The Novelty of the Normal, and the Banalty of the Unusual... a writing dilemma.

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

G. K. Chesterton.

One of the problems anyone trying to write a historical novel is faced with is that not only do you have to get the material details of time correct as well as the spirit of the age, but also you have to somehow handle the modern sensibilities of the reading audience.  Or do you? It's actually quite a problem, although many people, not appreciating how their own views are part of the context of a time, may not grasp that.  It's particularly a problem for a writer of the current era.

I'll get into more detail on the particular dilemma addressed here in a second, but I'd note, for example, a couple of novels that attempt to do this, and which are very well known, but in my view are not equal in their handling of this problem.  Both the novels The Killer Angels and True Grit are historical novels, set in distinct historical novels, and both were hugely successful.  But, frankly, as good as The Killer Angels is, in terms of viewpoints of the characters, set forth as internal thoughts, it just doesn't quite get there.  That is, it really doesn't have the mindset of characters of that period, at least uniformly, set forth all that well.  It's sort of a mix of modern and mid 19th Century views, which perhaps is not surprising given the enormity of the attempted task.  True Grit, on the other hand, succeeds in it brilliantly.  Written as a fictional memoir of a middle aged woman looking back on the great adventure of her teenage years, the book achieves this in part by simply assuming that the reader knows certain things that the reader frankly is not likely too. References to local events are one such thing, but others are occasional theological references from the narrators strictly Presbyterian view.  Chances are most modern Presbyterians wouldn't know what she's referring to, unless they looked it up, let alone non Presbyterians.  But it adds a lot of credence to the book.

Indeed, True Grit is so remarkable in this context that it's difficult to appreciate how well this is done, without reading the boo, although a person can get a bit of the flavor of it from the most recent, Coen Brothers, version of the movie. The author, Charles Portis, makes references to three different Christian denominations in the book, referencing the Methodists and the Catholic church in addition to the Presbyterian.  Examples of Presbyterian theology are so specific that Portis  is obviously familiar with it, and his characters subtle disapproval of Methodism likewise shows not only the character of the fictional narrator, but a bit of the spirit of the times and location.  That the narrator bothers to note the religious affiliations of other characters is likewise a skillful reflection of the times and characters.  Such elements are so integral to character that they are picked up a bit in both films, although only very briefly and in a very muted fashion in the first one. It's reinserted true to the book in the Coen Brothers film to such an extent that some commentators have noted the religiosity of the movie and even that it has a subtle Christian tone; something that is all the more remarkable as the Coen brothers are Jewish in faith.  It speaks a lot for their "ear" for the times and the characters they are portraying in their films.

Another novel that does this very well is Little Big Man.  Remembered now principally for the movie, the book is much better and a type of masterpiece.  One of the amazing things it achieves is to be able to present the late 19th Century Plains Indian World through their eyes, something that has rarely been done. The book closest to it is the audio biography of George Bent, and it's notable that the novel came so close to the same spirit of observation set forth in that biography, but with a lot more topics to address.

I did try to found a little heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy 

More specifically, however a really big problem for the current author is that in the past 20 years the view points of popular media have shifted so dramatically on matters of what were common morality that addressing them in a historical novel is now a problem of epic proportions.  When this really started is hard to say, but judging by television, probably sometime in the 1980s.  If a person judge by films, probably a bit earlier.  By books, perhaps a bit later. But the problem is now well developed.

What this problem is, quite simply, is that standards of earlier eras, which are often retained standards for large segments of the current population, are not "quaint" or antiquated, for the most part.  They're neither so in context, or in reality.  And, in any one era, what seems to be a "modern" view, often will be regarded as  a quaint novel oddity of a later era.

For example, and taking the last item first, Prohibition was once regarded as a "progressive" movement.  To its founders, living in the alcohol soaked 19th Century, the movement was part of the same social progressiveness that advanced emancipation of the American slaves and the franchise for women. We, today, tend to view Abolitionist, Prohibitionist, and Suffragettes as three distinct groups, but they weren't.  Most early Suffragettes had been Abolitionist. And may Prohibitionist were Suffragettes.  We seek the movement to ban alcohol as some sort of weird fantastical delusional movement, but at the time, many political "liberals" saw the Prohibition movement as part and parcel of the same movement that sought to secure the right to vote for women, and to advance such other social causes as early Workers Compensation, child labor laws, hour of work laws, and the like.  Indeed, these movements were often much more related than we can conceive of today; one of the thoughts behind prohibition, for example, is that it stood a good chance of reducing violence against women, as men were drinking so much all day long.

A view that looks sappy now, but common then.  A husband dries out, once the town goes "dry", and ceases to be a problem to his wife.

Looked at properly, therefore, a movement like Prohibition isn't really as silly as it now seems.  People like to believe that it was advanced by large, overweight, Victorian bitties, but in reality, it was advanced first by radical social reformers who were in favor of radical social equality and who saw drying up the supply of alcohol as part of that.

Suffragette and pro prohibition demonstrator, Rose Sanderman (her name is misspelled on the photo).

While on this topic, ie., Prohibition, the complexity of these matters is well demonstrated by its actual, as opposed to imagined, history.  First of all, it had support in surprising places.  Prohibition was pushed over the top, in terms of Congress, by Wyoming Senator and Civil War Medal of Honor Winner Francis E. Warren. Warren wasn't a naive sentimentalist.  He'd been in Congress for eons and had seen war up front and close.  He was, however, a shrewd politician.  If Warren was backing it, it wasn't a naive act at the time.  And even if it meant that Kemmerer Wyoming, ironically located in a region of the state with a high percentage of Mormons, became the epicenter for regional bootlegging, it also meant that Warren felt, probably correctly, that he had the support of most Wyomingites on this issue.

 

Long serving Senator from Wyoming, Francis E. Warren.

Secondly, Prohibition, in actual medical health terms, was a actually a stunning success.  I'm not a teetotaler myself, but in actuality, Prohibition did pretty much what its backers claimed it would.  It dried up a huge problem and had demonstrable health benefits for the nation.  The popular myth is that the whole country was awash in bathtub gin, but it really was not.  In actuality, the amount of drinking, illegal or otherwise (Prohibition did not actually dry up all legal sources of booze) plummeted and the amount of alcoholism in the country not only greatly decreased, it never returned to pre Prohibition levels.  In fact, Prohibition was so effective in reducing the consumption of certain types of hard alcohol that their popularity has never returned.  

The point here is that a movement that seems "quaint" to us, might not only have been far from naive, but moreover it may have addressed a genuine problem that was present in society, or which may even now remain present.  Prohibition actually did take on the general widespread acceptance of public drunkenness and end it.  The drinking culture that emerged post Prohibition was not the same one that existed before it.  And the people who were backing it weren't doing it in a vacuum, but chances are high that that they were also backing the franchise for women and Indians, the early predecessors of Social Security, and the like.

Even the effort to repeal Prohibition isn't well understood.   The effort came about, sort of oddly, as politically liberal upper class women started to oppose it, which essentially caused them to be allied to demographic groups in the country who had never supported it.  Never popular amongst those of close Irish, Italian, German or Polish descent, these groups found common cause with an upper class movement. This made the effort to repeal Prohibition both conservative, ethic, and liberal, all at the same time.  And those opposing the repeal did so on sincere moral, and health, positions.  Just opposing Prohibition's repeal didn't make a person some sort of Victorian.  It might just make a person a physician.  Oddly enough, just as the effort to repeal it made for strange bedfellows, the effort to keep it did too, as even a group like the Klu Klux Klan came in to oppose repeal, probably mostly because ethnic Catholics supported repeal.  

This, it should be noted, is yet another aspect of these sort of topics.  Just because a view changes doesn't mean a lot of people don't continue to hold it.  Prohibition, for example, is no longer the law of the land, but a lot of people do not drink, and some of those people don't drink for the very reasons that caused people to back Prohibition.

 Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.

G.K. Chesterton

Okay, well so much for Prohibition, but what does that have to do with anything modern or current?  Well, perhaps quite a bit.

Anyone who is at least 45 years old or so has seen a massive public shift about certain types of conduct, particularly in regards to relationships between men and women, but even in regards to all sorts of deeply held beliefs.  This is most evident in terms of television, which has undoubtedly sought, for mercenary reasons, to push the envelope on such things as it gets people to watch.  The impact of such things is subtle, and perhaps not very permanent, but it is real.  Even such a popular television show as Friends displayed conduct which, even in the early 1970s, would have been regarded as deeply immoral.  Indeed, the "norm" portrayed on Friends and many other such shows would have been regarded as abnormal in many earlier eras, or at least scandalous.

As this isn't an editorial on shifting moral standards, I won't get into that too much further, but I would note that it seems that television has taken this to a new level in recent years as the number of channels has expanded greatly.  Perhaps the most prevalent examples of this are found on TLC, which seems to be dedicated in recent years to promoting the odd and portraying the normal as odd.  This, again, presents a problem for the historical novelist.

For example, a popular TLC show follows The Duggers.  The Duggers are a family that lives somewhere in the American South and which has a large number of children, something like 19 or so.  They are also, as the show makes fairly plain, members of a Protestant evangelical church.  All this, apparently, entitled them to a television show, but why?

Nineteen children is a lot of children by any measure, but it isn't really as freakish as television would like to suggest. Large families have been the norm for most of civilized history.  At least some of my relatively recent ancestors came from families where a married couple had up to 12 children.  Twelve isn't 19, of course, but you can see it from there.  There's something more than a little odd about a society finding a married couple having children to be so novel that it merits a television show.  Likewise, there's something odd about a television show finding that the same couple holds a deeply held religious set of beliefs to be novel.  When belief become novel, that's a bit distressing.  Perhaps its not as distressing, however, as basic biological facts being regarded as massively odd, which is essentially the point of the show.  

So then, what does a novelist do with this?  Up until extremely recently, having a lot of children in a married household wouldn't be worth noting.  Maybe having only one child in a married household would be.  And the fact that if there were two in the household that they would be married would be an assumption, not the opposite.  Indeed, in many localities, including Wyoming, cohabitation was illegal for most of the 20th Century, and for good reason as the state didn't want to bear the costs of children that might result from an unmarried union, and feared for what the mother of a child abandoned by the father, and potentially by her own family, would have to do in order to get by.  Again, the law wasn't naive, it served a legitimate purpose.

In a modern novel, however, such as in any one of McMurtry's set in Texas or Mexico of the 19th Century, the opposite would be portrayed as true.  I don't mean to suggest that everyone in the 19th and early 20th Century was a saint, that'd be far from true.  But in order to make the novels apparently interesting to certain readers, it's been necessary, in his judgment, to introduce what must have seemed to be a certain unseemly element at the time, but which now, because of shifting standards may not.  In his novel Horseman, Pass By, for example (his best novel in my view) he does not do this, but does portray the typical reactions to a young man to young women, in a rural setting, pretty accurately, even by today's standards, and also portrays the relationship between two middle aged single people pretty accurately as well.  By the later stages of the Lonesome Dove series, however, he's had to resort to the semi bizarre.

Getting back to the television example, in the last couple of years TLC has treated viewers to a polygamist family that they follow around, which seems rather extreme (particularly because the male figure in the family is constantly grinning in a rather weird way and seems to be hyperactive in a distressing fashion).  Sister Wives follows this family around presenting them as a model of family standards, in stark contrast to the polygamist groups that have otherwise been in the news, making a subtle argument that polygamy is normal than normal, or perhaps even the epitome of conservative standards. Polygamy having lost its luster, perhaps, this year they're following some young Amish and Mennoite men and women around as they abandon their faith in a show telling titled Breaking Amish.

Its this last item that inspired this post in the first place.  I've never met an Amishman, that I know of, although I've very occasionally met Mennonites or Hutterites.  Suffice it to say, I'm not in either of those groups, but I know a little about them.  I'm not going to dwell on their religious beliefs, and TLC doesn't even scratch the surface on them, but they're complicated and have utterly nothing to do with being "old fashioned" or "quaint". They don't live in the past, as TLC seems to think.  Indeed, in the real world they're afflicted with some particularly modern problems, some of which are unique to farmers, and some of which are unique to groups which are very closely related, biologically.

Perhaps, in some ways, the most telling aspect of the outlook of the show's makers is the frequent insertion of quotes from the Bible in a fashion that would seemingly demonstrate that the person inserting them not only does not understand the text in terms of Amish or Mennonite beliefs, but probably doesn't understand them in relation to Christianity as a whole.  The message therefore becomes, in a way, that not only are people who isolate themselves in a cloistered community odd and missing out, but that anyone who doesn't embrace modern secularism does as well.  It's interesting to compare this to the same use of quotes from the bible in the Coen version of the film True Grit.  That film starts off with a quote from proverbs, that being "The wicked flee when no man pursueth", setting the tone for the start of the film.  The use of the quote, not one that is one that commonly comes to many person's minds, is brilliant in effect and impact.  TLC, however, stretches or misconstrues the quotes it wants to make, perhaps because the underlying tone of the series is to criticize the religions its referencing through the quotes.

 Catholic Church, New Mexico

At any rate, there's something basically disgusting about following around a collection of very young people, who are likely not very representative of their demographic, in a manner that essentially suggests that these people need to come out of their isolated group so they can "make their own decisions", while exposing them to some conduct, or having them engage in some conduct, that's either questionable or even reprehensible.   Perhaps the only benefit of this effort, and an accidental one at that, is that it shows American urbanites to perhaps been just as freakish or naive as the show obviously wishes to portray the Amish as being.  Indeed, this is so much the case that to at least some degree the show unintentionally makes the Amish and Mennonite isolationist practices look pretty good in comparison to the cheap materialism that those being "broken" are exposed to in the show.  Again, this isn't to comment on Mennonite or Amish beliefs, about which I know only a little (but more, I suspect, than the producers of the show do) but rather to point out that popular entertainment has reached a point where it doesn't grasp any standard, not just some standards.

 Catholic Church, Trampas New Mexico

Finally, taking one further example, albeit this one a prime time example from a major network, one of the various networks has a television show entitled Parenthood.  I'm sure the show conceives of itself as showing the trials and tribulations of modern parents, but what it really is best defined as would be as a species of prime time soap opera. As such, it gives a stunning example of the topics under discussion here.

In the most recent episode of Parenthood, amongst the various other plots that are centered around the fictional extended Braverman family, we find a young woman engaging in sex with a new boyfriend on their second or third date, to be woken up early in the morning by her mother who is giddy to find out about this. That same mother is now living with one of the high school teachers of her high school aged son, who (the son that is) uses the vehicle of his aunt's cancer to seduce his former sympathetic girlfriend, also high school aged, who had been seeing a college aged young man.  In terms of the evolution of thought or standards, almost every single thing depicted in this show would have been regarded as far from normal even relatively recently.  For much of the 20th Century, in fact, a good deal of it would have been regarded as illegal.  Both the illegal and legal aspects of it (and it all would have been illegal a century ago) would have been regarded as scandalous behavior.  Now, it's depicted as maudlin or even sympathetic, and all as normal, a massive departure from common views of even relatively recently, and probably still a departure for many now.

But what's a writer to do with this?  If a person takes McMurtry's approach, the writer would get out ahead of it and wallow in it.  But that seems like a misrepresentative approach.  If a person takes the approach taken in True Grit or Little Big Man, particularly True Grit, they'd flat out present the views that where held as views.  That seems the better approach.  And perhaps that also serves the purpose of not only been less exploitative, but more exploratory in some meaningful fashion.

On one final note on this, as more of a postscript as opposed to anything else, I can't help but note that after I started writing this the news about Gen. Petraeus broke. At first blush, the reaction to the news of his affair, and his resignation due to it, might seem to counter what's noted here. But, in reality, it does not seem to.  It is true that the reaction shows that there remains at least a segment of society which publicly adheres to the older standards and which continues to recognize the concept of shame. But what is telling about this is that it only seems to apply to those in the highest office.  It's odd, and indeed its a bit of a reversal of the historic norm.  Conduct which nobody would have publicly acknowledged two or three decades ago is now very openly engaged in now, except in high office.  Perhaps ironically, in high office conduct which was not unknown in prior decades is now exposed to huge scandalous effect, when earlier it was simply ignored.  Prior to this scandal, for example, President Clinton nearly lost his office due to his sordid affair with Monica Lewinsky.  But nobody seems to have been too concerned with JFK's conduct with Mimi Alford, assuming that Alford's recent revelations are true.  Likewise, if the rumored conduct about FDR are correct, everyone seems to have turned a blind eye to it.  I'm not saying that these alleged affairs should, or should not have, been exposed, if they were real, but it's interesting that we've gone from an era when affairs were regarded as wholly illegitimate, and kept secret for the most part, even though they were not infrequent, to an era when they're routine amongst average people, relatively rare amongst those in power, and career enders in high office, but not private office, if discovered.  Again, not an easy set of standard evolutions which are easy for a modern writer to take into account.

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Epilog:

Since I first published this entry in November, there's been a couple of times during the past year when something vaguely connected to it popped up.  Indeed, I did an entry that was fairly connected with it entitled "Fame."  

What causes me to republish it, and add the epilog, however is that in the past couple of weeks we've been treated to Amanda Bynes, former child actress, basically melting down, or  perhaps pretending to melt down, in public, with the predictable paparazzi like following of that, while at the same time it's been announced that Gen. Bryan T. Roberts, commanding general of the Army's Ft. Jackson, is being charged with adultery by the Army.

Now, I don't mean to excuse Gen. Roberts, but it is again interesting to note that in the case of Army officers and politicians, people expect the old moral standards to apply, but in regards to everyone else, they seemingly do not.  It's odd.