Ruh-roh, Ranny! Run!

[mrissa]

When I was little--and we're talking about preschool age here--I was terrified of Scooby-Doo. While this is startling to people who have seen even one complete episode, that's sort of the point: I didn't watch complete episodes. I watched the early bit where there was a monster going after people, and then I got scared and went away and didn't watch the rest, so I didn't see the bit where it was demonstrated, over and over again, that the monster was really a disgruntled neighbor in a costume. (Let us leave aside my assessment, once I had seen a few of those episodes and was older, like 6, whether it was actually rational to be less afraid of someone whose idea of navigating consensus reality within the social contract was, "Hey, I know! I'll dress up as a Swamp Thing and attack people to get my way!" Yah, those people are totally ones you'll want to trust in a dark alley. At least you could consider bribing a Swamp Thing with fresh frogs. But I was going to leave that aside.)

I'm having a very similar reaction to Anthony Trollope's Framley Parsonage. I strongly suspect that the convention of the oeuvre is that the horrible things threatening the sympathetic characters will not come to pass. I strongly suspect that it will be the equivalent of Scooby-Doo in that there will be a happy ending and all specters of debt and penury will be dispelled as simply Mr. Sowerby in glow-in-the-dark paint. So to speak. But in the meantime, this book is freaking me out.

Pop quiz: how many of your friends are, to the best of your knowledge, in immediate danger of having their planet blown up by hostile aliens? How many of your friends are--again, so far as you have been made aware--in immediate danger of having their throats ripped out by werewolves? their blood sucked and their soul removed by sparkly vampires? Now: how many of your friends are in danger of serious money problems? How many of your friends already have serious money problems?

By 20th and 21st century standards, Framley Parsonage is a very graphic and explicit book when it comes to income and debt. When we see Mark Robarts sign notes accepting debt, we know what his income is to the shilling, and we know what the debts are to the shilling, so...ackackACKACKACK!!! Noooooo! When reading Trollope, I am like the woman who stands up in the movie theater and shouts, "DON'T YOU GO BEHIND THAT STAIRCASE, HONEY! HE'S GONNA GET YOU WITH THE AXE! TAKE THOSE CHILDREN AND GET OUT OF THERE!"

So I'm going to finish this thing because of my experience with Scooby-Doo. But I liked it much better when people were just under threat of being eaten. Not so worrisome. Much calmer.

Comments

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Or you could do what I did and read Tooth and Claw. Being eaten is a very real problem when one is a dragon.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That was in fact the intended reference, yes.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Ack. I hate it when people make my dry wit explicit--sorry to have done it to you!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Heh. No problem. Happens to everybody sometimes. On the internet, no one can see my deadpan.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Also I was confused because there was always the chance that THIS week, the Scooby-Doo monster would be real and eat people. (Apparently I have always had a suspicious turn of mind.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's how I'd have ended the series, if they'd asked me.

FRED: "Don't be silly, Shaggy! It's just your imagination running away with AAAAAGH OH NO OH GOD HAVE MERCY ON ME AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!"

[papersky.livejournal.com]

While people in Trollope generally have happy endings as regards romance, the same is not always reliably the case as regards money. And he was clearly writing about debt as of someone who is intimately familiar with all that stuff. There's a bit in Phineas Finn that's also very graphic about this stuff.

You're right that modern books don't tend to go there. How very interesting. It's not that there's any less of it these days. But I'd be very surprised if I read a modern romantic novel, or even a modern literary novel, and found the details of debt. There's a bit in Margaret Drabble's The Realms of Gold in which one of the characters is said to reliably pay his bills as soon as he gets the red demand, and thinks that is what everyone does, which sticks in my mind because it's unusual. People in books don't usually even get bills as part of characterisation. Interesting. Do you think it's a taboo? Do you think other people are also frightened of it? Why did I change that when I wrote T&C?

Have you read Sean Stewart's Perfect Circle?

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

Margaret Atwood just wrote a whole book about debt, but it's non-fiction.

Two of the most horrifying scenes in literature, for me, are a) in Brothers Karamazov when Dmitri comes into a sum of money that could redeem his future and promptly squanders it all, and b) pretty much the same thing in Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Shudder.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Aaaaagh.

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

Tom Wolfe's A Man In Full is largely about two characters indebted in various ways (a blue-collar worker in the East Bay overwhelmed by bills, and a property investor who is up to his neck in millions.) It's a flawed book, but there are utterly brilliant sections.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have read Perfect Circle, yes.

I think one of the factors that may come into play here is that Trollope is very clear that while we are to sympathize with Mark Robarts, we are to sympathize with him as someone who is doing a very foolish and wrong thing. And we are not to suspend that "foolish and wrong" judgment. I think we have, as a culture, steered ourselves away from that. We are set up so that almost nobody pays out of pocket for housing, transportation, or higher education. Being in debt is the normal condition--I think we are among the financially better-off and more financially conservative among our friends, and yet we owe six figures to the bank on this house. timprov is the only one of us in this house who has lived in a similar situation: silentcal is a Presbyterian minister, so when timprov was little, they lived in a manse for awhile. Mostly people cannot think about how much money they owe, because it would send us all gibbering mad.

The other thing timprov has pointed out in conversation here in person is that most American books of the same time don't go into the same considerations as much because there simply isn't the "upper-class socially, completely penniless" group in the same way. The Alcotts are about as close as I can think of: the educated poor. But the only way debt comes close to threatening fundamental identity for most of the reading public is if they are--this is timprov's list--politicians, gamblers, or people who have become entangled with organized crime in some way.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

I'm just in the middle of rereading Perfect Circle and have loaned it to my husband to read. And I've been wondering if it's the right book for him to read right now precisely because of this.

[shana.livejournal.com]

I haven't read much Trollope, but I've read all the Angela Thirkell fanfic, and I believe it will come out all right.

[the_rck]

It's actually sort of nice to know that there are other people who get anxious when reading about characters with money problems (or other real world problems). I often can't do it.

I like watching anime, but there's a bit of comedy that comes up over and over again in certain series-- It's a focus on the heroes not having enough money to feed themselves. It's often also used to get them to take jobs that are silly or lethal. Generally, in those episodes, the characters end up not getting paid or getting paid just enough to pay their mission expenses without anything left over.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

You wouldn't be referring to Rurouni Kenshin, by any chance? (Because if there's another one out there doing exactly the same thing, I really don't need to see it.)

Anyhow, I think there's a big difference between something like that anime, where poverty is set up as an ongoing plot hook but never taken seriously, and something which realistically depicts what it's like to be in a hellish financial situation that is only going to get worse.

At the moment, given my financial state, I wouldn't read what Mrissa's reading, or anything like it.

On the other hand, I'm fascinated by writing which manages to realistically and vividly capture the experience of a kind of poverty different enough from my own problems that they don't send my anxiety levels spiking through the roof. John Grisham's A Painted House is an incredibly slow, vivid...color-saturated depiction of, among other things, the struggle of a Arkansas cotton-farming family in 1952, and the way that the 7-year-old protagonist's family is right in the middle of the spectrum of affluence and security and the ability to make enough money one year to do at least as well again the next year, looking at the Appalachian migrant workers, the Mexican migrant workers, the tenant farmers, the people like his family who own just enough land but it's not really good enough land, the people who own plenty of good land, and the people so wealthy they live in town and don't pick cotton at all. It's fascinating and very real, but it doesn't freak me out the way someone trying to juggle debts in a life more similar to my own would do.

Maybe none of that would affect you - I'm not trying to say it would, or should. I'm just saying I don't think episodic anime like Kenshin is a good test for whether one can be roused to anxious empathy by the plight of impoverished fictional characters.

[the_rck]

I'm not using anime as my measure of anxious empathy. I can be set off by a rather wide range of things, to the point that I'm often unable to read more than a few pages of books that, a few years ago, I'd have expected to enjoy quite a bit. I have disabling anxiety issues and don't know all my literary triggers yet.

I actually wouldn't consider Kenshin an example of the sort of thing I was talking about. Money issues come up their, but they're not an every episode joke. The series that come to my mind immediately are Cowbody Bebop, GetBackers and Black Cat. I know I've seen it in other series, too, but I can't recall titles off the top of my head.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, one of the not-quite-jokes around here is that I still sort of believe in debtors' prison. Not literally, but emotionally--there is a part of my hindbrain that is just sure that if a friend is late on student loan payments, they will be TAKEN AWAY TO THE WORKHOUSE AAAAAAAAGH.

Ahem. Beg pardon. I just really don't do well with financial uncertainty. At all. And I keep myself very aware that I am not in charge of my friends' finances, so that keeps me sane, but when it spills over into my reading material it is Hard.

Scooby-Doo

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

Not to worry. When I was that age I was afraid of Benson. In one show he was fake-crying, and I thought it was real and bawled my head off, and refused to watch any more of the "sad show."

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I tried floating this argument about crime fiction. I'm so fed up with the attitude that 'cosy' crime is for wimps, and that there's something 'better' about nitty-gritty crime-on-the-streets type crime fiction - as if mostly the people who are putting that line weren't nice middle-class people who are much more personally threatened by poisonings at the vicarage tea=party than by gang warfare in those parts of town they take care not to visit.

Oops, sorry. Rant over.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

While I do not mean to take gang warfare lightly, someone who can shoot someone else under threat of being shot himself/herself is a very different person from someone who can poison the tea and then hug the victim's family and do their dishes and help write up the obit. And I know which one I would consider more dangerous and scarier.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

I had to stop reading Framley Parsonage because I couldn't maintain suspension of disbelief re the protagonist and his money problems. There was a point where he countersigned someone else's note of hand despite knowing for certain that the someone else would default, he couldn't afford it, and his wife would kill him when he got home... and this is someone set up as being a responsible, if perhaps a little too ambitious, adult? No.

Like papersky I find it interesting that contemporary fiction avoids talking about debt. I have the impression that in Trollope's age, being in debt was enormously more stigmatized — you could be thrown in jail for it! — and so perhaps made for a more effective tension-enhancer. Nowadays, well, sure, the protag will be paying credit card bills till doomsday, but so what? Doesn't everyone? But this only opens an opportunity for fiction to illustrate why, well, no, actually, it's quite bad to be stuck paying credit card bills till doomsday, even if you're not going to be jailed for it. I would think.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Er.

As someone who has been making friends and colleagues really, really edgy by talking about my own finances matter-of-factly, I question whether debt is less stigmatized now. It's less transparently criminalized, certainly. And which kinds of debt are stigmatized and which are considered the norm varies tremendously and interestingly by class and culture, but...I've got to tell you: when an educated white woman in graduate school matter-of-factly states that the only way she could pay rent was by overdrawing her bank-account, and she's just bought groceries on a credit card without knowing whether she'll be able to pay the credit card bill because she's caught up in a bureaucratic nightmare of un-released student loans, people start surreptitiously moving their chairs away. I don't think they think I'm a bad person, I just think they really, really want me not to talk about these things.

As I've observed in my own journal when making posts that involve my finances, I know it makes people edgy. I think it makes people in similar situations or who have similar fears incredibly anxious to hear about it. I think it makes people who have never had the privileges I've had and have always had to deal with things I'm struggling with want to through their boots at me until I shut up with the white middle-class self-pity, and I think it makes the people who are currently secure and not carrying any kind of debt they don't feel they can handle feel guilty and self-conscious that I'm lying awake wondering who I can borrow money from that has it to spare to pay the electricity bill, and whether, if I don't pay, they'll shut it off this month or not until next month.

It's very class-related. It's very complicated. And it's very much taboo.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

For me one of the discomforts of having friends talk about money trouble--which is by no means saying that they should never do so--is that I do not want to be put in a position of giving them advice about their financial decisions. I want to steer way clear of that. It seems that while Lady Lufton in Framley Parsonage was regarded as something of a meddler, the direction of her meddling was clear enough: financial advice was more or less considered obvious. Fewer options, among other things.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Well, advice about anything gets tricky, among friends and especially online. I think we've all seen enough well-meant-advice-gone-horribly-awry to know that it's not a problem confined to the financial realm.

Among my mostly-moved-on one-time circle of friends, there was a tradition of throwing an "Out of Debt" party when one was truly 100% debt-free. The party-giver provided *everything* for a lavish though not extravagant spread; in most other social situations for us the norm was for everyone to bring a snack or two or something to drink or whatever, but not to Out of Debt parties. The giver dressed in black. All the guests dressed in black and red proportionate to their own remaining degrees of debt - there would be someone there all in black but with a red bandana, who had six more payments to go on something and then would be done, and then there was me, with my unpayable student loans and, at one point, some really abysmally stupid consumer debt, dressed head to toe in red, making jokes about the inavailability of red veiling to complete the effect. The parties were a lot of fun, and it was a great way to get past the taboos - we all acknowledged that for all of us, some degree of debt at some point in our lives was just about inevitable, and that everyone had a different row to hoe, so to speak, in terms of how deep they were in, and how long it would be before they'd be throwing their own party.

Mind you, my friend Tam had to time her party very precisely to fall in the narrow slot of time between paying off her student loans and signing her new mortgage. But it worked.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I hadn't paid off my first debt, my first car loan, when I bought my first house. So from the day I bought that car (after college graduation), I've never been out of debt. I believe this house will be paid off in another 27 years, or some such....

[callunav.livejournal.com]

I'm over $100,000 in debt on student loans, and going into a low income profession (social work). I have come to accept that I will never be out of debt. For me, financial success will be if I ever am in a position to make payments on everything I owe without juggling debts and swapping paychecks and bills around like some dizzying shell game. That would be nice, especially as I still intend to have at least one child, and I don't want to do it while I'm still wondering if I can get away without paying the heating bill this month.

I have had a lot of people, most of them women in steady but relatively low-paying work*, tell me "Honey, if you wait until you can afford it, you'll never do it. You gotta just have the kids, if that's what you want. Things will work out." I suspect that they are generally people with more of a safety-net than I have.

Debt is not especially scary to me. Poverty - which is, honestly, what I currently have - is scary.


* Many of them nurses. To me, nurses make insanely good money, but I do know that my perspective is warped by having always made much less.

[ckd]

For me one of the discomforts of having friends talk about money trouble--which is by no means saying that they should never do so--is that I do not want to be put in a position of giving them advice about their financial decisions.

That's one area where my reticence to give advice is strong enough to beat Geek Answer Syndrome into the ground, stomp on it, and salt the earth where it once was. Much of this is knowing how lucky/privileged I am to not have crushing student loan debt to deal with, to have had sufficient capital and income to buy a house at a relatively sane point in the local housing market, and to have a lifestyle and commute that allows not owning a car. And yes, a lot of it is luck/privilege, not the Magical Power of the Market touching me with its noodly appendage Libertarian Virtue.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

Ohhh, yeah. Talking about money issues just releases this whole cloud of anxiety throughout the surrounding area. I've been on the giving, and the recieving side of it, and what you say is totally true.

[redbird]

Another piece of the not-talking-about-it is something that I wish I could remember where I read: people treat unemployment the way a previous generation treated cancer, trying to stay away for fear that it will be contagious.

Some of the same thing may be going on with other admissions of financial problems. (It's slightly more likely that debt will be contagious, which may emphasize the problems.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I didn't think we were supposed to believe that Mark Robarts was responsible, and I only thought we were supposed to believe he was adult in a technical sense. Sympathetic, yes, but I have been reading this as "oh look what idiotic things people do when they aren't very well grounded."

Another guess besides what I said to Jo above: I think many writers feel that they have to think enough about debt and shaky finances in their real lives without having to dwell on it in fiction, too.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

I didn't think we were supposed to believe that Mark Robarts was responsible, and I only thought we were supposed to believe he was adult in a technical sense.

I think this is closer to what Trollope intended to convey; at any rate, reviewing in my mind, the part of the book that I read makes a lot more sense that way. (Not just the debt stuff.) But it's not at all what I got out of the characterization and I don't know why. Maybe I should try again.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't know. Maybe. I'm finding it awfully tense, though. I keep thinking I should find something to cut it with, something with nice calm rocks again, or possibly wars. But I keep not doing so.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Seriously, at six, Mrissa, you were thinking that a neighbor doing those things was actually scarier than a monster? Because it's 100% true, but I can't imagine having that much perspective under the age of, I don't know, 25 or so.

But whether you had that insight at 6 or 26, you are correct, and I wish more people could...back up and look at the shape of something and see that kind of thing. At any age.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, at 6 or so. I can't pinpoint it for sure, but no later than 8, certainly.