“Literature”

John Boyne: setting back Holocaust education since 2006

"Literature"
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If my novel about the Holocaust resulted in such pig ignorant takes on it, I wouldn’t write a sequel, but John Boyne is made of sterner stuff.

Boyne protests that his work is “just a fable,” but this doesn’t detract from the views of children after reading the book, many of which are quoted in the study mentioned above. “We always think of the Nazis as the bad guys and this shows that the Holocaust didn’t just affect the Jews (…) but the problems that Nazi families might encounter and what their problems were,” said Dan, a year 9 student. “It is too easy to feel sorry for the Jews (…), I don’t mean that in a rude way, it is just like, everyone is always (…) going to sympathize with the Jews (…) when you see it from like Bruno or the mother’s perspective it seems a bit different because they had to live with that,” said Jack, year 12. The most egregious quote though is “they (the Nazis) couldn’t do anything about it because they (…) basically got killed off if they didn’t do what he (Hitler) said (…) it doesn’t matter who was the bigger victim, they (Nazis and Jews) were all still victims of Hitler’s control in some shape or form,” from Erica, year 11.

This is why I distrust Holocaust fiction. Or any fiction revolving around recent genocides written by the un-involved. Even when done with the best of intentions it’s disrespectful. You’r e turning a history that isn’t yours, with all the pain and suffering associated with it and turn it into a setting for what’s usually just a trite morality play, giving your story a grandour and seriousness that it hasn’t earned. In the process the actual victims — Jews, Roma, Poles, others — are reduced to background bit players in their own tragedy.

It is bad enough when it’s some fundamentalist Christian hack writer using Auschwitz as a background to showcase the moral struggles of the SS Kamp Kommandant as he converts to Christianity, but much more dangerous when it’s a renowned literary writer like John Boyne. As Ally Goldber writes in the Kveller article cited above shows, because it became a bestseller and because of the cachet given to it by who wrote it, the Boy in the Striped pyjamas is widely used to teach the Holocaust to children, therefore doing enormous damage to their understanding of what it was like. That’s what leads to ideas that both Jews and Nazis were victims, that Nazi pain is more interesting, somehow better or more real than the pain of their victims. It reduces the Holocaust to a nice tearjerker that doesn’t blame anybody and we don’t need to worry about because, as the last lines of the novel states: Of course, all of this happened a long time ago and nothing like that could ever happen again. Not in this day and age.

No wonder John Boyne ended up in a slagging match with the Auschwitz Museum on Twitter, who stated that “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas” should be avoided by anyone who studies or teaches about the history of the Holocaust. The main problem with the book is well pointed out by Hannah May Randall writing for the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre: Because the focus of the story remains on Bruno’s family, the book does not engage with the main tragedy of the Holocaust: that none of the people in the gas chamber should have been there. The lines between victims and perpetrators are blurred, the Holocaust is reduced to almost a natural disaster that nobody could really be blamed for. and while it’s sad what happened to the Jews, the real tragedy is when a real person like Bruno is caught up in it.

If you compare Boyne’s output with something like Art Spiegelman’s Mause, you really notice how anodyne and two-dimensional it is. Vladek, Spiegelman’s father and main character is not some cardboard saint, but a real person, somebody who comes across as a bit of an asshole to his son. Spiegelman himself is not an entirely sympathetic figure either, struggling with the heritage of his parents’ experiences as Holocaust survivors and how that fucked up his own life as well. It doesn’t pretend to let you understand the Holocaust, but rather an attempt by Spiegelman to understand his own personal history, imperfectly as it may be rendered in a comic. That appeals a lot more to me than the pretentions with which Boyne approaches the subject.

But the best way I’ve found to glimpse even an inkling of the true horrors of the Holocaust is by following the Auschwitz Museum on twitter. Each day they tweet out the biographies of some of the people that were sent to Auschwitz and their fate. The four quoted here were just the first four I saw today when looking at their timeline, but most of them read like this. Somebody is born, grows up, is sent to the camp and is murdered there. Jew, Roma, Pole, Russian, an endless stream of promising lives destroyed. That to me is more horrifying and enlightening than any fictional story could ever be.

All those phonies arguing about Holden again

"Literature"
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Latest one day Twitter controversy was the eternal debate about The Catcher in the Rye, kicked off this time by somebody who apparantly felt the need to warn women against men who like Holden Caulfield too much. By the time it crossed my feed, the backlash against that position was already in full swing, but I do feel the need to add my two cents. To start with, is there actually anybody under the age of sixty who has The Catcher in the Rye as their favourite book, or Holden as their hero?

Doubt.

Furthermore, is anybody ever honest about why they dislike The Catcher in the Rye so much? I’ve seen all this before, back to the days of Usenet and rec.arts.sf.written, I know what this is about. It’s the pure resentment of the book nerd for being made to read books in school they didn’t enjoy. Normal people just write this off as just another annoying thing that high school forced them to do, but to your average book lover it’s an insult that they’re made to read books they don’t want to. How dare they make me read this trash when I could be reading something I’d actually enjoy. I don’t need this, I’m a reader, not so slavish television consumer. That’s the mindset we’re dealing with here, the 16 year old intellectual outraged that their teacher puts them on the same level as their class mates. A resentment stoked and nurtured for decades. And poor old Catcher gets it in the neck because it’s one of a few novels everybody had to read in high school.

You can’t really say that of course without being laughed at, so you get all those high faluting excuses about Holden as an exemplar of toxic masculinity blah blah blah. Occassionally you get some earnest young puritants involved too who think all fictional characters should be moral exemplars and who cannot get their head around unsympathetic protagonists, but usually it’s just boomers and gen-xers begrudging their high school English classes.

Maybe grow a thicker skin?

"Literature", Art & Criticism
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I’m sorry, but I just can’t see what’s so horrible about this statement that it got Sarah Dessen and a whole host of other big Name YA authors to flip their lid so hard:

During her junior year, Brooke Nelson said she fought hard against a Sarah Dessen book being selected.

“She’s fine for teen girls,” the 2017 Northern graduate said. “But definitely not up to the level of Common Read. So I became involved simply so I could stop them from ever choosing Sarah Dessen.”

Sarah Dessen, who apparantly has a google search alert for herself set up, reacted as follows (the tweet has of course been deleted since):

Authors are real people. We put our heart and soul into the stories we write often because it is literally how we survive in this world. I’m having a really hard time right now and this is just mean and cruel. I hope it made you feel good.

Which, you know, I understand. It is hard to see somebody dismiss your work as not college worthy so casually and if that makes you feel bad, you’re free to gripe about it to your friends. But she didn’t. She posted it on her twitter, taken out of context, for a quarter million or so followers. And then other YA authors with equally large followings did the same, some in the name of feminism. Because if something is feminist, it’s gangin up on a college student when you’re a bunch of succesful authors with a large, somewhat fanantical fanbase.

It was an old fashioned form of fisking that all those people , including N. K. Jemisin, which was …disappointing… engaged in. That first sentence “she’s fine for teen girls” was dissected as meaning that Brooke Nelson was dimsissive of teen girls, was unfairly biased to Dessen, a self hating woamn, etc. Insecurity and genuine concern about the place of YA fiction in wider literature led to take after take suggesting she was guilty of rampant misogeny and personally resposnible for all gender inequality everywhere. Earnest explainations of how teenage girls are always dismissed and not taken seriously were used as a cudgel to attack her with and nobody saw the irony of a group of mostly rich, mostly middle aged authors going after a college student for something she was involved with three years ago and had three sentences in a local paper talking about it?

Stop doing this. Stop overreacting to critics or readers disliking your work, stop ego surfing if you can’t handle negative reactions to your work. Stop pretending that somebody disliking you is an attack on all YA authors.

Grow up.

“A literary trick”

"Literature", Art & Criticism, science fiction
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In the New Yorker Junot Diaz talks about MFA vs POC.

From what I saw the plurality of students and faculty had been educated exclusively in the tradition of writers like William Gaddis, Francine Prose, or Alice Munro—and not at all in the traditions of Toni Morrison, Cherrie Moraga, Maxine Hong-Kingston, Arundhati Roy, Edwidge Danticat, Alice Walker, or Jamaica Kincaid. In my workshop the default subject position of reading and writing—of Literature with a capital L—was white, straight and male. This white straight male default was of course not biased in any way by its white straight maleness—no way! Race was the unfortunate condition of nonwhite people that had nothing to do with white people and as such was not a natural part of the Universal of Literature, and anyone that tried to introduce racial consciousness to the Great (White) Universal of Literature would be seen as politicizing the Pure Art and betraying the (White) Universal (no race) ideal of True Literature.

One way how this works was described by Anne Ursu talking about the way mainstream literary criticism has anointed John Green as the saviour of Young Adult fiction:

So the peculiar canonization of John Green and this string of bizarre articles that anoint him as the vanguard of a post-sparkly-vampire seriousness in YA isn’t simply about taking a white male more seriously than everyone else. It’s also about privileging a certain narrative structure—the dominant narrative’s dominant narrative. It’s not only that Green is a straight white man, it’s that he writes in the way that generations of straight white men have deemed important and Literary. And in art, the remaking of form has historically made the establishment very uncomfortable.

Apart from his own writing, Juan Diaz is perhaps best known for the following quote:

Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we’re taking over.

Which may be the most visible way in which the tension between literary values and writers of colour Diaz talks about in his essay plays out. For example in a Strange Horizons review of the science fiction anthology The Long Hidden where the reviewer was critical about the use of dialect in one story:

Troy L. Wiggins’s “A Score of Roses” features heavy use of phonetic dialect, a literary trick which works perhaps one time out of a hundred—a shame, because the story underneath all the “chil’ren”s and “yo’self”s is charming.

Which sparked a mini debate about dialect, first on Twitter with Daniel José Older (one of the editors of The Long Hidden) and Rose Lemberg criticising the assumptions made in the review.

Troy L. Wiggins himself wrote his own response about dialect being called a “literay trick”:

And, to be honest, I’m still not angry at the reviewer for not understanding before that review went to print exactly why her statement would be problematic. That she was essentially claiming that the voice I used to tell my story wasn’t sufficient, because it was a trick–and hackneyed to boot. That maybe this suggestion crossed the line from “i didn’t like this story” to “this story’s quality is invalid because of this THING.” Another friend of mine, another fantastic creator, recently gave me this advice: “Tell it true.” Sure, I could have used a style of dialogue that was less–whatever, I don’t know what would have been appropriate for the reviewer–but it wouldn’t have been true.

He also linked to Junot Diaz’s MFA vs POC essay and talked about his own experiences in writing workshops:

In my first year workshop, there was a young dreadlocked black woman who wrote in the tradition of Hurston, Walker, and Wright. Homegirl took big steps. She wrote in a powerful voice that mixed Wright’s sensibilities with Hurston’s down-home universes. Her stories examined the unique kinship of women who love each other in all the ways that humans should. They were powerful and poignant. She wove images in her work that captured the sorrow and joy of being in love.

But her dialogue. Oh! A tragedy.

She used AAVE. Vernacular. Dialect. American black folks’ speak. That specter of language, that literary trick that made the folks in our workshop cringe in their boots with actual physical discomfort because they didn’t get it, because it was alien and they didn’t understand, or because they didn’t think it had an appropriate use in the type of high-minded literature that undergraduate students in a first year writing workshop like to think that they are producing.

Responding to this were the editors of Abyss and Apex, a speculative fiction magazine you may know from wikihistory. They had their own struggles with finding a balance between using dialect and keeping a story accesible for readings who don’t speak said dialect:

We wanted our readers, who span the English-speaking world, to feel as if they were transported to the Caribbean – but without constantly feeling like they needed to stop for directions. We looked to Grenadian author Tobias S. Buckell (Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, Sly Mongoose) as an example of an author who used authentic island patois without overwhelming the story to the point where he alienated a large portion of his non-Caribbean readers. The St. Thomas-born, US-residing author of “Name Calling” worked with our Canadian-born, Trinidad-raised editor Tonya Liburd to make this happen.

To further illustrate their point, they published both the edited and unedited versions of Celeste Rita Baker’s Name Calling. reading both versions, Amal El-Mohtar summed it up as “One reading took me to an island. The other brought the island to me”.

Tobias Buckell, cited in the editorial as somebody who had gotten that balance right, had his own response:

Please do not hold me up in this way. For one, it is dangerous to other writers seeking to find their voices. It’s dangerous to me, as you sell me out as a brick in the wall. And it adds to a potentially dangerous view that there is a proper way to do dialect at all. I’m one way, and I’m always flattered and humbled when I’m held up as an example. But only that. *An* example.

Strange Horizons, which has always championed more diversity in science fiction, was quick to apologise in the comments to the review (and also rounded up the various responses to the review on their blog):

I think our editorial failure here was in not encouraging Katherine to consider those nuances when developing her argument — for which we apologise to her as well as to our readers. In the context of a review of a collection with Long Hidden’s stated mission, it was inappropriate to frame writing dialect as a “literary trick” and to pass over the whole topic so briefly.

“It’s possible I have bitten off more than I can chew”

"Literature", books and books review, Feminism
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I’m more than slightly in awe of Olivia Waite. For the blogging from A to Z in April challenge she decided to do a series of posts on intersectional feminism in Romance, leading to such gems as this review of Sandra Hill’s Frankly My Dear:

This is the petty tyranny of inconvenience — just as the heroine believes that her individual comfort somehow justifies the enslavement of roughly a hundred other human beings, romance readers feel it’s inconvenient and uncomfortable to reflect on the ways the genre not only has marginalized but continues to marginalize not only characters, but also readers and authors of color. This book was not written by an obscure self-published writer with a small niche audience. Sandra Hill is a New York Times bestselling author, a genre mainstay for the past two decades; she is still writing books set in the contemporary South, though I am certainly not going to read them.

In her introduction post she sets out how she will do this:

Every day in April, Sundays excepted, I will post about an author or a book that features something other than the straight white wealthy cis able-bodied mold romance is so wedded to (see what I did there?). These will not be reviews in the usual sense, though I will usually mention whether or not I find a book compelling as a romance. Instead, these posts will be literary or structural analyses with a feminist lens, using as much privilege-checking as I know how to bring. Many of the books are no longer new, so if you can think of more recent releases that grapple with the same issues, please mention them.

Every day in April, Sundays excepted, I will post about an author or a book that features something other than the straight white wealthy cis able-bodied mold romance is so wedded to (see what I did there?). These will not be reviews in the usual sense, though I will usually mention whether or not I find a book compelling as a romance. Instead, these posts will be literary or structural analyses with a feminist lens, using as much privilege-checking as I know how to bring. Many of the books are no longer new, so if you can think of more recent releases that grapple with the same issues, please mention them.

Sometimes, as with Sandra Hill’s novel, this means looking at a problematic work to see what it’s doing wrong and what this means for romance as a genre, sometimes, as with Jacqueline Koyanagi’s Ascension, it means looking at a book that gets it right and show how it does it:

It’s easy to say that Jacqueline Koyanagi’s luscious debut Ascension ticks just about every box on the anti-kyriarchy bingo card: our heroine is a queer disabled woman of color (in space!). She falls in love with a disabled starship captain who’s in a polyamorous relationship with another queer woman: a medic who plans on having children with a man-slash-engineer-slash-sometime-wolf. But like we saw with Her Love, Her Land, this book was written from deeply within the perspective of the identities it represents. The characters’ disability is a plot point, but it’s not The Plot Point — the same goes for queerness and race: they’re baked in, functions of character rather than Moving Moments. Polyamory gets a bit more of the Very Special Episode treatment, but this aspect is presented as bridging a gap between two different planetary cultures, one more sexually conservative than the other.

And all the characters are compelling, and several scenes made me gasp out loud (Adul!), but what I can’t wait to talk about is how this book treats the problem of humans having bodies.

And I’m so glad that finally not only has somebody else heard of Ascenscion, but she seems to like it as much as I liked it. It’s a novel I found only by accident, in the for sale section of a local bookstore and which nobody else online seems to have read, unlike say Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, which is somewhat similar.

I’m not much of a romance reader myself, but it is interesting to read these reviews and certainly some of them make me curious about the books reviewed, like e.g. Jeannie Lin’s Jade Temptress or Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. It’s impressive not so much to write a post each day — I’ve managed to do that for long periods of time myself — but rather to write such substantial and insightful posts on such a difficult subject day after day.

(Found via Natalie Luhrs, who has a knack of finding interesting, chewy sort of links.)