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sistermagpie) wrote2006-11-29 02:45 pm
sistermagpie) wrote2006-11-29 02:45 pm
Unconscious moral instructions
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lunacy helpfully linked to about five differnt interesting things in her last post, one of which led to this really interesting essay about Ender's Game. I've never read Ender's Game, but the essay is basically about how all of Ender's battles are set up along the same lines in the books, and how this all seems to feed into Orson Scott Card's overriding ethic. The author concludes:God, how I would have loved this book in seventh grade! It's almost as good as having a nuclear device.
The problem is that the morality of that abused seventh grader is stunted. It's a good thing I didn't have access to a nuclear device. It's a good thing I didn't grow up to elaborate my fantasies of personal revenge into an all-encompassing system of ethics. The bullying I suffered, which seemed overwhelming to me then, was undeniably real, and wrong. But it did not make me the center of the universe. My sense of righteousness, one that might have justified any violence, was exaggerated beyond any reality, and no true morality could grow in me until I put it aside. I had to let go of my sense of myself as victim of a cosmic morality play, not in order to justify the abuse-I didn't deserve to be hurt-but in order to avoid acting it out. I had to learn not to suppress it and strike back.
We see the effects of displaced, righteous rage everywhere around us, written in violence and justified as moral action, even compassion. Ender gets to strike out at his enemies and still remain morally clean. Nothing is his fault. ... As Elaine Radford has said, “We would all like to believe that our suffering has made us special-especially if it gives us a righteous reason to destroy our enemies.”
But that's a lie. No one is that special; no one is that innocent. If I felt that Card's fiction truly understood this, then I would not have written this essay.
I can't really add anything to the essay itself about this book, but was really intrigued by the quote that starts it off--a quote from OSC that says:
There's always moral instruction whether the writer inserts it deliberately or not. The least effective moral instruction in fiction is that which is consciously inserted. Partly because it won't reflect the storyteller's true beliefs, it will only reflect what he BELIEVES he believes, or what he thinks he should believe or what he's been persuaded of.
But when you write without deliberately expressing moral teachings, the morals that show up are the ones you actually live by. The beliefs that you don't even think to question, that you don't even notice-- those will show up. And that tells much more truth about what you believe than your deliberate moral machinations.
--Orson Scott Card
It's almost too obvious to even say it, but there's always something flat about an author trying to put across a moral lesson in a book, and yet moral lessons put across are often what make books so compelling. The trick isn't in the moral lesson necessarily being good, but just in its being believed on some level by the author enough that it becomes a good story. A sign of that, it often seems to me, is that you're going to get contradictions within that story.
I remember once, for instance, somebody on TORC complaining about Peter Jackson adding certain things to the movies that were disgustingly anti-Tolkien and one of these things was Legolas and Gimli having a contest to see how many people they can kill in battle. Of course everyone jumped in to tell the person that was in the original book--it's something people often remember really clearly. Yet at the same time you could see how this person found it anti-Tolkien: how do you have a climax that hinges on compassion, even compassion for a person who hasn't earned it and is your enemy, and then have these other guys cheerfully picking off the enemy? The answer is probably just that humans, no matter how hard they try and how hard they think about ethical beliefs, probably never live up to them. They just don't always act according to one philosophy. They don't always do something because they think it's the right thing to do, and anyway thinking something is right usually really means feeling it's right, and your feelings aren't always responding to the same things even in similar situations.
Some people find the ending of LOTR to be a Deus ex Machina. I never felt that way. To me what happens to Gollum always seemed logical and inevitable given what came before, and I think part of the reason for that is that Tolkien himself probably feels it that way. So the ending doesn't feel like the author stepping out to tell us boys and girls the moral of the story, it's just part of his story instinct--this is what happened next. It just so happens that the same man who thought that responded very differently to a rousing battle scene where Legolas and Gimli are just good soldiers showing off their abilities. The same man also could have Sam Gamgee look at a fallen soldier and think about where he came from.
The contradictions shouldn't disqualify Tolkien from saying anything about life. In fact, the contradictions are almost what make him persuasive because he sounds so human. It's somehow better that while we admire the friendship of Frodo and Sam we can recognize a romanticized class system. It's part of the realness of it somehow, and it's also what leaves us something to talk about in the story. I'd say that's doubly true for Harry Potter. There are points in the story where Rowling seems to be consciously making a moral point, like when Dumbledore is dealing with Draco in HBP, even though these moral points don't always seem to be reflected in other parts of the book. But that's not to say that Rowling is being herself when she writes Draco as repulsive and enjoys punishing him, then snaps into compassionate mode when she's making a point like a child straightening up when the teacher enters the room. What makes the story work, I think, is that she does seem to absolutely believe in both stances. If a reader sees a contradiction that's our problem as it probably isn't for her at all. (That goes of course for all the contradictions--our choices make us who we are yet Tom Riddle was a sociopath from birth? Obviously not a problem for the author any more than Ender the innocent mass murder is a problem for OSC.)
What tends to hold this stuff together isn't that it always adds up to something ethically airtight. Ethically airtight on the contrary often makes for something less believable and more flat. What puts it across is more how much the author likes to tell a story, so how logical story-wise it seems to him/her. For instance, after HBP it seemed like JKR really loved the story of the young man who joined the DEs but got cold feet later. She wrote it three times in different ways with Snape, Regulus and Draco. In Rowling's case this doesn't seem to be a story of someone who turned out to be "good" instead of "bad" like a DE, more just that this is what happens when she puts a human character (instead of one of the monsters) into that position. Anyway, it seems like Rowling is drawn to something in this story, but is it because of any ethical point? Possibly the only ethical point might be another way of punishing the characters further for being jerks or proving the good characters' superior choices better once again--who knows? What makes the story compelling is I suspect more the persuasiveness of the emotion in the way it's written. As Card might get off on Ender accidentally killing his enemies and feeling badly about it even though it was obviously the enemies' fault Rowling probably gets satisfaction out of Harry's dealings with his Slytherin foes.
And as readers I think we get more satisfaction out of the potential holes in the way it's presented. It's good that both Rowling's and Tolkien's presentations of the world can annoy some readers or strike the right emotional buttons with other readers. In the end what makes something a good story is really that you can't reduce it to what it's saying (I'm still waiting around for something I consider an example of the good guys much "doing what is right over what is easy" in HP), you have to just dump this big pile of story out and say "what do you think of this?" Then let fans go crazy based on what pings them.
Though I will say, having written this I think Rowling is maybe exceptionally slippery in this regard. It really does seem that in places her ideas about different kinds of people trump the right and wrong aspect, so she really does have her good guys be part of the problem without making the bad guys really the good guys. I think a lot of the time it may just be that she gets a kick out of writing bad behavior and isn't always bothered by it as much as other people. I sometimes wonder if maybe in fiction at least she just enjoys letting her inner bully have fun. It's probably not a coincidence that her protagonist's guiding good spirit is the form of James Potter, who seems to be the absolute perfect symbol of bully-who-will-always-be-the-hero, thus the perfect nemesis for Snape, our hero-who-will-always-be-the-bully. It's interesting to me to try to figure just where Rowling is really coming from a lot of the time, and that's what puts me in fandom. It's cool to try to map out those unquestioned beliefs that show up in the writing, even when they're potentially weird ones.
no subject
Haha, yeah, that's pretty much why there's a limit to how seriously I can take it. I can't get worked up about Fred&George or whatever, because the books are just -full- of Boys Acting Badly, like in a cute little 50s movie or something (at the same time there are 'moral lessons' about compassion... it's like two different levels, the child level & the adult level? Something like that). I think it even works for me 'cause I can regress too, though I was more the bullied than a bully, obviously-- I mean, note that the people who tend to have a problem are self-identified Ravenclaws or Slytherins, ahahah. Not saying one -shouldn't- have a problem, but this -is- heavily influenced by temperament, how one perceives/judges these sort of adolescent behaviors.
I mean, I'm not a Gryffindor (...mostly), but I find adolescent boys (or girls), in all their unjustified/wild rambunctious violence and self-righteous youthful zeal, to be... cute. It's a lot more repellent to me in an adult, because one gains experience and stuff by then. When one's 15, it's still inexcusable to be an arrogant bully, but it's a lot less definitive of character-- it's also something about being that age, in that social group (of other boys), especially if they're sporty active boys, etc. Anyway, I think JKR has this sort of affection for the adolescent gittishness of sporty British lads, or something, even as it's overlaid by the 'adult's' perception of ethical boundaries and the need for compassion and all that. I think most people feel and think differently in their ethics-- I mean, there may be convergence, but our instincts aren't equivalent to our higher ideals, obviously, and a lot of times people get zealous about their ideals -because- they're denying what their instincts/memories are saying, too.
I feel that Harry's different though, in her slew of sporty Gryffindor bully types and James and Snape as polar opposites, y'know? He's in the middle-- some of column A, some of column B, and most people (either in the books or in fandom) don't get that duality even though it's central to his nature. Either it's "Harry the victim" or "Harry the aggressor who needs to back the fuck down". I think it's like JKR put the most of her heart/complexity/beliefs into Harry-- he's the most vivid character to me when I read, definitely. Harry does lash out because he feels on the receiving end, but he doesn't go all the way, doesn't just repeat history. It'll be interesting to see what comes of the bathroom incident, but I do think book 7 will be where Harry breaks free of the pattern entirely-- he just has to. Well, has to grow up, leave the world of feckless boyhood behind entirely. Which makes me sad, but. :>
no subject
And of course with any house what's annoying isn't people liking the stuff but saying that since they like it it must be a sign of a noble character that can't be wrong. I mean...it's confusing because sometimes with any character you come on something that you really do take seriously and you really do think it's a serious thing, but that doesn't mean everything about the character is like that.
Anyway, I think JKR has this sort of affection for the adolescent gittishness of sporty British lads, or something, even as it's overlaid by the 'adult's' perception of ethical boundaries and the need for compassion and all that.
That's probably also why people roll their eyes when she lectures about bad boys etc. Obviously she loves them. She doesn't have to tell us that in interviews. It's just obviously her style of bad boys aren't Slytherins!
and most people (either in the books or in fandom) don't get that duality even though it's central to his nature. Either it's "Harry the victim" or "Harry the aggressor who needs to back the fuck down".
Please! Any kind of duality in a character seems to be a problem. I've seen people openly complain about just acknowledging that!
no subject
Yeah, it's the self-righteousness that sucks, though it's not that it's directly connected to what, precisely, the person/group is self-righteous about. And it gets even more muddled when people are then self-righteous -about- self-righteousness, as if their self-righteousness is 'justified' because... :>
...I think I'm hopeless by JKR standards 'cause I like -all- kinds of bad boys :))