Today, and continuing throughout November, I am presenting a series of posts I’m calling The Happiness Plot, which will make up a very brief introduction to storytelling structure. A perfect way to stay in the groove for NaNoWriMo2014.
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Ready to uncover the plot?
To find the beginning of The Happiness Plot, click here or “The Happiness Plot” category listing to the right.
Now, we continue with The Happiness Plot…
Mysteries, Thrillers, and Justice
13.
The conventions of the detective story and the thriller demand that, in the former, a criminal be found and brought to justice, and, in the latter, that someone being pursued by some force of evil ultimately find rescue. The justice that is promoted in such stories can, like the idea of “romance” in romance novels, be either thick or thin. Many a classic or “cozy” mystery, for example, focuses on the analytic prowess of the detective as he or she pursues a villain whose villainy is “thin” in the sense of being straightforwardly comprehensible. There’s nothing terribly complicated in the idea of a murderer who plants a knife in the back of Lord Boring in order to claim an inheritance. Everyone (more or less) agrees that murder is wrong.
Yet there are also mystery writers who through their mazy plots strive to promote “thicker” conceptions of justice. Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels, for example, as well as David Hare’s Worricker series on PBS’s Masterpiece Contemporary, endeavor to promote a sense of justice that Mankell and Hare see as out of step with the reigning world order. Mankell and Hare are “left-wing” in their political sympathies. A writer such as Evelyn Waugh, however, in his Sword of Honor trilogy about World War II, attacks modernity from a very different perspective, i.e., a religious and Catholic one. But what is interesting is that Waugh shares with Mankell and Hare a desire to critique the modern world in the name of a justice that in some sense is undervalued. Writers of this stripe don’t just want to underscore the evil of, say, murder; they want to shine a white hot light on the bloated underbelly of society itself.
The point here is not that, to be excellent, a story must trade on a “thicker” conception of the human good. Rather, it’s to say that in his attempt to distinguish character wants from the character’s natural needs, the writer must decide at what level of specificity he wants to address those natural needs. Does he want to promote an aspect of the human good on which everyone agrees (“Murder is wrong”), or does he want to promote a thicker aspect of that good that is more controversial (“Western Civilization becomes more chaotic and brutal the more it distances itself from its Christian roots”).
* The image above is reproduced courtesy of the BBC.
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