this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2026
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The novel is fundamentally an individualist genre, and the rise of the novel coincides with the rise of individualism.
Even good examples get misread. Upton SInclair bemoaned the fact that, with The Jungle, he "aimed at the reader's heart and instead hit him in the stomach." The book ends with Jurgis's involvement with communists as something of a deus ex machina that will help him and his fellow workers' situation, but the book merely influenced food and drug safety and not labor rights.
There is a lot of good anti-colonialist fiction - Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, etc.
I wonder if collaborative fiction like SCPF etc could form a collectivist counter movement to novels?
Maybe! I don't think it's impossible to write a non-individualist novel, by any means - there's just a degree of difficulty there that's analogous to Truffaut's insistence that you can't make an anti-war film, because cinema inherently glorifies.
Most of the books I know of that address this question are still in my to-read pile but someday I'll go on a binge.