Over break, I started Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus and I must say it’s one of the most brutal pieces of nonfiction to cross my desk. Wasik and Murphy headed up a research team for years, digging into the origins of the disease that took down Old Yeller. (Sorry to ruin it, Kiddo. The dog gets rabies).
They begin by blitzkrieging through a patchwork, non-chronolgical history of rabies in a tone that some might call disturbing and others downright macabre. Most insightful is how 50,000 people die every year from rabies simply because they can’t afford the cure. “Rabies has always been with us,” Wasik remarks. “for as long as there has been writing, we have written about it. For as long, even, as we have kept company with dogs, this menace inside them has emerged from time to time and shown its face to us.” This history, although comprehensive and entertaining, is unapologetically biased. Wasik assumes the same flawed assumption of most historians these days–that simply because he adheres to naturalism as a person, he can comprehend history before the first written language. To me, that’s absolute nonsense. I’m not calling into question Wasik as a naturalist. I’m calling into Wasik as a historian into question. History, by definition, is the narrative of events as told by observers. How can we observe and retell any history where there were no living people?
This wouldn’t be such a big deal if he respected other world views, but he downright insults and belittles any sort of supernatural thinking, completely writing off entire races and religions because of a few bad eggs. Me? I wanted to hear about rabies, not about what Wasik thinks of the Roman Catholic Church. He goes on to use words like “diabolic” and “demonic” to describe the illness, but refuses to frame those words in a context that includes the supernatural. This is naïve at best and artless at worst. To quote Chesterton:
Mr. McCabe thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think Mr. McCabe a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies.
In spite of all of that, I enjoyed the read and can recommend it solely on an entertainment level. The intro alone’s worth the price of the book, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Much like the outro in Danse Macabre. Stephen King sets up a masters-level class on the most disrespected genre in the history of fine arts: horror. In this nonfiction tome, he crafts an argument both honest and literary, both popular and intelligent, that rules in favor of horror films and books–and in turn defends his entire career.
I found myself inspired that such literature could be found among the dregs of pop culture, but find it I did. His literary peers might call this work charming but toothless, however I found this book working out muscles connected to my fantasy bone that I didn’t know I owned. Or maybe I knew it but had forgotten since childhood. His argument for why we want to be scared centers on the Medieval Danse Macabre–the dance of death. Cradle to grave, we dance with death and can never predict when he will take us. Because of that, the surprise of fear helps us vicariously face our fears and so become stronger for them.
Unlike King, however, I believe there to be exceptions to this rule. I find no value in the simple glorification of violence or depreciation of sex. In his defense, he says he deplores these things and gives examples, but some of his examples of how violence and sex can work as elements of story fall flat for me. To what end? I ask after consuming any bit of culture. It’s one thing to wrestle through whether the ends justify the means, but another entirely to have no end, to continue a story without point or purpose other than vanity and depravity. That’s anti-art.
Not to say that King’s against art, but to say that he shoots to make no plans, to never discipline his characters seems a bit naïve, to let them act of their own accord. Now don’t get me wrong, I have great respect for Mr. King as a mentor and a great many other things, but to say in the same book that there are forces at work out there beyond our control and then to later affirm the ideal that we should resign ourselves to whatever comes scares me–it seem’s he’s naïve about his own world view or that he doesn’t believe it himself or maybe I got an early version before the inconsistency was revised out. In any case, I respect the guy above any other living American author, but I also respectfully disagree–if you don’t take the reigns on your story themes, if you don’t choose them in advance, you’d better believe someone or something will.
Which brings me back to Rabid. Basically this: don’t use the grammar of demons if you’re not willing to deal with the consequences. Now I’m sure I’ll get a bunch of emails writing me off because I admit that demons exist and refuse to resign myself over to their whims, but I’d rather sound poetic or childlike than naïve.
And no, those last two are not the same.
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