What is fiction, and why are most people attracted to it? This isn’t just about reading books or short stories; what also is the attraction of movies and TV shows that are all about imaginary people facing imaginary problems? Why do people bother? The general consensus, these days, among psychologists and sociologists, is that stories (like play among children) are ways of vicariously rehearsing the challenges one might face in one’s own life. We like to see how others would deal with problem we might have. And it’s related for similar reason to gossip among neighbors, which actually serves a useful function, both to understand others’ problems, and to pass along values of honesty, trust, and shame, as appropriate; a way of demonizing ‘cheaters’ in the unwritten social contract of small groups.
NY Times, essay by Lyta Gold, 1 July 2024: Book Bans Are on the Rise. But Fear of Fiction Is Nothing New., subtitled “Nearly 2,400 years ago, Plato worried that stories could corrupt susceptible minds. Moral panics over fiction have been common ever since.”
Excerpted from a forthcoming book (from a small press publisher, that does some genre books).
I’ll quote the opening para’s:
The fear of fiction waxes and wanes, spiking every couple of decades like some kind of hysterical cicada. The current wave of book bans may be the worst since the 1980s, but we’ve seen this sort of thing before, and we’ll see it again.
The ’80s bans were driven by religious conservatives, dovetailing with the “satanic panic” over books and games involving magic, such as Dungeons & Dragons. Before that, in the 1950s, anxiety centered on trashy paperback novels and comics, which were said to cause “moral damage” and a “loss of ideals” in young people that would invariably lead to a life of crime. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the culprits were sexy Hollywood movies and modernist novels such as “Ulysses,” which — lest people engage in too much sex and modernism — resulted in the Hays Code and more book bans.
Earlier still, at the turn of the 20th century, people blamed America’s problems on dirty books and images that could be ordered through the mail. In the centuries before that, there were bouts of concern over penny dreadfuls, women’s novels, chivalric romances and comedic plays, going back through the ages to the fourth century B.C., when Plato declared in “The Republic” that all stories and other artistic “imitations” of reality — including poetry, music and painting — were unacceptable in an ideal society unless they could be proved to impart rational, wholesome values.
While the context changes, fear of fiction seems always to boil down to fear of one’s society and the people who live in it. Other people’s minds are frightening because they are inaccessible to us; one way we can know them is through their representations in fiction. We know that fiction affects us profoundly and mysteriously, and that other people are affected just as strongly and unpredictably as we are. Which means it’s at least theoretically possible that art could seduce our fellow citizens into wicked beliefs.
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Most histories of dangerous fiction begin with Plato, though anxiety about the pernicious effect of stories can be found in fragments of work by earlier Greek philosophers, who criticized the epic poetry of their day for portraying the gods as murderous, adulterous jerks. In “The Republic,” Plato expands on these early concerns: When people encounter stories about gods and heroes behaving badly, what stops them from imitating what they hear?
We read a bit about Plato’s take on stories in THE STORY PARADOX, by Jonathan Gottscahll, recently read and reviewed here. Plato’s concerns anticipated the way demagogues (and religious leaders) use stories to shape their followers’ minds, their very ideas about reality and truth. Repeat a story often enough, especially to the young, and it becomes unquestioned, a basis and filter for all future understanding of the world.
It should be apparent that these fears are mostly among conservatives, and they make sense in that context. Yet again: Conservatives (without consciously realizing it) prioritize survival, of the tribe, of the community, and so discourage anything their young’uns might be exposed to that would interfere with standard issue life of reproduction and family life. Still, even primitive tribal societies existing today talk practically during the day, and narratively in the evening: to reinforce tribal stories of identity and purpose. And to teach ‘lessons’ about how to deal with day to day problems.
Narratives have evolved, of course, as societies have changed. Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, from Gilgamesh to Star Wars; certain basic narratives continue to attract across the centuries. In the 19th century, dramas of class and society. (At least in the West, I should say.) In the 20th century, the focus turned inward — in reaction, I would speculate, to the increasingly inhuman discoveries in geology, biology, and cosmology — to focus on the individual. When I was in high school, and reading The New Yorker, the ideal story then was an incident in which an individual experiences something that changes their life: a proper story was about a single incident that changed everything. Meanwhile, science fiction told stories looking outward, rather than inward, and so was dismissed by literary folks as irrelevant.
What then, are we to think about science fiction? What does it use stories to do? If stories are about human problems and their solutions, how does science fiction fit in? I don’t have a complete answer, but basically: science fiction is about understanding human problems within the context of the objective universe. Eventually the species reaches a situation in which problems are not only about conflicts between individual people — as all those earlier patterns of fiction were — but about how individuals, and societies, deal with larger issues defined by our interaction with the vast, objectively real, universe.
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Three more items about the theme of this past week.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 3 Jul 2024: Republican glee over “immunity” decision shows they don’t fear Donald Trump — they desire a dictator, subtitled “Trump has threatened to have people killed and GOP politicians aren’t bothered in the slightest”
Again tribal mentality, the default of human nature. Us vs. them; principles and rules don’t apply to them.
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Media Matters, 2 Jul 2024: Heritage Foundation president celebrates Supreme Court immunity decision: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution”, subtitled “Kevin Roberts: ‘We’re in the process of taking this country back … we ought to be really encouraged by what happened yesterday'”
Without belaboring this, the word “back” has a couple obvious meanings.
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TNR, The New Republic, 3 Jul 2024: Trump Says “You Can Be Evil” So Long as You Get Good Ratings, subtitled “Donald Trump has revealed what’s really important to him.”
The superficiality of Donald Trump. It’s all about ratings. Never, ever, about principles (let alone the Constitution, or the Bible).
