Volumes, Figuratively Deciphered
Feb. 3rd, 2017 03:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinSome fandoms are pretty universally popular, and some are so niche they barely qualify as fandoms at all. Snicket fandom falls somewhere in between. Some people are passionate fans, but quite a few dislike the books or 'don't get' them; it's interesting to figure out what it is in a person that clicks with A Series of Unfortunate Events; who ends up liking them and who not.
After much mental chewing on my own small sample group, the best conclusion I've reached on the subject is this: You are more likely to enjoy Lemony Snicket if you are aware of the darker side of life – not necessarily accepting of the darkness, but accepting the awareness of it. If you haven't suffered loss, or been uprooted, or been disappointed in someone you were counting on, or simply prefer not to think about depressing things like these, you are more likely not to 'get' these books and wonder why anyone does. But if you know that, at any moment, your life might be turned upside down and everything you take for granted – even abstract things like kindness, truth, and justice – cast into doubt, you are more likely to look at these maudlin tales of misfortune and have something in you say 'yes, that's how it is.' Overblown and dressed up in a silly costume, yes, but with a kernel of truth, around which the absurdity and poignancy and tongue-in-cheek narration are built up like layers on a gobstopper.
Brian McDonald, a writer and screenwriting consultant, has a theory that the stories that stick with us are the ones that contain survival information.* Obviously, very few of us are going to be in a situation where we need to know how to survive being pursued by a greedy and violent count bent on stealing our family's fortune. But those who can recognise this as a cartoon version of what could possibly happen, in another form, prick up their ears. After all, it wasn't that long ago that people at the heart of European civilisation's culture and intelligentsia were hunted down by other people with Nordic names and some tenuous claim of elevated ancestry – it's not that great a leap to make, and it's one backed up by the author:
Of course, it wasn't just this one “unfortunate event” in world history to which the Snicket books bear relevance – there are similar stories around the world, throughout time, and there will, alas, continue to be so. The theme of a society's literati being smashed up by rapacious bullies is a familiar one, whether it's Stalin or Mao or Boko Haram doing the smashing. On a much, much more limited level, you can still find resonance in these stories if your own unremarkable life has had any common features with them, as mentioned above. I keep seeing posts on Tumblr [e.g.] about how the Baudelaires' situation is identifiable to an abused child, living in a private hell no adults believe or take action to change. One of my adult friends found emotional truth in the series, having just lost her mother. In the interview on the Bad Beginning audiobook, Mr Handler mentions the surprising amount of mail he's received from bereaved children, and says “I think the books, in some way, offer a sort of comfort, surprising as it may be, to people who have experienced unfortunate events of their own.” And from that NYT interview quoted above, "When children reach the ages that are appropriate for the Snicket books, they have the sense that the world is going in a way that's contrary to the rules you're told about ... You're given this code of behavior by your parents and teachers and watch the world disobey those rules. You can behave well and not necessarily be rewarded. Or behave badly and not necessarily get punished. The books reflect that truth."
Now we find ourselves in a world where, on an abstract level, these ridiculous tales are suddenly not so far off the mark. This series was written mainly during the G.W. Bush administration, when the culture wars were already well underway, and the idea of educated, cultured urban sophisticates being locked in life-or-death conflict with ignorant and crude but more ruthless people was an entertaining hyperbole of the contemporary climate. Now we've had a US election where those wishing to stick it to 'the elites' have won, and similar forces are in the ascendency across the Eurocentric world. Last week I flicked between the Netflix series and Twitter, with its steady stream of outrage at the smash-and-grab first week of the Trump administration, contingency plans to save libraries, and this classic: “America is a tire fire. The resistance is led by Teen Vogue, Badlands National Park, and the Merriam-Webster dictionary.” ... and I thought, good grief, the ridiculous is now.
By now, quite a lot of us could sympathise with having our world turned upside down, and finding that those who are supposed to protect us are too self-involved, self-interested, wilfully ignorant, or conflicted to stand up for us as they should. Anyone who thinks the adults in A Series of Unfortunate Events are unrealistically stupid need only look at our elected officials to see those character traits in real life.
The Baudelaires can stand in for any number of vulnerable people: they are quite obviously refugees, for example; their home destroyed and their lives at risk, but to those who could offer them sanctuary, they're not worth the trouble and are viewed with increasing suspicion (by book 7 they're accused of murder). They're also the rising generation, whose childhoods of comfort and security have been replaced with a maze of financial, social, and ecological pitfalls as the older generation pulls the ladder up behind them and laughs. They're minority groups who are having protective legal bulwarks pulled down around them. They're anyone who finds themselves in unfortunate circumstances and at the mercy of those more powerful and privileged, or just the louder and meaner.
It's not too hard to find a modern parallel for Count Olaf, the egotistical entertainer who will get what he wants by any means necessary, or for those who hitch a ride on his ambition. The really important identification here, though, is with everyone else: the adults who are too 'stupid' to act as they should. The original post on my link above sums it up more concisely than I could:
There are characters who are identifiably bad, but there are many more who simply fail to do good. Each person who disappoints the Baudelaires calls out a certain weakness in adults: fear, denial, bias, divided loyalty, self-interest. If any one of them had acted as it's obvious they should have done, the story might turn out differently. We know how they should act, because we know how stories should go; it's because they don't follow this clear precedent that we call them 'stupid.' As children, and children-at-heart, we read the books and identify with the Baudelaires, tossed about in a cruel and indifferent world, modeling how to cope with that. But as grownups, the adult characters in the stories should matter to us too: they model how ordinary people every day fail to act the parts they are given, and call us to question how we might be doing the same.
We find out later in the series (brought forward in the TV show, thankfully) that there are adults out there actively trying to help the Baudelaires and thwart Olaf and his henchmen. They are very few, and the odds are very long, but they're doing it anyway. And with their secret codes, disguises, hideouts, and obscure literary references, they are doing it awesomely. The contrast between them and the passive grownups is enormous, and invites us to ask ourselves, which would we be? I think we'd all want to be with VFD, but that's probably not the case. Nevertheless the obvious moral dichotomy of the stories challenges us to behave as the story 'ought' to go, and be that person who stands up for what's right despite the risks. They make no bones about how persistent evil is – it's not something you stand up to once and is vanquished forever, it's something that keeps coming back and keeps needing noble and courageous people to fight it down again. Even when the evil is very persistent, and the odds against you are very long, you've got to keep fighting because to do otherwise would be to let evil win. Even if all you can do at the moment is run away, you're still alive; if you're alive you can fight, and they haven't won. You may be a gentle person by nature, you may believe in the commonality of mankind and the unifying power of science and literature, but sometimes decent, kind, intelligent people have to fight for decency, kindness, and intelligence, or else see them wiped out.
CODA
This popped up from my favourite singer/songwriter today, which seemed relevant:
After much mental chewing on my own small sample group, the best conclusion I've reached on the subject is this: You are more likely to enjoy Lemony Snicket if you are aware of the darker side of life – not necessarily accepting of the darkness, but accepting the awareness of it. If you haven't suffered loss, or been uprooted, or been disappointed in someone you were counting on, or simply prefer not to think about depressing things like these, you are more likely not to 'get' these books and wonder why anyone does. But if you know that, at any moment, your life might be turned upside down and everything you take for granted – even abstract things like kindness, truth, and justice – cast into doubt, you are more likely to look at these maudlin tales of misfortune and have something in you say 'yes, that's how it is.' Overblown and dressed up in a silly costume, yes, but with a kernel of truth, around which the absurdity and poignancy and tongue-in-cheek narration are built up like layers on a gobstopper.
Brian McDonald, a writer and screenwriting consultant, has a theory that the stories that stick with us are the ones that contain survival information.* Obviously, very few of us are going to be in a situation where we need to know how to survive being pursued by a greedy and violent count bent on stealing our family's fortune. But those who can recognise this as a cartoon version of what could possibly happen, in another form, prick up their ears. After all, it wasn't that long ago that people at the heart of European civilisation's culture and intelligentsia were hunted down by other people with Nordic names and some tenuous claim of elevated ancestry – it's not that great a leap to make, and it's one backed up by the author:
Mr. Handler's father was a Jewish refugee from Germany as a child; the family left in 1938. Stories of escape, horror and fortuity were part of Mr. Handler's otherwise benign upbringing in San Francisco as the son of professional people who enjoyed opera and literature. But he heard and registered the stories of his grandmother hiding diamonds in the hollowed out heel of her shoe, of a disagreement about whether to stay or leave that ended his grandparents' marriage.*This likely grows out of Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, his treatise on the psychological grounding given by fairy tales, apocryphally (a word which here means 'until I can find a published source to cite') inspired by his observation, while imprisoned in Dachau, that the children who'd grown up with fairy tales coped better with the traumatising situation than the children who didn't.
"I don't mean to say, 'Oh, it's my father's painful legacy that is coming out on the page,'" Mr. Handler said. "For me the central lesson, over and over again, was the sheer unaccountability of fate and where you might end up. That definitely drives the Snicket books. In a lot of children's books if you behave well you're rewarded and if you behave badly you're punished. But anybody who tells a story about getting out of a country by the skin of their teeth, it's not because they were braver or more charming or better people. It's because somebody looked the other way or didn't bother to search the hollowed out heel of a shoe."
Of course, it wasn't just this one “unfortunate event” in world history to which the Snicket books bear relevance – there are similar stories around the world, throughout time, and there will, alas, continue to be so. The theme of a society's literati being smashed up by rapacious bullies is a familiar one, whether it's Stalin or Mao or Boko Haram doing the smashing. On a much, much more limited level, you can still find resonance in these stories if your own unremarkable life has had any common features with them, as mentioned above. I keep seeing posts on Tumblr [e.g.] about how the Baudelaires' situation is identifiable to an abused child, living in a private hell no adults believe or take action to change. One of my adult friends found emotional truth in the series, having just lost her mother. In the interview on the Bad Beginning audiobook, Mr Handler mentions the surprising amount of mail he's received from bereaved children, and says “I think the books, in some way, offer a sort of comfort, surprising as it may be, to people who have experienced unfortunate events of their own.” And from that NYT interview quoted above, "When children reach the ages that are appropriate for the Snicket books, they have the sense that the world is going in a way that's contrary to the rules you're told about ... You're given this code of behavior by your parents and teachers and watch the world disobey those rules. You can behave well and not necessarily be rewarded. Or behave badly and not necessarily get punished. The books reflect that truth."
Now we find ourselves in a world where, on an abstract level, these ridiculous tales are suddenly not so far off the mark. This series was written mainly during the G.W. Bush administration, when the culture wars were already well underway, and the idea of educated, cultured urban sophisticates being locked in life-or-death conflict with ignorant and crude but more ruthless people was an entertaining hyperbole of the contemporary climate. Now we've had a US election where those wishing to stick it to 'the elites' have won, and similar forces are in the ascendency across the Eurocentric world. Last week I flicked between the Netflix series and Twitter, with its steady stream of outrage at the smash-and-grab first week of the Trump administration, contingency plans to save libraries, and this classic: “America is a tire fire. The resistance is led by Teen Vogue, Badlands National Park, and the Merriam-Webster dictionary.” ... and I thought, good grief, the ridiculous is now.
By now, quite a lot of us could sympathise with having our world turned upside down, and finding that those who are supposed to protect us are too self-involved, self-interested, wilfully ignorant, or conflicted to stand up for us as they should. Anyone who thinks the adults in A Series of Unfortunate Events are unrealistically stupid need only look at our elected officials to see those character traits in real life.
The Baudelaires can stand in for any number of vulnerable people: they are quite obviously refugees, for example; their home destroyed and their lives at risk, but to those who could offer them sanctuary, they're not worth the trouble and are viewed with increasing suspicion (by book 7 they're accused of murder). They're also the rising generation, whose childhoods of comfort and security have been replaced with a maze of financial, social, and ecological pitfalls as the older generation pulls the ladder up behind them and laughs. They're minority groups who are having protective legal bulwarks pulled down around them. They're anyone who finds themselves in unfortunate circumstances and at the mercy of those more powerful and privileged, or just the louder and meaner.
It's not too hard to find a modern parallel for Count Olaf, the egotistical entertainer who will get what he wants by any means necessary, or for those who hitch a ride on his ambition. The really important identification here, though, is with everyone else: the adults who are too 'stupid' to act as they should. The original post on my link above sums it up more concisely than I could:
No adult in ASOUE is stupid. 100% of them are willfully ignorant, and it’s an important distinction.
- Justice Strauss is too timid and needy to critically think about the red flags around her.
- Mr. Poe cares more about his job than the people it affects.
- Uncle Monty is so self-involved that he assumes that Stephano is after him.
- Aunt Josephine is simply too afraid to consider the idea that terrible things may be nearby.
[NB: I would rephrase this as 'too afraid of everything to recognise the real threat'; it's a signal-to-noise problem. I'd also add, from later in the series:- Charles is too loyal to Sir to stand up for the Baudelaires
- Jerome has good intentions but put his aversion to conflict ahead of their concerns
- Hector seems decent, but his policy of telling people what they want to hear keeps the Baudelaires from trusting him, and his 'skittishness' stymies their escape]
This is not a story of “Adults are dumb”. It is a story about how people can contribute to evil and cruelty simply by being passive or refusing to confront it.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” - Edmund Burke
That is what the series is about. It’s an important distinction. The Baudelaires do not suffer from random fools that happen to be near them. The Baudelaire Orphans are receiving the sum total of the failings of society crashing upon them.
There are characters who are identifiably bad, but there are many more who simply fail to do good. Each person who disappoints the Baudelaires calls out a certain weakness in adults: fear, denial, bias, divided loyalty, self-interest. If any one of them had acted as it's obvious they should have done, the story might turn out differently. We know how they should act, because we know how stories should go; it's because they don't follow this clear precedent that we call them 'stupid.' As children, and children-at-heart, we read the books and identify with the Baudelaires, tossed about in a cruel and indifferent world, modeling how to cope with that. But as grownups, the adult characters in the stories should matter to us too: they model how ordinary people every day fail to act the parts they are given, and call us to question how we might be doing the same.
We find out later in the series (brought forward in the TV show, thankfully) that there are adults out there actively trying to help the Baudelaires and thwart Olaf and his henchmen. They are very few, and the odds are very long, but they're doing it anyway. And with their secret codes, disguises, hideouts, and obscure literary references, they are doing it awesomely. The contrast between them and the passive grownups is enormous, and invites us to ask ourselves, which would we be? I think we'd all want to be with VFD, but that's probably not the case. Nevertheless the obvious moral dichotomy of the stories challenges us to behave as the story 'ought' to go, and be that person who stands up for what's right despite the risks. They make no bones about how persistent evil is – it's not something you stand up to once and is vanquished forever, it's something that keeps coming back and keeps needing noble and courageous people to fight it down again. Even when the evil is very persistent, and the odds against you are very long, you've got to keep fighting because to do otherwise would be to let evil win. Even if all you can do at the moment is run away, you're still alive; if you're alive you can fight, and they haven't won. You may be a gentle person by nature, you may believe in the commonality of mankind and the unifying power of science and literature, but sometimes decent, kind, intelligent people have to fight for decency, kindness, and intelligence, or else see them wiped out.
CODA
This popped up from my favourite singer/songwriter today, which seemed relevant:
There is a kind of elegant, uncomfortable wisdom to these times too, no? We are shocked and horrified by the uncovering of hidden hatred, but dormant love and generosity and courage are also coming out of hiding. I think we are all in some version of “hiding", more or less, and in this world it’s becoming harder and harder to hide. Maybe that’s a good thing?
