When I hear the word ‘gun’ I reach for my culture

Left and right fight over realism in the arts without knowing what it is

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here)

During a panel at a literary festival I heard an experimental poet’s take that “realism is the language of fascism.” In the words of the rich kid on Christmas morning, there’s a lot to unpack here.

To start with there’s the take’s smug obverse. Say you were told acoustic guitars were the music of fascism by someone who plays electric guitar; you might think their statement was a bit self-aggrandising. If the artistic modes you don’t work in are fascist then your own artwork by sly implication is anti-fascist (or at least neutral, though I suspect the poet didn’t think of their work as such but out there on the front-lines, fighting the good fight, one free verse at a time).[1]

Have I got the wrong end of the poet’s logic though? Saying, “Cricket is the sport of Pakistanis” doesn’t mean to say cricket is Pakistani. The poet hadn’t claimed all fascist art is realist but that realism (implicitly realism in the arts) is the way — or at least one of the ways, and one significant enough to be called the language — that fascism expresses itself: that fascism speaks realism.