Between 2012 and 2014, I was enrolled in a graduate program for fiction-writing, even though my background and my subject-matter made me a fairly poor fit for this kind of program.
A lot of people, including me, rightfully disdain this message of good things happen to good people because it is cruel. It is obviously untrue. Terrible things happen to good people all the time.
I grew up in a culture that believes this and did it make me a better person? I think I would have been just as good had I not been raised this way. It also made me mean. If someone is unfortunate they must have brought it on themselves. I am trying to unlearn this but the message is everywhere and it sickens me.
I've found teaching high school in an exurban district that many of the kids who can read most fluently are also heavily involved in their Christian church. This isn't surprising, but the result is often that they have both a floor and a ceiling on their analysis of a text's rhetorical features. Their floor is higher than an atheist kid, because they read all the time, and a lot of the atheist kids don't read at all (they just watch short-form videos). They can do extremely well an analysis of a book like The Color Purple because it's actually just about the power of spiritual growth (it's essentially a sentimental novel, which is why it's so ironic that the state I teach in wants to ban it), and actually enjoy The Scarlet Letter unlike most of the kids I teach. However, their ceiling on analysis is often lower, because they can't understand why someone would enjoy Lolita or Frankenstein or Lord of the Flies, to give three examples of books these kids have struggled with that I think are pretty "anti-Christian." The strongest writers are probably the atheists who also read for pleasure all the time---the sci-fi kids!
I find it a little disconcerting how you make some of this stuff up. Was Jacob made up? The professor? The program? I know this is an increasingly common way to write. I have a friend who wrote a by-all-appearances autobiographical piece, without the usual trappings of fiction (no neat plot, no real climax). But it turns out it was mostly made up. I think this is part of an online culture that can't tell the difference between real and fake anymore.
I don't really accept that Christian writing has to be sentimental. Flannery O'Connor said, "The stories are hard, but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism." I also don't find Tolstoy particularly sentimental, even though he writes characters who've been positively transformed by their faith.
I think a lot of sentimental fiction betrays a lack of real faith in goodness. If you have faith in something there's no need to sell it so hard. You can write about life honestly, the good and the bad and all the doubts, and what will emerge is fundamentally good. I do believe that genuine goodness is usually rewarded, but often in subtle, unexpected ways.
Karin Fossum is a very underrated writer who I think has a genuine belief in goodness (I'm not sure if she would agree). She's a Norwegian crime writer, more or less explicitly atheist. Her books are marketed as middlebrow crime fiction in the US. But I think she's terrific, Dostoevskian in the best way, with none of the excess. She puts her characters in the most strenuous situations, always remains honest, never kids herself, keeps their motives in mind. She never forces a happy ending. But what emerges is positive.
I don't like it, I think it would be better to be straightforward. I love Naomi's criticism, insight, and true passion for literature, but I think these parables are beneath her, and I think inattentive readers will get confused.
I see a lot of younger people struggling to be confident today, and I think these parables come out of a lack of confidence. So my message is: be confident. I'm not aware of anyone else writing so well about literature today. This is someone who taught herself to read meter by muttering Chaucer for four months. If she can't be confident, who can?
"It really does feel like the two halves of our literature have been constituted in opposition to each other in some way."
Well struck - though the "Christian" and "anti-Christian" contrast is misleading. It's more like a difference between tame and wild literature, between cats and catamounts, or say between the conventional and the revolutionary, and who cannot see the appeal of both, at least in part?
Victor Hugo's epic novel Les Misérables was capacious enough to contain both the tame conventional and the wild revolutionary, and it was massively popular. It was denounced by the establishment, even as it forced the establishment to respond to it on behalf of the people, as biographer Graham Robb explains. The establishment fought back in literary, social, and political realms all, upon publication of Les Misérables. As Hugo notes, "'The newspapers which support the old world say, "It's hideous, infamous, odious, execrable, abominable, grotesque, repulsive, shapeless, monstrous, horrendous, etc." Democratic and friendly papers answer, "No, it's not bad."'" Robb adds, "Mme Hugo, who was in Paris giving interviews, tried to persuade Hugo's spineless allies to support the book and invited them to dinner; but Gautier had flu, Janin had 'an attack of gout', and George Sand excused herself on the grounds that she always over-ate when she was invited out…." Further:
"…Perrot de Chezelles [a public prosecutor], in an 'Examination of Les Misérables', defended the excellence of a State which persecuted convicts even after their release, and derided the notion that poverty and ignorance had anything to do with crime…. The State was trying to clear its name. The Emperor and Empress performed some public acts of charity and brought philanthropy back into fashion. There was a sudden surge of official interest in penal legislation, the industrial exploitation of women, the care of orphans, and the education of the poor. From his rock in the English Channel, Victor Hugo…[exiled] had set the parliamentary agenda for 1862"
– as he had set out to, in many ways. Flaubert described Les Misérables as "infantile," containing "neither truth nor greatness," showing "the fall of a God," his erstwhile icon. In reality, Flaubert and the rest of the literary establishment never escaped Hugo's shadow, in more ways than one. Robb adds that Les Misérables is "a work of serious fiction for the masses…one of the last universally accessible masterpieces of Western literature, and a disturbing sign that class barriers had been breached..."
I feel like Colleen Hoover and her ilk are the contemporary equivalent of this commercial literary expression of goodness, except the long-suffering female main characters are plucky and “sarcastic” and that makes them relatable to a mainstream American reader.
Maybe it all comes down to relatability, as much as we complain about it. Gotta say, I don’t much relate to “goodness & goodness rewarded” as expressed in the pseudo Christian popular worldview, nor do I recognize anyone I know in it, really.
Tolstoy is an interesting counterpoint though. Maybe he’s literary because he depicts flawed human beings flailing around goodness for quite a while before they (some of them, usually the academic young man) accept Christ, as opposed to goodness shining through them from the outset despite their circumstances.
I loved this, and was struck by your use of the phrase "open-hearted," which is kind of a synonym for honest, but more generous and vulnerable. Goodness does matter.
I think the appeal of it is very similar to The Lamplighter! One of its striking characteristics is how sentimental and open-hearted it is, propelled by the same kind of vision/faith for how the world works. The main difference being, instead of grounding itself in a Christian vision of good, its faith is in rationality and humanism, which made it a cultural touchpoint for people craving faith but unable to reconcile with religion.
Anyway, I was struck by the similarity, given how diverse those two works are!
I just found your substack and I like it so you’re going to find comments from me on a bunch of random recent things. Now, a question:
The good-things-happen-to-good-people trope made your point, but do you know Christian’s, who you respect, who sincerely hold this to be true?
I know no Christians worth listening to who promote this stuff, and I don’t know why non-Christians with sense don’t see the same.
Even in your own fictional representation, the good peoples lives kinda sucked. Presenting Jonathan (only Christian in the class) as holding this belief seems disingenuous.
Isn’t this the essential message of the sermon on the mount? The meek will inherit the earth. The first Christians understood this literally: Christ would come again and they would literally inherit the physical earth. Later that was translated into a heavenly reward. But it's still the same, if you are good, you will be rewarded.
Yes Christians generally believe all people are inherently sinful and that you can only be redeemed by faith in Christ alone. Which logically means that even evil people will go to heaven if they have a sincere faith in Christ. But in practice, both in folk Christianity and in the gospel itself, there is a belief that those who are oppressed in this world will ultimately prevail, and their oppressors will suffer.
The first christians did not understand what Jesus was on earth to do. In Acts 1 they ask if He will restore the earthly kingdom of Israel- and that wasn't the point at all.
However, we still believe that Christ will come again and we will inherit the physical earth- but not in any political way. It'll be a new world (and this may be what you mean by 'heavenly reward'), but it's important that it'll still be physical. It'll be 'heaven on earth' but it will be ON earth- well, some transformed version of it. We were created with physical forms and work that needed doing, and we will return to a redeemed state of this.
"Yes Christians generally believe all people are inherently sinful and that you can only be redeemed by faith in Christ alone."
I'm happy to hear you say this, as it is true and cuts to the heart of Christianity and bodes well for our ability to converse.
"Which logically means that even evil people will go to heaven if they have a sincere faith in Christ."
It logically means that ONLY evil people will go to heaven if... No other type of person exists. More on this under the next quote.
"But in practice, both in folk Christianity and in the gospel itself, there is a belief that those who are oppressed in this world will ultimately prevail, and their oppressors will suffer."
Ultimately prevail, yes, but not necessarily while alive, and not due to them being oppressed, or good people, or anything other than the fact that if they repent and believe and accept that Christs act of death and resurrection can cover their sin then they will be taken back into relationship with the Father. It's used in folk tails and literature, but I (and the Christians I'm trying to stand in for) use it poetically. Stories are a good way to teach things.
And I think you know that, which is why you didn't straw man it with an up-and-to-the-right story. To apply good-things-happen-to-good-people to our day-to-day lives is conflating our eventual state with our current state. You don't do this in your story, as it's obviously wrong, but seem to attribute it to the Christian in the classroom- which is a bit of a straw man.
Also important is that Christians aren't purporting to make non-Christians suddenly suffer much more then they are now when the New Kingdom comes. I'm sure you've read the DIVINE COMEDY: they won't be suddenly subjected to random torture as much as they will be given over to the way of life they've already chosen. They are given over to their desires and we have ours sanctified (made like Jesus'), it's not a +1 for Christian's and a -1 for unbelievers, it's a +1 for Christians and a 0 for unbelievers- it's just that the score card is made obvious. However, all representations of that time are poetic- we don't really know what'll happen. But at base we are all out of relationship with the Father, and some of us come back into relationship with him, Hell isn't a massive step down-you're already at zero. So "oppressors will suffer" is a bit of a misnomer, as in this life we absolutely don't know that. If you want another literary representation of Hell I loved C.S.Lewis' THE GREAT DIVORCE, wonderful description of hell as a fairly normal city (most of it is not set in this area).
You make a fine point about Tolstoy. Levin and Kitty do and believe “the right things” and are rewarded for it at the end of Anna Karenina. And yet no one would dream of calling Tolstoy trite or saccharine!
I like the one where good things happen to good people but in their spirits only and neither in heaven nor matter. Luke skywalker gets killed by a stray laser but jokes on everyone else because skywalker alone has the spirit prep necessary to be happy regardless of fate.
Human beings (and what I’m calling souls) are part of the world.
My answer (also Plato’s I think) would be that people who are good have a better chance doing good things in the world. Good people will probably be rewarded externally. But a well ordered soul is the only thing that a good person can be certain of (and some people think it’s the most valuable possession).
Okay, but then...we agree on a cosmological level. But...I don't think I would enjoy a story where people who are good just get killed by laser-beams and aren't able to topple the evils they've devoted their lives to toppling. I've read one novel like that, Hans Fallada's EVERY MAN DIES ALONE. And it was good, but one was enough.
Yeah, the one where the hero is killed randomly but still wins spiritually would be more a Borges story or a gospel then a novel. Death and the Compass but not ironic.
I think there’s a tried and true novel plot where the good person has misfortune and the bad person has fortune and the bad person is still psychologically at war with themselves and unhappy whereas the good person is happy.
Sort of, I was always most drawn to an idiosyncratic version of Neoplatonism when I was younger. But that’s definitely the same region of moral ideas.
I do have mixed feelings about the need for individual virtue to have an absolute reward. I think the stoic individual is probably too absolute and independent, and I’m more comfortable with insisting that virtue is a necessary precondition for happiness. (But I wasn’t inclined to emphasize that angle in the above discussion.)
That passage in the first footnote is touching. It is especially so if you have lived through episodes like this, which is really a function of age. Anyone with parents will find themselves caring for a person who was young and strong once, and who is failing and needs help. And the old man in the story was very fortunate to have someone to take care of him. This happens to literally everyone, both as the child and the parent. How can that be trite?
Charlotte Yonge is an English Victorian religious novelist who can be interesting to read, if you're interested in that sort of thing. Like Little Women only more so. She displays a certain amount of psychological insight while using it in the service of a worldview even people of her time often thought was a bit much. Lots of exaltation at deathbeds but in the meantime no detail of daily life is too small to be turned over for moral implications and possibility for improvement.
I’m no theologian, but I thought that the Christian story and worldview is the opposite of your portrayal. It’s not “be good and good things will come your way.” It’s more like, “be good no matter what it costs you, and it will cost you everything.” I mean, Jesus was crucified. The symbol is his method of execution. The goodness is its own reward. Except for prosperity evangelism, but that’s a very ugly doctrine.
Intereresting article. Commercial fiction can't be too off-putting, too depressing or realistic (however these are interpreted by the gatekeepers). I am not sure who is reading commercial fiction. Maybe if the readers are parents (and/or X-tians) they've gotta keep all their kids believing everything's going to be all right in the end, and there's "good" in all people, which we all know is def not the truth. "Goodness" is a difficult term these days!
The snobbery of some literary types towards popular fiction has always stuck in my craw. Today's pop fiction stories are tomorrow's classics.
Some see something wholesome and want to shout: "The word doesn't work that way!" Probably because it's never worked out that way _for them._ That doesn't mean it's never worked that way for anyone.
An interesting piece of writing and I'm not sure if you do really believe that good things happen to good people and that is, with elaborations, what makes good (or popular) fiction. There are so many examples where bad things happen to good people and vice versa and really good fiction (not all of course but a lot) explores goodness, badness, love and loss and engages the reader's empathy in their knowledge that they are neither all good or all bad. If you have time or the inclination, and if you haven't already done so, read The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma because that illustrates roughly what I'm trying to say.
And thanks for your writing, it is stimulating to read your opinions and your micro fiction, it makes me think!
A lot of people, including me, rightfully disdain this message of good things happen to good people because it is cruel. It is obviously untrue. Terrible things happen to good people all the time.
I grew up in a culture that believes this and did it make me a better person? I think I would have been just as good had I not been raised this way. It also made me mean. If someone is unfortunate they must have brought it on themselves. I am trying to unlearn this but the message is everywhere and it sickens me.
I've found teaching high school in an exurban district that many of the kids who can read most fluently are also heavily involved in their Christian church. This isn't surprising, but the result is often that they have both a floor and a ceiling on their analysis of a text's rhetorical features. Their floor is higher than an atheist kid, because they read all the time, and a lot of the atheist kids don't read at all (they just watch short-form videos). They can do extremely well an analysis of a book like The Color Purple because it's actually just about the power of spiritual growth (it's essentially a sentimental novel, which is why it's so ironic that the state I teach in wants to ban it), and actually enjoy The Scarlet Letter unlike most of the kids I teach. However, their ceiling on analysis is often lower, because they can't understand why someone would enjoy Lolita or Frankenstein or Lord of the Flies, to give three examples of books these kids have struggled with that I think are pretty "anti-Christian." The strongest writers are probably the atheists who also read for pleasure all the time---the sci-fi kids!
I find it a little disconcerting how you make some of this stuff up. Was Jacob made up? The professor? The program? I know this is an increasingly common way to write. I have a friend who wrote a by-all-appearances autobiographical piece, without the usual trappings of fiction (no neat plot, no real climax). But it turns out it was mostly made up. I think this is part of an online culture that can't tell the difference between real and fake anymore.
I don't really accept that Christian writing has to be sentimental. Flannery O'Connor said, "The stories are hard, but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism." I also don't find Tolstoy particularly sentimental, even though he writes characters who've been positively transformed by their faith.
I think a lot of sentimental fiction betrays a lack of real faith in goodness. If you have faith in something there's no need to sell it so hard. You can write about life honestly, the good and the bad and all the doubts, and what will emerge is fundamentally good. I do believe that genuine goodness is usually rewarded, but often in subtle, unexpected ways.
Karin Fossum is a very underrated writer who I think has a genuine belief in goodness (I'm not sure if she would agree). She's a Norwegian crime writer, more or less explicitly atheist. Her books are marketed as middlebrow crime fiction in the US. But I think she's terrific, Dostoevskian in the best way, with none of the excess. She puts her characters in the most strenuous situations, always remains honest, never kids herself, keeps their motives in mind. She never forces a happy ending. But what emerges is positive.
This is the conceit of the blog: thursday posts are fiction followed by commentary.
> On Tuesdays I post critical essays about the Great Books and/or the literary world. On Thursdays I post short tales or parables.
https://www.woman-of-letters.com/about#§why-dont-you-just-write-regular-essays
I don't like it, I think it would be better to be straightforward. I love Naomi's criticism, insight, and true passion for literature, but I think these parables are beneath her, and I think inattentive readers will get confused.
I see a lot of younger people struggling to be confident today, and I think these parables come out of a lack of confidence. So my message is: be confident. I'm not aware of anyone else writing so well about literature today. This is someone who taught herself to read meter by muttering Chaucer for four months. If she can't be confident, who can?
This is a dumb take. She’s literally a fiction writer.
"It really does feel like the two halves of our literature have been constituted in opposition to each other in some way."
Well struck - though the "Christian" and "anti-Christian" contrast is misleading. It's more like a difference between tame and wild literature, between cats and catamounts, or say between the conventional and the revolutionary, and who cannot see the appeal of both, at least in part?
Victor Hugo's epic novel Les Misérables was capacious enough to contain both the tame conventional and the wild revolutionary, and it was massively popular. It was denounced by the establishment, even as it forced the establishment to respond to it on behalf of the people, as biographer Graham Robb explains. The establishment fought back in literary, social, and political realms all, upon publication of Les Misérables. As Hugo notes, "'The newspapers which support the old world say, "It's hideous, infamous, odious, execrable, abominable, grotesque, repulsive, shapeless, monstrous, horrendous, etc." Democratic and friendly papers answer, "No, it's not bad."'" Robb adds, "Mme Hugo, who was in Paris giving interviews, tried to persuade Hugo's spineless allies to support the book and invited them to dinner; but Gautier had flu, Janin had 'an attack of gout', and George Sand excused herself on the grounds that she always over-ate when she was invited out…." Further:
"…Perrot de Chezelles [a public prosecutor], in an 'Examination of Les Misérables', defended the excellence of a State which persecuted convicts even after their release, and derided the notion that poverty and ignorance had anything to do with crime…. The State was trying to clear its name. The Emperor and Empress performed some public acts of charity and brought philanthropy back into fashion. There was a sudden surge of official interest in penal legislation, the industrial exploitation of women, the care of orphans, and the education of the poor. From his rock in the English Channel, Victor Hugo…[exiled] had set the parliamentary agenda for 1862"
– as he had set out to, in many ways. Flaubert described Les Misérables as "infantile," containing "neither truth nor greatness," showing "the fall of a God," his erstwhile icon. In reality, Flaubert and the rest of the literary establishment never escaped Hugo's shadow, in more ways than one. Robb adds that Les Misérables is "a work of serious fiction for the masses…one of the last universally accessible masterpieces of Western literature, and a disturbing sign that class barriers had been breached..."
Much more could be said.
I feel like Colleen Hoover and her ilk are the contemporary equivalent of this commercial literary expression of goodness, except the long-suffering female main characters are plucky and “sarcastic” and that makes them relatable to a mainstream American reader.
Maybe it all comes down to relatability, as much as we complain about it. Gotta say, I don’t much relate to “goodness & goodness rewarded” as expressed in the pseudo Christian popular worldview, nor do I recognize anyone I know in it, really.
Tolstoy is an interesting counterpoint though. Maybe he’s literary because he depicts flawed human beings flailing around goodness for quite a while before they (some of them, usually the academic young man) accept Christ, as opposed to goodness shining through them from the outset despite their circumstances.
I loved this, and was struck by your use of the phrase "open-hearted," which is kind of a synonym for honest, but more generous and vulnerable. Goodness does matter.
I just finished re-reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (if you haven’t heard of it, it’s a cult classic Harry Potter fan fiction that might be single-handedly responsible for the recent AI boom — see https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/21/what-does-a-harry-potter-fanfic-have-to-do-with-openai/).
I think the appeal of it is very similar to The Lamplighter! One of its striking characteristics is how sentimental and open-hearted it is, propelled by the same kind of vision/faith for how the world works. The main difference being, instead of grounding itself in a Christian vision of good, its faith is in rationality and humanism, which made it a cultural touchpoint for people craving faith but unable to reconcile with religion.
Anyway, I was struck by the similarity, given how diverse those two works are!
I just found your substack and I like it so you’re going to find comments from me on a bunch of random recent things. Now, a question:
The good-things-happen-to-good-people trope made your point, but do you know Christian’s, who you respect, who sincerely hold this to be true?
I know no Christians worth listening to who promote this stuff, and I don’t know why non-Christians with sense don’t see the same.
Even in your own fictional representation, the good peoples lives kinda sucked. Presenting Jonathan (only Christian in the class) as holding this belief seems disingenuous.
Isn’t this the essential message of the sermon on the mount? The meek will inherit the earth. The first Christians understood this literally: Christ would come again and they would literally inherit the physical earth. Later that was translated into a heavenly reward. But it's still the same, if you are good, you will be rewarded.
Yes Christians generally believe all people are inherently sinful and that you can only be redeemed by faith in Christ alone. Which logically means that even evil people will go to heaven if they have a sincere faith in Christ. But in practice, both in folk Christianity and in the gospel itself, there is a belief that those who are oppressed in this world will ultimately prevail, and their oppressors will suffer.
The first christians did not understand what Jesus was on earth to do. In Acts 1 they ask if He will restore the earthly kingdom of Israel- and that wasn't the point at all.
However, we still believe that Christ will come again and we will inherit the physical earth- but not in any political way. It'll be a new world (and this may be what you mean by 'heavenly reward'), but it's important that it'll still be physical. It'll be 'heaven on earth' but it will be ON earth- well, some transformed version of it. We were created with physical forms and work that needed doing, and we will return to a redeemed state of this.
"Yes Christians generally believe all people are inherently sinful and that you can only be redeemed by faith in Christ alone."
I'm happy to hear you say this, as it is true and cuts to the heart of Christianity and bodes well for our ability to converse.
"Which logically means that even evil people will go to heaven if they have a sincere faith in Christ."
It logically means that ONLY evil people will go to heaven if... No other type of person exists. More on this under the next quote.
"But in practice, both in folk Christianity and in the gospel itself, there is a belief that those who are oppressed in this world will ultimately prevail, and their oppressors will suffer."
Ultimately prevail, yes, but not necessarily while alive, and not due to them being oppressed, or good people, or anything other than the fact that if they repent and believe and accept that Christs act of death and resurrection can cover their sin then they will be taken back into relationship with the Father. It's used in folk tails and literature, but I (and the Christians I'm trying to stand in for) use it poetically. Stories are a good way to teach things.
And I think you know that, which is why you didn't straw man it with an up-and-to-the-right story. To apply good-things-happen-to-good-people to our day-to-day lives is conflating our eventual state with our current state. You don't do this in your story, as it's obviously wrong, but seem to attribute it to the Christian in the classroom- which is a bit of a straw man.
Also important is that Christians aren't purporting to make non-Christians suddenly suffer much more then they are now when the New Kingdom comes. I'm sure you've read the DIVINE COMEDY: they won't be suddenly subjected to random torture as much as they will be given over to the way of life they've already chosen. They are given over to their desires and we have ours sanctified (made like Jesus'), it's not a +1 for Christian's and a -1 for unbelievers, it's a +1 for Christians and a 0 for unbelievers- it's just that the score card is made obvious. However, all representations of that time are poetic- we don't really know what'll happen. But at base we are all out of relationship with the Father, and some of us come back into relationship with him, Hell isn't a massive step down-you're already at zero. So "oppressors will suffer" is a bit of a misnomer, as in this life we absolutely don't know that. If you want another literary representation of Hell I loved C.S.Lewis' THE GREAT DIVORCE, wonderful description of hell as a fairly normal city (most of it is not set in this area).
If you do, I need to introduce you to some more genuine Christians.
You make a fine point about Tolstoy. Levin and Kitty do and believe “the right things” and are rewarded for it at the end of Anna Karenina. And yet no one would dream of calling Tolstoy trite or saccharine!
I like the one where good things happen to good people but in their spirits only and neither in heaven nor matter. Luke skywalker gets killed by a stray laser but jokes on everyone else because skywalker alone has the spirit prep necessary to be happy regardless of fate.
To me that's the same as goodness not existing. If goodness doesn't have the power to affect the world, then it doesn't exist.
It can have the power to affect the world but not do so.
Or do you believe goodness is in action- just power used right?
Akin to “How could a good God allow evil?”
Human beings (and what I’m calling souls) are part of the world.
My answer (also Plato’s I think) would be that people who are good have a better chance doing good things in the world. Good people will probably be rewarded externally. But a well ordered soul is the only thing that a good person can be certain of (and some people think it’s the most valuable possession).
Okay, but then...we agree on a cosmological level. But...I don't think I would enjoy a story where people who are good just get killed by laser-beams and aren't able to topple the evils they've devoted their lives to toppling. I've read one novel like that, Hans Fallada's EVERY MAN DIES ALONE. And it was good, but one was enough.
Yeah, the one where the hero is killed randomly but still wins spiritually would be more a Borges story or a gospel then a novel. Death and the Compass but not ironic.
I think there’s a tried and true novel plot where the good person has misfortune and the bad person has fortune and the bad person is still psychologically at war with themselves and unhappy whereas the good person is happy.
So, you like stoicism?
Sort of, I was always most drawn to an idiosyncratic version of Neoplatonism when I was younger. But that’s definitely the same region of moral ideas.
I do have mixed feelings about the need for individual virtue to have an absolute reward. I think the stoic individual is probably too absolute and independent, and I’m more comfortable with insisting that virtue is a necessary precondition for happiness. (But I wasn’t inclined to emphasize that angle in the above discussion.)
That passage in the first footnote is touching. It is especially so if you have lived through episodes like this, which is really a function of age. Anyone with parents will find themselves caring for a person who was young and strong once, and who is failing and needs help. And the old man in the story was very fortunate to have someone to take care of him. This happens to literally everyone, both as the child and the parent. How can that be trite?
Charlotte Yonge is an English Victorian religious novelist who can be interesting to read, if you're interested in that sort of thing. Like Little Women only more so. She displays a certain amount of psychological insight while using it in the service of a worldview even people of her time often thought was a bit much. Lots of exaltation at deathbeds but in the meantime no detail of daily life is too small to be turned over for moral implications and possibility for improvement.
I’m no theologian, but I thought that the Christian story and worldview is the opposite of your portrayal. It’s not “be good and good things will come your way.” It’s more like, “be good no matter what it costs you, and it will cost you everything.” I mean, Jesus was crucified. The symbol is his method of execution. The goodness is its own reward. Except for prosperity evangelism, but that’s a very ugly doctrine.
Intereresting article. Commercial fiction can't be too off-putting, too depressing or realistic (however these are interpreted by the gatekeepers). I am not sure who is reading commercial fiction. Maybe if the readers are parents (and/or X-tians) they've gotta keep all their kids believing everything's going to be all right in the end, and there's "good" in all people, which we all know is def not the truth. "Goodness" is a difficult term these days!
The snobbery of some literary types towards popular fiction has always stuck in my craw. Today's pop fiction stories are tomorrow's classics.
Some see something wholesome and want to shout: "The word doesn't work that way!" Probably because it's never worked out that way _for them._ That doesn't mean it's never worked that way for anyone.
If the world only works that way for some people, then these stories are only as useful as 'vaccines for some people'
An interesting piece of writing and I'm not sure if you do really believe that good things happen to good people and that is, with elaborations, what makes good (or popular) fiction. There are so many examples where bad things happen to good people and vice versa and really good fiction (not all of course but a lot) explores goodness, badness, love and loss and engages the reader's empathy in their knowledge that they are neither all good or all bad. If you have time or the inclination, and if you haven't already done so, read The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma because that illustrates roughly what I'm trying to say.
And thanks for your writing, it is stimulating to read your opinions and your micro fiction, it makes me think!