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.