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Notes -
Does our fiction say anything about our society?
(The way I've been encouraging myself to read fiction again is by convincing myself it's anthropology/history/a window into culture)
Tanner Greer once authored a piece called "On the Tolkienic Hero," arguing that while history is littered with heroes who had no distrust of power and who conciously sought out their quest, J.R.R. Tolkien popularized the notion of a hero as a character whose very goodness is that they don't want power, that they will only shoulder power as a temporary burden. Nowadays we see this trope everywhere in the most popular form of writing: Young Adult fiction, from Harry Potter to Hunger Games to Star Wars. In a piece in City Journal Greer explores the implications of this - what could a culture that produces these kind of myths tell us about our society?
Greer has also written at length in the past about how he feels that modern Americans have lost agency as the country moved from self employed, locally-governed settler communities towards our current era of vast corporations and vast bureaucracy. His thesis here is that we see this expressed in our fiction - the modern, powerless YA protaganist raging against the machine is symptomatic of a society where people feel themselves to be at the whims of distant and impersonal forces:
Counterarguments:
1. Women's Liberation
In general when Greer talks about missing a past where people had more autonomy, he's really talking about men, and I think it's right to say that men are more likely to be disillusioned by modenity than women. The society that created these modern myths is one where women finally gained the right to have a voice, get a mortgage, start a business, etc, and Greer himself points out that most YA authors, protaganists, and readers are women. Should we see the portrayal of the teen girl protaganist finding empowerment against an oppressive society as just a story of the time, articulating a struggle many women went through in the last century? (Remember that even authors writing about young people are often from a previous generation and have lived through more cultural change).
Counterpoint: the female YA protaganists don't seem that different from the males in terms of their position in society. This might be just because more male protaganists are written by women and so also embody themes that women have lived through. On the other hand, compare modern "Tolkienic" women protaganists to heroines written by women authors in a different age, like Scarlett O'Hara of Gone With the Wind, Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice, Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables. All of these characters to me feel much more self-confident in their rank or purpose. Also, their much more sexist and heirarchical societies are not portrayed as particularly dystopian or oppressive, even with those books do grapple with themes of patriarchy.
2. Fiction written by commoners rather than elites
For a long time most great literature was created by a privledged elite class - of course they weren't going to portray their society as oppressive, they were the ones doing the oppressing! Elizabeth Bennet and Scarlett O'hara are literally from wealthy landowner families, of course they don't question their (relative) empowerment. Nowadays anyone can take a stab at writing fiction, so of course you're going to have more perspectives from people who don't feel particularly powerful and whose relation to society has been more subservient.
Counterpoint: Not all empowered female protaganists from that era were from wealthy backgrounds - Jane Eyre and Anne Shirley were orphans. Counter-counterpoint - their authors kinda were, Lucy Maud Montgomery was from a political elite family in Canada and Charlotte Brontë was at least relatively privledged, if not a giga-elite, so maybe their perspectives still don't incorporate the common person on the street.
3. ? Insert yours
Despite the counterpoints I listed to my own arguments, I think the answer is likely a combination of all of the above - late stage capitalism and advanced bureaucracy means we are now governed by vast, distant forces, but also fiction is increasingly created by women and normal people whose historical experience of being treated like second class citizens are going to bleed into the art we create.
I’d just attack the central point: the average man has *more *agency than in the past, and the leaders are reluctant because the followers are rebellious. Who wants to babysit a hundred Han Solos? In the land where every man is king, who wears a crown?
The forces we are subject to are distant indeed, nothing like the brutal personalized hierarchy of the past. If our literature celebrated a slavish reverence for authority, should we really conclude that all is well with our dear leaders?
Obligatory anti-woke rant: I’m not sure we’re going to be able to do art criticism much longer, since so much of recent art is corrupted by the artist’s conscious metadecision to ask that same question ‘what is this piece saying about our society?’ . What can a soviet or nazi morality tale tell us about their societies? Not much more than what they wanted us to think. It would be ludicrous to claim that soviet realist movies reflect the reality that soviet man felt oppressed by capitalism. In that vein, perhaps the iliad is nothing more than the condemnation/exhortation of a mirage, rather than a reflection of something real.
You can get a view of the late 19th century from reading zola, but that was already ‘committed literature’, so it’s hard for me to take it at face value. It’s only on the edges, far from an author’s central message, that there is truth. The more ideologically cleaned up works of fiction are, the least can be gathered from their study. They told me the role of art was to change the world, but I wanted it described, and perhaps embellished.
This is a good point that would throw things for a loop. I think it's relevant the heroes were talking about aren't necessarily being asked to lead (I think that's one of the bigger differences between older reluctant hero tropes like King Arthur or Cincinatus and say Hunger Games), they're being asked to oppose the current leaders. And the leadership structure they need to fight against (whether government or corporate) is often depicted as all encompassing, dictatorial, and easily capable of squashing dissenters who fancy themselves Han Solos. If people have more agency and it's harder to lead now, this certainly isn't how we're depicting the broader society in our fiction.
Maybe, but I'm not so sure this argument can't be made about previous works as well. Whether conciously or not, a lot of great works largely tell us what their creators wanted us to think about society - the Iliad no exception!
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I think Greer avoids thinking about the clear national distinctions between, say, Harry Potter and The Hunger Games.
The Hunger Games, like the majority of similar American fiction, is a retelling of the popular retelling of the American revolution. This is the ‘one story’ in American fiction. A plucky band of rebels overthrow throw the evil king, whose soldiers have drip. Star Wars is the same thing. The rebels, of disparate origins (Albion’s Seed style) are always scrappy, don’t have lavish bases, struggle to survive, and get a big break because of individual acts of heroism. Every single villain ultimate faction in most American genre fiction is the British Empire. Not British people, really, who Americans usually like, but the British Empire of the Yankee imagination.
Then look at Harry Potter. In Harry Potter institutions are fundamentally good. Hogwarts, the main source of authority, is led by someone who is ultimately a kind, powerful old man trying to do his best for his people. Most people in the Ministry of Magic are good. There may be corruption, subterfuge, individual villainy, but the story literally ends with the hero becoming a magical cop working for the government, where the father of one of the three main characters (who becomes a secondary partial surrogate father to the hero) also works.
The same is true if you compare American spy stories (like Bourne) with British ones (like Bond). James Bond presents MI6 as a positive institution for Britain and the world, staffed mostly by honorable people. The head of MI6, M, is always a good person, even if they make mistakes. Some senior politicians might be villains, but the main source of institutional authority in the fiction is a noble institution, only occasionally infiltrated by villains.
How often, in American spy fiction, is the CIA fundamentally wholesome and good and led by a brave and honorable man or woman? Even American spy fiction by hardcore jingoists like Tom Clancy often relies on either the corrupt agency trope or - at least - the incompetent, out of touch, slow and shitty bureaucratic management trope. Bond is about protecting the system, Bourne is always on the run from the CIA hit squads trying to kill him.
YA fits American fiction so well because the American story is this Star Wars thing, retold for each new generation. I don’t even know if stories about ‘defending’ institutions in America are viable, even Jack Ryan is a liberal at heart. Everything needs to be torn down or at least reformed, all the time, and both the right and the left agree. Every political movement, every successful narrative, must cast itself in the rebel-soldiers-in-1776 mold.
Counterpoint:
Consider political fiction. What does it say, for instance, that Americans made The West Wing, and British made House of Cards? When the Americans wanted to tell a drama about government, they made it one in which government is a fundamentally noble affair full of good-hearted altruists genuinely trying to do what's best for the people. When the Briths made one, they portrayed government as something amoral and fundamentally corrupt, something full of treachery and remorseless ambition. Notably when Americans made a drama about corrupt government, it was a remake of the British version! On a lighter note, even when making a comedy, the British made Yes, Prime Minister, a show that, while more gentle, shows politicians ae doddering, selfish, and absurd.
Or even to step away from politics - compare, say, the American The Office to the British version? In my judgement the American version is much more optimistic about the institution of the workplace. The UK version shows a place of quiet desperation - its office is a soul-crushing place, with people trying to find relief amid grinding misery. In the US version, the workplace is ultimately a place where people find meaning and satisfaction and love. There's a positivity that the British version lacks.
Moreover... I don't know, I feel like popular film does this? I can remember watching Independence Day, with the heroic US president character and his big patriotic speech at the end, and my father leaning over to me, putting on his best American accent, and saying, "Makes ya proud to be American, doesn't it?" (We are not.) I feel like it's much more rare for British or Australian media to be so... nakedly jingoistic, so unreservedly positive about government.
Great counterexamples. Maybe if there's a thread that runs througout it's a British distrust more of the dirty business of politics, contrasted to a larger trust in the permanent bureaucracy; "Diplomacy is about surviving until the next century, politics is about suriving until Friday afternoon." Even when the civil servants in Yes Minister are portrayed as completely cynical, they still seem like a beacon of competence and stability throughout the larger society.
In contrast the American depiction of democracy itself is more optimistic (or at least it was in the early 2000s) but their suspicion of the entrenched bureaucracy is much higher.
To be honest I think the super-competent civil service is itself a mis-reading of Yes, Minister?
Consider, say, from 'The Challenge', where Hacker decides to accompany government projects with failure standards, to increase responsibility. The civil service responds with lines like this:
Likewise as the show went on, I felt the nepotism and incompetence of the civil service came up again?
In 'Jobs for the Boys', the civil service are engaged in propping up a pointless construction project. In 'The Compassionate Society', they make a backroom deal to set up a dodgy union protest in order to protect the jobs of administrators. In 'Doing the Honours' they're shown to be entitled and entirely uninterested in safeguarding public money. In 'A Question of Loyalty' they are indeed shown to be "extravagant, overstaffed, incompetent", and deeply wasteful. In 'Equal Opportunities' they're cartoonishly sexist, and in 'The Skeleton in the Closest', their incompetence (Humphrey: "Well of course I'm not a trained lawyer, or I wouldn't have been in charge of the legal unit!") is seen to have wasted huge amounts of money. In 'The Bed of Nails' they're shown to be thoroughly compromised and controlled by the industries they supposedly regulate, and in 'The Whisky Priest' they are amoral and completely uncaring about being complicit in acts of terrorist violence. In 'A Victory for Democracy' the Foreign Office, despite its protestations of professionalism and long-term thinking, wants to throw a democratic government under the bus for no real benefit (that is, they'll let a Yemeni-backed Marxist revolution occur in exchange for which "the Yemenis will let you keep your airport contract", which they had already - Hacker's alternative solution prevents the revolution, keeps the country a British satellite, including the contract, and incurs minimal cost in either money or lives). In 'One of Us' the civil service is shown to be infiltrated by the Soviets and completely heedless of national security concerns. And so on.
The civil service affects competence, and because they're all confident, dignified old men with posh accents many in the audience seem to buy it, but on my reading of the show the civil service are pretty incompetent.
The fundamental tension in the show, I think, is that politicians like Hacker are good at winning elections (thus worrying about polling numbers, seeking publicity opportunities, etc.), and civil servants like Humphrey are good at expanding the power of the civil service and seeking further privileges for themselves, but neither of them are good at seeking the public interest of the United Kingdom.
It's moderated a little - Hacker's instinct is usually to try to do the right thing at first, and he has to be threatened or bullied into backing down, and Humphrey does sincerely believe that the pseudo-aristocracy of the civil service is a good thing that must be preserved - but when it comes down to it, neither group are particularly competent in a meritocratic sense. Politicians try to stay in power. Civil servants try to maintain the privileges of the club. That's it.
Honestly you may well be right - it sounds like you’ve see much more of the show than I have!
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I enjoyed this take, but there's always a John LeCarré even on the British side (an author I have always greatly admired) whose spies carry on even while often knowingly part of a dysfunctional system (and LeCarré suggested he made his fictional circus/MI6 much more efficient than the reality). The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is probably the best example of this, while the Smiley books are more in line with a loyal British subject in some way representing an ideal of a man soldiering on for his country despite a faithless wife and traitorous colleagues. But here it's individuals who fail him, not the system.
Book Bourne, if memory serves, is also considerably less hostile to the CIA than the Matt Damon, movie Bourne, who is an odd mishmash of superfighter pacifist. Your thesis isn't necessarily taken apart by this at all, but may be stronger when applied to film depictions. I haven't, alas, read Hunger Games.
Edit: I wrote that at 5 something after almost no sleep. Rereading it I am not sure what my point was.
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I like this take a lot. I even think Greer might be sympathetic in ways. Much of his writing about how people have less autonomy or self-governance is extremely American specific, they wouldn't make much sense in one of the many countries with a long tradition of serfdom (and of course wasn't true for the majority of Americans who came over as indentured servants or slaves). The way I interpret his argument at least is that American fiction expresses a unique dislike of larger systems partially because Americans have a genuine cultural memory of a different era and have some sense that the present state is historically unnatural.
At the same time, is there nothing moden about this trend? Was America writing popular fiction about plucky rebels fighting the empire in the nineteenth century? I think it's fair to say that when you read books like Huckleberry Finn or The Scarlett letter there's definitely themes of distrusting authority, but nothing (to my knowledge) like a complete revolutionary narrative, despite the fact that we were so much closer to that actual period of American history. The dystopian fiction about all encompassing, opppressive governments and corporations does seem to rise in tandem with the size and influence of the actual government and actual corporations. If Americans have an inherent distrust of institutional authority, it still took those institutions growing in size and scale for our distrust in them to grow towards producing a genuinely revolutionary literary culture.
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I view stories as the dreaming of a civilization. They tell us how we see ourselves and the world around us. The heroes we find interesting are a reflection of how we think heroes ought to behave. The problems they encounter are reflective of things we find scary in our own world.
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I'm shocked that the most obvious explanation for why this fiction is so popular was missed - it's literally not something most people have experience with! Of course people are interested in stories about that which they know nothing about, because reality is mundane and you have to actively seek out the interesting things in what you are familiar with. Rare is the story that is interesting even while historically accurate, and even then, it's typically because the audience isn't familiar with such things. Shows like White Collar, movies like Avengers, books like Twilight or Hunger Games, etc. are pieces of fiction that the reader has no experience. Why wouldn't they be fascinated at how these could be imagined?
Secondly, look at Tanner's examples of older heroes explicitly seeking out power.
Notice how frequently divinity appears. Yudhishthira and Aeneas are the progeny of gods, Rama is a god, etc. Indeed, this should not be surprising - when the hero is given a form of divine mandate, that mandate is often moral itself. To obtain power to carry out this mandate cannot be immoral. These gods are not The Corporation from the Waifu Catalogue or some evil ROB.
In contrast, Katniss Everdeen, Harry Potter, Divergent, etc. are not given such a mandate (I haven't read the last one, but from what I've heard, I don't recall any mention of gods in the Greek or Abrahamic sense). They are products of minds raised in a far more secular society.
This is not a rebuttal to Tanner, to be clear. I have not grappled totally with how one would rank the reasons he and I have listed, or any other reasons people come up with. But I would encourage at least some skepticism towards Tanner's case that this is so obviously an example of how Westerners have been rendered impotent and conforming.
That's a good point, in a culture where we don't expect to get commands from an unquestionable authority we'll all be less confident in our mission and actions. It makes sense that Harry Potter feels less confident where weird randoms tell him he's got all this stuff to do vs if God himself came down and gave him his assignment.
Not to mention that God is more of a questionable authority these days.
Yeah, I guess I should have said if Harry believed in a higher power things would be different, but by necessity he can't hear the call from a source he would trust completely, because he doesn't have one.
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Hang on, aren't you the guy who wrote those great blogposts about Midway? Hoist by your own petard.
No, that was MrManhattan16. I have a Ph.D, you can tell b/c I have Dr in my name.
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Joke's on you, none of it ever happened, it was all a fanfic of his!
C'mon, you think anyone would just wanna kill Jews? WW2 writers need to come up with a better villains.
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Also you can easily find reluctant heroes/leaders. Moses, King Arthur, Brutus in Caesar etc.
I don't think it as common as it is today but it's hardly unheard of either.
Cincinnatus is another classic example.
@Ioper as well, Cincinnatus is the most classic trope of the reluctant hero, but even he was of a high ranking patrician family and never questioned that he was the right man to lead when requested. Likewise, King Arthur was still the son of the actual King and Brutus one of the most influential and powerful people in the country. This feels qualitatively different to me than the modern YA protagonist, a mundane teenager nervous of responsibility and convinced they're not the right person for the job. Cincinnatus/Arthur also immediately become the Dictator/king who is in charge of the imperial machine, whereas the YA trope is more about a tiny cog in the machine raging against it. You don't see that same kind of distrust of power inherent in the old myths.
Or, to put it a different way, King Arthur is chosen by prophecy via martial display and Harry Potter chosen by a school admissions board - one feels much more tailored from our modern neuroses than the other!
Am I grossly misremembering something or wasn't harry potter chosen by prophecy? I wasn't that into Harry potter.
I don't really disagree with the second part of your argument but by the premise of Tanner. I think he is overstating his case.
On another note, it seems to me that YA fiction is moving in the direction of their heroes not having much self doubt at all and being more pure power fantasies where the protagonist unashamedly seeks power, gets it and uses it to humiliate their enemies.
There were actually 2 children that would have met the requirements of the prophecy: Harry Potter and Neville Longbottom. It wasn't totally clear which was the one who would kill Voldemort.
Admittedly, being one of two chosen out of the hundreds/thousands of magical British children is fairly close to being chosen.
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To be fair Greer doesn't say Tolkien invented the trope, and specifically references older examples like Cinncinatus or Yu and Shun, he's mostly claiming Tolkien popularized it.
Oh really? I'm probably pretty out of date with what's popular right now/
I'm thinking of the rise of Isekai, progression fantasy and cultivation.
The popularity of those is confounded a bit by their foreign origins - which adds novelty as a lure, and in works actually from China or Japan, changes the baseline cultural expectations the pieces used as references. Not a lot, it doesn't detract from your point, but I expect the first isekai or progression fantasy adaptation to go full mainstream will tone down some of the harshness, if not go fully feminised.
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