(She Must Be) The Most Beautiful Girl in the World
I read a book today, oh boy.
There's a convention among mythology and literature, a creature shows her face from time to time to cast a spell on the presumably-quite priapically-addled Male Lead(s) of the story. She is, you guessed it: The Most Beautiful Girl in the World. And all through mythology and up through modern literature, she's got one real function: Door prize. TMBGITW is, from Andromeda to Arwen, the ultimate in lady-objectification. Being TMBGITW makes her The Most Commodifiable Commodity in Existence.
It's an absolute, that's the thing. The author tells ya this here is the 1k-ship-face & you have to believe him even though, really, since A first of all Paris has no way of knowing f'r instance that she's the most beautiful girl of ever and B--and this is most important and what got Paris in trouble in the first place--there's no way to objectively rate a thing such as beauty.
TMBGITW is the personification of the Absolute. She's it. She's the line the writer is drawing around the world. And while I admittedly don't have a goldmine of data points to work with here, I'm going to go ahead and bore you by comparing the two in pre-and modern lit. Because I'm caffeinated.
The Most Beautiful of Anything is measuring something which can't be objectively measured or studied or determined so by imposing this notion & never having anybody question it is like a narrative cheat. Gods usually spout this MB exposition to us, or else mortals get in trouble for doing same and end up with their daughters chained to rocks. Tolkien's Arwen gets in to the club in part due to her unique heritage. But how does Aragorn like, know, man? Not that it's important, he lurves her anyway, but the author in this case is speaking to the world outside the setting of the novel, taking time out to let us all know how dag-blastedly Important Arwen is in the Grand Scheme by stepping out of the confines of the story.
Modern authors play with this convention. William Goldman's novel The Princess Bride spends something like an entire chapter devoted to who was TMBGITW before Buttercup inherited the title and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which pretty much got me started writing this tirade, devotes its most heartening passages to the story of an erstwhile-TMBGITW, whose beauty was nearly lethal. Who is so heart-breakingly beautiful that she spends most of her life alone, with no guy able to get up the courage to even speak to her.
It's an absolute, that's the thing and in my opinion fiction shouldn't deal in absolutes. It's an unclever form of Direct Address. Absolutes are for Religion and Science. Especially Science, which can actually fucking PROVE its absolutes. Most of them. The character in Infinite Jest is a natural progression/questioning of this theory, that if someone were so bright as to outshine everybody, well wouldn't that be kind of hard to take?
Thing is, we like absolutes. 'S why religion is popular. Wiggle-room worries us. Uncertainty worries us. TMBGITW is the human personification of a quantifiable absolute, and human beings are too slippery for that sort of conceit to work, really.
I'm not sure where I'm going with all this. I should confess at this stage in the narrative I wrote a short story once featuring a TMBGITW, who went on a string of high-profile bank robberies out of a sense of ennui. I didn't do anything near as high-brow or clever as Goldman or Wallace. I'm trawling the Interwebs for more literary examples, or, conveniently, an example of pre-existing literary criticism re: Stendhal-Syndrome-abulous ladies, but mostly what I get are opinions and Maxim spreads. Plus, that Prince song.
There's a convention among mythology and literature, a creature shows her face from time to time to cast a spell on the presumably-quite priapically-addled Male Lead(s) of the story. She is, you guessed it: The Most Beautiful Girl in the World. And all through mythology and up through modern literature, she's got one real function: Door prize. TMBGITW is, from Andromeda to Arwen, the ultimate in lady-objectification. Being TMBGITW makes her The Most Commodifiable Commodity in Existence.
It's an absolute, that's the thing. The author tells ya this here is the 1k-ship-face & you have to believe him even though, really, since A first of all Paris has no way of knowing f'r instance that she's the most beautiful girl of ever and B--and this is most important and what got Paris in trouble in the first place--there's no way to objectively rate a thing such as beauty.
TMBGITW is the personification of the Absolute. She's it. She's the line the writer is drawing around the world. And while I admittedly don't have a goldmine of data points to work with here, I'm going to go ahead and bore you by comparing the two in pre-and modern lit. Because I'm caffeinated.
The Most Beautiful of Anything is measuring something which can't be objectively measured or studied or determined so by imposing this notion & never having anybody question it is like a narrative cheat. Gods usually spout this MB exposition to us, or else mortals get in trouble for doing same and end up with their daughters chained to rocks. Tolkien's Arwen gets in to the club in part due to her unique heritage. But how does Aragorn like, know, man? Not that it's important, he lurves her anyway, but the author in this case is speaking to the world outside the setting of the novel, taking time out to let us all know how dag-blastedly Important Arwen is in the Grand Scheme by stepping out of the confines of the story.
Modern authors play with this convention. William Goldman's novel The Princess Bride spends something like an entire chapter devoted to who was TMBGITW before Buttercup inherited the title and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, which pretty much got me started writing this tirade, devotes its most heartening passages to the story of an erstwhile-TMBGITW, whose beauty was nearly lethal. Who is so heart-breakingly beautiful that she spends most of her life alone, with no guy able to get up the courage to even speak to her.
It's an absolute, that's the thing and in my opinion fiction shouldn't deal in absolutes. It's an unclever form of Direct Address. Absolutes are for Religion and Science. Especially Science, which can actually fucking PROVE its absolutes. Most of them. The character in Infinite Jest is a natural progression/questioning of this theory, that if someone were so bright as to outshine everybody, well wouldn't that be kind of hard to take?
Thing is, we like absolutes. 'S why religion is popular. Wiggle-room worries us. Uncertainty worries us. TMBGITW is the human personification of a quantifiable absolute, and human beings are too slippery for that sort of conceit to work, really.
I'm not sure where I'm going with all this. I should confess at this stage in the narrative I wrote a short story once featuring a TMBGITW, who went on a string of high-profile bank robberies out of a sense of ennui. I didn't do anything near as high-brow or clever as Goldman or Wallace. I'm trawling the Interwebs for more literary examples, or, conveniently, an example of pre-existing literary criticism re: Stendhal-Syndrome-abulous ladies, but mostly what I get are opinions and Maxim spreads. Plus, that Prince song.