An Outsider's Perspective on Social Politics

As I warned you, social politics are a thing that not even I, with my squirrelly cluelessness, can avoid. I've been waiting for the right book to toss around my opinion on the subject, and The Secret Life of Bees is probably as good as I'm going to get.

To begin: social politics are the attempts of constructed groups to gain a comparative advantage over each other. They're different from regular politics because they don't always travel widely-shared, explicit modes like elections, and because they are more frequently peopled by clichés and ideals. They're a favorite of Marxists, and like many Marxist theories, they're thought to be inescapable.

That's the first and last paradox to hurdle. Is everything we do an assertion of power over another class, race, etc.? Many people would disagree, but the assertion is that sitting in front of your computer and reading a literary blog is a luxury purchased at the expense of everyone else in the world who doesn't have that opportunity. After all, they say there's no such thing as a free lunch. The ideology that most promotes the awe of social politics also tends to find fault with behavior that doesn't make everybody equal–not only in freedoms and opportunities, but also in comfort, possessions, behavior, morals, personality, etc. I'm not straying too far into the political: this has everything to do with literature, being the branch of criticism that analyzes the social spheres of the winners and losers in any novel. In The Secret Life of Bees, if Sue Monk Kidd gives Lily a sandwich, it has a different import than if she gives Zach a sandwich. This has nothing to do with their lives and everything to do with their gender and skin color. What could be more natural?

The trick is that a level of this is always necessary. If I pretend that all my characters' races, etc. are random or arbitrary, then I'm both kidding myself and making room for a ton of accidental cultural slander. This is a trap that catches most of the crappier fantasy authors in the biz. Assuming that their legendariums are coming entirely out of their own heads, their characters and cultures reflect medieval Western Europe time after time. (Some are beginning to show signs of America, but this may be the result of declining levels of research.) Culture is what's literally inescapable, and writers shouldn't try. After all, we're creating culture. To admit anything less would be selfishly to insist that our ideas, including the language in which we write, are our private property. In this case, I shouldn't let anybody read my books.

Culture, however, is not at all the same as social politics. Oh, the two almost always intersect. There are many examples of culture without social politics, but a Marxist literary critic could read class warfare into almost all of them. Social politics, on the other hand, finds existing without culture a lot like breathing in space. After all, culture is the structure given to the shared beliefs of a society, and without more than one person to share political ideas, you've got a dictator on your hands.

People will read social politics into any book not because of their ideology, but because of who they are. I read The Secret Life of Bees much differently from the way my mother read it, because I've never been a fourteen year-old girl. I can share as much of Lily's ethics or personality as I want, but I don't have the experiences Kidd has written into her backstory. And neither I nor my mother has specifically African American memories, nor South Carolina ones. We understand the characters the same way we understand other people; that is to say, we read imperfectly.

Once this is understood, there are many ways to leap from the platform. All of them have to do with the outcome people want each other to have after reading the book; we want others to agree with us. Some readers insist that Lily should triumph in the end, and that she should come to a deeper understanding with the black characters who support her. This, it can be argued, would create an optimism that encourages other people to seek a similar understanding with their neighbors of a different social background. Other readers, especially the grumpy varieties of postmodernist, want a sad ending in which the iniquities of the real world (for example, racist dads) strangle Lily's dreams and her relationship with August, Zach, and the rest of the gang. The point of this would be to create a pessimism that would fuel the reader to go forth and fix such iniquities.

I don't believe that these outlooks are worthless. I, like most authors, tend to write mixed outcomes, with optimism and pessimism holding hands. But it becomes dangerous to neglect looking at a story from the inside. And, unlike a view of which class is oppressing which, it's absolutely necessary for reading. I tried to connect with Lily's choices in spite of never having been a fourteen year-old, white, lower-middle-class, South Carolina girl in the year 1964. Kidd's words and my thoughts are both human, and so however imperfect my understanding of the political setting, I am the better off for having read it.

There is a great reason that people like to empathize with the characters, and it has nothing to do with selfishness. Books are lessons that help us deal with the problems we face every day, not just what politicians and scholars see when looking down at a map of humanity. Everything else is founded on the face-to-face drama, which is the only (but generous) source of meaning for the vast majority of people who don't have the luxury of brooding in the ivory tower of progressivism.

My Two Big Fantasy Influences, Part 1

Bill Watterson

You probably know him, if not by name. Bill Watterson is the author of Calvin and Hobbes, widely argued to be the funniest, most insightful newspaper comic strip ever written. Not a lot is known about the man, mostly owing to the fact that as the ball dropped in Times Square and 1995 turned into 1996, he disappeared from the cartooning world, the press, and his fans, all of which have had trouble finding him ever since.

My love of Calvin and Hobbes goes back as far as I can remember. I can recall many evenings of sitting on the couch with my dad, each of us alternately reading a strip out of the various collections we had. I still own that copy of The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, probably printed around the time Watterson pulled the strip out of publication. Calvin and Hobbes is probably what made me want to be a writer.

As far as it pertains to fantasy, I'm not talking about sword-and-sorcery pulp fiction, or even what tries to be Tolkien. Like I say too often, fantasy's biggest problem is in trying to be a separate thing, and most authors don't succeed in failing to write the genre. I sure don't. That is, I may try, but I can't seem to get my books to escape the fact that they are fantasy, to give the reader a taste of the book's essence without crowding out the flexibility of imagination. The writers who earn the title of "genius" are the ones who can discern essential truths and communicate them with the reader, to allow the real world to speak back to them as they weave literature, which is a conceptual tapestry, something made up, that represents something fundamentally true. Watterson, in my opinion, is a master of this art.

It shouldn't seem strange for me to hold a cartoonist to such a high standard. One thing I've learned from Watterson's essays, as well as from contemporary cartoonists like Ryan North and Aaron Diaz, is that comics are a medium just like any other, and not a genre. This is mostly true. It's also true that people's expectations of literature shape what that literature becomes, like it or not. It's almost certain that Calvin and Hobbes survived its initiation into the world of newsprint because it had a small, goofy family and a talking animal, as newspaper readers expect and want to see. It works because it's trite and it's trite because it works; newspaper comics are "safe" media, rarely doing any sort of thinking outside the box (haw, haw). Calvin and Hobbes amazes me because it accomplished both.

Then there's the question of Hobbes. Some people understand it, and some people don't. One way to explain it is this: my sister, who has been reading The Lord of the Rings, recently asked me who Tom Bombadil is. She read the only chapter in which he appears, but his description there was not enough for her. And so we've run into the problem that comes with reading with so much assistance from classrooms, fan wikis, author interviews, and so on: it's now assumed that there's a right answer to every piece of a plot, some level of tangible objectivism. Guess what: there ain't. As my professor for Criticism told us, fiction isn't real. Tolkien did go farther than any other author in charting his legendarium, but he left the monsters on the map and the gaps in history that don't let us take certainty for granted. Tom Bombadil's origin is never quite explained, only hinted at.


This leaves Hobbes in a powerful place of balance. Overtly, Watterson's technique is simple: when Hobbes is alone or in the company of Calvin and nobody else, he is drawn as a live tiger; when someone other than Calvin is looking at him, he is drawn as a stuffed animal. It's not wrong to say that Hobbes is just a stuffed animal, and it's not wrong to say that he's a tiger. Watterson did not intend him to be a toy that comes to life whenever Calvin is around, but nearly everything else is fair game. This reconciliation of what would be a paradox, this act of balance, is exactly what I mean when I talk about the illustrative fabric of fantasy. As long as Hobbes' existence isn't pinned down logically, he makes Calvin wise. When he can be explained, he stops making sense.

Watterson's style is another thing I've sought to live up to for quite some time. I don't draw comics, but I love his determination to break panel conventions where it helped the strip, and his refusal to force the story into newspaper-proscribed structures. This is less about rebelling and more about knowing how to let your work come forth naturally, without constraint. His other kind of style, the storytelling one, is a compromise I've never been able to hit. I tend to use overblown words too often, which kill the message. Watterson uses overblown words to make his strip hilarious. Vivid, poetic description is a wonderful thing, but it can't seem out of place, and for some reason it always feels right coming out of Calvin's mouth.

Ursula K. Le Blog

The following is my comment on this blog post by fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin:

I could hardly pretend to be a fantasy nerd without admitting there are those authors who know more about it than others. Tolkien and Lewis, Gaiman and Beagle: the best writers recognize that in an age where ideology is trickier, quality fantasy is not genre-driven, but has necessary tools built in. These tools are the implicit admission that anything goes, that neither the reader nor shallow, specialized criticism is the ultimate arbiter. The key is walking the tightrope of humility between existentialism and agnosticism.

Ursula K. Le Guin ranks near the top of fantasy theorists, in my esteem: on par with Joseph Campbell, and with a similar perspective. This short post of hers accurately catches why fantasy is so relevant to modern science and ideology in certain ways not even science fiction can do, but it misinterprets a handful of key points.

   I've always had difficulty grappling with speculative fiction's role as a metaphor for reality. And it is a metaphor, in exactly the same way that any fiction is a metaphor for reality. As I rant nearly constantly, the coinage of the term "speculative fiction" implies that there's fiction that isn't speculative. (The term refers to fantasy, sci-fi, horror, dystopia, or anything else that doesn't limit itself to current scientific understanding.) This split wasn't always there. Shakespeare didn't care whether fairies were real when he wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream, but he needed a love potion to confuse Lysander and Demetrius. Mary Shelley was a sci-fi writer in her time because Victor Frankenstein would have lacked depth if he'd just had an ugly kid. College professors still assign these because they've been canon for so long, but a genius like Vonnegut has to be treated with the tongs of postmodern criticism, and that's because he takes the time to wink and tell the reader exactly what he's doing. Most writers just expect you to keep up.

   My only problem with Le Guin's argument is that it wavers between points of nihilism. She admits that "somebody's geometry" has to be in play in a fantasy story. That is, the reader has to understand it. But beyond that, anything goes. I disagree. I would replace her assertion, "It doesn't have to be the way it is," with a question, "Is it really the way it is?"

  Le Guin gives science the benefit of the doubt, and I find that perfectly reasonable. Science is a broad enquiry, a humble admission that we don't yet know everything. And we never will, with emphasis on the everything. The pursuit of knowledge is undoubtedly noble, but the contention that we're already there is the worst hubris I've ever seen firsthand. It's unscientific to say, "Look back at those medieval chumps, how they believed in spontaneous generation!" Science is a process, and as individual people we try to do our best with what we have. The best scientist, just like the best fantasist, is someone who always has questions. In another thousand years, 2012's understanding of the universe will seem just as primitive as people without microscopes. The potential stagnancy, the feeling that we've done it all, fits the status quo that Le Guin protests.

Interestingly, and she admits this, both of the authors she mentions were Catholic. There are many people who place religion and science as opposites, but both Tolkien and Chesterton knew that science and religion are both tools to discover deeper meaning. Le Guin, who has one of the broadest knowledges of anthropology of anyone I've ever read, probably sees religious people as those grasping at air. Some probably are. But most religions, as well as non-religious spiritualities, are not generated spontaneously, but rather founded on real experiences that clash not with science, but with old discoveries that we call "laws." The monk, the fantasy author, and the researcher are now equally Galileo.

And, as with all science or math that has any value, fantasy shouldn't exist for its own sake. Dungeons and Dragons is pure neurosis if role play isn't included. Le Guin's stories stretch beyond the Archipelago to our own fears of being locked in the dark or lost at sea, and our own hawkish pride. This is the geometry that fantasy preserves: the physics don't have to make sense when they sit on the shoulders of the moral.

Mirror Imagination: Yes, You

[This is an essay I did for Opus magazine in 2011. Hooray!]

            “Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.”

–Joseph Campbell (1904-1987)

            Hark! Have you noticed that there are only two kinds of people who read fantasy? It’s a social mandate. No matter what you do, you’ll be ungraciously smushed into one mold or the other and, like it or not, you’ll come out the other end, stuck in the prescribed shape.

            The first of these literary cookie cutters takes the form of the “chill”, cultured guy who reads the occasional sword-and-sorcery saga in spite of the fact that it’s a community no-no. His friends admire his grace as he lowers himself to their level while enjoying The Lord of the Rings – or maybe something else.

            The other is a rock-bottom nerd with a neck-beard to rival that of Thoreau and whose facebook “friends” barely exceed his roommate, his dad, his roommate’s dad, and his youth minister’s dog. Neither of his actual friends (nor, in most cases, his imaginary dragon) has a facebook account.

            Of course none of this is true. Written history has beaten people over the head with evidence that distinguishes individuals from the mass of faces who believe they’re not unique. But it’s so easy to lump people together, even if it’s only to obtain a larger perspective. It’s what allows great thoughts to come through now and then. Philosophy, religion, psychology, sociology, politics and statistics would be marooned in the ether without this practice, and each of these has provided definite benefits to humankind. So what’s a little stereotype among geeks, then?

            We all have a little something in common, at least in the form of language, culture and species genetics. If we didn’t, you might find this little harangue indistinguishable from the nutrition facts on your can of club soda. However, there’s no solid way to extend that to say what kind of person can or cannot appreciate fantasy literature.

            Take a look at all the pronouns in use so far. Women, this example shouldn’t surprise you. All right, men: try to picture a woman who’s enthusiastic about LeGuin, Pullman, or Lewis (or almost any fantasy author you know, but try not to use J.K. Rowling for this one). Got the image? Now visualize her wearing a sweater instead of that bikini or breastplate you just imagined. I hope it’s not too difficult. Instead of at a sci-fi convention or in a picture on the Internet, she’s at a coffee shop or beside her living room fireplace as she reads, her bookmark long forgotten. She’s just decided the bard is the most relatable character so far, but she thinks he’s up to something. After all, people like that exist in reality.

            No, it’s not only the white male who reads this stuff. Nor is it just the scrawny middle-schooler whose only social scene is the Scrabble club. In fact, with the right variety of culture that went into the books you choose, this genre is perfect for opening the mind and learning to relate to nearly anyone you meet. Fantasy was originally derived from mythology, and this doesn’t mean just Greek. Work your way up in a culture by enthralling yourself with its Buddha or its Osiris and see what came next and who reads it today. Simply point to any corner of the globe and you can dig up some speculative fiction that takes its roots from there. I promise it exists.

            At its heart, fantasy is about escaping reality for a little bit, but it doesn’t require real life to be all that bad. Anybody can appreciate it, given the right author. It’s a way to find a fresh change of scenery, to explore make-believe and real-world cultures, zany or terrifying characters, and hypothetical laws of physics that are downright incorrect and just as downright fun to imagine. After all, without an imagination, how can you decide what kind of person to be?