The Writer as Sock Puppet: A Selection from Margaret Atwood’s Burning Questions (2022)

“It’s an odd thing, but people are always lining up to preach to writers about their duties—what they ought to be writing, or what they should not have written; and they are very ready to tell the writer what a bad person he or she is because he or she has not produced the sort of book or essay that the preacher feels he or she ought to have produced. In fact, there’s a strong tendency to speak to and about writers as if they are the government; as if they actually possess that kind of physical-world power, and therefore ought to use it for the betterment of society, as they surely would do if they were not filled to the brim with laziness, cowardice, or immorality. If by some chance the preacher realizes that the writer does not in fact possess that kind of power, he or she is likely to be dismissed as a frill, an irrelevance, a self-indulgent narcissist, a mere entertainer, a parasite, and so forth.

Doesn’t the writer have a responsibility? these preachers ask. And shouldn’t the writer exercise that responsibility by doing the good and worthy thing that the preacher will now proceed to spell out? . . .

During and after the Romantic era, it became a truism that the ‘duty’ of a writer was to write in opposition to whoever was in power, as such incumbents were assumed to be corrupt and oppressive; or to expose abuses, as in Dickens’s take on the kill-a-boy Dotheboys Hall schools of his time; or to tell the stories of the oppressed and marginalized, as in Les Misérables, an approach that has subsequently launched millions of novelistic ships; or to champion a cause, as Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for abolition.

But this is very far from saying that novelists and poets have to write with such intentions. To judge novels on the justness of their causes or the ‘rightness’ of their ‘politics’ is to fall into the very same kind of thinking that leads to censorship.

Many is the revolution that has ended by eating its writerly young, as their once-acceptable productions are pronounced heretical by the victors in the inevitable power struggles. As a red-diaper friend of mine said recently of her parents’ Communist group, ‘They were always so hard on the writers.’

For revolutionaries, reactionaries, the religiously orthodox, or simply the passionate adherents of any cause whatsoever, the writing of fiction and poetry is not only suspect but secondary—writing is a tool to be employed in the service of the cause, and if either the work or its author doesn’t toe the line of the moment or, worse, goes directly against it, the author must be denounced as a parasite, ostracized, or disposed of as Lorca was by the Fascists—shot without trial, then dumped into an unmarked grave.

But for the fiction and poetry writer, the writing itself—the craft and the art—is primary, whatever other impulses or influences may be in play. The mark of a society approaching freedom is the space allowed to the far-ranging human imagination and to the unfettered human voice. There’s no shortage of folks standing ready to tell the writer how and what to write. Many are those who feel impelled to sit on panels and discuss the ‘role of the writer’ or the ‘duty of the writer,’ as if writing itself is a frivolous pursuit, of no value apart from whatever external roles and duties can be cooked up for it: extolling the Fatherland, fostering world peace, improving the position of women, and so forth.

That writing may involve itself in such issues is self-evident, but to say that it must is sinister. Must breaks the bond between the writer, such as me, and you yourself, Mysterious Reader: For in whom can you place your readerly trust if not in me, the voice speaking to you from the page or screen, right now? And if I allow this voice to be turned into the dutiful, role-fulfilling sock puppet of some group, even a worthy one, how can you place any faith in it whatsoever? . . .

The pen is mightier than the sword, but only in retrospect: at the time of combat, those with the swords generally win. . . . There will, of course, be protest movements, and artists and writers will be urged to join them. It will be their moral duty—or so they will be told—to lend their voices to the cause. (Artists are always being lectured on their moral duty, a fate other professionals—dentists, for example—generally avoid.) But it’s tricky telling creative people what to create or demanding that their art serve a high-minded agenda crafted by others. Those among them who follow such hortatory instructions are likely to produce mere propaganda or two-dimensional allegory—tedious sermonizing either way. The art galleries of the mediocre are wallpapered with good intentions.”—Margaret Atwood, Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021 (2022)