"My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time"
About this Quote
A critic announcing his mission like a modest inevitability is already doing criticism. Fiedler’s line sounds plainspoken, but it’s a challenge disguised as a job description: the writer isn’t tasked with “timeless” wisdom, or with flattering posterity, but with the messy, embarrassing work of naming what’s actually happening right now. “My assignment” suggests duty, even a kind of conscription; “what every writer’s assignment is” refuses the romance of specialness. The ego shrinks, the obligation expands.
The phrasing also sneaks in a provocation about truth itself. Not capital-T Truth, not a clean moral verdict, but “the truth of his own time” - contingent, local, politically charged. Fiedler is implying that a writer who claims neutrality is either lying or asleep. Your era will write through you whether you admit it or not; the ethical move is to face it, to make the implicit explicit.
Context matters: Fiedler came up as a mid-century American critic who treated literature as a cultural battleground, not a museum. His work pushed against polite canons and the idea that serious writing must stay insulated from popular culture, sex, race, and national mythmaking. So “tell the truth” isn’t just about accuracy; it’s about proximity. Get close enough to your moment to risk being wrong, unfashionable, or implicated.
There’s a quiet warning embedded here: time is the real censor. Writers who dodge their present get filed away as evasions, not witnesses.
The phrasing also sneaks in a provocation about truth itself. Not capital-T Truth, not a clean moral verdict, but “the truth of his own time” - contingent, local, politically charged. Fiedler is implying that a writer who claims neutrality is either lying or asleep. Your era will write through you whether you admit it or not; the ethical move is to face it, to make the implicit explicit.
Context matters: Fiedler came up as a mid-century American critic who treated literature as a cultural battleground, not a museum. His work pushed against polite canons and the idea that serious writing must stay insulated from popular culture, sex, race, and national mythmaking. So “tell the truth” isn’t just about accuracy; it’s about proximity. Get close enough to your moment to risk being wrong, unfashionable, or implicated.
There’s a quiet warning embedded here: time is the real censor. Writers who dodge their present get filed away as evasions, not witnesses.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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