Not the Protagonist
I'm reading the Decameron at the moment. It's bizarrely hard going.
To explain a little further: the Decameron is a set of one hundred stories, told by ten storytellers over ten days, written around the time of the Black Death. Translated, it's actually surprisingly readable and snappy. It was the go-to source for plots for any number of later writers, including Chaucer and Shakespeare. The stories mostly comprise series of jolly japes involving lovers, nuns, saucy friars, etc. But... well.
Here's an example of a story in the section Happiness after Cruel Adventures, somewhat paraphrased: There is a man who is in love with a woman who has expressed a strong interest in staying away from him. So he boards the ship she is on on her way to Rhodes for her wedding, kills a bunch of people and kidnaps her. But then his ship is blown ashore in Rhodes, and he is unsurprisingly imprisoned. But an inhabitant of Rhodes who also wants to abduct someone recognises his abducting skill, busts him out of jail, they kidnap the women they are after and make off with them. Happy ending. Except I'm sitting here thinking What??? Not to mention that the Decameron is massively in favour of cheating on people, to the extent that refusing someone who propositions you to cheat, even if you loathe them, is considered a bit of an off act, and one which is typically rewarded by a Bad Fate. And robbery, and deceit in general: man, that's awesome[1]. Now, I know that these are just stories, and sometimes people get what they want and obtain a happy ending for themselves by being arseholes, and the real world is complex and ambiguous. And I chose to read the Decameron specifically because I like the moral ambiguity and happy/not-happy ending of All's Well that Ends Well, which Shakespeare lifted directly from Tale 9 on Day 3.
The thing is, there is story after story like this. And because of the framing convention, after each story you also have all ten storytellers praising its truth and beauty and the wisdom of the protagonists. And then sometimes the book's narrator drops in too, and reports on how elegantly the tellers have captured real life. It's a bit like, well. One of the things about the interwebs is that no matter what you believe it's very easy to find people who agree with you. So you get little enclaves of people bonding together over their shared opinions, and reinforcing those opinions, and furiously agreeing, and after a while the centre of percieved normality starts to look distinctly off-centre. Like that. Like I've wandered into a chatroom where the prevailing view is that everyone is out to fuck over everyone else and take all they can get and that's awesome. And after each pronouncement on the subject there's a chorus of "Ho ho, no political correctness here", and "Man, that's beautiful" and then one of the moderators will drop in with a hearty "Yeah, tell it like it is, brother!".
I don't know. I suppose the main thing these stories have in common is that they are great for the main protagonist (apart from the ones that end sadly). I think it may be similar to my problem with romantic comedies of the sort where the heroine's initial beau is shown to have some minor personality flaw and thereafter more-or-less any humiliation of him is justified in order to get the heroine jiggy with the actual True Luurve Interest[2]. It's all awesome for the stars of the show. The thing is, I don't identify with the protagonist. I don't have a strong sense of being the central person in my own strongly-plotted
story. It feels much more as if I'm a bit-part player in other people's stories, the background figure who crosses the stage once or twice of some movie-worthy life. That's who I identify with: out of all those intertwining threads. The sailors on the boat who were killed, perhaps. Stop the plot, rotate ninety degrees: here's the news coming home to their families. Twist a second time: the husband-to-be, angry and powerless and left behind in Rhodes. Here's the guy whose only function was to be spanged in the face by a stray slapstick plank, laughing about it in the pub fifty years later, after an unremarkable life. Sitting next to him is the proverbial spare wheel of the romantic comedy, still bitter. And the barman: well, it's probably better not to ask. Ninety degrees again: henchman's goon, shot in the leg as the hero scales the building. Long crawl to safety. Reconstructive surgery and a desk job. Still limps. Won't tell grandchildren about his past.
I think I'd like to live in a world where the bit-part players are also human. Of course that's not necessarily conducive to good storytelling[3], and most of the time suspension of disbelief works just fine on issues like these, and if you think about that stuff for too long you start wondering Hey, isn't that genocide about the bit after the War of the Ring where Aragorn and his buddies go off to kill any remaining orcs that can be found[4]. But the whole relentless pile-on aspect of the Decameron makes it more difficult to ignore. Ho hum. Will persevere, with the vague hope of slightly more humorous naughty nun stories and/or me somehow becoming less po-faced.
[1] Admittedly I am coming at these stories from a place fairly untouched by either devastating plague or arranged marriage, amongst other things which were part of their original context.
[2] As opposed to horror-film morality, where minor personal flaws make you more deserving of death. Because, as we all know, if something bad happens to someone then they must have done something to deserve it. Oh yeah. Tell it like it is, brother.
[3] Which is not to say that a lot of authors don't manage it just fine; Neil Gaiman is quite good at it, for example.
[4] Assuming that modern Earth is meant to be the eventual evolution of Middle Earth, it seems fair to suggest that either they or something later succeeded. Unless the Loch Ness monster is actually the last surviving Watcher in the Water, or Bigfoot a clan of nearly-extinct trolls scratching out a mountain existence.
To explain a little further: the Decameron is a set of one hundred stories, told by ten storytellers over ten days, written around the time of the Black Death. Translated, it's actually surprisingly readable and snappy. It was the go-to source for plots for any number of later writers, including Chaucer and Shakespeare. The stories mostly comprise series of jolly japes involving lovers, nuns, saucy friars, etc. But... well.
Here's an example of a story in the section Happiness after Cruel Adventures, somewhat paraphrased: There is a man who is in love with a woman who has expressed a strong interest in staying away from him. So he boards the ship she is on on her way to Rhodes for her wedding, kills a bunch of people and kidnaps her. But then his ship is blown ashore in Rhodes, and he is unsurprisingly imprisoned. But an inhabitant of Rhodes who also wants to abduct someone recognises his abducting skill, busts him out of jail, they kidnap the women they are after and make off with them. Happy ending. Except I'm sitting here thinking What??? Not to mention that the Decameron is massively in favour of cheating on people, to the extent that refusing someone who propositions you to cheat, even if you loathe them, is considered a bit of an off act, and one which is typically rewarded by a Bad Fate. And robbery, and deceit in general: man, that's awesome[1]. Now, I know that these are just stories, and sometimes people get what they want and obtain a happy ending for themselves by being arseholes, and the real world is complex and ambiguous. And I chose to read the Decameron specifically because I like the moral ambiguity and happy/not-happy ending of All's Well that Ends Well, which Shakespeare lifted directly from Tale 9 on Day 3.
The thing is, there is story after story like this. And because of the framing convention, after each story you also have all ten storytellers praising its truth and beauty and the wisdom of the protagonists. And then sometimes the book's narrator drops in too, and reports on how elegantly the tellers have captured real life. It's a bit like, well. One of the things about the interwebs is that no matter what you believe it's very easy to find people who agree with you. So you get little enclaves of people bonding together over their shared opinions, and reinforcing those opinions, and furiously agreeing, and after a while the centre of percieved normality starts to look distinctly off-centre. Like that. Like I've wandered into a chatroom where the prevailing view is that everyone is out to fuck over everyone else and take all they can get and that's awesome. And after each pronouncement on the subject there's a chorus of "Ho ho, no political correctness here", and "Man, that's beautiful" and then one of the moderators will drop in with a hearty "Yeah, tell it like it is, brother!".
I don't know. I suppose the main thing these stories have in common is that they are great for the main protagonist (apart from the ones that end sadly). I think it may be similar to my problem with romantic comedies of the sort where the heroine's initial beau is shown to have some minor personality flaw and thereafter more-or-less any humiliation of him is justified in order to get the heroine jiggy with the actual True Luurve Interest[2]. It's all awesome for the stars of the show. The thing is, I don't identify with the protagonist. I don't have a strong sense of being the central person in my own strongly-plotted
story. It feels much more as if I'm a bit-part player in other people's stories, the background figure who crosses the stage once or twice of some movie-worthy life. That's who I identify with: out of all those intertwining threads. The sailors on the boat who were killed, perhaps. Stop the plot, rotate ninety degrees: here's the news coming home to their families. Twist a second time: the husband-to-be, angry and powerless and left behind in Rhodes. Here's the guy whose only function was to be spanged in the face by a stray slapstick plank, laughing about it in the pub fifty years later, after an unremarkable life. Sitting next to him is the proverbial spare wheel of the romantic comedy, still bitter. And the barman: well, it's probably better not to ask. Ninety degrees again: henchman's goon, shot in the leg as the hero scales the building. Long crawl to safety. Reconstructive surgery and a desk job. Still limps. Won't tell grandchildren about his past.
I think I'd like to live in a world where the bit-part players are also human. Of course that's not necessarily conducive to good storytelling[3], and most of the time suspension of disbelief works just fine on issues like these, and if you think about that stuff for too long you start wondering Hey, isn't that genocide about the bit after the War of the Ring where Aragorn and his buddies go off to kill any remaining orcs that can be found[4]. But the whole relentless pile-on aspect of the Decameron makes it more difficult to ignore. Ho hum. Will persevere, with the vague hope of slightly more humorous naughty nun stories and/or me somehow becoming less po-faced.
[1] Admittedly I am coming at these stories from a place fairly untouched by either devastating plague or arranged marriage, amongst other things which were part of their original context.
[2] As opposed to horror-film morality, where minor personal flaws make you more deserving of death. Because, as we all know, if something bad happens to someone then they must have done something to deserve it. Oh yeah. Tell it like it is, brother.
[3] Which is not to say that a lot of authors don't manage it just fine; Neil Gaiman is quite good at it, for example.
[4] Assuming that modern Earth is meant to be the eventual evolution of Middle Earth, it seems fair to suggest that either they or something later succeeded. Unless the Loch Ness monster is actually the last surviving Watcher in the Water, or Bigfoot a clan of nearly-extinct trolls scratching out a mountain existence.