Does Fiction Teach?

Whenever dark days afflict our republic, and these come along frequently now, I find myself wondering whether the western story is somehow culpable. I suspect it is, but don't really know.

Mysteries are violent, but the violence is directed at curbing violence, catching killers, and restoring good order. So there is a rationale, a moral or ethical underpinning, that steers crime fiction and mysteries away from celebrating violence.

But that is not true of modern western fiction, some of which clearly celebrates violence for its own sake, and makes a hero of the Top Dog. The violence of western gunmen, these days, is rarely directed toward ending injustice, rescuing the weak, restoring peace, or bringing comfort to the disadvantaged. The underlying purpose of some westerns is to glamorize the violent hero.

The question remains, does this violence embedded in certain mass-market stories, have an effect on some readers, inciting them to violence, or at least allowing them to justify whatever violence they are contemplating in their private lives? I don't know the answer. No one knows. I suspect that some unstable readers discover in violent westerns a legitimizing fantasy that nurtures their own violent conduct and sometimes triggers it.

In previous incarnations of the Western, the hero resorted to violence reluctantly, as a last resort. Put bluntly, Shane hated his own profession.

I have long since ceased to write novels of that sort, high-body-count stories, and if violence crops up in my novels, it is minimal and there because I am pursuing historical realities. I particularly avoid glamorizing violence, writing anything that an impressionable young person might employ as a rationale for murder.