In 2000, Douglas Adams made an interesting observation that I keep returning to.

A user on Slashdot named “FascDot Killed My Pr” had asked the following question (where HGttG = Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy):

Comedy….or Tragedy?

First, a big thank-you. You’ve made a lasting contribution to “our” culture (or should that be “culture”?)

I first read HGttG in my early teens. I doubled over laughing the whole time. I read and reread the entire series, bought both Dirk Gently books AND Last Chance to See. Loved them all and wouldn’t trade having read them for anything. (btw, the first mental ward scene in Long Dark Teatime is a no-foolin’, all-time classic.)

However, a few years ago I was talking to a (then) classmate. Very smart, philosophy-major type. He said (paraphrased) “I thought that HGttG was depressing. Such nihilism.” At the time I thought “Hmmm…I didn’t SEE a black beret on his head….”. But every reading of the series since then his comment has struck me as more true–especially in the case of Arthur Dent. In fact, far from being funny, I now find Dent’s character depressing–he’s not just a loser, he literally has no control over his life at all (except in So Long for a while). And the control he does have does him no good (e.g. Earth is destroyed while he’s trying to save his house.)

So my question is: When you were writing these books did you feel you were being gaily whimsical or did you instead feel frustrated and cynical?

Douglas Adams replied with:

I suspect there is a cultural divide at work here. In England our heroes tend to be characters who either have, or come to realise that they have, no control over their lives whatsoever – Pilgrim, Gulliver, Hamlet, Paul Pennyfeather (from Decline and Fall), Tony Last (from A Handful of Dust). We celebrate our defeats and our withdrawals – the Battle of Hastings, Dunkirk, almost any given test match. There was a wonderful book published, oh, about twenty years ago I think, by Stephen Pile called the Book of Heroic Failures. It was staggeringly huge bestseller in England and sank with heroic lack of trace in the U.S. Stephen explained this to me by saying that you cannot make jokes about failure in the States. It’s like cancer, it just isn’t funny at any level. In England, though, for some reason it’s the thing we love most. So Arthur may not seem like much of a hero to Americans – he doesn’t have any stock options, he doesn’t have anything to exchange high fives about round the water-cooler. But to the English, he is a hero. Terrible things happen to him, he complains about it a bit quite articulately, so we can really feel it along with him - then calms down and has a cup of tea. My kind of guy!

I’ve hit a certain amount of difficulty over the years in explaining this in Hollywood. I’m often asked ‘Yes, but what are his goals?’ to which I can only respond, well, I think he’d just like all this to stop, really. It’s been a hard sell. I rather miss David Vogel from the film process. He’s the studio executive at Disney who was in charge of the project for a while, but has since departed. There was a big meeting at one time to discuss, amongst other things, Arthur’s heroicness or lack of it. David suddenly asked me ‘Does Arthur’s presence in the proceedings make a difference to the way things turn out?’ to which I said, slightly puzzled, ‘Well, yes.’ David smiled and said ‘Good. Then he’s a hero.’

In the current, latest version of the screenplay, I think that Arthur’s non-heroic heroism is now absolutely preserved, and I’m pleased with the way he works out.

(Douglas Adams Answers (Finally) - Slashdot)

I think I have more to say about this, and will try to come back and add more here, but meanwhile a few things at random:

• As a matter of fact, I have read The Book of Heroic Failures (1979) with great enjoyment. (Post from 2011 — I only wrote four sentences of my own, but one of them was “Too many books have been written in praise of competence; this book provides an antidote by celebrating failure as only a British author can.”)

• I think he is right that this goes over better (generally speaking) in England than in the USA. Of course one can make jokes mocking failure, but someone who fails does not automatically become endearing (in a kind of everyman way) in America the way they would in England. It seems to me that Americans are more likely to feel either contempt or pity than to feel kinship: or at any rate, they regard the failure as a setback or interesting circumstance, rather than the natural/default state of the world. (As someone who is neither American nor English, I am of course not someone whose opinions you should pay any heed to.)

• As we live our lives, are we merely victims subject to winds of chance and external circumstance, or are we powerful agents fashioning our own stories, making our own luck? Obviously the answer is “both”, but perhaps the most distinctively American trait is to lean more towards the latter.