Gratuitous Hero Torture
Jul. 12th, 2004 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaPulled upthread from a conversation with the Black Dog that is buried somewhere back in May or June or something. (Hope you don't mind, Black Dog... it's more manageable this way, no?)
Ack! I meant to put this behind a cut tag! Sorry folks!
I said: "I define genre fiction (to the extent that I think the category exists at all) as fiction that fulfils a very precise desire of the reader."
From BD:
Why precise? I was thinking about this on one of our old threads -- would it be reasonable to say that "genre" fiction is fundamentally about wish-fulfillment, while "serious" fiction is about deepening one's sense of awe at the world as it actually is, however resistant to our fantasies?
I like your distinctions, and will think about them some more. I remember your idea about deepening one's awe--it is very resonant, very moving.
Meanwhile, I said "precise" because I think *all* fiction is about wish-fulfillment, so the question is, what wish is being fulfilled? In serious fiction (as good a name as any for that Other Stuff) one may not even know what wish one desires to have fulfilled. One may enter the book in hopes of having one's inchoate desires identified.
But genre fiction is marked by the clarity and concreteness of its promises. It will fulfil Wish A, not Wish B. It is "precise" in that it is defined by some extremely rigid formulas--starting with their sharply gender-specific nature. A bodice-ripper is written for a precisely defined audience of women, and fulfils a specific and precisely delineated wish or fantasy. Some examples drawn from the bodice ripper genre include:
-If there is a pregnancy, there must be a child, not an abortion.
-If there is a child, there will be a marriage.
-If there is a child, the child will belong to the heroine, and will be loved by the hero, whether they are blood relations or not.
-If the hero is of the wicked and masterful sort, he will learn moral rectitude and love simultaneously, through his experience of the heroine.
-If there is a rival, he will turn out to be corrupt, a wolf in sheep's clothing.
-The ending is happy.
-The ending consists of the hero and heroine together.
-At the end, mysteries are solved, loose ends are tied (the ending is complete).
-The ending is clear.
-There are no empty tombs in the ending.
Etc. So precise are these rules and formulas that they exist in documents in publishers' offices. The reader's expectations are precise, and their fulfilment is obligatory. Author and reader are equally bound by them and the author's creative license is strictly circumscribed.
At best that's probably only a first approximation -- it makes the Iliad serious literature and the Odyssey genre, for instance.
Because the Odyssey has magic in it? I dunno... I think maybe awe at the world as it is isn't so opposed to wish fulfillment (fantasy) as you propose. Maybe this is not a binary opposition, but a pair of experiences that fluctuate within any book, or any reading, depending perhaps on the humor and expectations of the reader.
Still, the element of escapism seems fundamental.
Fundamental, I would argue, to all fiction. We enter the world of the book and leave behind our reality. Even in the most harshly realist novel (oh, say, Kozinski or--ugh--Saul Bellow or Updike) we escape. One could say that reading fiction is a kind of temporary schizophrenia, in which we are in a fugue state.
But I wonder about "precision," -- surely there can be a process of self-discovery in genre fiction
Perhaps, but if so, it happens in spite of the book and through the peculiarities of the reader--an instability in her expectations, maybe, or some idiosyncracy in her reading. There is always room for that, but I picture the book being very surprised when it happens.
Genre fiction is ... I think the word I want is "prescriptive." OTOH, I am fairly skeptical of these categories, at best. War and Peace is by most definitions a genre romance for the first 2/3, interrupted by chunks of a genre shoot-'em-up war novel. Only in the last section does it take a wierd left turn away from its own genres, mainly because Tolstoy kills off the romantic hero (for which I shall never forgive him).
GHT seems to push this definition to interesting places.[ snip examples ].
GHT may stimulate all the responses you name. And there's another one, a doozy, our old Aristotelian friend Pity-and-Fear: pity for his suffering, fear for him because we identify with him and fear for ourselves. In short, Aristotle was being a lot more Freudian than he realized (and vice versa of course): the catharsis, the provocation of pity and fear in the viewer/reader, is a quintessentially voyeuristic event.
You're entirely right that our relationship to the hero is an ambivalent mixture of envy, admiration, aspiration, love, resentment, and other anxieties. Hero torture stimulates all these responses in us. Gratuitous hero torture does something more: It sets the hero apart from us (we could never sustain so much suffering), and at the same time it tears away the veil that hides him from us. (Ah, look! he suffers a longing for love, just as we do!)
The debasement of the hero both repels us and fascinates us; we are repelled by its cruelty and by our awareness of our own voyeuristic fascination with it. And we are fascinated by the power of the cruelty and the power of the hero to resist and survive it.
I think, btw, that although the language I've been using is that of physical torture (Sadean or Christian extremities of physical debasement), the hero torture that is most potent, has most juju, is the emotional punishment. Odysseus can bear any physical pain, but to lose Penelope would destroy him, and the mere thought of losing her is anguish. My memory of Brideshead is not good, but isn't this a bit what Charles suffers? He loses too much--he loses everything: art, friendship, love, the house, the family. It is too cruel, too relentless, too complete. But without it he would not really be much of a hero, because he's too weak, too equivocal, too willing to compromise. (Am I remembering wrong? Will have to read the thing...)
Similarly, in Mark'sJesus hero story, Jesus suffers the physical tortures of crucifixion, but he can bear that. What really hurts him beyond bearing is the anguish of abandonment, being left alone. (More on this later.)
All of these could be dimensions of voyeurism, I guess, which seems somehow to be about an assertion of psychological power by those who refuse or are incapable of action.
Here's what Laura Mulvey says about fetishism, voyeurism, and fiction (which she calls story) in the essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (bearing in mind that it was written in 1973 and is dated):
"Fetishistic scopophilia [pleasure in looking] builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself. [...] Voyeurism, on the contrary, has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt [...], asserting control and subjugating the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness. This sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end. Fetishistic scopophilia, on the other hand, can exist outside linear time as the erotic instinct focused on the look alone. These contradictions and ambiguities can be illustrated more simply by using works of Hitchcock..." ( in Visual and Other Pleasures, Indiana U. Press, 1989. pp 21-22; she then does an analysis of voyeurism in "Rear Window").
You also raise the interesting possibility that GHT can be a sort of bastard form of "serious" literature, in that the wish-fulfillment is incomplete, because the hero is permanently marked or broken. "Bastard" because it doesn't really reject the premise of wish-fulfillment, it just sort of fetishizes one would-be hero's failure. What exactly, do you think, the reader is getting off on, here?
The $64k question. What does the reader get out of the story of the torture of Jesus? Catharsis? Voyeuristic glee? Relief? Redemption? Renewed faith? Repelled disgust?
One possible answer is that the reader is fetishizing his own anguish, or being a voyeur of his own suffering. That is, when the story ends without the triumph of the hero, the reader either experiences a pleasurable catharsis, and is relieved and purged and so on, or suffers a pang of frustration and unsatisfied longing, if the catharsis is not achieved. (Gah, no matter how I try to phrase this, catharsis sounds like a pseudonym for orgasm. I wonder if Aristotle intended any of that..., nope, it's probably just me.) If the latter, then the reader suffers along with the hero, though for slightly divergent reasons.
And so we suffer and watch ourselves suffering, and watch the hero suffering, and watch ourselves watching the hero. And so on. Watching, suffering, pleasure, and story-telling are all tangled up in the person of the hero. The more he gets hit, the more we believe in him.
I guess my own favorite type of literary encounter (that's an odd way to put it) is a work that starts with desire but that educates and corrects it in a serious way.
Yes, indeed. The trick, as you imply, is that education and correction must not be at the expense of desire or a negation of desire, but its fulfilment. Something the later Christian interpreters of the NT tended not to grasp very well. (With the notable exception of John Donne: http://search.able2know.com/About/3676.html : "Take me to you, imprison me, for I, / Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.")
I guess that was obvious in my rambling about Brideshead. I love genre as much as anybody as a recreation; it's like diner food, and it's often exhilarating to just give in and fully inhabit the stereotypical emotions and situations. But I get queasy spending too much time in an atmosphere where fantasy cushions the healthy, abrasive blows of actual living. (Although intellecualizing genre works is an extremely fun thing to do, as is intellectualizing anything!)
Yep.
More after a break for these important messages.
From BD part 2:
[snipping Houseman, because I agree and have nothing to add] Which brings us to Jesus! Don't worry, I'm a good agnostic, not handing out any fliers today, but I'm as fascinated by the NT as I am by a lot of other literature. Because of course the NT from one perspective is the ultimate wish fulfillment -- "you picked a fight with the wrong motherfucker, boy . . ." But not all of it.
Much though I dislike Christian faith and all the guff that goes with it, the Jesus story is a textbook example of Gratuitous Hero Torture, and is therefore very handy. And though the NT has a fair amount of genre fiction in it (cf. definition above, especially re precise expectations on the part of the reader), it is also a prime demonstration of why the voyeuristic, sadean hero narrative is so very powerful. Whatever it's mechanism may turn out to be, it resonates with unmatchable power for readers. There is nothing more potent. As we see, indeed, in the gratuitous, relentless torture of Harry Potter--especially in vol. 5, where he loses everything he has gained and is punished physically and emotionally over and over. He loses Sirius, he loses his respect for Dumbledore, he loses his innocence once and for all. Brutal stuff; too brutal, not at all cathartic.
Some day, if you're very bad, I will ramble on about Mark
1. I paid my taxes 3 months late.
2. I have been late to work every day for a month.
3. I pushed the cat off the bed really hard this morning.
4. I haven't been to the gym all summer.
5. I've racked up my credit card horribly, buying stupid stuff.
6. I have not only been watching "La Femme Nikita" reruns beyond all reason lately, but I've persuaded three friends to do so as well. (Dante puts people like me into the 10th bolgia: false counsellors; veryverybad)
7. Ate Ben & Jerry coffee buzz buzz ice cream for dinner last night.
8. Took the name of the lord in vain, worshipped false idols, and coveted my neighbor's Miata all in one sentence last Sunday (<--sabbath).
Will that do?
who I think is a Master of the Void, worthy of Beckett, while the other gospellers are plump, cheerful sectarians. A typical Markan touch: in the "why have you forsaken me" scene, J is of course quoting a psalm but the onlookers think he's calling on Elijah. The spectators don't even recognize their own classic literature, don't understand the moment or the mission at all -- the sense of futility and incomprehension go all the way down. And of course in the original version of Mark there's no resurrection, just an ambiguous empty tomb. He really asks, in a way the others don't, "If the messiah came [and the messiah here stands for all sorts of narcissistic closure, wish fulfillment, perfect redemption of the burdens of the world, yadayada] how would you know? What would it mean? What would change?" And his answer is to leave everything radically in doubt, to throw the spiritual seeker back on themselves. Although I admit, I may be alone in this reading. :)
It sounds rather Gnostic, from what little I recall of the Gnostic Gospels: no certainty, no bodily resurrection, only the possibility, the pure idea, the voice crying in the wilderness: beware, be ready; the word made not flesh, but spirit.
But it's a brilliant example of the refusal of wish-fulfillment right in the canonical heart of the biggest wish-fulfillment story of all time.
I can't bear to snip any of this. All I can say is: Please sir, I want some more.
ETA: The conversation begins in an LJ entry on May 5.
Ack! I meant to put this behind a cut tag! Sorry folks!
I said: "I define genre fiction (to the extent that I think the category exists at all) as fiction that fulfils a very precise desire of the reader."
From BD:
Why precise? I was thinking about this on one of our old threads -- would it be reasonable to say that "genre" fiction is fundamentally about wish-fulfillment, while "serious" fiction is about deepening one's sense of awe at the world as it actually is, however resistant to our fantasies?
I like your distinctions, and will think about them some more. I remember your idea about deepening one's awe--it is very resonant, very moving.
Meanwhile, I said "precise" because I think *all* fiction is about wish-fulfillment, so the question is, what wish is being fulfilled? In serious fiction (as good a name as any for that Other Stuff) one may not even know what wish one desires to have fulfilled. One may enter the book in hopes of having one's inchoate desires identified.
But genre fiction is marked by the clarity and concreteness of its promises. It will fulfil Wish A, not Wish B. It is "precise" in that it is defined by some extremely rigid formulas--starting with their sharply gender-specific nature. A bodice-ripper is written for a precisely defined audience of women, and fulfils a specific and precisely delineated wish or fantasy. Some examples drawn from the bodice ripper genre include:
-If there is a pregnancy, there must be a child, not an abortion.
-If there is a child, there will be a marriage.
-If there is a child, the child will belong to the heroine, and will be loved by the hero, whether they are blood relations or not.
-If the hero is of the wicked and masterful sort, he will learn moral rectitude and love simultaneously, through his experience of the heroine.
-If there is a rival, he will turn out to be corrupt, a wolf in sheep's clothing.
-The ending is happy.
-The ending consists of the hero and heroine together.
-At the end, mysteries are solved, loose ends are tied (the ending is complete).
-The ending is clear.
-There are no empty tombs in the ending.
Etc. So precise are these rules and formulas that they exist in documents in publishers' offices. The reader's expectations are precise, and their fulfilment is obligatory. Author and reader are equally bound by them and the author's creative license is strictly circumscribed.
At best that's probably only a first approximation -- it makes the Iliad serious literature and the Odyssey genre, for instance.
Because the Odyssey has magic in it? I dunno... I think maybe awe at the world as it is isn't so opposed to wish fulfillment (fantasy) as you propose. Maybe this is not a binary opposition, but a pair of experiences that fluctuate within any book, or any reading, depending perhaps on the humor and expectations of the reader.
Still, the element of escapism seems fundamental.
Fundamental, I would argue, to all fiction. We enter the world of the book and leave behind our reality. Even in the most harshly realist novel (oh, say, Kozinski or--ugh--Saul Bellow or Updike) we escape. One could say that reading fiction is a kind of temporary schizophrenia, in which we are in a fugue state.
But I wonder about "precision," -- surely there can be a process of self-discovery in genre fiction
Perhaps, but if so, it happens in spite of the book and through the peculiarities of the reader--an instability in her expectations, maybe, or some idiosyncracy in her reading. There is always room for that, but I picture the book being very surprised when it happens.
Genre fiction is ... I think the word I want is "prescriptive." OTOH, I am fairly skeptical of these categories, at best. War and Peace is by most definitions a genre romance for the first 2/3, interrupted by chunks of a genre shoot-'em-up war novel. Only in the last section does it take a wierd left turn away from its own genres, mainly because Tolstoy kills off the romantic hero (for which I shall never forgive him).
GHT seems to push this definition to interesting places.[ snip examples ].
GHT may stimulate all the responses you name. And there's another one, a doozy, our old Aristotelian friend Pity-and-Fear: pity for his suffering, fear for him because we identify with him and fear for ourselves. In short, Aristotle was being a lot more Freudian than he realized (and vice versa of course): the catharsis, the provocation of pity and fear in the viewer/reader, is a quintessentially voyeuristic event.
You're entirely right that our relationship to the hero is an ambivalent mixture of envy, admiration, aspiration, love, resentment, and other anxieties. Hero torture stimulates all these responses in us. Gratuitous hero torture does something more: It sets the hero apart from us (we could never sustain so much suffering), and at the same time it tears away the veil that hides him from us. (Ah, look! he suffers a longing for love, just as we do!)
The debasement of the hero both repels us and fascinates us; we are repelled by its cruelty and by our awareness of our own voyeuristic fascination with it. And we are fascinated by the power of the cruelty and the power of the hero to resist and survive it.
I think, btw, that although the language I've been using is that of physical torture (Sadean or Christian extremities of physical debasement), the hero torture that is most potent, has most juju, is the emotional punishment. Odysseus can bear any physical pain, but to lose Penelope would destroy him, and the mere thought of losing her is anguish. My memory of Brideshead is not good, but isn't this a bit what Charles suffers? He loses too much--he loses everything: art, friendship, love, the house, the family. It is too cruel, too relentless, too complete. But without it he would not really be much of a hero, because he's too weak, too equivocal, too willing to compromise. (Am I remembering wrong? Will have to read the thing...)
Similarly, in Mark'sJesus hero story, Jesus suffers the physical tortures of crucifixion, but he can bear that. What really hurts him beyond bearing is the anguish of abandonment, being left alone. (More on this later.)
All of these could be dimensions of voyeurism, I guess, which seems somehow to be about an assertion of psychological power by those who refuse or are incapable of action.
Here's what Laura Mulvey says about fetishism, voyeurism, and fiction (which she calls story) in the essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (bearing in mind that it was written in 1973 and is dated):
"Fetishistic scopophilia [pleasure in looking] builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself. [...] Voyeurism, on the contrary, has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt [...], asserting control and subjugating the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness. This sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end. Fetishistic scopophilia, on the other hand, can exist outside linear time as the erotic instinct focused on the look alone. These contradictions and ambiguities can be illustrated more simply by using works of Hitchcock..." ( in Visual and Other Pleasures, Indiana U. Press, 1989. pp 21-22; she then does an analysis of voyeurism in "Rear Window").
You also raise the interesting possibility that GHT can be a sort of bastard form of "serious" literature, in that the wish-fulfillment is incomplete, because the hero is permanently marked or broken. "Bastard" because it doesn't really reject the premise of wish-fulfillment, it just sort of fetishizes one would-be hero's failure. What exactly, do you think, the reader is getting off on, here?
The $64k question. What does the reader get out of the story of the torture of Jesus? Catharsis? Voyeuristic glee? Relief? Redemption? Renewed faith? Repelled disgust?
One possible answer is that the reader is fetishizing his own anguish, or being a voyeur of his own suffering. That is, when the story ends without the triumph of the hero, the reader either experiences a pleasurable catharsis, and is relieved and purged and so on, or suffers a pang of frustration and unsatisfied longing, if the catharsis is not achieved. (Gah, no matter how I try to phrase this, catharsis sounds like a pseudonym for orgasm. I wonder if Aristotle intended any of that..., nope, it's probably just me.) If the latter, then the reader suffers along with the hero, though for slightly divergent reasons.
And so we suffer and watch ourselves suffering, and watch the hero suffering, and watch ourselves watching the hero. And so on. Watching, suffering, pleasure, and story-telling are all tangled up in the person of the hero. The more he gets hit, the more we believe in him.
I guess my own favorite type of literary encounter (that's an odd way to put it) is a work that starts with desire but that educates and corrects it in a serious way.
Yes, indeed. The trick, as you imply, is that education and correction must not be at the expense of desire or a negation of desire, but its fulfilment. Something the later Christian interpreters of the NT tended not to grasp very well. (With the notable exception of John Donne: http://search.able2know.com/About/3676.html : "Take me to you, imprison me, for I, / Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, / Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.")
I guess that was obvious in my rambling about Brideshead. I love genre as much as anybody as a recreation; it's like diner food, and it's often exhilarating to just give in and fully inhabit the stereotypical emotions and situations. But I get queasy spending too much time in an atmosphere where fantasy cushions the healthy, abrasive blows of actual living. (Although intellecualizing genre works is an extremely fun thing to do, as is intellectualizing anything!)
Yep.
More after a break for these important messages.
From BD part 2:
[snipping Houseman, because I agree and have nothing to add] Which brings us to Jesus! Don't worry, I'm a good agnostic, not handing out any fliers today, but I'm as fascinated by the NT as I am by a lot of other literature. Because of course the NT from one perspective is the ultimate wish fulfillment -- "you picked a fight with the wrong motherfucker, boy . . ." But not all of it.
Much though I dislike Christian faith and all the guff that goes with it, the Jesus story is a textbook example of Gratuitous Hero Torture, and is therefore very handy. And though the NT has a fair amount of genre fiction in it (cf. definition above, especially re precise expectations on the part of the reader), it is also a prime demonstration of why the voyeuristic, sadean hero narrative is so very powerful. Whatever it's mechanism may turn out to be, it resonates with unmatchable power for readers. There is nothing more potent. As we see, indeed, in the gratuitous, relentless torture of Harry Potter--especially in vol. 5, where he loses everything he has gained and is punished physically and emotionally over and over. He loses Sirius, he loses his respect for Dumbledore, he loses his innocence once and for all. Brutal stuff; too brutal, not at all cathartic.
Some day, if you're very bad, I will ramble on about Mark
1. I paid my taxes 3 months late.
2. I have been late to work every day for a month.
3. I pushed the cat off the bed really hard this morning.
4. I haven't been to the gym all summer.
5. I've racked up my credit card horribly, buying stupid stuff.
6. I have not only been watching "La Femme Nikita" reruns beyond all reason lately, but I've persuaded three friends to do so as well. (Dante puts people like me into the 10th bolgia: false counsellors; veryverybad)
7. Ate Ben & Jerry coffee buzz buzz ice cream for dinner last night.
8. Took the name of the lord in vain, worshipped false idols, and coveted my neighbor's Miata all in one sentence last Sunday (<--sabbath).
Will that do?
who I think is a Master of the Void, worthy of Beckett, while the other gospellers are plump, cheerful sectarians. A typical Markan touch: in the "why have you forsaken me" scene, J is of course quoting a psalm but the onlookers think he's calling on Elijah. The spectators don't even recognize their own classic literature, don't understand the moment or the mission at all -- the sense of futility and incomprehension go all the way down. And of course in the original version of Mark there's no resurrection, just an ambiguous empty tomb. He really asks, in a way the others don't, "If the messiah came [and the messiah here stands for all sorts of narcissistic closure, wish fulfillment, perfect redemption of the burdens of the world, yadayada] how would you know? What would it mean? What would change?" And his answer is to leave everything radically in doubt, to throw the spiritual seeker back on themselves. Although I admit, I may be alone in this reading. :)
It sounds rather Gnostic, from what little I recall of the Gnostic Gospels: no certainty, no bodily resurrection, only the possibility, the pure idea, the voice crying in the wilderness: beware, be ready; the word made not flesh, but spirit.
But it's a brilliant example of the refusal of wish-fulfillment right in the canonical heart of the biggest wish-fulfillment story of all time.
I can't bear to snip any of this. All I can say is: Please sir, I want some more.
ETA: The conversation begins in an LJ entry on May 5.
