Cleverness

[owlectomy]

Ah, sometimes I miss being unpublished and being able to name names when complaining about books in public posts. So I will refrain from naming names, because I'm more interested in the larger issue.

It's an extremely good book on a number of levels, tautly written and plotted, with a great sense of voice and atmosphere. And as it goes on it seems to hinge, fundamentally, on the moral questions of violence and nonviolence, as the protagonist is placed in a situation that threatens to turn violent very quickly. Throughout the book, a few hints of backstory and scene-setting are dropped very unobtrusively -- and as the book wends towards its finish these are the hints that the plot turns on, because the protagonist manages with cleverness and resourcefulness to get out of the dangerous situation without resorting to violence.

And it was exactly the kind of ending that ought to work on paper, and obviously did work for a large number of readers. For me it felt moralistic and patronizing and in some ways fundamentally dishonest.

Generally speaking I want stories to be about moral things. I don't want them to be about virtuous people doing virtuous things, but moral questions are the questions that I want fiction to deal with. And that doesn't mean that I want the good guys to win by being good; that works in Sailor Moon but pureness of heart doesn't get you that far in real life and most fiction should reflect that. But a story where the good guys win by being stronger than the bad guys feels trivial unless they're stronger because of some moral quality (they have learned to work together! They have learned to get past their own egocentricity and accepted the need to buckle down and train hard!), and likewise for a story where the good guys win by being cleverer than the bad guys. Cleverness is not a moral quality.

But on the other hand, the willingness to look for a third way is a moral quality, isn't it? The conviction that even in the direst circumstances you have better options than violence? The faith that you will be provided with the three crucial pieces of information that you need to beat the bad guy?

Maybe it's just that I'm more interested in what you do when you aren't provided with those crucial pieces of information. Maybe it's just that I don't believe things can ever work out so neatly in real life. Yes, author, I want to believe that there are other alternatives besides violence and victimization! But they're more hard-won and difficult than that; they're not about cleverness, I think, but about compromise, empathy, community, swallowing one's pride, speaking the truth.

I may just be dealing with a fundamental mismatch between the book the author meant to write and the book I wanted to read. But these are questions I'm thinking about a lot lately and I can't help seeing everything through that filter.

Comments

[daedala]

I find that cleverness often equals special snowflakeness, and have become somewhat disenchanted with it. Despite being very clever myself. It often seems to rely on privilege, is what I think I'm getting at.

[starlady]

To which I say, it sounds like A Conspiracy of Kings would make an interesting comparand to this book.

But on the other hand, the willingness to look for a third way is a moral quality, isn't it? The conviction that even in the direst circumstances you have better options than violence? The faith that you will be provided with the three crucial pieces of information that you need to beat the bad guy?

I would say that the willingness and the conviction are ethical qualities; I'm not so sure about the faith part, that seems more idiosyncratic to me. Cleverness and faith are essentially unrelated as well.

[oursin]

This sounds like a number of works I have read in which I am reminded of that Far Side cartoon 'And then a miracle happens': somehow everything is resolved without resort to violence through the handwavey power of something or other. It always makes me gnash my teeth.

[dianamcqueen.livejournal.com]

Isn't cleverness likened to power of mind, or intelligence? Cleverness isn't moral? I see why it wouldn't be, but I guess preying upon an opportunity presented by the villain's inattention, is gray with good cause, not moral.

I enjoy literature that blows my sense of morality out of the water. I like it when at the end It seems I've been siding with the villain but they were presented as the hero. This is why I love Heist movies...that is, when they don't suck so bad.

I often get dissapointed even when my moral expectations are met in fiction. When things turn out the way I need them to to feel good, I feel like I've lost an opportunity to think outside my comfort zone.

Violence has really lost it's glamour for me. In all media. I pray this is a trend.

I'd like to read the book you're thinking about. :)

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

To me, I feel that cleverness is akin to physical strength, or charisma, or something like that: it's useful for solving certain kinds of problems, but that says nothing about whether it's a problem that needs to be solved or whether it's right to solve the problem in that way. Is it any better for the hero to trick the villain than for the villain to trick the hero?

In real life I wish there were more people who, rather than yelling about how their side was correct, would look deeper and try to figure out a third alternative beyond the two yelling sides. But in fiction the author gets to set up things the way the author wants, and it's hard to read a book like this one without being very consciously aware that the author set up a situation this way so that it could be resolved without violence, and it doesn't feel honest to me if it feels too much like what the author did rather than what the character did.