치에 대한 생각을 자극하고 열정적으로 표현된 주장을 제시합니다. 그녀는 지적 엄격함과 감정적 영향을 모두 포괄하는, 독서와 글쓰기에 대한 보다 참여적이고 세련된 접근 방식을 옹호합니다.
