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.” 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 actually be criminally 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 this is better than any alternative course of action. 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 fiction for all demographics, the narrative beat known as hubris, a feeling of going all-in, even some kind of 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 read as hewing to intuitive and almost 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 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—chthonically magical, true, moral—might present itself any time a narrative event takes place that the character previously believed impossible, but would have wished, even subconsciously, that it were possible. Magic sometimes breaks the laws of physics; but often it breaks rules of etiquette, authority structures or mere habit.
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 appears to actively seek 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 becomes a moralizing habit: 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 physical 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, which I perceive as the author letting 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 healthier 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.
