Torturing main characters in an already tortured world
They're already in a tree with rocks (or worse) pitched at them. What does it look like if the writer wrote to comfort and protect them and not just lob a few more grenades?
Artful Wobbler
I’ve been thinking about beating up main characters.
If you write fiction you’ll know a variation of Nabokov’s take on characters: drive your hero up a tree and pitch rocks at them. He manages this with cruelty, humour and tenderness. Pnin is among my favourites, a ridiculous not particularly likeable character who still manages to tear my heart. Reading Pnin would be unbearable for me without the dog. The dog (perhaps pointedly not a person,) is the note of grace that allows us (me anyway) to go on.
The villain is another character type, providing a purge or proxy for our own inner darkness or as a weapon to right the wrongs of a society that villainizes the just and celebrates the brutal. The shooting death of health care insurance CEO has unleashed this kind of real-life public sentiment, a villainous act seen by many as justice for a larger villainy sanctioned by society and law and claiming untold numbers of victims.
We’re living in cruel times again, falling into the kind of abyss we congratulated ourselves on defeating not too long ago. It’s possible we’re incapable of humanitarian progress without looping back into callousness, bigotry, cruelty, authoritarianism and violence. And this is where I get a little sick looking at my poor character/s huddled in the leaves with projectiles whizzing by her ears, scraping her tired flesh. With so much cruelty and callousness floating around our real lives, families, structures and systems, torturing your main character feels not just mean but extraneous. They’re bleeding from 50 punctures, what do you want the next 5 to achieve?
But what if you want to protect them? Is there a way to write a compelling character even in confines and brevity short fiction or flash, where the writer’s goal is to acknowledge the air is already thick with arrows dripping poisons and plague and form a shield so the reader can also know, however temporarily, a feeling of protection, a moment of respite. Or more importantly, permission to act outside the assumption that we are the worst of us.
I’m not sure exactly what I mean by this, though I know what I don’t mean. I don’t mean kindness is the cure, or shine light to drown shadow, or any form of toxic positivity or denial of reality, though there is a fine place for fiction that allows us to escape ourselves and our reality. I don’t mean cozy fiction, though there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t mean tidying up messy characters or simplifying braided motives and intentions. I don’t mean hiding from or not depicting our brutality. The brutality throughout Human Acts by Nobel winner Han Kang is so powerful because it is overwhelming, uncloaked, vivid and vicious. This is what we look like when we sink into our barbarism, and we seem incapable of not doing so at regular intervals. We are expert at seeking the conditions to allow, institutionalize and weaponize suffering.
I do mean, somehow, something about bestowing writerly permission for characters who have done nothing wrong to stubbornly refuse to feel shame for that. To live beyond the way we’ve been told we can.
The point of fictional conflict is to see how characters overcome it. In longer form, a novel or novella or even a skilled short story there is space for the layering of our many forms of brutality: malicious and active, indifferent and callous, fear of standing out, isolation, exile, victim blaming, the terrifying and morally reeking ‘acceptable causalities’ of a corporation or system. Protection of self and loved ones at the expense of someone else’s self and loved ones. Usually a whole group of them. The faces of brutality are in your home, your school or workplace, your café. You probably love some of them. It might be you. One way or another, it’s often ourselves.
But the challenge in fiction is to write all of humanity, and that includes its higher aspirations, its tender longings, its magnificent sweetness. Isn’t it the deep inner ashamed wish of many of us, the bleeding hope, to not be alone, to have something other than our own bodies to blunt the blades all around us? To have someone or something with no ulterior motive or profit want the best in us and for us, and act that way? To expect it from us, even, to see survival of the fittest as a call to compassionate action instead of aspiration?
In other words the main character is already in a tree with rocks (or worse) pitched at them. What does it look like if the writer wrote to comfort and protect them and not just lob a few extra grenades? What does it look like to depict the true darkness of life and people but also its natural counter as we tumble again toward the most brutal iteration of ourselves, not just in a superhero/villain dichotomy, but through our puny selves? To give permission to be the best for us and others? To remove the shame and stigma of acting outside the prescribed roles of aggressor or victim, winner or loser where the stakes only spiral up and society only spirals down.
We’re already up a tree with arrows and rock flying at us. What if we, like the dog in Pnin, are the saving point of grace? What if the author flung that toward the tree instead?
You probably have great examples of stories, poems, flash, micros, novels and more that achieve this already. I’d love to hear about them.