Some have greatness thrust upon them…

In the last quarter of 2009, I spent a lot of internal dialogue on a question of aesthetics that formed itself from ongoing thoughts and conversations about the media in my life. First, I had read Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (http://perrynomasia.blogspot.com/2009/10/wind-up-bird-chronicle.html) and, needing a pattern to shape my thoughts around and against, I did a little research into the criticism of the novel. With few exceptions, the praise was effusive though I often found that analysis was missing—there was not much by way of examples from the text about why it was so good. But I also recognized as I read it that it just had a feel of "greatness," somehow the book was making me feel like it was supposed to be good, which is a strange metafictional artifact and pretty difficult to express, let alone quantify.

Similarly, much to the distress of Mrs. Speculator and my friends, I just don't understand the fascination with the TV series, Mad Men. I've watched every episode of it now, and while I can appreciate the talent of the writers and some of the actors, it all seems to be in the service of something I am just missing out on. Repeatedly I am told—by friends whose opinions I trust, critics I value, and award shows—that this is good drama and that I should appreciate it more than I do. And all I can see is a particularly well-written soap opera set in an earlier time (which used to be a regular point but is rapidly becoming just a gimmick). Why is Mad Men nearly universally seen as great television? What quality of it makes it good? And again, I keep getting the feeling as I watch it that I am supposed to think it is good, that it is explicitly trying to impress me with how good it is.

I recognize that part of the issue here is going to be semantics: defining "good" is a difficult process, especially since it relies so much on personal values. But in some cases (especially with Mad Men) there is an air of snobbery—if you don't get why it's good, you're just unaware of what good really is. This is never explicit but my well-meaning attempts to understand by asking questions like "What makes it good?" are met with dumbfounded stares or their virtual equivalents. If the conversation evolves beyond that impasse, I often am told that it's very literary, as if that's more easily defined than "good." And since I have degrees in literature and write and talk passionately about books, clearly I should know what "literary" is and that it is the goal to which all story-telling aspires.

And then, over the fall, the speculative fiction community took a long look at itself after some critical remarks were made about how the literary awards never seem to have genre fiction as their nominees, even though the books that do get nominated are rife with themes and plots that would otherwise qualify them as speculative fiction. This all started when Ursula le Guin reviewed Margaret Atwood's latest novel, The Year of the Flood, questioning Atwood's determination not to be "pigeonholed" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/aug/29/margaret-atwood-year-of-flood). In it, Le Guin talks about some of the manufactured differences between "literary fiction" and genre fiction. Embedded in those distinctions is the belief, or perhaps fear if you view it from a marketing perspective, that genre fiction can never be good, while literary fiction is always good. And taking it a step further, if something puts on the trappings of being literary—calls attention to itself as being literary—then it also implies that it is inherently good. It's like the brick and mortar book stores have been divided into sections: science fiction, mystery, westerns, and over there is the good section. And yet I find myself thinking of Michael Chabon who rejoices in his genre roots, even announcing his genre intentions as his books get placed in the good book section.

So all of these thoughts whirling about in my head eventually led me to ask myself what the heck "literary" means and why literary equals good. What do these literary things have in common and do they really somehow proclaim their own literariness?

On the surface, Murakami and Mad Men have pretty much nothing in common. The novel deals with a young man hitting a crisis in his personal and professional life while the TV show is about a 1960s ad agency, focusing on a troubled protagonist but including threads from all the characters. The book is ethereal and sometimes fanciful, and the series is usually visceral and grounded, but with moments of something else. I wrestled with this for a while—the use of language is different, symbolism is different, the themes are different. What do these things have in common?

Denseness. Not of the reader/viewer, but of story-telling. Layer upon layer of narration, multiple story threads weaving around one another. Not, usually, denseness of language, but complex (not necessarily complicated) stories. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, instead of the usual single-thread narrative of a man's life—all the events that relate to the story the writer wants to tell—we are given nearly every facet of the protagonist's life, from the moment he wakes up and considers what his breakfast might be until he lays his head down on his pillow. And we meet every person he meets and are given part of their stories as well. On Mad Men, the plot revolves around as many as ten characters and their families/lovers, showing the depth of relationships and of personality since no one acts exactly the same way around every person they know and when alone. And the main character is especially rich in his experiences and decisions if not particularly deep. The dense storytelling, looked at another way, could also be called verisimilitude: the stories show the breadth of real people and their range of experiences, even if those experiences are ridiculous (is it irony that we want our fictional people to feel real?).

And denser storytelling usually makes for harder reading/viewing, making the consumer work for the pleasure they get out of it. There's an underlying relationship there: we're supposed to like the things we work hard for—we want our efforts to be spent judiciously—so we are inclined to like it. We may even want to like it, biasing ourselves from the start.

There are some interesting corollaries to this equation. For one thing, associating literariness and goodness to density neglects all the other things that make good writing. I enjoy good stories, but good writing makes me swoon. Powerful language, style used to an intent, narrative structure—all these are just as important as the plot. Critics argue, maybe rightfully, that Neal Stephenson is not very good at plots, but his language and sentences are delightful. Is that not literary? Iain Banks is masterful at narrative structure. China Mieville is brilliant at world-building. And while these authors are recognized as good, they live cleanly on the verge of literariness in the public eye. Maybe it's because they are so clearly genre writers as well (but that's a topic for another time). Arguably, these other aspects are more difficult than good plotting.

Following this line of reasoning, there must be literary things that are not good. Cultural things that are not good rapidly pass from our awareness, unless they are so not-good that they become known and honored for it. I know this is true for TV and movies, but I can't think of an example of bad books becoming beloved for their badness—though I suppose it could be argued that anything by Dan Brown fits the bill. As a result, perhaps, merely having a major publishing house put "literary" or "literature" on the spine of your book or having major chains put it in the literary section becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy (again, in the mind of the consensus).

There's a parallel with "art" here. It's art so it must be good…and I have to like it. And if I don't like it…I just don't get it. And more so than books (and definitely more so than TV), people are explicitly snobby about their ability to "get it" with art.

Which leads to my final corollary—there are good things that are not literary! Why do I feel ashamed that Empire Records makes me smile? Why am I embarrassed to tell people I love Edgar Rice Burroughs? Because the consensus perception is that they are inherently not good—they have no value beyond entertaining me, as if there is something wrong with faithfully and regularly entertaining people. Oh, I do it too—I did it above. People love Dan Brown, and he gets bashed over and over by critics. Even now I'm struggling to write these words—perhaps he deserves some credit for entertaining so many people.

So I hereby resolve to recognize "literary" as another style, another identifier for media, but not a descriptor of value. Literary things are not inherently good. Being a literary movie is not inherently better or worse than being a popcorn movie. What matters is how well the book/movie/TV show pulls off its goal. If it has literary aspirations, has it met them? If it was designed solely to entertain, did it? And then, the critic's real job, why did it or did it not?

And I will no longer be cowed by Mad Men; it's a dang soap opera.

The Mirror of Her Dreams

This is a book (or the first half of a book, if you'd like to be picky) that I am reading for my book group, so this blog will be intentionally sparse.

I think I was about 14 when I was first introduced to Stephen R. Donaldson via The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant's first book Lord Foul's Bane. I knew very little about it but remember being very excited to receive it for Christmas, since it was an explicit recognition of my individuality—someone gave me a speculative fiction book as a gift, noting that I didn't follow the mainstream (if I recall the same person also gave me The Stars My Destination, so they either had terrific taste or were just pretty darned lucky). But immediately upon starting the book, I ran into difficulties. I remember rereading the first twenty pages four or five times to try to get "into" the book and just not succeeding. There was something off-putting about the rhythm, which as I look back more critically would be something of an accomplishment, since it would be an implied reflection of the most off-putting protagonist in speculative fiction, Thomas Covenant himself (hmm, off-putting protagonists, Thomas Covenant and Gully Foyle—perhaps my poorly remembered benefactor had a plan in mind…).

It was obvious to even my young critical powers that Donaldson was attempting to create the anti-epic fantasy novel, by just completely overthrowing the tropes from the outset. Thomas Covenant is a vile man, though extraordinarily human and thus perhaps understandable. Having lost his family due to their inability to cope with his leprosy, Covenant finds himself transported to a world where not only has he been healed but he has tremendous power, wrapped up in the symbol of his failure, his wedding band. Overwhelmed by his health and power, his first real act in this world is to rape a woman for which the world forgives him because he is obviously a hero come to save them from their mortal danger.

After I got past the hitch that stalled my reading, I devoured the book and its companions in the series, even going so far as to buy the last few books in hardback in order to not have to wait for them. The world was vibrant and different, the supporting characters were wonderful, and even in his ugliness, I could recognize that Covenant was richly developed, though as I recall, the narrative spent a lot of time in his head, which I found to be off-putting.

The Mirror of Her Dreams is the first half of a novel, Mordant's Need, that Donaldson wrote outside of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. In it, Donaldson returns to part of what made his first series so powerful: a seriously flawed protagonist. Only this time, around, Terisa Morgan is not quite so thoroughly developed and her flaw is emotionally based rather than physical, and thus that much harder to accept in its complexity: a victim of emotional abuse throughout her childhood, Terisa is not convinced she actually exists.

I admit that I can't make sense of this purely existential question; it's the opposite of solipsism, a game I used to play in school wherein everyone else exists and I am merely a figment of their combined imagination. But while my theoretical philosophical state was just a game, for Terisa, it is a lifestyle, an ethos that paralyzes her in the most inopportune moments. Since Donaldson continues to use internal narration as a lynchpin for the entire novel, and since Terisa's interior monologue is centered on a mental state I can't quite comprehend, her repeated protestations of inability and ineffectiveness just become annoying, quickly. I think Donaldson is solid in his representation of what moving from a world of modern technology to medieval magic would do to an average person, especially in the situation that Terisa finds herself in—a king who is apparently mad and his country under attack from two known enemies and one unknown, and people scurrying to try to save themselves and their land. Comprehending just those two levels of problem is made far worse by the people's insistence that Terisa will save them, such that I don't understand what feels to me to be another, unnecessary layer—Terisa's debilitating emotional state.

The world that Terisa finds herself in is skillfully crafted, and I admire the thought and work that went into it, especially the genre-bending idea that the king knows he is being attacked but that his best course of action is to do nothing. The vehemence with which King Joyse throws himself into this role and the few moments where we can see him mourn the cost of his inactivity are tremendous. It also carefully creates a comparison to Terisa's own involuntary inactivity. The supporting characters are pretty good too, but seem a little flat to me, each really displaying a single characteristic more than any sort of fullness. But it is powerful writing beyond my particular nits, if a little heavy-handed in its genre-bending. But it is also decidedly the first half of two parts, and I am relatively eager to see how it gets resolved—I care about the characters enough to hope they survive their crisis relatively unscathed. However, given Stephenson's history, I rather expect there will be some scathing.

Up in the Air

A great deal of critical space has been used describing how Up in the Air, a Jason Reitman-directed movie, is a parable for our times of tragic economic conditions and big-scale cutbacks by corporations. George Clooney stars as Ryan Bingham, a corporate "transition specialist" which is a euphemism that means he is hired by companies to come in and fire people when the companies themselves are too scared to do it. Of course, business is booming, and Bingham actually offers some humanity in the face of a horrible task. The film never focuses on the rightness or wrongness of the task itself, but in how it is performed. The film also focuses on Bingham himself, not only in how he performs this task with grace and even compassion (even though he seems to speak with the corporate line), but in how he survives—even thrives—in the setting he finds himself in: travelling 322 days a year. Discussions of Up in the Air that focus on this aspect of the movie are missing the forest for the trees. Up in the Air doesn't really make a commentary about the tragedy of job loss, but uses it as a metaphor to describe the stories people tell themselves to get by with their daily lives.

Clooney's Bingham tells himself he doesn't need a home, or the people associated with a static location. He is very good at everything he does—the scenes of his travel preparations are edited to mimic military precision of squads in formation—and his interactions with the people he has been hired to fire are graceful and delicate, even if just underneath them there is a tension because he is paid to say the compassionate thing rather than he feels the need to. He is a consummate traveler and the best at his job, and because of this expertise, he has told himself he doesn't need ties that bind. But he meets the lovely and equally gifted Alex Goran (played by Vera Farmiga) in a hotel bar and discovers what appears to be a similar soul. They connect and then they bond over their similarities (and because they are two outrageously attractive people who are alone). Their tentative exploration of the possibility of a relationship is charming for its apparent innocence handled by two very world-weary adults.

Another bond is forced on Ryan when fresh up-and-comer Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) is dropped on him by his company. Natalie has come up with the idea of outsourcing firing so that it can be performed via the internet using webcams and microphones. Of course, the company loves this idea since it will save them scads of money. Ryan's objections are not what one might expect—that it's inhumane; instead he argues that on the one hand not having the interaction personally cannot account for the actions the other person might take and on the other, that Natalie has no experience firing people and so should have to do it for a while before trying to change the process. His company agrees and teams Keener with Bingham as they travel about the country, letting her learn the ropes so she can revise her initial plans. And it's true, Natalie is just out of college and very bright, but she has no real-world experience, which is reflected in the story that Natalie has told herself about her life: she'll be married in her early 20s to a man for whom she has exacting specifications and lead the fulfilling life of working mom, with adoring children awaiting her return each workday and a doting husband. Attempting to fulfill this vision of herself lands her in Omaha, rather than in San Francisco at her dream job, but it is a sacrifice she feels she has to make. Ryan recognizes the self-delusion in Natalie's story, and the slow revelation to Natalie herself is played lightly and with comedy.

At the same time, however, Natalie tries to show Ryan the self-delusion in his own self-story, trying to impress upon him that loneliness is poor life choice. And grudgingly, Ryan begins to see the wisdom of her arguments: clearly something is growing between he and Alex, something he likes, and perhaps he should have better goals than to become only the seventh person to achieve American Airlines's ten million mile frequent flyer club. And so Ryan and Alex goes to the wedding of his estranged sister in Wisconsin, where he proves to himself (and to his astonished family) that he is still capable of having and perhaps deserving a home. But Ryan and Natalie never consider that Alex might have her own story about herself, and that story is revealed with haunting repercussions.

Up in the Air begins and ends with interviews supposedly with people that have just been fired. Their responses are tough to endure and lead to the conclusions I mention above, that this is a movie about job loss. But these people too are having their stories unraveled before them—their responses indicate how they are being forced to change their world-views and views of themselves as a result of what has happened to them. And what makes Ryan so good at his job is how he helps them with this paradigm shift; his interview with the great character actor J.K. Simmons demonstrates the kinds of questions and self-understanding that changing self-stories require, again with a frisson of bile since Ryan is being paid to say these things and only reveals a tiny smattering of concern about these people outside of the room where he so deftly changes their lives.

Up in the Air does not come to a definitive conclusion—there are no tidy endings in life. What we do get to see is people closing chapters of their life and revising their self-stories. Whether they are better or worse off at their stories' conclusion is unknowable: it depends on what they do with the new direction they have been given and how the viewer feels about the original stories the characters arrive with. If there is a message in the movie, it's that life goes on—people take life's worst blows and deal with them (with one excruciating exception), continuing their stories with new possibility and direction. This is a subtle film: there are no sustained guffaws or operatic tragedies. It's just the life of people you might pass by every day and never know the twists and turns their life has given to them. And in this subtlety, in this honest witness into people's lives, it does not judge the characters, though it makes it exceedingly easy for its audience to do so. But it challenges the viewer to not make that judgment but to just experience, for a few moments, those lives. The result is a powerfully effective movie, one that reminds me of Lost in Translation for its understated emotional impact, as we learn to care for slightly odd characters doing the things that make them who they are, as we learn the stories they represent to the world.