Running Scared
Page 37
Westerns were once scorned as badly written, formulaic, lurid escapist fare best read in closets. Westerns are still often viewed that way, despite valiant efforts on the part of a few academics to push politically correct westerns (antiheroes, disease, cruelty, bigotry, degradation, despair and death). The readers were not fooled. They avoided these academic Westerns in droves. The heart of the Western’s appeal is larger-than-life; it is heroism; it is people who transcend their own problems and limitations and make a positive difference in their own time and life. That is what made Louis L’Amour one of the bestselling authors in the English language—or any other language, for that matter. That is what readers pay to read.
That is what critics disdain: Heroism. Transcendence.
Romances were once scorned as badly written, formulaic, lurid escapist fare best read in closets. They still are. I suspect they always will be. Their appeal is to the transcendent, not to the political. Their characters, through love, transcend the ordinary and partake of the extraordinary.
That, not bulging muscles or magic weapons, is the essence of heroic myth: humans touching transcendence. It is an important point that is often misunderstood. The essence of myth is that it is a bridge from the ordinary to the extraordinary. As Joseph Campbell said many times, through myth we all touch, if only for a few moments, something larger than ourselves, something transcendent.
Unfortunately, transcendence has been out of intellectual favor for several generations. Thus the war between optimism and pessimism rages on, and popular culture is its battlefield. Universities and newspapers are heavily stocked with people who believe that pessimism is the only intelligent philosophy of life; therefore, optimists are dumb as rocks.
How many times have you read a review that disdains a book because it has a constructive resolution of the central conflict — also known as a happy ending? The same reviewer will then praise another book for its relentless portrayal of the bleakness of everyday life.
This is propaganda, not criticism. What the critics are actually talking about is their own intellectual bias, their own chosen myth: pessimism. They aren’t offering an intelligent analysis of an author’s ability to construct and execute a novel.
Contrary to what the critics tell us, popular fiction is not a swamp of barely literate escapism; popular fiction is composed of ancient myths newly reborn, telling and retelling a simple truth: ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Jack can plant a beanstalk that will provide endless food; a Tom Clancy character can successfully unravel a conspiracy that threatens the lives of millions. A knight can slay a dragon; a Stephen King character can defeat the massed forces of evil. Cinderella can attract the prince through her own innate decency rather than through family connections; a Nora Roberts heroine can, through her own strength, rise above a savagely unhappy past and bring happiness to herself and others.
The next time you hear a work of popular fiction being scorned as foolish, formulaic, or badly written, ask yourself if it is truly badly written, foolish, and formulaic, or is it simply speaking to a transcendent tradition that emphasizes ancient hope rather than modernist despair?
In our society, popular fiction is story after story told around urban campfires, stories which point out that life is not a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. There is more to life than defeat and despair. Life is full of possibilities. Victory is one of them. Joy is another.
And that’s why people read popular fiction. To be reminded that life is worth the pain.
— Elizabeth Lowell
(This essay was originally published at www.elizabethlowell.com, a partner of www.writerspace.com.)
About the Author
Elizabeth Lowell’s many remarkable historical and contemporary novels include New York Times bestsellers, Moving Target, and the four acclaimed books featuring the Donovan family, Amber Beach, Jade Island, Pearl Cove, and Midnight in Ruby Bayou, as well as, Forget Me Not, Only Love, A Woman Without Lies, Autumn Love, Winter Fire. Ms. Lowell has more than 20 million books in print. She lives in Seattle, Washington, with her husband with whom she writes mystery novels under a pseudonym. She can be contacted at www.elizabethlowell.com.
BOOKS BY ELIZABETH LOWELL
Amber Beach
Autumn Lover
Beautiful Dreamer
Desert Rain
Eden Burning
Enchanted
Forbidden
Forget Me Not
Jade Island
Lover in the Rough
Midnight in Ruby Bayou
Moving Target
Only His
Only Love
Only Mine
Only You
Pearl Cove
Remember Summer
To the Ends of the Earth
Where the Heart Is
Winter Fire
A Woman Without Lies
Credits
Cover design by: Bradford Foltz
Cover photocollage: skyline by D. Boone/Corbis
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
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http://www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
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http://www.harpercanada.com
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
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London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.fireandwater.com
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
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New York, NY 10022
http://www.perfectbound.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
RUNNING SCARED. Copyright © 2002 by Two of a Kind, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.
PerfectBound e-book extra: "Popular Fiction: Why We Read It, Why We Write It" copyright © 1999-2002 by Two of a Kind, Inc. This essay was originally published at www.elizabethlowell.com, a partner of www.writerspace.com.
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Adobe Acrobat E-Book Reader edition v 1. April 2002 ISBN: 0-0607-7053-8
Print edition first published in 2002 by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
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