Entertainment for Entertainment’s Sake
Part 3 of 12
When I speak of literature, I am not speaking only of novels, short stories, and poems but also of movies and television. Anything, in fact, that is first written before it is presented to an audience. Non-fiction is not really a concern of this tractate. Also, when I speak of morals and morality, I’m not speaking about a specific religion’s take on, or twisting of, morality. In fact, I believe there is a universal human morality, and that the only real difference between organized religions is the cultural coding of the myths, which arise from the physical and linguistic environment the people live in. Or, to put it more simply, all religions communicate through metaphors, and metaphors always have two parts: vehicle and tenor. The vehicles of a myth or religion are unique to each culture and setting: desert cultures will have desert images, forest cultures will have forest images, prairie cultures will have prairie images, etc. The primary source of sustenance for a tribe will be exalted as beneficial gods, while the animals that compete for the same resources as the tribe will tend to be seen as devils or tricksters. The tenor, however, is universal: trust, faith, honesty, love, compassion, courage, intelligence, cunning, and so on. Good literature will tap into that universal tenor, the human truth. Bad literature will focus on the vehicle and ignore the tenor, or, at its worst, abuse and twist it. This is important to keep in mind because it is the tenor of metaphors that get abandoned when our only concern narrows to simple entertainment.
In the aesthetic I’m arguing for, Bosnian writer Dževad Karahasan’s memoir, Sarajevo: Exodus of a City rests at the center, specifically the chapter “Literature and War.” Having written his memoir during the Bosnian War of 1992-95, and while living in that besieged city, Karahasan’s analysis of Yugoslav literature’s culpability in creating the moral landscape where such a war could happen has a certain undeniable weight and validity.
For Karahasan there are two kinds of bad literature that should concern us. The first is “Art for Art's Sake,” which I will also call “Entertainment for Entertainment’s Sake” since most of the work that falls into this type rarely ascends to the level of “art.” Karahasan called the second type “Heroic Literature,” but I will call it “Dogmatic Literature” because, although Karahasan's term is accurate in a purely academic sense, I don't want to battle the positive connotations associated with a word like “heroic” when we’re discussing a type of literature that is categorically the worst and most destructive of the two bad types. So, since dogmatic works equally well for this type of bad literature, dogmatic shall be the term.
First, let's start with Karahasan's definition of Art for Art’s sake:
[Art for Art's Sake] appears with various “vanguards” experimental literary projects and, of course, hand in hand with the struggle for the freedom of literature. In that struggle, it is most important to prove that literary work has no content, and that the metalinguistic material is utterly irrelevant, because literature like any other art - is a pure form.
By depriving literary work of its content, and by divesting metalinguistic material of all meaning, the authors of such literature reduce their craft to a series of processes that result in a literary form. The processes used to create a literary form are reduced to a self-contained game that does not point to anything beyond itself. In the past, the process of developing and molding material was the sacred secret of any serious trade. Now it is a game enclosed in itself, like an enigmatic witticism or a children's puzzle (Karahasan, 72).
Karahasan goes on:
It is entirely normal for writers of this literature to opt for the so-called subliterary genres, where metalinguistic material comes as a given, in advance, as a rule. In this case, literary skill is exhausted in the construction of a recognizable form with an odd “surprise”; (Karahasan, 73).
Most writers who fit the above description write their books with the intention of achieving commercial success, whether in one of the subliterary genres (mystery, thriller, Sci-Fi, etc.) or in the “literary” genre fostered by the major publishers and prestigious MFA programs. In a few cases, they find it. The bestseller’s list is dominated by such writers, as would be expected.
Now, when I get into discussions of Entertainment for Entertainment’s Sake, I’m often asked “Why can't things just be entertaining? Why do they have to mean something?” One published writer I took a summer workshop from, apparently angry that I put forth the proposition that Art for Art's Sake was dangerous, and that literature needed to be morally responsible, trotted out this gem; “Literature doesn't have to have a reason to exist. A tree doesn't exist for anyone's sake.”
A tree exists for plenty of reasons outside of its own existence, especially for writers. Furthermore, it can provide shade from the sun, material for houses, or fuel for a fire on a cold night. But, most basically, it scrubs the air of carbon dioxide and produces oxygen. Although a tree may seem, to a casual observer, to be inert, it certainly does not exist solely for its own sake, certainly not in a complex ecosystem—and we live in a complex ecosystem. A tree is integrally connected to the world, and the environment it grows within,[1] as are all of us, and all of the things we produce, even art, which is the most important of all non-utilitarian things[2].
Since a book by itself could easily be argued to be inert, at least until it is opened and read, it can, in that sense, fit the description of “existing for no reason” quite well, but there is more to it. A book is created by a human being. There is a craft involved. Consider other objects created by artisans and craftspeople. We have entire agencies of government created to ensure that the craftspeople who manufacture cars, houses, appliances, medicines, and even toys don't carelessly create something that could be dangerous or harmful to those who buy and use such things. Moreover, even without those controlling agencies in place, a person or entity that produced something and then took an indifferent stance to the harm that product had on its consumers would either kill off its customer base, quickly go out of business, be bankrupted by falling profits and lawsuits, or be the firearms industry.
So, why do we tolerate such an attitude of carelessness from writers?
We tolerate it because literature has won that freedom Karahasan spoke of, which is to be a meaningless, self-referential game. It also comes from the fact that it is hard to directly witness and therefore recognize the link between the psychological and social effects the consumption of meaningless, indifferent art has on people, and the ills it inspires in our society. It took being trapped in a besieged city for Karahasan to become aware of the impact meaningless art had on his country. Fortunately, we don’t have to live through our own siege to learn that lesson now that we’ve been told the story.
When an art form is made meaningless, priests and politicians aren't concerned with controlling it. Meaningless art, meaningless entertainment, is not a direct and present threat to those in power, or their station in society, and it’s certainly no threat to their control of the average citizen. In fact, meaningless art helps control the average citizen first by distraction, then by preparing them to be filled with the designated and approved meaning the ruling class favors (as we’ll see in Dogmatic Literature).
The connection between meaningless art and the social ills we see around us begins with Entertainment for Entertainment’s Sake and its power to deaden our native intelligence in favor of seemingly reliable, but ultimately flawed, assumptions and clichés about the world. Those false assumptions and clichés about the world that make up this literature, as noted by Karahasan, begin with those recognizable forms and formulas.
There are people out there who make a living selling their forms and formulas to would-be writers. The community college where I once taught as an adjunct offered a one-day course with a local writer on how to write a novel. Such an idea, that one can learn all they need to learn in order to write a novel, let alone a good one, in a single day, or even a single class, is ridiculous, unless the writer takes shortcuts.
Now, what's the problem with shortcuts?
Here's a personal analogy: the company that built my mother's house used shortcuts. She has had to repair bad plumbing, a sinking foundation, poor ventilation, and, finally, treat for termites because the builder left scrap wood buried under the front porch, which gave the termites a great place to build a nest from which to launch their assault.
Shortcuts weaken the end product, whether the writer or reader is aware of it or not. Writing a book by formula means basing the entire endeavor on the assumption that readers will be too distracted by new twists, new puzzle pieces, and whatever passes for the writer’s wit, or so convinced by years of bad experiences with other bad books, that they won't realize how flimsy, dishonest, and condescending the story is.
A formula for writing a novel has almost no room for deviation; no room for anything, really, except what the formula calls for. The writer needs only plug in the appropriate stereotypes: the crusading, upright lawyer, the semi-celebrity cryptologist, the timid legal scholar with a big secret, the alcoholic divorced detective, the greedy corporate lawyer, the ruthless assassin, or the insane serial killer and then come up with a few new shocking twists and turns. The formula works (at least functionally, insofar as a story is completed) because it doesn't concern itself with nuances, gray areas, or any of the real vagaries of human life. It's all black and white, so-called good versus so-called evil, deceit versus truth. It's all about appearance and ignoring the rotten element of nihilism buried underneath.
Other than the shining surface, the reader isn't asked to consider anything challenging. The reader isn't even shown anything challenging. The assumptions made in these works about the world generally reinforce the assumptions already held by the reader and, therefore, lay out a familiar emotional landscape. There is no true moral dilemma for any of the characters and, by extension, the reader. Once the “hero” decides on the pre-determined right thing to do, the hero does it. The only question is “Will the hero survive?” and, if readers ask themselves honestly, they know, even from the first page, the hero will survive and defeat the bad guy. Sure, the hero might lose a best friend, a spouse, a partner, but it's all part of the formula; the process of denying the hero success in order to keep suspense in place and suggest that the bad guy just might, this one time, beat the hero.
Here's the essential problem: the hero is a stereotype, a functionary of the form and not often bearing any resemblance to a real human being. The audience cares about the hero inasmuch as they care about their personal ideas of good defeating their personal ideas of evil. In these types of formulaic stories, what the audience thrills to is the threat of personal disappointment. There is no significant or real connection to the hero. There are only the reader’s already established, unexamined assumptions about the world. So, the reader, short changed emotionally by a stereotype simulacrum of a person, and relying subconsciously on their own basic human desire that good defeat evil, thrills to the recognition of their own pre-existing opinions and world-views (confirmation bias), or worse, the adrenaline rush of possibly being duped by the writer, instead of actually experiencing empathy for another person.
Entertainment for Entertainment’s Sake conditions a person to react to story not as a rehearsal for real life, as Gottschall says we do in The Storytelling Animal, but instead as confirmation of their prejudices. Meaningless literature reinforces our tendency to fall victim to confirmation bias, the most common of cognitive biases. The constant consumption of meaningless entertainment could, and in my opinion does, in fact, appear to train people to identify only with other people exactly like them.
If entertainment doesn’t give its audience an appropriate, safe, risk-free place to practice responding to trouble, especially the troubles of a fictional other who is different than they are, people will create trouble and thrills in the real world, or virtual world of social media, that won’t be driven by a desire to learn about and from others, but about acting out their fear and hatred of other people whom they perceive as violating their falsely confirmed “truths” about the world.
One of the principles at work here is the same principle at work in the military when they train peaceful, law-abiding recruits to kill other humans: operant conditioning. In his book On Killing Lt. Col. Dave Grossman[3] gives a detailed account of how recruits undergo operant conditioning in order to break down the basic human resistance to kill another human being. He describes how the military uses human shaped targets that fall backwards when hit, and balloon filled uniforms that drop when they are shot, and jugs filled with red paint so when they are shot, there's blood splatter. This type of conditioning is aided by society at-large; think of first-person shooter video games, or the cartoon nature of most Hollywood violence. Essentially, the purpose is to detach a would-be soldier from his possible empathy for the enemy. Entertainment for Entertainment’s Sake operates in the same fashion.
The metalinguistic material that Karahasan spoke of as being “given” is the assumption that stories are contests between simple good and simple evil. There’s also, especially in American literature and movies, a heavy white Anglo Saxon bent, which means the majority of good guys are assumed to be, and therefore presented as, white men, while the bad guys are often portrayed as something other—foreign, or black, or non-Christian, and sometimes even non-male or non-straight. The majority of the white American population doesn’t balk at this or feel uncomfortable because it is “just entertainment” and it “doesn’t mean anything.” Instead, it silently and subconsciously confirms their bias about the world.
Alexs D. Pate, author of Finding Makeba and West of Rehoboth, once said to a class I was part of that the writer's responsibility is to create in the reader the condition of empathetic imagination. This condition is one where readers are able to imagine, in great detail, the unique experience of an “other” and ultimately gain a personal understanding of what it is like to be someone completely different from who they themselves are. In Entertainment for Entertainment’s Sake, the reader doesn't experience that condition of being an “other.” They experience their own anxiety (we’ll touch on this part more deeply in the section on the dangers of cliche). The character doesn't matter so much as the threat to the reader's pre-established assumptions about the world.
Entertainment for Entertainment’s Sake, with its premise that it means nothing and that it is disconnected from and not responsible to the reader and is only about providing an entertaining thrill, can be held partly responsible for creating in society the conditions where people feel disconnected from meaning and truth (and therefore desperate for something that will give them meaning and truth—or, at least, a deeper simulation of it). People who feel disconnected from society, from each other, even from themselves, begin to seek out ways to feel connected and alive. Depending on a person's psychological make-up, they could seek out mostly harmless adventures like bungee jumping, or more dangerous things like crime.
Most of us, however, will turn to social organizations that promise the kind of personal connection and meaningful stories that will give us that purpose driven life we feel we’re missing. This leads to the second principle at work when people who feel bereft of meaning and go looking for that meaning. People will join political parties and movements, charismatic churches, or even hate groups to feel that connection to a meaningful story. When that happens, the groups and the belief systems those groups promote, take on the sheen of revelation, and will often encourage violent and irrational protection because we actually fear social death, being abandoned by our chosen in-group, more than we fear our physical death.[4]
Much like the young unpublished writer who clings to a strict aesthetic to justify his existence, true believing converts to an ideologically organized community will do anything to protect the ideology they feel has given their lives meaning. The ideologies people embrace are usually encountered first through the second type of bad literature: Dogmatic Literature.
Works cited.
Quoted texts
· Karahasan, Dževad. 1994. Sarajevo, Exodus of a City. Kodansha.
Referenced works.
· Gottschall, Jonathan. 2013. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human.
· Grossman, Dave. 2014. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Open Road Media.
· Pate, Alexs D. 1996. Finding Makeba. Putnam Adult.
o ———. 2002. West of Rehoboth.
· Becker, Ernest. 2007. The Denial of Death. Simon and Schuster.
· Solomon, Sheldon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. 2015. The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life. Penguin UK.
[1] There’s even recent research that suggests trees are in communication with each other via their roots systems and can send nutrients to trees that need it, among other things.
[2] Utilitarian things would include clothes, hammers, nails, computers, cars, roads, etc. things that serve an outwardly useful function and are, fundamentally, interchangeable in times of need. For example: if you were left naked in a city, any clothing that fit would do, the brand wouldn’t matter. If you needed a hammer to build a shelter, the manufacturer wouldn’t matter as long as it successfully pounded nails into place. Art, however, serves no outward utilitarian purpose and because art is first the personal expression of the artist, it might not be palatable to the recipient. In other words, if I wanted something to read, and the only thing available to read were novels by Dan Brown or Jonathan Franzen, I’d choose not to read. I also wouldn’t hang a piece of art in my house simply to have art hanging in the house if the piece of art didn’t mean something to me, and I’d choose to go without music if all that was available to listen to was Toby Keith.
[3] This is the same Dave Grossman who travels around the country training “warrior cops.” The aggressive, armored behavior of cops today can be directly tied to this man’s lack of effective hobbies in his post military career.
[4] In fact, the more socially connected and integrated we are, even without harmful, violent groups, the less we fear our physical death. This idea is well laid out in Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, and Sheldon Solomon’s The Worm at The Core.