literary criticism

The Tonga castaways don’t disprove “Lord of the Flies”

Leave a comment
Book cover of "The Lord of the Flies" by William Golding

With the release of a new Netflix adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies comes another round of media reminders that the book’s most famous plot element—shipwrecked children turn barbarous and violent—was “disproven” fifty years ago on an island in the South Pacific.

The logic goes something like this:

In 1965, six Tongan teenagers were shipwrecked on ‘Ata, an uninhabited island on the southern tip of the Tonga archipelago. Rather than descend into savage violence, as the children do in Lord of the Flies, the Tongans managed to survive and form a communal-like existence. They shared duties, kept spirits up, and even tended to one another, such as setting one’s boy’s fractured leg. After fifteen months, they were rescued and returned to their families.

The story of the Tongans has grown into a modern parable warning against taking Golding’s book seriously, or even simply discarding it outright. One example comes from a recent article, where Lenore Skenazy recounts the Tongan success story with the brisk conclusion, “So much for barbarism.”

The popular linking of the true-life Tongan incident with Golding’s novel appears to have begun with Dutch historian Rutger Bregman. His 2019 book Humankind: A Hopeful History sets out to prove that people are fundamentally decent and eager to build a better society. Whatever Golding’s fictional account may depict, he says, real children do not become wild and bloodthirsty creatures once removed from the watchful eyes of civilization.

Bregman followed his book with a 2020 Guardian article headlined “The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months.” The story went viral on social media, leading to years of articles reiterating that the uplifting story of the Tongan castaways refutes Golding’s grim worldview. A sampling of subsequent headlines mirror the Guardian‘s, almost down to the word:

Since the Tongan teenagers didn’t turn against each other, the logic goes, Lord of the Flies has been proven wrong. It’s as if we should discard the lessons of Animal Farm because there exists not one recorded episode of farm animals forming an authoritarian Marxist collective.

The best at everything

As Scott Alexander writes, “Beware the man of one study.” A single example that ends well does not slam the door on Golding’s book, and it’s pretty sad that so many people think it would.

But if one example is proof positive, is a single counterexample dispositive? Consider the Sugamo child abandonment case. In 1988, a mother left her four young children alone in a Tokyo apartment for nine months. No, they weren’t shipwrecked like the Tongans or the Lord of the Flies boys—but that’s kind of the point. The children had modern shelter, clean running water, and easy access to food, which they procured from local convenience stores using money the mother had left for them. The children did a remarkable job of taking care of each other, but it wasn’t enough.

When finally discovered by social workers, they were malnourished, and one of the children was missing. The eldest boy admitted that two of his friends had assaulted and killed the youngest girl. While the eldest boy was not present at the killing, he helped his friends bury her body.

Still from Nobody Knows (2004), a Japanese film based on the Sugamo case.

When reports reached the public, the response in Japan mirrored an underlying question posed many times in Lord of the Flies: “How could Japanese children be reduced to this behavior?”

In Lord of the Flies, it’s the English who are puzzled: “I should have thought that a pack of British boys…would have been able to put up a better show than that,” one character remarks at the end of the book. The boys were raised well and taught in boarding schools. Each had a reading diet of British Empire adventure books about self-sufficient boys who always act as proper young gentlemen, even in the face of adversity. “We’re English, and the English are best at everything,” young Jack declares, a statement which turns out to be surprisingly empty by the final chapter. “The northern European tradition of work, play, and food right through the day, made it possible for them to adjust wholly to this new rhythm,” the narrator of Lord of the Files declares, another statement found to be empty after only a few pages.

After all, the book most often named the first prose novel in the English language is none other than Robinson Crusoe, a story about a shipwrecked Englishman surviving due to self-discipline, routine, and his education. Crusoe was written for adults, but over the years it developed a younger audience. It also became a model for how every Englishman should act under duress.

It’s not hard to imagine Ralph, Jack, and the others reading Crusoe while in school. Yet Golding’s book feels like a rebuttal to Defoe’s classic, tearing down its colonial-era pride with cool precision.

Scene from the 1963 adaptation of Lord of the Flies.

“How can you be surprised that Tongans survived on an island?”

Contrary to popular depiction, the children in Lord of the Flies don’t immediately descend into barbarism. Upon their arrival on the island, the boys form rules, coordinate efforts, and develop routines, just as their boarding school education taught them. They choose a leader in the fair-haired (and fair-minded) Ralph, who sets about in assigning duties. He even leads the boys in building a signal fire atop the island’s sole mountain, exactly as the Tongan boys did.

The Tongans numbered six teenagers, aged 13 to 19. They were friends at a Catholic school. They ran away, gathered food and supplies, and stole a boat. That is, they were working together before they even reached the island.

In contrast, the number of children in the book is not stated with precision, but it’s likely close to twenty or thirty. The children do not know each other, and none are pubescent. The “littleuns” are so numerous that, after the mountaintop fire grows into an inferno, the older children are unsure if one of them perished in the blaze.

Two months after Bregman’s story in the Guardian, Tongan Meleika Gesa penned a rebuttal arguing the boys of ‘Ata were not the “real” Lord of the Flies. Gesa explains how Tongan values and education prepared them for survival. Not only did they know how to start a fire and catch and prepare fish, the Tongan culture instilled a familial cohesion among the group. There’s no such unity among the boys in Lord of the Flies, save for their nationality.

Amusingly, Gesa asks, “How can you be surprised that Pasifika people, specifically Tongan, can survive on an island?”

The Guardian article claims Bregman “unearthed” the forgotten story about Tongan teenagers on an island, like a paleontologist discovering a new fossil. Gesa points out the story of the teens is well known among Tongans, and not forgotten at all.

Gesa has more complaints about the way Bregman presents the story, but the overarching tragedy is that Bregman’s, not Gesa’s, account dominates public perception. “While the boys of ‘Ata have been consigned to obscurity, Golding’s book is still widely read,” Bregman wrote in 2020. That’s not so true today.

Realism and literalism

In the 1950s, William Golding wrote that Lord of the Flies “is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. … The whole book is symbolic in nature.” (Emphasis mine.)

That Lord of the Flies is a parable constructed with symbolism and metaphor, and not a detailed, realistic account of children on an island, seems incredibly obvious to me—and yet, here we are, with people treating the book as a failed thought experiment.

We all seem to agree that society is defective—otherwise, we wouldn’t spend so much time arguing over politics, policy, and taxes. If society’s defects don’t emerge from defects in human nature, where else would they come from?

I see little evidence in the world that people’s natural instincts are to work together, avoid conflict, and live peaceably side-by-side. If anything, much of our modern existence is spent pushing against those social norms. (For example, tech companies’ practice of “better to plead forgiveness than ask permission,” or people treating all criticism as a personal attack.)

But can those social values—work together, avoid conflict—be taught? At one time, they were, via humanistic education, religion, active parenting—the same institutions Western culture has been discounting over the past fifty years.

Have we adopted some system of moral instruction to fill the void? If so, I can’t locate it. What appears to have taken its place is a kind of raw, undeveloped trust in Realism and Literalism, twin brothers of interpretation which frantically attempt to nail down, rather than open up, our understanding of human nature.

William Golding wrote, “The moral [of Lord of the Flies] is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system.”

Tongan Meleika Gesa wrote during the pandemic, “Just look at how we’re surviving Covid-19 together. My family have given away food to our neighbours and checked up on friends and family because that’s how we survive.”

Jack in Lord of the Flies says, “We’re English, and the English are best at everything.”

That’s the ethical and moral divide between the Tongan teens and the boys in Lord of the Flies. What follows flows from within.


. Last updated .

Ten years of blogging: A unique manifesto

Leave a comment
Cover of The Atlantic magazine, July/August 2001
The Atlantic magazine, July/August 2001. This issue featured the first installment of B. R. Myer’s original “A Reader’s Manifesto”

Previously: Flaubertian three-dimensionalism
Next: Waiting for Neuro

My favorite blog post for 2021 would have to be my review of B. R. Myers A Reader’s Manifesto, a book of literary criticism with a remarkable life: It started as a different book, was published as a two-part essay in The Atlantic, and then was published in book form yet again. (The history of its repeated rebirth is remarkable unto itself, and something I spend a little time digging into.)

Myers’ original 2001 essay sparked a debate over the state of American literature that was singular in my lifetime. His thesis was that American literature had grown pretentious, stunted, and dull. It’s wild to think there was a moment in recent American history when a good chunk of the public was discussing literature, contemporary or otherwise.

I did a bit of extra research for my post, digging into online newspaper and magazine archives to locate contemporaneous articles. (As I wrote, this was “a time when most people had their news delivered to them via bicycle.”) I also put the review through several extra editing cycles, in a lawyerly attempt to make certain everything on the page was either supported elsewhere or comported exactly to my personal viewpoint. There’s an admirable cleanness to Myers’ prose that I wanted to emulate.

Cover of A Reader's Manifesto by B.R. Myers

As an example of Manifesto‘s continuing relevance twenty years later, here’s a paragraph from the acclaimed 2021 novel Leave the World Behind:

The store was frigid, brightly lit, wide-aisled. She bought yogurt and blueberries. She bought sliced turkey, whole-grain bread, that pebbly mud-colored mustard, and mayonnaise. She bought potato chips and tortilla chips and jarred salsa full of cilantro, even though Archie refused to eat cilantro. She bought organic hot dogs and inexpensive buns and the same ketchup everyone bought. She bought cold, hard lemons and seltzer and Tito’s vodka and two bottles of nine-dollar red wine. She bought dried spaghetti and salted butter and a head of garlic. She bought thick-cut bacon and a two-pound bag of flour and twelve-dollar maple syrup in a faceted glass bottle like a tacky perfume. She bought a pound of ground coffee, so potent she could smell it through the vacuum seal, and size 4 coffee filters made of recycled paper. If you care? She cared! She bought a three-pack of paper towels, and a spray-on sunscreen, and aloe, because the children had inherited their father’s pale skin. She bought those fancy crackers you put out when there were guests, and Ritz crackers, which everyone liked best, and crumbly white cheddar cheese and extra-garlicky hummus and an unsliced hard salami and those carrots that are tumbled around until they’re the size of a child’s fingers. She bought packages of cookies from Pepperidge Farm and three pints of Ben & Jerry’s politically virtuous ice cream and a Duncan Hines boxed mix for a yellow cake and a Duncan Hines tub of chocolate frosting with a red plastic lid, because parenthood had taught her that on a vacation’s inevitable rainy day you could while away an hour by baking a boxed cake. She bought two tumescent zucchini, a bag of snap peas, a bouquet of curling kale so green it was almost black. She bought a bottle of olive oil and a box of Entenmann’s crumb-topped doughnuts, a bunch of bananas and a bag of white nectarines and two plastic packages of strawberries, a dozen brown eggs, a plastic box of prewashed spinach, a plastic container of olives, some heirloom tomatoes wrapped in crinkling cellophane, marbled green and shocking orange. She bought three pounds of ground beef and two packages of hamburger buns, their bottoms dusty with flour, and a jar of locally made pickles. She bought four avocados and three limes and a sandy bundle of cilantro even though Archie refused to eat cilantro. It was more than two hundred dollars, but never mind.

If you skipped ahead, go back and read it again. After all, Leave the World Behind won over twenty “Book of the Year” awards.

Myers called out these “skim-friendly” lists as indicators of “a tale of Life in Consumerland, full of heavy irony, trite musing about advertising and materialism, and long, long lists of consumer artifacts, all dedicated to the proposition that America is a wasteland of stupefied shoppers.” He was speaking about White Noise back then. He could very well be speaking about Leave the World Behind today.

When I first read Manifesto in 2001, and again in 2021, my view was that Myers should be taken more seriously than some would have us believe. I remain convinced. Then and today, literary readers are pressed into accepting an author as a modern-day genius by dint of their credentials, their identity, their subject matter, or their elite supporters in the press. Myer’s Manifesto is more than a work of literary criticism, it’s a work of media criticism—he’s also taking aim at the literary gatekeepers and taste-makers perched in positions of cultural privilege.

In 2001, B. R. Myers asked an emperor-has-no-clothes question: Instead of rewarding authors because of who they are or who they know, why not judge their books by story, language, themes, and meanings? That question caused a big fuss back then. It turns out, it still can, if you ask it in the right company.

Twenty Years Later: B. R. Myers, A Reader’s Manifesto


. Last updated .

Rethinking realism

Leave a comment
Close-up of man's face from "The Arnolfini Portrait" by Jan van Eyck

Not “rethinking realism” as in rethinking a single objective reality, hard as rocks and nails. I mean “rethinking realism” in the sense of questioning the elevation of literary realism over the many other forms of storytelling.

Realism has long been the go-to form in literature for telling a story a certain way. An entire literary style—Naturalism—sprung from the sense that Romanticism had gone too far and produced a literature divorced from the world as commonly experienced. The pendulum later shifted the other direction, and for a period of time “realistic” literature was derided as bourgeois and reactionary. Since World War II, with the rise of creative writing programs and a reinvigorated enforcement of upper-class distinctions, kitchen-table realism has returned to the pinnacle of literary loftiness in America.

So it’s funny to me that realism is also so important in popular entertainment. This is nowhere as true as with television, which is obsessed with depicting reality—from the “you are there”-style news reporting (a la Dateline NBC) to game shows branded as “reality TV.”

When the writers of TV’s M*A*S*H killed off Col. Henry Blake in a season finale, they were inundated with letters from outraged viewers. The Emmy award-winning writing team’s response was, “Well, that’s reality.” American auteur Robert Altman famously ends Nashville with an out-of-the-blue assassination of a central character. Why? Because, he explained, that’s reality.

Strange, then, that “reality” is so important to literary fiction and to popular media, especially since both styles vigorously insist they are nothing like the other.

It’s not that claims of a story being realistic is faulty or wrong-headed. My complaint is that the excuse—”It’s reality”—is a lazy defense of artistic choices. Writers should cop to their decision rather than take the passive route and saying reality made the choice for them. Writers should ask themselves if a “realistic” moment is adding to, or subtracting from, the story, and make the necessary adjustments.

Anyone who’s attended a creative writing class, workshop, or MFA program is familiar with the high ground presumed by realism. The trendy term is “psychologically realistic fiction.” In writing programs, names like Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Tobias Wolff, and Tim O’Brien are tossed out as the zenith of American writing. Students are explicitly encouraged to emulate them, and their importance is implicitly signaled by their repeated presence in syllabi and required-reading lists. (I’ve read “The Things They Carried” at least eight times over the course of decades of writing groups and classes.) These authors are lionized for many reasons, but importantly, they all write about reality.

(There are two exceptions worth mentioning: One is magical realism, although its high regard in writing programs is tied up with identity politics. The other is Borges, whom I jokingly refer to as science-fiction for MFA students. It must be pointed out that both exceptions originate from outside the United States, which I think is not accidental. Also, while Kafka is read and praised in writing programs, it’s never in such a way as to encourage emulation—I suspect my instructors liked the idea of Kafka more than Kafka’s output.)

Look at how so much literary fiction operates. Protagonists tend to be thoughtful, rational, and deliberative. Often, they exhibit little to no affect. Characters in opposition tend to be boorish, thoughtless, and emotional. Dialogue is either flat and unadorned, or snappy, like the patter of a stand-up comic. Scenes flow as one character uttering a brief line, followed by paragraphs of rumination. The other character responds, and more paragraphs of rumination.

The prose might be good—it might even be inspired—but is this realism? Going through contemporary literary magazines, reading one story after another, I’m not sure one will find a lot of psychological realism, in the sense of psychiatry’s DSM-5.

Genre fiction is not immune either. Too often connoisseurs of hard-boiled detective fiction and tough-guy novels claim their favorite authors are superior because of their attention to realism. Raymond Chandler’s “The Simple Art of Murder” is wonderful and insightful criticism, but at its heart is a trashing of the classic British mystery because “fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic.” It’s one of the few arguments in the essay that I question.

Janet Burroway wrote, “Sometimes reality doesn’t make for good fiction.” It’s a tough lesson to learn, and one that even seasoned writers fail to grasp.

After all, there is no widely-accepted maxim stating the primary purpose of story is to reproduce reality. Fiction is supposed to be an expression of a writer’s inner state, not a dry report of the who, what, where, and when. Besides, why do we need to reproduce reality with such fidelity? We’re soaking in it. If you want reality, put down your phone or leave your computer screen. You have returned to reality, effortlessly.

In a writing class I attended, one of the students was a fan of horror, particularly H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Chambers’ The King in Yellow. At an end-of-semester presentation before the class, he expressed frustration at the psychological-realism reading list we’d been given, and of the months of instruction requiring him to write in similar form. “Reading about reality is like reading about your job on your day off,” he told us. There’s something to that.

Story creates a transcendence within the reader. This transcendence defies reality while mimicking it—reality is Play-Doh in the hands of an adept writer. From hard realism to squishy-soft fantasy and everything in-between, great writing takes me to another place and time, a chance to live another person’s life. Books are experimental lives. Books are “portable dreamweavers.”


. Last updated .

Has the digital revolution killed fiction?

Leave a comment
Obituary billboard
by Elliot Brown (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Will Blythe at Esquire asks, “In the golden age of magazines, short stories reigned supreme. Has the digital revolution killed their cultural relevance?”

Wearily, I started his essay expecting more of the same, and lo, finding it: Computers and the Internet, he contends, has done much to destroy literary fiction. By this point, I’m surprised any writer pursuing such a thesis would bother fortifying their argument with examples or statistics. Blythe does not fail on that count either: Other than some “c’mon, look around, you know what I’m saying,” the argument is made sans corroborative evidence. Of course the Internet has wrecked American literature. Why bother denying it?

It’s telling, then, that Blythe opens with the usual barrage of accusations about digital distractions—”Can you read anything at all from start to finish, i.e. an essay or a short story, without your mind being sliced apart by some digital switchblade?”—and then, to prove how things used to be so much better way back when, he segues to life as an Esquire editor in the 1980s and 90s:

[Rust Hill] and I would occasionally drink two or three Negronis at lunch, sometimes at the New York Delicatessen on 57th Street, and talk about the writers and novels and short stories we loved (and hated). … Then he and I would happily weave our way back to the office at 1790 Broadway, plop down in our cubicles and make enthusiastic phone calls to writers and agents, our voices probably a little louder than usual.

The jokes about fiction editors at a national magazine choosing stories to publish after a three-cocktail lunch write themselves, so I won’t bother. (Although I should, since, as an early writer, I had high hopes for placing a short story with a publication like Esquire. Perhaps I should have mailed a bottle of Bombay with each of my submissions.)

The dichotomy Blythe illustrates is telling: The hellish “after” is the mob writing Amazon user reviews and him not knowing how to turn off iPhone notifications; the blissful “before” is editorial cocktail lunches and not having to give a rat’s ass what anyone else thinks.

One counterpoint to Blythe’s thesis: The 1980s had plenty of distractions, including the now-obvious inability to silence your telephone without taking it off the hook. Another counterpoint: If you want to drink Negronis and argue literature over Reubens, well, you can do that today too. A third counterpoint: A short story printed in the pages of Esquire was sandwiched between glossy full-color ads for sports cars, tobacco, and liquor—most featuring leggy models in evening gowns or swimsuits. Distractions abounded, even before the Internet.

But none of these are what Blythe is really talking about. What he bemoans is the diffusion of editorial power over the past twenty years.

Blythe throws a curveball—a predictable curveball—after his reminisces about Negronis and schmears. Sure, computers are to blame for everything, but the real crime is that computers now permit readers to make their opinions on fiction known:

Writers and writing tend to be voted upon by readers, who inflict economic power (buy or kill the novel!) rather than deeply examining work the way passionate critics once did in newspapers and magazines. Their “likes” and “dislikes” make for massive rejoinders rather than critical insight. It’s actually a kind of bland politics, as if books and stories are to be elected or defeated. Everyone is apparently a numerical critic now, though not necessarily an astute one.

I don’t actually believe Blythe has done a thorough job surveying the digital landscape to consider the assortment and quality of reader reviews out there. There are, in fact, a plenitude of readers penning worthy critical insight over fiction. Just as there are so many great writers out there that deserve wider audiences, there also exist critical readers who should be trumpeted farther afield.

Setting that aside, I still happily defend readers content to note a simple up/down vote as their estimation of a book. Not every expression of having read a book demands an in-depth 8,000 word essay on the plight of the modern Citizen of the World.

Rather, I believe Blythe—as with so many others in the literary establishment—cannot accept readers could have any worthwhile expressible opinion about fiction. The world was so much easier when editors at glossy magazines issued the final word on what constituted good fiction and what was a dud. See also a book I’m certain Blythe detests, A Reader’s Manifesto, which tears apart—almost point by point—Blythe’s gripes.

Cover of A Reader's Manifesto by B.R. Myers

When B. R Myers’ Manifesto was published twenty years ago, a major criticism of it was that Myers was tilting at windmills—that the literary establishment was not as snobbish and elitist as he described. Yet here Blythe is practically copping to the charges.

Thus the inanity of him complaining that today’s readers hold the power to “inflict economic power” when, apparently, such power should reside solely with critics and magazine editors. I don’t even want to argue this point; this idea is a retrograde understanding of how the world should work. This is why golden age thinking is so pernicious—since things used to be this way, it was the best way. Except when it’s not.

Of course the world was easier for the editors of national slicks fifty years ago, just as life used to be good for book publishers, major news broadcasters, and the rest of the national media. It was also deeply unsatisfying if one were not standing near the top of those heaps. It does not take much scratching in the dirt to understand the motivations of the counterculture and punk movements in producing their own criticism. The only other option back then was to bow to the opinions of a klatch of New York City editors and critics whose ascendancy was even more opaque than the bishops of the Holy See.

That said, it’s good to see a former Esquire editor praise the fiction output of magazines that, not so long ago, editors at that level were expected to sneer down upon: Publications such as Redbook, McCall’s, Analog, and Asimov’s Science Fiction all get an approving nod from Blythe.

But to cling to the assertion that in mid-century America “short fiction was a viable business, for publishers and writers alike” is golden age-ism at its worst. Sure, a few writers could make a go at it, but in this case the exceptions do not prove the rule. The vast sea of short story writers in America had to settle for—and continue to settle for—being published in obscure literary magazines and paid in free copies.

No less than Arthur Miller opined that the golden age of American theater arced in his own lifetime. Pianist Bill Evans remarked he was blessed to have experienced the tail end of jazz’s golden age in America before rock ‘n’ roll sucked all the oxygen out of the room. Neither of those artistic golden ages perished because of the Internet.

What caused them to die? That’s complicated, sure, but their demise—or, at least, rapid descents—were preceded by a turn toward the avant-garde. Which is to say, it became fashionable for jazz and theater to distance themselves from their audience under the guise of moving the art forward. The only moving that happened, though, was the audience for the exits.

Blythe then turns his attention to a third gripe in his meandering essay. Without a shred of evidence, he argues that the digital revolution of the last twenty-five years metastasized into a cultural Puritanism in today’s publishing world:

Perhaps because of online mass condemnations, there’s simply too much of an ethical demand in fiction from fearful editors and “sensitivity readers,” whose sensitivity is not unlike that of children raised in religious families… Too many authors and editors fear that they might write or publish something that to them, at least, is unknowingly “wrong,” narratives that will reveal their ethical ignorance, much to their shame. It’s as if etiquette has become ethics, and blasphemy a sin of secularity.

I cannot deny that there appears to be a correlation between the rise of the Internet in our daily lives and the shift over the last decade to cancel or ban “problematic” literature. What I fail to see is how pop-up alerts or a proliferation of Wi-Fi hot spots is to blame for this situation.

If Blythe were to peer backwards once more to his golden age of gin-soaked lunches, he would recall a nascent cultural phenomenon called “political correctness.” P.C. was the Ur-movement to today’s sensitivity readers and skittish editors. Social media whipped political correctness’ protestations into a hot froth of virtuous umbrage—a video game of oneupsmanship in political consciousness, where high scores are tallied with likes and follower counts. Using social media as leverage to block books from publication was the logical next step. But blaming computers for this situation is like blaming neutrons for the atom bomb.

After a dozen paragraphs of shaking my head at Blythe’s litany of complaints, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself in agreement with him:

The power of literary fiction—good literary fiction, anyway—does not come from moral rectitude. … Good literature investigates morality. It stares unrelentingly at the behavior of its characters without requiring righteousness.

At the risk of broken-record syndrome, I’ll repeat my claim that Charles Baxter’s “Dysfunctional Narratives” (penned twenty-five years ago, near the beginning of the Internet revolution) quietly predicted the situation Blythe is griping about today. Back then, Baxter noticed the earliest stirrings of a type of fiction where “characters are not often permitted to make intelligent and interesting mistakes and then to acknowledge them. … If fictional characters do make such mistakes, they’re judged immediately and without appeal.” He noted that reading had begun “to be understood as a form of personal therapy or political action,” and that this type of fiction was “pre-moralized.”

"Burning Down the House" by Charles Baxter

Unlike Blythe, Baxter did not fret that literary fiction would perish. Baxter was a creative writing instructor at a thriving Midwestern MFA program. He knew damn well that writing literary fiction was a growth industry, and in no danger of extinction. What concerned him was how much of this fiction was (and is) “me” fiction, that is, centered around passive protagonists suffering through some wrong. He noticed a dearth of “I” fiction with active protagonists who make decisions and face consequences.

As Blythe writes:

Too many publishers and editors these days seem to regard themselves as secular priests, dictating right and wrong, as opposed to focusing on the allure of the mystifying and the excitement of uncertainty. Ethics and aesthetics appear in this era to be intentionally merged, as if their respective “good” is identical.

If Blythe is going to roll his eyes at the glut of reader-led cancellations and moralizing editors, perhaps he could consider another glut in the literary world: The flood of the literary memoir, with its “searing” psychic wounds placed under microscope, and its inevitably featherweight closing epiphany. These testaments of self-actualization may be shelved under nonfiction, but they are decidedly fictional in construction. In the literary world, stories of imagination and projection have been superseded by stories of repurposed memory, whose critical defense is, invariably, “But this really happened.”

It was not always so. Memoir was once synonymous with popular fiction. Autobiography was reserved for celebrities such as Howard Cosell and Shirley MacLaine, or a controversial individual who found themself in the nation’s spotlight for a brief moment. It was not treated as a high art form, and perceived in some quarters as self-indulgent. No more.

There remains an audience for great fiction. Readers know when they’re being talked down to. They know the difference between a clueless author being crass and a thoughtful author being brutally honest. They also know the difference between a ripping yarn and a pre-moralized story they’re “supposed” to read, like eating one’s vegetables.

The death of literary fiction—especially the short story—will not be due to iPhone notifications and social media cancellations. Perhaps the problem Blythe senses is the loss of a mission to nurture and promote great fiction. The literary world has turned inward and grown insular. Its priorities are so skewed, I’ve witnessed literary writers question if fiction can even be judged or critiqued. The worsening relationship of class to literary fiction should not be overlooked, either.

If Blythe laments Asimov’s Science Fiction, perhaps he should check out the thriving Clarkesworld. Substacks of regular short fiction are regularly delivering work to thousands of readers. I don’t know if these publications’ editors are gulping down Negronis during their daily Zoom meetings—but as long as they’re putting out quality fiction that challenges and questions and enlightens, maybe that doesn’t matter, and never did.


. Last updated .

Charles Baxter’s dysfunctional narratives

Leave a comment
Charles Baxter
Charles Baxter

What if I told you that there’s been a sea-change in American storytelling over the past half-century? Not merely a change in subject matter, but that the fundamental nature of American narratives radically shifted? Would you believe me?

Now, what if I told you that a writer twenty-five years ago described these “new” stories, and even predicted they would become the dominant mode in our future? Would you believe that?

In 1997, Charles Baxter published Burning Down the House, a collection of essays on the state of American literature. It opens with “Dysfunctional Narratives: or, ‘Mistakes were Made,’” a blistering piece of criticism that not only detailed the kinds of stories he was reading back then, but predicted the types of stories we would read, watch, and tell each other today.

Baxter appropriated the term “dysfunctional narrative” from poet C. K. Williams, but he expanded it so much, it’s fair to say he’s made the term his own. He borrowed a working definition of dysfunctional narratives from Marilynne Robinson, who described this modern mode of writing as a “mean little myth:”

One is born and in passage through childhood suffers some grave harm. Subsequent good fortune is meaningless because of the injury, while subsequent misfortune is highly significant as the consequence of this injury. The work of one’s life is to discover and name the harm one has suffered.

Baxter adds that the source of this injury “can never be expunged.” As for the ultimate meaning of these stories: “The injury is the meaning.”

To claim this mode of writing has become the dominant one in American culture demands proof, or at least some supporting evidence. Baxter lists several examples, such as Richard Nixon’s passive-voice gloss over the Watergate cover-up (“mistakes were made”), Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, and conspiracy theories, among others.

“Dysfunctional Narratives” doesn’t succeed by tallying a score, however. Rather, it describes a type of story that sounds all-too-familiar to modern ears:

Reading begins to be understood as a form of personal therapy or political action. In such an atmosphere, already moralized stories are more comforting than stories in which characters are making complex or unwitting mistakes.

Don’t merely consider Baxter’s description in terms of books. News stories, the social media posts scrolling up your daily feed, even the way your best friend goes into how their coworker undercut them at the office—all constitute narratives, small or large. Dysfunctional narratives read as if the storyteller’s thumb is heavy on the moral scale—they feel rigged.

It does seem curious that in contemporary America—a place of considerable good fortune and privilege—one of the most favored narrative modes from high to low has to do with disavowals, passivity, and the disarmed protagonist.

(I could go one quoting Baxter’s essay—he’s a quotable essayist—but you should go out and read all of Burning Down the House instead. It’s that good.)

Dysfunctional narratives are a literature of avoidance, a strategic weaving of talking points and selective omissions to block counter-criticism. If that sounds like so much political maneuvering, that’s because it is.

“Mistakes were made”

Let’s start with what dysfunctional narratives are not: They’re not merely stories about dysfunction, as in dysfunctional families, or learning dysfunctions. Yes, a dysfunctional narrative may feature such topics, but that is not what makes it dysfunctional. The term describes how the story is told, the strategies and choices the author had made to tell their story.

Baxter points to Richard Nixon’s “mistakes were made” as the kernel for the dysfunctional narrative in modern America. (He calls Nixon “the spiritual godfather of the contemporary disavowal movement.”) He also holds up conspiracy theories as prototypes:

No one really knows who’s responsible for [the JFK assassination]. One of the signs of a dysfunctional narrative is that we cannot leave it behind, and we cannot put it to rest, because it does not, finally, give us the explanations we need to enclose it. We don’t know who the agent of action is. We don’t even know why it was done.

Recall the tagline for The X-Files, a TV show about the investigation of conspiracy theories: “The truth is out there.” In other words, the show’s stories can’t provide the truth—it’s elsewhere.

More memorably—and more controversially—Baxter also turns his gaze upon Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, which features the use of recovered memories (“not so much out of Zola as Geraldo“) and grows into “an account of conspiracy and memory, sorrow and depression, in which several of the major characters are acting out rather than acting, and doing their best to find someone to blame.”

In a similar vein, a nearly-dysfunctional story would be The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy. It centers on a family man who, via therapy, digs through memories of a childhood trauma which has paralyzed him emotionally as an adult. He gradually heals, and goes on to repair his relationship with his family. Notably, his elderly father does not remember abusing him years earlier, leaving one wound unhealed.

Another example would be Nathanael West‘s A Cool Million, which follows a clueless naif on a cross-American journey as he’s swindled, robbed, mugged, and framed. By the end, the inventory of body parts he’s lost is like counting the change in your pocket. It might be forgiven as a satire of the American dream, but A Cool Million remains a heavy-handed tale.

This leads to another point: A dysfunctional narrative is not necessarily a poorly told one. The dysfunction is not in the quality of the telling, but something more innate.

Examples of more topical dysfunctional narratives could be the story of Aziz Ansari’s first-date accuser, who found much to blame him for, but portrays herself as all-but-blameless. The complaints of just about any politician or pundit who claims they’ve been victimized or deplatformed by their opponents is dysfunctional. In almost every case, the stories feature a faultless, passive protagonist being traumatized by the more powerful or the abstract.

There’s one more point about dysfunctional narratives worth making: The problem is not that dysfunctional narratives exist. The problem is the sheer volume of them in our culture, the sense that we’re being flooded—overwhelmed, even—by their numbers. That’s what seems to concern Baxter. It certainly concerns me.

A literature of avoidance

In his essay Ur-Fascism, Umberto Eco offers this diagram:

onetwothreefour
abcbcdcdedef

Each column represents a political group or ideology, all distinct, yet possessing many common traits. (Think of different flavors of Communism, or factions within a political party.) Groups one and two have traits b and c in common, groups two and four have trait d in common, and so on.

Eco points out that “owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity, a family resemblance between four and one,” even though they do not share any traits. The traits form a chain—there is a common “smell” between the political groups.

Not all dysfunctional narratives are exactly alike, or have the exact traits as the rest, but they do have a common “smell.” Even if a 9/11 conspiracy theory seems utterly unlike A Cool Million, they both may be dysfunctional.

"Burning Down the House" by Charles Baxter

Likewise, in the traits that follow, just because a story doesn’t include all of them doesn’t mean it “avoids dysfunction.” Rather, dysfunctional narratives are built by the storyteller selecting the bricks they require to buttress their message:

  • A disarmed protagonist
  • An absent antagonist
  • Minimal secondary characters
  • An authorial thumb on the scale
  • “Pre-moralized”
  • A vaporous conclusion
  • Authorial infallibility and restricted interpretations

The most common trait of the dysfunctional narrative is a faultless, passive main character. Baxter calls this the “disarmed protagonist.” He differentiates between “I” stories (“the protagonist makes certain decisions and takes some responsibility for them”) and “me” stories (“the protagonists…are central characters to whom things happen”). Dysfunctional narratives are the “me” stories.

And the errors these “me” characters make—if any—are forgivable, understanding, or forced upon them by dire circumstances. Compare this to the mistakes the characters around them make—monstrous, unpardonable sins:

…characters [in stories] are not often permitted to make interesting and intelligent mistakes and then to acknowledge them. The whole idea of the “intelligent mistake,” the importance of the mistake made on impulse, has gone out the window. Or, if fictional characters do make such mistakes, they’re judged immediately and without appeal.

Power dynamics are a cornerstone of all narratives, but one “smell” of the dysfunctional variety is an extraordinary tilting of power against the main character. The system, or even the world, is allied against the protagonist. Close reads of these narratives reveals an authorial thumb on the story’s moral scale, an intuition that the situation has been soured a bit too much in the service of making a point. This scale-tipping may be achieved many ways. Often it requires a surgical omission of details, the good fortune in the main character’s life that would be considered a success, or even the result of unearned privilege.

Hence how often in dysfunctional narratives the antagonist is absent. A crime in a dysfunctional novel doesn’t require a criminal. All it needs, in Robinson’s words, is for the main character to have endured some great wrong: “The work of one’s life is to discover and name the harm one has suffered.”

Poet Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson

Name the harm, not the perpetrator. Why not the perpetrator? Because often there’s no person to name. The harm is a trauma or a memory. The perpetrator may have disappeared long ago, or died, or have utterly forgotten the wrongs they inflicted (as the father does in Prince of Tides). The malefactor may be an abstraction, like capitalism or sexism. But naming an abstraction as the villain does not name anything. It’s like naming narcissism as the cause of an airliner crash.

This is all by design. Abstractions and missing antagonists don’t have a voice. The point of a dysfunctional narrative is to avoid giving the antagonist a voice, or for their voice to be hobbled (by making them loudmouthed, insensitive, or enfeebled, to offer a few examples). Even Satan gets to plead his case in Paradise Lost.

No ending is reached in a dysfunctional narrative, because there’s only a trauma, or a memory, or an abstraction to work against. These injuries never heal. Memories may fade, but the past is concrete. By telling the story, the trauma is recorded and notarized, like a deed. “There’s the typical story in which no one is responsible for anything,” Baxter complained in 2012. “Shit happens, that’s all. It’s all about fate, or something. I hate stories like that.” These stories trail off at the end, employing imagery like setting suns or echoes fading off to signify a story that will never conclude.

The most surface criticism of these narratives is that we, the readers, sense we’re being talked down to by the author. “In the absence of any clear moral vision, we get moralizing instead,” Baxter writes. A dysfunctional narrative dog-whistles its morality, and those who cannot decode the whistle are faulted for it. The stories are pre-moralized: The reader is expected to understand beforehand the entirety of the story’s moral universe. For a reader to admit otherwise, or to argue an alternate interpretation, is to risk personal embarrassment or confrontation from those who will not brook dissent.

And making the reader uncomfortable is often the outright goal of the dysfunctional narrative. The writer is the presumed authority; the reader, the presumed student. It’s a retrograde posture, a nagging echo from a lesser-democratic time. (When I read A Brief History of Time, I was most certainly the student—but Hawking admirably never made me feel that way.) Dysfunctional narratives are often combative with the reader; they do not acknowledge the reader’s right to negotiate or question the message. With dysfunctional narratives, it’s difficult to discern if the writer is telling a story or digging a moat around their main character to protect them from attack.

“What we have instead is not exactly drama and not exactly therapy,” Baxter writes. “No one is in a position to judge.” A dysfunctional narrative portrays a world with few to no alternatives. A functional narrative explores alternatives. (This is what I mean when I write of fiction as an experiment.)

This is why so many dysfunctional narratives are aligned to the writer’s biography—who can claim to be a better authority on the author’s life, after all? But the moment a reader reads a story, its protagonist is no longer the author’s sole property. The character is now a shared construct. Their decisions may be questioned. Hence the passive nature of the protagonists—inaction avoids such judgements.

If the author introduces secondary characters, the author can’t claim similar authority over them—every additional character is one more attack vector of criticism, a chipping away of absolute authority over the story itself. That’s what happened to sensitivity reader Kosoko Jackson in 2019, whose debut novel was pulped due to questions over his secondary characters. For a dysfunctional narrative, the fewer the secondary characters, the better. (This is what usually sandbags grand conspiracy theories. If the conspiracy requires tens or hundreds of participants, it seems impossible no one involved would eventually blow the whistle.)

Of all the traits listed—from the disarmed protagonist to the vaporous conclusion—the trait I find the “smelliest” is authorial infallibility and restricted interpretation. That’s why I used weasel language when I called Prince of Tides “nearly-dysfunctional:” The book is most certainly open to interpretation and questioning. In contrast, questioning a conspiracy theory could get you labeled an unwitting dupe, a useful idiot, or worse. Questioning the moral outcome of a short story about abuse in a writing workshop? Unthinkable.

A Cambrian explosion

What Baxter doesn’t explore fully is why we’ve had this Cambrian explosion of dysfunctional narratives. He speculates a couple of possibilities, such as them coming down to us from our political leadership (like Moses carrying down the stone tablets), or as the byproduct of consumerism. I find myself at my most skeptical when his essay stumbles down these side roads.

When Baxter claims these stories arose out of “groups in our time [feeling] confused or powerless…in such a consumerist climate, the perplexed and unhappy don’t know what their lives are telling them,” it seems Baxter is offering a dysfunctional narrative to explain the existence of dysfunctional narratives. He claims they’re produced by people of “irregular employment and mounting debts.” I strongly doubt this as well. In my experience, this type of folk are not the dominant producers of such narratives. Rather, these are the people who turn to stories for escape and uplift…the very comforts dysfunctional narratives cannot provide, and are not intended to provide.

Rather than point the finger at dead presidents or capitalism, I’m more inclined to ascribe the shift to a handful of changes in our culture.

The term “The Program Era” comes from a book by the same name detailing the postwar rise and influence of creative writing programs in the United States. This democratization of creative writing programs was not as democratic as once hoped, but it still led to a sharp increase in the number of people writing fiction. Most of those students were drawn from America’s upwardly-striving classes.

The workshop method used in these programs led to a rise in those aspiring writers having to sit quietly and listen to their peers criticize their stories, sometimes demolishing them. (Charles Baxter was a creative writing professor and the head of a prominent writing program in the Midwest. Many of his examples in Burning Down the House come from manuscripts he read as an instructor.) The realities of publication odds means that those workshops may be the only place for a writer’s stories to be read and analyzed. It would be natural for those writers to focus their creative energies on minimizing criticism in the workshop.

With the expansion of writing programs came a rise in those writers scratching around for powerful subject matter. Topics like trauma and abuse are lodestones when seeking supercharged dramatic stakes. These writers also drew from personal biography for easy access to subject matter. A common rebuttal in workshops to criticism is, “Well, this really happened.” It’s a good way to silence dissent in a workshop. Reality doesn’t always make for a good story, though.

The Program Era also ushered in a heavy-handed emphasis on character-driven fiction over plot-driven fiction. I’ve come to believe this too could have led to a rise of dysfunctional narratives in writing programs. I explore this theory here.

And there’s been a shift in why we tell stories: Not necessarily to entertain or enrich, but as an act of therapy or grievance, or to collect “allies” in a climate where you’re either with me or against me. Inaction in fiction has come to be praised as a literary virtue. Stories with characters who take matters into their own hands often are derided as genre fiction.

Another reason is staring back at you: The World Wide Web has empowered the masses to tell their stories to a global audience. This has created a dynamic where everyone can be a reader, a writer, and a critic, and all at the same time. Collecting allies is equated to collecting followers on social media, with likes substituted as populist approval of one’s message.

The next step in the evolution of the above is for storytellers to strategize how best to defend their work from criticism—to remove any fault in the story’s armor, to buttress it with rearguards and fortifications. (This is different than working hard to produce a high-quality experience, which, in my view, is a better use of time.) Dysfunctional stories are defensible stories.

These are not the kind of stories I want to read, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distance myself from them. Writers should strive to offer more than a list grievances, or use their stories to settle a score. If it’s too much to ask stories to explain, then certainly we can expect them to feature human, contradictory characters who connect dots and discover fresh truths in our fragile world. Even if the main character does not grow by the last page, we should grow by then, if only a little.


. Last updated .

Sherlock Holmes: The enduring allure of history’s greatest detective

Leave a comment
Sherlock Holmes

Mystery and Suspense Magazine has published my article “Sherlock Holmes: The enduring allure of history’s greatest detective” on their web site. In it, I explore the traditional reasons why critics and fans think the Baker Street detective remains popular—even immortal—to this day, and offer in return my own thoughts on the subject:

What is the enduring appeal of this shape-shifting character? Doyle gives no indication that Holmes is particularly attractive or magnetic in personality. He can be cold, abrasive, and downright rude in moments. One cannot help but feel Dr. Watson is a man with a remarkable reservoir of patience. How many Sherlock Holmes adventures open with the detective challenging Watson to discern the history of a person from nothing more than a walking stick, a battered hat, or a muddied shoe? Watson entertains Holmes and his games of deduction, but always as the lesser, never as the equal. (In my experience, medical doctors are not the sorts of people who take well to being talked down to.) Why would such a man continue to fascinate and entertain well into the 21st century?

My thinking on Doyle and his creation has shifted over the past few years due to a renewed appreciation for the Sherlock Holmes canon and, of course, writing a reinterpretation of his classic The Hound of the Baskervilles.

The Mystery and Suspense article is here.

For more background on my thinking, there’s “Sherlock by Train” and “Why I wrote ‘A Man Named Baskerville'”.

And you can learn more about A Man Named Baskerville, which is available in Kindle and paperback.


.

West’s Disease and “Sadly, Porn”

3 Comments
W. H. Auden, Dan Strange (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Update, 7 Jul 2022: I’ve taken a fair amount of heat for the sin of admitting I’d not read Sadly, Porn before producing the following post. Note that I did read the Amazon sample before writing what follows, which is 10% of the book’s opening; I don’t count that as a full read, and didn’t want to quibble about that point when I first published this. Scott Alexander’s review quotes substantially from the book as well, but again, another quibble.

What my detractors don’t seem to get is that this post spends the bulk of its energies examining W. H. Auden’s “West’s Disease” and not Edward Teach’s book. The post originated as a comment to Scott Alexander’s follow-up to his review, but as my comment grew and became more involved, I decided to publish it here, on my blog.

As such, this post should be framed as “If Astral Codex Ten and Resident Contrarian are correct about this one point in Sadly, Porn, it relates to West’s Disease in this way…”

But, of course, it depends on the reader to carry the logic from there, and not simply dunk on me and walk off with LOLs.

I am now reading Sadly, Porn. For the record, I’ve read nothing so far that changes my mind on any of my thoughts below. If anything, it’s only cementing my position.

Allow me to state this up-front: I’ve not read Edward Teach’s Sadly, Porn. Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten (ACX) has, though, and in response wrote a rather lengthy and discursive review, as well as a follow-up on the comments it elicited. At this moment, most of my understanding of Sadly, Porn comes from these sources (which I freely admit is an imperfect substitute for reading the book).

From what I’ve gathered, Sadly, Porn is a meandering and intentionally obscure treatise (diatribe?), grounded in psychoanalytics, which purports to explain—among other things—the ways people lie to themselves. Released in December 2021, the Kindle edition clocks in at over 1,100 pages, brimming with extended discourses on topics you might think plucked from the air, such as a ten-page examination of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. It’s also larded with David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius-style exhortations directed at the reader. The author opens with a thirty-page erotica story which, he later claims, is only included to scare off readers. (An odd strategy, since there are a multitude of writers producing such fiction for a lucrative living.) Really, to get a good idea of the book’s scope, read the ACX review.

What lit my interest in it comes from ACX taking a stab at boiling down Sadly, Porn to its core thesis:

Psychologically healthy people have desires. Sometimes they fantasize about these desires, and sometimes they act upon them. You’ve probably never met anyone like this.

Psychologically unhealthy people, e.g., you and everyone you know, don’t have desires, at least not in the normal sense. Wanting things is scary and might obligate you to act toward getting the thing lest you look like a coward. But your action might fail, and then you would be the sort of low-status loser who tries something and fails at it.

Again, from what I’ve gathered, Edward Teach believes that social status is the chief (or even sole) motivator of human behavior. (Or, perhaps he doesn’t; ACX makes it clear the book is too cagey to state its arguments plainly.)

Teach certainly paints us all as loathsome meat-bags of pettiness. Yet there’s something familiar about his observations that makes it difficult to reject his assertions. In a time where social media has devised a multitude of ways to score our social standing (via follower counts, likes, retweets, and so on), and in a culture endlessly promoting concepts like self-actualization and fame, his claims about the primacy of status-seeking has substance.

Now compare Teach’s accounting of Man’s damnable condition with W. H. Auden’s analysis of Nathanael West’s novels, where he first describes “West’s Disease”:

This is a disease of consciousness which renders it incapable of converting wishes into desires. … All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: “I refuse to be what I am.” [But the sufferer] cannot desire anything, for the present state of the self is the ground of every desire, and that is precisely what the wisher rejects. [Emphasis mine.]

Nathanael West
Nathanael West

To simplify Auden’s distinction: A wish is the simple act of imagining oneself as a different person, or in a different situation; a desire is imagining how one might convert one’s current self into a different person or situation. A wish is wanting to be thin; a desire is vowing to join a gym and work-out every day (even if one doesn’t act on it). West’s Disease is the inability to transform one to the other, leading to inaction, loathing, and rage.

The finest examples of West’s Disease may be found in The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West’s most well-known novel. It’s a brilliant and acidic look at 1930s Hollywood, as witnessed by a motley group of misfits well-distanced from Tinseltown’s glamour, money, and success. “Hollywood’s success as a dream factory is predicated on knowing our wishes and actualizing them on the silver screen,” I wrote two years ago. “That’s why Hollywood appears a tantalizing cure for West’s Disease.”

Auden’s diagnosis that a person with West’s Disease “cannot desire anything” echoes another summation of Sadly, Porn from blogger Resident Contrarian:

[Teach asserts] we in general are incapable of action; we don’t want to act but also can’t act, and we rely on a nebulous “them” to put us on a track towards having to do it. … we want a situation where we don’t have to take an action, but where an action is demanded of us by circumstance.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that RC’s example (“you don’t want to talk to the pretty girl; you want her to trip so you have to catch her”) sounds like a stock scene in a Hollywood romantic comedy. And I do equate wishing, in Auden’s terms, with Teach’s idea that we crave an externality to occur that actualizes our wishes for us. Teach is perhaps exploring Auden’s wish mechanism a bit more fully, but it looks to me that Auden in 1962 struck upon the same vein of thinking that Teach is attempting to communicate in 2022.

The Day of the Locust movie poster
Poster for The Day of the Locust (1975) movie adaptation

West’s Disease is what paralyzes the misfits in The Day of the Locust. These Hollywood outsiders witness the fruits of Hollywood’s money and glamour being distributed to others, never themselves. They want success, but success is supposed to come to them, not vice-versa. Faye Greener, the only character who can claim to have a film career in front of the camera, complains “the reason she wasn’t a star was because she didn’t have the right clothes.” (There’s a similar shrugging passivity in McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?)

But Auden is less absolutist than Teach. It’s West’s Disease, after all: It only afflicts certain individuals, whereas Teach finds it to be widespread. (Perhaps Teach is right, though. Perhaps West’s Disease is contagious and has spread virulently since 1962. Or since 1939, when Locust was published.)

Auden also does not pin down West’s Disease as a natural state of the human psyche, but as a result of modernity:

There have, no doubt, always been cases of West’s Disease, but the chances of infection in a democratic and mechanized society like our own are much greater than in the more static and poorer societies.

When, for most people, their work, their company, even their marriages, were determined, not by personal choice or ability, but by the class into which they were born, the individual was less tempted to develop a personal grudge against Fate; his fate was not his own but that of everyone around him.

But the greater the equality of opportunity in a society becomes, the more obvious becomes the inequality of the talent and character among individuals, and the more bitter and personal it must be to fail. [Again, emphasis mine.]

This jibes with one of my intuitions as I read ACX’s review: That Teach’s near-universality of status-seeking in the human psyche is more likely the result of (or greatly amplified by) recent trends in technology and social organization. Auden wrote the above when notions like meritocracy were ripe in the air and corporate ladders were being erected sky-high. Today, social media and tabloid-esque journalism is king, can show you the numbers to prove it, and has disjointed our culture in unexpected ways.

What’s more, 21st-century American popular media doesn’t merely make “inequalities of talent and character” obvious; our celebrity-obsessed culture revels in and celebrates them. As Budd Schulberg wrote about status climbing: “It will survive as long as money and prestige and power are ends in themselves, running wild, unharnessed from usefulness.”

The Day of the Locust opens describing those with West’s Disease as those who “loitered on the corners or stood with their backs to the shop windows and stared at everyone who passed. … They had come to California to die.” In the final chapter, they rise up in revolt, and Los Angeles burns. Auden saw West’s Disease as damaging not merely to the individual, but to the society around them.

Teach seems to treat West’s Disease as an intellectual, and perhaps masculine, failing. (Apparently cuckoldry is a running theme throughout Sadly, Porn.) The book adopts a scolding and sneering tone toward the reader, implicating them as weak and blithe to this delusion of false desires and status envy.

I know which author I’m inclined to listen to.


. Last updated .