Tag Archives: themes

Living outside of stories, or When does Lennie poop?

Posted on August 8, 2014 | Leave a comment
There is symbolic value in this photo only if you want there to be symbolic value there.

There is symbolic value in this photo only if you want there to be symbolic value.

Where do literary characters go when they’re not on the page?

When I watch outtakes from a movie, I can see the actors stop being the characters and return to being actors. Of course, they never stopped being the actors; the characters they play are just ideas.

And so are the characters in a fiction or nonfiction narrative. They’re just ideas, which is to say, they aren’t physically real at all. You can’t touch Sherlock Holmes in “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” you can’t touch Abraham Lincoln in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” and neither you nor I can touch the person who, according to my journal today, got a cavity filled yesterday. Yesterday-me is not who I am now.

When we tell stories, we turn real (nonfiction) or imagined (fiction) experiences into ideas. What one sees as a real person with particular traits (this height, that eye color, a certain laugh, a tone of voice) becomes just “Jim” or “a tall man with blue-green eyes,” etc. We give up particulars, abstracting the experience so we can communicate it. And while we can give in-depth descriptions of particular things, we are at best only specifying an idea, not really conveying the experience itself. To tell a reasonably compact story, we limit our descriptions to just what we think are the most-important things (and, I suggest, choosing what was most-important may not be a conscious, intentional process).

As we tell our own stories and take in others’, we get more efficient at turning experience into stories, so that not only does the process start to seem automatic but we may even start making our stories interesting in themselves, as entertaining abstractions. For instance, if we decide to tell an experience as a comic narrative, we may choose funny words, reveal things in order to create tension or suspense, and even exaggerate certain aspects of the story, all in service of making the story itself into a work of art. Two people who witness the same event may turn it into very different stories.

The broader concept here is that when we turn our experiences into stories (and even as we store our experiences as remembered narratives), we are no longer dealing with physical reality but with ideas. Particularly when we read or listen to others’ stories, we are getting not the experiences that they had but their  interpretations of those experiences into abstractions. This can lead us astray if we take the stories as somehow more real than reality. It has taken me years to learn this.

One issue with making stories is editing — what to leave in and what to crop out. A story is usually organized around around a central theme — say, all the times I went to the E.R. — or around a plot that shows how characters’ actions result in a logical or likely consequence — for instance, in “Of Mice and Men,” how George and Lennie’s choices result in two deaths. The storyteller must include the parts needed to tell a satisfying narrative, and exclude parts would be off-topic or digressive. When information is organized thematically, around a topic or plot, it is not necessarily complete chronologically (or in other ways). (On the other hand, texts that are organized chronologically, like my daily journals, describe all the things in the order they happened (more or less), but these things may not have any connection to each other and may be thematically ordered into several different themes or plots.)

We live chronologically, where a bunch of unrelated stuff happens in one day, but we mostly tell stories thematically, skipping around in time.

When we read a story such as “Of Mice and Men,” which tells about decisions and deaths across three days in the lives of characters George and Lennie in less than 120 pages, chronological time will be skipped. We don’t know what the characters are doing in each moment of the day — for instance, we never see Lennie poop. Not that we need to see Lennie poop — that’s not the organizing theme of the story! But the story we’re told includes only those aspects that lead up to, that contribute to, the murders at the end of the book. It’s a story about murders; it’s a story where the plot is central (more than, say, the characters).

But, back to the original question in this post, where are George and Lennie when they’re not on the page? Perhaps they are occupying entirely different novels, essays, or poems — George’s travel memoir, “Me and Lennie,” Lennie’s Montaigne-style ponderings, “Why I Like to Touch Soft Things,” or Curley’s poem, “Ode to Things I Hate about Guys Bigger Than Me.” And if these characters were real people, they would surely have done things like wiping the sweat off their brows as they did fieldwork, and maybe stopping to appreciate the summer flowers.

In other words, the characters, if they lived like real people, would not have known that they were in a plot at all. They saw things, met people, had various and disparate experiences, and only at what constitutes the end of the story did George decide that he had to kill Lennie. Up until what occupies the last minutes (in story-time) of the book, none of the characters in the book would have had any idea of what the plot was — in our own lives, we can see things like plot (causal relationships) only in retrospect. There’s no such thing as foreshadowing until after the fact (as the saying goes, hindsight is 20/20). And in fact, there are no such organizing principles as theme or plot in our lives as we live them. This is to say, theme and plot are aspects only of stories, and not of real life. Of course, if we are interviewed and asked something like, “What was the most important moment in your life,” we may be able to come up with an answer, but of course, this would be an arbitrary choice and an abstraction. One person could write about her own life experiences in many different ways, say, as comedy, as tragedy, etc. — and there’s no one correct story of her life. Perhaps all meaning that is derived from our experiences is exactly that — derived, a result of our interpretation — and there’s no meaning that’s inherent in our experiences.

In a story like “Of Mice and Men,” we see characters on what will probably (hopefully, for their sake) be the worst day of their lives. I feel bad for them — I wouldn’t want to be judged by how I acted on the worst day of my life. I wonder what these characters would’ve been like in other contexts — say, if they were paid for their labor and took the afternoon off to go on a picnic, say. (Or these other possibilities.)

At least, on a picnic, they would’ve been eating not abstractions but particular foods — not “an apple,” but this apple, with its particular shape and spots and taste. I too like to return to particulars, to draw my attention away from the abstractions of words and ideas and toward the particulars around me: this bite of sandwich, this smooth pen, this slanted sidewalk — and all the other things that seem physically real and thus don’t need my (and our) names for them. When my attention is directed toward real, particular, physical things, I am able to live outside of labels and principles and stories myself. I can be undefined, as can everything around me. It’s not a feeling that lasts long, but it’s kinda wonderful to not have to live as if I were a character myself, trapped in some plot, some theme, my life always having to mean something — how tedious that would be!

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All Satisfying Stories Have Morals: A Reader’s Critical Perspective

Posted on February 2, 2014 | Leave a comment

Simple stories for children, like the Brothers Grimm’s “Cinderella,” seem to have obvious themes that are also morals, instructions on how one should and should not behave. I have used these fairy tales as fictions that are easy for my high school students to analyze critically. We have looked at the stories and decided which characters are winners, those who end the story in better position than they started it, and which characters are losers who end up worse off.

This approach seemed too simple to use for more modern, psychologically complex stories. But as I’ve been thinking about how to best teach my students to analyze Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” (see also here and here), it occurred to me the other day that most traditional stories also can be analyzed by making a distinction between the morally good characters — those who get rewarded — and the morally bad characters, who get punished.

By traditional stories, I mean those stories that have a consistent point of view and tone (so it’s clear to readers what’s “really” happening in the story and how we readers are supposed to feel about it) to convey a sequence of events that can be causally explained by reference to the characters’ given traits and chosen actions.

For example, “Of Mice and Men” is a traditional story. Not that we can predict the outcome from the beginning (though there are strong hints that things will not end well for George and Lennie — and without these mood-hints, the dramatic ending may seem unbelievably abrupt), but once we get to the resolution, we can trace back the causes. Everything that happens has a cause based in the characters’ natures and their actions. George shoots Lennie because Lennie killed Curley’s wife. Lennie killed her because he thought she would get him in trouble, as he has gotten in trouble before. If he got in trouble, he wouldn’t be able to get the rabbits he hoped to tend. He wants rabbits because he seemed to have an obsession with soft things, which obsession also leads to his conflict with and killing of Curley’s wife.

Everything is explainable. There are no random acts in this story. (Stories that do have random acts are not the traditional type of stories I’m talking about.) If Lennie had gotten killed by a rattlesnake after killing Curley’s wife, that would not be directly caused by a character’s choice, and so this wouldn’t feel like a satisfying ending to readers.

And I want to suggest that satisfying endings are those that grow out of human causes — human decisions. Characters had to be free to choose their actions, so that they deserve their consequences. This is what makes stories satisfying — consequences are direct result of human choices. We readers can ask what choices the characters made, or could have made, and this can help reveal the behaviors that earn consequences. The metaphysical implication here is that we are in control of our lives, our fates.

But, of course, in real life, it does not seem that we are not in control of all aspects of our lives. Sometimes things happen to us. Perhaps we read traditional stories so as to, for a time, enjoy the feeling that events can make sense. Traditional stories are appealing because random things do not happen, and because fairness and justice are served, unlike in real life, where sometimes bad deeds go unpunished, innocent people get killed by drunk drivers, and people disappear without a trace. Hell, in real life, we don’t always even know what the right decision is.

And so these traditional stories can be satisfying. Sometimes, though, these stories may seem artificial, false — altogether too tidy, not life-like. And so there are other stories — stories told from multiple points of view, stories that end ambiguously, stories where random things happen, stories where the good guys lose. Though these stories may better resemble what really seems to happen in life, these stories tend to not be satisfying. I often get frustrated by the predictability of traditional stories, but I also wonder what is the point of reading a nontraditional story that is just as messy as real life.

A story that isn’t traditional won’t have a clear meaning, because it’s more like life and life doesn’t have clear meanings — because meaning doesn’t reside in physical things, but only in consciousnesses.

(Perhaps I cannot be satisfied by reading fiction. My friends who enjoy fiction more than I do tell me they appreciate the journey of the reading experience — they enjoy being absorbed into the story, spending time with the author’s voice, perhaps, or seeing how the narrator makes variations on the usual storytelling conventions to avoid being too predictable. Maybe I just read too much for theme to enjoy these other aspects of fiction. But if an author’s gonna ask me to read a couple hundred pages and pretend that these characters are real people, it better be worth my time. There’s a Kurt Vonnegut quote about giving readers a plot by which he can make his ideas more palatable, but sometimes I wonder why Vonnegut doesn’t just give us his ideas without the machinery of characters and plot.)

So it had never occurred to me until recently how must stories that we enjoy reading serve an ancient, eye-for-an-eye sort of morality. I should be careful not to overextend my analysis to all traditional stories, but I suspect this would be a critical perspective that might work. I hadn’t thought that so many stories could be analyzed from a punishment/reward perspective, but maybe traditional stories are that simple, and are satisfying for — but are also limited by — that simplicity.

Afterthoughts: Here are some related ideas I want to convey, but didn’t want to clutter up the above discussion.

* Traditional stories have human characters, or characters with human-like consciousness. They tend not to have, say, animals-qua-animals, or trees, or shoes, as main characters. I suspect that this is because satisfying stories really require choices to be made. Narratives where a character is just acted upon might not seem so satisfying. Morality only involves human choices; nature is amoral, beyond moral, because animals and trees can’t make moral choices. They live not by choice but by their natures, their instincts.

* I mentioned above an “eye-for-an-eye” morality, which implies an Old Testament idea; this prompts the question what a New Testament, “turn the other cheek” story would be like. Would that be dull, because the point is to avoid conflict?

* Characters: There’s a weird dual nature to fictional characters. They are just ideas, of course, but in that way, they are not so different from those real people we know but who aren’t currently in our presence. Characters must be real-seeming enough for us to care about them, particularly in a drama that doesn’t want to be laughed at — and yet, some of my students may have reacted to George shooting Lennie with (perhaps nervous) laughter. We readers of fiction books and viewers of fiction movies can’t feel too strongly about characters, or we’d feel too strongly to watch people get killed in action or horror movies. At some level, we know characters are merely ideas and not real, but we need to see them as real if we are to take the work seriously. There’s a duality here to our understanding of characters.

* So much of fiction requires conflict, and so it sets mutually hostile characters into revealing situations. This can feel artificial at times. It’s not unlike what reality shows like “Big Brother” do — “let’s put a bunch of terrible people into an enclosed space and watch them do terrible things to each other,” as the producers might say.

* The meanings that stories often present — what choices and behaviors are good and should be rewarded, and which are bad and should be punished — these can sometimes seem arbitrary. The meanings I find even in my own experiences may change over time.

* It’s easy for us to see some traits — mutual respect, kindness, fairness, for example — as generally good, and other traits — greed, selfishness, disregard — as bad. But beyond these, I wonder how many qualities seen as good are simply cultural or situational. For example, I wonder if the resource waste and pollution that I take for granted in my life — or, I feel a little bad about it but I figure that it’s too hard for me to live without fossil fuels, say — will come later to be seen as terribly bad qualities.

* Steinbeck makes Curley’s wife seem like a bad character. The other characters complain about her, and when she talks, she says terrible things (like threatening Crooks with lynching). But somehow this makes her seem like she was partly to blame for her own murder, and I’m not comfortable with “blame the victim” mentality. One wonders how she would tell this story from her point of view. She certainly wouldn’t have lived to see Lennie killed.

* We know the main conflict is resolved when the story ends — this is partly how we know that “Of Mice and Men” is the story of Lennie’s demise. George keeps living after, but Lennie does not. This is the end of their relationship. In a way, the resolution is George choosing to shoot Lennie, and yet, this is the resolution to a much earlier problem — why George brought Lennie to this ranch in the first place. Readers want to see how the set-up, how the main conflict, turns out. A story that sets up a situation but does not resolve it is not going to be satisfying.

* Sometimes a story doesn’t end. For example, the TV version of “Game of Thrones,” which story kills off important characters, and so then I feel like this must not have been Ned’s story, or Rob’s story — I must not have understood whose story this really is, who the main chars are. When a story goes on and on, it’s tediously unsatisfying — again, it starts to seem like real life, and yet real history has at least the ending of the present moment.  If one reads English history from a thousand years ago, there’s a lot of it, yet you know that it stops at the present moment. With “Game of Thrones,” it’s not clear that it will ever end. The books that would end the story haven’t even been written yet, and once a story goes on for so long, it seems it would be difficult to have an ending that is meaningful enough to justify the duration of the story. (See also “Lost.”)

* Steinbeck says he based Lennie on a person who killed someone, but did not get killed and instead went to an asylum. So I wonder why Steinbeck decided to have a story where it seems OK for the George character to make the decision to take Lennie’s life instead? Why did Steinbeck change the story in this way — because it provides a better sense of “divide justice” than if Lennie just gets locked up?

* Though a published narrative is fixed and unchanging, I think it is a valid critical technique to ask what options the characters had each time they made a decision. Even if George and Lennie didn’t have good options, they had options. They had to, if they are to be held responsible for their actions. And in a way, “Of Mice and Men” seems like the story is told, seemingly from George’s point of view (the narration is third person, but George is the only character we see from the beginning of the story to the end), as if it were George’s justification for his decision to shoot Lennie (though the story offers George a self-defense claim when Carlson suggests that George took the gun from Lennie, and George, knowing this is false, agrees). This entire story, then, can be seen as an argument for when a person might be justified in taking another person’s life out of love for that person. I’m still not sure this argument works, however. The story seems to draw a parallel between George shooting Lennie and Carlson shooting Candy’s dog — but of course, Lennie is a person, not a dog.

* We readers find happy endings satisfying when the characters have earned them by some means (even if that means is just by suffering, as Cinderella seems to). But an unearned happy ending isn’t satisfying. If someone struggling with poverty suddenly wins the lottery, that would be a “deus ex machina” and would feel like the author is too heavy-handedly forcing things. That’s not satisfying. A traditional story could be satisfying if it would have an unpredictable thing — lottery winnings, earthquake — happen at the beginning of the story, and then it could show how the characters react to these things.

* Another example of how we like to find control in our lives is when we hear that someone got a diagnosis of cancer, and we think of reasons that person did something to cause that disease.  We might say or think, “well, he WAS a smoker” — as if we’re looking for ways to protect ourselves — ” I won’t get lung cancer bec. I’m not a smoker,” when that’s not always true, of course. This is a terrible, petty thing to think, but we sometimes want to understand the world and feel we’re in control — it’s disturbing to our human consciousnesses to realize how much we do not control (our genes, our environments, other people who might hurt us, etc.).

* Simplistic stories sometimes make the bad characters simply, evilly bad — bad without an understandably human motivation. I prefer to think of most bad characters as not just evil but merely self-interested — more mafioso than demon. Cinderella’s stepmom doesn’t mistreat her out of pure meanness, but because she wants to advance her own daughters’ fortunes over Cinderella’s. I once had a student who said, somewhat plaintively, “But my stepmom is nice,” and I said, yes, in real life, lots of stepmoms are nice. But as characters whose interests may be suspect anyway, stepmoms can play that role of antagonist (as opposed to, say, making a mother herself opposed to her children, as was the mother in early versions of “Hansel and Gretel.” That’s just too monstrous to consider). My wife pointed out that conflicts over resources remain a significant fact for a lot of people in the world — it’s the stability of our American political/industrial/military power that allows so many of us in this country to take so many of our basic needs for granted. (As I mentioned above, this “taking for granted” may turn out to be a bad trait on our part.)

* And what IS good? Lots of modern fictional shows have anti-heroes — “Breaking Bad,” “Sopranos” — why do people watch those? (I choose not to. For entertainment, I usually watch comedy, shows that imply the world isn’t so bad.  I don’t want to spend my time and attention on grim stuff when I see so much of that in the news and in my students’ lives.) Do we come to have some respect for these anti-heroes, even if we disagree with their goals? Do we respect their code of conduct — efficiency, effectiveness, loyalty — even if their goals are selling drugs. But I’ve heard some drug gangs’ operations are similar to those of legitimate businesses, and some businesses do morally questionable things as a matter of normal actions.  We don’t really know whether we’re good — until we get judged in Heaven? Is that all we really wanna know, if we’re good or not? We know we’ve done bad things but we want redemption? — are these the reasons we find traditional stories satisfying — we can compare ourselves against these bad characters to feel OK about ourselves?

Addendum:

* Stories that are not traditional — those stories with multiple narrators, or random events, or ambiguous endings — do not contain meaning about theme and character so much as they present meanings about story structure itself. Update 16 Feb.: In the 10 Feb. 2014 New Yorker magazine (paywalled, but here), James Woods describes as “the full, familiar postmodern quiz-kit” these “metafictional questions” in a fiction work: “truth-telling, the veracity of representation, the coherence of the self, language’s relation to silence, and what we mean by innocently talking about fictional ‘characters’ as if they were real people.” These, Woods seems to say, are the markers of stories that aren’t really about characters and events but are about the philosophy and practice of storytelling itself.

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How the Grinch Stole Christmas to Overcome Crushing Loneliness

Posted on December 1, 2013 | 6 comments

grinch_upshotWatching “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” the other night, my wife and I wondered why, the morning after the titular Grinch had stolen their Christmas presents, decorations, and food, the Whos all came out to sing their traditional Christmas song without seeming to acknowledge that they had been robbed.

As my wife characterized it, “All their shit got taken — ‘Let’s go sing.'”

The Who tradition, as described early in the story, is to play and make noise with their new toys, to eat a dinner, and then to sing in the central open space of Whoville. Having lost their toys and foods to the Grinch, the Whos still carry out the singing part of the tradition. Seeing this display of good cheer even in the face of loss, the Grinch returns the pilfered goods and the Whos invite the Grinch to their meal.

This story warms the heart (well, literally enlarges the heart) of the Grinch, and it warms the audience’s hearts too, because we all see that the Whos have not succumbed to ill-will at the loss of their goods. According to some commentors, that’s the main message here — this story “criticizes the commercialization of Christmas.”

This is an interesting take on “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” because our main (and only dynamic) character, the Grinch, learns a lesson only out of his attempt to teach a lesson. Dude hates Christmas, and we don’t find out why — the text says “no one quite knows the reason” — the narrator speculates that his “heart was two sizes too small.” Perhaps he was feeling alienated from the society of the Whos and their “warm lighted windows,” but the only specifics he states for his scheme to punish the Whos is that they annoy him by celebrating too loudly (“Oh the noise!“). Perhaps the Grinch is not self-reflective or self-aware enough to see that he was just lonely and wanted to strike out at the Whos because he wanted them to be as miserable as he was.

grinch_caveOf course, some of the blame for the Grinch’s alienation must lie with him — living at the top of a mountain far above town, it’s not likely he’s gonna get a lot of visitors — and this line of thought brings up questions of economics and sociology: How does the Grinch relate to the Whos? Does he conduct commerce with them? Have they ever seen him before? Do they even know he exists? Oddly enough, this reminds me a of childhood fantasy I had of living hermit-style myself — so that the Grinch’s cave-dwelling has long seemed kinda neat to me. Sure, a real cave at mountain-top would be a pain to get to, would be drafty, etc., but the idea of a cave at the top of a mountain seemed fun. Maybe that thought was a function of my own introversion and felt-alienation?

grinch_townWhether or not the Whos know of the Grinch, he is certainly aware of them, as he watches them in the valley below his hovel. The Whos draw the Grinch’s ire because they are too jovial, basically. The Grinch decides to rid himself of the annoyance of the noise — as he blames the noise problem on Christmas (rather than on the Whos themselves), he decides to “stop Christmas from coming.” But did he really think this would work? Or was this whole Grinchy scheme a cry for help, for attention, from the Whos? Is Seuss making an ostensibly anti-commercial story in which the true message is about recognizing and overcoming loneliness? If so, that’s kinda sweet.

I had intended to make another point here about how the Grinch changes his mind about what the punishment’s about — from noise-abatement to anti-materialism (“Maybe Christmas,” he thought, “doesn’t come from a store”) — but now that I am interpreting the whole story as the actions of a lonely hermit looking for attention, I’m starting to see how the Grinch’s punishment-motive shift could happen — the text seems to point out that the Grinch doesn’t know quite why he’s doing what he’s doing, and taking away their toys doesn’t shut the Whos up at all — they still sing, which singing should annoy the Grinch more, but it doesn’t.

However, there’s still the problem of why the Whos don’t seem to react to having their stuff stolen. If the Whos are supposed to resemble humans, their nonreactive behavior seems unlikely.  I begin to speculate: Maybe the Whos are not supposed to be human — maybe they are Buddhist types who accept reality just as they find it, moment to moment. Or maybe the Whos are beings who can see the future and they know that the Grinch will bring back their stuff. My wife suggested “maybe they’re just simpletons” who aren’t aware of their loss. All are possibilities.

Except, if we take the interpretation that the Grinch is just lonely, and maybe the Whos know, or at least suspect, this loneliness about their neighbor who has “put up with” their Christmas celebrations for “fifty-three years,” maybe the Whos saw their houses emptied, and suspected the Grinch, but didn’t get mad about it, and figured that if they just seemed good spirited about it, the Grinch would return their stuff. Maybe the Whos figured out that the worst thing they could do in that situation was to get angry about it (in which case the Grinch wouldn’t feel compelled to return their things).

(And what happened “fifty-three years” ago: Was that when the Grinch moved to the area? Was that when the Whos moved to Whoville? Or maybe the Whos were always there, but began celebrating Christmas — at least, in the contemporary fashion, only 53 years ago? Or was the Grinch formerly a Who himself who left the company of the Whos and transformed physically, as Smeagol did by becoming Gollum?)

The Grinch and Cindy Lou: Two genetic Whos?

The Grinch and Cindy Lou: Two genetic Whos?

Perhaps the Whos even have regular contact with the Grinch, and know he’s just an ornery ol’ cuss who is actually a softie at heart (we know his heart is prone to significant volumetric expansions and contractions which seem to correlate to his positive and negative moods), so that they know not to get upset by his antics.

I had started this post prepared to make fun of how weirdly the Whos act in “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” but as I wrote, I began to see a sweet story of alienation and acceptance. In this way, the Grinch is a little like that other famous Christmas character, Scrooge, in that both live outside their societies (literally for the Grinch; figuratively for Scrooge) and both have Christmastime experiences that bring them back into the company of their fellow beings. In this way, the Grinch and Scrooge stories are picking up both on how simple emotional demands can drive more complex behavior, and both stories touch on the necessity of the social life for human consciousness.

Note: Images above were taken, via PrintScreen, from the cartoon.

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