A literary controversy nobody noticed – nobody ever notices literary controversies – took place in the Irish Times last month. An Irish writer and creative writing teacher wrote an oversweet, shallow, and rushed review of a book about the rise of creative writing programmes in the US. A few days later, a writer and creative writing teacher in Galway wrote an offended and feline response.

The controversy was: Can someone be taught to write creatively? Well, that was what it looked to be about, but of course that is an old and useless question. The reviewer dismissed the romantic notion that writing is “carried out in a vacuum” by “the solitary genius.” She said that x and x and x would probably never have become writers if it hadn’t been for creative writing programmes. The Galway teacher said, Aha! But X and X and X didn’t take creative writing courses! Which is a rather obvious thing to say, but is a noteworthy reminder.

You might find yourself on either side of the divide. I want to argue that it doesn’t matter. You can believe that writing can be taught, and you can believe that writing cannot be taught, but that still does not address the real controversy – which is that almost everything we know today as literature (writing that calls itself art) is shit.

I want to live in a world where I am free to say something like this. You will agree with me, or you will think I am a fool. It’s not an argument. It’s a statement of faith. I want to remove the prophylactic assumption of politeness in matters of art. I want to argue that shit is a fine and thoughtful review of a novel, or a book of short stories.

If there were, for instance, a refusal to write anything more than shit in a review unless the book deserved it, some author, at some point, might ask, Well, why is my book shit? And we might do him the favor of being honest. You will think I’m being exaggeratedly simplistic for the sake of entertainment. Some of you will think I sound like a lunatic. But when injustice has become a condition in society, any effort to address that injustice will be perceived as lunacy.

The sorry state of literature has very little to do with the proliferation of creative writing courses. It has everything to do with civilization, and our age, which cannot – as Baudelaire said each age must – find its beauty. Now, to talk about ages and civilizations and beauty will cause a lot of you to laugh. I admit, it looks precious on the page. But I want to live and teach in a world where people get away with these statements, not because they are entertaining or funny, but because they are invaluable.

I’d love if everybody stopped writing – even the good writers – just for a few decades. But I want to be practical: people will write. So why not pursue a more adversarial approach to books? Why not demand that writing ask of itself, Why must I be written? And why not let our book reviews reflect that skepticism? We begin our protest with a word, and wait for the word to insinuate itself into the industry of literature, and to disorganise the industry. One might argue that all this barking is irrelevant, since I’m nobody. James Bastille never published a book in his life, and nobody would hire him to write a review, because nobody would pay him a hundred euro each time he wrote shit. But it’s more than that. I would argue that only a nobody can say these things with veracity and effect. A somebody cannot be trusted. When you are deciding who to trust, don’t trust a person with lots of friends; trust someone who is not afraid to make enemies.

At this point, I have either got you, or I have lost you. These ideas are intuitive. This is not about teaching creative writing. It is about an admission of weakness, of lack of vision, of pathetic wanting – to belong, to matter, to exist – of a reckoning with our ignorance, and with our fear of influence.

James Bastille is an English lecturer who lives in Cork.