A Brief Comment on "The New Gritty"
I'm not really entering the nihilistic fantasy discussion because its originator post strikes me as more political than literary, and that includes the fact that the original post does not mention a single female writer, an elision I consider relevant to the larger points. Some of these "older" notions of honor and morality are, shall we say, ones that either confine or elide women, so they are in that sense rarely "universals" except in a narrow range of defining what is to be considered universal which becomes universal often through measures of exclusion.
Now, I have my own issues with times I have come across people who seem to be saying that depictions of human cruelty and/or treachery, say, are "more authentic" than depictions of human kindness and honor, say. Both cruelty and kindness (expand these dualities as you wish) exist within the human condition. I'm not going to go into what reservations I may have on that here at the moment either (although they can be tackled in the comments).
Also, be aware that I do not have a single view of things. I tend to have nuanced and sometimes even contradictory views of things (although not always; sometimes I'm very simplistic). So what I say below is ONE comment I have on "the new gritty" -- not the totality of my thoughts on it or supposed nihilism, or the death of morality, or whatever.
But. It does occur to me that a reason -- one possible reason -- for the rise of the new gritty may be not the death of morality but the death of belief in the stories that we were told to believe were the truest measure of what is foundational.
When I look, for instance, at the amazing demonstrations in the Arab world right now, I see them being driven by young people who perceive the old institutions, both physical and symbolic, as corrupt and oppressive and as layered with a gilded veneer of putative truth over a pit of lies, greed, and force. And I don't say that specifically about the Arab world. I mean that in the greater sense of a significant shift as the 20th century lurches onward into the 21st and a new generation calls for transparency, equality, and honesty, a generation that may have reason to doubt they have been well served environmentally and economically (just to name two axes) by the institutions and economies and mindsets currently in power.
So I am not surprised to see some of the writers of today writing skeptically or critically or even cynically about the institutions and "sentiments" that we have societally been raised to valorize even and maybe especially in the fiction we tell ourselves to try to describe what I might call "deeper truths" about culture and society and our place in it. So maybe those people write in ways that are uncomfortable, unpleasant, or downright ugly.
As a reader, I may or may not want to read such works. In fact, I think such works themselves are too individual in tone and outlook to be usefully lumped together as if they are all the same. But on this axis of inquiry at least I have a sense of where some of them may be coming from.
(okay, not so brief)
Now, I have my own issues with times I have come across people who seem to be saying that depictions of human cruelty and/or treachery, say, are "more authentic" than depictions of human kindness and honor, say. Both cruelty and kindness (expand these dualities as you wish) exist within the human condition. I'm not going to go into what reservations I may have on that here at the moment either (although they can be tackled in the comments).
Also, be aware that I do not have a single view of things. I tend to have nuanced and sometimes even contradictory views of things (although not always; sometimes I'm very simplistic). So what I say below is ONE comment I have on "the new gritty" -- not the totality of my thoughts on it or supposed nihilism, or the death of morality, or whatever.
But. It does occur to me that a reason -- one possible reason -- for the rise of the new gritty may be not the death of morality but the death of belief in the stories that we were told to believe were the truest measure of what is foundational.
When I look, for instance, at the amazing demonstrations in the Arab world right now, I see them being driven by young people who perceive the old institutions, both physical and symbolic, as corrupt and oppressive and as layered with a gilded veneer of putative truth over a pit of lies, greed, and force. And I don't say that specifically about the Arab world. I mean that in the greater sense of a significant shift as the 20th century lurches onward into the 21st and a new generation calls for transparency, equality, and honesty, a generation that may have reason to doubt they have been well served environmentally and economically (just to name two axes) by the institutions and economies and mindsets currently in power.
So I am not surprised to see some of the writers of today writing skeptically or critically or even cynically about the institutions and "sentiments" that we have societally been raised to valorize even and maybe especially in the fiction we tell ourselves to try to describe what I might call "deeper truths" about culture and society and our place in it. So maybe those people write in ways that are uncomfortable, unpleasant, or downright ugly.
As a reader, I may or may not want to read such works. In fact, I think such works themselves are too individual in tone and outlook to be usefully lumped together as if they are all the same. But on this axis of inquiry at least I have a sense of where some of them may be coming from.
(okay, not so brief)
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