Still a very slow work period. It's getting on in 2013, and no trips yet. Things are looking up though: I have a few jobs coming up, so we'll see. In the meantime, here's another post in my series of school papers interspersed with old photojunk. This time the pictures are from the ski town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the German Alps, where I lived from 1997-2000. Hover over them for delightfully nostalgic descriptions. The paper in question is my English II final, where the assignment was to take any three short stories that we had read from our text and compare and analyse them. I chose 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,' which I'd already written a paper on so, yay. Easy. Also, Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. If you intend to read this post—and I don't blame anyone at all who doesn't want to—and you haven't read any of them, then you ought to follow the links and read them first. Otherwise reading my paper will be even more painful than it has to be.

________________________________________________________________

Zen And The Art of Speculative Fiction

Speculative fiction is an extremely broad genre. In researching the term online, I found many essays which attempt to define what it is and what it isn’t. I even found one person who thought that the film ‘JAWS’ could be considered a member of the genus, but I disagree with that on the grounds that a world in which everything is exactly the same as in ours with the exception of a ludicrously giant man-eating shark who has a taste for beach bunnies is hardly an imaginative or insightful enough scenario to earn the title of Speculative. Horror, yes. Fiction, fine. Speculative, no. So here is the definition I’ve found that I most agree with:

Speculative fiction is a world that writers create, where anything can happen. It is a place beyond reality, a place that could have been, or might have been, if only the rules of the universe were altered just a bit. Speculative fiction goes beyond the horror of everyday life and takes the reader (and writer) into a world of magic, fantasy, science. It is a world where you leave part of yourself behind when you return to the universe as we know it, the so-called real world. Speculative fiction defines the best in humanity: imagination, and the sharing of it with others. (Bowlin)

I would add two things to Bowlin’s definition. First, I would say that while Speculative fiction (Spec-fi) may frequently go “beyond the horror of everyday life,” it equally as often dives right into it, delving human nature for insights both illuminating and shocking. Thus I would say that the essence of good Spec-fi is that it tweaks reality in order to reveal a previously hidden aspect of it. Second, I would make the distinction that although writers of science fiction, horror, and fantasy regularly dabble in Spec-fi, not all sci-fi/fantasy/horror stories qualify as Speculative and not all Speculative necessarily has to belong to one of those genres. Perhaps Spec-fi became a genre in order to award distinction to those stories from each of those categories that aimed for something higher than mere escapism, though some would argue that important science fiction writers were aiming that high all along.

The three short stories I will talk about are such speculative fictions. ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’ by Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘Harrison Bergeron’ by Kurt Vonnegut, and ‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson each describe an undignified aspect of human nature. They have each chosen to illustrate these aspects through the useful lens of dystopian societies. In ‘Omelas,’ Le Guin uses a science fiction world as her setting. In ‘Bergeron’ Vonnegut uses a society vaguely set in the future, which is also a staple of science fiction. The world of ‘The Lottery’ is less definable. It could be our world, if not in the present day then in the near past, except that the eponymous social event is so horrifying that it doesn’t really seem to have a place in any known society similar to the one that it otherwise portrays. It could therefore be a science fiction world, or a far post-apocalyptic world, or perhaps even simple allegory, similar to the hellish night of Young Goodman Brown who had a vision of the secret, sinister natures of his neighbors in the Puritan village of Salem. In any case, the inventive nature of the lottery itself in a setting that is still somewhat familiar more than qualifies the story as speculative in nature.

‘Omelas’ is a deep story which hints at many ideas, but as I wrote in a previous paper I believe that Le Guin uses the device of a captive child, kept in squalor and degradation, abused and friendless, as a symbol for the dark psychotic id at the center of humanity’s collective consciousness. The story seems to say that although the face we put on for each other in public may be one of civilization—the love of peace, the arts, humanities, progress, and everything positive and hopeful about it—behind it all is the wretched animal at the center of all human endeavor, the monster within ourselves that we try to ignore, but can’t. In the end there are several different ways that one can look at the people who choose to walk away from Omelas after contemplating the child, but the suggestibility of the imagery there only confirms that Le Guin is a master storyteller who has succeeded at making the readers ask themselves what it all might mean, and forces them to look inside themselves for the answers.

‘Bergeron’ is perhaps the most pointed, least allegorical of the three. Vonnegut wrote it as a way of taking a certain philosophy to its logical extreme—the idea that natural advantage is unfair and leveling the playing field for everyone in every activity is the way to bring about equality. For example, my young nephew plays in his district T-ball league. The league organizes the players such that every player gets to bat, during each inning, no matter how many outs are accumulated. I found it absurd because T-ball to begin with was meant to be an equalizing force for young children learning the physical aspects of baseball. When I was a young boy I played in little league and we had great derision for the new T-ball league that had just begun for younger kids. But even then, T-ball was played with otherwise regular baseball rules—three outs per team per inning. Perhaps younger kids needed help learning to hit before swinging at live pitches, but they were never too young to start learning and dealing with the rules of the game. Unlimited hitting and playing were for practice, not game day.

Fast forward to the present and they’ve dumbed the sport down even further. According to Teeballusa.org, here are some of the most Harrison Bergeron-like rules: “There are no walks or strikeouts. Every player bats and plays in the field. An inning is over when all the players have batted once. Scores are not kept for the younger players” (T•BALL USA Association). The rationale for all of this is that it is supposed to build self-esteem, so that everyone can feel like a winner and have a chance to play. The problem, of course, is that life isn’t a game of “organized fun” like that. All that these rules are really doing is preparing children to be unable to deal with failure and teaching them how not to strive to be better; it’s easy to play and pointless to play harder when everyone is a winner.

Vonnegut takes this kind of trend into a future where everyone must be equal so that no one feels bad about themselves. ‘Bergeron’ shows how when the playing field is leveled, even for those unqualified to play, you wind up exemplifying the lowest common denominator. Different people are talented in different ways, and if you force everyone to be equal in every arena, not only will individuals never find out what they are best at, they will also never know that they are truly bad at something and thus be forced to explore other, better options for themselves. The possible heights of human achievement are thwarted forever in this manner.

‘The Lottery’ is a metaphor for blind slavishness to tradition. Jackson is skewering the bovine mentality of the mob that perpetuates certain myths and traditions, beyond the point where they are logical or relevant to the present time. She does this by taking what appears to be an ancient fertility rite—human sacrifice meant to secure a bountiful harvest from the gods—and places it in an inappropriate time period where once again the logical extreme exposes the inherent absurdity of the philosophy in question. The villagers don’t seem to fully understand the purpose of the lottery, except as a vague idea from a saying that seems to have slipped from common usage. A line spoken by one of the characters implies the forgotten nature of the adage, which in turn hints at the fertility aspect of the lottery. “Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’” This illuminates for the reader the general uncertainty regarding the tradition. The villagers in truth only continue participating because “there’s always been a lottery.”

My personal take on the story is that she is talking about the folly of religious tradition; a system of belief based on ancient “holy” books written by goat herders who knew less about how the world works than most second graders do today. People and communities still slavishly devote their lives to the outdated traditions of these religions, and they usually do not truthfully understand where these traditions came from, nor why or how they arose in the first place. Considering the vast gap in time and culture between when they originated and now, it is a wonder that anyone still considers the reasons for them to be valid. However, both the nature of belief itself and the human tendency to blindly observe tradition as illuminated by Jackson help to explain the phenomenon. It is possible though that the story could be lampooning any number of other bizarre traditions. Jackson uses the Spec-fi device to expose the irrationality of this tendency that people have to instinctively follow the strictures of society while abandoning critical thought. The organized annual murder of a neighbor may seem extreme—it is unlikely that in reality any such tradition could carry on into the present day—but it does make a striking argument about the idiocy of maintaining rituals simply for the sake of tradition. There is nothing wrong with examining them more closely to determine if they are actually still relevant in modern life.

The aspect of human nature which each of these stories reveal through a speculative twisting of reality are truths which are not always simple to talk about in other formats. Trying to make the point in a thesis statement that unexamined traditions can be harmful to society, for instance, might need an entire book of material including exposition, facts, and references. But Spec-fi has the unique ability to cut through the empty talk in favor of tradition by using reducto ad absurdum to illustrate its point. By taking real ideas and putting them in an organized setting, reality is exposed. This is how science and philosophy test their hypothesis: by pulling a test subject or idea out of its element and subjecting it to different experiments in order to discover its boundaries.

Speculative Fiction, then, is the literature of abstract concepts. It is the preferred storytelling method of philosophers and scientists. It is reading material for those who wish to understand something larger and more insightful about everyday experience. It is also material for communicating complex or heretofore invisible truths in a symbolic—i.e. brief and profound, manner. It differs from most forms of literature in that it isn’t trying to tell a story about a time and a place, a person or an event, per se. It instead—at its best—is telling a story about a way of looking at the world.

Some of these truths may be ugly. But that only makes them even more imperative to communicate. If the Vonneguts and Jacksons of the world don’t thumb their noses at moronic human behavior, and if the Le Guins of the world don’t expose the beasts at the bottoms of our wells, then these dark aspects of humanity will remain unexamined. Only in investigating them will we learn how to overcome them within ourselves. Speculative fiction is a uniquely Zen-like literary format. In altering the nature of reality for a brief moment, like a Zen slap, it teaches the reader something about unaltered reality. It is for this reason that I say that Speculative fiction has a place among the highest forms of literature, and is uniquely capable of communicating big ideas to empty heads.