Losing the Plot
Sep. 27th, 2020 04:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
primeidealContent note: lots of religion.
This intro might have been longer but there's some nonsense that's kind of too asinine to summarize, so I'll just link to this post about countersignalling. Countersignalling can be seen as a series of "levels," or back-and-forth behaviors for different reasons:
Level 1, the poor person, drives a beat-up old car because she can't afford anything else
Level 2, the middle-class person, drives a fast new car to show the world that she's not a level-1 poor person
Level 3, the rich person, drives a beat-up old car to show the world that she's not a level-2 middle class person.
When it comes to something like literary tastes, or religious reactions/movements, there's something similar but different.
Level 1, very loosely, might be reading Revelation as a somewhat-literal preview of the end of the world. "Yeah, there's going to be a lot of death and destruction and scary things, but, then Jesus will come and we'll all go to a new heaven and there will be lots of music and awesome stuff and it'll be great!"
The Narnia series is a sort of "parallel universe" Christianity (CS Lewis didn't like the term "allegory"). For six-and-a-half books it deals in fairly typical fantasy tropes--talking animals, warfare, exploration, rescue quests, secret identities, disguises, all that good stuff. Eventually the world as we know it ends, and the main characters all go to the "realer" world, "further up and further in." Lucy is like "so...we're gonna go back to the real world eventually, right? I mean, you said we couldn't stay in Narnia."
Aslan responds:
There are more substantial criticisms that have been leveled at this ending. One, portraying a deadly train crash as a happy ending is a bit dissonant in children's literature. Two, school should hopefully be an interesting time of social and/or academic development for kids, some people will be stir-crazy if they stay on vacation too long, is Lewis portraying eternal summer break as a good thing? (One possible response to this is that Lewis just really hated the British school system, there are other side-swipes at it via the Professor and Eustace's parents.) (Criticism three is Susan but that's a whole nother thing.)
But this brings us to Level Two, the reaction against level one. By this I mean something more specific than "there probably is no life after death," because there are lots of works, genre or otherwise, that just have people die without taking a philosophical stance." Here I'm specifically thinking of "people die. Here's Why That's A Good Thing" or "there is no life after death, Here's Why That's A Good Thing." Which is something I've run across plenty of times in modern SF/fantasy. "Person tries to invent a machine that will preserve consciousness, But Oh No, It's Evil/Doesn't Work/All A Conspiracy."
Level Three, in contrast, would be something like the "Left Behind" series, which takes a very literal reading of Revelation and tries to turn it into a post-apocalyptic thriller. I haven't read it, but I've seen critiques that amount to: set aside the questionable theology, this isn't even good literature. Good stories have beginnings and middles, rising action and falling action, character growth and change. (Okay, a few of them don't, but even these authors understand the conventions they're choosing to defy.) Left Behind has a checklist of "okay, well, I think the Bible said this will happen next, so I guess that's gonna happen." (Link is to Fred Clarke's exhaustive criticism.)
So the message of "everybody dies, but that's cool, because we all go to heaven and it's perfect and amazing and beyond our currently-limited comprehension!", whether or not it is true, does not lend itself well to writing stories with interesting plots, unless it's the very end of something much longer like Narnia. From this perspective, it's not surprising that Level Two narratives tend to "succeed," as fiction, where Left Behind and its ilk do not; they're set in some version of our world, where brokenness and imperfection and suffering are real and inescapable. But then, the contrapositive also holds; just because a story is engaging and unpredictable and well-crafted, doesn't mean its worldview is true.
Edit, just over two years later, because I'm about to link to this in another book writeup. I'm pretty confident that "Staying Behind," by Ken Liu, is one of the examples that was on my mind when I wrote this, because I'd just read it a month before. "The relationships among children and parents are angsty...posthumanism and different formats of the passage of time are angsty." The narrator is one of the few holdouts who resists brain uploading. His mother, while she was alive, had also been staunchly opposed, and tried to make the kids promise they wouldn't upload her. However, the father refuses and has her uploaded anyway. The narrator later receives a letter from uploaded!mom claiming she was wrong and things are so much better in the singularity-afterlife. He thinks "well, that can't really be her." The point of my criticism is: the stakes are inherently unfair, because if the premise of the story was "we all get our brains uploaded and it's all great, everyone lives happily ever after, the end," the story would be about two lines long.
This intro might have been longer but there's some nonsense that's kind of too asinine to summarize, so I'll just link to this post about countersignalling. Countersignalling can be seen as a series of "levels," or back-and-forth behaviors for different reasons:
Level 1, the poor person, drives a beat-up old car because she can't afford anything else
Level 2, the middle-class person, drives a fast new car to show the world that she's not a level-1 poor person
Level 3, the rich person, drives a beat-up old car to show the world that she's not a level-2 middle class person.
When it comes to something like literary tastes, or religious reactions/movements, there's something similar but different.
Level 1, very loosely, might be reading Revelation as a somewhat-literal preview of the end of the world. "Yeah, there's going to be a lot of death and destruction and scary things, but, then Jesus will come and we'll all go to a new heaven and there will be lots of music and awesome stuff and it'll be great!"
The Narnia series is a sort of "parallel universe" Christianity (CS Lewis didn't like the term "allegory"). For six-and-a-half books it deals in fairly typical fantasy tropes--talking animals, warfare, exploration, rescue quests, secret identities, disguises, all that good stuff. Eventually the world as we know it ends, and the main characters all go to the "realer" world, "further up and further in." Lucy is like "so...we're gonna go back to the real world eventually, right? I mean, you said we couldn't stay in Narnia."
Aslan responds:
"There was a real railway accident," said Aslan softly. "Your father and mother and all of you are--as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands--dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning." And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
Narratively this may be a slight cop-out, but Lewis has a point; if heaven really is so fantastic and wonderful, it's beyond human comprehension, and he doesn't really know how to write about it. The Pevensies' earthly lives have come to an end, but that doesn't mean they have ceased to be, or even ceased to be part of a story with individual identity and events unfolding; it just means that Lewis, as an Earthly human, can't fathom it.There are more substantial criticisms that have been leveled at this ending. One, portraying a deadly train crash as a happy ending is a bit dissonant in children's literature. Two, school should hopefully be an interesting time of social and/or academic development for kids, some people will be stir-crazy if they stay on vacation too long, is Lewis portraying eternal summer break as a good thing? (One possible response to this is that Lewis just really hated the British school system, there are other side-swipes at it via the Professor and Eustace's parents.) (Criticism three is Susan but that's a whole nother thing.)
But this brings us to Level Two, the reaction against level one. By this I mean something more specific than "there probably is no life after death," because there are lots of works, genre or otherwise, that just have people die without taking a philosophical stance." Here I'm specifically thinking of "people die. Here's Why That's A Good Thing" or "there is no life after death, Here's Why That's A Good Thing." Which is something I've run across plenty of times in modern SF/fantasy. "Person tries to invent a machine that will preserve consciousness, But Oh No, It's Evil/Doesn't Work/All A Conspiracy."
Level Three, in contrast, would be something like the "Left Behind" series, which takes a very literal reading of Revelation and tries to turn it into a post-apocalyptic thriller. I haven't read it, but I've seen critiques that amount to: set aside the questionable theology, this isn't even good literature. Good stories have beginnings and middles, rising action and falling action, character growth and change. (Okay, a few of them don't, but even these authors understand the conventions they're choosing to defy.) Left Behind has a checklist of "okay, well, I think the Bible said this will happen next, so I guess that's gonna happen." (Link is to Fred Clarke's exhaustive criticism.)
So the message of "everybody dies, but that's cool, because we all go to heaven and it's perfect and amazing and beyond our currently-limited comprehension!", whether or not it is true, does not lend itself well to writing stories with interesting plots, unless it's the very end of something much longer like Narnia. From this perspective, it's not surprising that Level Two narratives tend to "succeed," as fiction, where Left Behind and its ilk do not; they're set in some version of our world, where brokenness and imperfection and suffering are real and inescapable. But then, the contrapositive also holds; just because a story is engaging and unpredictable and well-crafted, doesn't mean its worldview is true.
Edit, just over two years later, because I'm about to link to this in another book writeup. I'm pretty confident that "Staying Behind," by Ken Liu, is one of the examples that was on my mind when I wrote this, because I'd just read it a month before. "The relationships among children and parents are angsty...posthumanism and different formats of the passage of time are angsty." The narrator is one of the few holdouts who resists brain uploading. His mother, while she was alive, had also been staunchly opposed, and tried to make the kids promise they wouldn't upload her. However, the father refuses and has her uploaded anyway. The narrator later receives a letter from uploaded!mom claiming she was wrong and things are so much better in the singularity-afterlife. He thinks "well, that can't really be her." The point of my criticism is: the stakes are inherently unfair, because if the premise of the story was "we all get our brains uploaded and it's all great, everyone lives happily ever after, the end," the story would be about two lines long.
