Character Motivation As A Social Barometer

Oh joy! A few minutes away from math to ramble about books, even though I haven’t been able to read one (that doesn’t involve math or concrete) for ages!

Yes, it’s a long weekend and there are midterms I need to study for. But I think there’s been enough dead air for my two readers. Never mind the fact that I had to reschedule the google hangout I mentioned a while back. Look at it this way–both of you will have that much more time to think of ways to make me uncomfortable on the internet!

So the title of this post probably sounds a bit dry. It’s definitely not as charged as the trigger for my writing this, which was fellow Western Canadian dieselpunk writer Lindsay Kitson’s latest post about female characters. Read it here.  I have never thought of it in those terms. You just want to think, “ah look at all these reluctant female kickass characters, equality isn’t an issue anymore.” But she’s right–it’s not totally the same as having the characters themselves become the driving force of the story’s conflict because they want something.

The main thing that got me thinking was the end of the post, which mentions the popularity of dystopias and how relying on characters to merely react to their surroundings is a symptom of our generation’s hopelessness. Now I wonder if it actually is a symptom of this one generation, or if it’s just the post-World War II nihilism still hanging on. In the end, that traumatic kernel, or “end of history,” is what dieselpunk is bucking against. Actually I don’t know how true that is with other dieselpunk people. Maybe some are purely interested in the look and using it in the same postmodern confusion as anything else these days.

FIrst off, I think (perhaps unfortunately. . . I keep going back and forth on this issue) once again Ayn Rand shows us as dieselpunk writers how we need to react to what’s going on. Dagny Taggart is exatly the kind of character Lindsay is talking about being underrepresented. Is Xena tougher than Dagny because she’s really tall and kills people? Not exactly. I don’t think you can even compare the two motivations, to be honest. “Get the fuck away from my children/dog/family” is different to “I want my own fucking railroad.” Both are tough, but they are entirely different.

I don’t know if this is a gender issue though. Let’s go back to where the reactive, reluctant fantasy hero originated: Elric of Melnibone. He’s not that strong, morally labile, and generally bewildered. An “anti-hero.” The way Michael Moorcock wrote this character and those stories was incredibly dense and deliberate–far from the empty postmodern heroes with anti-hero tendencies we’re used to now. To me, Moorcock’s experimental postmodern writing was the legitimate reaction to experiencing the second world war. But as with music, I think after the 1970s that honesty in general faded and since then we have been writing postmodern emptiness because we simply don’t know anything else. Rather than shocking us into a different aesthetic like global warfare did, things like the internet and 9/11 haven’t forced us out of the postmodern emptiness, but just driven us deeper into it. Popular character motivations seem more than ever to be centred around nihilistic gimmicks–like exploring criminals or people turning to morally bankrupt lives in order to achieve something better. It’s like writers only know how to grab us by screwing around with boundaries we set for ourselves–”ooh, you don’t like drug dealers? HAHAHA I will now make you empathize with one so you begin to doubt your own morals!” As usual for gimmicky writing, I think that crap is best left on cable TV.

So maybe you can make the argument that the above example isn’t much different to Elric fighting for both sides depending on the situation. Again, I’d say it’s entirely different. I can’t identify any big event or experience to cause us to still be doubting ourselves this much, or rejecting boundaries. You can only hang on to that postwar confusion for so long–writers these days have no claim to it and need to sack up and write some characters who have their own lives and aren’t afraid of thinking in certain absolutes. Agents and writing workshops always establish this necessary pattern of starting your story by upsetting some everyday pattern, which then forces your character to react. Those same agents would then put your story in the round file and tell you that your character is too passive; yet a lot might find a character written like Rand’s as too bombastic and unrealistic.

What would be much more interesting is if characters (and people) stopped accepting the idea that you can’t make up  your mind, aren’t allowed to judge, and shouldn’t be selfish and got themselves into trouble because they wanted their own railroad or space station or to win something. I think we have become more than comfortable enough with the idea that nothing is wrong and that everyone is right and that everything is purely relative.

Now does this mean we need to forget about Elric and go back to ridiculously awesome but flat manly pulp heroes? Nah. All I’m saying is that we should make an effort to break with the tendency to pat the postmodern reader on the head and console them in their nihilism. Instead,  writers should think about making them uncomfortable with heroes who know how to get shit done, want more than to return to the pre-conflict homeostasis, and have no problem telling the reader that they are likely morally superior.

The risk with that is this: readers can’t identify with the kind of drive and ambition from Rand’s stories. They’d find it offensive. They’d say it wasn’t “sustainable” for people to think that way. That it wasn’t socially conscious. Better off to write a story about an heroic anti-GMO protestor. Therein lies the problem facing us right now: any attempt at reintroducing science and industry and order is immediately mistrusted and assumed to be an attempt to imprison the world. But if you can pull it off and still keep credibility with the reader, I think  it would pay off big time.