A couple of years ago, I was walking down Ponsonby Road one night and, passing the bar Grand Central, overheard a youngish woman sitting outside talking about Harry Potter. Apparently, a Feminist critical theorist she had been reading harboured a grudge against JK Rowling, believed the Harry Potter books had caused the theorist psychological damage because they had "sexualised her at a young age", brought her attention to sexual matters before she was old enough to fully understand them. As happens occasionally in my life, this apparently random experience struck me as a kind of revelation, a snatch of overheard conversation that symptomised a deeper cultural problem. The generation that read Harry Potter when they were children is also the Woke generation of today and so it was inevitable, given the snowflake character of youngish people, their tendency to take offence and externalise personal unhappiness onto outside perpetrators, that eventually they would turn on Rowling herself. Recently, JK landed herself in a great deal of trouble for arguing that sex is biological; immediately, she was labelled 'transphobic' and a TERF (trans exclusionary radical Feminist). A Marie Claire article, titled "The Time Has Come to Let Go of 'Harry Potter'" is perhaps representative of some of the reaction. A quote: "But it is time for Harry Potter to be dethroned from its place atop the zeitgeist. [...]. We should consider shutting down Cursed Child and Harry Potter theme parks. Because we cannot simply and wholly divorce Rowling from the Wizarding World she conjured. When we patronize Harry Potter parks or movies like Fantastic Beasts, she still benefits financially, and her position of power remains unchecked. In doing so, we abandon the trans lives her public statements endanger." Not even JK Rowling is safe from Cancel Culture.
One of the topics that I have returned to in this blog is the creative process that produces fiction, and this process has a bearing on modern attitudes to fiction expressed by people like the Marie Claire essayist. Although I am no Stephen King (who has published at least 95 books), I have read a great deal of fiction, have studied it, and have written two plays, three and a half screenplays, and at least ten short stories, many of which I've published in this blog. The ordinary laity imagine that stories emerge from a vacuum. They don't. Stories come from four places. Writers draw from personal experience; they draw from their observations of other people; they draw from their reading of other fiction; and lastly they sometimes simply make stuff up. The following quote from Thomas Wolfe gives some idea of how he believed that the first two sources are the soil out of which fictions grow: "We are the sum of all the moments of our lives — all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape or conceal it. If the writer has used the clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all men must, what none can keep from using. Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose. Dr. Johnson remarked that a man would turn over half a library to make a single book: in the same way, a novelist may turn over half the people in a town to make a single figure in his novel."
It takes a skilled reader to determine the origins of the various elements that make up a story. Many professors of English bristle at the suggestion that fiction is sometimes disguised autobiography because it then becomes hard to say that the events and people in a work have the wider thematic and symbolic significance that professors of English like to look for; if these elements are the accidental incursions of the writer's environment into the writer's life, they will not be universal. (This is not a blanket statement about all English professors. Many are quite well aware that autobiographical details enter into a work of fiction.) Autobiography, despite what some professors think, undoubtedly inspires and informs fiction. Consider Moby Dick. Herman Melville spent four years aboard whaling vessels and his experiences of real life whaling greatly informed the novel. Moby Dick can be considered a fusion of autobiography with a dramatic and entirely fictional conceit – the monomaniacal obsession of Captain Ahab to find and destroy the White Whale. The two controlling ideas in this work, the descriptions of whaling and Ahab's obsessive quest, one based on reality and one entirely imagined, are brought together by the author's own obsessive and finally hopeless because never-ending quest to fully and exhaustively define the word 'whale', a quest that can only culminate in disaster because it is impossible. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene is inspired by Greene's own affair with Catherine Walston but he combines autobiography with an entirely fictional conceit involving several miracles and a self-sacrifice. I could give other examples but these two in themselves suggest the way writers will fuse autobiography with a fictional conceit to generate a story. This shows indeed that "fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose."
But writers don't just write about themselves, they also write about the people they've met and known. Any decent writer of literary fiction is a kind of amateur psychologist, is fascinated by the inner workings of other people. Madame Bovary is obviously not autobiographical, nor is Anna Karenina. But Flaubert and Tolstoy both understood the psychology of women well enough that generations of readers, including female readers, have found these books not just plausible but profound. This raises a question. Can white writers talk believably about the experiences of black characters, as Carson McCullers attempted in The Heart is A Lonely Hunter and Harriet Beecher Stowe attempted in Uncle Tom's Cabin? Can heterosexual women write convincingly about gay male characters as Annie Proulx tried to do in Brokeback Mountain? Did the creators of the film A Beautiful Mind make a believable film about schizophrenia? It could be argued that authors are attempting to make sense of the world around them through their fictions. It could even be called a kind of madness, the compulsion to try to see the world through somebody else's eyes. In today's politically charged atmosphere many consider it politically incorrect to write about anything outside one's own experience. In a story I published in this blog, A Refusal to Mourn, the protagonist is a blond, white woman with dreadlocks. Was I engaging in cultural appropriation?
Thirdly, authors draw from other fiction. This is most obvious in Fantasy fiction. Fantasy books are largely inspired by Tolkien, featuring elves, dwarves, halflings, and dragons. Fantasy books are like jazz – the writers are improvising around an old standard. The film Knives Out references Agatha Christie style murder mysteries with this twist – the audience knows, or thinks they know, who the murderer is very early on in the film and the murderer is the heroine. JK Rowling draws heavily from two genres: obviously, with wizards, witches, dragons, goblins, were-wolves and house-elves, in a world with a Sauron like-evil nemesis Voldemort, she is drawing on the Fantasy genre. But, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out in a book review titled "The Boy Who Lived", she is also drawing from a genre popular since at least World War 2, the boarding school story, with its depictions of inter-house rivalry, good and bad teachers, and minor disobedience. A third genre that Rowling draws from is children's detective fiction such as The Famous Five. It is not simply that writers draw on other fiction, they also draw upon urban myths and other received wisdom. In A Beautiful Mind, Nash starts interacting with imaginary friends as a first year student at Princeton University; later, after he is diagnosed schizophrenic, he is well when he takes medication and ill when he goes off it. Neither factoid is truly consistent with Nash's actual life history but audiences accept both because they align with popular misconceptions about schizophrenia, the psychiatric wisdom that schizophrenia is a causeless disease that emerges in late adolescence or early adulthood, and the psychiatric wisdom that antipsychotic medication is at all helpful. There is thus no clear boundary between the second and third source for fiction, between observations of others and received wisdom – an author can draw upon his or her observations of other people but can also draw upon psychology textbooks and on other fiction when he or she believes that a work of fiction is an accurate portrayal of possible people. Insofar as fiction provides believable depictions of believable people, there is no clear distinction between fiction and other sources of information about the real world. The novel The Good Son by Paul McVeigh is a work of fiction but it gives, in my opinion, a totally believable account of the causes of homosexuality.
Lastly, writers sometimes just make stuff up. According to the philosopher Hume, we imagine wholly new entities by combining known components – for instance, a Chimera is a composite of known ideas, a creature combining elements of a lion, a goat, and a snake. The new ideas that writers create, from a Humean perspective, are syntheses of disparate, already known elements. In endorsing Hume's notion of the Imagination, I am not saying that I am an Empiricist, as he was. Nor am I saying that I'm a Rationalist, the school of thought traditionally opposed to Empericism. I don't believe that all our knowledge of the world comes from direct experience, but neither do I believe that a person can work out the meaning of life while sitting comfortably in his or her armchair. I believe that much of a person's knowledge comes from what he or she reads or hears from other people. We are immersed in stories from infancy and some of those stories are true and some are not.
The most convincing way of elucidating the creative process is to describe how I came up with some of the stories I have published in this blog. Consider the story 69. There has long been a kind of urban legend in circulation – in this legend, an apparently heterosexual married couple invite a woman to join them for threesomes, and then the wife runs off with the woman. This myth had gathered enough traction that it inspired an episode of Friends in the 1990s. In 2013, it occurred to me that you could tell a story that put a novel twist on this urban legend – a lesbian couple invite a man to join them for threesomes and then one of the lesbians runs off with the man. Obviously, this story would be a comedy. When I sat down to write it in mid-2014, this one idea wasn't enough though– it required another idea, that the man should be a sort of pop-culture geek, and this was enough to get me writing. This second idea came in part from The Big Bang Theory and partly from my own life (like me, Aldous is a fan of Neil Gaiman). The idea that a somewhat ridiculous and inept Star Wars devotee should become such a Lothario I believe added to the absurdity of the narrative. Consider another story, Starlight. The setting is inspired by my time living at the Big House but this idea was fused with another, that the story should feature a character who is in the commune's bad books but who recovers his standing within the commune after the police come looking for him in response to a minor crime and the other members of the commune rally around him by telling the police that he doesn't live there. This character, partly based on myself, barely features in the story – instead I told the story from the point of view of an anonymous generic resident of the commune. In some sense I was trying to make sense of my own life by talking about it from somebody else's perspective.
Stephen Donaldson has argued that stories begin as the collision of two different ideas and I agree with him. The example he gives is the inspiration for his own Thomas Covenant series. Apparently, Donaldson had had the idea of a man, transported to a Fantasy world to battle an evil adversary, who then refuses to fight because he refuses to believe that the Fantasy world is real. But Donaldson wasn't ready to begin writing until this idea had fused with another – that the protagonist of the story should be a leper. (Donaldson talks about this in an essay published alongside the novel The Real Story.) The examples I have already given to my mind demonstrate quite conclusively how stories grow from an interaction of two different ideas. Melville wanted to write about whaling but he also wanted to write an epic tragedy of a semi-Shakespearian figure seeking God or his own death. JK Rowling wanted to tell a Fantasy story of good vs. evil set at a boarding school. Star Wars is a fusion of a good vs. evil story and a really fast-paced homage to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Raiders of the Lost Ark I suspect grew from a collision between a conception of the protagonist (an independent, individualistic, all-American, heroic archeologist with a fedora and bullwhip) and the legend that Nazis carried out occult research in the 1930s to bolster their war chances. (This legend has since been discredited although it also inspired the Hellboy comic books and films.) Raiders of the Lost Ark can also be read as an allegory for the nuclear arms race and as a Jewish revenge fantasy. Of course, a novel or film requires a lot more than just two ideas, but the seed of a story lies in the tension between two disparate foundational concepts. You need two to make a start.
And now we come to the nub, the political dimension of fictions. The characters and events in a story represent abstract ideas, regardless of their origins in the lives of authors. There is a school of thought that all stories have, or should have, morals. A story like The Lorax by Dr. Seuss, for instance, doubtless inspired generations of kids to embrace environmentalism. And, of course, the decisions we make about which stories we tell can have political motivations. The film Hidden Figures for example has been acclaimed as presenting a little known history of the way intelligent black women have participated in state science. It is a story with a moral: that we shouldn't overlook the contributions made by minority groups to science. (Apparently the film contains a number of factual errors but that has no bearing on its political message.) To provide another example, the biopic Darkest Hour, towards the end, contains a scene in which Winston Churchill, aboard an Underground train bound for Westminster, is reassured in his decision not to surrender to Germany by the enthusiastic statements of the other passengers, their avowed willingness to fight rather than simply submit. These other passengers stand in for the British people as a whole, and it is not accidental that prominent among the group is a black man. The writer and director are retroactively projecting modern day multiculturalism onto Britain in 1940. This scene has abstract significance. It dramatises Churchill's character arc, his shift from being an out-of-touch aristocrat to a man who is at one with the common man, a hero for the common man. It also symbolises dramatically the claim that Churchill was on the right side of history. Both Hidden Figures and Darkest Hour are biopics rather than pure fictions but the creators of these stories are quite willing to fictionalise to make their political points. In my view, although real life is usually messier than fiction, the many biopics that have bombarded us in recent years tend to be simpler, morally and politically, than pure fictions. They seem to be saying that history has a trajectory from bad to good, to be marking the milestones in humanity's progress towards the wonderfully tolerant multi-everything liberal world in which we live today. I would explore this idea further but it would better be saved for another post.
The idea that all stories have political subtexts, that they either reinforce or challenge ideologies, has been taught in Literature Departments for decades. A cottage industry exists of columnists and other opinion-makers, schooled in this way of thinking, scrutinising stories and then either praising or condemning them for the Political Correctness. An example of such a commentator in New Zealand is the New Zealand Herald columnist Siena Yates. Yates, in the past, has written columns talking about the representation of queer and transgender people in film and TV; the rationale is that queer people exist and they deserve recognition and representation. I like Siena but the type of critical discourse she engages in is problematic. The reason it is problematic is that the best stories are necessarily ambiguous, they depend on conflict; insofar as they are political, they tend to present a progressive and reactionary message simultaneously – although, in order for a story to find closure, to end, one of the two idealogical positions has to win out. I have presented this view of narratives in earlier posts (in some ways it echoes Derrida). But such a sophisticated way of looking at stories, even though it is the best way, is not the prism through which commentators of the sort I have described view fictions. If their view became the paradigm, if all stories had to be ideologically pure, we would end up in a world without stories at all.
I am a member of the Auckland Film society and just now have returned from a screening. (This post has taken me several days to write.) The film I saw was the gay love story God's Own Country; if my approach to stories is at all valid, it should apply to all decent stories, and so I have been pacing around my apartment trying to work out an interpretation of it. For those who haven't seen this film, it is about a young closeted gay man who works in his family's farm in rural Yorkshire. The family employ a Romanian gypsy to work as farmhand and he and the protagonist embark on a torrid and more or less secret affaire. The film ends with the two returning to the farm after breaking up briefly and the implicit understanding that their relationship will now be public, official, and that they will work together in the future to manage to farm. It seems to me that the story, as always, results from a collision of two ideas – the rural Yorkshire setting and the gay love story. But we can also analyse its politics. The protagonist is presented early on as making a habit of engaging in anonymous, casual sex in places like pub bathrooms; Johnny and Gheorghe break up at Plot Point 2 after Johnny cheats on Gheorghe in a bathroom; the film ends with Johnny and Gheorghe reuniting and Johnny, asleep, resting his head on Gheoghe's shoulder as they bus back home. The film is thus representing the conflict between a reactionary and progressive understanding of homosexuality. The reactionary view is that homosexuality is all about sex (anonymous, promiscuous, and casual) while the progressive view is that homosexuality is all about love (committed and monogamous). The latter view wins out. In this it is mirroring a shift in societal values that has occurred over the last fifteen years. A significant aspect of the film is that Johnny never explicitly comes out to his father and grandmother. Instead they come to know and accept his homosexuality without it ever being explicitly said.
A completely different film, but one no less interesting, is the first Rambo film, First Blood. I won't conjecture about the ideas that inspired it and shall focus on its politics. Nor will I give a synopsis of this film because one is available on Wikipedia which seems to do fairly good job. Suffice it to say that Rambo is let down and abandoned by his own government and fellow citizens, and so takes arms against them. In depicting Rambo's plight as a rootless vagrant subjected to mistreatment by local authorities, First Blood is calling attention to the situation of many Vietnam veterans, their mistreatment by their own countrymen, a social issue that is most clearly communicated in the film's final scene. However, the bulk of the film depicts Rambo's solitary war against the local police of a small American town, then the State Police, and then the National Guard. The film gradually reveals that Rambo is a super-warrior, fearless, exceptionally competent, seemingly indestructible; the audience wants him to win and half expects him to win. Rambo's fight is a kind of symbolic replay of the Vietnam war in which Rambo represents American soldiers generally and the police and state military stand in for the Vietcong. There is also a sense that Rambo represents the eventually victorious Vietcong and the local military stand in for the American military presence in Vietnam, unable to defeat a guerrilla despite overwhelming numerical and technological superiority. I admit this reading seems paradoxical – Rambo is at once all-American and America's enemy, the town constabulary is at once America and its foe – but this is the ambiguity at the heart of the story. The idea, it appears to me, that the film is playing with is the premise that the Vietnam war was traumatic not because it was unethical but rather because the United States lost. The moral of the story is that American soldiers did everything possible to win, should have won, and could have won if they hadn't been betrayed by their own side. Rambo is trapped in a vicious loop, endlessly trying to win an unwinnable war. The film is founded on a conflict between the patriotic tenet, "America always wins" and the reality that the US lost the Vietnam war, and this leads to a paradoxical, wish-fulfilling identification of an all-American hero with the Vietcong. At the end of the film reality wins out; it ends with Rambo the loser, surrendering, victimised by his own traumatic past.
The tunnel vision of Woke commentators, their failure to see that the best stories are ambiguous, leads some commentators down a kind of blind alley, into critiques that are disingenuous if not downright backwards. An example of this is the approbation heaped on the film The Danish Girl. Like other biopics, this film marks a milestone – supposedly the first male-to-female transgender woman to undergo sex reassignment surgery. In representing the first trans person, this film has been hailed as an important moment in the movement towards trans rights. The problem with the praise heaped on this film by Woke commentators is that, according to established Woke wisdom, trans women are women who are born with the brains of women and the bodies of men. But this view, contrary to the synopsis of the film given by Wikipedia, is not what The Danish Girl presents. Einar Wegener is a man in his forties who is encouraged by his wife to dress in women's clothes as she needs a female subject for her paintings. Shortly after, they attend to a party, Einar dressed in drag as a lark, where there he is kissed by a man and suffers a sudden and apparently inexplicable nose bleed. These events, combined with some serious unresolved issues from childhood, instigate a kind of descent into madness. When watching the film, it is hard not to conclude that Einar/Lili goes nuts, an interpretation that is borne out by a scene towards the end of the film in which Lili says that she wants to have children – even in the 1920s this must have been known to be a biological impossibility. Despite its seemingly unimpeachable progressive credentials, The Danish Girl has a conservative subtext – it smuggles in the truth under a Politically Correct banner. Another example of the way Woke commentators seize on fictions as being allied to the Woke cause when they are not is the way the Sandman comic books by Neil Gaiman have been adulated. Gaiman often features gay and transexual characters and this has led some commentators to suppose that he espouses the view of gender advanced by Judith Butler. But a close reading of an important storyline, A Game of You, quite clearly shows the victory of a white, cisnormative, heteronormative patriarchy over queers, trans people, and women (although the story presents this victory as a kind of tragedy). I wrote about The Sandman and A Game of You in 2017, in the post "A Case Study of Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman"" and in the two posts that followed it chronologically; I recommend readers have a look at these posts because they were some of the best interpretations I have written. In this post, it is enough to say that every good story presents a paradox or contradiction, an aporia. The ambiguity of The Danish Girl or The Sandman is a strength, not a weakness.
We are born into a world of stories, stories that sometimes contradict each other. A fiction arises from the tension between the stories we tell each other and ourselves, and the lived experience of the storyteller. Stories are inspired by experience and by other stories, and the best stories deal with the grandest of themes, have abstract as well as biographical significance. Every story is both personal and political because the personal is the political. And every story has the potential to change the world. To expect stories to be perfect, or to cancel JK Rowling because she made a couple of supposedly transphobic remarks, would be to do a disservice to literature.
I want to finish this post by talking about Sam Harris. A couple of days ago I heard, on Youtube, the clip entitled "Can We Pull Back From The Brink?" The reason I wish to mention it is that Harris echoes an argument that I used in the previous post. I think Harris published this podcast after I'd written that post; certainly, I hadn't heard his podcast until after I'd written the last post. It makes me wonder if Sam Harris reads my blog. In this podcast, Harris makes an extraordinary claim – he argues that there is no systemic racism in the US police force at all, or to use his type of argument, that there is no evidence of systemic racism. This claim is extraordinary because it runs completely counter to everything that is being said by other people I follow on Youtube, such as Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert, and by the protestors marching in the streets. If there is no systemic racism (and thus no unconscious bias and no white privilege), why are people protesting? I cannot believe that there is no systemic racism in American society. Sometimes I feel that I am caught in a double-bind: I cannot subscribe to the Woke faction but nor can stake a position alongside the most vocal anti-Woke intellectual pundits. Anecdotally, there is evidence of systemic racism and perhaps that is enough. Despite excesses that occurred at Evergreen College and have occurred recently, there is a germ of truth to the demonstrators' complaints. Nevertheless, Harris makes a strong argument. If you do read this blog, Sam, I advise you to have a debate with someone who has evidence of the opposing position. Something might change your mind.
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