Tag: Coville

  • Theme #2: Empathy

    Theme #2: Empathy

    There’s something you need to know. Please, please listen. It will be easy to understand. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you voluntarily. I mean, this story, this specific story, you should really know what it says, I want you to know, and the story is inside me, so I need to let it out; I need to share it with you.

    Where did I store that stuff in my brain, again? There’s a lot inside me: things I want here, things I don’t want, things that I call, “myself,” things that I … reject. No! Get away! Stop, stop listening! I don’t want you to know that. Get away.

    … where is everyone?

    The End. Emotional whiplash, anyone? This has been the tragic story of the stories inside us—really, of the stories that are us. And, because a story becomes a story only when we tell it, when we share it with others (it’s true; this article will not make much sense to those of you who never learned to share when you were children, but that’s fine, I don’t mind writing just for myself), I call this the tragedy of human unity. We got tension, optimism, mystery and drama, but also, from the very beginning, a degree of sweetness. You know: cooperation. You know: vulnerability. You know: intimacy.

    And then, the twist! Intimacy turns out to be the one thing in the world we can’t cope with. Yes, human unity is a bitter story. But to feel bitterness, we must first feel hope. Human unity may be a tale of potential refused, but it is a tale of great potential, refused. Children’s books teach, instruct, model. So human unity is the possibility of potential—maybe not in our benighted time and place, but someday, somewhere, in the soft, fumbling hands of generations yet to Z. This, I think, is how Bruce Coville conceives of it. Closeness, acceptance, cooperation; I would say these things are like death, in that only those who have reached that moment, know what it’s like. Coville would say they’re like the stars, in that together we are destined to travel there, and experience wonders.

    My claim in this article is that Coville structures all of his novels (Coville’s corpus) as expositions on the tragedy of human unity. My claim is that he does this, not based on some analysis, but because he can’t help it, because his honest assessment is that everyone who has ever lived and ever will live, experiences the same tragedy. What, the narrative asks the writer, what is a person? And the writer replies (Coville’s catechism), a person is one who has refused intimacy and lived to regret it.

    You can see why this idea would motivate someone to write children’s books. A story can be a warning: when you refuse intimacy, you’re going to feel pain. When you try to share but your personal boundaries are unclear, you’re going to panic; you’re going to push the other person away. A story can be sympathy: the need to share is understandable; the need for privacy is also understandable. A story can be forgiveness: everyone pushes others away sometimes; everyone regrets it; it doesn’t make you a bad person.

    You can see why, specifically, this idea would motivate someone to write science fiction in the pulp sub-genre (Coville’s camp). The tragedy, put another way, is that each of us has this stellar—yes, this galactic potential, no less than some cheesy action hero, yet we are as vulnerable as a cybernetic intelligence in its first hour of self-awareness. The tragedy is that we are as distant from each other as distant stars. Our potential when we do cooperate is mind-boggling—what revolution we have in store when we are able to do it a little more often! What will the world be like when that day comes?

    Speaking of mind-boggling, very little reading between the lines is necessary to discern the common theme of (tragic, potential) human unity across many novels, because it is marked very clearly with a recurring motif, sometimes called in-world by the colloquial name, telepathy. The Monsters of Morley Manor features body-stealing, which causes telepathy. In the Unicorn Chronicles, unicorns communicate exclusively via telepathy. In Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher, the main relationship thrives on telepathy and the story concludes by reinforcing this image. The Rod Albright books feature numerous telepaths, a school that trains telepathy, a long episode of body-sharing that is also non-verbal, and technology-aided telepathy. In the My Teacher is an Alien series, apparently all earthlings are self-deactivated telepaths, requiring only a little therapy to ease open the valve on the brain’s transceiver, plus, this fact is revealed after numerous discoveries of telepathic abilities between various human-alien pairs.

    Every one of these examples displays the tragic structure: first, the need for connection; second, introspection interrupted by panic; third, loss.

    So I would go so far as to say that, in these works, telepathy is a symbol for the tragic potential of human unity. It is a one-to-one mapping (Coville’s convention).

    Briefly, let’s name a handful of scenarios where the tragedy of human unity does not describe the human experience in any relevant way. One is when people experience racial difference. Do black Americans feel a need, a primal urge, to share their inner selves with white Americans? If they do, that’s a shame because no one is listening. If not, that would only make sense; in fact, an urge to slap white people in the face might make more sense. And then, do white people reach out to black people? Far from it; at the best of times, they have myriad ways of holding them at arm’s length; other times, they reach out with a loaded gun.

    Coville rarely treats this dynamic directly, which is probably appropriate for a white American writer. There is one large exception: the case known as assimilation. For readers unfamiliar with assimilation, this word describes a segregated town where white people, using money collected at gunpoint from the forced labor of black people (but surely that was all long ago1), establish great material comfort in a context they are pleased to call “mainstream culture,” and violently and illegally attempt to exclude black people from that comfort, but where, despite everything, one or two percent of the population2 are black people who have slipped through the gates and now are allowed to survive more or less side-by-side3 with everyone else, provided they do not look, act or sound too black. White people who live in the ghetto, obviously, are not an example of assimilation.4

    No; assimilation would be the trope of the black best friend. Coville has written one or more black best friends. When the tragedy of human unity—opening up versus drawing away—is in question, his black characters experience the same drama at the same time on the same topics as other characters, which is a choice that could be criticized as gaslightey, that is, the fiction says to the reader, “Ongoing harm is not going on.” But it is also a choice that highlights with laser-like focus the idea of human unity.

    This article is descriptive, not prescriptive. Perhaps the same stories could have been better told with different tropes; who knows? To avoid the topic of race is obviously not a good solution. Most of Coville’s novels, while not as whitewashed as the fiction he grew up with,5 is still whiter than the America he lives in; then again, perhaps his fiction accurately represents the towns and counties he has lived in, which, again, can only honestly be described as segregated. But in fiction, this choice also minimizes black culture and black community and racist harm.

    In contrast, separate from or in combination with race, human unity can also be interrupted by gender, and Coville treats this scenario often, almost constantly. Again, perhaps appropriately for a male writer, he opts for equivalence more often than contrast. In his novels, girls walk, run and fight the same, play the same sports, and study the same topics in school as boys; they also struggle with the same emotional tragedy. The intention is obvious. The uniqueness of individuals, Coville points out, is enough to stage the tragedy of human unity, regardless of these racial and gender divisions that group us and divide us chaotically and without our consent. People reach out and shrink away over and over again; we also die; but we also give each other respect, nurture and understanding in a few brief shining moments that make the rest of this mess all worthwhile.

    Finally, speaking of living out the same pattern over and over again, speaking of nurture, let’s draw the crucial, subtle thread that links human unity and Coville’s at times almost egoistic obsession with the word, “teacher.” What is this creature, Teacher (Coville’s coaches), and what planet do they come from?

    Well, who cares what planet they’re from, as long as they have something to say about the things that matter to us? Occasionally Coville’s many (many) teacher characters tell the protagonist, fun is somatic, or, fun is magic. This is beautiful, but risks a veer toward dogma. Can a teacher ever be more like a suggester, a fellow student, an equal? That happens when Coville’s teachers attempt to help the protagonist with the tragedy of human unity. In those moments, teacher and child are equals because they feel, again as if leveled with a laser and then pinpointed with another laser, the same pain.

    We’ve all witnessed it. Sometimes people feel the same joy, the same hope, the same pain, about two different topics or flowing from events of two different times. Sympathy is not in itself the human unity we’ve been talking about, more like commiseration, the actualization of our potential potential. Coville’s child heroes never look up with wide eyes and say, “I win?” But one of the little terrors looks up in every story—sometimes every chapter—and says, “Human unity is possible?” They’ve probably given themselves a crick in the neck at this point is his career.

    Those of us readers who, like the teacher among equals, have lived the tragedy of wasted potential many times and have noticed the pattern, feel sympathy when the teacher gives Coville’s characteristic response. Just about the only objective fact about earthlings is that human unity is, and, except for a few lucky people for a few lucky moments, always has been and might always be, a distinct possibility. They tell the child this, and they tell them that the possibility is worth living for, worth striving for, worth anything, worth everything.

    1. It was not—is not—it is now. ↩︎
    2. (but never a representative proportion) ↩︎
    3. less ↩︎
    4. One wonders if something is wrong with them; even their black neighbors are concerned. Some of them used to get hired to breakdance for Disney—oh; no, my mistake; those were conservatory students who grew up in the suburbs; it was only on TV that they played characters who were reverse-assimilated. ↩︎
    5. We know; he’s written about it. ↩︎
  • Theme #1: Fun

    Theme #1: Fun

    Picture a good child: clean, small, well-presented … a good student, a good friend. A nice child. Now ask yourself: does the child have any needs that are not being met? And consider the possibility that every child needs one thing they are not regularly allowed: “to scare the living daylights out of people.” Well, why on earth would anyone need that?

    Intuitively there’s little enough mystery. Being a good child is not always fun. Children need fun. Fun, like the essential amino acids, cannot be replaced with any other substance—and a child starved of it is an unhealthy child. But let’s clearly state the resulting paradox. Is fun a necessary value, or isn’t it? If fun is one of our basic needs, then why is being a … bad child, even a monster … even just once in awhile … so much fun?

    This is the first of three articles that attempt to name the main recurring themes of the writing of Bruce Coville, in anticipation of a later (and hopefully very long) series where we will consider specifically how he has constructed each novel. Here, I argue that across all these different stories, a few consistent ideas—primal, chthonic emotions—clearly motivate Coville’s creativity; these are the insights Coville believes he has to offer the world. They are human insights, but they are especially preadolescent insights, since one of the functions of the novel form is to model, to instruct, to tell the child-reader, “One integral part of being human is …” Fun. What is this fun, about which we have heard so much, and how does one … have any?

    Picture a good child. No, better, first picture a healthy child.

    We must challenge this image. Does a healthy child have agency, stuff they can do that makes a difference to their environment? Does a healthy child have self-determination, the authority to make choices and have their choices respected by others? Perhaps this challenge prompts some defensiveness. Human beings make decisions with the information available to them, and a child has had little time to gather information about the world, so it would be irresponsible for society to allow them too much self-determination. Fine; the defenses are noted. A re-framing of the question will help us set them aside. Picture an unhealthy child.

    A kid who enjoys, say, tormenting other kids (or perhaps manipulating adults to gain some kind of negative attention) must have the agency to do so. And when a child breaks things out of spite, is this any less than a lamentable instance of conscious intent, choice, proactive behavior? Agency is inherent to our existence; no kind of protection or nurture ever fully takes it away. It would be a disturbing world otherwise. But, clearly, having it is not sufficient for healthy development; the child must have opportunities to use it productively; perhaps the lack of these opportunities trains a child’s habit for destruction. So we can restate the paradox of fun like this:

    Agency contains many inherent dangers: one’s own danger toward others, the danger of acting out of resentment or bad habits, of doing injury to oneself (perhaps with some help from the environment), and indeed the danger of consequences, that one’s actions will harm a relationship, opportunity or reputation. Self-determination describes a confrontation with the unknown. But human beings can’t live without agency and self-determination. So a healthy child is not one who has all or nothing of these things; a healthy child is one for whom these things are in balance.

    The need for this entire complex to support healthy development, I think, begins to describe the insight that Coville narrates time and again, and a paraphrase for the complex might be, “power.” I am thinking of examples in Coville’s novels where a character confronts the unknown, not recklessly but with respect, even grit; where a character places their relationships, their reputation and sometimes their life in danger, because it is their considered opinion that it’s better to take a risk than to do nothing. Children have minds. To grow up healthy, they must use them. Conveniently, human beings are born with an unquenchable drive to figure out how, which we are familiar with as, “fun.”

    In genre fiction for all demographics, the narrative beat known as hubris, a feeling of going all-in, even loss of control, is de rigueur. You haven’t told a character’s story if you don’t discover, ultimately, who the character really is. In Coville’s stories, that beat may occur separately, but the motif I call fun is an image of gratification that the character would almost rather refuse. Fun is almost possession, a devil seizes the character, and yet there is catharsis—the character needed that devil. Fun is an airing of grievances too long held in; giving someone a piece of your mind; a reflex; a sneeze. The motif clearly depicts opposition, yes, sometimes against the antagonist, but other times against better judgment or some boundary that the writer has arranged for the character to violate, and not always in safety or comfort. Sometimes, being seized by a devil brings suffering. So, casting around for a name for the fun-complex, I tried some of the following: danger, fear, aggression, wrongness. But, for Coville’s earnest, pro-social and often wounded protagonists, none of these things is fun by itself.

    Power is.

    Admittedly, I doubt if Coville thinks in terms of power when he composes his stories. Rather, his narratives hew to intuitive, moral knowledge, the chthonic emotions I mentioned, especially to an interplay of two types of power (or powerlessness), which appear as “the somatic,” and “magic.”

    Magic might be self-explanatory. Coville likes to leverage genre tropes when he confronts the good child/bad child paradox. A child might very reasonably and very suddenly risk life and limb, might disobey their parents, when confronted with what imagery? Magic spells; space aliens. But less literally, a magical emotion—chthonic, true, moral—might present itself any time an event takes place that the character previously believed impossible, but wished it were possible. Magic sometimes breaks the laws of physics; but often it breaks the laws of habit, etiquette or power structures.

    Whether the break is realistic or supernatural is not what makes magic. Magic is when a box opens that can never be shut again, like telling a secret, or growing up. Some magic may be painful, and the character may not wish it would actually happen, but to be an ingredient in fun, the magic must be interesting (a favorite word of Coville’s), a possibility that no sane person would wish blotted out from the world by some strict, emotionless God armed with a gray kneaded rubber eraser.

    Anyone who’s read Coville’s books will immediately recognize the somatic, too; body humor and for that matter bodily-focused high drama are familiar to the middle-grade demographic, but Coville actively seeks out opportunities to spend time on them. Sometimes his writing becomes low-brow, even gross. He’s undeniably compelled by this insight: our bodies are among the best founts of knowledge, of truth. Again, the extreme of this trend approaches moralization: what could be more ethically wrong than to deny verbally, something felt in the body? What could be more ethically right than to act in the way your body tells you to?

    Coville is not a writer unfamiliar with irony, but his stories hang from a robust skeleton of physical interactions, much more than social or symbolic ones. The story moments that root long, complex scenes, and entire novels, are acts of physical self-expression: the sight of a loved one’s face when they remove a mask; an antagonist’s helpless crouch as they are wracked by pain; and, yes, scaring the living daylights out of people. The reader, like the character, has a body, and knows what it feels like to scare and be scared. And when the story is felt, it becomes real. Power is felt. Fun is felt.

    So at last, what does Coville understand fun to be?

    From the quotation above, where the author lets a few drops of his own personality bleed into the story, suppose Coville thinks scaring people is fun. When we picture a good child, we can confidently say that to refrain from scaring people because it’s mean is much more healthy than to refrain from scaring people because you can’t. But it seems Coville is motivated to write narratives about the morality of knowledge, truth, self-expression. What is evil? A lie. What is good? Your feelings; your self. We know that we know what we know because it is somatic, because we know our own body; or because it is magic, because we know our own wishes. Any child who wishes to scare people, needs to be allowed to do so, at least one day a year on Halloween. Any child who knows fear, needs society to address fear, to acknowledge its reality.

    In these articles, I ask how stories are told: from inspiration to The End, from beginning to denouement. But at the end of a novel, it’s more common for the reader to review of the story in light of the conclusion and ask, “How did all of this happen?” If the protagonist succeeds, they ask, “How did they succeed?” Here, under Coville’s rubric, is how to succeed.

    People are born with agency—a body, a brain—but we are not born with any clue what to do with it. We have somatic experiences, not to mention hopes, dreams, shock, dismay, surprise, the experience called magic. By the way, there is conflict in the world, and thank goodness, because it makes life interesting. But only some, the lucky, the loved, the wise, discover that the somatic experience suggests somatic behavior, give or take a potentially painful learning process, that the magical experience suggests brand-new growth, that play—play!—is the most powerful tool in the universe for future self-actualization. (The world would be better if more people were shown this discovery, perhaps through reading books.)

    Play is one interface between the self—the primal, chthonic, true, complete self—and the environment. Conflict is another. When conflict does arise, we sometimes act out of line with our values, but then we tend to fail, and badly. We must take advantage of our strengths to attain success, to experience power. For that matter, even the most successful situational manipulation, if we behave cynically, out of line with out values, feels like unmitigated crap in the end, because cynicism is not real power—when we act cynically, we do not experience our own (primal) power. A lawyer would say, there is a two-step test for power: first it must succeed, and second it must be our own, and when both are fulfilled, we experience power. But the writer says, watch the real magic here. When these two steps are fulfilled, power immediately undergoes metamorphosis and we experience fun. But before we act, before we even make a conscious decision, we feel our somatic and our magical experience, so we know, we know what behavior will succeed, and we know what behavior is our own.

    The narrative says, fun is not an event; fun is knowledge. And fun is true, correct, reliable knowledge because it is felt, equally felt when safe or dangerous, when allowed as true or repressed by lies. Fun is the reason things happen; fun is the strategy by which heroes succeed.

    We know how to act because we know what is fun.

  • Introduction

    Introduction

    These words are being written by an individual who has loved books and stories, and loved writing, for his entire life. I love them—stories are located at my heart, invisible, warm. If someone were to ask me why I write, I would have difficulty giving an answer. That someone who loves reading, should love writing, seems self-evident, but no, listen. The creative act, like a Tibetan monk warming the winter air, moves from the heart outward. Books are a process with two halves, and for every time the individual expresses ideas into the environment through writing, the individual must also receive ideas from the environment through reading. Inspiration, like inhalation, comes from the outside in.

    I can remember very clearly the first time I finished a book and wanted to write my own. It felt different from finishing a book and saying, “That was great; time to do something else now.” Reading passively, I would say to myself, “Imagine a magical world,” which is a remark by the imagination about the imagination, but this time, I found myself saying, “What a beautiful look into the magical world that some other person holds in their head,” which is a remark about reality. Of course we crave oxygen, but at the end of a deep breath, there’s an instinct to exhale. A daydream is not a document.

    This thought moved me very deeply: that fiction is important to reality; that the creative act, on the part of that writer, had become part of the real world for me. I wanted to add to the real world in that way, myself. I still get the same feeling three hundred years later or however long it’s been, each time I go back and reread Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Coville: I want to make the world a better place, the way Coville did when he put pen to paper. I am inspired.

    These articles will examine Coville’s novels from that perspective—the novels, and maybe especially the through-lines, the common themes. Coville’s corpus inspired my younger self in a way that was, at that time in my life, unique. Why? How? How do they work? How do I work? So, these are literary articles; we have thoughts to articulate about literature. They are also personal articles; to this day I wear Coville’s stories on my body—I mean my mind, my metaphorical body, the hand with the pen in it. My style.

    “Why,” I can imagine myself asking Coville. “Why do you, the writer, write? What inspired you to write these particular stories?”

    “Why do you?” His signature facial expression, he wrote in an afterword somewhere, is to raise one eyebrow. “What is it about these particular stories that inspires you?”

    So I thought we could investigate that.