Payoffs and Reader Expectation
The other day I made a post about story payoffs. burger_eater made a comment to the effect that he's disappointed when the character he's invested in doesn't gain respect from the story. I asked him to explain that, and he did.
His response got me to thinking about why narrative tones raise certain expectations in me. A comedic tone appears to promise a safety net, by which I mean implicit is the promise of no long scenes of torture, murder of innocents and the helpless, dreary or tragic situations or endings. What is sometimes termed black humor delivers these things, can even be about these very things. I suspect this is why some readers don't find black humor funny. "Kafka is screamingly funny!" "Sez you--I think he's boring and dreary." For some readers, suffering is funny, not because they are cruel people, but they can gain a distance from the pain by laughing at it. Others are not going to find the laugh mechanism triggered by certain subjects no matter what.
Several people admitted to disappointment in Joss Whedon's penchant for sudden and pointless character deaths. It is argued, "Hey, real life has pointless death all the time!" to which I often see the response, "Yeah, but none of this is real life, it's drama. Therefore I find such stuff at best pretentious." burger_eater's point about the story respecting the character resonated with me when I thought about Whedon's zap of a character in a certain piece. Just suddenly, whoops! The character is jerked away, leaving the sucking sound of my character investment, and I'm thrown right out of the movie back into my living room, tea in hand, mouth gaping as i grope for the remote control so I can backtrack to find what I obviously managed to miss.
Can the author be wrong? Certainly for individuals whose expectations are not met. There's plenty said, including here, about how tough it is to gauge what a reader brings to a piece of work. But when is it okay to hold the author to blame? Can one say they've failed?
I'm thinking of works that a majority appear to have considered a disappointment. Three examples, one classic book, one modern ya book, one movie. First is Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. Much ink has been spilled in the heroine's dispraise, including unfair and untrue observations about her lack of sense of humor (she has a whole lot more than Anne Elliott ever did) and her romantic choice at the end. Well, the choice is partly queasy-making given modern ideas about genetics, but I think the biggest failure is an extraordinary lapse on Austen's part--obviously an artistic choice--after a series of the most brilliant story arcs in her entire oeuvre, she has the narrator step out on stage and tell us the ending. And readers of her time as well as readers now have trouble believing in what happened. For two centuries, many readers have remained unconvinced.
The second example is a kids' fantasy that came out a couple years ago. It was positioned to be big, written by the offspring of a famed writer, given mondo publicity and push....and readers pretty much hated it. Most felt that what amounted to a nineties splatterpunk ending tacked abruptly onto a fantasy added up to fail. A few liked it--it got a couple reviews of praise for its risky choice, and the editor obviously thought it good, or it wouldn't have hit print. But out in the world, especially the kid world, it went down in flames. I think sometimes adults forget that most ten-twelve year olds have a burning craving for justice, which only time and real life erode. Anyway, I was sent a couple of copies (four, actually) of that book, so I took it to school. No love for that ending, boys or girls. A few refused to even try it, once some spoiler talk had gone among the kids.
Third, the relatively recent Christmas movie The Stone Family--[warning SPOILERS AHOY] what appeared to be a romantic comedy set in the holiday season promised, and delivered, funny and well-acted ups and downs as one of the kids brings home a sweetie, and the entire family is thrown for a loop. But midway in we're plunged into bathos: the mom has inoperable cancer. I'd suspected something like from the opening thirty seconds, but everyone else had totally missed the cue. My spouse brought it home the year after it came out, saying he'd gotten it at Target on sale for a couple of bucks, so we had it as the after Thanksgiving dinner movie for us and our house full of guests. When that part of the movie came on, you could feel the atmosphere of pleasurable expectation just drop. I mean, from the eighty-year-old gramma who'd been fine with its language and mild sexual refs until then, to my son, then in junior high. My son took off for his room, and we soon heard the muted beedle-bloop of video games. The rest of us stuck it out, hoping for a happy ending, but we ended up with an ending that was obviously supposed to be Meaningful. Judging from the small, restless movements of our guests, it hadn't pleased anyone, male or female, whatever age. "Now I know why it was a couple of bucks," the spouse said, and the guests went home, the turkey day fun having been pretty well punctured. Would they have liked it better if it hadn't seemed to be a holiday feel-good movie? Hard to say. The writing and acting were excellent. But cancer was too heavy a boulder for the souffle of a romantic comedy, especially a holiday one.
Anyway, while one can fully support artistic choice--Cassandra Austen finally acquiesced to Jane's choice, though we're told she argued hard for another ending to Mansfield Park--sometimes a work carefully builds a certain range of reader expectation that causes not the shock of artistic truth when flouted, but a sense of disappointment or even anger that one had invested so much time, just for that.
Arbitrary endings and deaths--respect for characters--respect for the reader. Anyone have any insights to offer here?
EDITED TO ADD: ursule has some interesting things to say in an older post.
His response got me to thinking about why narrative tones raise certain expectations in me. A comedic tone appears to promise a safety net, by which I mean implicit is the promise of no long scenes of torture, murder of innocents and the helpless, dreary or tragic situations or endings. What is sometimes termed black humor delivers these things, can even be about these very things. I suspect this is why some readers don't find black humor funny. "Kafka is screamingly funny!" "Sez you--I think he's boring and dreary." For some readers, suffering is funny, not because they are cruel people, but they can gain a distance from the pain by laughing at it. Others are not going to find the laugh mechanism triggered by certain subjects no matter what.
Several people admitted to disappointment in Joss Whedon's penchant for sudden and pointless character deaths. It is argued, "Hey, real life has pointless death all the time!" to which I often see the response, "Yeah, but none of this is real life, it's drama. Therefore I find such stuff at best pretentious." burger_eater's point about the story respecting the character resonated with me when I thought about Whedon's zap of a character in a certain piece. Just suddenly, whoops! The character is jerked away, leaving the sucking sound of my character investment, and I'm thrown right out of the movie back into my living room, tea in hand, mouth gaping as i grope for the remote control so I can backtrack to find what I obviously managed to miss.
Can the author be wrong? Certainly for individuals whose expectations are not met. There's plenty said, including here, about how tough it is to gauge what a reader brings to a piece of work. But when is it okay to hold the author to blame? Can one say they've failed?
I'm thinking of works that a majority appear to have considered a disappointment. Three examples, one classic book, one modern ya book, one movie. First is Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. Much ink has been spilled in the heroine's dispraise, including unfair and untrue observations about her lack of sense of humor (she has a whole lot more than Anne Elliott ever did) and her romantic choice at the end. Well, the choice is partly queasy-making given modern ideas about genetics, but I think the biggest failure is an extraordinary lapse on Austen's part--obviously an artistic choice--after a series of the most brilliant story arcs in her entire oeuvre, she has the narrator step out on stage and tell us the ending. And readers of her time as well as readers now have trouble believing in what happened. For two centuries, many readers have remained unconvinced.
The second example is a kids' fantasy that came out a couple years ago. It was positioned to be big, written by the offspring of a famed writer, given mondo publicity and push....and readers pretty much hated it. Most felt that what amounted to a nineties splatterpunk ending tacked abruptly onto a fantasy added up to fail. A few liked it--it got a couple reviews of praise for its risky choice, and the editor obviously thought it good, or it wouldn't have hit print. But out in the world, especially the kid world, it went down in flames. I think sometimes adults forget that most ten-twelve year olds have a burning craving for justice, which only time and real life erode. Anyway, I was sent a couple of copies (four, actually) of that book, so I took it to school. No love for that ending, boys or girls. A few refused to even try it, once some spoiler talk had gone among the kids.
Third, the relatively recent Christmas movie The Stone Family--[warning SPOILERS AHOY] what appeared to be a romantic comedy set in the holiday season promised, and delivered, funny and well-acted ups and downs as one of the kids brings home a sweetie, and the entire family is thrown for a loop. But midway in we're plunged into bathos: the mom has inoperable cancer. I'd suspected something like from the opening thirty seconds, but everyone else had totally missed the cue. My spouse brought it home the year after it came out, saying he'd gotten it at Target on sale for a couple of bucks, so we had it as the after Thanksgiving dinner movie for us and our house full of guests. When that part of the movie came on, you could feel the atmosphere of pleasurable expectation just drop. I mean, from the eighty-year-old gramma who'd been fine with its language and mild sexual refs until then, to my son, then in junior high. My son took off for his room, and we soon heard the muted beedle-bloop of video games. The rest of us stuck it out, hoping for a happy ending, but we ended up with an ending that was obviously supposed to be Meaningful. Judging from the small, restless movements of our guests, it hadn't pleased anyone, male or female, whatever age. "Now I know why it was a couple of bucks," the spouse said, and the guests went home, the turkey day fun having been pretty well punctured. Would they have liked it better if it hadn't seemed to be a holiday feel-good movie? Hard to say. The writing and acting were excellent. But cancer was too heavy a boulder for the souffle of a romantic comedy, especially a holiday one.
Anyway, while one can fully support artistic choice--Cassandra Austen finally acquiesced to Jane's choice, though we're told she argued hard for another ending to Mansfield Park--sometimes a work carefully builds a certain range of reader expectation that causes not the shock of artistic truth when flouted, but a sense of disappointment or even anger that one had invested so much time, just for that.
Arbitrary endings and deaths--respect for characters--respect for the reader. Anyone have any insights to offer here?
EDITED TO ADD: ursule has some interesting things to say in an older post.