As I mentioned last week, I’m trying to make a concerted effort to read modern fiction books. What tends to come along with this are modern takes on old issues in society, and modern takes on modern problems. This is perhaps the strongest argument for reading difficult modern literature: it makes us confront issues in a new way, and become warier of issues facing our current society.
For as long as "mass media" can be considered to exist (I won’t make a guess as to when that is, I’m no historian) it has in some cases served as a reflection of the worries and joys of current society, and also potentially as propaganda. Today, I believe most fiction books fall heavily in the former category, if only because they are not as widely circulated now that many other forms of digestible media exist.
The other benefit of books today is that, unlike other forms of mass media, they are not nearly as censored. Sure, they can be removed from school reading lists, but they’re still available. As far as I know, there is very little content-scanning done for self-published books on marketplaces like Amazon. I also find that books do a better job at showing introspection. A movie or TV series can show horrific images to get a small sense of a situation, but a book can dive deep into many characters’ psyches and explore how events are affecting them and all corners of their lives.
With this backdrop, I want to consider the book I mentioned last week, The Great Believers. It is a book focused on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the gay community of Chicago during the 1980s. There is a side story that jumps into 2015, but that’s not the focus of my thoughts here. This is one of the first books that I’ve read which deals with an issue a decade or so outside of my living memory, and does so in an incredibly empathetic and raw way. The parts of the book set in the 1980s follow Yale, a gay man who lives with his partner Charlie. Yale works for a burgeoning art gallery based in Northwestern University, focusing on accumulating more works of art and developing a permanent display.
The power of this book is not in its graphic display of men infected by HIV/AIDS. There is a bit of that, but it mostly holds back. It’s really about how this community in Chicago viewed themselves, how they worked together (or didn’t), how they viewed the world outside them, and how a virus that is already debilitating enough further exacerbates the degree to which they are outcast.
This was admittedly jarring to me. I come from a reasonably liberal background, and spent two years working in dorms in college, where a huge focus was on diversity and social justice. I met, and befriended, people from a wide variety of backgrounds. But despite all this, it doesn’t mean I’m incredibly comfortable with the terrible things many people have to go through. Fully because of my background and my privilege, I’ve been put in positions where I am the one helping and providing guidance, because I don’t have to face the issues. With the amount of news that we get, it’s hard to empathize with so many people at once, and I personally have a habit of starting to blocking things out or becoming numb to the realities others don’t have a choice but to face. Consciously reading a book where I am following a specific character, and getting to hear the thoughts, tends to have a much greater effect and put me in a better mindset to slowly wrap my thoughts around the broader scope.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The reason this post is Part 1 is because by next week I anticipate finishing another modern book that focuses on another tough issue with which I have no firsthand experience. The parts of this book which caused me the most discomfort, as I mentioned, were the focus on the outcast nature of the gay community, and the affect of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Growing up, I knew nothing about HIV/AIDS until I took my first health class, whenever that was, and learned a bit about STD/Is. However, the origins of HIV/AIDS and the stigma associated with it I only picked up via bits and pieces of culture and roaming the internet. Despite all that, I had never really been confronted with the reality of it and how divided people could be over it at the time. (Of course, even now, I’m sure there are lingering effects.)
Being thrown into the (relatively mild) discomfort of reading accounts of how this disease progressed through the gay community, and seeing a literary microcosm of how the people involved responded, I believe increased my empathy. It’s given me another marker with which to silently orient myself whenever I’m navigating a conversation or ingesting a piece of media related to this situation. I’m not sure there is anything specific and actionable I can point to right now, but I know that I feel both a bit more knowledgeable from it, and increasingly aware of my naivety and the lack of context I actually have to handle these realities of the world.
As I continue to read, I want to make an effort to diversify the experiences I’m coming across. I think the best thing we can do is open ourselves to the thoughts and realities of others, and accept that what it implies is that we are not in positions to judge, only to offer the best help that we can without judgement. Solutions developed in understanding and context, even if it’s well beyond our own experiences and comfort level, will always surpass those brought about in ignorance, fear, or smug pretenses of exceptional knowledge.