"We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings"
About this Quote
Okri’s jab at “this very mean description of humanity” lands like a moral diagnosis dressed as a literary complaint. The word “mean” does double duty: stingy in imagination, and cruel in its consequences. He’s not only critiquing a school of fiction; he’s calling out a cultural mood that has started to mistake bleakness for honesty.
Naturalism, at its hardest edge, treats people as the sum of pressures: class, biology, trauma, environment. Okri hears in that approach a quiet surrender. If characters are primarily specimens, then agency becomes an illusion, wonder becomes naivete, and any talk of spirit, mystery, or transformation gets filed under sentimental lies. His phrasing suggests we’ve “fallen” into it, as if reductionism isn’t a deliberate philosophy but a default setting encouraged by modern life: data-driven explanations, cynical politics, algorithmic profiling, the constant urge to flatten motive into cause.
As a poet-novelist whose work often leans toward the visionary, Okri is defending dimensionality. He’s arguing for fiction as a technology of enlargement, not just exposure. The subtext is a warning to writers and readers alike: when art only mirrors the worst determinisms, it trains us to see each other as trapped, predictable, manageable. That vision can feel bracingly “real,” but it also risks becoming self-fulfilling, a realism that impoverishes the real.
He’s not asking for denial of hardship. He’s insisting that any account of human beings that can’t accommodate surprise, inner life, and the possibility of change is not tough-minded; it’s incomplete.
Naturalism, at its hardest edge, treats people as the sum of pressures: class, biology, trauma, environment. Okri hears in that approach a quiet surrender. If characters are primarily specimens, then agency becomes an illusion, wonder becomes naivete, and any talk of spirit, mystery, or transformation gets filed under sentimental lies. His phrasing suggests we’ve “fallen” into it, as if reductionism isn’t a deliberate philosophy but a default setting encouraged by modern life: data-driven explanations, cynical politics, algorithmic profiling, the constant urge to flatten motive into cause.
As a poet-novelist whose work often leans toward the visionary, Okri is defending dimensionality. He’s arguing for fiction as a technology of enlargement, not just exposure. The subtext is a warning to writers and readers alike: when art only mirrors the worst determinisms, it trains us to see each other as trapped, predictable, manageable. That vision can feel bracingly “real,” but it also risks becoming self-fulfilling, a realism that impoverishes the real.
He’s not asking for denial of hardship. He’s insisting that any account of human beings that can’t accommodate surprise, inner life, and the possibility of change is not tough-minded; it’s incomplete.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Ben
Add to List
