Escapism Is for Readers; Writers Stay
By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson) | November 18, 2016 |
Image – iStockphoto: Stacey Newman
Nobody blames you if recently you’ve felt like getting the hell out of Dodge.
To be really clear about this, I’m not going to tell you whether you should love or hate the results of the US general election. That’s for you to decide.
But everyone is feeling the pressure.
If the vote went the way you hoped, you might find yourself as wide-eyed as the transition team at Trump Tower these days, parsing the flying news reports about this potential cabinet appointment or that suddenly unclear stance on one or another platform position.
If the vote went south for you, you may be wondering what the DC-wide shift is going to mean to your own interests and how you and your political soulmates will navigate the next four years that used to look a lot clearer than they do now.
From whichever side of the aisle you’re watching, you may be dismayed to find citizens in confrontations, sometimes violent ones—there’s video of Trump supporters being bashed and many minority members being accosted. This is wrong. All of it. No one should be hurt, period.
And it’s at times like these that you hear your readers talk about wanting to “escape into fiction.”
Being able to escape into fiction has been crucial for me over the last week.
— Eb (Elsewhere In Bio) (@EbThen) November 16, 2016
From a reader? This is good news. Even if good heads remind us that the best fiction leads us back to ourselves.
"In fiction, you escape only to run into yourself, again and again." – Katie Kitamura https://t.co/NOwg6Jbbza
— The Writer Magazine (@TheWriterMag) November 11, 2016
But when your writer-friends (or was that you?) start talking about escaping into your fiction? That’s when Killjoy Porter is going to swoop in for a big chat.
Here’s my provocation for you today: As lovely, dark, and deep as the woods of your writing may seem right now, Mr. or Ms. Frost, I want you to “keep your soul in the room,” as transcendentalists used to say, and your eyes wide open.
- For the good of your readers;
- For the good of your own head; and
- For the good of your society.
Provocations graphic by Liam Walsh
For the good of your readers
Image – iStockphoto: Demaerre
Whatever your readers think is “good escapist entertainment” (and I fear it may involve Jennifer Anniston), the farther it takes them from the world in which we need their best minds and hearts, the less a favor we do them.
Not only do your readers meet themselves in the best fiction (let alone nonfiction) on the market, but they also learn more, grow more, deepen more when we, as artists, lead them—compassionately, of course—back to the tones and currents of their lives.
No, please do not set whole chapters on the campus of the electoral college. But staying attuned to the tensions of the times will resonate in your work in myriad, subtle ways that build authenticity into what you’re doing, even in some of the farther-flung genres.
It’s a bit like playing the ball where it lies (not “lays,” thank you). I want you to play your readers where they lie. And that, at the moment, is in none too comfortable a culture.
For the good of your own head
Image – iStockphoto: Mark Piovesan
You remember your own head, don’t you? Me, either. I still love Mac Wellman’s lovely line from his play, The Bad Infinity: “I was in my right mind once. It seems so long ago.”
And never has the road to Canada looked so scenic, eh? When the colleagues you feel closest to started wearing pants suits, you knew things were getting weird. And what about the ones dyeing their hair yellow and donning those towering ties?
Twenty-four-hour news is watched 24 hours per day only by journalists like me who’ve worked for those companies. Our need to know the incremental progress of stories is comical, etched into us by space shuttle explosions and royal car crashes and sieges of Mosul and inadequate exit polling. Don’t be like us.
But if literature of any genre means anything of contemporary value to its readers, it does need its writers to be aware of the contours and collisions of life around them. This beats nipping off to some Maxfield Parish fairyland facsimile of a dream. Our culture is too given to entertainment, as it is. Too much getting away from it all, too much fantasy, too much insistence that “life is so hard” when we really have very little idea what a hard life is about, here in the first world.
All I’d suggest, in the service of keeping one foot in your world as you work, is thinking of your characters reading the headlines you are as they head off to work or come home from school. Remind your characters of what’s going on. Don’t change their lives or arcs because of it. But make them aware, as you are. They’ll be richer, clearer, smarter, worthier of sales in a marketplace already choking on mindless comedy.
For the good of your society
Image – iStockphoto: Jim Doberman
Yep, you’re responsible for your society. So am I. None of us is excused.
And from either side of this dramatic political divide in Western culture, one thing looks the same: we should have seen it coming. Hiding from it is how we got here.
The obvious surprise on the Trump team’s faces was no more pronounced than the obvious shock in the Clinton campaigners’ eyes. We’ve managed to scare the pants off both sides, in one way or another.
Earlier in these provocations, we’ve talked of how the writers of a society are the ones who bear the burden of expressing something for everyone else. There’s a responsibility there, like it or not. And rarely has there been so much that needs expressing, exploring, explicating, exchanging. It’s a time when the ability to turn a phrase can be so helpful—a time of fear, of lessons that needed to be learned, of mistakes that shouldn’t have been made, of the exhausted realization that the plot wasn’t going where most folks on either side thought it was.
I urge you to watch the news, a bit. Keep up. Stay engaged. Writer Unboxeders are plenty good at making things up, nobody’s going to take your fictional aplomb away from you. But let it be infused with the troubles of the times. Again, the word “vote” need be nowhere near your work, I’m talking only in terms of emotional context and a shaken society. We need your citizenship, not just your storytelling.
Starting November 8, your readers have become different. In whichever direction they may lean politically, they’re reading you as somewhat changed people. Everywhere in the world, too, not just in the States. A shift has occurred.
Please don’t ignore that. Escape helps neither you nor them. Nor us. Share the tremors with your characters and your consumers. Simply by staying awake. We’ll all be better for it.
(Scorched) Earth to Writer Unboxed: If you’re not already off into some fictional feint, what do you think? Can you embrace this worldwide strain into which we’ve wandered and keep writing?
[coffee title=”Wish you could buy Porter a glass of Campari?” icon=”glass”]Now, thanks to tinyCoffee and PayPal, you can![/coffee]
@Porter_Anderson is a fellow of the National Critics Institute. He is Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives, the international news medium of Frankfurt Book Fair. He co-founded The Hot Sheet, a newsletter for trade and independent authors, which now is owned and operated by Jane Friedman. Priors: The Bookseller‘s The FutureBook in London, CNN, CNN.com and CNN International–as well as the Village Voice, Dallas Times Herald, and the United Nations’ WFP in Rome. is a recipient of London Book Fair’s International Excellence Award for Trade Press Journalist of the Year. PorterAndersonMedia.com
I was with my son this week and he said essentially the same thing: we might be spending too much time escaping. I need to give that some thought.
Ah, an insightful son, Barbara.
Yeah, it’s a hard thing to come to because each of us experiences no end of adversity at our own level and place in life — on any given day, I’m ready to dive into a tennis match, for example (and grateful this week for the ATP season finals) because, like other forms of entertainment, sports can feel like a safe island away from the struggles of the moment.
But your son is right, I’m afraid, we just look too hard to find these ways out — and this time, I’m worried that some of that instinct, honest as it is, probably contributed to our not seeing what was shaping up in our culture, how needy and unheard many felt they were, for example: they’ve finally made themselves heard.
Tough times, and none of us needs to feel bad about this. We just need some awareness, I think, that there’s more to our arts and entertainments’ potential if we can do the difficult thing of keeping ourselves exposed to the strain. It’s a lot to ask of ourselves, in many ways, but hard to escape its importance.
Thanks, as always, and great seeing you in LA!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Dear Captain Killjoy:
I’m going to be calling you that for a while, sorry. Killjoy Porter. Now THAT is a moniker.
Well said, sir. It’s okay to get knocked to the mat. It’s not okay to stay there, or crawl off and hide. (I say this as a person with the full right to head off to Norway and live there with my half-Norwegian bride.)
But I would love it if the recent trend into fantasy for the sake of something new might turn more to the untold stories of the people this economy has left behind. There is obviously a vast expanse of America that feels utterly ignored — by us no less than the “elites” (of which, perhaps, we are an unwitting part). Looking for material? There’s a start.
Thanks for the call to the ramparts, Killjoy.
Yo, David, lol,
You may call me Killjoy Porter with abandon, I’ll answer to it readily. :)
Thanks for this insight on fantasy, that’s exactly what I’m getting at. We have this chance, so frequently, to turn our talents to such powerful, pertinent topics and events, and yet we’re so long programmed to rush off with the swords and dragons that can’t possibly hurt us as much as real words and weapons can.
An unwitting part of the “elites,” I’m afraid, yes, we probably are — most of us — in some way just that and this has been a useful, if terribly painful, call to face some truth.
Thanks for being so willing and gracious. See you on the ramparts!
-KP
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Porter and David, I want to thank you for your enlightening comments on fantasy. I was sort of looking for an excuse to quit writing the stuff. I mean, I keep getting these notions that lure me toward writing about the issues of today. And, of course, I’m aiming at mere escapism. And, hoo-boy, it’s tough keeping it that way.
Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I should just quit altogether, and be an escapist reader. Yes, let others worry about making important art. Much easier. Now let me see, whose escapist fantasy do I have to catch up on? Well, there’s Robin Hobb – surely as escapist as it gets. No wait. I forgot that her darn character Fitz’s use of The Wit made me dwell at length on the morality of using drone strikes when innocents will become collateral damage. And her Outislander’s use of Forging really brought to mind the indoctrination of religious youth to radical terrorism. Shoot, that’s all too “today-ish” for me right now. Oh, I know – Sabaa Tahir’s new one, A Torch Against the Night. No, wait. Her prison for dissidents, Kauf, is reminding me a lot of Guantanamo. Well, I guess there’s always good ole’ GRRM. But then, Tyrion Lannister is sort of bringing Rudy Giuliani to mind just now.
Darn it all! Can either of you recommend some of the total, mindless escapism you seem familiar with? Swords, dragons, I’ll take it. Anything but this applicable stuff I’ve been reading. Oh, and thanks for setting me straight. It’s a relief. ( ;-) )
Vaughn-
Is fantasy escapist? Does it do nothing but affirm heroic conservative values and truck in good-versus-evil?
Don’t you believe it. Fantasy is great escape but it subversive. Shhh. Don’t tell. Let it be what it is: a sneak attack on our hearts.
Agree, Don, thanks.
And that sneak attack on our hearts goes down well with a Campari, too.
Cin-cin. :)
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Why, Vaughn, you seem miffed. :)
And someone had just been telling me how politically pertinent some of your own fantasy writing can be. (Congratulations!)
I don’t think by any means that all fantasy is written without the potential for great reflection on the human condition, both contemporary and historical. Nor did I say so, sir. :)
You’re welcome to be as defensive of your genre as you wish, of course. As someone who reads literary fiction, I get very put out, myself, with the people who chant that it has no plot and that its characters are all revolting self-absorbed pessimists. I, too, can be made defensive on such points.
But you’ll find no blanket aspersions cast by me on fantasy or other genres. As you can tell from my piece, I don’t really think that great social and political import infused the gauzy elfin landscapes of the late Maxfield Parrish (as much as I appreciate his inventiveness), but nothing says that everything has to be relevant to how we live (and die) today.
My point is that it can be. Relevant.
And yes, given a choice, I will opt to read something that does recognize the context of our daily struggles, rather than “sit-back-and-relax” mindless fun. That’s just the way I am. Others will prefer the fun and will think me quite ridiculous for preferring to sit forward and be tense.
Ye shall know us by our sitting postures.
Cheers,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Miffed? At you, Bro? Never. All in good fun. And to prove it, Campari’s on me. Cheers! (And thanks for the congrats. :-)
Ha! You sling me a Campari and I’ll follow you through every dungeon and past every dragon you’ve got. :)
Thanks, bro,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Porter and David (Corbett):
Bread and circuses was ancient Rome’s way of managing the masses. Make sure people are more or less fed, and keep them amused, distracted.
Our circuses are digital, electronic, pixelated. A larger share of the readership for YA fiction is made up by chronological adults than by adolescents. Look at the movies that succeed. How many stick to the known laws of physics, instead of filling the air with talking toys, people mounted on dragons and broomsticks, or butchering the lurching undead?
Am I wrong in thinking that the coarse but massive delusional construct that has brought the President-elect to victory couldn’t have happened without this condition of mind?
Pundits are trying to explain how so many people could have voted for someone with no credentials but a hit show, one whose payoff each week was the President-elect telling someone “You’re fired.”
I think it–the national condition of mind–has much to do with what you, Porter, are here talking about: escapism, delusion, wishful thinking, fantasy.
And let’s face it: our bread and circuses include books that denigrate thought in the name of feeling. If you don’t grab the reader by the emotional short hairs in the first nanosecond, game over–and it’s pretty much true. Because far too often, we give our time to what is not worthy of it.
Porter, Barry, Everyone–thanks for this. The conversation is needed, but we are where we are because often we are unable to face reality and escaping works just fine. Let me watch someone else struggling through a reality TV show and I don’t have to struggle. They win, I win. No you don’t. Content matters. I agree that the emotional grab is disconcerting (wow, that word grab has risen in the lexicon) but novels are still being published where that doesn’t happen–some writers are still breaking in with content that challenges the mind. My big push is for EMPATHY. Studies show good reading can contribute. Maybe we need to be passing out TO KILL A MOCKING BIRD instead of bread and circuses.
Hey, Beth,
Thanks for the good comment here.
It’s true, thank God, that some writers still are “breaking in with content that challenges the mind,” but this work tends to be less and less a feature of the wider society’s consciousness — it lies more in the major prize competitions. And literary fiction isn’t faring well in the digital environment (except with me — I read it all digitally and it has just as much impact as paper, I can vouch for that, lol).
What we can say is that while the love of serious work is unlikely to ever die completely, we’ve never had such a formidable level of competition from entertainment. The electronic entertainment media are far bigger than anything we’ve known in the past and are as close to ubiquitous (that being the nature of digital) as we probably can imagine.
This is one reason I thinkit’s good for us to try to get a conscious understanding of this, be mindful of what the seemingly logical love of escapism can mean to how we think and read.
And thanks for being part of the discussion!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Well, Barry, you certainly have a feel for the entertainment-saturated mind of the population.
Without getting too deeply into actual details of the election, it’s flatly evident that Donald Trump’s mere presence on the national scene is based in entertainment. He’s a media personality as well as a businessman.
The dynamics behind his election, I think, have more to do with the energies and viewpoints of an underserved part of the electorate than the entertainment angle, but I’m sure there is impact of some kind baked into this event, as there was when Reagan, Schwarzenegger, and Al Franken succeeded at the polls, too.
The need for something more serious is precisely what underlies my commentary here today. I like the way Barbara O’Neal’s son has put it to her: we might be spending too much time escaping.
Here’s a big chance for all of us to say, look where that has landed us.
So thanks for the input, much appreciated.
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
P.S. From an article in Foreign Policy today (which, interestingly, invokes Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America in its analysis of the current state of the nation):
“I admit that my inclination is to cultivate my own garden, to retreat for the next four years into teaching and writing works of history. But once we get over the shock, the question of the day will be how to preserve the values we most cherish. That doesn’t just mean standing at the ramparts. The day after tomorrow, the urgent task will be to rethink and recast political and economic liberalism in order to forge a non-demagogic, non-cynical, non-vulgar answer to the profound anxieties about the future that this election has exposed. That is a fight worth waging.”
Wow, David,
That’s a beautiful quote. It really says it, doesn’t it? This is just it, perfectly turned. For so many of us, the (natural) first thought is to just drop it, just walk away because it all seems to difficult and unsatisfying. But the real task is staying put, facing the facts, and working on how to move forward with these “profound anxieties” on all sides.
Excellent reference, I’ll jump over to FP and find it there. Thanks again!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
It is difficult to carry on! The first thought is to just drop it and walk away. In a past situation I have done that. Am I better for having done it? Yes. It took me a couple years to gain footing again and jump back into the world, but I don’t regret what I did.
Hi, Beverly.
Yes, it is extremely difficult to carry on at times. I’m glad you found a response that worked in the past. This makes you more experienced in this instance, perhaps better at responding thanks to that earlier event.
The important thing is that you find a way of reacting that works for you. And if it allows you to consider something other than escapism, all the better.
Best wishes,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
What has come to mind repeatedly since last Tuesday night are the words in Toni Morrison’s The Dancing Mind–her acceptance speech at the National Book Awards on winning the 1996 Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award.
She opened with:
There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war. It is larger than that. The peace I am thinking of is not at the mercy of history’s rule, nor is it a passive surrender to the status quo. The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one–an activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing world we live in. Accessible as it is, this particular kind of peace warrants vigilance. The peril it faces comes not from the computers and information highways that raise alarm among book readers, but from unrecognized, more sinister quarters.
https://bit.ly/2gqo9RQ
This election, as you say, has been not just a game changer but a life changer. With games, if you lose, you can always play a rematch somewhere down the road. When something like the result of this election occurs, we are in what Lucretius called “a moment when atoms in the universe swerve in a direction hitherto unexpected.” We are in a moment not exactly never lived through before, but in a moment similar to the rediscovery of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things by Poggio Bracciolini in the 15th century, which irrevocably altered the course of modern science and thought.
(Stephen Greenblatt’s book, The Swerve is worth reading, or re-reading, I think, this moment in time; for no other reason than we are in a swerve that will change/has changed the course of history. It will certainly influence any writer’s voice that doesn’t want to merely to escape but to speak the truth.)
Hi, Shelley,
Wonderful of you to invoke the eloquence both of Morrison and of Greenblatt. I agree with you completely that we may well indeed be witnessing a “swerve” as France faces the National Front led by Marine Le Pen, the UK grapples with the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, The Philippines hears from its new leadership and more, before we even look back at the events of this month in the States.
As you say, Greenblatt’s book has a lot to offer “any writer’s voice that doesn’t want to merely to escape but to speak the truth” — and I hope we’ll find that we have many such writers among us.
Thanks for this considered response, much appreicated!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
The Swerve: excellent recommendation, Shelley.
Reading it again over the summer felt an important thing to do, to prepare myself for the election (the result of which I am sorry to say did not surprise me after Brexit). The Swerve reminded me that truths can go underground for a long time but there is always hope that they will emerge when cracks in old structures give way to a new order. Poggio might never have found the manuscript had it not been that his employer John XXIII was deposed, and Poggio, without a master, was free to go book hunting.
I go back and forth about climate change more than other issues. Sometimes, I am afraid we will fail ourselves and the world if Trump finds a way to pull out of the Paris Treaty, and remove the clean air restrictions in place in America. Sometimes I think–Necessity is the Mother of Invention, she has never failed us; perhaps Trump’s election is the goad we needed to activate several solutions we already know can slow down climate change, and that do not need Trump’s approval to enact them. Solutions that would give us time to find longer-term answers to save the world’s ecosystem.
That said, I have no desire to write a book about climate change, fiction or research. In this time of great uncertainty, I feel more than ever that the best thing I can do is be true to myself and write what is most meaningful to me.
More than the story of Poggio Bracciolini, what stays with me from The Swerve is Greenblatt’s story of how he picked up the used copy of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things because he was drawn to the cover art. The meeting of these two minds, millennia apart, seems serendipitous. And yet that’s how the light gets in. I’m not sure where I’m going with this but I know this much:
“We are so privileged to gather in moments like this when so much of the world is plunged in darkness and chaos. So ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” (Leonard Cohen)
“A shift has occurred.” Indeed. And I agree, Porter, that we should have seen it coming. Many did, seeing as how the signs and portents were everywhere. But as chroniclers and storytellers, we are called to not look away. And, as David said, above, to consider that perhaps we are an unwitting part in the unraveling. But as one thing unravels, another begins to form, and as writers, we can choose to take a conscious part in telling the stories that need to be told. Thank you for the powerful reminder.
A gracious and smart reminder, Susan, that being “called to not look away,” as you rightly put it, doesn’t mean despair.
I like your saying, “as writers, we can choose to take a conscious part in telling the stories that need to be told.”
Exactly. This is where the hope lies. Surely everyone becomes a better storyteller when the stakes are raised. And from whichever side of this election you look, the stakes are certainly much higher than they were two weeks ago.
Much appreciated, thank you!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Missed you at Un Con this year, Porter. Let me catch you up. Two points stood out.
Lisa Cron’s first directive was to find the point of your novel. My last exhortation was to find the purpose in your writing. We both suggested ways.
At the end I reminded us all that novels have changed the world, and will again. There were a hundred fiction writers in the room in Salem. What if 100 novels were written with a point, and for a purpose, and were all published in the period 2018-2020? Could the world stay the same?
It could not. Culture lays the groundwork for change, and often precedes it. The Civil Rights movement found white minds at last receptive to change. That period, though, was preceded by fifty years of ragtime, blues and jazz. Do not underestimate the influence of culture on our thinking.
I am writing to you from a café in Brooklyn. Across from me is a young guy reading the latest novel by Elena Ferrante, an Italian feminist author who captures our times through the lens of a long friendship between two women.
Stories change us. Science proves it. Stay engaged. Nothing wrong with entertainment or “meeting yourself” in writing fiction. But there is a wider world and our characters live in it. Let’s see that too, through your own lens, and meet each other.
Some friends here and abroad have described the dawning age as “dark times”. I don’t accept that. The outpouring I’m reading is the greatest since the Vietnam War but there is a difference. This time people are listening to each other.
They’re listening. What do you have to say?
Being a child of the sixties I feel the revolution that began back then was curtailed by the assassinations of three great leaders–the two Kennedy brothers and MLK, jr. Fifty years later we are at a similar crossroads to the one that made it possible for civil rights movements to emerge. You are right to remind us that culture changes minds and lives. How could not? It is who we are. Meg Rosoff wrote to me yesterday, “As it is the revolution might happen after all. We shall see.”
Thanks again, Shelley!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
So well turned, Don,
Thank you for this. Indeed, I missed not being at the conference in Salem, too — I owe you an Italian dinner. A conference engagement in Singapore made it impossible for me to be in Massachusetts this year (and gave me the odd experience of following election night, having voted in advance, from a trans-Pacific flight…eerie in the extreme, as you might imagine).
I love what you’re saying here. You’ve always supported work with a point and a purpose, as we all recognize, and if we can see the era we’ve stumbled into as one in which, as you say, people are actually listening — if WE are listening — then maybe the cultural underpinning of political contextualization you’re describing can be our greatest yet.
David Corbett has pointed us to a terrific piece from James Traub at Foreign Policy https://atfp.co/2fTifsb and I’m happy to pass it on.
I love — and listen to — how Traub captures this:
“I admit that my inclination is to cultivate my own garden, to retreat for the next four years into teaching and writing works of history. But once we get over the shock, the question of the day will be how to preserve the values we most cherish. That doesn’t just mean standing at the ramparts. The day after tomorrow, the urgent task will be to rethink and recast political and economic liberalism in order to forge a non-demagogic, non-cynical, non-vulgar answer to the profound anxieties about the future that this election has exposed. That is a fight worth waging.”
And so it is.
Allons-y, my friend.
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
A great post, Porter. Though a Canadian, I was immersed in your country’s election campaign. It was on CBC and CTV news every night. We in Canada couldn’t avoid it. It occupied our dinner conversations. In fact, last night, when we had our daughter and son-in-law over we discussed what was happening right now with Trump’s transition team.
I frankly want to move on. It was distressing to see and hear how ugly the campaign became, starting with the primaries. It was the language: the cruel words that were hurled, the outright lies that flew through social media like a murder of crows bent on revenge.
I’ll be watching what develops next and hope that reason and kindness will find some room to settle, especially in the minds of leaders in your beautiful country.
And as you say, these are times that can feed writers and therefore provide readers with something to chew on. It’s just another chapter (welcomed or unwelcomed) in an author’s journey.
Hi, Diana,
And many thanks for your gracious comments here.
I think that moving on in our beautiful country (I can only compliment you back on yours), is exactly the point but in a way we normally don’t intend the phrase. “Moving on” tends to mean leaving the current array behind. In fact, this is a moment that we cannot get past — and must not — so easily.
For both supporters of the newly forming Trump presidency and for its detractors, the stakes are incredibly high. The American experiment hasn’t faced this particular turn of events, this “swerve,” as Shelley Souza reminds us we can think of it. And there are those who believe that the shift in electoral direction has created a real chance for that experiment’s most basic tenets to be challenged sorely.
Thus, as much as I think we all would like to move on — especially past the grotesque vulgarity that has marked so much of the experience so far, yes — we cannot. We do actually need to play this one out in blow-by-blow steps of the White House transition, the Capitol Hill leadership questions, the issues of the protective pool in the press and of traffic jams around Trump Tower in Manhattan, of party leadership (on both sides) and analysis of voter sentiment (on both sides)…many more nights of discussion and debate and headache, I’m afraid.
In the end, I think we’ll “feed” writers too much. We’ll be choking them. Hence the concern behind my piece. I need them, we all need them, to stay with it, not turn away, not try to escape. And that’s such a big ask. This is a very big development in societal and cultural terms, and, as you’re saying, in places well outside our own borders.
As my maternal grandmother Zola would have said, “Well, we’ve really done it this time.” :)
She’d be right. We have really done it this time.
And the author’s journey has taken on a massive new load of baggage. The trick now is to keep challenging each other to stay on point. To look, as Don Maass reminds us, for point and purpose in our work, despite the exhaustion.
A long road ahead.
Thanks again,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Porter, I agree with what you’re saying. Thank you for your thoughtful response.
When I said I want to move on, I meant that I want to “emotionally” move on. What has surprised me is how much I’ve been hit by what has happened in your country. I’ve been hit to the core. In fact, I woke up last night with my mind reeling; I couldn’t stop thinking about the choices that Trump is making in selecting Flynn, Bannon, and Sessions for key positions in his administration.
Why should I care, being Canadian? I care, because we are no longer that separate as people. With social media and the way news reaches us in every way, we are friends and neighbours and part of a global community.
My biggest fear is that Trump will bow out of the Paris agreement. There is no time to waste with the environment. We have already done too much damage to our beautiful earth. When other nations are turning their backs on coal, Trump is promising to revive coal production.
And then there’s immigration. I’m the daughter of immigrants from Ukraine. Though I was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, I remember the pain I felt when my mother sent me to Grade three dressed in a beautiful cross-stitched satin blouse. It was an Anglo-Saxon neighbourhood, and even though I had skipped a grade and was an A student, the teacher discriminated against me and more than a few children told me to go back to where I came from. I was also called D. P. (displaced person). I didn’t get over that until my adult years. So, I can imagine the fear that many in the USA are feeling right now with what Trump and Bannon are proposing.
Some of that hate, I’m sorry to say, has slipped across our border. We’ve had some anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic incidents in recent days. I can’t imagine what our Jewish friends are feeling. We are going to a dance tonight at a synagogue in Vancouver and I’m sure we’ll find out.
Why would Trump bring into his inner circle Sessions, a man who has been known to make racist remarks? And why Flynn, who is known to be cozy with the Russians and is also suspected of losing his way mentally. We don’t need anyone who is trigger happy in the position of Secretary of Defense in the greatest democracy on earth.
Given Ukraine’s history under the Russian thumb, I also fear for those in the land of my ancestors. Putin is a bully; he will stop at nothing to build up the Russian Empire once again, no matter how many lives are lost or ruined.
And how do you begin to trust your president elect when he has shown what a liar he is? The settlement re: Trump University is only one example of many. It’s a joke. He’s now going to pay those students who brought the case against him to keep their mouths shut. Once it was announced, he had the audacity to tweet that it was a winnable case. And then there’s his business with women…
Sorry to have gone on and on. I worry about our planet, our wonderful American neighbours who believe Trump will give them the American dream, and all those who are not white in your country. (And just to be clear, I’m not too happy with how we’ve dealt with our indigenous population. We need to be vigilant in Canada as well).
I must put my fears aside and “move on”. I will move on but I will also pray and hope that the progress that has been made in your country is not stopped, but rather built upon. And because I’m an optimist by nature and want the best for our children and grandchildren, I will hold on to Hillary’s words, “the best days are still ahead.”
No worries, Diana,
I understand your desire to move on emotionally — God knows I feel it, I think we all feel it. And many more people here are as appalled as you are by these developments, of course.
I especially appreciate your personal reaction as someone who is an American neighbor and of immigrant background. My own viewpoint is in the international arena where I worry that the place of the USA is a critical one that makes a moment like this most crucial on the world stage. As you say, climate issues are a big factor there. So are trade, the freedom of expression, and the community of nations.
But I hope you’ll forgive me for not going into your specific criticisms of Trump and his transition process. My effort here (which doesn’t have to be yours, of course) is to recognize that people on both sides of this major divide are experiencing enormous distraction, even dismay, and massive exhaustion. (Well before the elections, therapists here were reporting a major trend in clients suffering election anxiety.)
Most of what has happened in the States has been about pulling apart, pulling people and a nation apart. Concretizing such divisions cannot help us. But we have a terribly difficult task ahead in learning to live together and support each other because our differences have been shown to be much deeper, so much more painfully wider than many of us had assumed they were.
In the grand scheme, this will have been a good lesson, something that we needed to know, something that can make our country and world stronger, not weaker, because truth is good — and this divide is true, that vote was real, these opinions are in actual and authentic conflict, however inauthentic may be the man who triggered them.
So in writing about how each of us as writers needs to stay alert and engaged, I think it’s important to realize that — to be plain about it — we have Trump voters in the Writer Unboxed community, just as we have Clinton voters. The tensions each side feels are different but acute. And unless we can recognize that and respect it in each other, we can’t move on, not even emotionally.
Please don’t feel upbraided or that I’m lecturing you in any way. I get your emotional struggle very viscerally, believe me, and my own version of it is wrenching — not since the Vietnam conflict have I felt so kicked in the face by a political dilemma.
But while a new struggle is developing — one that represents many things that have, in fact, come to define the very character of the States — unless we can find some way to respect each other as we debate and parse these searing divisions, we’ll have failed to respond to this emergency.
In the setting of this discussion here at WU, the actual elements of the crisis are less important than the understanding that we have to solve that crisis — and that writers need to stay attuned to the issues to contribute to that. The Trumpian tone generates division, absolutely, no question. It’s polarizing, and purposefully so. And it has done its work: It has shown us that a vast part of our populace can honestly find a way to get behind that tone because they’re that upset, they feel that disenfranchised. That’s not Trump, that’s our people. Our own people. Many of us haven’t listened well enough to them.
And the real task is trying to learn to minister better to the needs of the people of this nation while trying to mitigate the effects of a loose cannon who revealed those people’s distress.
If anything (and how exhausting this is to consider), we need to hang onto the emotional components of this moment so that we don’t underestimate the sea-deep gravity of what’s going on.
However understandable and perfectly intelligent your concerns may be, they are countered by other views held by many people, and we (in the States) have not done a good job of knowing this. I’m afraid that a lot of escapism helped us get to this point. We can’t escape it now. We have to stop and fix it.
We can use every bit of the good will and intelligence of your country, our great good neighbor, now. This is probably the defining point of maturation for the American experiment, and we simply can’t afford to get it wrong.
Thanks again for all your good thoughts and concern. Miles to go before we sleep.
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Porter, I do not feel upbraided in the least. As you’ve pointed out so well, it’s complicated. I have writer friends online who voted for Trump and we are still friends. Thank you again for your reply and the opportunity to exchange views on this momentous time in your country’s history.
Likewise, Diana, very much appreciate your good input and gracious reception!
Bests from here,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
I was in that the Un-Con when Don made the remark about 100 people and 100 books… I remember the burn of hope that seared through the large knot of fear in my chest. It pushed that knot of fear into my throat and tears into my eyes.
I am a member of a large multi-cultural family. My friends on both sides of the pond call us “The Americans” because we are a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities, Hispanic, African American, Asian, Jewish, Native American and my white privilege, we’re the American ideal of immigrants through Ellis Island and the original dwellers on this sacred land, a microcosm of the Land of Opportunity. And we were hurting.
Waking up Wednesday morning in a strange room, to what was for me and all I hold dear, a catastrophic message on a cell phone, an instrument of doom, that had somehow managed to travel with me to a terrifying alternate universe, I think I was in post-traumatic shock syndrome when I left for Un-Con classes that day. In fact, it was all I could do to leave my grown-up daughter alone in the hotel room, what with the stories on the TV about the triumph of hateful reactions.
“We’re in a Blue State”, my daughter reminded me calmly. “Besides I went to college in the deep South, and I survived all kinds of things with my head held high, I got this, you got this, now this is our vacation and I want some extra sleep. There won’t be any sleep when we get home next week.”
And so… I headed out the door, but at that moment it was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. And when I entered the hotel lobby I was greeted by hugs and loves. Everybody at the Un-Con was hugging everyone else, and everybody’s energy was fired by love…
And… then a few days later, at the end of his workshop, Don looked out over our sea of students of the craft, and as if inspired by truths more ancient than written words, said that stuff about 100 writers and 100 books and our collective power to make the world a better place. I looked around the room at all the talented, beautiful and kind faces who had all traveled here to the origins of America for the same reason as me, to hone our craft to better tell our stories, to seek out like minded tribe, to promote a new understanding… And I knew that even if things got tough, even if they got more frightening than I could comprehend at this moment… Even if we were at a crossroad of history…
This was my country too, a country where Lady Liberty, greeted immigrants like me, travelling on a boat into the New York harbor, with a message of hope, hope for the disenfranchised, hope for the hungry, hope for the carriers of fragile, tattered dreams…
And it dawned on me that I was home, here among my tribe of fellow scribes, with all of our tangible dreams and dedication to a craft of such immense power that it could actually change a reader’s perspective to one of a deeper understanding and empathy for people and circumstances that were not their own.
And the world will be a better place for it.
Blessed be our journeys.
Wow. Just wow. Such power. Always write like that, Bernadette, and we’re going to be okay.
Bernadette, you’ve captured beautifully what many are feeling. I share your fears and hope and pray there’s a rainbow ahead.
Thanks, Bernadette.
I think the trick will be to retain the emotional energy you clearly derived from your good experience at the conference. What will actually make this wrenching change even more difficult than we’ve known it to be so far — again, both for those whose candidates lost the election and for those whose candidates won — is the grinding, item-by-item-by-item time it takes to experience this in its fullness.
So some degree, things will now feel almost like urban guerrilla warfare in which the operatives have to work door-to-door, no shadow or corner safe until checked and either changed or purposefully left unmarked. A ground skirmish of political ideologies is surfacing now with exhaustion as one of its most effective bits of weaponry — for whomever has more energy to use it.
So I’ll suggest you hang on to your good memories of how you felt at the conference, keep them close for when you need them.
And thanks again for sharing this heartfelt response, it’s appreciated.
All the best,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
I feel as if we’ve been granted a reprieve, time to change public sentiments through our works, words and prayers. And that’s what I’m doing gratefully.
Thanks, Vijaya,
If you can change public sentiment at this point, you’ll have accomplished something that, clearly, few others have managed this year. That, really, is the point. And how we understand and face that point will make all the difference.
All the best,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Excellent, Porter. Thank you for your this…
Thank you, too, Robin.
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
You’re quite right. We live in a much different world than the one we grew up in. Not only do we have 24 hour news, we have ways to escape it for 24 hours. Neither is healthy. One or the other has led to a generation that cannot cope with personal loss, let alone a true disaster of Pearl Harbor or Twin Tower proportions. Great writers led their readers through tragedy and showed them the potential for beauty beyond it. The Diary of Anne Frank is hardly a way to escape the horrors of life, but the faith of one child destined to die has inspired readers to face their own challenges for decades. I pray we have an outpouring of books that show that America is a much bigger idea than a single man or woman. If it were not, we would have been crushed long ago under the weight of popular opinion. This truth has been lost on this generation, I fear. It’s up to writers to show them that the greatness of any nation doesn’t lie (happy?) within its leader, but within the hearts of its people.
Write on, friends. Hope I haven’t lost any this week!
These are good thoughts, Ron,
Thanks for them. The country is, of course, larger than one man, and as I work my way through this, I do think that we’re collectively starting to see that the figures in the campaign are far less important than the issue they came to symbolize.
If we can remember that we, as a people and a nation and a society, are bigger and more important than one or another office-holder, we’re also on the way to remembering that these office-holders, of whatever political stripe, work for us — not vice-versa.
Good perspective, much appreciated.
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Like Bernadette, I was at Un-Con and really appreciated the mix of solid craft and fire-it-up inspiration. It was just what I needed (thanks all)!
Porter, your post is a great follow-up to that experience. This week I’ve found myself determined to stay awake, stay connected, but still thinking at length about HOW I will do that effectively. It’s a question that I will have to answer, my own responsibility, and I can’t predict the answer just yet. Which is OK: I’m pretty sure the first, quick response wouldn’t get to the crux of the thing.
So I am pondering how my current WIP needs to change, not because it must be “ripped from the headlines” (on the contrary, it’s historical fiction), but because for both story reasons and world reasons, the ground has shifted just enough that a rebalancing will need to occur now. As you say, a shift has definitely occurred. I love the question of how my characters might respond to current news, by the way–I could immediately sense that they would have some VERY specific responses.
Hi, Alisha,
And sorry for the very late response here.
The “how,” of course, is always the tricky part of something like this.
I think that “querying your characters” in your mind is actually a great exercise for many things. I’ve found that at times you can simply imagine what a character would say if you sat him or her down in a room and explained (perhaps with time quite out of joint, as in historical) what they might advise, it can be a fascinating exercise in learning a bit more about who they are — they can surprise you! — and learning something about who you are, as well.
Once past the exercise, I think you’ll find that subtle vibrations remain in your characters that carry some of the energy — in the abstract, of course — that went into their grappling with the questions you put to them.
And in terms of staying awake to the situation today, I recommend getting a subscription to one or more really reputable news and commentary outlets (my own favorites are the New York Times, Washington Post, and Foreign Policy) online and letting them send their daily political roundup to you. That way, you have a contained, controlled amount of input — devote a few minutes to it daily to stay abreast, then keep going.
That approach won’t work for everyone, of course, but it’s at least one way to try to fit awareness into a busy day, hope it might help.
Cheers,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Well, it’s hard to hide from today’s politics, Porter. In the last month, hundreds of openly racist/anti-Semitic incidents have been documented; here’s an account from Larry Summers, Harvard Professor Emeritus, never known as a bleeding heart liberal:
“Painted swastikas have defaced the middle school that my twin daughters attended and the college another daughter now attends. At a different university where my daughter studies, all the black freshmen were sent emails with pictures depicting lynchings.”
The Trump campaign normalized messages of hate and division. And the chickens are coming home to roost: Jeff Sessions, whose history of racially insensitive remarks denied him a federal judgeship, is now our attorney general. A new Clinton-loathing CIA director who despises the Iran treaty, meet Gen. Flynn, the National Security Adviser who squints and sees a terrorist in any Muslim—let the bombing begin.
A climate change denier—not a skeptic, but a denier—to head the EPA transition. And then there’s the cherry on the cake: Steve Bannon, head of an overtly anti-Semitic, racist “news” organization, as Trump’s chief strategist.
It is hard to conceive of these people making the world a better place. Heaven help us. Anyway, thanks Porter. I will stay awake in my life and my writing. We are still a democracy, until we’re not.
I was sorry and disturbed to read about the incidents you name. One sounds worse than the other but it is not. Both reveal the face of evil.
I confess, for the first time since emigrating here in 1981, I feel afraid of living in America, because of the colour of my skin. I am afraid that a Trump bigot will think I’m a Muslim and throw rocks without bothering to learn I was raised a Roman Catholic.
I’ve always known America has racial issues, but so did my home country, England. Except that in England we tried to pretend racism didn’t exist. I guess Brexit showed us! And in America, in New York at least, I have never experienced it. I have assiduously avoided traveling to any part of America I knew or felt was openly racist.
And, yes, we are still a democracy until we’re not. Even then, unless there’s mass extinction, the light of Plato’s Beauty Goodness Truth is still alive in the human sprit. It will rise up again. It is rising up again.
The one thing we have going for us, which Germans who voted for Hitler did not have, is hindsight. We have their history to inform our conscience. And, love or hate the fact, we have instant global connections.
We should draw courage from the fact that less than 60% of the country voted in the election, and of those who did less than 25% voted for the president-elect. What happened is correctable if the right people are sent to speak to disenfranchised Americans now, and can find solutions to the problems that disenfranchised these voters and the non-voters to begin with.
Thanks, Tom.
It might be helpful to remember that there are regular readers and, I assume, contributors to Writer Unboxed who see things from the Trumpian perspective and would disagree with you right down the line on all your points.
As you know, my purpose here is not to argue the actual politics of this wrenching election cycle, so I won’t be responding to your interpretations of things — not out of disrespect but because the inclusiveness I think we all want for Writer Unboxed demands a realization that we are many people with many opinions about absolutely everything.
What I do think is that the infrastructure of tension you’ve described by raising these viewpoints is indicative of what we’re facing and of the actual element of the experience we want writers to stay alert to.
In other words, the divisiveness of it all is, in the long run, fully as important, if not more so, than the various points of political action or stance. This is why, for example, the transition period in which our citizens who normally completely ignore cabinet appointments is so charged. Suddenly everyone is discussing appointee potentials.
What has shifted is the foundation of our respective visions. Economic analysts, for example, are saying that while financial indicators would suggest a strong retail holiday season, the election has destabilized this so that consumer spending may be less than could have been predicted purely on the face of the financial readings.
Whatever the political and social challenges we face, time will render those details less important than the changes in basis, confidence, security we’ve known before, and unless you’re writing directly about this political experience, your characters’ evocation of this whole experience will likely have to do with tension, uncertainty, anxiety, hostility, mistrust, confusion.
It’s a tough time and we won’t know just how tough for even more time.
As amorphous as it seems, that, in fact, is the real key available to our storytellers now: when the ground moves under us, how — and how well — do we carry on?
Thanks, Tom,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Porter, you’re right: my little partisan screed doesn’t shed any light on the discussion, or build any bridges. I suppose I was throwing off some sparks because of fear, which never is a host to broad discussion. I need to find some ways to understand the divide here.
I love this country, both as a concept and as home, and my fear is that the direction of its new stewardship is away from both its historic ideals and from its pluralistic strengths. But we’ve all got to live here, eh? (I don’t think the California secession movement has enough momentum.) Thanks for your thoughtfulness.
No right or wrong to it, Tom, not to worry. From whatever side we view this situation, fear isn’t far away and what these events do to the American experiment is at the very heart of what we’re talking about.
It’s emotionalism that got us where we are, though, at least in the basic mechanism of election day dynamics, so the more we can put some mind over the feelings, the better we might become at cooling the debate and reaching out rationally to each other.
Scary times, yes. You’re hardly alone.
Thanks again,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Thanks for this, Porter. I’ve been trying to motivate myself to get back to writing in earnest for months now, but have been unable to take my eyes off the slow motion train wreck south of the border. (I’m Canadian, but have relatives in the U.S.) One of my attempts at motivation has been to tell myself I can put messages of hope and optimism in my stories, but so far it hasn’t been enough to get me back to my previous routine. (My husband’s heart attack last fall is what disrupted my routine in the first place.)
I have been worried since I started following the U.S. election, but above all, I have felt betrayed. I grew up at a time where it was impossible for most of us not to see the U.S. as the “good guy”, as the man with the white hat, as forever the entity we could turn to in order to seek help from the forces of evil. Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger, Matt Dillon: humble, kind, brave and able to defeat the bad guy. Jimmy Stewart’s characters of Mr. Smith and George Bailey made me believe everything would turn out well in the end.
Now Bedford Falls has been transformed into Pottersville with unsympathetic, self-serving Potters calling all the shots. Who will prevent them from destroying not just Bedford Falls, not just America, but the world, with their greed and hate? Where’s Jimmy Stewart when we really need him?
So I sit here with the beauty of nature outside my office window, the sun shining on snow-dusted hay fields, dotted with the tracks of resident deer and foxes, and my immediate world is still as safe and benevolent as a world containing cougars, wolves, and sub-zero temperatures can be. I’m trying to stop watching the news, because I can’t fix what’s wrong in the Middle East or America or with the climate, I can only try to offer some small amount of hope and comfort by writing about my own good guy, who is imperfectly humble and kind and brave, and exposes the bad guys one at a time. (I write murder mysteries, of course.)
To answer your question, can I embrace what’s happening and keep writing? I hope so. My fifth book is already half a year late. Enjoy your Campari!
Hi, Ruth,
Apologies for the late response, which I thought I’d made much earlier.
What’s happening for many of us here south of your border since I published this piece is that we’re coming to realize that “the hits just keep on coming” in terms of the unexpected news, twists, and tweets—especially the tweets.
One of our sharpest commentators on CNN the other night said that she’s “made a decision to pace my outrage” at the events relative to the presidency. The line got a good laugh (I loved it), but she’s right: we’re all realizing that we can’t stay on the ceiling 24 hours per day for four years.
So to some degree, and each of us in our own way, we’re learning to find our way to our work, wary and watchful at all times for what’s flying by, but “pacing our outrage” so that, with luck, our own nervous systems (and, we pray, our political system) survive the moments that are so upsetting to so many, so invigorating to so many others.
Wish us well, as we do you, and pace that outrage! :)
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Escapism is for me, too, not just the reader. But my avenue of escape is a bit different than it is for the reader. When I escape into ancient Babylon I KNOW that all the misery I put my characters through will be resolved by the end of the story. I’ll get closure. And it will be satisfying.
What I found fascinating about the present situation in the US is how human nature stays exactly the same no matter what age we’re talking about. I could have been writing a modern story. Based on the information we have and the uncertainty we feel, we anticipate the future and expect it to be bad – no positive outcome, no satisfying closure. And so people warn, threaten, march, protest.
According to historical records, the average Babylonian citizen and the Hebrew slaves thought everything was going to be bad for them when they were invaded by the Persians. The Hebrews figured they’d just be so much ‘cannon fodder’ and the Babylonians thought their way of life would be destroyed. They anticipated the worst and acted out accordingly. But they were wrong. The Persians protected their temple precincts and preserved their way of life and the Hebrew slaves were allowed to return home. Who would have thought?
So take heart my American friends. The Republican ‘invasion’ may not be as bleak as you think it will be.
Thanks, Linnea,
We may be interested in trading some of our own leadership for your ancient Persians at some point. :)
Cheers,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Wow Porter, there you go again making people think. Darn you, man.
Like many, I wasn’t pleased with the outcome of the election – although I wouldn’t have been pleased if it had gone the other way either. Both individuals selected to vie for being the leader of the free world were woefully lacking in my opinion.
And to be honest, I’m a bit weary of the outrage from both sides. Let’s call it an election/post-election hangover if you will. I think you’re right too, it’s reflective of a cultural decline and likely our desire and easy ability to escape, retreat and nest in our own universes. And pretend the world outside doesn’t exist.
I’d agree that infusing our work with what is happening in the world around us is good advice. Except that I fear many will take that to mean that they should step onto their personal soapboxes and pontificate from within their novels. I don’t believe that is the solution either.
If there is one thing you can count on – everyone has a political opinion which they feel the undying need to broadcast to the world at large, usually through social media. And many will. There will be books written about corrupt presidents whose characters will be obviously based on Trump and populated with straw men characters to drive home the political point. *Sigh*
But I believe smart authors will do as you suggest – work into their stories that their characters are reading and responding to what has just occurred and will continue to occur in the world around us. I think that smart authors do this already and can do so without having to change genres or even plot lines. To me, those are the best stories – the ones that show that the characters do know what’s happening in the world and that it does affect them and their actions – but within the context of the story.
I believe that most writers who are in it for the long haul, have always done this and those are the stories that persevere and stay with us long after we’ve read them.
As to dark times ahead, I would say this – America has survived a lot of crappy presidents and we will survive another. We’re stronger than that, we’re better than that.
Good post, thank you for this.
Annie
Hi, Annie,
Thanks for your comment. I’m glad you’ve made it because I worried that some might thing what I was asking for was pontification on one specific aspect or another of the political world.
If Joan Didion does this, I’m there. :)
Otherwise, what I’m actually arguing for is that writers remain in touch with the “tenor of the times,” to use an old phrase — to stay alert, not to escape, and to let the nervousness, the divisiveness, the tension, the fear all pervade their creativity.
This doesn’t mean we want nothing but nerous, divisive, tense, and fearful books, nor that we need all the analytical tomes that, as you say, will always follow a moment like this.
But it does mean that — as I think our colleague David Corbett is putting it so well in comments here — we need to ask whether our work has meaning in such a world as this. As he puts it in a comment that’s on the page shortly after this one: ” I do think we need to recognize that something is very wrong in America, and we need to wake up to it, not content ourselves with bedtime stories.”
I can give you a parallel here, too, thanks to the fact that I started my journalistic career in the 18th century or so as a performing arts critic and found myself looking at a lot of grand opera and classical ballet. Beautiful, elegant, opulent blasts from the past, the worlds of ballet and opera are fantastic creations of aestheic idioms all their own. And — except for modern dance and contemporary opera — the have nothing whatever to say to us today. These were living museum pieces. There are lines in such libretti that say things like, “The dew dances for the dawn.” What the hell is that to us today? There’s no need to disparage what the world’s greatest Old World opera and ballet are, but at the same time, that kind of escapism makes close to zero sense in a world like ours.
And by the same token, I think a lot of writers get into what they’re doing with some outmoded ideas of the place and purpose of literature (of all genres), only to find that kind of mindless-entertainment approach reinforced by the sort of bad reality and comedic TV programming we’re up to our knees in these days.
I want authors to ask themselves if their characters could exist, could cope with a world in which a lone attacker can hold the Ohio State University campus under lockdown as just happened today, or whether those characters could walk down Fifth Avenue with the police lights flashing as New York City spends more than $1 million daily to protect Trump Tower.
A book (and those characters) don’t have to have a thing to do with these immediately contemporary events or conditions. No one’s work has to be set in our time at all. Historical and futuristic work is welcome.
But if we can’t imagine our characters in some way in touch with the “tenor of the times,” then we’re not writing something that’s in touch with the times of our readers. That’s my concern.
If there’s a chance just to let the moment infuse an author’s consciousness while working, I’m grateful to that author for letting it happen and not trying to dash off to a cartoonishly pastel world far from our own.
Thanks again for your input, always appreciated!
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
What you said. :D
Sorry to have bowed out of the conversation. I was on a flight from Philadelphia to San Francisco and lacked internet.
Vaughn: I feel like I struck a nerve, and I had a feeling I might with you, and I feel terribly you thought I was belittling or denigrating your genre. Context: at the writing retreat we were at this past week, one of the big questions was: How do we do something new? And fantasy has been increasingly an avenue pursued by writers and filmmakers to deliver on that relentless hunger for something never before seen.
But as Shelley suggested, this is a historical moment. And though I hope Linnea is right, I’m not holding out hope that the Persians will be nicer than I fear. A more apt historical moment might be Athens during the final decades of Peloponnesian War, or fourth century Rome, or 1930s Germany. I know it’s up to me to stand up for the values I believe in, because democracies die. I’ve been reading Thucydides and feeling frequently stunned at the horrifying parallels.
And except for a few writers — Donald Roy Pollock, Daniel Woodrell, and Bonnie Jo Campbell come to mind — the plight of that segment of the populace that clearly feels forgotten, disrespected, and angry has been largely neglected in fiction, film, and TV. And this election presented a way for them to say: You can’t ignore us any longer.
I think we should listen. That doesn’t mean we should all stop what we’re doing and write about the plight of the Forgotten Caucasian Male. But I do think we need to recognize that something is very wrong in America, and we need to wake up to it, not content ourselves with bedtime stories.
I do believe fantasy can deliver on that. I think Game of Thrones in particular is a culture-wide lesson on the consequences of unchecked power, and for the challenges to individual nobility, virtue, and purpose in the face of ruthless tyranny and ambition .
But I also think that part of the writer’s task is to give a voice to the voiceless. And I was merely wondering aloud whether we had not failed to live up to our calling there.
This echoes Don’s call to purpose. It’s tempting to simply crawl into the cocoon of storyteller, and simply spin tales. I believe, however, we have to always ask: To what end? We each will be defined by his or her answer.
David– I always pay attention to what you say (and admired The Mercy of the Night), and when you say “something is wrong in America,” I couldn’t agree more.
At that point, though, we part company. I am not a reductionist who translates every transaction among humans into economic terms. But I am convinced that money, not sociological inequities, or failure to give a voice to certain groups has much if anything to do with the disastrous outcome on Nov. 8–and no other word applies.
Until we have federally funded national elections, and limit private contributions to sweat equity, not money, more of the same is in our future.
But those in control on both the right and the left will never allow this to happen. Certainly not in my lifetime, and probably not in yours, or in anyone else’s at Writer Unboxed.
One reason Rowling’s Harry Potter has had such a profound impact on a generation of children and adults, and continues to appeal to readers, is not just that “It’s an epic saga of childhood confusion, danger and adventure. But that “Behind the witchcraft and the wizardry lies an intensely moral fable about good and evil, love and hatred, life and death.” – James Runcie, J.K. Rowling – A Year in the Life
Runcie begins his documentary by asking Rowling “A few direct questions.”
What’s your favourite virtue?
Courage.
What vice do you most despise?
Bigotry
What are you most willing to forgive?
Gluttony.
What’s your most marked characteristic?
I’m a trier.
What are you most afraid of?
Losing someone I love.
What’s the quality you most like in a man?
Morals.
What’s the quality you most like in a woman?
Generosity.
What do you most value about your friends?
Tolerance.
What’s your principle defect?
Short fuse.
What’s your favourite occupation?
Writing.
What’s your dream of happiness?
Happy family.
Rowling’s answers are her values. The story that unfolds over seven books reflects her deepest beliefs. Her characters represent or resist the good and evil that resides in us all. The best we can say, if we are not truly evil: “There, but for the Grace of God, go I.”
One doesn’t need religion to divine our moral compass. We have only to prick ourselves a little to find the same bigotry and gluttony, tolerance and generosity we condemn or admire in others is alive and well in us.
Runcie’s questions give writers, particularly of fantasy, an opening to go beyond a “character’s wants and needs.” His questions are about us. What do we want our characters to say about us?
The disenfranchised white male can write his own books.
We should write ours.
Hi, David,
Just butting in here to say thanks again, I’m especially appreciative of these lines: “It’s tempting to simply crawl into the cocoon of storyteller, and simply spin tales. I believe, however, we have to always ask: To what end? We each will be defined by his or her answer.”
This is a wonderful evocation of what I’ve hoped to say, too. Surely, if we just ask ourselves “to what end?” we’ll have a better chance of creating work that contributes rather than just entertaining.
I’ve spent a lot of time in my career being upbraided by people who don’t like to hear that “just entertaining” isn’t enough. Never have I been convinced by their arguments. If we have any talent with words and skill with structure, I think we need to ask more of ourselves than “just entertaining.”
And maybe it’s time to be more outspoken on the point. Things, after all, have shifted. We can’t be so tone deaf as to not hear that call.
Thanks again,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Coming late to this discussion–but I wanted to say thank you, Porter and others, for the call to action. The last week has been exhausting, and it is all too easy to allow a feeling that “the world is too much with us” to halt creative pursuits. Obsessively reading news articles to seek some glimmer of reassurance does not a novel produce!
Thanks so much for your comment — never too late on a post of mine: it takes me the better part of a month to answer everyone on my pieces! :)
Thanks again and watch for ways to remain vigilant and aware but not obsessed. We’ll all be better balanced if we can keep our heads realatively clear. And that, in this scneario, proves to be no mean feat.
Thanks again,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
I agree that we mustn’t run and hide as people, from what the future holds. In that regard, writers as people are no different from anyone else who might foolishly decide to stick their head in the sand for a while, (as per the above stock photo on this post.)
I also agree that writing can be informative, educational, responsive to the times. Such works no doubt will be of great importance in the future, as they have always been.
Yet I resist the notion of eschewing authorial tendencies towards absolute escapism. Story tellers come in all shapes and sizes, and indeed all missions and visions. The stories we tell can be totally removed from whatever is happening in the world without we, their authors being so. I feel the need to be vigilant in this new type of world we see forming (perhaps), yet I confess i don’t feel the need to make my fiction particularly aware of or educational about what is happening.
Not that I write much wholly escapist fantasy fiction myself. (Though there are some of those elements in my work.) But when I tell my stories, I generally tell the stories I want told, sometimes with lessons layered in, and sometimes for the sake of a yarn. I don’t want half the country to crawl into a cave and pretend nothing is happening out there, but I think we have got to acknowledge that there is value in escapism, and that somebody has got to be there to write such stories. Those stories, in my view, cannot fully serve their legitimate function as escapism if authors of same decide they must become too “aware” within their narrative of what the real world might be turning into.
In any given piece i write, part of my job is creating a world. Creating lives and events. Some of those stories simply have no connection to, or awareness of what’s happening, in our very real world and I think I rob myself of some of my artistic freedom even if, as you suggest, I make sure my characters only check the headlines on their way to work.
I do hope literature and other art continues to shine a light on the dark places of society, no matter how prominent they become. But in the end, escapist readers are going to want their escapist fiction, and “educational readers” are going to want their educational, socially aware fiction. Writers can and should choose which horse to back in any given story, or in any given lifetime’s body of work. But both types of writing and reader are here to stay, and should be.
Hi, Ty,
Thanks for your comment. While my personal preference is for litertature that means something, everyone certainly has the right, of course, to create escapist fiction, just as readers have the right to read it.
My interest is in asking writers—and readers—to be aware of their choices, to make conscious decisions about whether they want to write “pure entertainment,” as it’s sometimes called, or what you’re referring to “educational” content, something I’d probably call socially relevant material.
The key is consciousness and—for all of us—stopping to be sure we’re thinking carefully through why and how we produce the work we do.
Thanks again,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
I beg to differ and precisely because so few in the critical, literary, and academic community have read — and if read, have heeded — Tolkien’s On Fairy Stories:
“Though fairy-stories are of course by no means the only medium of Escape, they are today one of the most obvious and (to some) outrageous forms of ‘escapist’ literature; and it is thus reasonable to attach to a consideration of them some considerations of this term ‘escape’ in criticism generally.
“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter. Just so a Party-spokesman might have labelled departure from the misery of the Führer’s or any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery. In the same way these critics, to make confusion worse, and so to bring into contempt their opponents, stick their label of scorn not only on to Desertion, but on to real Escape, and what are often its companions, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt. Not only do they confound the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter; but they would seem to prefer the acquiescence of the ‘quisling’ to the resistance of the patriot. To such thinking you have only to say ‘the land you loved is doomed’ to excuse any treachery, indeed to glorify it.
“For a trifling instance: not to mention (indeed not to parade) electric street-lamps of mass produced pattern in your tale is Escape (in that sense). But it may, almost certainly does, proceed from a considered disgust for so typical a product of the Robot Age, that combines elaboration and ingenuity of means with ugliness, and (often) with inferiority of result. These lamps may be excluded from the tale simply because they are bad lamps; and it is possible that one of the lessons to be learnt from the story is the realization of this fact. But out comes the big stick: ‘Electric lamps have come to stay,’ they say. Long ago Chesterton truly remarked that, as soon as he heard that anything ‘had come to stay,’ he knew that it would be very soon replaced—indeed regarded as pitiably obsolete and shabby. The march of Science, its tempo quickened by the needs of war, goes inexorably on … making some things obsolete, and foreshadowing new developments in the utilization of electricity’: an advertisement. This says the same thing only more menacingly. The electric street-lamp may indeed be ignored, simply because it is so insignificant and transient. Fairy-stories, at any rate, have many more permanent and fundamental things to talk about. Lightning, for example. The escapist is not so subservient to the whims of evanescent fashion as these opponents. He does not make things (which it may be quite rational to regard as bad) his masters or his gods by worshipping them as inevitable, even ‘inexorable.’ And his opponents, so easily contemptuous, have no guarantee that he will stop there: he might rouse men to pull down the street-lamps. Escapism has another and even wickeder face: Reaction.
“Not long ago—incredible though it may seem—I heard a clerk of Oxenford declare that he ‘welcomed’ the proximity of mass-production robot factories, and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic, because it brought his university into ‘contact with real life.’ He may have meant that the way men were living and working in the twentieth century was increasing in barbarity at an alarming rate, and that the loud demonstration of this in the streets of Oxford might serve as a warning that it is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences, without actual offensive action (practical and intellectual). I fear he did not. In any case the expression ‘real life’ in this context seems to fall short of academic standards. The notion that motor-cars are more ‘alive’ than, say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more ‘real’ than, say, horses is pathetically absurd. How real, how startlingly alive is a factory chimney compared with an elm-tree: poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist!
“For my part, I cannot convince myself that the roof of Bletchley station is more ;real’ than the clouds. And as an artefact I find it less inspiring than the legendary dome of heaven. The bridge to platform 4 is to me less interesting than Bifröst guarded by Heimdall with the Gjallarhorn. From the wildness of my heart I cannot exclude the question whether railway engineers, if they had been brought up on more fantasy, might not have done better with all their abundant means than they commonly do. Fairy-stories might be, I guess, better Masters of Arts than the academic person I have referred to. Much that he (I must suppose) and others (certainly) would call ‘serious’ literature is no more than play under a glass roof by the side of a municipal swimming-bath. Fairy-stories may invent monsters that fly the air or dwell in the deep, but at least they do not try to escape from heaven or the sea.”
Or, said simply, it is by dreaming of the other world — the higher heavenly world to which Dostoevsky referred — that we know how exactly to fix the one we occupy at all times, even while reading so-called escapist literature.
Hi, Lance,
Thanks for this. As usual, my personal preference would be to have your own thinking rather than that of someone you quote. You live now. Tolkien does not. Nevertheless, I certainly appreciate your contributing to the conversation.
Nothing wrong with Tolkien, by the way, but he is making the argument of a man who wrote fairy stories, after all, and gave us some of the world’s most successful literary escapism. Quoting him is a bit like quoting the Holy See in defense of Jesus Christ — what else is he going to say? :)
The roof of Bletchley station could never be as inspiring as the vault of heaven, nor would we expect it to be. More “real”? Does it matter? Yes, when it falls in on your head. It does matter.
I’m perfectly happy for you to think and feel as you will, you know that, my friend. But I’d just caution you that we’re moving into a political territory less well explored than even the nether regions of Tolkien’s maps.
I’m gratified to hear my colleagues in journalism across the board talking of the need we all share now for more “accountability journalism” that was applied during the election cycle.
These things are real, and for all my respect, of course, for the masterful artistry of Tolkien–and for your regard for his thinking–the dark impulses that drive nationalistic awakenings in many parts of the world today, this troubling time, are, yes, more real in the world in which we must live than that dome of heaven.
In the same way that one doesn’t have to be Christian or Jewish or Buddhist or Muslim or otherwise religiously invested in order to know how to properly value each other as human beings and to be kind, generous, and respectful of each other, we don’t need to study a higher heavenly world (religiously described or otherwise) in order to know how to fix the one we occupy. There is actually no knowing how to fix this world at all.
We’re looking for new resources of courage, honesty, grace, and vigilance. And what I argue for in this piece is vigilance.
From the need for that, there’s no escape.
Thanks again,
-p.
On Twitter: @Porter_Anderson
Hey man!
Forgive me, as usual: I have the bad habit of deference and the detestable practice of disbelieving in originality, preferable though each remains to me. Honestly, I tend to keep quoting such things because I know few read them, public domain be damned. Hell, in today’s age of title-only social media, where people react to the title of a post without actually reading the substance to which the post links, perhaps lengthy quotes in comments are needed more than ever? What better grace can we readers offer than an old truth told in a new way?
Of course, you’re simply trying to get me to speak my mind more, to speak freely and openly. Instead of being coy, I should give you what you seek:
You’re right, of course. Tolkien in this piece says exactly what’s expected of him. Certainly Dawkins says what’s expected of him and Shaw of him and Twain of him, but why should that matter at all? If we ever hope to defend a point by only quoting our antagonists — or the antagonists of a given demographic — I fear most of our positions will remain woefully undefended. It’s quite like when a critic pokes fun at a given Broadway show for being “theatrical” — of course it’s theatrical, it’s taking place in a bloody theater! Of course that actor is being histrionic, the word literally means “actor-ish” in Latin — what else could he be? On the practical side of things, I don’t go to governors for an appendectomy and don’t go to surgeons to write congressional bills. Wielding both that ideological critique and that practical critique, then, of course we would look to an expert On Fairy Tales to teach us the nuance of escape: what better expert could we look towards to tell us, honestly and openly, what’s actually going on inside such allegedly misnomered “escapist” literature?
Perhaps you’re right and “more real” does matter if it falls on your head. Of course, in context, that’s a bit of a lexical ambiguity: are you talking about the roof of Bletchley station or the vault of heaven? Certainly Chicken Little worried that the sky was falling. And rightly so, for so it has for many of us Americans. We did not heed his warning and here we are. The point remains that fairy tales are true not because they teach us that dragons are real, but that dragons can be beaten. And Chicken Little is true not because he tells us that the dome of heaven will literally fall, but rather that when it falls, it will be because we listened to chickens who said it would. For instance: well-armed preppers who wanted to bring back tarring and feathering and settled for voting in the current fox. It is amazing how many predicted and worried about the end of America right before they brought about such doom. And it remains to be seen which races of fowl this fox will eat and therefore how our sky will actually, practically, fall. And when it does, both metaphorically and literally, it will hurt far more than the collapse of Bletchley’s roof.
The above illustrates why prophets are always first and foremost thespians and storyweavers: they make both predictions and proclamations through drama or what historians call “prophetic speech-acts.” Certainly Banksy does that with spraypaint: images mashed together to create a third world that critiques our own. Why can’t we do the same with fiction? Words mashed together to create a third world that critiques our own?
I think we need look no farther than Mordor and the ring to find exactly the kind of ruthless pursuit of domination to which Tolkien speaks: the will to dominate all life. That’s my point: Shelob consumed herself when she ran out of light to eat and so did Sauron, but it was not without cost and it was not without great pain to those involved. You see it in the work of orcs who burn down forests and ruthlessly pursue industry regardless of what it does to their neighbors or the foreigners living in their lands. And you see that very point echoed in DeCaprio’s recent documentary Before The Flood. Tolkien was as “aware of the contours and collisions of life around [him]” as anyone. Perhaps more so: as an introvert, he stewed over the things he saw like many good journalists (I’m thinking of Farai of 538 right now and his article on “The Call to Whiteness”). Tolkien could speak to that drive to dominate all life because of his work in the war and what he witnessed happening to South Africa even then. That drive has not died in mankind. It has only deformed into something even more grotesque. And therefore we also see the right and good solution in the common men, the little men, who fight back by giving up that very lust for domination over others. That’s the thing about the myths and their modern scions, the fantasies: they’re constantly dressing up temporary struggles in the garb of universal metaphors. The point isn’t magic. The point isn’t even high-concept. The point is to talk about common things through the funhouse mirror of universal principles. That’s why so many of the philosophers start, or end, in myth and poetry.
We are indeed given over to entertainment. But there is a cataclysmic difference between entertaining new thoughts from being open minded and mere amusement. So-called “entertainment” that keeps us from thinking is a-musement. Works that entertain new thoughts? Well lets just say we could use more stories in which the arrogant, self-centered billionaire empties himself and puts his body, fame, fortune, and sanity on the line for the sake of humanity as Tony Stark did in Avengers. It was not, in the end, his money or fame that saved them, but rather a decision to die for the sake of the other. That is precisely the kind of hard decisions we in the first world will need to make for the sake of those who actually do have a truly hard life: a limbless, waterless, food-insecure life. Who outside of fiction writers and narrative screenwriters are telling such stories? And no, a tech fluff piece about how Mark Zuckerberg created a foundation in his name in order to “give away everything” even though he retains control of his own money and lobbying power is not at all what I mean. We meet such real sacrificers so rarely in life (though not so rarely in history) that we need a reminder that evil — or what you referred to as brokenness, i.e. that which needs fixed — need not be the norm. We watch the news that we might learn how to fear the world. But we read fiction that we might learn how to fix it. After all, even Jesus used parables and Martin Luther King had a dream. A fairyland facsimile at the time, certainly, but he brought that dream to bear upon the real world. Without vision the people perish, as it were.
Said in another way, you and I both have every right to fear any number of pressing issues: climate change, nuclear holocaust, the continued plight of the poorest of the poor, the scramble over single source aquifers that hold prehistoric 10,000-year-old water, the silencing of truth and the gagging of any freedom of speech that allows truth to rise up unhindered, the dispersal of free assembly — any number of right and good principles may be neutered in the coming years by those who hope to alienate the inalienable. But that fear is like any fear. It has its root in nonentity. And the response to nonentity is always the courage to be the best versions of ourselves right in the teeth of the tempest, virtue at the testing point, truth spoken and love given and justice upheld in the face of death and whatever doom may be deemed. We need more and better models for that kind of courage and the myths and fantasies sculpt such forms. They show us the way to escape this broken prison and end up with a new Earth.
Sure, I think accountability journalism is a great and noble thing. I’m happy for it too. But I don’t know why that need conflict with the imagination. I can hear Dumbledore already: “Of course it is happening inside your head, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?” The very brains that imagine metaphors for whatever will happen in the West Wing tomorrow share common ancestry and brotherhood and synapse trajectory with those that write fantasy novels. This is why the fictions of the best escapists will never live up to those of the United States Press Corps. In fact, if mainstream journalists may be critiqued on one side through those like The Intercept and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism or even Chomsky who fact-check their non-fiction (and so they should), certainly they may also be critiqued on the other through those like Rowling and Pratchett and Stockett and King who all have a metaphor or three for the virtues and vices of the press. Or is it bad for the prisoner of war to learn both how their prison operates and their means of escape? Certainly knowing both helped Andy Dufresne and John Anglin alike.
By looking up to the dome of heaven and seeing Being donated to every contingent thing, I find myself well-armed for the current strife with those beings in front of me. You look to Trump and tell me he is more real than Orion. I look to Orion and find an armed slayer who molested the daughter of a king, tried to kill this king, and then threatened to kill every beast of earth. Perhaps that is the very dark impulse that drives this national awakening: for a man like Trump to find inspiration in a hunter like Orion. If the Nazis sought the spear of destiny, why not now Orion’s bow? The problem is not mythology or escapism, but rather which mythology and what means of escape. Certainly the breakout from Azkaban during the rise of Voldemort is not the kind of thing we want to promote. The tales we tell ourselves matter just as the tale Trump has been telling himself for years matters. Come to think of it, didn’t Mother Earth responded to Orion by sending a giant scorpion to kill him? Real metaphors illumine the real. There is more than meets the eye here.
An illustration from my own life might show the positive side of what I mean. I encountered Frodo, Harry, Aslan, and the Speaker for the Dead before I ever read Satyagraha, The Power of Nonviolence, Why Civil Resistance Works, or Strength to Love. Therefore last year, when 50,000 of us shut down Manhattan after Eric Garner was strangled to death by a white police officer, when we shut it down in order to show that black lives matter just as much as white lives, it was not lengthy passages from Ghandi or Thoreau I first thought of, but rather The Battle of Hogwarts and two hobbits in Mordor and Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. When we protested the brothel outside of our house that was sex trafficking little girls alongside our neighbors, I wasn’t reminded of Howard Zinn, but rather of The Last Unicorn and Alyosha. When life in this prison got bad, I had an escape plan. And I used that plan quicker than many of my peers. You are right: we are moving into a political territory less well explored than the nether regions of a map. But it’s not a map of Middle Earth, but rather America. I find the easiest way to move into uncharted territory is to learn the lessons of navigation already taught us by cartographic fiction writers. The fog of any war revealed is the fog of every war revealed. Warfare, for all of its technological shifts, remains boringly unchanged in human history: we declare and defend our wars for the same boring reasons. We exploit for the same boring reasons. And we respond to warfare, exploitation, and arrogance with the same basic tools, tools taught us through the best and most riveting tales.
I fear the very contradiction of your last paragraph shows the need I mean. “One doesn’t have to be… religiously invested in order to know how to properly value each other as human beings and to be kind, generous, and respectful of each other… there is no knowing how to fix this world at all.”
If I’m understanding you correctly, on the one hand, we don’t need to be invested because we intuitively know how to be kind and respectful. On the other hand, there’s no fixing it and we can never know. We cannot have it both ways, I fear. Complete illumination and complete ignorance are incompatible and unreal. Both are at play, like seeing through a glass darkly.
Otherwise why praise any one man’s virtues over another’s? Why praise or compliment at all? Or, on the converse, what’s the point of criticism if not to judge the value of a given work?
We weigh things. Some things have little dross and few occlusions. Some things we find lacking. Some thoughts and tales have more light and others promote the abolition of man. Those things that have substance linger, and because of this we seek both men and worlds that promote and encourage and teach what will last. And we seek them constantly, “through all vicissitudes we make our way,” if you’ll let me quote Virgil here at the end. Vigilance, as you said.
Constant vigilance, as Mad Eye Moody said.
One vigilant seeker to another,
— Lancelot