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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 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.
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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