When the allegations happened last week, I was shaken. But I told myself that it wasn’t about me. That it wasn’t my place to have any feeling about the issue: I wasn’t the victim, my feelings didn’t matter in comparison to those of the victimized party. And you separate the art from the artist—and I can not use the shorthand phrase for doing that here—so I should be able to retain what that game, that story, that narrative, meant to me irrespective of the many actions of one of it’s artists other than “making this game.” I was determined to do that. I bought myself a little pin, as a totemic act, a portrait of Gregg.
Because whatever else happens, Gregg rules, ok?
Then the alleged abuser took his own life. And, in direct contradiction of the very clear wishes of the suicide victim, his family, and everyone else actually connected to the tragedy in real life, a certain online faction are now trying to make this death, and the game itself, a rallying standard for another mass harassment campaign.
I’ve put a lot of effort into clarifying my thoughts about this, and I can’t be the only one who needs that. So, if you are confused and upset and just wish you could go back to enjoying the game you liked, it’s possible you’ll find some of this useful.
There’s a stock response, in cases such as this, that you need to separate the art from the artist. I’m gonna go ahead and use the phrase “Absence of the Author” to refer to this when and if I need to. You love narrative X, you learn that it’s author did something genuinely reprehensible like sexual abuse or voting for Trump, and you’re urged to mentally divide the art you enjoy from the misdeeds of the person that created it. Not only does this not work in this case, I would submit that it has never worked.
(This is leaving aside that this advice is a misunderstanding of “Absence of the Author” even as a concept in literary criticism, which merely means that the author’s interpretation of their text is not inherently more valid than anyone else’s.)
You cannot ignore upsetting knowledge about a narrative while enjoying that narrative, because the attempt to do so makes your enjoyment of the narrative ABOUT ignoring the unpleasant knowledge and not about the narrative. It is a denial of the unpleasant facts, not a confrontation, and it takes a sustained effort of will to maintain it. The misdeeds in question, whatever they are, happened and have had real consequences, and however you feel about them you’re experiencing real emotions and reactions, and trying to go back to the narrative as a refuge from that narrative’s own context is doomed to failure. It is like trying not to think of a purple elephant by starting fixedly at a sign that says “a purple elephant.”
So, you cannot ignore such real world misdeeds by invoking Absence of the Author and separating the art from the artist. Must we, then, surrender narratives whose authors are discovered to have crossed a certain lines into the unacceptable? No, not only is this a false dilemma, it is one that is in fact not psychologically possible, I believe, for human beings to perform. Human beings are essentially meaning-generating entities, and self-defining, and both of those things are done using narrative as a tool. The narratives that speak to you define who you are, and you cannot abandon them without serious work of self-disassembly, which even in ideal circumstances is tedious and unpleasant. In the majority of cases, losing one’s narratives is deeply traumatic: it suddenly takes away pieces of your own self-definition, and a self-definition is something without which a human being cannot function. If for no other reason, philosophy and psychiatric therapy are invaluable simply for their ability to carefully and gently edit self-definition without the traumatic crises that the task usually requires. Even if such losses from one’s self-definition are done carefully and harmlessly, the continual work of having to always start another one because there’s always another allegation about another author of a beloved narrative, which means you now have to start the work of disassembling that one and you weren’t even yet finished with the last one, how many more times are you going to have to do this, you’re EXHAUSTED?
(This, incidentally, is the kind of trauma that cultural appropriation inflicts. That’s why it’s bad.)
It is not possible to enjoy a work in a vacuum. There is always a social statement attached to being the audience for a narrative, because at the very least, being the audience for a narrative implies a decision that hearing THAT narrative is more important than the consequences, for yourself or anyone else, of your doing so. Imagine the most pablum, non-controversial, un-ideological game or movie or book in history. If I were to play or watch or read it instead of washing the dishes and walking the dog, then my husband and my dog would be correct in reading my actions as a statement about the worth of that narrative relative to my responsibilities to them, and maybe justified in feeling hurt about that.
In a vacuum, sure, enjoying a narrative doesn’t mean anything more than “this is a narrative that I enjoy,” but we don’t live in a vacuum, and we don’t enjoy narratives there either. Your choice to play such-and-such is always going to be made in a particular time and place, and therefore is always going to be relative to that all the other things related to that narrative in that particular time and place. There has never been, is not, and never will be a situation with no context.
That’s what’s going on here. If I were to go out to the games convention wearing my pin, I would be making a statement relative to the context of this game. And, for one thing, I don’t actually know at time of writing what that statement would even be! The import of the context is currently being fought over, and there’s a particular faction that’s trying VERY hard to try to make it so that enjoying this game is equivalent to stating that you beleive a sexist, misogynist, homophobic, pro-rape conspiracy theory that the game itself is inherantly ideologically opposed to, and which the authors took every opportunity to condemn. They’re outright lying to do it, but if you know the faction I’m talking about you’re not in the least surprised by that, but the important point is that this is the only tactic they have: manipulating the context of an entire genre of narrative to try to convince people that enjoying any game ever is a statement in their faction’s favor, that people have to choose between being on their side and never playing a game again. And as we discussed above, living without any narrative is not possible, and having the narrative you are attached to taken away is painfully traumatic. That’s the lie: “you have to support us or Some Scapegoat We Made Up—the SJW’s, or Cancel Culture, or The Gays, or… women taking the radical standpoint that rape is bad—will take your narratives away.”
(In the interest of keeping this digression short, I’ll simply say that our cultural lack of a recognized process of recontextualization for retaining a self-definatory narrative other than doubling down on the injustices discovered to have contributed to it is a huge part of the rise of the current plague of various right wing fascisms. And it’s not just men, either, I’ve seen women react with some bafflingly bigoted things when confronted with the homophobic implications of their narratives.)
So what is needed is another piece of context, so that the statement made by enjoying the narrative need not be a morally reprehensible one.
Consider another narrative, foundational to a lot of people’s self-definition, The Lord of the Rings. No, I’m not about to tell you morally unacceptable things J.R.R. Tolkien did. I’m going to bring up one of the points that the Lord of the Rings, and it’s wider continuity, the Silmarillion, is trying to make that often gets ignored. In the Lord of Rings’ internal mythology, the world is created by God—called Iluvatar but explicitly The Catholic God in the text—telling the angels to sing about a theme and then turning that music, with the angelic co-authorship in it, into Middle Earth. This goes off the rails almost immediately, because one of the angels decies to defy God and sing about something else, it spoils the music and creates discord. At first the other angels try to simply sing louder, to drown him out, but that doesn’t work. What does work is “the third theme” described as “deep and wide and beautiful, but… blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which it’s beauty chiefly came.” And the text points out that the evil discord’s “most triumphant notes were taken by [it] and woven into its own solemn pattern.”
What Tolkien is doing is trying an answer to what Theistic Philosophers call The Problem of Evil, ie How can evil exist in a universe created by a benevolent and omnipotent God. And whether he succeeds is a matter for other essays, and I won’t pretend not to have an opinion on that, but the relevant point now is that ignoring evil doesn’t work. You cannot pretend that the hurt didn’t happen. What you can do is deny the hurt’s ability to rule you. You can choose to enjoy the narrative not in ignorance of the wrong done but in defiance of the wrong done, and make the statement made by so doing “you have committed an injustice, but that injustice is not permitted the further injustice of denying me this story. I need it to live. You cannot take it.”
“Absence of the Author,” separating the art from the artist, doesn’t do that. It ignores and suppresses, it is the “I urge you to forgive him and move on, for your own sake, even though he hasn’t apologized.” It leaves the context of the narrative in the hands of the abuser, and makes the statement of choosing to hear the narrative one of solidarity AGAINST the abused. What is needed in response to evil actions is not ignoring, but denial. Making the statement “to those who have commited injustice, you cannot have this. It is no longer yours. It was all of ours, but your actions have cut you off from all of us and so also from it.”
In that light, the actions of the other authors of Night in the Woods make perfect sense and are indeed the only moral option. And in that light, I would say to those trying to seize control of the context of a game they professed to loathe for their own purposes: “it is not yours. It will never be yours. It is mine, and it is ours, and you have no power over us.” They would have you believe that to have the story is to be tarred with the same brush of guilt, because they want as many people as possible to have to wear that guilt, but it is that very guilt that makes it impossible for them to have the story. And all it takes to make THAT context, make the game into THAT statement is for me to articulate that I am, in fact, doing so.
Because whatever else the author has done, the narrative is still HERE, and the act of proceeding as if it’s not itself makes another narrative, one in which the evil done overpowers and undoes the good of the art. That can’t be allowed to happen.
The lone and level sands stretch far away. Yet look on his works, ye mightless, and take heart. The statue falls, the name is lost to time: the poem about it lives, and still inspires.
So will still say, not as an observation, but as an imperative:
Gregg rules, ok?
