Don't say I didn't warn you
Jul. 19th, 2004 02:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaIt is long.
...though whether they will live happily ever after is open to question.
I think we now have two topics running concurrently:
1) The purpose and effect of GHT, and
2) The definition of genre fiction.
It may be that the points where these two intersect are what we should be concentrating on, but I am so fond of both subjects that I'd just as soon pursue both at once. If that can be done without my brain exploding.
To me, both topics are aspects of the larger question of the reader/book ship--what sort of love affair it is (genre romance or serious relationship?). But I can set that aside and explore them for their own sake.
Toward the end of Black Dog's post, a third topic emerges:
3) The definition of the ending.
The nature of the Ending is an important matter for us. The closed or open, complete or incomplete, happy or tragic ending is a key indicator of whether a text is genre or serious (though not necessarily the key). The fulfillment of expectations resides in part in the ending. And the purpose of torturing the hero can only be determined when we see how his story ends.
One of the problems embedded in discussions of this kind is that sooner or later, the meanings of the prime terms collapse under the attempt to understand them through ever more refined definitions. What is genre? What is serious? What, indeed, do we mean by "gratuitous" or "hero" or "desire"? Of course, there is great pleasure too in coming to grips with definitions, because it is in the effort to define that the real issues emerge. But the definitions are rarely complete or satisfying.
With that disclaimer I proceed.
I said, grandly, that "*all* fiction is about wish-fulfillment … Escapism is … fundamental to all fiction. … The trick is that education and correction must not be at the expense of desire or a negation of desire, but its fulfillment."
Black Dog requires greater rigor:
I'm uncomfortable with the general levelling tendency of the statement that all fiction is about wish-fulfillment. … how does that differ from the degree of "wish" or desire in any purposive act, in any adventure? … by overgeneralizing the applicability of wish-fulfillment to all reading, we lose sight of some more salient distinctions about the nature of the wishes involved -- the most important of which, I would suggest, have to do with whether we are seeking safety, reassurance, confirmation of our sentiments on the one hand, or disorientation, fundamental challenge, alteration of ourselves, on the other.
I see wish-fulfillment not as one activity among many kinds of entertainment that we may seek, but as a core human activity, integral to the creative act itself. This immediately gets me in the soup, because it is general indeed, and furthermore conflates the act of reading with the act of creating (authorship). But, well, at the end of the day that's my whole thesis, so this position does not seem to me either too vague or too broad, but consistent.
Nevertheless, I think I can respond a little less mooshily than that. Upthread, you queried my earlier statement that genre fiction does not fundamentally challenge or change the reader; I responded that it might do, but such was probably not the book's intention. You were right to ask this; it's important always to leave room for the reader's agency to revise or override the book's own intentions.
So I guess I am turning the question back to you: Is this distinction between reasons for reading so necessary? You and I have both argued that we read one kind of book for complacent reasons--confirmation, safety, pleasure; and another kind of book for something more valuable--challenge, change, education. And from that we have established (in mutual agreement, I think) a basic distinction between genre and serious fiction. And have also accounted for the possibility of variants--the challenging book may be read for pleasure without interrogation; the formulaic book may spark self-doubt revelation unexpectedly. So far, so good. I actually think this mostly answers our question #2--well enough to proceed with. But having served to form a working definition of "genre," the distinction seems to me to break down.
I understand that you are arguing for the greater importance of one kind of: reading--reading to be challenged and changed, and to discover the awe of the world as it is--and I agree with you there. That is an MVP (most valuable prose) kind of reading, which deserves to be privileged. But I think we need not remove wish-fulfillment from the serious activity of reading in order to see it as serious. This far, I remain convinced that the act of reading fiction--any fiction--involves the desire of the reader to escape from "the world as it is," into another world. I do not dispute that the result of this plunge into other worlds may be a greater understanding of the world as it is--far from it. I guess I see wish-fulfillment as so fundamental a desire in the reader, expressed in the act of reading, that it can't be described as leveling, unless to declare that all fiction which has a story is leveling; or all fiction which includes world-building.
That's probably inadequate, but maybe it's a start?
And making that distinction forces me to be somewhat wary of the third quote above -- that any "correction or education" that results from the experience of reading must not be "at the expense of desire, but rather its fulfillment." I would agree with this if it allowed for the transformation or substitution of a different, "better" desire for the one the reader started out with. But that amendment again makes the rule overly general -- the interesting distinction, I would contend, is between experiences that never take you out of the round of familiar or conventionally-imagined desires, and those that do.
Here, I think you are perhaps setting up a straw man, Black Dog. I agree that the correction or education the reader receives in the encounter with the text probably includes a transformation of the reader's desire into a better desire--along with other transformations. I probably assumed as much.
My caveat had to do with a concern lest improvement or education be understood as opposed to desire, better than desire, or--the gods forbid--a solution to desire. I acquit you of proposing a puritan agenda ;-) of course, but I myself am a bit of a fundamentalist on this subject: when it comes to identifying the essential Goods we seek to achieve in reading: I want to see desire on Olympus along with wisdom and grace and awe and the love of the world as it is. For that matter, I would never evict fantasy from that pantheon--the love of the world as it is not. *tosses Plato's Cave, shadows, poets, justice, and art into big pot; adds paprika, nutmeg, angst; stirs*
Finally, I suppose you could say that wishes are precise in that the reader precisely is looking for an action-adventure story, or a romance, or a good scare, or a satisfying detective puzzle, but I think that's at a different level from the kind of wish-fulfillment that is going to happen, or is going to be transcended, within the story.
I'll give you this one. Sounds right to me
We could apply this again to the Iliad/Odyssey case, because I think you initially rejected my argument there, and I'd like to take another stab at it. The reason I said the Odyssey would be "genre" by my "wish-fulfillment" definition is that we ultimately get a feeling of safety and closure from the work -- all of the wishes evoked by the situation, for escape, triumph over adversity, homecoming and resolution -- are put through their paces methodically, and satisfied in the end. Odysseus has a goal, and he never loses sight of it (what's ten years with a minx like Circe?), he overcomes obstacles to achieve it, and in the end he gets pretty much what he wants and what we're conditioned to want for him.
In the Iliad, by contrast, Achilles is radically transformed by his experiences, so that his desires at the end are not commensurate with his desires at the beginning. He starts out a creature of "wrath," and this perhaps reaches its peak in the terrible nihilism of his speech about death to Lycaon, and in his sadistic treatment of Hector's body. But at the very end, he seems oddly humbled, is willing to recognize a common humanity with Priam and to treat him with courtesy and empathy. He's experienced perfect fulfillment of his desire to overcome Hector, and perfect loss in the death of Patroclus, and it is as though the initial categories of his "desire" have just been emptied out, transcended, are no longer relevant to him.
OK, this gives me a clearer sense of what you see as differing between Iliad and Odyssey with respect to the hero and his sufferings. It provides a good exemplar of the distinction I think you are making, but (setting aside whether I read the 2 poems this way) I'm not convinced that the example of Achilles is so widely applicable to all tortured heroes (do they all undergo profound transformations as a result of it? Don't some merely endure, heroically, or resist transformation, ardently?), nor that Odysseus is so immune to transformation.
The Odyssey's happy ending shares with genre fiction a complete, satisfying closure, but is there maybe a false syllogism here? Every genre fiction has such an ending; is every book with such an ending genre? Even if I accept the proposition that Odysseus does not change, undergoes no transformation, does every work that has an immutable hero and a happy ending fall within the definition of genre? Or am I taking your example too literally and reading it too narrowly?
Here is where these terms begin to disintegrate. If I follow you, under this definition the Odyssey could only escape the genre label if Odysseus were understood to have been educated and transformed by his experiences: emerging a better man, and we with him. But I want to insist on a separation between our education and the hero's. We are dancing around the idea of the novel as moral education--both of reader and of hero--and I think we should lay the idea on the table and whack away at it.
First, the novel as tool or embodiment of moral education is only one sort of novel. Novels that do not embody moral education, nor function as tools of it, may nevertheless provide an experience for the reader that includes revelation, self-discovery, transformation. But that is not the same thing as the hero's transformation, though the two events may be congruent. In Quest stories, the hero's journey is mimicked by the reader's. And this, indeed, is the realm of the Quest, the Spiritual Journey.
But that is only one kind of education or transformation. I started with the idea that GHT is that level of torture which cannot be justified by the author as necessary to the transformation or education of the hero--it is not the crucible of hero-formation. I am on uncertain ground with this definition--it seems to work, but it's still just a guess. What I like about it is that it shifts the focus from the protagonist to the reader: GHT serves the reader's desires, not the protagonist's.
Black Dog asked: So what is the reader getting out of it (or getting off on), then?
And I took a shot in the dark, drawing as I often do on the idea that the reader/book relationship is constantly reflexive: Maybe the voyeurism of the reader is a means of involving ourselves in the experience of the book. We watch ourselves watching the hero--and our self-awareness is perhaps heightened in these moments of the hero's greatest suffering, because it stirs powerful and contradictory emotions in us--both empathy and distancing. I have an inductive or intuitive sense of this, but no real means of exploring it. Perhaps it only makes sense to me.
* * *
Now, Question #1: GHT.
*sidesteps definition of "gratuitous" for the moment.*
We got to genre fiction by way of the torture of the hero--the excessive, unwarranted, unjustified torture of the hero. We came to genre fiction because GHT is common there and provided good examples. And immediately became entangled in two other problems: that of desire and that of catharsis.
Black Dog:
I'm not saying that genre fiction is never about transformation -- but the transformation usually takes place within approved forms, such as coming-of-age, or marriage. I guess I am saying, though, that genre tends to refuse to surprise the reader, refuses the idea of a transformation that is radical or unexpected to the reader. And in this sense I think it is bounded by wish-fulfillment in a way that "serious" literature tries to get beyond.
I admit I'm not totally satisfied with this definition, I just think you haven't exploded it by saying that everything is "wish fulfillment." It may be that the distinction I'm making is better expressed, say in Aristotelian terms, by the comedy-tragedy distinction. Hold that thought for later.
*clings like a limpet to thought*
Conversant also implies (I think) that genre-fic is by definition seductive and has heroes static heroes who do not grow, as opposed to the heroes of the Other Stuff (serious lit, or literary fiction, or whatever we may call it). This may come in handy when we get to the great Comedy v. Tragedy Smackdown.
BD:
Now, your alternative formulation is that genre is distinguished by the "precision" of the wish fulfillment involved. And you cite some compelling evidence for that, in the Rules for Romance that you itemize. Those rules certainly embody a hypothetical reader's precise "wishes" for the outcome of the story. But I wonder if this isn't an artifact of the nature of romance, rather than of genre literature in general. You could probably come up with an analogous list for action-adventure literature, where wishes are also fairly explicit and precise. But my own favorite genre reading is mystery/detective fiction. And I would contrast, for example, the Detection Club's rules for Murder Mysteries, as an example of an equally strict set of genre regulations – with the interesting difference that they are more about method and less about outcomes, so that they are less directly related to anyone's "precise" wishes.
I'm not sure I buy the focus on method rather than outcomes. Don't murder mysteries usually have to reveal whodunit at the end? And don't they have to observe the Aristotelian unities of time and place with peculiar strictness (one might almost say, with precision)? There can be no fudging or vagueness as to date and time; each suspect must be accounted for, each event in the story plotted and explained--and innocence must be proven as well as guilt. Full disclosure in the denouement, no loose threads, no ambiguities of fact. If possible, too, the perp must be caught and punished, and justice done (or, in the dark urban version, justice forever insufficient, with a prescribed gritty irony). For murder mysteries are moral tales (indeed, they are far more explicitly tales of moral education than most serious-fic novels can claim to be). That's not to say that the clever writer cannot push the boundaries of the genre a bit. There's the famous instance of The Big Sleep, in which a minor character (the chauffeur) dies either by suicide or murder, and neither Chandler nor Marlowe bothers to resolve his death. But that is an acknowledged anomaly, no?
Instead, I think that what both the Rules of Romance and Rules of Detection have in common is that they lay out a fairly structured game, whatever the specific content of the game, and the genre reader then has very precise expectations about how the game is going to be played – which may or may not precisely determine the outcome and therefore may or may not be described as "precise wishes."
I guess I don't quite see where the indeterminacy comes in--or rather, I don't see the distinction between expectations as to structure and expectations as to outcome. For the two go together insofar as the reader's expectations are concerned. In genre, the reader expects the rules of the game to be followed, and one of those rules is that the ending, the outcome, will fulfil the promises made at the beginning--whatever those promises may have been. (E.g., happy ending for hero and heroine in a genre romance; perhaps grim irony and justice denied in a certain kind of hard-boiled police procedural.)
[snipping a bit]
I'm resisting a definition that levels the distinction between reassurance and disturbance, between remaining in the circle of familiar expectations and trying to break outside them between -- in the most radical terms -- psychological stasis and growth. Because that kind of distinction is what I find most important in maintaining a separation between "genre" and "serious" literature.
I don't disagree with you about the importance of that distinction--indeed, I think it's the only reason why a distinction between "genre" and "serious" fiction matters at all. I only doubt that the distinction depends on the presence or absence of wish-fulfilment.
But I think we can work with slightly differing understandings of genre, and proceed.
I said: "[GHT] 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."
Black Dog:
It's the difference, again, between Mel Gibson's Jesus and Mark's. Are we to be tourists in a strange, extreme place, or are we to be actually tranformed by the story?
You suggest at one point that GHT may work on the reader much like Aristotelian tragedy -- by evoking pity and terror it works a catharsis in the reader.
Sometimes produces a catharsis. But often the gratuitous nature of the suffering (I think) produces not catharsis, but something a bit more sordid and less purgative (or redeeming): voyeuristic pleasure. And if not pleasure but horror, then of a noncathartic kind: a repulsion and dismay at the extremity of the events without redemption or relief. Either or both reactions are possible. And though I haven't seen the Mel Gibson "Passion of the Christ," I will hazard a guess from reports that it aims for the latter and perhaps unintentionally achieves the former instead. For the Christ story to produce a conversion to faith, it must offer no escape--no catharsis, no relief, no final separation of the witness (or viewer or reader) from the hero, no final realization that one's terror and pity were directed at a fictional character, bringing about the legitimate purgative relief of catharsis. So I am not opposing you when you say:
But I think a major characteristic of the kind of tragedy Aristotle was commenting on was that it was a story that offered no reassurance, no consolation. In Greek tragedy ... the sense of suffering and loss "goes all the way down," there was no satisfying closure to it, and that is what made it such an extraordinary thing for the viewer to try and assimilate emotionally. GHT as genre-fiction seems, to me, to tease the reader with this dark vision but then retreat to something more reassuring, which is a very different game to play with the reader.
Perhaps so. But here is where Holly's question comes in. "Does it have to end badly to be serious fiction?" she asks. Conversely, she implies, if it ends well, must it be genre?
That is, in a comedy (a book with a happy ending) must the GHT be deemed not to have reached the high emotional and ethical level of Aristotelian tragedy, but to be playing a game with the reader whose stakes are lower? Is tragedy always more serious than comedy? Is torture of the hero always more justified in a tragedy? Is even the most voyeuristic, sadistic, gratuitous torture excused or justified in a tragedy on the grounds that it produces catharsis and leads to the education, the improvement, the greater transformation of the reader/viewer?
Here we can only lament that we do not have Aristotle's lost treatise on comedy to guide us. Fortunately, however, we have his close friend Jane Austen (that master observer of the unities), who has offered to speak for him.
Jane is raising one eyebrow skeptically and looking down her nose at us with a sneer worthy of Mr Darcy. What, she wants to know, is more transformative, more transcendent, more morally educational than a happy ending? And who knows better than she how to put a hero (or heroine) through the tortures of hell--of disappointed hopes, guilty conscience, bitter regret, loneliness, and the possibility of living an unloved, isolated life? OK, there are no whips, there is no blood; her tortures are never violent; but they are the more gruesome for being conducted in the drawing room. And the more her heroes and heroines suffer, the happier we are--both in their punishment (for do they not deserve it all?) and in their eventual rescue.
Aristotle is laughing a little behind his hand at his companion's performance. He has just noticed the same thing that the authors of cheap imitative genre romances have been noticing for years: that Jane has a damn good formula going there, something seductive and alluring, deeply satisfying. It produces novels with very happy endings that are nearly--but not quite--predictible, nearly (but not quite) reassuring. Nearly but not genre.
I have a feeling this has been an exercise in sophistical manipulation, Black Dog, for surely you never claimed that comedy could not be serious literature.
Well, grist for the conversation mill, if nothing else.
...though whether they will live happily ever after is open to question.
I think we now have two topics running concurrently:
1) The purpose and effect of GHT, and
2) The definition of genre fiction.
It may be that the points where these two intersect are what we should be concentrating on, but I am so fond of both subjects that I'd just as soon pursue both at once. If that can be done without my brain exploding.
To me, both topics are aspects of the larger question of the reader/book ship--what sort of love affair it is (genre romance or serious relationship?). But I can set that aside and explore them for their own sake.
Toward the end of Black Dog's post, a third topic emerges:
3) The definition of the ending.
The nature of the Ending is an important matter for us. The closed or open, complete or incomplete, happy or tragic ending is a key indicator of whether a text is genre or serious (though not necessarily the key). The fulfillment of expectations resides in part in the ending. And the purpose of torturing the hero can only be determined when we see how his story ends.
One of the problems embedded in discussions of this kind is that sooner or later, the meanings of the prime terms collapse under the attempt to understand them through ever more refined definitions. What is genre? What is serious? What, indeed, do we mean by "gratuitous" or "hero" or "desire"? Of course, there is great pleasure too in coming to grips with definitions, because it is in the effort to define that the real issues emerge. But the definitions are rarely complete or satisfying.
With that disclaimer I proceed.
I said, grandly, that "*all* fiction is about wish-fulfillment … Escapism is … fundamental to all fiction. … The trick is that education and correction must not be at the expense of desire or a negation of desire, but its fulfillment."
Black Dog requires greater rigor:
I'm uncomfortable with the general levelling tendency of the statement that all fiction is about wish-fulfillment. … how does that differ from the degree of "wish" or desire in any purposive act, in any adventure? … by overgeneralizing the applicability of wish-fulfillment to all reading, we lose sight of some more salient distinctions about the nature of the wishes involved -- the most important of which, I would suggest, have to do with whether we are seeking safety, reassurance, confirmation of our sentiments on the one hand, or disorientation, fundamental challenge, alteration of ourselves, on the other.
I see wish-fulfillment not as one activity among many kinds of entertainment that we may seek, but as a core human activity, integral to the creative act itself. This immediately gets me in the soup, because it is general indeed, and furthermore conflates the act of reading with the act of creating (authorship). But, well, at the end of the day that's my whole thesis, so this position does not seem to me either too vague or too broad, but consistent.
Nevertheless, I think I can respond a little less mooshily than that. Upthread, you queried my earlier statement that genre fiction does not fundamentally challenge or change the reader; I responded that it might do, but such was probably not the book's intention. You were right to ask this; it's important always to leave room for the reader's agency to revise or override the book's own intentions.
So I guess I am turning the question back to you: Is this distinction between reasons for reading so necessary? You and I have both argued that we read one kind of book for complacent reasons--confirmation, safety, pleasure; and another kind of book for something more valuable--challenge, change, education. And from that we have established (in mutual agreement, I think) a basic distinction between genre and serious fiction. And have also accounted for the possibility of variants--the challenging book may be read for pleasure without interrogation; the formulaic book may spark self-doubt revelation unexpectedly. So far, so good. I actually think this mostly answers our question #2--well enough to proceed with. But having served to form a working definition of "genre," the distinction seems to me to break down.
I understand that you are arguing for the greater importance of one kind of: reading--reading to be challenged and changed, and to discover the awe of the world as it is--and I agree with you there. That is an MVP (most valuable prose) kind of reading, which deserves to be privileged. But I think we need not remove wish-fulfillment from the serious activity of reading in order to see it as serious. This far, I remain convinced that the act of reading fiction--any fiction--involves the desire of the reader to escape from "the world as it is," into another world. I do not dispute that the result of this plunge into other worlds may be a greater understanding of the world as it is--far from it. I guess I see wish-fulfillment as so fundamental a desire in the reader, expressed in the act of reading, that it can't be described as leveling, unless to declare that all fiction which has a story is leveling; or all fiction which includes world-building.
That's probably inadequate, but maybe it's a start?
And making that distinction forces me to be somewhat wary of the third quote above -- that any "correction or education" that results from the experience of reading must not be "at the expense of desire, but rather its fulfillment." I would agree with this if it allowed for the transformation or substitution of a different, "better" desire for the one the reader started out with. But that amendment again makes the rule overly general -- the interesting distinction, I would contend, is between experiences that never take you out of the round of familiar or conventionally-imagined desires, and those that do.
Here, I think you are perhaps setting up a straw man, Black Dog. I agree that the correction or education the reader receives in the encounter with the text probably includes a transformation of the reader's desire into a better desire--along with other transformations. I probably assumed as much.
My caveat had to do with a concern lest improvement or education be understood as opposed to desire, better than desire, or--the gods forbid--a solution to desire. I acquit you of proposing a puritan agenda ;-) of course, but I myself am a bit of a fundamentalist on this subject: when it comes to identifying the essential Goods we seek to achieve in reading: I want to see desire on Olympus along with wisdom and grace and awe and the love of the world as it is. For that matter, I would never evict fantasy from that pantheon--the love of the world as it is not. *tosses Plato's Cave, shadows, poets, justice, and art into big pot; adds paprika, nutmeg, angst; stirs*
Finally, I suppose you could say that wishes are precise in that the reader precisely is looking for an action-adventure story, or a romance, or a good scare, or a satisfying detective puzzle, but I think that's at a different level from the kind of wish-fulfillment that is going to happen, or is going to be transcended, within the story.
I'll give you this one. Sounds right to me
We could apply this again to the Iliad/Odyssey case, because I think you initially rejected my argument there, and I'd like to take another stab at it. The reason I said the Odyssey would be "genre" by my "wish-fulfillment" definition is that we ultimately get a feeling of safety and closure from the work -- all of the wishes evoked by the situation, for escape, triumph over adversity, homecoming and resolution -- are put through their paces methodically, and satisfied in the end. Odysseus has a goal, and he never loses sight of it (what's ten years with a minx like Circe?), he overcomes obstacles to achieve it, and in the end he gets pretty much what he wants and what we're conditioned to want for him.
In the Iliad, by contrast, Achilles is radically transformed by his experiences, so that his desires at the end are not commensurate with his desires at the beginning. He starts out a creature of "wrath," and this perhaps reaches its peak in the terrible nihilism of his speech about death to Lycaon, and in his sadistic treatment of Hector's body. But at the very end, he seems oddly humbled, is willing to recognize a common humanity with Priam and to treat him with courtesy and empathy. He's experienced perfect fulfillment of his desire to overcome Hector, and perfect loss in the death of Patroclus, and it is as though the initial categories of his "desire" have just been emptied out, transcended, are no longer relevant to him.
OK, this gives me a clearer sense of what you see as differing between Iliad and Odyssey with respect to the hero and his sufferings. It provides a good exemplar of the distinction I think you are making, but (setting aside whether I read the 2 poems this way) I'm not convinced that the example of Achilles is so widely applicable to all tortured heroes (do they all undergo profound transformations as a result of it? Don't some merely endure, heroically, or resist transformation, ardently?), nor that Odysseus is so immune to transformation.
The Odyssey's happy ending shares with genre fiction a complete, satisfying closure, but is there maybe a false syllogism here? Every genre fiction has such an ending; is every book with such an ending genre? Even if I accept the proposition that Odysseus does not change, undergoes no transformation, does every work that has an immutable hero and a happy ending fall within the definition of genre? Or am I taking your example too literally and reading it too narrowly?
Here is where these terms begin to disintegrate. If I follow you, under this definition the Odyssey could only escape the genre label if Odysseus were understood to have been educated and transformed by his experiences: emerging a better man, and we with him. But I want to insist on a separation between our education and the hero's. We are dancing around the idea of the novel as moral education--both of reader and of hero--and I think we should lay the idea on the table and whack away at it.
First, the novel as tool or embodiment of moral education is only one sort of novel. Novels that do not embody moral education, nor function as tools of it, may nevertheless provide an experience for the reader that includes revelation, self-discovery, transformation. But that is not the same thing as the hero's transformation, though the two events may be congruent. In Quest stories, the hero's journey is mimicked by the reader's. And this, indeed, is the realm of the Quest, the Spiritual Journey.
But that is only one kind of education or transformation. I started with the idea that GHT is that level of torture which cannot be justified by the author as necessary to the transformation or education of the hero--it is not the crucible of hero-formation. I am on uncertain ground with this definition--it seems to work, but it's still just a guess. What I like about it is that it shifts the focus from the protagonist to the reader: GHT serves the reader's desires, not the protagonist's.
Black Dog asked: So what is the reader getting out of it (or getting off on), then?
And I took a shot in the dark, drawing as I often do on the idea that the reader/book relationship is constantly reflexive: Maybe the voyeurism of the reader is a means of involving ourselves in the experience of the book. We watch ourselves watching the hero--and our self-awareness is perhaps heightened in these moments of the hero's greatest suffering, because it stirs powerful and contradictory emotions in us--both empathy and distancing. I have an inductive or intuitive sense of this, but no real means of exploring it. Perhaps it only makes sense to me.
* * *
Now, Question #1: GHT.
*sidesteps definition of "gratuitous" for the moment.*
We got to genre fiction by way of the torture of the hero--the excessive, unwarranted, unjustified torture of the hero. We came to genre fiction because GHT is common there and provided good examples. And immediately became entangled in two other problems: that of desire and that of catharsis.
Black Dog:
I'm not saying that genre fiction is never about transformation -- but the transformation usually takes place within approved forms, such as coming-of-age, or marriage. I guess I am saying, though, that genre tends to refuse to surprise the reader, refuses the idea of a transformation that is radical or unexpected to the reader. And in this sense I think it is bounded by wish-fulfillment in a way that "serious" literature tries to get beyond.
I admit I'm not totally satisfied with this definition, I just think you haven't exploded it by saying that everything is "wish fulfillment." It may be that the distinction I'm making is better expressed, say in Aristotelian terms, by the comedy-tragedy distinction. Hold that thought for later.
*clings like a limpet to thought*
Conversant also implies (I think) that genre-fic is by definition seductive and has heroes static heroes who do not grow, as opposed to the heroes of the Other Stuff (serious lit, or literary fiction, or whatever we may call it). This may come in handy when we get to the great Comedy v. Tragedy Smackdown.
BD:
Now, your alternative formulation is that genre is distinguished by the "precision" of the wish fulfillment involved. And you cite some compelling evidence for that, in the Rules for Romance that you itemize. Those rules certainly embody a hypothetical reader's precise "wishes" for the outcome of the story. But I wonder if this isn't an artifact of the nature of romance, rather than of genre literature in general. You could probably come up with an analogous list for action-adventure literature, where wishes are also fairly explicit and precise. But my own favorite genre reading is mystery/detective fiction. And I would contrast, for example, the Detection Club's rules for Murder Mysteries, as an example of an equally strict set of genre regulations – with the interesting difference that they are more about method and less about outcomes, so that they are less directly related to anyone's "precise" wishes.
I'm not sure I buy the focus on method rather than outcomes. Don't murder mysteries usually have to reveal whodunit at the end? And don't they have to observe the Aristotelian unities of time and place with peculiar strictness (one might almost say, with precision)? There can be no fudging or vagueness as to date and time; each suspect must be accounted for, each event in the story plotted and explained--and innocence must be proven as well as guilt. Full disclosure in the denouement, no loose threads, no ambiguities of fact. If possible, too, the perp must be caught and punished, and justice done (or, in the dark urban version, justice forever insufficient, with a prescribed gritty irony). For murder mysteries are moral tales (indeed, they are far more explicitly tales of moral education than most serious-fic novels can claim to be). That's not to say that the clever writer cannot push the boundaries of the genre a bit. There's the famous instance of The Big Sleep, in which a minor character (the chauffeur) dies either by suicide or murder, and neither Chandler nor Marlowe bothers to resolve his death. But that is an acknowledged anomaly, no?
Instead, I think that what both the Rules of Romance and Rules of Detection have in common is that they lay out a fairly structured game, whatever the specific content of the game, and the genre reader then has very precise expectations about how the game is going to be played – which may or may not precisely determine the outcome and therefore may or may not be described as "precise wishes."
I guess I don't quite see where the indeterminacy comes in--or rather, I don't see the distinction between expectations as to structure and expectations as to outcome. For the two go together insofar as the reader's expectations are concerned. In genre, the reader expects the rules of the game to be followed, and one of those rules is that the ending, the outcome, will fulfil the promises made at the beginning--whatever those promises may have been. (E.g., happy ending for hero and heroine in a genre romance; perhaps grim irony and justice denied in a certain kind of hard-boiled police procedural.)
[snipping a bit]
I'm resisting a definition that levels the distinction between reassurance and disturbance, between remaining in the circle of familiar expectations and trying to break outside them between -- in the most radical terms -- psychological stasis and growth. Because that kind of distinction is what I find most important in maintaining a separation between "genre" and "serious" literature.
I don't disagree with you about the importance of that distinction--indeed, I think it's the only reason why a distinction between "genre" and "serious" fiction matters at all. I only doubt that the distinction depends on the presence or absence of wish-fulfilment.
But I think we can work with slightly differing understandings of genre, and proceed.
I said: "[GHT] 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."
Black Dog:
It's the difference, again, between Mel Gibson's Jesus and Mark's. Are we to be tourists in a strange, extreme place, or are we to be actually tranformed by the story?
You suggest at one point that GHT may work on the reader much like Aristotelian tragedy -- by evoking pity and terror it works a catharsis in the reader.
Sometimes produces a catharsis. But often the gratuitous nature of the suffering (I think) produces not catharsis, but something a bit more sordid and less purgative (or redeeming): voyeuristic pleasure. And if not pleasure but horror, then of a noncathartic kind: a repulsion and dismay at the extremity of the events without redemption or relief. Either or both reactions are possible. And though I haven't seen the Mel Gibson "Passion of the Christ," I will hazard a guess from reports that it aims for the latter and perhaps unintentionally achieves the former instead. For the Christ story to produce a conversion to faith, it must offer no escape--no catharsis, no relief, no final separation of the witness (or viewer or reader) from the hero, no final realization that one's terror and pity were directed at a fictional character, bringing about the legitimate purgative relief of catharsis. So I am not opposing you when you say:
But I think a major characteristic of the kind of tragedy Aristotle was commenting on was that it was a story that offered no reassurance, no consolation. In Greek tragedy ... the sense of suffering and loss "goes all the way down," there was no satisfying closure to it, and that is what made it such an extraordinary thing for the viewer to try and assimilate emotionally. GHT as genre-fiction seems, to me, to tease the reader with this dark vision but then retreat to something more reassuring, which is a very different game to play with the reader.
Perhaps so. But here is where Holly's question comes in. "Does it have to end badly to be serious fiction?" she asks. Conversely, she implies, if it ends well, must it be genre?
That is, in a comedy (a book with a happy ending) must the GHT be deemed not to have reached the high emotional and ethical level of Aristotelian tragedy, but to be playing a game with the reader whose stakes are lower? Is tragedy always more serious than comedy? Is torture of the hero always more justified in a tragedy? Is even the most voyeuristic, sadistic, gratuitous torture excused or justified in a tragedy on the grounds that it produces catharsis and leads to the education, the improvement, the greater transformation of the reader/viewer?
Here we can only lament that we do not have Aristotle's lost treatise on comedy to guide us. Fortunately, however, we have his close friend Jane Austen (that master observer of the unities), who has offered to speak for him.
Jane is raising one eyebrow skeptically and looking down her nose at us with a sneer worthy of Mr Darcy. What, she wants to know, is more transformative, more transcendent, more morally educational than a happy ending? And who knows better than she how to put a hero (or heroine) through the tortures of hell--of disappointed hopes, guilty conscience, bitter regret, loneliness, and the possibility of living an unloved, isolated life? OK, there are no whips, there is no blood; her tortures are never violent; but they are the more gruesome for being conducted in the drawing room. And the more her heroes and heroines suffer, the happier we are--both in their punishment (for do they not deserve it all?) and in their eventual rescue.
Aristotle is laughing a little behind his hand at his companion's performance. He has just noticed the same thing that the authors of cheap imitative genre romances have been noticing for years: that Jane has a damn good formula going there, something seductive and alluring, deeply satisfying. It produces novels with very happy endings that are nearly--but not quite--predictible, nearly (but not quite) reassuring. Nearly but not genre.
I have a feeling this has been an exercise in sophistical manipulation, Black Dog, for surely you never claimed that comedy could not be serious literature.
Well, grist for the conversation mill, if nothing else.
