Writing: Philip Roth, & the ethics of writing · 9:06pm Jun 4th, 2014
Now & again the question of what is okay to write about comes up. When it does, I always conclude that it was okay for whomever to write about whatever they did.
So do I think it's cool for anybody to write about anything?
I found an example of something I don't think is okay: Philip Roth writing about a Vietnam vet in The Human Stain. The problem is that his Vietnam vet is pure stereotype: In Vietnam, he went in friendly and innocent, but pretty soon was killing civilians for no reason and saving their body parts as souvenirs, just like everyone else (according to him). After coming home, he remains tripped out all day, every day, for 30 years, on PTSD; angry, violent, murderous, resentful, paranoid; constantly thinking about killing; hallucinating and unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. He has no character beyond that. And he isn't a background character; he's central to the action and themes of the novel.
It's a very famous novel, but no one seems to have given him shit for this.
This is one thing that crosses my redline: Writing a main character as an over-the-top negative stereotype of something you haven't experienced. Philip Roth was in the Army, at least--in 1955 and 1956, after Korea but before Vietnam.
I've always said it's less what you're writing about than how you're writing it.... And what you're describing soundsin poor taste (ie it's fine to write about Vietnam vets, it's even fine to write about ones that are evil, but just resorting to negative stereotypes without any character beyond it is classless), though I'd have to actually read the book to see how much I agree.
Or to put it another way, I agree that it's fine to write about anything. That doesn't make it fine to write the wrong stuff about it.
Wait... you mean that's not how ALL veterans are?
That depiction is the standard for how veterans are portrayed in television. It's now such a part of culture that security protocols and even national policy are being dictated by cliche fiction.
Just like laws against switchblade knives were passed due to movie depictions of minority gangs, except this time instead of vilifying a pocketknife, it's a whole category of human.
Well, that doesn't necessarily mean it's out of line for him to write it. It just means it's crap.
I'm not sure if you mean "negative stereotype" in the sense of "harmful to public perception" or negative in the sense of "painted in a bad light." Your example seems to encompass both meanings, but would a flaming gay character, or a Asian model student make you as angry, if they were protagonists but just as stereotypical?
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"You can't be angry about a stereotype unless you're just as angry about ALL stereotypes."
OK, thanks for that.
2175631 Good question. There's some modifying factors.
First, how distinctive / likely is the stereotype? I've known Asian model students. Lots of them. It's not very distinctive. All it says is "Asian" and "good student", and there are lots of Asians, and lots of good students, so finding them combined in one person is not especially unlikely.
"Vietnam war vet" plus "nice sweet person at first" plus "killed uncounted numbers of women and children" plus "cut off their ears as souvenirs" plus "has permanent crippling PTSD" plus "sees hallucinations" plus "hears voices" plus "paranoia" plus "violent" is very distinctive and not very likely. There might not be a single person alive who matches this description.
Second, what else has the character got beyond the stereotype? This character seems to have nothing at all beyond the stereotype, and is always thinking about the war.
I think that writing something that essentially tends to degrade the moral virtue of its readers is probably immoral. (The keyword there being essentially.) Even if you don't believe in essences or in virtue, you can probably recast the same idea into more modern terms. An easy and uncontroversial example might be something like propaganda for an immoral cause.
Writing deliberately in order to offend your readers might also be something immoral. Not that people have any kind of right not to be offended, but rather that the desire to cause gratuitous harm, even such slight harm such as an offensive story might cause, seems to me to fall rather on the sickly side of human nature.
The thing about writing stereotyped characters is that, very often, people don't know what they don't know. That is to say, they don't necessarily realize that they're writing offensive stereotypes rather than well-rounded characters. Of course, I'm not sure a man like Philip Roth would have that kind of defense.
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The stereotype originated, essentially, as Communist propaganda during the Vietnam War. The point of it was to paint US Armed Forces as a monstrous institution which turned nice innocent kids into senseless murderers then threw the resultant burned-out-wrecks aside, because those who created the stereotype wanted to simultaneously discourage American military recruitment ("if you join the military you will be turned into a senseless killer and then cast aside") while claiming that there was something especially-horrible in the way we fought the war (since, after all, what our soldiers were supposedly doing at an unprecedented rates was randomly killing civilians and then harvesting their body parts as souvenirs).
Among the things which make the stereotype despicable is that it was used to help the Communists conquer South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos -- resulting in the deaths of millions of civilians at the hands of Red troops who never got a reputation as senseless killers of civilians even though they actually were; and that it was used after the war to impair the careers of US veterans (because they were all shell-shocked, drug-addled lunatics according to the stereotype). It served the cause of evil both coming and going.
And yes. Of course there were some Vietnam veterans who during their war service senselessly murdered civilians, raped young women or did just about any terrible thing one can imagine. This is true of any war -- put rifles into the hands of hundreds of thousands of young men and turn them loose in the controlled anarchy that is war, and some will deliberately do evil. A single infantry division is the size of a small city, almost all its personnel are the most hormonally-dangerous type of human imaginable -- young men -- and in any real-life small city, one will find some bad people.
The key to judging a war effort is: how common was this sort of behavior relative to the numbers engaged? and "Was it seen by the army involved as war crime, or standard practice." The US military in Vietnam did well on the first metric -- atrocities were uncommon. They did more poorly on the second -- atrocities were often swept under the rug -- but if you compare our conduct to that of most armies, we don't come off that badly. The degree of popularity of the negative stereotype came mainly from Red propoganda.
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While it is certainly true that not all veterans end up that way, the truth is that veterans are indeed more prone to criminal behavior than the population at large - even their same age peers. If you've ever wondered why so many veterans seem to end up getting charged with assault and murder, it isn't just because it is sensationalistic to report on such; they commit crimes considerably more often than their peers do. And people with anger issues and PTSD (that is to say, both) are the ones who are most likely to do so, specifically - they're about 2.5x more likely to get themselves in trouble with the law than their compatriots without either.
In the long run, Vietnam veterans with PTSD are more likely to get arrested than black men. That certainly isn't an encouraging statistic.
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Unsurprisingly, psychotic individuals are much more likely to develop PTSD than non-psychotic individuals. I sorely doubt they'd really be a nice, sweet person at first - though a lot of people like to pretend that people were a lot nicer than they were before something bad happened to them, which makes it not really their fault that their loved one became a crazy person. But you'd actually expect higher than naive chance numbers of people with all those symptoms together, because of high rates of comorbidity between them.
Whether the book represents such people realistically at all, I doubt it. But well, you'll never win an Oscar that way.
The unwritten rules on writing sensitive female characters seem to be somewhat slanted in favor of female writers who have a lot of odd life experiences and tend to lean to the left a bit⁽¹⁾. So if Mary writes a strong female lead who gets assaulted⁽²⁾ in the course of the book, and later gets revenge in some horribly bloody fashion, that's fine. If Bob doe it, not so fine. The flipside of that is the gunfire and blood intensive stories written by authors with names like Butcher who would not get nearly the Amazon sales position if their name was Penelope.
To get good examples of the Political Correct minefield that current authors tiptoe through, compare and contrast the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America official website with the experiences of John Scalzi and Sarah Hoyt (both extremely good sites with lots of good educational articles about writing).
(1) As in everything, there are exceptions to the rules. Except this one⁽¹⁾.
(2) The current euphemism for the 'R' word now, as far as I remember.
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My take on that problem is this: It's not so much about a stereotype-as-such so much as it is about it being a character rather than a device. If you write a real character, with motivations, wants, dreams, then I think that having such a character display certain stereotypical traits is okay. I mean, some Asians are certainly good students, and never writing about them would be odd.
The problems comes when you have a character that's just a stereotype. Ideally all of the people in your story are fully-fleshed out, but even if you take the time to imagine them complexly, you still can't take time out to explain them to the reader. So if the reader only sees them as stereotyped cutouts... then you have a problem. So a character who is both Asian and a model student is fine, I think. A character who's a Vietnam vet and a war criminal is fine. But having someone in your story whose whole identity is That Good Asian Student and The Crazy Vietnam Vet—that is prejudice. Also bad writing.
Because it's not just negative stereotypes that are the problem. I mean, yes, they are the most obviously harmful, certainly, but the 'positive' ones are also quite bad. Painting all Asians as model students seems to be doing them a favor at first[1], but really all it does is constrain them and deny a portion of their uniqueness and agency. Their success isn't theirs, suddenly, but just the inevitable result of their skin-color.
[1] Well, okay, it may not depending on how well versed you are in, say, American racial dynamics.
Based on your summary, it seems to me that Roth was entirely concerned with illustrating either his view on war in general, or just the Vietnam war, as opposed to realistically representing it or the experience of most soldiers. In other words, maybe he believes war is atrocious because of what it does to people, and so he writes a book where the effects of war are terrible, thus hopefully leading his readers to the same conclusion.
So if his purpose is to convince others of his own beliefs, do you believe that such an endeavor is bad? Or does is depend solely on what the belief is?
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My dad once told me that before the great immigration from central Europe in the late 1800's, Americans thought of the typical Pole as this pale, effete aesthete. "We sure defeated that stereotype!"
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Well, you could make a point about the dehumanizing effects of slavery in America by depicting black American men as brutal rape - mad animals, and in fact both Precious and The Color Purple have done just that, and won awards.
So if you're comfortable with that--I guess stereotyping veterans ain't no thing.
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Okay TD, I would like to see the statistics that back up your claim.
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2177122 There's a stereotype that Jews have red hair. Figure that one out.
2176781 The book is about self-identity and the impracticality of being yourself. The main character has to conceal aspects of his own identity because of social prejudices. The Vietnam vet is a plot device to make it more important for the main character to conceal his behavior. He's dating the vet's ex-wife, who is half his age. The real story component is that he must conceal this from the town, because they would think it was disgusting for a man his age to still be having sex. But that wasn't scary enough and didn't have dramatic enough consequences, so Roth added the Vietnam vet. Which IMHO is cheating, thematically.
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...So come with me, Moses Ri-Too-Ri-Li-Ay.
Explains that, at least.
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Depending on how emotionally involving the drama caused by the Vietnam vet is, it might be that where people would otherwise see the obvious heavy hand behind the curtain they instead don't think about what they've already made emotional conclusions about. *cough*mylittledashie*cough* 'Might' because I could be completely wrong in this case.
2176671 This gets into the distinction between disliking a book because of what it's saying versus how it's written.
Both of which can be perfectly good reasons to dislike a book, but we should note which (or both, as seems to be the case in Mr. Horse's blog) applies to any given book-dislike.