You Can't Fight the New Wave
You Can't Fight the New Wave
On the pitfalls of literary didacticism as a calling card.
David Herod, co-founder of Tooky’s Mag and talented fiction author, recently published a piece criticizing our fellow author ARX-Han’s use of the term "New Wave." ARX-Han, himself a talented outsider novelist, coined the moniker to describe an up-and-coming group of literary and pulp fiction authors with big ideas who are dissatisfied with the landscape of traditional publishing. It’s since become kind of a thing.
David argues that the term New Wave deliberately lacks moral substance, eschewing taking a side in the culture war—or the war for civilization, if you want to be more dramatic. He thinks it's self-defeating for people to arrange themselves around hollow symbols of youth and transgression if those symbols are vague enough to be co-opted in any direction. Fair enough.
Notably absent in his spiel, though, is any concrete set of values that might actually define such a movement as he might want it. There's no didactic fiction manifesto in his post, and that's because it's really hard to create one that's specific enough to represent what you believe in and broad enough to build a coalition of contrarians and disagreeable people without alienating most of them. That's the utility of the term "New Wave" as ARX-Han coined it, and that's why it has so much sticking power. It's a Rorschach test, a Schelling point. You can look at it and see yourself, pretty much no matter what you believe, as long as what you believe is not served by the literary status quo.
“Didactic Fiction is Good, Actually,” David titles his piece. No one is trying to tell him it’s not. In truth, there’s plenty of room for him and all his didacticism within the New Wave. He’s not even unusual in his use of moral frameworks to undergird his work. Every author puts his or her beliefs onto the page in some fashion. A better title for his post, in candor, might be, “The Literary Movement I Want to Join Should Explicitly Advocate for My Moral Principles,” or maybe, “We All Need to Declare Political Team Allegiance.”
David doesn't explicitly suggest his preferred political allegiances in his post. Even as he rails for what he believes, he understands on some level the intellectual benefits of not using context-flattening partisan labels, no matter how much his lower tribal instincts might yearn for it.
His implicit accusation that the New Wave is a cabal of degenerate cosmopolitan minorities (true) trying to defang and pollute the purity of his crusader fiction with moral relativism (false) falls apart on its face. The truth is, there's no binary between didactic fiction and ‘moral relativist’ fiction. Even if such a binary exists, the works of the New Wave fall far more in the didactic camp than in the realm of impartial observation—which, frankly, I don't think exists, because a strong stance in favor of moral relativism is didactic in and of itself.
Take ARX-Han’s Incel, for example. Incel is a very pointed work with a specific message. It's trying to speak to young men in that sphere and pull them away from the most self-destructive aspects of their personalities, showing them a way to grow. If that's not didactic, I don't know what is, but ARX-Han doesn't advertise the book as a moral lesson on rejecting being an incel; he just promotes it as a good book, a solid work of literary fiction, and encourages people to read it on that premise.
Ironically, not calling your work didactic is the only way you're going to get through to people who don't already believe what you believe. Declaring your allegiances more loudly than you declare your artistic voice is a good way to end up with a very small number of readers who only try your books because they already subscribe to your factional dogma. In the most self-defeating way, you've created a situation where you're not teaching anybody anything, which is the opposite of being didactic.
This is a sad fate for authors, and one you should try to outrun as long as you can if you want to be considered in all your complexities by the public. Nobody's reading Ayn Rand unless they're either already a libertarian or they're specifically seeking to tear her work to shreds. The didactic label has destroyed her reach. It’s put her in a box. Nobody wants to be in a box. The reason people are part of the New Wave in the first place is that they aren't satisfied with the boxes the publishing establishment has offered them.
Ultimately, how you categorize yourself is a marketing tool. "New Wave" in that sense says what it's supposed to say. “We're fresh, we're bold, we're provocative, we're giving you things you can't get anywhere else, and it's going to be an exciting ride whether or not you agree with us.” From there, the authorial opinions—whatever they may be—come along with the thrilling experience of reading skillful work. I say ‘opinions’ instead of ‘lessons’ because the frame of the didact teacher places the author as the reader’s superior. This would be tenuous for a great master, and it is even more absurd for an anon posting screeds on Substack. We must court the ur-reader with humility.
There are plenty of other reasons to quibble over the term “New Wave.” My writing partner, Nathan Eitingon, recently suggested ‘neo-Modernist’ as a replacement. While it is more accurate and context-rich a term, it seems to me to be direly lacking in vitalist energy. It doesn’t have the sauce. His legitimate concern here was the fact “New Wave” has been used too many times in other contexts. There's the French New Wave of cinema, Godard and the rest. There's, of course, New Wave music of the '80s. I actually think these associations work in our favor, because all those movements are really cool and define some of the greatest art of the 20th century.
In essence, that's what we're doing, attempting a continuation of the long 20th century and its masterworks in the internet age. We're taking the sword, the pen, the crown—whatever you will—that's been left by the wayside in favor of stupid social projects, and we're picking it back up. We're saying, "Hey, we're going to continue where these great people left off. We're going to be our own managers and our own publicists, and we're not going to wait for the approval of people we don't respect politically, aesthetically, or intellectually. We're going to form our parallel institutions, and we're just going to play the game better than you."
Now, let's say you're a didactic crusader and you're not interested in creating a space where anyone can discuss any idea. You want an intellectual environment that's just as closed off as the one we have today, if not more so, but for your own team’s advantage. The fact is, you can still participate in the New Wave and benefit from its breadth while railing against it. The paradox of tolerance isn't in play here. You're free to advocate for the social regime that would crush the New Wave within the constraints of the New Wave. We'll probably even find it funny and enjoy what you write.
Of course, you can always take your toys and go home, or cluster in a group with your hyper-specific political allies. Bon voyage if so, but I doubt that's going to get you very far. The whole purpose of this wave is community-building and mutual inspiration through network effects. None of us are getting rich off writing and publishing—at least not right now. We're doing it because we care, because we believe in great work, and because we want to push boundaries faster than the mire of incumbent intelligentsia or academia would let us. It’s a difficult thing to go into battle alone.
If you're engaging in this discourse as an author, you're part of the New Wave whether you like it or not. This whole thing is the New Wave. As long as he hangs out here, even the dissident didact is New Wave, no matter how much he fantasizes about crushing cosmopolitans under his tiny crusader heel. The only way out is not to play.
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