Yea-Sayers and Nay-Sayers

[Connavar]

I was influenced, in coming up with this thread, not only by my sense, as I spend a lot of time with The Prelude right now, of Wordsworth as a great Yea-sayer, but by having read a bit by Colin Wilson within the past couple of months or so. Wilson's not one of my favorite authors, but I've read him from time to time since high school days in the 1970s, and I find him a lot more pleasant to read than the literary theory guys. And this Yea/Nay thing seems to matter to him. But he'd read many authors I haven't read, or not much. I think he puts Hesse in the Nay category, but I've done little with Hesse's writings since the 1970s. Likewise, Wilson would put Shaw in the Yea-sayer category, but this is an author I've read even less than Hesse.

Interesting thread, topic i must say. Very unique way to think about authors, their works, their outlook on things. I feel like some authors change over the years, in their field,genres, in their writings from Yea to nay or the other way.

I qouted this from your first post in thread:

A nay-sayer’s implied narrator might affect a stance of detachment, and a nay-sayer is likely to write works pervaded by irony.

When i think author you listed we have in common i would agree Vance is very much like nay-sayer of thise type. Irony, detachment,dry humour is very prominnent in most known, important works.

I would say Lord Dunsany is often both, some of his novels is very much full of passion, overly focus on beauty, good things in life, like The King of Elfland's Daughter but some of his short stories, even the ones that are not fantastical, even in the plays for example he is very early enviromentalist, very clear disdain for how humans, their machines ruin nature, wildlife. There are 2-3 page short stories that wrote from the POV of the mountains how the humans have destroyed,cluttered those part of nature.

Its like you have to be nay-sayer to be critical of human condition, the way we live, destroy the earth,animals, other humans way of life.

 

[HareBrain]

I think he puts Hesse in the Nay category

Wilson mentions Hesse in several books, but it always seems to be in relation to one passage in Steppenwolf that mentions the stars (that's all I can remember) which Wilson cites positively as an example of a wide-angle view of life. So I think he'd call him a yea-sayer. (Wilson himself is about as yea-sayer as it gets.)

 

[Extollager]

Its like you have to be nay-sayer to be critical of human condition, the way we live, destroy the earth,animals, other humans way of life.

From my point of view, a Nay-sayer's "Nay!" is more unconditional than that. Nay-sayers aren't simply critical of some bad behaviors, such as wilful polluting. They aren't standing by to say "Yea!" if only people would correct some problems that, in principle, could be turned around if people just saw what was in their best interests. Nay-sayers see something incorrigibly inadequate or grim or empty or meaningless in the way things are.

William Golding saw mankind as producing evil as bees produce honey. That's a moral expression of the Nay-sayer view.

Some Nay-sayers don't think in terms of moral evil but in terms of what they regard as an inescapable human pettiness. Dunsany may have cared about beauty as a person, but, in his notion of things, beauty can only be found in the beauty of a soap bubble, fragile, transient, not an aspect of the ultimate order of things, which he believes is meaningless -- or anyway that's my impression of Dunsany.

Wilson mentions Hesse in several books, but it always seems to be in relation to one passage in Steppenwolf that mentions the stars (that's all I can remember) which Wilson cites positively as an example of a wide-angle view of life. So I think he'd call him a yea-sayer. (Wilson himself is about as yea-sayer as it gets.)

I've read Wilson's essay on Hesse (in Hesse, Reich, Borges) but that was years ago. I had the impression that Wilson censured Hesse for romantic self-pity.

Not all Nay-sayers are self-pitying, but that certainly would be a characteristic of some.

 

[Extollager]

I feel like some authors change over the years, in their field,genres, in their writings from Yea to nay or the other way.

Yes -- that might be an interesting discussion topic. H. G. Wells might be someone who started as a Yea-sayer and ended (Mind at the End of Its Tether) as a Nay-sayer -- although the ending of The Time Machine suggests an early Nay-saying tendency.

 

[Extollager]

William Golding saw mankind as producing evil as bees produce honey. That's a moral expression of the Nay-sayer view.

More precisely, I should have said Golding (so far as I know) leaves it at that and, so, is a Nay-sayer. A Yea-sayer may have a very grim view of the human proclivity for suffering, folly, and evil and yet believe man can be saved, redeemed, and that the ultimate order of things is good. Dostoevsky would be a case in point. A Nay-sayer believes that the order of things is, in the last analysis, not redeemable, even though one may have a cheery time of it for a while, with pleasant companionship, books, music, food and drink, curiosity to be satisfied and then new things to be curious about, etc.

 

[Idealect]

I don't think Robert E. Howard fits in 'nay'. He wasn't very fond of life as it happened to be right now, as he saw it. But he liked life itself so much that he invented his own timeless world of rip roaring adventure.


As I see it, his view of life was sometimes grim but almost always glorious. His characters descend into the depths of hell, but they come up swinging. And isn't descending into the depths of hell pretty brave in the first place?

Underestimated and overlooked characters often shown unexpected strength at pivotal moments, and even his villains have their wonderful charm, -often acting from the same 'excess of life' that Chesterton often praises. (though of course not to such extremes).

They come face to face with death, in all its horrific splendour, but they aren't phased. Compared to their towering prides (and their spites, and their oaths, and many varied precious things, not least their often keen sense of life), -death is but a paltry thing.

And who else can say they have villains as terrible and fearful as Robert E Howard's, but also the heroes to match them?



Now of course Howard.. 'said nay' in the sense that he killed himself, but his dissatisfaction with life very much seems to have been out of a sense that it could be so much more.


And one could even see it as an affirmation of life -as he saw it:

Something secondary to pride, to greatness. Something to be dealt with violently and sweepingly. Most of all, something never to be afraid of losing.

_
_

To draw a parralel with Chesterton, seems to have believed, and believed very vividly

that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than fear. -G.K. Chesterton

except that to him this was not god, but man

 

[Extollager]

Idealect, not necessarily to try to change your mind, but to explain my view of Robert E. Howard:

Yes, Howard seems to think that those who can grab hold of pleasures of life may well do so, and that if you are confronted by tangible enemies you may well fight back as hard as you can. But it seems to me that the background of his thinking is that, finally, it's all futile. Your actions one way or the other don't really matter; there's no purpose to everything, not really; the natural state of things is for human achievement either to remain in a brutish state or to collapse back into it, etc. People may naturally seek to improve their comforts and invest a lot of "primitive" energy in such efforts, but, when they attain comforts, they lose their primitive vitality and become decadent, and, inevitably, the prey of other people who (temporarily) have more vigor than they. If Howard personally admires bravery, I don't think he would say that the brave man is really superior to the coward. He has no interest whatever in children, although he is rather strongly interested in the idea of one's tribe -- if there is an "ought" in Howard, I suppose it is that one "ought" to fight against people of other tribes if it is to one's own tribe's advantage to do so; so one's tribe is an extension of oneself. Oneself is all, really, that one has -- and oneself will perish, and all will be as if one had never existed. Existence is futile.

With such considerations in mind, I continue to see Howard as a Nay-sayer in the sense I've tried to indicate at the beginning of this discussion.

 

[Bick]

Yea
Isaac Asimov
Alan Dean Foster
Larry Niven
P. G. Wodehouse
Charles Dickens
Haruki Murakami
Leo Tolstoy
Richard Russo
Jerome K. Jerome

Nay
Robert Silverberg
J. G. Ballard
Philip K. Dick
George R. R. Martin
George Orwell
Evelyn Waugh
Somerset W. Maugham

 

[Emphyricist]

For now I'm going to aim to list only what I think are new additions or where I disagree with placements by previous posters:

Yea:
Eleanor Arnason
James Blish
L. Sprague De Camp
Gordon R. Dickson
H. Beam Piper
Eric Frank Russell
James Schmitz
Cordwainer Smith
Dan Simmons
A. E. Van Vogt

Nay:
Anthony Boucher
Leigh Brackett
John Brunner
C. M. Kornbluth
Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (as collaborators)
Ursula K. LeGuin
Larry Niven
John Scalzi
Theodore Sturgeon
William Tenn

I think the hardest to place for me (of the names not yet mentioned) are Fredric Brown, Robert Sheckley, James Tiptree Jr., and Steve Baxter. The first two have a very cynical view of humanity true, but their stories are never exceptionally dark, and they often go for upbeat endings. I think I'd class Sheckley as a yea-sayer and Brown as a nay-sayer, but it's a tricky matter. Tiptree writes really dark stories that still celebrate life, and I think I'd probably (narrowly) classify her as a yea-sayer. Baxter is similar to Tiptree, but seems even more cynical, and I'd probably class him (also narrowly) as a nay-sayer. I'm not really confident on any of these classifications though, which is why I didn't put them in my main lists.

 

[TheDustyZebra]

I'm interested to see that Heinlein isn't in anyone's list on either side. Does everyone consider him iffy, or is it just that no one thought of him at all?

 

[Emphyricist]

I just assumed someone had already mentioned him. I'd definitely call him a yea-sayer. Same with Asimov and Clarke. While Vonnegut, LeGuin (as I already mentioned), and Dick I'd all call clear nay-sayers. Bradbury, mentioned in the OP as a yea-sayer I'd say is iffy; I'd probably lean towards yea-sayer too, but he's not as clear-cut to me.

 

[Toby Frost]

Heinlein is very difficult, because the personality his books imply seems to vary and is difficult to pin down. Reading Starship Troopers, you might get the impression that he was a grim old veteran angry with the kids of today, but reading Stranger in a Strange Land, you might see him as part of the counter-culture. Philip K Dick or Ray Bradbury remain pretty constant, but Heinlein was either very changeable or only ever revealed a small aspect of himself in each book.

It also occurs to me that yea or nay is no indicator of goodness as a person. Some of the maniacs of the French and Russian Revolutions would definitely be in the Yea camp.

 

[Emphyricist]

I haven't read Starship Troopers. The only Heinlein novels I've read are Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, both of which seem fairly bullish on humanity. Most of his short stories I've read also share this characteristic, with the possible exception of "Universe." The most compelling example of Heinlein's yea-ness comes from a story he wrote about a man who foils an attempted coup on the moon. He dies trying, but his sacrifice leads to him being honored by the whole planet and being remembered by humanity for generations.

 

[Fried Egg]

Interesting discussion this. I certainly hadn't thought about authors in this light before.

Would it be fair to say that most, if not all (effective) horror writers would have to be in the "nay sayers" category?

Judging by how other people have categorised authors, I would have to say that I lean towards "nay sayers" (although I read a lot of horror) but I certainly enjoy many "yae sayers" too.

 

[Extollager]

Fried Egg asks us, "Would it be fair to say that most, if not all (effective) horror writers would have to be in the "nay sayers" category?"

I hope others will respond to that question too. I thought about it and at first I was going to agree, and probably would agree, except that perhaps I should recuse myself, in that I haven't read widely in the horror genre. In fact, I wouldn't be prepared to explain a key term associated with the genre ("grimdark") because I don't know what it means. I have read Lovecraft backwards and forwards and I've read a fair bit of Clark Ashton Smith, and a great deal of the antiquarian ghost story subgenre (M. R. James et al.). And I've read Dracula and some other famous horror stories.

But then also I thought that maybe a lot of the genre authors in horror haven't got as far as, in effect, saying yea or nay. Perhaps they're -- like a lot of us; like modern politics often assumes we all are -- ordinary sensual people, who feel yea-wards when on vacation, or at the beginning of a new romantic relationship, etc., and who feel nay-wards when bored, disappointed, frustrated, etc.

 

[Fried Egg]

I'm not sure I would describe myself as "widely read" in the horror genre because I know I tend to only like a certain strain of horror (more restrained and subtle) but certainly it seems to me that an extremely grim and pessimistic view of humanity and our place in the universe is largely universal because it is an essential part of what makes such stories horror.

Anyway, I'd be interested to hear of horror authors that are so called 'Yea Sayers'.

 

[Randy M.]

Going back to one of my original arguments in this thread, if you think of it as a spectrum rather than black/white dichotomy, I think Bradbury leans toward yea-sayer. There is an energy and vitality in his portrayal of people that leans optimistic, even as he acknowledges the dark side. Think of the ending of Something Wicked This Way Comes for instance.

I believe this is also mostly true of Stephen King, who shows great hope in the actions of individuals if not always in collectives and groups.

Thomas Ligotti, on the other hand ... nay-sayer, big time.


Randy M.

 

[Toby Frost]

Well, I would firmly put Stephen King and Clive Barker in the yea camp. King’s books seem to celebrate traditional Americana: small towns, families, high schools, courting couples, gossip, and so on. His outlook reminds me of Bruce Springsteen (like Springsteen, he also talks about poverty and social collapse). A force often appears that threatens that kind of “normal life” and the force is defeated by good decent folk. I think there’s a clear link between the vampires in Salem’s Lot and the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Barker is almost the opposite: he’s gay, British, and very much an outsider. A lot of his stories involve rebellion against “normal life” and a sense of oppressive drabness. But often that involves some sort of (very bloody) transformation into something better and more mystical (and deadly). You can imagine Barker really enjoying life (although perhaps some of his fun might not be to everyone’s taste…). In the right circumstances, I think both authors could be very happy people. I don’t think either has a fundamentally negative view of humanity, the way that Lovecraft seems to have. You can’t imagine Lovecraft caring about the high school prom, or gay pride for that matter, the way he would care about an ancient first edition.

“Grimdark” is, I think, different to horror, and is more a term I’d use to describe a style of (predominantly) fantasy and some SF, rather like “utopian”. It involves more “realism”; ie more dwelling on gore, failure, squalor, misery and discomfort than usual. “Noir” in crime is vaguely similar, although I suspect that Grimdark is often more ironic and exaggerated (noir, after all, started up in a time of serious censorship). Grimdark comes from a self-aware quoting of Warhammer 40,000’s slogan “In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war”, and Warhammer has always had a pulpy, cartoony edge that it sometimes acknowledges (in turn, it owes a certain amount to the comic 2000 AD). The writing varies hugely, from the very serious George RR Martin to the wink-to-camera feel in someone like Joe Abercrombie. In the case of Abercrombie, the sense that he doesn’t take his setting entirely seriously suggests that it’s hard to say what his real outlook is (probably yea). Martin seems like a cheerful man, but the first of his long fantasy novels, A Game of Thrones, feels pretty much like “nay”.

Where would you put M.R. James, Extollager? The events of his stories are sometimes pretty nasty, but I don't get the same sense of overwhelming bleakness as Lovecraft. I think a person in the world according to M.R. James could have quite a pleasant life if he didn't inquire into forbidden things and was lucky enough to avoid them. Overall, I'd give him a mild and gentle "yea".

 

[Randy M.]

Where would you put M.R. James, Extollager? The events of his stories are sometimes pretty nasty, but I don't get the same sense of overwhelming bleakness as Lovecraft. I think a person in the world according to M.R. James could have quite a pleasant life if he didn't inquire into forbidden things and was lucky enough to avoid them. Overall, I'd give him a mild and gentle "yea".

Ditto.

 

[Extollager]

Anyway, I'd be interested to hear of horror authors that are so called 'Yea Sayers'.

Me too.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote some excellent horror -- "Thrawn Janet," The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde come to mind, also "Olalla" (it is too long since I read "Markheim"). Sickly, he knew he wouldn't live long, but he was a yea-sayer all right. His epitaph makes the tears come:

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me;
"Here he lies where he longed to be,
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill."

M. R. James, as Toby and Randy suggest, and I'd agree with Randy about Bradbury too.

Russell Kirk wrote a number of ghost stories, but while he aims for creepiness, I don't think he aims for horror.

Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood were yea-sayers.

Charles Williams wrote some work with quite intense horror elements but was a yea-sayer. The depiction of Wentworth's relationship with the succubus, in Descent into Hell, is unusually convincing for horror fiction. Brrrrrr! The necromancer in All Hallows' Eve is, again, exceptionally believeable, including his warped relationship with his woman disciple, and his intentions for the daughter he begot on her are all too plausible.