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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   29527 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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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:

As unconscious illustrations of common beliefs about authority, fate, and morality, [French Fairy Tales] offered a rare window into the ancien regime as the common man experienced it. The fairy realm of the French peasant mirrored his lived reality. His was a vicious and empty moral order, where personal destiny depended on the arbitrary whims of the powerful...

like the fairy tales of old, [American] escapist yarns can escape only so far. Their imagery and plotting are irrevocably tied to our society...these fictional narratives share a set of attitudes and convictions about the nature of authority, power, and responsibility. They provide a window into the moral economy of the twenty-first century’s overmanaged meritocrats...

The defining feature of the YA fictional society: powerful, inscrutable authorities with a mysterious and obsessive interest in the protagonist. Sometimes the hidden hands of this hidden world are benign. More often, they do evil. But the intentions behind these spying eyes do not much matter. Be they vile or kind, they inevitably create the kind of protagonist about whom twenty-first century America loves to read: a young hero defined by her frustration with, or outright hostility toward, every system of authority that she encounters...

It is not just twenty-first-century teenagers who feel buffeted by forces beyond their control...one-third of Americans now find themselves employed by corporations made impersonal by their scale. The decisions that determine the daily rounds of the office drone are made in faraway boardrooms—rooms, one might say, “where adults discuss things out of earshot.” What decides the destiny of Western man? Credit scores he has only intermittent access to. Regulations he has not read. HR codes he had no part in writing...

The modern-day fairy tale is not at peace with HR. Our fairy realm’s preoccupation with the problems of the micromanaged life resonates. Its paranoia reflects a culture that has lost faith in its own ruling class. The YA novel’s adolescent attitude toward authority speaks to the experiences of the many millions shaken by their own impotence. The mania for dystopia is a literary sensation custom-made for the frustrations of our age.

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'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.

This was not some new ideal in Shakespeare’s day. For the sake of name Athena spurs Telemachus away from home; for the sake of rule she spurs Odysseus homeward bound. Yudhishthira gladly leads his brothers on the path of dharma, but it is a dharma of kingdom and acclaim. Aeneas, Sigurd, Gawain, Gilgamesh, Rama, Song Jiang—search the old epics and annals for the modern distrust of heroics, and you find it in none of them.

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.

Rare is the story that is interesting even while historically accurate

Hang on, aren't you the guy who wrote those great blogposts about Midway? Hoist by your own petard.

Hang on, aren't you the guy who wrote those great blogposts about Midway?

No, that was MrManhattan16. I have a Ph.D, you can tell b/c I have Dr in my name.

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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