Literary shorthand
Bookworm on Dec 08 2008 at 6:01 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized
Some time ago, I wrote an article about romance novels in which I pointed out that many authors, to telegraph that their lead male character is reliable, strong, honorable and handy in a tense situation, give that character a military background. In the same way, I’ve noticed when reading romance novels written by those on the New York Times side of the political block that the way to telegraph that a character is rotten is to make him or her politically right wing. (And I really mean it about the New York Times thing, since these same authors will always announce their characters’ intellectual chops by alluding to them reading the Times on Sunday morning — especially in post-sex romance mode.)
For example, I’m reading Toby Devens’ My Favorite Midlife Crisis (Yet)
“The times they are a-changing,” Neil said. “We cannot afford liberal largesse. We are not a welfare provider.” I’d heard this too many times before. Neil is way to the right politically. (p. 47.)
Given that the book came out in 2005, maybe we can forgive the author for being unaware of post-2005 studies establishing that it’s those who are way to the right who are more charitable, not those to the left, who sit around and wait for the government to provide.
That wasn’t Devens’ only attack on conservatives though. Her most loathsome character is a hate-filled, manipulative daughter who forces her widowed mother to choose between a new love and her grandchild. You get the picture, right? In case you don’t, though, Devens drives it home by reminding us that the daughter is practically Hitler-esque in her horribleness:
Summer was a stiff-necked little prickette who supported the most outrageously right-wing political cause with the money she and her equally tight-assed husband had reaped from the sale of their dot-com.
Quick, fellow readers! Get out the garlic.
I’m still reading the book, despite its political mean-spiritedness because it is, otherwise, a decent novel about “women of a certain age.” I’ve decided that, just as I ignore Dorothy Sayer’s periodic forays into antisemitism, excusing them on the ground that she was an upper class person in Britain in the 1930s, and (a) those attitudes came with the territory and (b) she is often sympathetic to, as opposed to genocidally inclined towards, Jews, so too will I ignore Devens’ outbursts. She’s obviously a woman of her class and time (New York, early 21st Century) and has to be forgiven her foibles. But I wouldn’t let my daughter read the book, and that’s entirely aside from the R rating I’d give it on account of the sex scenes.
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I dunno, Books. I’m short on reading time as it is. There was a recent SF book that ended up on That Spot On The Wall — the one that’s such an easy throwing target — somewhere in the first 30 or so pages, when it became clear that the author was setting up a world in which the Confederacy was re-established, slavery and all, by George Bush and the Republicans.
It might have been good otherwise, but honestly, when it’s clear the author has that little respect for me (and, not incidentally, very nearly half of the rest of the voting population) I figure he doesn’t deserve my custom.
“Summer was a stiff-necked little prickette”…politics aside, this strikes me as pretty lame writing. Good authors don’t *tell* us what a character is like, they *show* us.
I have never seen “prickette” used that way before.
Previously I had thought it was French slang for a certain part of the female anatomy.
Domestically, it’s what my nurses used to warn me to prepare for as they advanced on my arm with a needle.
Both off and on topic…are any of you familiar with the “Illustrated Classics for Children”? No, not the Classics comics! (I wonder if _those_ are still around!) They were printed by Baronet Publishing, which seems to be out of business, bought out, or whatever. I can’t find any current info about them, in any case.
I’ve just recently discovered the series, and have been having a good time searching ebay, making lists of what I’ve sent to which grandchildren, and watching to see if some of the less common ones are available out there. I’m not even sure I’ve got a complete list – but if you’re looking for something for a young person 9-12 in age range who also enjoys reading, you might check out ebay. Most of them seem to be “boy” books, but some of the classic “girl” books are there as well. I had to laugh – my son was sure that the copy of “Little Women” would be interesting to his son – after all, it _was_ a classic. Hah. His son is now a very precocious 8 yr old, and his daughter is just 3+ a bit. It’s so absolutely hilarious to me when he calls and tells me that “boy…girls sure are different from boys!”. Did I mention that he went to UCSanta Cruz? That was _definitely_ our mistake!
You know…I’m struck again and again with the fact that if we don’t pass on our classics and our history, our next generation is just going to have to make the same mistakes over and over again. Even those to _do_ learn from history make mistakes and repeat the same things people have done wrong…but young people _never_ listen to their parents or grandparents, so how are they supposed to learn? With books, there’s hope that the information will be there when they’re ready – or for those whose parents aren’t wise.
Sue, it would appear that while the original Classics Illustrated stopped publication in 1971, the imprint has been purchased and revived.
Those links are to the Classic Comics. Not the same thing at all. I notice that the new series has been picked up by Berkeley Publishing, and reading some of the “about us” info, it appears that they have been “updated and the cartoons modernized”. Personally, being aware of the reach of progressive propaganda, I’d read them over before I passed them on to young unsuspecting minds.
Here’s a link to an ebay listing for some of what I’ve been looking at. You can see that they’re pretty different…
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=120346555885&ssPageName=ADME:B:SS:US:1123
Book, it’s gotten to the point where I wince when I read. I am almost finished with Steven King’s Duma Key, which is a pretty darn good book. However, there were about half a dozen times where out of the blue clear sky, one of the characters would indulge in a bit of Bush bashing or sneering at conservatives. I used to read Stuart Woods until I read his book Two Dollar Bill where the conservative bashing was constant and petty. Mr. Woods has lost me forever.
I’ve pretty much decided that I will read non-fiction, techno thrillers, romance novels, and classics until the literary community re-gains its senses.
I’ve decided that, just as I ignore Dorothy Sayer’s periodic forays into antisemitism, excusing them on the ground that she was an upper class person in Britain in the 1930s, and (a) those attitudes came with the territory and (b) she is often sympathetic to, as opposed to genocidally inclined towards, Jews, so too will I ignore Devens’ outbursts. She’s obviously a woman of her class and time (New York, early 21st Century) and has to be forgiven her foibles.
I like to think of it as putting it into a compartment, knowing that the knowledge is there, but not letting it affect our other thoughts or emotions. The Left does this automatically, but they don’t even know that they are doing it. This is a derivative of doublethink where you can hold two mutually exclusive beliefs at the same time, without arriving at any fundamental conflict between the two in your thoughts. Cognitive dissonance, to use a compare and contrast example, is when those two mutually exclusive thoughts start producing friction which you then start to notice and which then are expressed in your actions.
I don’t forgive them for their foibles so much as I take it into account when I am dealing with such people. Any data coming from them first goes through the filter, in which their views are separated out into air tight compartments: only then will I start integrating those ideas into my mind, past my defenses.
If you allow, for example, their beliefs to enter your core consciousness without filters and security walls, then you start to become programmed and you start to have your basic assumptions changed according to the view of the virus (the author). It is no wonder that we are affected the most by advertisement and propaganda when we believe that we are unaffected by them. It is no wonder that we are persuaded by techniques which make us think that we came up with the idea to buy, sell, or so forth. It is no wonder, in the end, that human beings will drop their suspicions if the world and the people in it act according to their expectations. Eternal vigilance in terms of security and national defense means challenging your assumptions of the “threat” as well as your “allies”. Eternal vigilance means questioning your certainties, and the more certain you are of something the more you must probe it and question it and look at it in different angles to see if what you believe is really true or whether it is something your enemy has planted in your head.
On another note entirely, John Scalzi writes very nice science fiction novels. His military is by definition one created by a civilian with no real experience or connection with the military philosophy, but his created worlds are internally consistent, his character demonstrate nobility and valor, and his plots are generally interesting and successful. However, John Scalzi believes that Bush has ended the Pax Americana with the “mistake” of Iraq and supported Obama’s rise in order to “fix” things.
I never detected such tendencies, although some of the characters in his Old Man’s War series were anti-authority types and the authority types were kind of like corrupt Vietnam Military Industrial Complex types. I didn’t make the connection because Old Man’s War isn’t set on Earth, it is set in interstellar space in a universe constructed by John Scalzi. It, thus, did not bore any relationship with real Terran politics and without such a relationship I did not make the connections. Once I read Scalzi’s blog and discovered his tendencies, the rest made perfect sense. It made perfect sense precisely because if an author constructs his own world, obviously he will try to make his own world work according to his philosophy and principles. And if it is internally consistent, then it can work very well indeed. Up until the novel meets reality, of course. Then we will have problems.
What I like about David Weber’s novels and secondly SM Stirling, Eric Flint, David Drake, and John Ringo’s novels is that their worlds are just as real on paper as it is in reality. Meaning, what they write isn’t entirely their own invention, it is often sourced from our past. They don’t have to “create” something new and make it internally consistent in order to hope that it works. They know it works. All they need to do is to re-apply it in a different time; that is where the creativity aspect comes in.
For example, SM Stirling and David Drake’s Raj Whitehall series and David Weber’s Off Armageddon Reef series are both science fiction stories set into the future, just like Scalzi’s, where the setting is not Earth but somewhere in interstellar space (colonies on other planets). The difference is, the former two series has most of their setting where the humans are using technology that are inferior to what we on Earth today use while John Scalzi creates a more classic science fiction setting in which humanity has progressed to a high technological level and is now battling aliens. The Raj Whitehall series, for example, has no aliens. All they fight are humans. With the complete military history of the human species open, the authors had plenty of unique military incidents they could extract. It made for a gripping story and a gripping history lesson at the same time. David Weber’s story tells the story of humanity’s fall from grace. Once we had technology that rivaled the most advanced species in the galaxy, but once the war with that species was lost, so was the technology, and the colonies, and even the written history of the human species. Humanity, thus, starts all over from zero. And that is where the human condition and the glory of the human species comes into play, for not everything was destroyed in that war. A single immortal adviser survived, complete with some of the advanced technology that was the preserved. So now you have a single avatar on a planet full of humans using muscle powered technology, without even steam power let alone electricity. Cunning and indirect methods will be the only way to uplift this planet’s societies to something that won’t get smashed by the species that defeated humanity before. And yet, we come across interesting ethical dilemmas. If you are immortal, effectively speaking, and you have advanced technology, then why should you not pose as a God to the lesser humans on this planet, in order to protect them and guide them for their own good?
You see, John Scalzi’s novels never get into such ethical dilemmas. While his main characters strive to do good and what not, the government and the leaders of that government in Scalzi’s world never mentions mutually beneficial alliances or how wars can bring societies closer together rather than farther apart. Scalzi’s governments use the eternal relic of real politics to calculate their strategic advantages and disadvantages. This is based off the Cold War and it is just as obsolete and inefficient. In the Cold War, there could not be an active war without the spectre of nuclear fallout. Calculating advantages and disadvantages by supporting dictators, betraying allies, and so forth became the primary method of fighting that war. In reality, in a real war, a Total War, the dynamics are completely different. Yet, while Scalzi’s universe is filled with alien species fighting each other for resources and territory, utilizing Total War scorched earth tactics like obliterating enemy colonies to the last sentient lifeform, there is no such thing as alliances between human beings and other species with mutual enemies or mutual interests. There is no such thing as the alliance between a more advanced power, America, and a less advanced power, South Vietnam, united in blood and warfare, separated by the betrayal of America’s political elites and the might of the Soviet Union’s tanks rolling into Saigon.
In short, John Scalzi does not create a universe where classical liberals exist for he does not envision a universe where classical liberal values and truths exist at all. He does not believe they will work and so he condemns Iraq and Bush and lifts up Obama as the ultimate pragmatist and real politics operator.