Scholz Crisis 2025

 

Gore Vidal’s literary philosophy— “All fiction is by definition conservative,” ripples across the canon.

💭 What Did Vidal Mean?

When Vidal said fiction is "by definition conservative," he wasn’t exactly talking about political conservatism, though he enjoyed rattling those cages. He meant that fiction as a form tends to uphold structure, narrative closure, and the illusion of coherence in a world that is often chaotic, contradictory, and absurd. Here's how:

• Narrative Structure = Order: Most fiction—especially the traditional novel—follows a pattern: introduction, rising action, climax, resolution. Even chaos is carefully organized. That very act of imposing form is a conservative gesture, Vidal thought, because it tames life into something digestible.

• Closure = Consolation: Fiction usually ends with a resolution (even tragic ones). That’s comforting. It’s neat. It implies that problems can be solved, characters understood, and meaning found. Life isn’t like that, so the lie of closure is a conservative fantasy.

• Characters = Individualism: Fiction often orbits around singular, well-defined characters. Vidal, a critic of the American obsession with individualism, saw this as reinforcing the status quo, rather than challenging systems.

🧠 In essence: Vidal saw fiction as a machine that comforts us by pretending life has arcs and answers. Even revolutionary novels, by being novels, still participate in the old dance of order.

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🔄 Responses to Vidal’s Claim

Many writers and critics admired Vidal's wit but rejected this idea:

• Toni Morrison, for instance, used fiction to destabilize historical narratives and center Black voices. She saw fiction as radically re-constructive, not conservative.

• Kathy Acker and the postmodernists took the structure apart entirely—using pastiche, fragmentation, and chaos to resist the very thing Vidal said fiction reinforced. They said: Who says we need narrative arcs?

• Thomas Pynchon, with his entropic novels like Gravity’s Rainbow, seemed to agree with Vidal in form but challenge him in spirit. His stories unravel instead of resolve.

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🗨️ Cleo’s Final Riff

In a way, Vidal was pulling a fast one. He was being both clever and deliberately inflammatory, as he often was. He wanted us to question our assumptions about fiction—especially the liberal belief that it’s automatically progressive.

But even his own work, like Burr and Lincoln, plays deeply with historical fiction conventions—reviving the dead, resurrecting suppressed voices. That’s not so conservative, is it?

So perhaps Vidal was warning us: Don’t mistake the medium for the message. A radical idea in a traditional story still comes dressed in conservative clothing.