ladybusiness | (Reply)

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'I've been wondering why it's so much easier for some issues to speak for themselves than others'

ME TOO! Right now I think it's got a little to do with common social values, so if general society perceives something as absolutely wrong a book is much more able to cast aside didacticism and effectively explore an issue from all angles, without being read as condoning that issue. So, for example, 'Lolita' presents a paedophilic protagonist that the reader is initially encouraged to sympathise with, but each reader knows that general society condemns paedophiles, so we're more willing to go along and see where Nabokov is going with this and feel like what he writes doesn't threaten out particular stance on this issue. Books about rape, are different, because we don't all know that general society agree with our individual stance on rape (every day there's proof that many people just don't get what constitutes rape) and so anything written more ambiguously can lead the individual reader to feel like the book threatens to lend help to a view they despise. It's a theory, but it may not pan out...

I'm not totally sold on the entire removal of didacticism from texts. I think some of the best modern novels in the world include didactic 'comments' in amongst ambiguity, it's just that they do it much more elegantly than the word didactic implies. Paulo Bacigallupi's 'The Wind Up Girl' for example is hugely complex and ambiguous to the max. He never really lets his characters go off on 'here is the point I am trying to make' speeches and pretty awful things happen to good people, but there are deaths and consequences in his novel that reveal where he stands on everything, while he still allows the reader the freedom to make up their own minds on many issues.

In terms of novels about rape Joyce Carol Oates 'Rape: A Love Story' is really realistic and bleakly honest (no real happy endings for anyone involved), but it's pretty clear where JCO stands on rape, without her having to start speechifying (basically a detective starts his own crusade and kills a bunch of the rapists, but it's left really debateable as to whether this makes anything better for anyone involved, or whether this is justice).

I'm reading a novel right now called 'A Fine Balance', written in 1980s, which has the unfairness of poverty built into its whole story, but it's also very..eh...not fair to all its characters exactly, but it allows them humanisation however much they might hurt those below them. I felt the same way about 'Sea of Poppies' which humanised some characters whose actions were pretty despicable, but at the same time made sure (by humanising all the characters they hurt) that readers knew their actions weren't good.

All these novels are open to multiple readings and I bet there are some people that find them too apologist, or too unforgiving, but they definitely have an underlying stance (as it sounds Lanagan's book does, because she spends so long showing how devastating rape is to her main character).

But my thoughts are all tangled up in the mix between art and politics and something at Sophisticated Dorkiness that wondered if the modern novel could, or should ever have the political impact of earlier novels. I'm wandering away from your track - looking forward to seeing what comes next.