The Charlie the Tuna Problem in literature
Good place is no place
Chloe Houston, Times Literary Supplement, 11/22/17:
Chloe Houston, Times Literary Supplement, 11/22/17:
What place does utopia have in 2017? It is now half a millennium since the word was invented by Thomas More as the name of his imaginary island, located in the New World and visited by the Portuguese sailor Raphael Hythloday, who describes it, in conversation with a fictitious Thomas More, as an exemplary society. Utopia, as More coined it, means “no-place”, the prefix ou in ancient Greek connoting negation, and also “good place”, eu suggesting “well” or “good”. Utopia is nowhere, and if utopian societies can be said to have any defining characteristics, then a lack of existence in the real world is probably one of them.
If utopia is conventionally nowhere, however, then in 2016 it seemed to be everywhere, as Utopia’s quincentenary was celebrated with an array of publications, exhibitions and events. These included numerous academic conferences and books, a year-long festival at Somerset House called UTOPIA 2016: A year of imagination and possibility, and Utopia500, an international project which celebrated utopian thinking as a driver of social change and promoted commemorative events throughout the year. This was a good time for writing and thinking about utopia: a utopian moment for utopian studies.
Yet dystopia (the Greek prefix dus meaning bad or unfavourable) was also ubiquitous in 2016, when the politics of division triumphed: the American election of a climate change-denier as President; Britain’s acrimonious referendum; and the strengthening of nationalist political parties across Europe. These victories seemed to remake the political landscape and made imaginable the possibility of dystopia in our own time. With the immediate future in mind, “dystopias are certainly easier” to imagine, as Ursula Le Guin writes in an essay on utopian fiction, published last year in a new edition of More’s Utopia, introduced by China Miéville and produced in conjunction with the Somerset House festival.
This has not always been the case. Utopian literature proliferated in the late seventeenth century, for example, in the wake of the Civil War. Writers such as Samuel Hartlib, John Dury and the rest of the Hartlib Circle devoted themselves to imagining idealized institutions such as schools, universities and libraries, which would give wider access to knowledge and improve humanity’s capacity to understand the world in which it lived. There is a direct line between their utopian imaginings – and those of their predecessor Francis Bacon, whose New Atlantis of 1626 projected a utopian scientific institution, Salomon’s House – and the development of real institutions such as the Royal Society, founded in 1660. Seventeenth-century utopian writers often rejected the imaginative trappings of utopian fiction, such as the mythical island and the difficult journey, precisely because they wanted to emphasize the practicality of the ideas they portrayed. They also wanted to be taken seriously; and “utopian” was already a dirty word by that time, used to describe ideas and places that were too good to be true...
In literature, as in politics, utopia and dystopia are of course inextricably linked, two sides of the same coin. It was John Stuart Mill who seems to have used the d-word first, during a debate on Irish land tithes in the House of Commons in 1868: Mill suggested that the Conservative government should be called “dystopians, or cacotopians” as “what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable”. In Mill’s conception, dystopias and utopias both fail on the grounds of practicality, the one seeming too bad, and the other too good, to be put into action. The word “dystopia” was not widely used until the twentieth century; it seems to have become characteristic of the early twenty-first. By common consent, we live in a dystopian age, and “dystopia”, as Gregory Claeys observes in Dystopia: A natural history, “increasingly defines the spirit of our times”. Dystopian literature may seem a natural place to turn in the face of international political upheaval: in the first weeks of the Trump administration, as the New York Times reported in January, Nineteen Eighty-four leapt to the top of the Amazon bestseller list, as readers faced with “alternative facts” sought out fictional parallels.
There has always been a protectionist element to fictional utopian societies – an interest in building walls and isolating themselves from the wider world – starting with Thomas More’s island of Utopia itself. There the entrance to the harbour by which the island is accessed is narrow, and protected by invisible rocks, lying beneath the water and making navigation perilous to foreigners. Utopian societies in literature are often difficult to access, and harder still to join and to participate in as a citizen. Yet there are also significant differences between, say, Trump’s America and More’s Utopia, perhaps the most obvious being that More’s Utopians disdain capitalism and those who covet gold. The Utopians, who use gold to make chamber-pots and slaves’ chains, and mock visitors wearing expensive jewellery, would have no room for Trump Tower.
If utopia is conventionally nowhere, however, then in 2016 it seemed to be everywhere, as Utopia’s quincentenary was celebrated with an array of publications, exhibitions and events. These included numerous academic conferences and books, a year-long festival at Somerset House called UTOPIA 2016: A year of imagination and possibility, and Utopia500, an international project which celebrated utopian thinking as a driver of social change and promoted commemorative events throughout the year. This was a good time for writing and thinking about utopia: a utopian moment for utopian studies.
Yet dystopia (the Greek prefix dus meaning bad or unfavourable) was also ubiquitous in 2016, when the politics of division triumphed: the American election of a climate change-denier as President; Britain’s acrimonious referendum; and the strengthening of nationalist political parties across Europe. These victories seemed to remake the political landscape and made imaginable the possibility of dystopia in our own time. With the immediate future in mind, “dystopias are certainly easier” to imagine, as Ursula Le Guin writes in an essay on utopian fiction, published last year in a new edition of More’s Utopia, introduced by China Miéville and produced in conjunction with the Somerset House festival.
This has not always been the case. Utopian literature proliferated in the late seventeenth century, for example, in the wake of the Civil War. Writers such as Samuel Hartlib, John Dury and the rest of the Hartlib Circle devoted themselves to imagining idealized institutions such as schools, universities and libraries, which would give wider access to knowledge and improve humanity’s capacity to understand the world in which it lived. There is a direct line between their utopian imaginings – and those of their predecessor Francis Bacon, whose New Atlantis of 1626 projected a utopian scientific institution, Salomon’s House – and the development of real institutions such as the Royal Society, founded in 1660. Seventeenth-century utopian writers often rejected the imaginative trappings of utopian fiction, such as the mythical island and the difficult journey, precisely because they wanted to emphasize the practicality of the ideas they portrayed. They also wanted to be taken seriously; and “utopian” was already a dirty word by that time, used to describe ideas and places that were too good to be true...
In literature, as in politics, utopia and dystopia are of course inextricably linked, two sides of the same coin. It was John Stuart Mill who seems to have used the d-word first, during a debate on Irish land tithes in the House of Commons in 1868: Mill suggested that the Conservative government should be called “dystopians, or cacotopians” as “what they appear to favour is too bad to be practicable”. In Mill’s conception, dystopias and utopias both fail on the grounds of practicality, the one seeming too bad, and the other too good, to be put into action. The word “dystopia” was not widely used until the twentieth century; it seems to have become characteristic of the early twenty-first. By common consent, we live in a dystopian age, and “dystopia”, as Gregory Claeys observes in Dystopia: A natural history, “increasingly defines the spirit of our times”. Dystopian literature may seem a natural place to turn in the face of international political upheaval: in the first weeks of the Trump administration, as the New York Times reported in January, Nineteen Eighty-four leapt to the top of the Amazon bestseller list, as readers faced with “alternative facts” sought out fictional parallels.
There has always been a protectionist element to fictional utopian societies – an interest in building walls and isolating themselves from the wider world – starting with Thomas More’s island of Utopia itself. There the entrance to the harbour by which the island is accessed is narrow, and protected by invisible rocks, lying beneath the water and making navigation perilous to foreigners. Utopian societies in literature are often difficult to access, and harder still to join and to participate in as a citizen. Yet there are also significant differences between, say, Trump’s America and More’s Utopia, perhaps the most obvious being that More’s Utopians disdain capitalism and those who covet gold. The Utopians, who use gold to make chamber-pots and slaves’ chains, and mock visitors wearing expensive jewellery, would have no room for Trump Tower.
T.D. Storm, Lit Hub, 12/12/17:
...Ultimately, the whole project gives the impression of being based on two simplistic and very flawed premises: 1) you can judge a sex scene ripped from context, and 2) a good sex scene evokes not amusement, disdain, or pity but rather arousal (and yes, this second premise exists despite the pronouncement that the award is “not intended to cover pornographic or overtly erotic literature”).
When you take a passage in isolation, you lack the ability to assess whether it’s satirical, whether there’s some dramatic irony there that would make us feel or know something the character doesn’t know, whether it’s inflected with a perspective or a character’s state of mind. This last point is especially important because sex is something that is more attitudinally inflected than most activities. To look at a sex scene and to critique its description of the mechanics of the sex without having a full understanding of the attitude informing that description is irresponsible reading.
And the purpose of a sex scene in literature is often not to titillate. Sex is an interaction. The author’s goal is to use interactions to test the character in some way—and to use that test to help illuminate character objective, stakes, and personality traits. Privileging arousal makes the interaction about us, the readers, not the characters. Sometimes, of course, the characters themselves are sexually aroused—in ways that might seem immature and funny to us. But good writing about sex does not have to turn the reader on.
Literary Review is surely better than I’m portraying them. They know that context matters; they know that sex scenes do not need to titillate. But why continue this mean-spirited tradition that is sloppy and tone deaf at worst and nitpicky (in ways that elude most outlets reporting on the award) at best?
What bothers me most about the Bad Sex in Fiction Award is that it’s rooted in and accompanied by a mob of unthinkingness. There is little or no meaningful critique released with each year’s announcement of shortlists and winners, but lots of bandwagon mockery. For an infinitely more illuminating discussion of what sex could—and should—look like in literature, read Salon’s Good Sex in Fiction series (which, lamentably, only ran for one year).
When you take a passage in isolation, you lack the ability to assess whether it’s satirical, whether there’s some dramatic irony there that would make us feel or know something the character doesn’t know, whether it’s inflected with a perspective or a character’s state of mind. This last point is especially important because sex is something that is more attitudinally inflected than most activities. To look at a sex scene and to critique its description of the mechanics of the sex without having a full understanding of the attitude informing that description is irresponsible reading.
And the purpose of a sex scene in literature is often not to titillate. Sex is an interaction. The author’s goal is to use interactions to test the character in some way—and to use that test to help illuminate character objective, stakes, and personality traits. Privileging arousal makes the interaction about us, the readers, not the characters. Sometimes, of course, the characters themselves are sexually aroused—in ways that might seem immature and funny to us. But good writing about sex does not have to turn the reader on.
Literary Review is surely better than I’m portraying them. They know that context matters; they know that sex scenes do not need to titillate. But why continue this mean-spirited tradition that is sloppy and tone deaf at worst and nitpicky (in ways that elude most outlets reporting on the award) at best?
What bothers me most about the Bad Sex in Fiction Award is that it’s rooted in and accompanied by a mob of unthinkingness. There is little or no meaningful critique released with each year’s announcement of shortlists and winners, but lots of bandwagon mockery. For an infinitely more illuminating discussion of what sex could—and should—look like in literature, read Salon’s Good Sex in Fiction series (which, lamentably, only ran for one year).
Emily Temple, Lit Hub, 11/22/17:
5 famous books put on trial or banned for the naughty bits. Of one, Catcher in the Rye, she writes,
In her book about J.D. Salinger and his most famous novel, Raychel Haugrud Reiff identifies “four main reasons” for the constant censoring of The Catcher in the Rye: bad language, “‘scandalous episodes,'” bad role modeling on the part of Holden, and Holden’s disavowal of “American values.” She notes that “from 1966 to 1975, forty-one attempts were made to keep The Catcher in the Rye out of public education institutions, making it ‘the most frequently banned book in schools’ during these years.” Some examples:
In 1962, a parent in Temple City, California found the language “crude, profane, and obscene” and argued that the novel attacked “home life, [the] teaching profession, religion, and so forth.”
In 1963, parents in Columbus, Ohio asked for the novel to be banned because it was “anti-white.”
In 1972, parents in Massachusetts “claimed that no young person could read this ‘totally filthy, totally depraved and totally profane’ book ‘without being scarred.'”
In 1978, a concerned citizen in Issaquah, Washington, “found 785 profanities and charged that including the novel in the [high school] syllabus was ‘part of an overall communist plot.” By the way, 1984 was also once bizarrely challenged, in 1981 in Jackson Country, Florida, for being “procommunist.”
I also heard that page 32 has no less than 3 goddamns. Salacious.
In 1962, a parent in Temple City, California found the language “crude, profane, and obscene” and argued that the novel attacked “home life, [the] teaching profession, religion, and so forth.”
In 1963, parents in Columbus, Ohio asked for the novel to be banned because it was “anti-white.”
In 1972, parents in Massachusetts “claimed that no young person could read this ‘totally filthy, totally depraved and totally profane’ book ‘without being scarred.'”
In 1978, a concerned citizen in Issaquah, Washington, “found 785 profanities and charged that including the novel in the [high school] syllabus was ‘part of an overall communist plot.” By the way, 1984 was also once bizarrely challenged, in 1981 in Jackson Country, Florida, for being “procommunist.”
I also heard that page 32 has no less than 3 goddamns. Salacious.
This Week’s Birthdays:
December 17:
Ford Madox Ford (1873); Erskine Caldwell (1903)
December 18:
Saki (1870); Ossie Davis Centennial (1917); Michael Moorecock (1939)
December 19:
Eleanor Hodgman Porter (1868); Henry Clay Frick (1849); Jean Genet (1910)
From Henry Bemis Books’ profile of Porter:
America was mad for stories of plucky children and lost heiresses who triumphed over adversity- as in Inez Irwin Hayes’ endless Maida series (1910-55)- and Hodgman was up to the challenge. In two decades she produced fifteen novels and 21 collections of short stories- over two hundred in all.
Hodgman’s claim to deathless fame was, and remains, her 1913 novel, Pollyanna, a tale of an orphaned minister's daughter boarded with old, stiff, thrawn-faced relatives in a town full of the same. Filtering her every waking moment through what she called “the glad game,” Pollyanna saw the good in everything, eventually transforming the town into an unrelievedly sunny eden.
Early in the book, Pollyanna, poking in the dregs of the barrel of castoffs her missionary father received from home, hoped for a new dress but found only a pair of crutches. From this, she determined to be grateful that she did not need them. By the book's end, she temporarily lost the use of her legs in a car accident; convalescing, she was grateful they didn’t have to be removed; and, later, even more grateful that she got the use of them back. Whether she was over the moon at having saved those crutches- you never know- I could not bear to reread the book to remember.
In a nation of just over ninety million people, Pollyanna sold over a million copies, going through 47 printings by 1920. It remained in the top ten US bestsellers for three years. So popular did Porter become that she stayed in the top ten, with various books, from 1913 to 1918, and generated an equally saccharine sequel, Pollyanna Grows Up, in 1915.
Glad Clubs sprang up across the land; one was still operating in Denver as late as 2008. Helen Hayes took Pollyanna to Broadway in 1916, and Mary Pickford, to film in 1920. Parker Brothers brought out a Glad board game; fourteen more Pollyanna books came out in the years after her death, including two in the 1990s. There were Pollyanna calendars, and almanacs offering daily reasons for gladness.
Hodgman’s claim to deathless fame was, and remains, her 1913 novel, Pollyanna, a tale of an orphaned minister's daughter boarded with old, stiff, thrawn-faced relatives in a town full of the same. Filtering her every waking moment through what she called “the glad game,” Pollyanna saw the good in everything, eventually transforming the town into an unrelievedly sunny eden.
Early in the book, Pollyanna, poking in the dregs of the barrel of castoffs her missionary father received from home, hoped for a new dress but found only a pair of crutches. From this, she determined to be grateful that she did not need them. By the book's end, she temporarily lost the use of her legs in a car accident; convalescing, she was grateful they didn’t have to be removed; and, later, even more grateful that she got the use of them back. Whether she was over the moon at having saved those crutches- you never know- I could not bear to reread the book to remember.
In a nation of just over ninety million people, Pollyanna sold over a million copies, going through 47 printings by 1920. It remained in the top ten US bestsellers for three years. So popular did Porter become that she stayed in the top ten, with various books, from 1913 to 1918, and generated an equally saccharine sequel, Pollyanna Grows Up, in 1915.
Glad Clubs sprang up across the land; one was still operating in Denver as late as 2008. Helen Hayes took Pollyanna to Broadway in 1916, and Mary Pickford, to film in 1920. Parker Brothers brought out a Glad board game; fourteen more Pollyanna books came out in the years after her death, including two in the 1990s. There were Pollyanna calendars, and almanacs offering daily reasons for gladness.
Walt Disney, who in the 1950s never met a lily that couldn’t bear gilding, cast 14-year-old British actress Hayley Mills in a remake of Pollyanna. She won the last Juvenile Oscar for her role (Annette Funicello accepted it for her) and spent six years under contract with Disney (he pressured her to turn down the title role in Lolita as unwholesome).
Within a decade of Pollyanna’s publication, the name became a household word. Webster’s Dictionary defined it as "an excessively or blindly optimistic person" and one who is cheerful to a fault. After her sequel came out, Porter herself was a bit defensive about the sunny monster she had loosed:
"You know I have been made to suffer from the Pollyanna books. ... People have thought that Pollyanna chirped that she was 'glad' at everything. ... I have never believed that we ought to deny discomfort and pain and evil; I have merely thought that it is far better to 'greet the unknown with a cheer.'
Porter died, childless, in 1920. Littleton, New Hampshire cheerfully clasps her to its civic bosom, celebrating Pollyanna Days annually and having erected a statue to the fictional heroine.
December 20:
Hortense Calisher (1910)
December 21:
Benjamin Disraeli (1804); Albert Payson Terhune and Rebecca West (1892); Diana Athill Centennial (1917)
December 22:
Edward Arlington Robinson (1869)
December 23:
Carlos Castaneda (1925); Robert Bly (1926)
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