![]() We need to nourish and inspire as much as we need to gird and be cautious. But if the readers I talk with regularly are any indication, we need to balance that out in equal measure. We know the world is in a bad way right now, and we respond to stories that speak that truth back to us. And yes, sugar rots, too, if you consume nothing else. If all we have are stories of bleakness, if that’s all we’re feeding ourselves, that’s going to rot us from the inside out. Sugarcoating of the highest order.īut there is a flipside to that. If the only thing we did in the face of trouble was write happy endings (I say, as a writer of happy endings), that’d be disingenuous. We need to tell cautionary tales and put up warning signs. I want to make this as clear as I can, in case the title of this piece makes you think I’m about to come down against that: The darkness we’re seeing in fiction is a healthy thing (and weirdly, often an enjoyable thing-I was thinking of some of my favorite stories as I wrote that last paragraph). Is it any wonder why we gravitate toward protagonists who brave apocalypses and fight dystopian governments? Is it any wonder why so many fictional astronauts are on missions not of scientific exploration, but of human survival? Is it any wonder why our superheroes can’t agree on how best to save us? Is it any wonder why, when Ned Stark got his head chopped off, we thought about it and agreed that being the vocal good guy within a corrupt system is a great way to get yourself killed? We are afraid, and pop culture reflects that. Our stories have naturally followed suit. We are, all of us, walking around in a constant, low-grade anxiety attack. And all of it may be a moot point anyway if a giant space rock shows up, because we’re too busy killing and stressing and starving to prioritize that kind of long-view planning. There’s nothing we can buy that isn’t doing harm in one way or another, and we’re too broke to afford things that soften the blow. Harvesting the raw materials that make said marvelous technology work probably resulted in an environmental horror show. The marvelous technology I’m using to write this was undoubtedly assembled in a sweatshop thousands of miles from here. We have people who don’t have enough to eat while others throw leftovers away. We’re still killing and exploiting each other in ever-inventive ways (and for monstrously stupid reasons). We’re at each other’s throats politically, with no clean resolution in sight. Zoom in a bit, and things don’t look much better. ![]() Our air and water are poisoned, and it’s our fault. ![]() Our neighboring flora and fauna are dying, and it’s our fault. Our glaciers are shrinking, and it’s our fault. Out in the real world, our species is trying to put our 200,000-year-old brains to a task they did not evolve for: solving problems on a planetary level. The contemporary trend in popular fiction (pick a genre, any genre) leans toward grit and grimdark, and for good reason. Comics, literature, video games-all of them reflect the wide spread of values and questions on the table at the time in which they were created. Glance at any medium and you’ll find symbiosis. I imagine this concept is familiar to most folks reading this. It was, to twenty-one-year-old me, one of the most beautiful concepts I’d had my eyes opened to: a constant feedback loop between societal change and creative expression. We weren’t talking about individual works, we were talking about trends. Now, this was not the first time I’d been in a class where we dissected the social conditions surrounding a piece of fiction (reading Huckleberry Finn in high school springs to mind), but it was the first time I’d been a part of that discussion as framed within the entire arc of a century. To talk about the bittersweet, musically diverse dramas of the 1970s, you have to talk about the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution. ![]() To talk about the Rodgers and Hammerstein era, you have to talk about America during (and immediately following) World War II. To talk about the death of vaudeville, you have to talk about the Great Depression. We didn’t just learn the history of musical theater. My recollection of the day-to-day particulars is fuzzy, but the overall structure of the class was something that grabbed me hard. When I was in College, I did a semester-long course on the history of musical theater (such were the perks of being a performing arts student). The Case for Optimism is an essay by Becky Chambers that originally appeared in the third volume of our Quarterly Almanac.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |