Vengeance parables and vengeance fantasies

 Last week, I wrote about the second book in RF Kuang's Poppy Wars trilogy, which I found disconcerting for a variety of reasons.  The first book was an interesting examination of how the drive towards vengeance could lead to dark places, set amid a metaphor for the Second Sino-Japanese War in a fantasy world.  It was, at least as I read it, a cautionary tale.  Yet the second book in the trilogy seemed to throw that ethos by the wayside, embracing the urge to avenge, not just blind to the lessons of the first novel, but blind to the specific lessons of historical reference.  I recoiled.  Yet it is at least worthy of note when a book keeps me thinking, as The Dragon Republic did, about other types of stories.  Specifically, vengeance fantasies.  Consider a few prominent movies by Quentin Tarantino with historical reference points:  Django Unchained, and Inglourious Basterds [sp].  (Sorrynotsorry about the "[sp]")

Both are good movies, in my opinion, and in fact, I would argue that Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino's best.  What they have in common, of course, is violent, bloody, retribution for historical injustice.  A few elements distinguish these Tarantino flicks from where Kuang appeared to be going, though.  First, there was a constrained nature to the revenge.  Second, there was a cartoonish quality, or at least, a tonal acknowledgement that you don't actually do this.  This is an escape, a fantasy, to enjoy within the realm of fiction, constrained and permissible by the limited scope of the vengeance.  The Basterds weren't wiping out all of Germany.  They were in the killin'-nazi bid'niss, although bid'niss was a-boomin'.  Django wasn't wiping out every white person in the South, and the violence was sufficiently stylized and ahistorical that the process of watching is one in which the experience is intrinsically an escapist one.

Why?  At the risk of referencing Star Wars, I'm gonna reference Star Wars.  Why is the third movie called Return of the Jedi?  It was originally supposed to be called, Revenge of the Jedi, but Lucas then said, wait, the Jedi don't do revenge.  That's, like, a Sith thing.  Evil, 'n stuff.  So he changed the title.  If you want to pay fuckloads for stupid shit on eBay, you can find shit with the Revenge title on it, but... dude.  Get a life.  Also, an investment manager.  Preferably, one who will tell you to stick your money in a passively managed index fund and not touch your fucking money, in which case, you don't need an investment manager.  Anyway, the point is, Jedi don't do revenge.  Sith do.  Hence... never mind.  Not goin' there.

It's a thing you can indulge in fiction, for escapist purposes, as long as it is clear that there is nothing more than escapism goin' on, and that is clear in those Tarantino flicks.

There are also the parables, like what I thought was the first Kuang novel, The Poppy War.  No, really, don't go down the road of revenge.  Rin was not the hero.  She was the vessel for the Phoenix, the god of fire and vengeance, and in an act of vengeance, she committed genocide.  Rin was not the hero, and The Poppy War, as I read it, was a cautionary tale rather than a revenge fantasy.

But what happens if the wires get crossed?

And really, I think that's where The Dragon Republic turned Kuang's series down the wrong path, the path to the dark side, the path of the Sith, keeping in mind that I haven't read Book 3 because Book 2 really bugged me.  The Dragon Republic read like a book in which Kuang was really, seriously indulging the idea of vengeance on a mass scale.  Not Tarantino escapism, but, like, let's seriously stew in this shit.

There are two points to be addressed here.  First, the contrast between The Dragon Republic, and The Poppy War.  The first book in the series read like an excoriation of rage and revenge, so an indulgence of such emotions and ideas in the second book felt like backsliding rather than shifting from moral contemplation to Tarantino-ism.  Perhaps "backsliding" is not the ideal term, since it conveys order, and I find value in a movie like Inglourious Basterds, but there's something that feels at best like a bait-and-switch.  There is a place for a vengeance fantasy, but to go from real moral contemplation to indulgence feels almost like endorsement, and think about what happens when you replace vengeance with some other moral wrong.  Take your pick which one.  That can get icky.  I think it's icky enough with vengeance.  Path to the dark side, it is.

Second, there may be a difference between the media.

A jokey-jokey, or at least, snarky tone can come across with quick cuts and actors' facial expressions on screen, and really, I wish I could attribute this properly, but there was a directors' commentary to something asserting that the difference between horror and comedy is the music.

Picture some horrifying event on screen.  Imagine it playing with Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana," to go with the biggest musical cliche ever.  OK, now picture the same atrocity with Frank Zappa's "Peaches En Regalia."

See what I mean?

If I'm referencing Frank and The Poppy Wars, a Firebird Suite reference would have been ideal if I could have swung it, but it just didn't work, and it isn't as famous.  Whatever.

Anyway, ain't no music in text.

Well, some authors reference music, but that doesn't have the same effect.  That's what I mean by an effect of the medium.

Tone matters, though, because tone provides the valence attached to the actions within the story.  Consider a classic of a movie, Office Space.  We all know that the greatest scene in the movie is the severe beating of the printer, but there are so many scenes in that movie.  Regardless, contemplate that scene.  You're smiling, aren't you?  That's because, at some point in your life, you have gotten pissed off at a copier/printer thing.

But, um... what they did was illegal.  Technically, it was vandalism/destruction of private property/or however the fuck you want to classify it, even though the construction of the scene was as though it were beating a person to death.  It was probably only a misdemeanor, but it was a crime, and it was wrong.  They did a lot of illegal things in that movie.  And we do not condone those things.  Oh, but there have been times we've wanted to do such things, and that's the point.  But by watching the movie, we vicariously experience the joy of brutalizing a noncompliant printer, and such.  That way, we can go about our lives not doing those things.

Can works of fiction present characters doing vile things with tones of true approval?  Of course.  The most famous example may be The Turner Diaries.  Depending on how much you have read about racism and extreme ideologies, you may know about the book, or not, but essentially, it is the white nationalists' fantasy about a race war.  It is fucking terrifying.  It is not a cautionary tale.  It is the thing they want to happen.  The bad things?  They are described approvingly.

Tone matters.  Tone is how we distinguish between a cautionary tale, escapist fantasy, and some form of endorsement.

Writers have no obligation to tell morality tales.  They have no obligation to turn society into some vision of a properly ordered Republic, Plato's claims be-damned.  Yes, Plato claimed that it was the responsibility of the poet, the writer, the musician to create art that constructed a vision of society-- a Republic-- which fit a vision of how men, in particular, should be.  Blah, blah, strong and masculine, and look at my masculine maleness.

You wanna see advocacy of the patriarchy?  The real deal?  Go read some fuckin' Plato, and some of that old shit.  Lookin' around at society today?  No.  Go read some fuckin' Plato.

Seriously, non-Sophoclean motherfucker wrote that poets were supposed to make men dick-ier.  Why?  Because dicks.  That's why.  OK, it was because of masculinity and strength and pseudo-stoic bullshit, and that ain't what Marcus Aurelius was sayin', but Plato wanted you hard, not soft.

Um...

There is so much one could say, and so much that has been written because there is an entire discipline, "Classics," which consists of rehashing Plato, so people have been writing about this shit for thousands of years.  Literally.

I think Plato was full of shit, and the idea of an entire discipline that exists to rehash a guy who was full of shit is more than a little odd.

OK, they also re-read Homer and Virgil, but dude.  How many times can you re-read the same fuckin' thing?

Off track.  As usual.  Point being, artists have no obligation, except to produce something interesting or evocative.  Yet, what do we take from the morality in a work of fiction?

The fantasy to do what we want but know we cannot do, whether that is vandalizing a noncompliant office printer, or enacting vengeance on someone (i.e., people rather than office technology) has a place in literature, presuming we understand the fantasy element, and by "we," I include the author, because if the author is not included, the tone will be off, the the work will be presented approvingly rather than fantastically.

Because there are several ways to present such ideas-- the parable, complete with moral weight, and the fantastical, done with a tone indicating an understanding of the moral irony.

The problem comes when the work gives in to those dark impulses, and gives moral permission.  To his credit, that was where Plato was thinking.  He just wasn't thinking sufficiently deeply, because he was full of shit.  He had a simple view that art either enforced moral purity, or moral degradation, and society-- the polity-- required art to enforce moral purity, directly.

To be sure, I am not, nor would I ever advocate censorship.  Yet I have no obligation to provide a positive assessment of art that endorses rather than merely indulges in propositions that fail the basic moral calculus.  Plato would not make those kinds of distinctions, but fuck Plato.  The line is crossed when the artist endorses that which is wrong rather than winking at it.

Mike Judge winked at it.  Tarantino winks at it all the time.  Kuang went from Jedi moral philosophy and condemnation of shit like vengeance to seeming to endorse vengeance quests.  There's a difference.

Again, I could have Kuang wrong, not having read the third book.  She might redeem the trilogy by having Rin crash and burn, and return to showing that vengeance is wrong, and Jiang was right.  But that book bugged me.

The wrongness of vengeance.  This is an important point.

Nashville West, "Mental Revenge," from their only album, self-titled.  That's Clarence White (The Kentucky Colonels, The Byrds) on guitar.