The decision to create The Cautioner’s Tale as a graphic novel is what works most in this book. The illustration are beautiful, though they seem a little too arranged, a little too much like pages from my sister’s scrapbooks. The book itself seems a little too arranged. It feels like the author, R. M. Wilburn, is chaperoning the reader conclusions she wants them to reach. We can learn from that, though. We can explore that.
The Cautioner’s Tale is an obvious metaphor and warning about the current political situation in the United States. First, she names the villain Herr Bigly Rump. The current U.S. president is named Trump, though he is often mocked online as tRump. It’s also a sort of American tradition to use German (Herr) to denote evil. This is probably a reference to Nazis and our American forgetfulness that Nazis took their murderous example from the American eugenics movement. Wilburn uses German again later in the book by naming the head of the FBI (and next president) Dastardly Gott, forgetting perhaps that Gott is German for good.
Names are a big deal in the universe of The Cautioner’s Tale, punny and obvious. We have Ever Hopeful, Juggler Vein, Parsimonious Creed, Ancillary Pawn, and on and on and on. They feel self-consciously clever. They also feel as though the author doesn’t think the reader is clever, and so she must create these names to help us separate the good characters from the evil. This leads to some apparent questions about the intelligence of the main character and the electorate in this universe.
The metaphor and warning of the tale are equally overt. Canker Ranx literally warns that Mary Morgan (the hero) “must destroy gateway to 2016” in a coded message and Mary asks herself “Was this when he learned how (and how not) to tamper with elections” (loc 30-31). The conclusions Wilburn wants the reader to reach are painfully obvious. There are multiple references to a Last Great War that almost destroyed humanity twenty years before the book takes place (2045). Here is the warning: something is going to happen in 2025, and that something is instigated by the election of 2016.
But The Cautioner’s Tale isn’t only a warning that our current universe is going to create the universe of the book. It’s a metaphor of our current universe. Rump is a double for Trump, even down to the promise to “make the world great again” (loc 43), the suggestion of Russian involvement with the involvement of Chain Yankervich, “a tyrant and Evil-doer by all accounts” (loc 25).
Mary Morgan works the clues out just quickly enough to find the next clues. She doesn’t seem able to put them all together until just before the end when she is very conveniently at just the right place. Suddenly her mind works much more quickly than it has anywhere else in the book and she puts all of the clues together to know just what to do.
The Cautioner’s Tale is visually beautiful. But the plot and storytelling are frustrating and obvious. Still, I can learn from this. I can learn what I don’t like and what I don’t want to do. The reader was given a lot of clues in The Cautioner’s Tale, textual clues and visual clues. I learned here that I need to be subtler. I need to trust the intelligence of the reader and that it’s ok if the reader reaches some conclusions I don’t intend. The cleverness of the names really turned me off. This was partially because of the un-subtlety of it, but it was also because there were so many of them. Why would I want to name characters that never appear? That gives the reader too much to keep track of. It also feels like showing off. The metaphor of the book was also quite heavy-handed for my taste. This teaches me that I’d prefer to create metaphors that are more indirect and implied.
No, I didn’t enjoy The Cautioner’s Tale. But I learned from it.
I agree with you that much of The Cautioner's Tale seemed a little heavy handed, or perhaps written as if for younger children in the main character's obliviousness and entirely too coincidentally timed "revelations." But I do have to wonder if Wilburn consciously made those choices, in an attempt to be so bluntly obvious with their social message that no one could miss it. This of course then has the issue of irritating some readers, or of getting others in an uproar, such as those who will support Trump and his MAGA propaganda until the day they die, no matter what proof of his incompetence, bigotry, and narcissism is put in front of them. I also wonder how much of Wilburn's choice to be heavy handed was from an imposed, self-imposed or otherwise, goal to keep the book as brief as possible, as I feel a great deal more subtlety could have been achieved, if only a little more time had been taken throughout the storytelling. Like you say, the book is an excellent example of a learning opportunity for us, reminding you to be more subtle, and reminding me to take my time with more than just the world building.
ReplyDeleteAs with Jamie, I also agree that it seems a bit heavy-handed at times which (again agreeing) that I wonder who the target audience is? Is it for the younger generation of voters who can look back to that graphic novel/journal story they read in elementary school and connect the dots? Is it meant for an older audience such as ourselves or even those who voted for someone like Bigly Rump (*cough, cough* TRUMP *cough, cough*), so that if they were to read it, they would have no excuse as to denying what it's referring to? If it's meant for younger readers, I definitely think that being less subtle is appropriate as rereading books that I remember as being so clever and ambiguous to 7yo me are now painfully obvious.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to further play devil's advocate just a little bit in terms of the names of characters (many of whom we don't ever truly meet). A lot of these names, if you recall, were chosen by the characters in question following the election as a way to protect themselves within correspondence (i.e. Ever Hopeful) so in a way it does make sense that they're obvious. So while I do agree that there are characters that are obvious and not chosen by the characters themselves (i.e. Bigly Rump, Parsimonious Creed), these are ones where we have to bring our own experience of events outside of the novel to our reading for these to be as obvious as they are. This brings us back to who is the intended audience as someone younger who maybe didn't pay attention to the events surrounding the 2016 election might not bring the same reading to it that we do and just see Rump as a really shitty person while characters such as Ever Hopeful would still remain obvious to the younger reader.
I think I had another thing that your post made me think about, but it keeps running away from me when I try to recall what it was so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is so fascinating! Reading your post made me think of the satirical equivalent in film... Have you ever seen "Idiocracy?" Everything about the world of Idiocracy is dripping in Obvious Juice. The caveat, though, is that when you watch the movie, you are complicit in that feeling of superiority over the characters. You watch and you think, "look how gullible everyone else is in future America." As someone in the audience seat, you feel like you are on the inside.
ReplyDeleteThis book reminds me of that film. Do I think it was pulled off with as much grace? Hmmm. A lot of this hinges on how complicit the reader feels in the overall scheme. How seriously does the reader take the world?
I totally agree that the names of characters feel "self-consciously clever." I feel like the names are saturated and punny. But then I also think that's totally the point... the Obvious Juice of it all is supposed to make us feel like we are participants in this dystopia. We're superior as well, wink-wink, nudge-nudge.