I disagree very strongly. All of the best works of literature have something to say about society, politics, religion, etc. Literature as a subject is about unpicking stories/writing/texts and being able to see how they are relevant to society and what they say.
Here are a few examples of great, successful works of fiction that very clearly display political or social (socialism is a political ideology) views:
-
The Lord of the Rings is very clear in its Christian messages, plus it is very clearly anti-industrialisation. Tolkien presents the “natural” as good and the “man-made” as evil. The bad guys are the ones who cut down trees and make huge industrial-style structures, whereas the good guys live with nature.
-
Narnia is a very, very clear example of Christian imagery. Aslan is literally Jesus. It’s so on your nose it is impossible to miss. He even says he’s known by a different name in our world.
-
On the other end of the spectrum of religious ideology, you have His Dark Materials, which started with The Golden Compass. In the series, they literally kill God. Philip Pullman was an atheist and he showed that in his writing.
-
The Black Panther is a great example of political messaging in a story. They start off as an ethnostate. They don’t trust anyone from outside of their borders and they try to stay isolated and excluded from the outside world. They are presented with someone who wants to punish the West for what they did to Africa, which pushes them out of their comfort zone. In the end, T’Challa opens up Wakanda to help others. The message is that we need to help, not conquer, one another. Political views are very clear in this work. Isolationism doesn’t work and we all have a duty to help other countries in need.
-
1984 is another very clearly political text about the dangers of the authoritarian regimes that had either just fallen or were strong at the time of writing. Namely, the USSR and Nazi Germany. It tells of the importance of memories and the truth, and how authoritarian regimes can use language to control people.
-
Another text by the same author as the last is Animal Farm, which is very explicitly about the failures of Communism. That communism in Russia may have started out with good intentions, but very quickly, it devolves into being no different from the monarchistic regime it left behind. Again, this is super on-the-nose, with the ending literally being the animals not being able to tell the pigs and the humans apart.
And that’s just to name the few that came off the top of my head!
Every piece of writing that you write has a bias. You can’t write without bias. It’s impossible. The trick here is to be able to identify what your biases are and use them to your advantage. It’s important to be able to make sure that you’re saying what you want to say and now accidentally put some stuff in that might not reflect the story you’re trying to tell.
If stories didn’t have political or social views in them, they wouldn’t be saying much about the world. If stories don’t say anything about the world, then what’s the point? What’s the point in studying literature? Why are some works considered classics while others aren’t? Why do experts spend so much time analysing stories? If the messages don’t matter, then diversity wouldn’t matter either because it wouldn’t do anything.
But that’s not the reality. The reality is that every story says something because we all have biases. Our biases factor into the story we want to tell, how we want to tell it. Most importantly, our political and social views shape who we write as the hero and who we write as the villain.
For example, let’s take His Dark Materials again. In that, Lyra is pretty much the new Eve. The original Eve is framed as a hero, to some extent. Why? Well, she eats the fruit from the tree of knowledge so that we can escape ignorance. When you see the biblical story in that way, it makes God seem kinda abusive or even evil because he kept us in the dark about the reality of the world. So Eve did us a favour, according to the atheist Philip Pullman.
If a Christian wrote the same story, the people trying to kill sin and kill God would be the villains instead of the heroes. You know what they say: the victor writes history. The same goes with certain biases. The most dominant political view affects our stories the most. So we don’t notice that they’re political because that’s the politics everyone agrees on.
Like, another great example is racism being bad. That’s a political statement. There are some people who disagree. However, because we’re the dominant ones, we portray the racist people in our stories as wrong or bad and that’s not seen as political. It’s just seen as normal, even if it is a political statement. It is political to make racism evil in your stories. I’m not saying we shouldn’t do that! It’s right! It’s good! But it is political, too.
Or how Nazi propaganda portrayed Nazis as good people who were right and correct. In our media, we show our view that Nazism is bad by making the Nazis in our stories either the villains or just people who are wrong and need to be educated. Or, we use Nazi imagery to code our villains as villains. Like the Empire in Star Wars. We make them look and act like the Nazis, which shows what we think about Nazis!
The challenge isn’t to rid your story of politics. You can’t, so there’s no point in trying. But even worse than that, if you think your story has no politics in it, you’re much more likely to accidentally include some really bad messages into it because you’re not thinking about the fact that your views shape what you write. Therefore, the challenge is to choose what side you want to portray. To choose what messages you want to include in your work and how this is going to affect the way you write.
Letting the villain win sometimes is nothing to do with neutrality and everything to do with the story you want to tell. I have stories planned in the future where the villain wins. But that isn’t because I’m neutral. Like, in The Man in the High Castle, the Nazis win WWII. But that’s not because the author is neutral about Nazism. He’s not on the fence about whether it’s a good thing or not. Of course not! It’s because he wants us to feel hopeless. He wants us to see how bad the world would be if they did win.
Plus, letting the villain win from time to time helps us to create compelling stories. When the heroes are at their most hopeless, that’s when we can really care about what happens to us and it makes a huge impact when they win. It’s like a phoenix rising from the ashes. When the hero always wins, the story gets boring. What’s the point of telling a story with no struggles at all?
