The Slacktavist, a blog I enjoy only a passing familiarity with, has spent the past four years intermittently discussing the first book in the Christian Revelations-porn series, Left Behind. Each entry has covered just a few pages of the book, and it's taken four years to finish the discussion of a single book. I'd call the project a labor of love, except that the blogger clearly hates the book he's been so painstakingly deconstructing. Just about any entry from the series is worth reading, but
the last post does some nice work summing up the entire pony show.
This brief chorus line stroll here on the final page of the book is only a trivial example, but larger examples of larger impossibilities can be found on every other page. This is, in fact, a major theme -- perhaps the major theme -- of Left Behind. The book is an unending series of events that it is impossible to imagine really occurring in the way they are described.
This brings us back to the failure of world-building we discussed last week. LaHaye and Jenkins almost never bother to tell us much of anything about the strange post-Event world in which their story takes place, and when they do provide details they turn out to be irreconcilable with details provided earlier. This lack of world-building in Left Behind is not an oversight, it's a necessity. The authors are presenting an impossible story set in an impossible world. The more they tell us about that world, the less convincing their story becomes. But they couldn't do more to describe such a world even if they wanted to because such an impossible place is indescribable, unimaginable.
I'm not merely suggesting that this story is outlandish or that it's premise is audacious. I like outlandish and audacious stories.
...But such outlandish settings must be consistent. Storytellers can make up their own rules all they like but, having done so, they have to abide by them. Otherwise, it's just nonsense.
And Left Behind, ultimately, is just nonsense. It makes up its own rules and then breaks them. And then it makes up more rules that require its other rules to be broken. Left Behind refutes itself.
The premise of the book is clear and clearly stated. The Rapture and all the other events foretold by premillennial dispensationalist "bible prophecy scholars" are all real and are all really going to happen. Soon. The book wants to show us the events of this cosmic drama acted out before our very eyes in a story that takes its plot from the authors' End Times check list.
Yet the more we watch, the more we read, the less convinced we become that such a series of events could ever occur. Not because they're too outlandish, but because they contradict and preclude one another. We cannot accept the authors' assertion that A will be followed by B and then by C, because A renders B impossible and C could never take place in a world in which B had already happened.
This is the great and insurmountable failure of Left Behind. It set out to be a work of propaganda, a teaching tool meant to demonstrate -- the authors would say to prove -- that the events it describes could and indeed will really happen. Yet their attempt to present a narrative of such events instead demonstrates -- I would say proves -- that these events could not and indeed will not ever happen. It proves that the weird and contradictory events of their check list could never happen in a world anything like the world we live in, or in any other imaginable world. It proves that their supposed prophecies will never, and can never, be fulfilled.
It's an interesting criticism. After all, anyone can glance at one of the Left Behind novels and see that they're horribly written, with leaden prose and terrible dialogue and boring characters, but none of those faults have ever stopped a book from being successful. It's far more revealing to consider that the entire world fiction of the Left Behind book(s) is undone...
by itself. The books were written by godly hacks; we knew that, but I assumed the mythology of the books worked and developed cleanly. Apparently they fail even at that?
On a related issue, it's always amazed and amused me that people will eagerly lap up substandard entertainment offerings, whether books, movies, TV, or music, so long as they purport to come from a religious perspective. I don't mean actual televised sermons or televangelists, but works of fiction, in whatever medium, that are modern updates of Christian lore. If the Left Behind books had invented a new mythology they'd have sold about 500 copies, since they're written poorly, and there's no logic or consistency to their story. The same goes for most Christian music, movies, etc. And, I assume, for Muslim, Mormon, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, etc, entertainment, in various locations where those faiths are ascendant.
It's an interesting issue; that humans are willing, even eager, to consume sub-par entertainment so long as they feel it will not contradict, or will actually reinforce, their operational dogmas. I guess it's logical; if you buy into the metaphysical claims of religion X or Y, then it's more important that you stay true to those than that you consume entertainment that's actually entertaining.
Labels: religion, writing
