escapism as a luxury

[intertribal]

I've been off conducting research in the field for my job - we investigate "needs improvement" schools - and one of the places I visited was a school on a reservation.  This is rural Nebraska, so things are isolated enough as it is, but it felt even more so that way at this school.  Most of their teachers are white and live across from the school building in a little row, friends only with each other, without access to ambulances or police departments (except for the FBI, if it's an emergency).  They have massive amounts of administrative turn-over - one principal walked into the school after he was hired and walked right back out.

The teachers are frustrated that they can't do much to get students out of abusive home environments.  Most of the family set-ups are always in flux - cousins moving in and out, grandparents taking over for parents, students moving from house to house.  Alcohol and meth abuse is a huge factor - some students start using in 3rd grade.  A 2nd-grader recently committed suicide.  Students are often out of school because of funerals in the community (the road you take to get to the school is a dangerous bendy road with lots of crosses on either side).  Teachers say students don't see the point in doing well.

Students at this school much prefer non-fiction to fiction.  And the genre they dislike most of all?  Science fiction and fantasy.  A couple reasons were offered for this (who knows what the real reason is):

• Those are not "their" stories.  Lack of relevance.
• They don't want to escape into fantasy, they want a better reality.  Like there is a certain stress point at which real life difficulties make fictional escapism totally irrelevant.

Of course, there is escapism going on - into alcohol and meth.  Part of what these answers show is what the staff thinks science fiction and fantasy (fiction in general?) are "supposed to do."  But I found it interesting that sf/f was the genre singled out as the least appealing.

Comments

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I haven't read enough DFW to tell (just the Tracy Austin thing), but I think some people would find his criticism of the avant-garde pitfall ironic. I agree with his point, but I'm just sayin'.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Well, to be fair, he does say he intentionally wrote for intellectuals.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

I do, however, think it's at least relevant...

What were you intending to do when you started this book?

I wanted to do something sad. I'd done some funny stuff and some heavy, intellectual stuff, but I'd never done anything sad. And I wanted it not to have a single main character. The other banality would be: I wanted to do something real American, about what it's like to live in America around the millennium.

And what is that like?

There's something particularly sad about it, something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness. Whether it's unique to our generation I really don't know.

just to show where i'm getting all this from...

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Not much of the press about "Infinite Jest" addresses the role that Alcoholics Anonymous plays in the story. How does that connect with your overall theme?

The sadness that the book is about, and that I was going through, was a real American type of sadness. I was white, upper-middle-class, obscenely well-educated, had had way more career success than I could have legitimately hoped for and was sort of adrift. A lot of my friends were the same way. Some of them were deeply into drugs, others were unbelievable workaholics. Some were going to singles bars every night. You could see it played out in 20 different ways, but it's the same thing.

Some of my friends got into AA. I didn't start out wanting to write a lot of AA stuff, but I knew I wanted to do drug addicts and I knew I wanted to have a halfway house. I went to a couple of meetings with these guys and thought that it was tremendously powerful. That part of the book is supposed to be living enough to be realistic, but it's also supposed to stand for a response to lostness and what you do when the things you thought were going to make you OK, don't. The bottoming out with drugs and the AA response to that was the starkest thing that I could find to talk about that.

I get the feeling that a lot of us, privileged Americans, as we enter our early 30s, have to find a way to put away childish things and confront stuff about spirituality and values. Probably the AA model isn't the only way to do it, but it seems to me to be one of the more vigorous.

The characters have to struggle with the fact that the AA system is teaching them fairly deep things through these seemingly simplistic clichés.

It's hard for the ones with some education, which, to be mercenary, is who this book is targeted at. I mean this is caviar for the general literary fiction reader. For me there was a real repulsion at the beginning. "One Day at a Time," right? I'm thinking 1977, Norman Lear, starring Bonnie Franklin. Show me the needlepointed sampler this is written on. But apparently part of addiction is that you need the substance so bad that when they take it away from you, you want to die. And it's so awful that the only way to deal with it is to build a wall at midnight and not look over it. Something as banal and reductive as "One Day at a Time" enabled these people to walk through hell, which from what I could see the first six months of detox is. That struck me.

It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that's gutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me, like "It's really important not to lie." OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don't feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can't trust you. I feel that I'm in pain, I'm nervous, I'm lonely and I can't figure out why. Then I realize, "Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie." The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting -- which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff -- can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't, that seems to me to be important. That seems to me like something our generation needs to feel.

Re: just to show where i'm getting all this from...

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, I feel like DFW and I have a number of significant differences. I mean, it took me years to get over a sort of categorical imperative not to lie. And more years to really recognize this sort of conflict between the values I believed in when I was younger and how they play out in the world, and think about which I have to choose, I mean, really recognize the weight of that choice and not just see it as a rule. Sorry, I'm not thinking straight anymore. Deteriorating. I have to get on a bus in 7 hours to go to class, and I want to grade papers first...