Joy in Fiction?
We are programed, each of us, to pay attention to the negative emotions, fear, anger, jealousy, sorrow. Being aware that we are afraid and tending to that fear is a matter of survival, even today. We don’t need a saber-toothed tiger waiting to pounce to justify our fear. A semi barreling toward us will do very nicely. Or a rumor that there are going to be cut-backs at the office.
But joy is another matter entirely. It comes on the breath of a spring day and is gone with the passing breeze. Tara Brach, in a recent dharma talk, recommended pausing for ten breaths when we are visited by joy. Ten breaths to catch it, hold it, and let it penetrate our bones. Because if we don’t pause to notice joy, it flies away.
Fine advice for living a life, but I found myself asking, how does that piece of wisdom relate to the stories we tell? Is the fact that we are programed to notice and to keep thinking about the negative emotions the reason the great tragedies have so much more power than the comedies, why Paradise Lost has more impact on the psyche than Paradise Regained?
The complaint circulates often, especially about young-adult fiction, “But it’s so depressing! Why does the literature for our young people have to be so depressing?” And part of the reason is certainly that, in our culture, happily ever after endings have come to be seen as unsophisticated. But I suspect some of the answer lies here, that the happy stories, the funny stories melt away. The ones that pull up dark feelings stay. And we all want our stories to stay.
Part of the reason for darkness in our stories lies, of course, in the very nature of stories. Stories are based on struggle. If you don’t have struggle, if your character doesn’t have a problem that feels really important, at least to that character, you don’t have a story. At a father-son book club, a father once asked me, “Why does the father in Runt have to behave the way he does? Why can’t he be kinder? Why can’t he acknowledge and support his son?” And the only answer I could give was, “Because this is a story. If the father had accepted Runt as we all want him to, I would have no story to tell. If all had been fine in Runt’s world, you wouldn’t care. You would, in fact, be bored.”
This “rule” of storytelling is so strong and so built into our unconscious expectations that if a story starts out, as they sometimes do, with all being right with the world, we read tensely, waiting for disaster to strike. It’s a story, after all. Disaster has to strike. Our lives can sometimes go along smoothly for days, months, years, but lives as they are lived don’t make good stories. A life can only become the material of a story when someone begins selecting, leaving out all the too-easy bits, perhaps, too, leaving out the joy.
No, I’m not advocating more happy endings to our stories. A story’s ending must reflect what a story means, dark or light. But I wonder, is there a way, while we’re dealing with struggle, while we are creating an emotional connection to our readers through strong negative emotions, to occasionally build in ten breaths for the savoring of joy?
It’s just a thought.