Monday, May 17, 2004
In Which The Author Shoots His Big Mouth Off On A Promised Topic: "Consolatory Fantasy"
Ursula K. LeGuin once wrote:
"Soon after A Wizard of Earthsea came out in England it received a review in a science-fiction periodical which took the book to task for being "consolatory" and "reassuring". Well, fair enough, I thought, if the consolation is false, if the reassurance is unwarranted; but are consolation and reassurance inherently false, unwarranted - foolish, soft, silly, childish - sentimental? Are we writers only to threaten, terrify, and depress our readers with our ruthless honesty: have we not as good a right to offer them whatever comfort we've come by honestly?
"I wrote the reviewer and told him what I thought, and that I thought I had Tolkien to back me up. He wrote back nicely enough saying that of course he hadn't been thinking of the book as being written for children. Apparently it is permissible to reassure or console children, but not adults.
"Such an attitude seems to me to be based on a strange notion that the Common Reader is so happy, so foolishly confident, so stupidly trustful, that the Common Writer's whole duty is to convince him that life is hard and full of grief and that there is no consolation. Most adults I know already know that life is hard and full of grief; and they look for both confirmation of this knowledge, and consolation for it, in art."
*****
Now watch me gild the lily as I try to further enumerate the weaknesses of a position I (inelegantly) tag as "anti-consolationist," though it should be noted that in no real sense are its proponents truly anti-consolation. They vouch distaste only for "consolatory" literature that isn't consolatory to their own values, and apply other labels (such as the ever-popular "subversive") to politically acceptable flavors of consolation. Yet it is context alone that determines the subversive value of a work of literature.
Fallacy The First: I'm Subversive, You're Consolatory
At a Marxist commune, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle would be quite consolatory, and The Chronicles of Narnia would be profoundly subversive. Even the most self-critical and broad-minded of us kindles a certain warm fuzziness in the breast when he is told that his philosophy and/or his politics are "correct." To this end, even pessimistic and dystopian literature can be intensely consolatory in that it affirms certain values and suspicions. And if consolation itself isn't really the enemy (which it isn't), we're back to simple upjumped snobbery again: The things anti-consolationists like are bold and challenging, the things other people like are insipid and infantile.
There's nothing wrong with the expression of distaste for books one finds philosophically objectionable; I have no use for the so-called writing of people like Ann Coulter, for example. What I object to is the attempt to cloak simple (and essentially leftist*, in this particular field) snobbery in the mantle of a literary value judgment; those who are consoled by one sort of fiction are supposedly better adults than those consoled by another. Indeed, those who are consoled by the first sort of fiction aren't actually consoled at all, they're inevitably "challenged," their "boundaries stretched." It's only those poor sad twits reading the second sort of fiction that require "consolation."
"Neener neener, we're the cool kids and you're not," remains a deeply childish pronouncement no matter how much polysyllabic invective is squeezed out in its defense.
It isn't enough for anti-consolationsts to merely decry flat prose, shallow characters, ridiculous situations, poor psychology, lax worldbuilding, and cliched thinking. It isn't enough to simply enumerate the literary crimes of "consolatory" works, though the enumeration of such could be a full-time job for an entire office of sleepless crack addicts. No, political reasons must be manufactured for the condemnation of literary vices. Human nature being what it is, it's more satisfying to imagine that one's distaste for certain works stems from the moral deficiencies of their authors, rather than from the plainer fact that said authors are piss-poor crafters of prose, character, and narrative.
It was Oscar Wilde who said, "There are no such things as moral or immoral books. Books are well written, or badly written, and that is all." His pithy bon mot neatly encapsulates this aspect of my argument; that anti-consolationism is less about genuine critical analysis than it is about self-aggrandizement.
Fallacy The Second: "Consolatory" Is a Binary Value
As you might suspect, I have become intensely suspicious of the notion that what is "consolatory" is somehow ubiquitous and universal. For example, the received wisdom of the anti-consolationists is that The Lord of the Rings is consolatory because it is morally black-and-white, genteel, and idyllically feudal; I find it consolatory rather because it is deeply pensive and tragic (and therefore reflective of the natural courses of our lives and history), and I am far from alone in this. Literature is by nature interactive; what we take from it is determined largely by what we bring to it. Certainly there are individuals who cherish The Lord of the Rings for its rank sentimentalism and Edenic landscapes; yet I cherish the same books for their pervasive atmosphere of autumnal melancholy.
The consolatory function of a given work is thus at least half-dependent upon the individual reader's emotional baggage. Another major problem with anti-consolationism is the very curious idea that "consolatory" is a binary value; that a novel either is or isn't consolatory. If this were true, it would require that each reader take the exact same experience away from a novel. Yet the real-world experience of everyone reading this should immediately confirm the impossibility of such a thing. Only the delusional truly believe that when a thousand people read the same literary work, they will have a thousand identical experiences and a thousand identical reactions. The label "consolatory" is therefore generally worthless as a descriptor of the final literary outcome, reader reaction.
Fallacy The Third: The Bloody Authors Themselves Claimed To Be Consolationists, So It Must Be True!
It is routinely recognized in literary analysis and criticism that authorial intent is, in fact, one of the least reliable and significant gauges of a work's power and symbolism. Countless authors are convinced that they've written unique, necessary, vigorous, and powerfully-conceived works of lingering genius; they frequently say so in memoirs and correspondence (nowadays, in chatrooms and messageboards as well). Justly, few of them are believed. Likewise numerous are those authors that would gladly degrade, take back, and obscure works that have acquired lasting fame and praise; Anthony Burgess (rest his soul) would gladly have unwritten A Clockwork Orange if he only could have. He considered the attention paid to it an insult to works that he thought of as grander; fortunately, nobody gives a shit as to what he thought of the novel, or what he would have chosen to elevate in its place.
Tolkien (to use the most-cited subject) did indeed claim that he wrote in a consolatory vein (though he used the term in a very specific fashion, the nuances of which are not always grasped by his detractors); why should we necessarily believe that he succeeded? Why are his statements on his own work somehow more trustworthy than those of Burgess, or Hemingway, whose statements on the symbolism (or lack thereof) of his work have been largely ignored for decades? Terry Goodkind is convinced that he's writing peerless works of genuine human drama, transcending genre, a genre unto themselves. Do you believe him?
A Necessary, Subversive, and Challenging Conclusion that Will Stretch Your Boundaries
Tolkien wrote: "... fairy stories offer also, in a peculiar degree or mode, these things: Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation, all things of which children have, as a rule, less need than older people.” The implication is that children can supply those qualities for themselves through the unfettered exercise of their own imaginations;** it is adults who truly need (and labor to construct) the stimulation and consolation of what we now think of as "speculative fiction."
Regardless of the merit of this argument (though I think it at least partially truthful), I believe it's quite clear that anti-consolationists have constructed for themselves a meta-fictional version of a fairy story; a sophistry of false oppositions and semantic games used as a shroud for snobbery, well-intentioned or otherwise. I for one am intensely weary of the denigration of "consolatory fantasy;" I am much more interested in the denigration of poor writing itself; let politics and philosophy rest until the author makes them intrusive to the narrative. At that point, fetch the pitchforks and jab away. I'll even help; the feeling of justified criticism is a deeply consolatory one.
*****
*I say this as a serious liberal (in the contemporary American sense of the word), with quite a few rather leftist sympathies.
**Of course, another implication is that the cheerful little bastards simply haven't been around long enough to pick up the psychic baggage that this world imparts with its toil, tragedies, and disappointments. But there was only so much room in the paragraph, gentle reader. Now quit reading this and go elsewhere; you have loved ones that miss you.
