How Literature Broadens Our Humanity

 Reading The Guardian this morning, I thought these three pieces shared a theme.

Divided times: how literature teaches us to understand 'the other':

Fiction teaches us to think creatively about difference. Anthropological studies, psychoanalysis, sociology – all offer theoretical descriptions for what a novel teaches by example and by identification. “The imitation of an action”, is what Aristotle called tragedy. It would be difficult for one to think up a more groundbreaking mode of understanding the mind and the heart. Guilt, jealousy, despair, violence, anxiety, irrationality, the fear of death – nothing that is human is foreign to literature. So the more education falls into decline because of a lack of imagination (not to mention funds), the more literature is called on to serve as another form of education. When we read the emblematic works of the European tradition we begin to trace the outlines of a coded, radical understanding of the other. Unconsciously we begin to accept that the other is always a mystery and that easy characterisations lead nowhere. Imagine if Odysseus were nothing more than a filthy, shipwrecked man. And think just how much we learn from his arrival on the island of the Phaeacians about the people arriving every day on Europe’s shores.

If we leave the treatment of the refugee crisis to the mass media, if we forget the shipwrecked men of literature – from Odysseus and Robinson Crusoe to Michel Tournier’s Friday – we’ll remain trapped in the stereotypes of refugees as a homogeneous mass of people who have come to tyrannise the west. Literature transforms amorphous fear and pity into individualities. It tells us: the other is not what it seems.

‘Could I understand the people who rushed into the Capitol?’: George Saunders on how stories teach empathy from George Saunders:

Now, so as not to get too dreamy about this: the guy who charges into a school and kills a bunch of kids – he’s also on a continuum with me. And with, you know, Gandhi. This idea of existing on a continuum doesn’t mean, “We are all good,” or “We are all, brothers and sisters, exactly the same,” or “All is forgiven, no matter what you do,” but, rather, something like: “Wherever you are on the human continuum, I can know you, approximately. I’m going to proceed on that basis: whatever tendencies are large in you, must be here somewhere, perhaps smaller and/or nascent, in or me.”

Could I, approximately, know the people in that crowd that rushed into the Capitol? Of course. Does that tendency – to fail to know propaganda when I see it, and react to it with violence – exist in me too? I know for a fact that it does. Why is this more comforting than terrifying? Well, because it implies that these people are not beyond my understanding, nor your understanding, and that no one is.

In fiction, a broad signifier (“misogynist barber”, “extreme rightwinger”, “typical housewife”, etc) gets fractured into a pattern of more specific, nuanced signifiers and these, because they are more finely observed and less conceptual, tend to be more precise. We move from broad assertion to a series of increasingly specific actions, which complicate and might even contradict one another, creating a pattern that is more ambiguous, that puts us into a state of higher alertness, that keeps challenging and overturning our judgments.

And a more cautionary example from a review of Alan Moore's stories, Illuminations by Alan Moore review – a savaging of the superhero industry:

And all this, Moore asserts, runs parallel to the rise of populist fascism in the US. If the comics industry is “a metaphorical microcosm for the whole of society”, then comics fans and Maga reactionaries both similarly reveal “how blurred the line separating fact from fiction is for many people”. Moore drives this point home during a chapter where Porlock watches the 6 January Capitol riot on television, musing that when Trump was elected in 2016, “six of the dozen biggest-grossing movies had been superhero films”, and many of the former reality star’s followers responded to him as though he was a four-colour superhero figure. “They wanted big dramatic threats and enemies, no matter that they strained all credibility, and also wanted some improbable and memorable character to offer them solutions that were simple, and as unbelievable as the imagined menaces they were pledged to combat.” This led inexorably to the events at the Capitol, when Trump’s hardcore fans (“fanatics” in the truest sense) revolted against the inconvenient truth of Biden’s electoral victory in an effort to “expose troublesome fact as fiction, while establishing pulp picture-story narrative as universal fact”.

America’s “post-truth” departure from factual objectivity, in other words, is a consequence of its near wholesale embrace of the fascist mythology that reality can become whatever one has the will to make of it – a mythology endlessly rearticulated within mainstream corporate superhero fantasies and reactionary political subcultures. Moore has offered variations of this argument elsewhere, but What We Can Know About Thunderman gives a savage, satirical perspective on the American superhero industry – and by extension America itself – unmatched in his previous writing. The collection as a whole demonstrates that although Watchmen may be Moore’s best-known work, his storytelling has transcended its origins in the vexed commercial medium he now conscientiously eschews.

Mythology is fictional without being literature. It flattens character into archetype rather than exploring commonalities of humanity. Mythology gives the safety of certainty, while literature examines the twists of character. The MAGA crowd extols Western civilization without comprehending that our civilization is marked out by Captain Ahab and Hamlet and Macbeth and Falstaff and Hester Prynne and Jake Barnes and Tom Joad and Huckleberry Finn and Jason Compson and Jay Gatsby and Carrie Meeber. MAGA proves the failure of American society to educate its members.

From Idaho and What we risk by narrowly restricting our kids’ view of history and culture:

 It is important that the young people of this state and nation be exposed to a wide range of books, even though some may contain words or concepts that make some people uncomfortable. Restricting the historical or cultural view of our children limits their ambitions and horizons.  This nation has a proud history and our kids should be taught about it in an honest manner. On the other hand, the country has engaged in some reprehensible conduct – slavery, Jim Crow laws, rank discrimination against Asians, massacres of Native Americans. That history should also be honestly taught.

Our children need to be made aware of our faults as well as our virtues. Honesty in history is not for the purpose of making anyone feel personally guilty, but to recognize the wrongs that have been committed so as to prevent their repetition. Sugarcoating our past is self-deception that keeps us from taking corrective action.

Parents, not schools or libraries, have the primary role of teaching values to their children. Teachers and librarians can play a supportive role by making sure that materials exposed to children are age appropriate, but they should not be the gatekeepers, nor should they be made scapegoats for parental failure.

sch 10/16/22