Literary Heroes: That Sticky Road

(11:39:14 CDT)

Literary Heroes: That Sticky Road

When I was younger, I was convinced I needed a literary hero. By younger, I may even mean "earlier today" because I cannot say I have really dropped the habit. I go through stages. I am sure we all do. We develop a need for heroes, for role models, for things to gyre, like slithy toves, about. Rock gods are easy to find: find someone from the middle of the charts, above the fields of obscurity but below the plains of banality, and buy a poster. Movie gods are just as easy: with the wrinkle that you need to look into their 1980s and 1970s careers, so that you can explain way their recent lapse into popularism. Literary gods, though, those are impossible. One man's Beckett is another Godol. Some will go to the noose in defense of Charles Dodgson, but wave aside as mere tripe a Samuel Clemens. Music might be the universal language, movies might be a reasonable indicator of world economic health, but books are what people stab each other over. What people burn. What people condemn. What people read one chapter of in high school and swear, up and down, with a vehement passion, that they are now the ultimate haters of its author and with good reasons that are not so much reasons as "Well, it's stupid, isn't it, because, like, our teacher was explaining the symbolism and I was thinking that maybe a leaf's a leaf, you know, and it's stupid isn't it?" By the way, I think we should teach kids to read crap in high school. They will only hate it. Why not make them hate James Patterson?

It is the elusiveness of a favorite writer, perhaps, that drives us to find one. In a world where so many put "a bit of everything" as their favorite book after listing ninety-seven bands in chronological order of first singles using font colors to represent the relatively hotness of the lead singer—and, what's more, in a world where writers can either write prolifically or proficiently—whom do we bet on? The standard mode for finding a literary hero goes like this: (1) Read a book and really like it, (2) read a short bio of the author on the back of that book and marvel at how their life is kind of like your life, (3) worship. From this point on, it is a game of accumulation. You will eventually find other works by the same writer and either really like them, building more worship, or not like them as much, decreasing but not necessarily breaking worship. In the end, you either bag them or release them, and go fishing for another (note, literary heroes seem less singlular, probably because excepting a small handful, any hero you choose is likely to have less than twenty major works, of which half are too obscure even for the most dedicated fans). Most, though, can only take some scrutiny before they start to fade. Rock gods are meant to be pathetic blobs of style over substance. Movie stars are meant to be drug addled man-children. Favorite writers are meant to be the best parts of us, those that know the human soul and sing it into being. What do we do when they disappoint?

I could wax poetic for hours on the issue, so let's divert our attentions to the more particulars: what about my literary heroes? At one point in time, the term just meant someone whose books I liked. Piers Anthony was probably one of the first, until the pop-fantasy kind of wore on me. J.R.R. Tolkien showed up somewhere in there, but his rather small number of works seems to have stopped him from becoming a real player. More literary: there have been flavors of Dostoevsky and Golding and Dickens (see the name of the blog) and Hardy, but all are less heroes and more artists worthy of applause. More recently, the title has drifted towards the underground set, the horror set, or the modern fantasy set: Gaiman, Palahniuk, Mellick, King, and Keene. Cory Doctorow was strong in the running for a while. Philip K. Dick is a regular attendee to the list but I am not sure if the word "hero" ever works. He is more a catalyst to thought. I am not even sure people like Gaiman or Mellick or Keene want to be heroes, modern gods of the pen. They do like fans, and they like to have their work respected, and they love to promote their fellow artists, but the hero tag sounds like something they may not require.

Why do literary heroes fall? I think the first reason is because we do not see the man, or the woman, but we see a wellspring from which things we admire comes. To wit, we read something like Crime and Punishment and we assume that Dostoevsky is whichever character that holds whichever philosophy that we agree with. Look at Chuck Palahniuk and Fight Club. Fans would come up and assume that he was Tyler Durden. Look at the recent "Gaiman promotes rape culture" thread after he wrote "GRR Martin is not your bitch". While the issue was blown far too far by a few, a lot of the responses involved "And I thought he was such a wonderful man due to [this or that female character he wrote]". He was judged not only for using a word in a way that had meaning to him, and a different meaning to them, but because he, the man, was not worthy the work in their eyes.

The second cause might come, for some us, out of the writer tendency to dial things up a notch. I mentioned Cory Doctorow, above. While I share his general "copyleft" concepts of adding to the dialogue instead of always making art for the purpose of making money; there have been several times where hyperbolic trope has trumped common sense. Beyond him, look at many of the key writers of the 20th century: alcoholics, suicides, womanizers, cheaters, idiot savants, recluses, self-important boasters, substance abusers, political ranters, and others obsessed with working in a pithy moral condemnation at almost always the worst time. During some of the various copyright realignments that have been going on lately thanks to ebooks and peer-to-peer networks, you can find some doozies: authors basically referring to their own fans as parasites that require authors for sustenance. Many, many brilliant authors seem entirely unable to keep things in, and I am somewhat loathe to use this term after reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, perspective.

We dangle there, somewhere, between the first and second causes; torn between worshipping the output of a person rather than the person, always on the brink of finding out too much. Those of us who find real heroes, the prolonged sort, usually a) luck up and find someone who holds up to [their] scrutiny, b) enters into a semi-permanent state of focusing on the work rather than the author, or c) kind of likes it when Kerouac talks crap about women. For me, I will settle with the adage that I am not perfect, and how can the rest of you sub-Dougs ever hope to be(?), and be done with it. That, and well, Brian Keene the writer who promotes his fellow horror authors and talks with (and never "to", which makes the difference) fans and deals with all the crap life throws at him while sharing his own wisdom and foibles is a lot more interesting than literary hero Brian Keene. Hero worship sometimes gums up the works when it comes to dissecting a corpus, to really understanding and appreciating what someone like PKD was saying when he wish-washed between different ideas of goodness and compassion. It gets rid of the journey, of the contradictions; it stops us from understanding why Wittgenstein wrote a second major work that completely disagreed with his first major work. In other words, it stops them from being real people and tries to make them into something that should earn our respect, instead of our reading and our dialogue. Heroes are mythological perfections beyond discourse. Writers are not, and never will be. That's kind of why I have given up on the whole literary hero thing...for now.

Si Vales, Valeo

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