Overly explicit moral argument weakens fiction about historical injustice

Evidence

An observation by the Irish writer Eavan Boland is pertinent to the novelistic challenges Sinha must negotiate: “If the voice of a character in a fiction speaks too clearly with the anger and hindsight of an ethical view of history, then the voice may be made louder by argument but grow less convincing through being less imagined. Then both humanity and history can be sentimentalized.” Because novels about slow violence suffer from a drama deficit, they risk resorting to sentimentality and political moralizing as substitutes for arresting spectacle and narrative tension. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 137

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘drama deficit’ diagnosis is useful for the literature strand: slow violence lacks arresting spectacle, so activist fiction must solve a structural problem of boredom/moralizing.