I’m… still thinking through an incident that happened in a server I was in today, because it’s an attitude I see more and more of online, and it worries and bothers me.
It’s really the same thing I’ve harped on a million times before, but it’s. Oof. Reading something about a topic isn’t… the same thing as supporting that thing in reality. It isn’t. It genuinely isn’t. If you can’t maintain the understanding that some things are supposed to disturb you and make you uncomfortable, that that is the POINT, and that reading a book where a character does something troubling isn’t the same thing as being in support of their actions… then your critical thinking is woefully underdeveloped and this is going to hamper you for your entire adult life. Genuinely.
It comes up a lot with romance tropes but this was just… from a discussion on the server about books that really stuck with us / haunted us. And I brought up Feed, by M.T. Anderson, because I read it back to back with The Circle, by Dave Eggers. And it was a very potent one-two punch.
Feed is really masterfully written to use deceptively simple language because your point of view and thus framework for the entire narrative is a teenage boy who doesn’t have the language, knowledge base, or developed reasoning to process what is happening around him. This means a lot of things seem very simple as you’re reading them and eventually context builds in a way you realize what’s really going on, (while he still doesn’t grasp things until the very end,) and yknow. If you ever feel like crying over an advertisement for trousers, I do highly recommend the book.
But that framework really stuck with me, because I see it a lot in the student interns I work with now. They don’t have a good framework or good context for things happening around them. So when they’re finally hit by these things they don’t understand, it’s blindsiding. And they really are quite intelligent, but you can’t know what you’ve never been taught, and our powers that be really do want us ignorant on many things! There’s a world of difference even in what I was taught about world events vs what students are now.
And then The Circle. Mae Holland is… a perfect choice, as she’s so very sympathetic as a pov character right up until the end and you’re gut punched. But the juxtaposition between the two and where it really struck me, was (ironically given the conversation that transpired in this server) the death scene where Mae is complicit. And it got me thinking about clout chasing, because in today’s social media environment it’s hard not to relate the two.
And in the moment it feels so good and so justified, just like how Mae justifies it. (And of course, in the wake of forced ID everywhere I can’t stop thinking about Transparency / Going Transparent. The Circle has been more on my mind this year than it was back when I read it. )
We had some younger folks in the server that took offense to themes in The Circle I and another person were discussing because apparently enjoying the book even though it roughed us up emotionally meant we were terrible people and totally supported Mae’s behavior. Like yes totally I, a loud privacy advocate, am in total support of harassing a man until he ends his own life to escape me. Yup. Absolutely that’s what that means.
I don’t know where to begin. I’ve certainly read books with way worse graphic scenes that linger like a thunderclap afterward. Hell, Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart is a Chainsaw lingered with me a good month after I read it. (His books are good at that.)
But if someone reacted that kinda way to The Circle I don’t even wanna know how they’d react to horror.
Idk. My own literature education was very very solid and I really did learn so much that’s been a useful perspective framework to apply to my whole life, and I’m starting to realize I’m barely grasping at the surface of the new shortcomings that have entered education as a field since I graduated.
