James McDonald, and the Demand for "Strong Characters"

In recently surveying the literary scene and asking "Where is Our [Emile] Zola?" James McDonald, noting the extreme neglect of working-class life not only in the more popular genre fiction, but the ever more minute body of "literary" fiction purporting to offer something more than escapist entertainment, had occasion to consider the literary agents who are the field's gatekeepers, their standards, their tastes.

As he noted one commonly finds among the agents' hazily expressed preferences (in fairness, they're not really interested in having some unknown trying to cater to their tastes) a desire for "strong" characters. As McDonald remarks, these agents' "tastes represent an upper-middle class approach to literature," looking for "role-model ("strong") characters," who will somehow "overcome" some contemporary problem, typically of the more fashionable types ("spousal abuse, alcoholism, sexism, to take a few from the current bestsellers") on the basis of "[i]ndividual resilience, 'grit' (the term of the hour) and personal choices," even when purportedly writing realistic, adult fiction (which is rare enough, McDonald emphasizing the preference for "escape into childhood, magic and a romanticized past").

It is, in his view, a step backward from what we were starting to see in the nineteenth century with writers like that pioneer of naturalism, Zola--I would say, a step back into the eighteenth century, when the individualistic, bourgeois novel emerged.

Thus do we, in an age in which "Artificial General Intelligence" may have already arrived, carry forward literary ideals belonging to an era where the steam engine was scarcely becoming serviceable for industrial use, and pat ourselves on the back for how progressive we are in doing so.