The answer to the question in my last post is: I guess it depends on what kind of writing you do, but for the most part it is a resounding no! It is hard to write good literature or even good history without adversity. There are many reaons, the most obvious is that life is about conflict, obstaces that we overcome, or ones that overcome us. Without them, we have a story as flat as the plains of Kansas and just as boring. One can write poetry, psalms, songs and even comedy without engaging in sticky, or depressing details but it is hard to write a history or even a novel without tension, adversity and challenges that the protagonists or characters in your book confront. Even in scholarly work the people we write about usually face a pushback in their lives. Currently, I'm reading a short memoir that has very little drama and while I want to read it I admit that it is not very engaging. The protagonist faced many obstacles in his life but actually never engages them in an significant way, deciding instead to accentuate the positive to a point that it reads like a 7th grade essay.
But the point I want to make here is not that all literture needs tension but that tension, adversity and challenges are not the only point of any story or work of scholarship. It is about resolution even if that resolution sometimes turns out to be fully negative in the end. In today's scholarship and even in some of the general fiction there is too much negativity and too much whinning. Everything becomes a story of unfairness which suffocates all action. This is particularly true in memoir where "straw men (and straw women)" are constantly set up and the memoirist spends the rest of the book bemoaning his/her tragedy. It is like a revisit to the 1950s & 60s where American writers discovered how dysfunctional were their families and decided that since everyone else's was also dysfunctional they had a ready made audience.
Today, dysfunction and childhood adversity and "they don't treat me right because of who I am" stories proliferate. Now, there are many who do confront adversity and unfairness--lest I say racism, sexism, agism (I'm getting there), etc. But that literature mostly has value when there is some form of resolution even if its learning to live with one's misery. Resolution, then, is not about a complete turn around or a "fix" to all our problems, instead it is about personal--or at times collective--decision-making that frees one from hopelessness even if not totally from the problem itself.
This doesn't mean we don't write tragedy or histories of oppressed people. It means that we give them life, recognize the struggle, and validate them regardless of whether they fully solved their problems or are overwhelmed by them. Otherwise we add to the literature of negativity and whinning. Most people are fighters, and those that aren't are usually not worth writing about.
