Fearing Fear

The publishing industry in the United States especially exhibits a trend especially alarming to me, an as-yet-unpublished writer.

We read the same authors. Even if every book an author ever writes is so identical as to be indistinguishable from all her/his other works, we read them all to the exclusion of new writers. If a writer sells, no matter what trash he/she sells, the books are published, marketed, and consumed. [I'm looking at you, Clive Cussler]. Well, if it works once, right?

So why didn't Stephanie Meyer write another Twilight-ish saga?

Maybe because she valued her craft? Clearly the only direction to go from there was up, and slightly to the left.

There's a security in reading books by a familiar author. We trust them. But even with a critical eye for lesser and greater books in the same saga, that attitude privileges the author over the text, a theoretical stance roundly troubled by critics in the later 20th century. When we bow to that authority, we diminish our own readerly power and responsibility. We no longer step up to discover something new, we cower behind our narrow experience.

I'm clearly speaking very, very generally. This is a national trend I see, though exhibited so often in my acquaintance. Just two days ago I barely survived an insufferable conversation with an idiot who couldn't drag herself all the way through Dandelion Wine because she didn't like science fiction, and Ray Bradbury's prose is "too purple" * Dandelion Wine is NOT SCIENCE FICTION (for anybody who hasn't read it) but I don't understand people who don't like science fiction, or speculative fiction more generally. What do they fear? Are they afraid that imagination is contagious?

I think many of us are afraid to waste our valuable leisure time on something that might disappoint us, and the unknown always carries that risk. But isn't there the barest chance that you might discover something totally unique, if perhaps flawed?

I watch lots of crappy movies. I have slogged through some of the worst films imaginable, but only twice have I ever begged God for my two hours back, and both of those films were blockbusters.** I watch independent films, Asylum films, foreign movies with subtitles, foreign movies without subtitles, film without synchronized sound, black-and-white comedies, and SyFy productions (um, occasionally. With permission to MST3K it all). Sometimes I hate them, sometimes I love them, but I never hide behind the writer, producer, director, production company, or actors for my choices.

I'm brave. I should be braver when it comes to books. My future would be just a little brighter if everyone were.

In my religious culture, this trend manifests itself even more problematically. Readers would rather re-consume ill-written texts that have been deemed "safe" rather than risk having to process parts of the text that range outside their own experience or idealized morality. There are vast herds of Mormon readers who will read everything written by Anita Stansfield because of what it does NOT contain (swearing, sex, other fun stuff), rather than seeking for something well-crafted and grappling with what it might contain. There is something horrifying about a literary culture based on absence. It is the Nothing. It is the Unmaker.

These readers fear a moral influence, but elements of evil in a text, depending on how they are used, are not necessarily pernicious. If we read bravely, they can be moments of truth-finding. If we read actively, we wrestle with all ideas in texts, not just the ones couched in offensive terms.

Le Sigh. Think of the world if we were all courageous readers who could browse a library's shelves ourselves, and not just phone up to the reference desk to put everything on the New York Times bestseller lists on hold.

 

 

*Clearly spoken by someone who doesn't understand the meaning of the term, though I am often guilty of perhaps exaggerated anger at people who are not sufficiently reverent to the memory of Bradbury's literary genius.

**Wayne's World and Dumb and Dumber respectively. Clearly the 90's comedy era did not suck me in.