Among the things they discovered was that, despite fascinating and instructive differences, there were overlaps and resemblances that people from widely disparate backgrounds could nevertheless recognize in each other. Careful attention and strong imaginative abilities enabled James Baldwin, for example, to create vivid characters who were straight, white, and for that matter Italian, like Giovanni in Giovanni's Room . According to the argument, she would be qualified to write only about characters with exactly the same genetic composition as herself, which is outrageous. In any case, writing and reading are complementary activities. If we weren't able to inhabit the experience and consciousness of another person, reading stories apart from our own autobiography would be impossible.
Identification is the readers' counterpart to the authorial imagination.
The poet Suzanne Gardienier, in a panel discussion, offered a useful qualification in this debate. She agreed that writers can invent characters different from themselves, but noted that readers can, in turn, object to fictional portraits whenever they found them incredible or offensive. Showing exactly how a male author has misunderstood women, for example, wouldn't amount to blanket censorship but instead would open the door for discussion and deeper comprehension. Dialogue is needless to say preferable to censorship, which, in any circumstance, is always a self-contradiction when it comes from the Left. The Festival's purpose was to celebrate and encourage narrative.