Wednesday, January 08, 2014

The Wisdom of Fiction

As an avid reader and writer of historical fiction, I have often ruminated on my own place in time and what would have become of me if I had been born in another era. I may never write "important literature," but many books have made me stop and think what I might have been had the circumstances of my birth been different. I have considered issues of health and science and technology and whether I would have even survived to adulthood in the 19th century or even the early 20th century. In most cases, I probably would have died before I reached my first birthday. The bigger question, assuming I would have survived, is what kind of person would I have become?

I have been moved to righteous indignation by classic books like The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Scarlet Letter, and more recent selections like Shine, Inside Out and Back Again, and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I can't help but wonder where my moral compass would have pointed if I had grown up in the Antebellum South or in WWII Germany. Would I have accepted bigoted codes of ethics as morally right or hidden behind the general attitude of the time because it was easier than expressing an opposing opinion?

Having come up through the 1960's and the explosion of free speech and equality-for-all rallies, I must have soaked up the social vibrations that that would have bounced my grandparents right out of their comfort zone. Yes, I had a loving grandmother who regularly used a slew of racial and religious epithets to describe the Jewish, African American, and Hispanic people around her, completely convinced that they were just ordinary adjectives and acceptable classifications.  My mother adopted some of that, but she was more subtle. My mother was also a staunch Republican—chairman of the local GOP—but a firm women's libber who started her own business. It was an interesting set of messages to ingest, so I don't really know what part of me stems from her influence and what was just innate.

Books have so much power, especially in our formative years (adolescence in particular), to both elicit a response and to shape it.  It was easy for me to stand in 1979 and see the injustice of Hester Prynne's sentence, but how would I have felt about it in the 1630's or even when Hawthorne published it in 1840? Would I have defended her?  Would I have protected The Witch of Blackbird Pond's Hannah in 1687 or would I have joined the hunt? Would I have stood up for Tom Robinson in the 1930s? I would like to think I had the gumption to choose the right path no matter where or when I lived.

I have always felt blessed to live in a more "enlightened" era where the lessons of history seem so obvious and clear in the books that I have read. I have looked around and thought that I don't have those sorts of huge choices to make, so maybe I'm not as evolved as I would like to think.

Then again, I have seen the fall of Apartheid in South Africa and protested in my own small way against those who supported it. I have been sickened by the sort of hatred that drags a black man to his death behind a pick-up truck or lashes a young gay man to a post, beaten to within an inch of his life and left to die. I have seen the kind of fanatical judgement that drives jet planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and takes thousands of lives. I have heard the story of a 17-year-old Afghan girl who risked her life just to be educated. I have seen what fear and hatred can do to the marginalized of our generation.  We choose our response, big or small, and every tiny spec of dignity matters.

I choose to read the books I read, too, and I react to them of my own accord, from something that lives deep in my bones. Not every book has to ask some huge moral question, but each can show us a little about who we are or who we would like to be. There must be a reason I cry when Tom's life is lost because of bigotry, when Dimmesdale dies and Hester suffers on, when Hannah is hunted like an animal because of fear and superstition.

Would I have understood what it meant to be human even back then? I hope so. Maybe the rebellious literature of the age would have found me. Maybe I would have searched for it and loved it and learned from it. And maybe, just maybe, I would have written some of it.

1 comment:

  1. "I choose to read the books I read, too, and I react to them of my own accord, from something that lives deep in my bones. Not every book has to ask some huge moral question, but each can show us a little about who we are or who we would like to be" I ditto that! Profound thought very succinctly put; I enjoyed reading it.

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