Gratuitous Hero Torture

[malsperanza]

I thought it might be useful in the course of this discussion to name some books that I think use Gratuitous Hero Torture and that are not, in my opinion, "genre" fiction--defined, in part, as fiction that uses GHT in formulaic ways.

This is a random list, meant to be illustrative of range, rather than comprehensive in any sense.

Ernie Levy in The Last of the Just (possibly the most serious book I have ever read, though it is also very funny).

Zeno, the persecuted alchemist in The Abyss

Wyatt Gwyon, the forger in Gaddis's The Recognitions

Heathcliff

Jim in Lord Jim

Maybe even Aschenbach in Death in Venice, if it's not too bizarre to call him the hero

Harry Potter

Frodo (possibly)

Pyrrhus in An Arrow's Flight

Lear (not sure about this one: not sure about his hero status)

Hamlet (see discussion below)

Marlowe's Edward II (ditto, courtesy of Conversant)

Shakespeare's Richard II? Hm, not convinced but willing to try it (per Conversant)

And I have to mention one example that isn't available in English, alas, Mr Silvera in a lovely Italian novel called The Lover with No Fixed Abode (L'Amante senza fissa dimora)

Jesus, in the Gospels of the New Testament (possibly genre fiction, depending on how we resolve the question of wish-fulfillment as a marker of genre)

Gilgamesh (exile and angst! exile and angst!)

Most of the Greek canon:

Iliad
Odyssey (maybe)
Oedipus
Antigone (a rare female tortured hero)
Orestes (in fact, the whole Atreides family)

And now a couple of titles that are usually called "genre" fiction, but that are, IMO, very good books:

Philip Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely (where he gets beaten so badly he tries to commit suicide)

Similarly, Ned Beaumont in The Glass Key

Lymond and Nicholas in the two Dorothy Dunnett series

James Cobham in Freedom and Necessity (a lesser book, but a good example of the tortured hero)

And then there is The Fountainhead, a veryverybad book, but no one could deny that it is chock full of GHT


It would be fun to add to this list. I'm prepared, frex, to include both Harry and Draco from the Draco Trilogy . . . depending on how it ends. Because, as we shall see downthread, How It Ends is key.

Other suggestions are invited.

ETA:

From Tipgardner (I haven't read these):

Saladin Chamcha (Satanic Verses)

The narrator of Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Murakami)

Protagonists in:

Money, by Martin Amis
Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon
Fall of a Sparrow, by Robert Hellenga
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, by Haruki Murakami (Not sure I agree: he is confused, befuddled, misled, mistreated, but it's hard to say how deep his angst goes... well, maybe. Worth putting on the list anyhow)

Comments

[priceyeah.livejournal.com]

I'm sort of a newcomer to your journal so not as up on your GHT as I could be. This may sound kind of silly, but after the gargantuan success of Rambo II, Stallone was sort of king of Hollywood for a bit and in that context someone asked him why he thought his Rocky and Rambo series were so successful. I don't have a quote, but his answer was something like, "Oh, well, it's easy. All you have to do is have the hero die and then have him come back to life again." For some reason that stuck in my mind as an interesting take on the subject. Perhaps this pattern of gratuitously torturing the hero is something we need to see for a narrative to really get us where we live, or get very many of us where we live, or something. Your mention of Jesus certainly seems a propos.

I wish I'd read more of the books you mention, I've read only a few. I'll have to think about the ones I have read. In the meantime, another very successful book I haven't read -- how much does Scarlett suffer in GWTW?

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Brilliant!

These are all GREAT examples--if I were home, I'd try to post a couple of pictures I have on my hard drive: a screencap of my current herartthrob, the spy Michael from La Femme Nikita, with a scar on one cheekbone (handily emphasizing the actor's fine bone structure), looking at an x-ray of a skull. Eros! Thanatos! and one of Rambo, rampantly nekked, except for a tiny loincloth, being strung up on posts and covered with leeches and whipped. I have no idea which Rambo movie it's from because I've never seen any of them, but it is the most bizarrely homoerotic film still I've seen since James Mason in tight breeches said "Flog him!" to Alan Ladd in "Botany Bay" in 1953.

"Oh, well, it's easy. All you have to do is have the hero die and then have him come back to life again."

Fabulous! And if anyone knows where the quote might be found, I'd be grateful.

RE GWTW: Yes, I think Scarlett is a Tortured Heroine. She gets smacked down a lot and always rises again. It's a terrible book--no need to read it unless you want to know why the South has such a romantic image of itself. But this suggests to me that the Spunky Heroine (a staple of genre romance) is a form of Tortured Hero converted into a feminine form (with some salient revisions of the type). Interesting.

[priceyeah.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm glad you liked. I find myself wondering whether some of this isn't just inherent to plot, in the form of conflict that every plot requires. (Or is this indeed your thesis?) Another movie-centric quotation which also isn't precise but at least this time I know the source: Inner Views by David Breskin. The line is David Cronenberg's, I think he was responding to the notion that he's too pessimistic about technology and such, as in why does the Fly have to go through such agonies etc. He implied that it was possibly the nature of dramatic forms that things turn out badly, and his example was memorable: "I mean, if Gregor Samsa wakes up and he's a bug and it's great and everybody thinks it's groovy, then you don't have much of a book."

I'll think of some novels sometime soon. Are you working on making this into a book? It sounds book-worthy to me.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

LOL re Gregor Samsa. "As Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous bug. 'Hm,' he thought, 'that's quite odd.' He decided to skip work, rolled over and caught another 40 winks. Later he got up, ate some food, ran around the walls and ceiling aimlessly for a while, and went back to bed. His family were cool with the whole thing. His sister played the violin for him. It was all kind of nice."

The end.

I am aiming for something beyond just the basic idea of conflict that drives any fiction. The particular conflict I'm interested in is not important to the plot, but to the relationship between the reader and the hero, or (more broadly) the reader and the book as a whole. The reader's engagement with the book involves a kind of seduction, or at least an unequal and romantic power relationship with the hero (hero and book being more powerful than reader, though with some interesting exceptions). Thus, the condition of the hero has an effect on the reader's state of mind and heart. The hero's trajectory is traced, and perhaps mimicked by the reader's trajectory through the book: both make a journey, both complete a Quest.

So the torture of the hero makes the reader suffer. But here something interesting happens: The reader also *enjoys* the torture of the hero. We are fetishists, voyeurs, even sadists when it comes to the hero's suffering. We hate it, and empathize with the hero, but we also love it and want it to be really bad. We are veryverysick puppies.

Am not planning to write a book, but thank you for the compliment... I think ;-)

[conversant.livejournal.com]

...Rambo, rampantly nekked, except for a tiny loincloth, being strung up on posts and covered with leeches and whipped. I have no idea which Rambo movie it's from because I've never seen any of them, but it is the most bizarrely homoerotic film still I've seen since James Mason in tight breeches said "Flog him!" to Alan Ladd in "Botany Bay" in 1953.

First of all, I must obviously see 'Botany Bay'! (I've never heard of it even.)

Second, 'rampantly nekkid.' Hee!

Third, While I'd forgotten that scene in Rambo, I vividly remember the scene with Mel Gibson in similar straights (erm, straits) in the first Lethal Weapon movie: the scene involved very few clothes, a shower and electric shock torture, as I recall. Again, a tremendously homoerotic film and this scene is an important element of that coding. Oh, and also, Mel Gibson at that age was a heck of a lot prettier than Sylvester Stallone.

[conversant.livejournal.com]

I'd exchange Hamlet for Lear, though I'm open to the idea that with Lear, Shakespeare is pushing the boundaries of the issues you've been discussing (What is a hero? What can one get away with doing to him and through him in a work? Where are the borders of this genre and what will you do to me if I pick up the surveyors' marks and move them a mile down the road?) This is the game in Macbeth and Richard III, as well, as I tend to think about them.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

You know, I went back and forth a lot about Hamlet and Lear. I'm not sure about either of them. Lear is clearly the object of massively gratuitous torture--one would think Shakespeare hated him, so malevolently does he treat him. But Lear is not a romantic hero--there's no eros in him, which makes him not parallel to the others for comparison purposes. And whether or not he is a hero is very hard to say.

Hamlet is clearly a romantic hero, and a tortured one. I think I took him off the list because I wasn't sure the torture was gratuitous. But I guess if you add up: father murdered, mother incestuous, college roomies hired to kill him, girlfriend goes mad, poisoned sword, and relentless inner angst, that's a lot of thwaps. I don't know why it doesn't quite seem typical to me.

But then Shakespeare is never typical. As you say so well: Shakespeare sneers at definitions and moves the surveyor's marks at whim. It's very disorienting. Clever bastard, Shakespeare.

[conversant.livejournal.com]

I guess if you add up: father murdered, mother incestuous, college roomies hired to kill him, girlfriend goes mad, poisoned sword, and relentless inner angst, that's a lot of thwaps. I don't know why it doesn't quite seem typical to me. I thought that was today's category: GHT in not-just-a-genre piece. To me, Hamlet is the number one exhibit.

In Hamlet, I think Shakespeare said, 'You know this whole revenger/blood tragedy thing is making people the big bucks [okay, not what the idiom he used...] but I can't believe how thin the formula is. Let's raise the stakes a bit, people!'

I was thinking on my way to work about whether this distinction separates Marlowe's Edward II and Shakespeare's Richard II. Marlowe takes his country's second most maligned monarch (Richard III took top honors in the Tudor era) and makes him understandable and then sad and then grief-stricken and then terrorized and then tortured and then sodomizes him with a red-hot poker. But it's genre-fic, baby, all the way. Especially if you get hot under the collar or somewhere else over his relationship with Gaveston.

When Shakespeare tackled Richard II, he clearly had Marlowe's play in mind and he was able to line out the play to follow a very similar sequence of events, especially in its endgame, but Shakespeare decided not to make Richard appealing. He decided not to sentimentalize and not to sensationalize the doomed king whose story he was telling. Interestingly, it is only in the end when GHT reaches such a pitch that Richard comes to seem 'a man more sinned against than sinning' (the line is a description of Lear, of course, but it works here) that he suddenly, finally becomes sympathetic. He gets a moment or two where he transcends his suffering and where he exhibits nobility in the face of ruthless cruelty, and I fold under the press of that genre-coding for those several minutes every time.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

RE Hamlet: yes, you're right. *puts Hamlet back on the list* He's my favorite character of all time anyway, so I'll put him on any list you like. ;-)

RE Marlowe's tortured hero and Shakespeare's: If I follow you, Edward is genre but Richard is not because Edward is sympathetic, whereas Richard is deeply problematic? That is, the genre definition in this case depends on the reader's relationship to the hero? The easy bonding of the reader with Edward tosses the hero into a wallowing pool of genre? Catnip to me, with my seduction-of-the-reader obsession, but I'm not sure that's sufficient. Can you elaborate?

In both cases, the reader falls in love with the hero--sooner with Edward, very late in the day with Richard. And the sexual seduction of the reader by Edward does not exist (I think?) in Richard. (Because, I think, Shakespeare wanted Richard's crisis to remain a nuanced political one, while Marlowe was interested in politics in that play only as it shaped Edward's personal dilemma.)

One could propose that the reader falls all the more heavily for Richard, having first despised him. I fold too. (Oh, let us sit upon the ground... wah!!) But I also fold for Edward, bigtime.

The word that jumps out at me here is "sentimentalize." That is a technique of genre, for sure. It's a marker--though again with the possible false syllogisms: genre fiction is often sentimentalizing; but a sentimentalized fiction may still transcend genre, though I bet it doesn't happen often. Quixote, maybe? Or how about Lord Jim?

In any case, I have never seen Richard II and Edward II discussed together like this. Food for much thought, thank you.

Part One

[conversant.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I can be rigorous tonight on this (or any topic): I've just had a couple of glasses of wine over dinner and only one cup of filter coffee to balance it out. However, I'll try.

My hypothesis about EII v. RII is, as you've said, that EII is genre-fic in that it exploits the tools of a seductive genre to do something radical, if it worked/works, which is to make the central character not only a selfish, uncaring husband and a careless, impolitic king, but also a blatant and unapologetic sodomite sympathetic in an age that was very uneasy about boy-sex. (This is a complex issue, to be sure, given that Marlowe and his theatrical peers depended on, and to an extent, surely, normalized the eroticism of the transvestite boy players. However, Marlowe's play opens the issue and whomps its audience over the head with a convention that had been cool in large measure because it was so deliberately coy.)

I'm finding it difficult to argue the main point here in a straight line because of the continual need for qualifications (or perhaps it's the wine).

In any case, despite the fact that Marlowe is using the genre to accomplish something important, I don't believe it changes the fact that he *uses* the genre: he plunges into it unapologetically, and he doesn't break the mold because he needs the genre to work according to formula. And if it's played properly (and cast properly) this play can sell the world's worst king as a fellow who would have been content in a forgotten corner if he could only have had his Gaveston beside him (not that this would ever have satisfied Gaveston, mind you).

I disagree that RII becomes genre fic because it uses the sympathetic appeal of GHT at the end to make us feel for Richard. On the contrary, I think that what Shakespeare accomplishes is something much more brilliant than genre fic can: he makes his unlikely protagonist (appear to) grow by borrowing this convention with which his audience was surely familiar in order to convince us that the central character, who has never merited the title, 'hero,' has gained substance through adversity, has had the necessary moment of self-recognition, and has come to understand the events/choices/failures that led him to that point. If we believe he has had this 'anagnorisis,' we not only might see something approaching tragedy in RII's failed reign, but we also see Bolingbroke in a new light. If Richard remains an incompetent, petulant idiot, the play is in danger of making Bolingbroke seem to be a merciless bully. (This is a dicey thing, because at the beginning it is clear we are to see him as having been wronged, but once he deposes Richard, the balance shifts and he could easily play as a tyrant instead of a justified conqueror. To go back to EdII, Bolingbroke could easily come off the way Mortimer, Junior does.) My position is that Shakespeare uses a carefully measured dose of genre-fic's conventions (or perhaps just a careful allusion to the genre?) in order to rebalance the two central characters, while still making it clear that Bolingbroke's coup was necessary and merited. (Oooh, lots of loaded terms there for you to jump on, but I'm going to leave them for you.)

Now for the one term I've continued to use: sentimental. You said, 'The word that jumps out at me here is "sentimentalize." That is a technique of genre, for sure. It's a marker--though again with the possible false syllogisms: genre fiction is often sentimentalizing; but a sentimentalized fiction may still transcend genre. I agree completely and I do not mean to suggest any sort of reductive equation of sentimentality with genre-fic. I'd take your formula one step further in fact: genre fiction is often sentimentalizing; however it does not have exclusive use of the technique. Not only may sentimentalized fiction transcend genre, but [what are we calling the other category?] literary fiction [??] may make use of sentimental coding [in action, character, mise-en-scene, whatever] in carefully managed doses to achieve an end that quite definitely transcends genre.

Part Two (epilogue)

[conversant.livejournal.com]

About Shakespeare's borrowings from Marlowe: they are legion, and every time fanfic writers get too huffed up about 'plagiarism' when it is really just riffing on favorite pop-culture lines in the public domain, I think of Shakespeare's opportunistic mining of Marlowe's plays for their best moments. Shakespeare explicitly re-worked Marlowe several times: most famously, of course, he reworks The Jew of Malta in The Merchant of Venice (and in this pair, I think Marlowe comes out on top), but he also quite openly borrows scenes from Tamburlaine in Henry V (Henry's scene with the governor of Harfleur reworks T's remorseless treatment of I can't now remember which city) and then there's the ruthless treatment of the deposed monarchs in EII and RII.

Shakespeare treated Marlowe's plays as grist for a clubby sort of 'Did you catch all my allusions to him this time?' way. His most obvious riff on Marlowe happens when we here how Shylock reacted to his daughter's elopement with a Christian: Salanio says:

I never heard a passion so confused,
So strange, outrageous, and so variable,
As the dog Jew did utter in the streets:
'My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!
Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats!
Justice! the law! my ducats, and my daughter!
A sealed bag, two sealed bags of ducats,
Of double ducats, stolen from me by my daughter!
And jewels, two stones, two rich and precious stones,
Stolen by my daughter! Justice! find the girl;
She hath the stones upon her, and the ducats.'
Salarino replies with even more mockery:
Why, all the boys in Venice follow him,
Crying, his stones, his daughter, and his ducats. (2.8.12-24)

This borrows what must have been an infamous representation of the stage Jew in Marlowe's Barabas, who is overjoyed when his (at that moment, still-faithful) daughter steals his treasure back from the Christians and throws it down to him in the street:

Oh my girle,
My gold, my fortune, my felicity;
Strength to my soule, death to mine enemy;
Welcome the first beginner of my blisse:
Oh Abigal, Abigal, that I had thee here too,
Then my desires were fully satisfied,
But I will practice thy enlargement thence:
Oh girle, oh gold, oh beauty, oh my blisse! (2.1.51-59)

need a better proofreader!

[conversant.livejournal.com]

when we here
when we hear

*goes to bed*

Re: Part Two (epilogue)

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

I haven't time tonight to absorb this properly, and so must be satisfied for now with just thanking you--it is fascinating, as are your other comments, upthread. Much to think about...

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

I am almost wary of commenting here, considering what happened with my last babbling. (By the way, when I go off the deep end, which is an occupational hazard of mine, by all means call me out on it! It's a perfectly reasonable answer to say that my premises are so muddled and my argument so incoherent that it makes you spit with frustration just to untangle it. LaTourette's syndrome, eh? :D I'm afraid that will happen from time to time, and you shouldn't encourage me by sparing me when it does.)

Anyway. The points about Hamlet are well taken, but I would vote not to lose Lear. I'm intrigued by your comment that Lear has "no eros in him." Do you mean that the reader feels no erotic attachment to him, or that he himself has no interesting erotic motivations that we can identify with?

I agree he lacks attractiveness in the normal sense, but it made me think about what being drawn to Lear really might be about. I suppose at one level he stands for the desire for neat closure at the end of life, a willful affirmation of a private notion of order and justice with one's own supposedly well-deserved, larger-than-life status as the proof of it. He is clearly getting ready to be memorialized, getting ready to be remembered with love and awe, although it's not clear why he's earned the right to this. In a more general way, perhaps, because he really is so unworldly ("he has ever but slenderly known himself"), he may stand for a craving for some of the rewards of experience (gravitas, authority, the regard of others) without having to go through all the messy bits involved in getting it.

Or finally, even, he may be a type of intellectual -- his "as if we were God's spies" speech always seemed to me to reveal his fundamental nature as an observer, as someone whose center is in contemplation rather than action -- and who mistakes the grandness of the world he percieves for the grandness of his own soul as the perceiving instrument, his willed notions about the world for things as they actually are.

The pattern of his correction in the play also suggests that he originally saw himself as someone above all contingency, above all messy human complications, and thought that this was a good thing. He gets a taste of what being stripped of all "inessentials" is really all about; he experiences the brutality of random loss ("why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life and thou no breath at all?"); his madness is an exaggeration of his characteristic delusion that his word makes things so ("they cannot touch me for coining, I am the king himself . . . Nature's above art in that respect!") and his genuine shock when the world does not conform to his premises ("they are not men o' their words: they told me I was every thing; tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.") His final act ("pray you, undo this button . . . Thank you, sir.") perhaps signals his achievement of humility, his acknowledgment of dependency and kindness, his reattachment to concrete things.

The GHT is therefore directly connected to who he is and what he needs to learn. But is it "genre?" As Conversant says about Richard II, it's maybe genre with the boundaries moved a mile or so, something beyond genre that uses genre as a tool. Here I guess the "genre" would involve the fairy-tale division-of-the-kingdom theme, and the conventions about good and evil daughters belied by their appearance, and the general expectation that this will be a story about moral correction.

Is Lear a hero? His character induces a fascination with, if perhaps not a craving for, the darker and more irresponsible side of our contemplative natures, our willful intellects, as something we may at least want to understand and take precautions against. Is this fascination (and perhaps, if we are introspective enough, this partial identification) a kind of eros, or strong enough to substitute for missing the eros more typical of a hero?

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

LaTourette's syndrome, eh? :D I'm afraid that will happen from time to time, and you shouldn't encourage me

*encourages Black Dog*

[conversant.livejournal.com]

I've got to hear your thoughts on Dunnett. (I've only read The Game of Kings because much as Lymond was coded to be attractive, I just found the whole thing too formulaic to feel any curiosity beyond that first book.) I will, however, grant that there are interesting things about the book, but for me, at this early stage in thinking about your genre topic, I have to put it firmly on the genre-fic side.

I agree that 'how it ends is key' and I'll be interested to hear your thoughts on the DT, as well. I expect I'll agree.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

RE Dunnett: All I can say is, keep going; they get better. The Game of Kings was her academy piece; she got more innovative afterward. I wouldn't say that Lymond exactly breaks the genre formula, but he certainly distorts it.

OTOH, Nicholas, protagonist of the House of Niccolo books, does things to the formula that defy categorization. You'd probably like that series better--I do. Maybe try that one, and if it works for you, Lymond will still be waiting in the wings.

The two Dunnett series are among my favorite books evar. Hard to encapsulate my thoughts on them because I spent 8 years on a closed listserve talking about them at massive length. Can't begin to synthesize all that, but it was the genesis of my interest in the tortured hero and the author/reader OTP. Dunnett is master of the readerfuck; there's no one better.

[blackholly.livejournal.com]

Er, so how is How It Ends key? Must it end badly?

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Well, the Jesus story doesn't end badly (*g*), does it? (Does it?) And I sure hope for a happy ending for Harry Potter and the DT.

Of course, it depends on what we mean by "happy" and "ending."

*puts on Official Bill Clinton Redefinition Glasses, the ones with plastic nose and eyebrows attached*

There's a false syllogism here (which I am going to gleefully break off and beat Black Dog over the head with downthread): Genre fiction pretty much always has to end happily, but not every fiction that ends happily is therefore genre.

But you're right: it's an interesting question and worth gnawing at.

More on this over the weekend.

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

Does Job become genre-fic because he gets his camels back in the end? Would it be more "serious" if it simply ended when God answers him out of the whirlwind, and he "repents in dust and ashes?"

[priceyeah.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking and thinking of novels, and I've been coming up dry -- so dry, in fact, that I'm going to suggest a possible corollary that may end up altering the thesis itself. Let's start with that and work our way there. The corollary is: the modern/modernist "psychological" novel form does not, in general, use the GHT template much. That is to say, the GHT theory may be restricted to works with a far more "mythic" bent, which is why it works better for pre-modern artists like Shakespeare, Homer, etc. -- and for movies, which some have posited are the myths of our time. I was pondering all these novels, making lists even, and very, very few of them seemed to fit at all. Flaubert? Tolstoy? Woolf? Henry James? Dickens? Sure, there might even be torment in any or all of these, but not the kind of suffering you're talking about. A few notes follow.

Kafka, already mentioned, seems to conform. Hawthorne at times might conform, and Melville's Moby-Dick might conform. There's a certain kind of "novel of ideas" that sometimes conforms, examples include Orwell's 1984 and Burgess's Clockwork Orange.

I was able to find some newer novels where it sort of fit but you had to bend to make it work. There's a tendency of certain ambitious novels to take the main character and tear down his psyche or self-will and then have him find his way back to a new, better place. I wouldn't classify any of them as GHT exactly, but maybe it's as close as the "nuanced" psychologically oriented novel likes to come. Here are some books that work like that:

Money, by Martin Amis
Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon
Fall of a Sparrow, by Robert Hellenga
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, by Haruki Murakami

In each of those books the protagonist (in K&C one of the two protagonists) basically reaches a point of despair or doubt that is unsustainable and MUST reconstruct the foundations on which his (yes, all male in these examples) life is based. Other than that, I can't think of many novels that go in for this kind of thing.

I don't know. It seems like the kind of GT we're talking about is almost ... unseemly in a 100,000-word prose book, in a way that maybe isn't when the same kind of content is made into a 2.5-hr. movie or an epic poem.

[tipgardner.livejournal.com]

I wrote a no more meaningful response to more or less this topic in the next post of Malsperanza's journal in which I mentioned another Murakami book, Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Whilst the protagonist of that book may reach a level of comfort with the end of the story, one imagines that doesn't make him happy about it. I would say that Bird Chronicle's protagonist goes through both torturous and positive transformations and he most likely ends well/happily as is the case with the protagonist of Wild Sheep Chase and Dance, Dance, Dance.

Murakami is, however, definitely a master of bending the frame of genre to suit his needs. His books have alternately fit in the detective and/or noir categories, the romance novel category, the sci fi genre, etc. And yet his books, quite clearly are none of those things. He no longer even writes books that would be termed magical realist and yet I often find his books even creepier and more palpably supernatural now that there is nothing supernatural in them.

[priceyeah.livejournal.com]

Murakami clearly has a great deal of sheer narrative skill and the ability to suspend a reader's disbelief that outstrips whatever limitations of genre are imposed on him, in theory. I have only read Wind-Up Bird and Sheep Chase. Certainly there's an interest in the supernatural there, and I'm intrigued that he's dispensing with it.

I would also say that the tone of a book is different from the structuret. Even in Wind-Up, one might infer that the protagonist isn't all that content at the end, while allowing that the structure of the book still definitely revolves around the resolution of certain problems in his makeup/personality/state of mind/etc.

Similarly, in Kavalier and Clay one suspects that Kavalier is simply consitutionally glum in addition to undergoing certain GHT-related agonies. At the end he is more stable but still likely to be melancholy etc.

In the cases of Money and Sparrow, the protag ends up genuinely giddy with the newfound possibilities etc., the transformation is sharper and possibly more lasting. So these things vary.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Wah! No time this weekend to jump into this! But you guys keep going, eh?

More soon...

[tipgardner.livejournal.com]

Mmm...Money, I think you are absolutely right. One of the key elements of the story is that this oafish boor in the world of high hip and culture is naturally happy with a nurse and a lager on the steps of his counsel house in East Finchley or where ever. He was tortured, perhaps gratuitiously so, but he ends happy even if that seems unfair to the jaded reader who wants him to have his revenge.

Wind-up Bird Chronicle - unhappy...I'm of the mindset that Murakami is utilizing the classic Hollywood technique of leaving the character at a point on the road from which the reader infers a safe arrival home. A kiss amongst high schoolers at the end of a teen romance indicates that the couple will live happily ever after, that sort of thing. Thus, although not all is resolved in his life, I suspect he resolves his relationship and is able to move forward.

I think many of Kavalier's issues stem from the fact that he is described in largely manic depressive terms and was suicidal, not necessarily that he was receiving authorial torturing. I feel (no real data on this) that he was constructed to elicit reader sympathy in an era of syndrome, therapy and psychological fascination.