Dangerous Fictions

Fiction is, in fact, the story of other people. That, more than anything else, is what makes it dangerous. At the same time, however, the panics over fiction are never fully about fiction: they're almost always deflections of some other, more formless anxiety. Anxiety about the body politic, anxiety about the next generation, anxiety about who gets to make and control art, anxiety about what kinds of people get to exist in the public imagnination, and, at its deepest level, anxiety about what kinds of human activity can be categorized as valuable and therefore worthy of attention (and compensation) in the first place. The debate over "dangerous fiction" is never about such simple questions as "Is fiction good for us?" or "Is fiction bad for us ?" No matter what we're saying, we're always speaking in metaphor and allusion: we're always talking about something else.
*source: Better World Books*