Passivity in American Letters

In a recent essay in the New York Times Book Review, author Benjamin Kunkel complained that the problem with today's memoirs isn't that they're untruthful but that their protagonists are too passive. Without citing specific examples (except for a quote from Running with Scissors), Kunkel argued that today's memoirs feature main characters whose only accomplishment is to have endured suffering and survived.

Last weekend, memoirist Mary Karr responded, in a letter to the Book Review, by referring Kunkel to his own novel Indecision, whose hero has so much trouble making up his mind about anything that he does just about nothing for about two hundred pages. Finally, after taking drugs and having sex in South America, Kunkel's hero decides to do something: he goes to his old prep school and delivers a lecture about something called "democratic socialism." Not exactly an edge-of-your-seat plot.

Passive heroes are not unique to memoirs. You can find plenty of passivity on both sides of the fiction/non-fiction divide. I agree with Kunkel's complaint (and said something similar in my own essay on memoirs in Poets and Writers) that too often American memoirists write about bad childhoods, abuse, drug addiction, surviving a fatal disease, any affliction you can name. However, a survey of American fiction turns up much the same thing.

Want to read about surviving child abuse? Try Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison. Surviving slavery? Start with Toni Morrison's Beloved or The Bluest Eye and then keep on going. Surviving the boss from hell? Try The Nanny Diaries or The Devil Wears Prada. From award winners to best-selling fluff, our fiction is filled with heroes and heroines who survive rather than act.

Why is this happening? For one thing, during the `90s, thanks to Oprah Winfrey and the increasing popularity of ethnic and gender studies, we became surrounded by the victim narrative. On TV, in school, in the movies, newspapers, and magazines, stories of manly straight white men doing bold deeds were replaced by tales of noble sufferers (often victims of those manly white men) whose act of courage was to tell a story that had not yet been told.

I also think the passive hero syndrome is a side effect of the growth in the teaching of creative writing. It's hard to make up stories and at the same time to make them believable. As a result, many creative writing teachers exhort students to "write what you know" (without adding, "or else, know about what you write.") And since most people who take creative writing classes in America are not rocket scientists, brain surgeons, or astronauts, the world that they know may not seem immense. They may not recognize the drama of everyday events like work, family, and love, but rather feel tempted to reach for that one awful time in their lives when everything seemed to go wrong.

One more thing. Our lives today in America can seem so easy and well-ordered. Anything we could want can be found in a moment on the Internet. We walk into a restaurant and within minutes we are served a tasty meal fusing tastes and spices from a variety of sources, Asian, Mexican, African, French, all in one bite. Credit cards arrive every day in the mail promising us more free money to shop with. In such a climate, maybe we enjoy the thrill of watching things go wrong instead of right so often.

Whatever the cause, all this passivity in American writing can't be good for us because the picture it paints is false. As Americans, we enjoy a position of privilege and power unmatched on the planet since the time of the Roman empire. And yet we turn a blind eye to the things that go on in our name around the globe and instead cry over re-runs of talk shows because we too were not hugged enough by our fathers or we too have trouble managing our alcohol intake. When will our writers stop re-enforcing our penchant for self-pity and start exhorting us to wake up, and act up?