Chuck Palahniuk on redemption · 8:37pm Mar 1st, 2023
[ADDED MARCH 11 2023: I wish I hadn't posted this. I posted it because I liked his take on redemption; but the lead-up to it, in which he accuses Americans of loving "pain porn", is both dumb and hypocritical. After cutting out the dumb part, there isn't enough good stuff left to be worth reading.]
From Consider This: Moments in my writing life after which everything was different (Hachette 2020):
Years back, my editor put me in touch with an editor at Harper’s magazine. ...
At one of our first pitch sessions, Conn [the editor] warned me, “No redemptions.” Very sternly, she explained that a new chief editor had been hired, and his edict was that no story in the magazine could offer a redemptive ending. ...Take The Grapes of Wrath. The Joad family loses their farm. They struggle to migrate west. The oldest generation dies on the journey and are buried ignominiously. They starve and find abuse at the hands of lawmen and deceptive labor brokers. The family falls apart and the next generation is born dead and dropped into a river, not even buried but cast adrift to shame the world.
[Here I deleted a long section in which Palahniuk misguidedly tries to find evidence of the elitist prejudice he found at Harper's in popular movies and popular culture. That's just silly; popular culture likes redemption stories. The disagreements in the comments over Rocky were in response to this deleted section.]
...So if you were my student I’d tell you to make a sympathetic character suffer, then suffer more, then suffer worse, never make the reader feel complicit with the tormenters, then—the end. No redemption. People love those books.
Then I’d tell you the opposite. Don’t perpetuate the status quo. Let Nick Carraway shout “You’re a bag of dicks!” at Tom and Daisy, and “Daisy slaughtered Myrtle!” Let Jay Gatsby leap from his pool and grab the gun. What is our preoccupation with defeat? Why do high-art narratives end poorly? Is it the destruction of the Greek comedies and the Christian church’s obsession with tragedy? If more writers strove for paradigm-busting resolutions, would there be less suicide and addiction among writers? And readers?
Above all, I’d tell you, do not use death to resolve your story. Your reader must get out of bed tomorrow and go to work. Killing your main character—we’re not talking about a second-act sacrifice—is the cheapest form of resolution.
I don't think it's right to call Rocky or the Bad News Bears losers, and I love me a good tragedy. So I'm not on board with lumping all tragedies and sad stories with pain porn (and I think that's a strange thing for Palahniuk to say, considering that he's the most-shocking pain-and-gore peddler in mainstream literature). But I'm glad he stands up for redemptive stories.
Also see: Applejack Digs a Hole, Siren Song.
This is the problem, to my mind. If a story lingers too long on suffering, keeps coming back to the same torment, I can't help the feeling that the writer enjoys it more than they're letting on, and that the readers who stick with it are doing the same.
Yes, yes, the art world being a kakistocracy is something you've talked about before.
This was one of the lessons my father instilled in me when I was rather young.
Preceded by the usual:
"If you work hard, your hard work will pay off."
And concurrently, perhaps the best advice he ever gave me:
"Never sacrifice what you want most, for what you want now."
These three lessons aligned for me in 1992. We had just gotten the Super Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas. It came with Super Mario World. And when I saw a new game release, Mario Kart, I wanted that to be the next game I got.
However, I could not get something by simply asking for it. I needed to earn it. As I recall, the new cartridge was in the range of about $60. I worked very hard shoveling snow from the neighborhood driveways that winter, and my hard work did indeed pay off. I had earned $55, just a bit shy of my goal.
Easter arrived. My parents would hide eggs around the house and property and I knew that the best egg would have a crisp $5 bill inside. But it would also be the hardest to find. But I worked hard, and I found what was sure to be the best egg, well hidden in the back yard. My hard work had paid off.
As my father watched, I opened it. And out fell a dog turd. As a young boy, I cried, much to my father's hysterical laughter. I didn't find so funny at the time.
My father waited patiently for me to calm down. Which I did in short enough order. I asked him why, why had he forsaken me in this way? (Or however I said it.) He just got down on one knee and put his hand on my shoulder.
"You've done well in learning the lesson that hard work pays off. And you've saved your money for a long time for the thing you want most instead of getting a quick candy bar. So now it's time for you to learn another important life lesson:"
"Sometimes, no matter how hard you work, even if you do everything right, life will still give you dogshit."
I won’t lie, I love a good dark fic or tragedy, even if it has a sad or grim ending. The only times I can’t stomach it though is when it’s relentless.
I can’t say what truly makes a good dark and/or tragic fic but I find I enjoy them a lot more when there are moments of reprieve. Sedate points in the story where the characters can either relax, recollect themselves, or process what they’ve just been through.
I’ve read a few stories that never let up on the suffering (unless they were long setups to revenge fics but those are just a whole other barrel of tropes) and those just left me a touch depressed. I’ve also read stuff that sort of had moments of reprieve but were always tinged with the characters either being extremely cynical, or with them gritting their teeth for any potential misfortune in the future - those left me really tired.
This wasn’t fully in-line with the topic of redemptive stories but I thought I’d offer my two bits when it comes to those stories of suffering that article mentions.
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Well, the book also contains this story about Stephen King's fans:
Make of that what you will.
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Did he really do that?
Your dad must be one half awesome and one half jerk.
A channel I really like called Cinema Therapy talked about this during a Rocky binge. They had a similar phrase for this, but more optimistic: "Win by losing." Just for example, Rocky lost his fight, but winning wasn't his goal. He wanted to be in the ring, to go the distance. And he did.
Then there was something about a robot? I digress
It's not so dissimilar to having different win conditions in, say, Magic. Typically, the standard method is "reduce your opponent's life to 0," but other conditions for victory exist, like making them draw out their entire deck, or, if you're a real dickowitz, annoying the table enough to make everyone rage quit then jump you in the parking lot. That last one is a very weird win-con, but I don't kink shame.
See also: YOU DIDN'T WIN
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Yes. But he was never cruel.
As a footnote to that story, when I didn't throw a tantrum from being cheated out of the prize, and I understood what it was he was trying to teach me, he still gave me the $5. And I was still able to buy Mario Kart for the SNES. But I'll never forget that Easter, and the lesson he taught me, which was far more valuable. It gave me thicker skin for when life did indeed give me dogshit in spite of my very best efforts, and he taught me to not get discouraged. Because that's just life. And sometimes... shit happens.
I don't know. On the one hand, I've argued that writers have an obligation to not make things worse. A litany of despair is not a contribution to the sum total of human art, or at least, not a desired one.
On the other hand, tragedy isn't inherently evil. A hero's journey that ends in failure isn't the end of the world, unless the writer chooses for it to be so.
“I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of man's puny, inexhaustible, voice still talking! ...not simply because man alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because man has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion, sacrifice and endurance.”
And damnit, The Grapes of Wrath doesn't end in despair. It ends with the voice of Tom Joad promising a sort of life after defeat, life after death, life after the end of things as he knew them. A pantheistic promise that a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one.
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I thought Rocky was a poor example for Chuck to pick, for that reason. The Bad News Bears, too. I haven't seen Midnight Cowboy or Saturday Night Fever. And the horror stories might be more about moral instruction than pain porn.
I guess I don't think he chose very good examples. And I think tragedy is a great art form. I'd rather if Chuck had just said that redemption is also a great art form.
So long as your character dies for a purpose, especially if said character is an anti-hero on a redemptive arc who has gone too far for redemption, I have nothing against a character dying. Also, if your characters have consistent plot armor, then one's stories tend to lose something. The readers KNOW that regardless of what you put them through, they will come out in the end, alive if not happy.
At any rate, death can be very transformative to the world where a character dies, so long as it is done properly, not capriciously.
My experience has been that this sort of thing moves in cycles that are discernible in different genres and entertainment industries if you know to look for them. To wit:
"Why is everything so grim and dark and tragic and complicated? I want to see some brighter, more upbeat, more straightforwardly heroic stuff going on! I want the villains to receive comeuppances or be befriended and turn good! I want to come away happy, damn it! All this grimdark shit is just shallow tragedy porn."
Ten years later:
"Why is everything so bright and shiny and simplistic and dialed down? Why do the heroes always win and the bad guys always lose? I want pathos! I want something that makes me confront my own existential dread that nothing I do matters! All this sunshine and flowers stuff are shallow just-so stories."
A lot of people end up "stuck" in one of these two settings and don't notice people coming up behind them looking to turn the wheel again.
Also, and this is just me... I feel like a lot of "serious" art and the people who make it are obsessed with tragedy out of a kind of understandable paranoia that more upbeat stories are trying to lie to you in some way, feed you some pablum about how the world should or does work to keep you satisfied and docile. There is... some truth to this. Not complete. Not even mostly. But some. Tragedy often feels real; triumph often feels like a lie.
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Every generation has thought this about the youth coming up behind them, almost as far back as we have written records.
They have always been wrong.
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I suppose I'm glad to see that your father showed you later that this is bullshit. Because it is. Hard work very often does not pay off. Hard work paid off for your father's generation. As time has gone on, that hard work has been less and less valuable every decade.
Dude, the way this anecdote is going, we're the same age or near enough to it. Every generation says this about the generation that came after them and it's never been true. Stop perpetuating silly shit like this.
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Hmm, I guess you're right.
i.pinimg.com/736x/1e/9f/19/1e9f19d89cbf43222b8d411ce5b86db0.jpg
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I love a good tragedy, and I don't think Bad News Bears, or any of the movies he mentioned are tragedies. But I have a theory as to why tragedy is considered the most-serious form of literature: Tragedy addresses the fears of the elite; mass-market addresses the aspirations of the many.
Suppose you're the kind of person who gets to help define the literary canon--say, a tenured Yale professor who's married to another tenured Yale professor. Between them, they're taking home $400,000 / yr in salary for 10 months' work. They get interviewed by national publications on a regular basis, and visit Europe, Asia, Australia, or South America at least twice a year for conferences. Once every 7 years, they go on sabbatical for a year (which means they really get about 16 weeks of vacation a year).
Do these people need stories telling them that, with luck and dedication, they, too, could succeed? That sometimes the underdog can win? No, they do not. They're not the underdog, and they've already won. They're the succeedingest of the succeedors, at the top of the heap. They still have aspirations: to be elected a member of the Whatever Society, or elected president of said society; to win a major award; to be invited to the White House. But mostly what they have (I'm guessing) is fears. Fear of losing what they have, of falling from grace.
And that's what tragedy is traditionally about: A rich, successful person falling from grace. It's for the rich and powerful. Ordinary folk may not have as much sympathy for tragic heroes. How much can they pity someone for losing something they'll never have?
Modern tragedies are about more normal people; but the principle still applies. People on the bottom need to hear stories that can help them climb up. People at the top need stories that show them how not to fall back down.
You (Murcushio) might object that people at the bottom need stories that will give them revolutionary consciousness. I think that's sometimes true, and sometimes not very true. I'm sure that I think it's less true at present than you do.
That segues into the question of whether what people want in fiction is what's good for them. I'm inclined to think that people usually have good enough instincts to want what's good for them, unless there's been some drastic change in the environment since 5000 BC, like cheap candy bars and hamburgers. But there's a good counter-argument (from the experience of ethologists) that we should always expect things we like instinctively that are good for us, to have a corresponding superstimulus that is no good for us; and that booksellers should by now have homed in on those superstimuli.
I don't know the answer. It's one of the most-important and difficult questions in literary theory, IMHO: If we define a good story for person X as a story that's good for X, and person X likes a story, how likely is it that that story is a good story for X?
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Part of what makes it relentless is length. There’s a reason why horror often works better as short stories than as full-size novels or fantasy epics. Make your point, then end things.
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Triumph is propaganda for those who want to inspire you to believe that hard work always pays off—working hard toward which goal? Shut up and work hard; it’s good for you.
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I wish more authors were senseless when killing protagonist-tier characters instead of saving the deaths for the most significant thematic impact. Spare me redemption = death suicide bombing of your universe’s Death Star. Show me the aftermath of the hero party mourning when the prior protagonist got shot by some off-screen unnamed footsoldier.
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Was this incident before or after the publication of Misery?
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No idea.
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I don't think I agree with this, at least as-stated. The foundational canon of modern English tragedy are Shakespeare's tragedies, and those were straight-up mass-market pieces of media, written by a middle-class striver and designed, as all his plays were, to appeal primarily though not exclusively to the penny-payers standing in the pit. Most of the enduring canon are things with broad mass-market appeal, I would say.
I'm also not even sure its tragedy that your hypothetical elites are looking for so much as it is pathos. (I'm also somewhat suspicious of your formulation here, but am not prepared to address that.)
Like, your hypothetical tenured Yale professors probably think that the best movie of 2022 was Everything Everywhere All At Once. EEAAO has a very straightforward happy ending about the power of empathy and understanding; it is explicitly not a tragedy. It is, however, absolutely loaded to the brim with pathos.
I actually kind of don't think this, at least not as-stated?
Art as a tool of moral instruction, persuasion, or indoctrination may be useful to those looking to promote revolutionary (or reactionary!) consciousness. There's been some absolutely white-hot stuff made explicitly as naked propaganda, with greater or lesser success AS propaganda. But I don't think people NEED this. People who find themselves with a need for revolutionary consciousness will, in my opinion, usually come to it well before the artists try and start inculcating it. Art may fulfill, unlock, or clarify that need, but I don't think it creates it.
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I think that's a myth. I've seen the layout of the Globe, and it looks like at least half of the audience wasn't in the pit, and paid many times more than the people in the pit; so the pit-dwellers could have generated only a negligible fraction of his income. And Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth attended at least a few times, and hired his troupe to perform for her, as did many nobles. Shakespeare needed continual support from the Queen and the nobility to keep the Church from shutting him down, IIRC? He didn't need to please the pit.
One of his dumbest plays, which I'd have guessed he wrote for the pit, was apparently never performed in public, nor printed for sale in Shakespeare's lifetime (probably because he knew it was a rotter)--Twelfth Night. It was written exclusively for the nobility. It is not a tragedy, though, so perhaps it scores as many points against my theory as for it.
Anyway, his tragedies are all about the fall of nobles. I think literally every single one of them. The pattern is too strong to dismiss. And I think we know, from how stories shifted when the middle class developed, that people who aren't nobility don't especially like tragedies about the nobility.
Pathos? I don't think it's brimming with pathos. It isn't really sad at any point in the movie. Nobody shoots the dog or throws their baby in the gutter; no main characters die.
It is a good point that they probably like it, though maybe also for its post-modern aspects. But I think that movie was so much better than anything else I saw in 2022, in imagination, character, themes, blending of fear and humor, and many other things, that I wouldn't attribute its popularity with any class to any one thing. It really struck me as an outlier. I was startled that Hollywood could still make something so good. (I don't see many movies, so I'm speaking out of some ignorance.)
More important is the general rule: Hollywood blockbusters are deliberately not aimed at the elite. Hollywood's in it for the money, and that's what keeps them honest--they still have to make things ordinary people like. Literary publishers aren't, and don't.
So I think that we can equally well look at that movie and observe that it was not, in fact, a tragedy. I think it wouldn't have been as popular as a tragedy. Tragedy is not the popular mode. And we can simultaneously look at what the elite have praised most-highly, say by looking at the most-often-assigned books in high school English, and see it's chock full of tragedy.
Maybe? But I think not in cases where the revolutionary consciousness is about someone else's plight rather than their own. E.g., Uncle Tom's Cabin. Actually BLM is like that. It's mostly brought revolutionary consciousness to white kids.
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I should clarify here; my reference to pleasing the penny-payers in the pit wasn't meant to refer to them as the main source of his income or a demographic he had to please. Merely that 1) they're the masses, the "rubes in the cheap seats," and 2) he was deliberately writing to please them; that is, he intended his tragedies, like every single one of his plays, to explicitly be what we would call mass-market entertainment, appealing to and appreciated by the people who would be paying a penny and standing in the pit.
And I believe that's born out by the scholarship, which tends to acknowledge that just about everything Shakespeare wrote he intended to find a mass audience, not for economic reasons (although he did like to have money and was powerfully motivated by it) but because he... wanted to entertain the masses? He wanted the elite noble classes to love him too, but he also wanted the penny-payers to like what he was giving them and wrote everything with an eye towards that. He wasn't doing it because he needed the pennies (although he REALLY wanted those pennies) but for other reasons.
Your original point called a clear distinction between mass-market and tragedy:
And, well, that sort of falls down a bit if the foundational tragedies of the modern English canon were deliberately made by a middle-class guy who was writing with an eye towards his work being mass-market, yeah?
Which is why nobody is watching Succession. Oh wait...
Literally the first two-thirds of the movie are about how massively alienated the entire Wang family is from each other, how their lives have curdled into distance and lingering pain, and the major hook into the sci-fi side of it is "your family is so fucked up and has caused so much pain to each other that there's a universe where these facts have created an apocalypse monster who will doom us all, oh and by the way this apocalypse monster is a version is your daughter, and she's coming to turn your ACTUAL daughter into an extension of her madness."
Now, where I come from, this is sure as hell pathos. It's absolutely meant to evoke the relevant emotions in those watching; how could it not?
The thing is, though... maybe your high school was different, but, while I was assigned a LOT of what you'd call a tragedy in high school, almost all of it was in the popular mode, works that were hugely, massively popular when they first came out. Like, the prototypical high school English novel is The Grapes of Wrath, right? Grapes of Wrath was ENORMOUS when it first came out, a giant cultural phenomenon.
I don't ever recall being assigned anything obscure or weird or that had sold poorly but been absolutely loved by a tiny segment of elites when it hit the shelves. It was all stuff that had sold huge. Some of them were things that had become obscure through age (I'm not sure anyone really reads A Separate Peace anymore if it isn't assigned in class) but they'd all sold gangbusters when originally released.
You could I suppose make the case that, while there are very popular tragedies, tragedy is overrepresented in the literary canon due to elite preferences. But that's a narrower argument, I think, and it cuts away some of the idea that tragedy primarily exists as an elite-driven phenomenon.
Palahniuk mentions The Great Gatsby, but that book was mostly ignored by both the critics and the masses, until it became unexpectedly popular among overseas soldiers in WWII. They still had to get out of bed in the morning and fight a war, but what do they know about suffering?
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For me, a movie brimming with pathos would have to be a tear-jerker. Everything etc., isn't.
Seriously? The literary canon is full of stuff that didn't sell well until the elites endorsed it. Jane Austen, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, just for starters. Not so much popular successes. I don't see Stephen King or Norah Roberts in high schools yet. (Probably somebody has taught King in high school, to get the kids to read. I would. Norah Roberts, they wouldn't touch.)
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I think it's an open question whether tragedy in all its fullness, including everyman protagonists as in Death of a Salesman or The Talented Mr. RIpley, appeals more to elites. But I think it's obvious that tragedy developed as a literature for the elites; from the ancient Greeks through Shakespeare, it was only about elites, while comedy was typically about the middle class, most-often merchants (the enemy of the elites). I think it's also obvious that the middle class isn't interested in these tragedies about the elites. Single counter-examples are irrelevant; the statistical trend has so much been away from tragedies about the nobility and towards tragedies about everyone else, that I don't feel the need to even count. But the count is what matters. Anecdotes aren't data.
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But I'm more-interested in the general issue of people with different life experiences liking different things. For example, neuratypicals, especially people with what we now call Asperger's or ASD, have had a big influence on literature, I think partly because they're likely to write something really different, like Edgar Allen Poe or Gertrude Stein; or to just not get it and then write books of strange rationalizing literary analysis to try to create a formula they can explain literature with, like Viktor Shklovsky.
Another class is people who've been traumatized, who in my limited experience tend to prefer books with wish-fulfilment and little tension.
Yet another class is children. Ask an adult to name some great children's stories, and they're likely to mention The Little Prince, The Velveteen Rabbit, The Giving Tree, or some other book that little kids don't like very much because they're all about grown-up issues.
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I don't know enough about how the term is used and generally interpreted to know if this is a common mode of interpreting pathos. It seems very... narrow? Then again a lot of highly technical literary terms are very narrow.
Austen achieved success on her own with her very first book. You could, I suppose, argue that any successful novelist at her time would necessarily have to have been elite-driven owing to the extremely expensive nature and low print runs.
You've got a point about the rest, I suppose, although I regard most of these as things that get assigned in college. I guess Gatsby is assigned in high school a lot? I took AP English for three years and my teachers would never have imagined assigning Joyce or Faulkner or Morrison, and would have been VERY leery about letting us select them on their own. I think maybe we read some of Pounds poetry?
But most of what I remember being assigned was stuff that had been quite successful in its own time. Grapes of Wrath, A Separate Peace, Cold Sassy Tree, Handmaid's Tale, Watership Down, All Quiet on the Western Front (that was actually assigned in AP European History AND AP English), Bradbury's short story collections, stuff like that.
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Almost all literature was developed as literature for elites, though. "Being able to read and having the disposable income to purchase items to read for pleasure" made you elite until fairly recently.
Plays had a more widely universal reach (anyone can watch and listen to a play) and I suppose there's a case to be made here. I dunno. I'm always very suspicious of elite-conspiracy narratives involving the academy, especially in this day and age where people have... weird ideas where professors are elite but multimillionaires with political connections are not, and this angle seems adjacent to that... but you maybe have a case here.
But I'm definitely skeptical of "tragedy isn't mass-market." An awful lot of tragedy is super mass-market.
... merchants have ALWAYS been an elite class. Like straight-up. They might have been the enemies of other elites but they've always been a very powerful, influential, elite class in and of themselves. Even in societies that tried to enforce a caste system that placed merchants at the bottom, they were usually powerful, influential elites.
My parents read the Velveteen Rabbit to me as a child repeatedly, but I can't remember if I liked it or not. I think I might've been too young for it; I wouldn't read Velveteen Rabbit to a kid, I'd give it to a kid who already knows how to read.
I feel like people will also name stuff like Goodnight Moon and an absolute shit-ton of Doctor Seuss books, which children absolutely DO adore.
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I meant not to define pathos narrowly, but to say that the argument you were making and the words you used seemed to require the movie to be an outlier in its pathos content.
Austen achieved a measure of success on her own, but look at this graph, and at the height of "Jane Austen during the years she was publishing (1811-1815).
Probably mostly true--it depends on what you call literature, but the stuff generated for the non-elites was often mostly oral, and either written down by the elites, or lost. I might argue that Homer's works weren't written for the elite, but the Iliad at least seem pretty elitist. The Odyssey is more pop. (I don't believe they were written by the same person, or even by any one person.)
I think that observation supports my hypothesis, though, since tragedy was (I'm guessing? really I ought to count something) a greater fraction of literature before modern times. Also the canon has lots more tragedy than bestseller lists do--most of the time, there's almost no tragedy on bestseller lists. There is pathos, but it mostly gets resolved heroically or some other way. I mean something like A Tale of Two Cities isn't really a tragedy.
It would be interesting to see how the tragedy content of bestseller lists changes during economic downturns. A correlation like "the better-off people are, the more they like tragedy" would support my larger hypothesis that literary tastes underserve the under-privileged. (Especially today, when the emphasis on "diversity" in literature has lead to displacing white males with people who are "underprivileged" as measured by skin color and gender, yet come primarily from places like Oxford, Harvard, or Wellesley to such an extent that our roster of literary stars is more-privileged than ever.)
Re. merchants, you really have to distinguish merchants from the ruling elite to understand medieval history. The hereditary aristocracy was the elite. (This mostly includes the church, but they did also let the children of wealthy merchants rise in the ranks, including St. Augustine and St. Francis of Assissi.)
The merchants and financiers became rich, but that didn't make them elite. They were the ones who destroyed feudalism, by redistributing wealth, and giving common people the power to change the market, and thus the society, simply by buying stuff and being able to save money (which, before the merchants, most commoners had no way of even acquiring). The history of the Middle Ages is, economically, the history of conflict between the aristocracy and the merchants. The merchants didn't take any overt actions against the aristocracy, but the social-class power struggle going on was between merchants who wanted to make money, and aristocrats who hated them, but needed their financing to wage war.
The aristocracy understood that free markets and fungible currencies were eroding their power base, which was based on restricting the inheritance and the transfer of land to the aristocracy. Having money and free markets created a channel by which people who couldn't inherit or buy land to accumulate financial power. It also caused resources to be diverted from producing things for the aristocracy, to things for commoners.
This is one half of why Europe hated Jews so much. (The other half has to do with the fact that the Jews had a long-standing traditional exception from the Roman law requiring everyone to make offerings to the emperor. Early Christians claimed exemption from that law on the grounds that they were the real Jews, as the ethnic Jews had rejected the Jewish Messiah. Even after that law was abolished, Christians still knew that for Christianity to gain legitimacy, it had to destroy the legitimacy of Judaism. So they wrote lots of tracts about how wicked the ethnic Jews were. The first Christian Bibles, produced in the 4th century AD, had an extra book, Barnabas, which is viciously anti-Jewish.)
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I am highly dubious of this formulation of "elite." I struggle to understand what sort of rubric places a Yale professor in 2023 among the elite, but not a wool factor in Amsterdam in 1623. You did clarify "ruling elite" but you don't have to be in the ruling elite to be elite.
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I was going to say, that whole thing sounds like two groups of elites that hate each other.
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In my Yale professor example, I began with "Suppose you're the kind of person who gets to help define the literary canon." That's a specific type of elite. But I did then generalize that to "the elite". So, fair point.
I think it makes sense to say a Yale professor today is one of the elite, while a merchant in 1300 was not. In 1300, it was the nobility that had status, and that made the big cultural and administrative decisions. Merchants decided nothing for other people unless they were personally making a deal with them. They had much lower social status--they were probably not invited to court often (though I'm guessing), they were looked down on in a way that Yale professors never are. Intelligence had much lower status. Medievals modeled themselves on Romans, who had basically no respect for intelligence and saw academics as tools.
By contrast, today Yale professors set social standards more than Congressmen or capitalists do. They are America's nobility. It's the Yale professors who dictate morals and goals to the American elite. When I say "elite", I mean those with the power to direct society. This includes politicians at many levels, and professors and administrators at elite colleges, but only a small number of business owners. Only the extremely rich owners have social power--each city has one group which is "the group", and "the group" can never be made too large for everyone to know everyone else. (I learned this from a billionaire's daughter I dated, or perhaps more-accurately, fucked a few times.) Business executives have little power under capitalism, because they're just employees; they don't own the business and don't make the fortunes. They make a lot of money, but it's still usually human-scale money, as in they could spend it all on themselves if they tried. It's the businessmen who are today in the position of medieval merchants: rich, but lacking social influence, and widely despised.
The hated medieval merchant was where we got the Marxist concept of "the bourgeoisie" as an evil, money-grubbing, untrustworthy, shallow, ignoble, dangerous class. "Jew" and "bourgeois" were practically synonyms; see Marx's "On the Jewish Question" for a canonical example, in which he makes it clear that, to him, "Jew" isn't really an ethnicity, but an attitude towards money. (Either that, or he wanted to kill all the Jews.)
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This is... not really true. Merchants of sufficient wealth were and have always been in the cultural and social elite and possessed great influence over society, especially over those who had formal state power. This has been true even in societies that tried to codify formal caste or social standings that put merchants at the bottom; theoretically a banker in Tokugawa Japan was of lower social status than a guy barely eking out a living growing rice on a hectare of land, in actual practice ahahahahahahaha no.
There has always been a massively robust and powerful anti-intellectual apparatus in the west, my guy. We literally currently live in an era when powerful social and political forces in America regard "tenured professor," not even "at Yale" or "at an Ivy" just "you have tenure at a state school" as synonymous with "traitorous scum who need to be hounded from their tower and destroyed."
It is true that the "merely" well-heeled were often not welcome in formal, open court. That didn't make them elite and without power, though. A shopkeep was probably not elite; but the trading factor supplying a specific to every shopkeep in a two-hundred-mile radius absolutely was. They were periodically purged, abused, and maltreated by the "properly" noble classes, it is true... who almost always lived to regret it and often came crawling back.
Your conception of what makes someone elite seems to be narrowly tailored to "has what you perceive to be social capital" or "has formal temporal power." There are, and have always been, PLENTY of folks who have neither and are elite, and the wealthy have almost always had immense social capital because their wealth buys them that.
This is an extraordinary claim, and extraordinarily poorly-supported. Indeed, people entrenched at the upper levels of elite educational institutions tend to LAG social trends and standards, not SET them. Despite the popular conception of the academy as at the forefront of social change, at the very upper levels it is often a profoundly reactionary place.
This is, again, an extraordinarily poorly-supported claim. Chambers of Commerce are some of the most politically influential groups in the country and are chock full of the prototypical small business owner. If you're going to say that politicians have the power to direct society (and they do) then the people who have massively outsized influence over said politicians (which would be business owners as well as those who have sufficient wealth to be able to purchase access) have immense power and are, in fact, elite.
To claim that Yale professors are dictating morals and goals to most members of Congress is just... sort of absurd?
This is often true, but there are MANY cities of varying sizes. Plenty of them have lots of guys who classify as wealthy, but not extremely so, and they have a ton of social power. It is always the well-heeled in any locale who have the vast bulk of the social power. Hell, this is often exacerbated once you get outside the cities; a doctor or a lawyer in a mid-sized suburb with a membership in the local country club is a big fish in small pond, and those guys are as a class often very politically powerful; ONE country club in a mid-sized suburb isn't that important, but there's an absolute shit-ton of them and they tend to be filled with people who exercise outsized political power to their numbers specifically because of their wealth, which buys them social capital.
Imagine claiming that in America in 2023, it is well-heeled who lack social influence and power. They have immense social influence and power! Trying to define it as "it is only a tiny number of business dudes who have power" is baffling to me. And that's without even considering that yeah, business guys are widely despised... and also widely venerated.
You seem to be trying to define elite in a modern context as "college professors, a tiny number of billionaires, people with formal state power, and nobody else. If you're a mere millionaire, sorry, you're not elite. If you're a multi-millionaire but a billionaire cuts your checks, also not elite." This is a... crabbed and narrow definition. If your definition of elite excludes people buying million-dollar homes, sending their kids to private school, and capable of maxing their political donations every year without breaking a sweat, because they don't occupy a position in the academy and aren't in the billionaire class, I question its usefulness.
Frankly, this definition is edging close to the conspiratorial worldview I continually encounter where a claim is advanced that someone like Joe Rogan or Kanye West (to pick two random examples) isn't part of the American elite because a lot of other elites hate them and regard (and treat) them with dismissive contempt.
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Well, you have strong opinions. Look, there are different valid definitions of "elite" for different purposes. Yes, wealthy people are always elite in some way. I was trying to write specifically about who sets the literary canon, and more generally about who directs high-cultural change. The guys who own football teams and stock-car racing teams may direct low culture.
My strong impression, from studying many cases of novel ideas that led to great changes in the ethos of the masses, is that they usually entered by changing high culture, and came from an intellectual elite.
From the Renaissance to the 20th century, that class had a lot of aristocrats, some artists and writers (mostly in the Renaissance and after 1850), and (in Protestant areas) preachers. During the middle ages, it was mostly clerics, although it would include merchants if we're talking about changing financial culture.
But while I know finance changed culture a lot, I see finance in the middle ages as an outsider, not as an insider, because the world of finance has an ethos which didn't take over the mainstream until centuries later, and I would say never really did. Not like Christianity, Protestantism, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, equality before the law, abolitionism, and women's votes. Those were all ideas that originated with the intellectual elite I'm talking about, and were eventually adopted by the masses. Other major shifts in belief seem to have started from the grass roots and then been adopted by those intellectual elites: the civil rights movement, gay rights, second-wave feminism. I can't think of any that were conceived of by a businessman, capitalist, or politician. You could argue for the Anglican Church, but I don't think it really changed the nature of Catholicism except gradually and accidentally.
(Yes, Christianity was pushed on the masses by the elites. It went nowhere until Roman Emperors decided to use it, and they pushed hard and long to stamp out paganism, probably because they wanted to crush the power of the senatorial families, who were mostly pagan.)
That sort of influencer, in the 20th century, was found at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Oxford, the University of Paris, et cetera. That's all I'm trying to write about. I'm not trying to say merchants or businessmen have it hard. I'm just saying they don't come up with the ideas that make huge directional changes to social beliefs and values. You could argue that Edison and Ford did just that, but I don't think they really did. It isn't obvious whether mass production and high tech changed the values of the masses, or just allowed the masses to fulfil those values for the first time.
If you want to get me to take your position as a serious contender, you'd have to come up with at least a half-dozen major reversals in the beliefs or values of the masses, and show that they were first conceived of and popularized by merchants, businessmen, chambers of commerce, etc.
Rocky is a bizarre story to lump in 'misery porn' or even 'loser' because Rocky never expected to win. His goal was to go all the way against the champ instead of being knocked out early to prove to everyone what he was capable of and he succeeded. It was great for his boxing career, he showed he could play in the big leagues. Rocky is an excellent story about managing your expectations. You don't always need 'a win' to win. In fact, the champ who actually won the match, came out with a damaged image because some nobody had pushed him so hard.
Plus, Rocky got the girl at the end, too, just to put a cherry on top.
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I agree entirely. I just put a disclaimer at the top saying I don't think this post is worth reading. I like the part in favor of redemption, and that Chuck showed there is an anti-redemption prejudice in the literary world. But he drew all his examples trying to prove this exists from popular movies, where there is no anti-redemption prejudice, but the opposite.
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Right, trends in 'proper literature' and 'popular movies' can diverge wildly.
Now "Grapes of Wrath" and "Gatsby," those were his actually effective examples of tragedies and they're both better known as books than movies.
Sorry, I still think this excerpt was worth posting as something to think about.