The Literary Pursuit of Happiness

Photo courtesy of Flickr via Taylor, ‘Reflecting on a Window Pane’ under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0. Full terms at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0. Image was modified.

This is a happy ending:

Kate and Matthew meet in a restaurant. Kate is waiting tables while she waits for dialysis to incapacitate her; Matt is fleeing from his psychotic junkie ex-wife and eating haphazardly in diners across the country. They instantly recognize each other as kindred lost spirits. They fall in love.

Kate gets sick enough to be dropped by her health insurance. They no longer have time to fulfill all their plans; they compensate with new plans. Matt suggests marriage but Kate won’t make him a widower, and just as her liver begins to fail — this is the climax of their rather linear plot map — the ex-wife appears. Kate, from her hospital bed, convinces the evil ex to leave her ex-husband alone. Her resulting empowerment gives her the strength to recover for a few minutes, until — it is the power of love! — she gets a new liver. What a triumph. Matthew proposes.

This is a sad ending:

Kate dies on a hospital bed for ten pages. Her loss gives Matthew the strength he needs to commit his ex-wife to a rehabilitation program, reflect momentarily on the butterfly effect, and move on. The story wraps its silver lining around your neck.

This is the problem:

As Richard Lea observes in his December 2013 article in The Guardian, “literary fiction has a problem with happy endings.” And writers know it. In a conversation with Lea just after winning the 2013 Guardian First Book Award, writer Donal Ryan hesitates to admit[ref]According to Lea, anyway. As you can see in the comments below, Ryan himself disagrees with this interpretation of his words. — Ed.[/ref] that his new novel-in-progress might stop short of defiling readers’ hope for humankind. Ryan is the author of The Spinning Heart and The Thing About December, works which have won international applause for — as Lea calls it — their anger, despair, and “dangerous greed.” According to Lea, Ryan seemed “almost embarrassed to admit that… his next book is looking a little more upbeat.”

Ryan’s case is not unique; when writers are asked whether they consider the ending of their novel to be ‘happy’, if the answer comes within a kilometer of yes, they dance around the question as if they have been asked if they have romantic feelings for their cousins. “Well, I don’t know if that’s exactly the proper word — the situation is a bit more complicated — can’t be summed up in a phrase — ”

They feel instantly criminalized.

Happiness does not receive thoughtful finger-snaps from literary critics like tragedy does.

Why is it our obligation as writers to abandon our characters at their moment of most dire need? Franz Kafka writes in The Blue Octavo Notebooks that “doing the negative thing is imposed on us, an addition; the positive thing is given to us from the start.” He and many other “serious” writers seem to believe this, that the “positive” is a sort of default assumption, and that real writing peels away the painted, plaster layers of deceit to reveal reality’s cracked and complex truth: the bleakness at the center of every literary case study. They believe that to tackle life’s complexity is to reveal its tragedy.

They ignore the fact that happiness itself is just as complex as sadness.

This is an Ancient Greek happy ending:

Kate and Matthew are young warriors of Argos. They are exquisitely built, with lush hair that cascades about their shoulders. The children of a long line of aristocrats, they are learned in the philosophical and mathematical arts, students of Aristotle and scholars of Plato; they are looked up to by their peers and successful in the public sphere.

They are beheaded in battle.

But the battle is won, their bodies are honored with a public funeral, and the Argives — considering them to be the greatest of youths — have statues erected of them, which are sent to Delphi.

Happiness: A History

Happy endings have prerequisites. These prerequisites have over centuries evolved, bred, and mutated — they are unpredictable and genetically diverse. Yet the attributes most frequently and most confidently applied to happy endings are “contrived, unrealistic, fake.”

“Stupid.”

The happy endings of today’s Kates and Matts have different prerequisites than those of Ancient Greece’s Kates and Matts. The anecdote above is adapted from the story of “two young men of Argos,” related in Herodotus’ Histories. The protagonists of this narrative die with all the prerequisites for a happy ending: resources, good friends, and glory. But were this story to be placed in a modern context, Kate and Matthew would violate every expectation of a happy ending for one simple reason: they die.

Unlike the modern definition of a happy ending, the Ancient Greek definition of a happy ending hinges upon the finality of death. And in fact, so does the Ancient Greek word for happiness: eudaimonia. Directly translated from its roots, eudaimonia possesses the element of “good” and the element of “spirit,” or, more applicably, fortune. In other words, the Ancient Greek conception of happiness depends upon some measure of final good fortune — which means that so long as there is time for life to take a downwards turn, one cannot achieve eudaimonia.

The story surfaces during a philosophical argument between King Croesus and the wise Solon in which Croesus attempts to persuade Solon that he himself is the happiest man alive. Solon, however, is persistent in naming only examples of the happy dead — examples which do not include Croesus. Until a man is dead, Solon says, “keep the word ‘happy’ in reserve. Till then, he is not happy, but only lucky.”

The Ancient Greek happy ending does not deny death — it depends on it.

It follows, then, that when readers rebel against happy endings that involve survival of the odds, they are not only rebelling against an unrealistic lack of death (after all, plenty of tragedies do not need to slaughter their characters to break our hearts) — they are rebelling against happiness itself. As Kate and Matt of Argos demonstrate, death and joy are not mutually exclusive; countless Disney movies end with villainous cartoon characters tumbling into chasms to the ecstasy of their audiences. Therefore, the characters’ ability to survive is not what stinks of magical thinking to the jaded reader. The perceived stench comes from the characters’ simple ability to achieve happiness and hold onto it until the book closes.

What do they do?

Just as all works of literature must have endings, all endings have places in literature. We spend a great deal more time talking about what sad and happy endings are than about what sad and happy endings actually do. And what they do is use our emotions to change our interpretations of stories.

The endings of stage plays have very pointed effects on the stories they have told. Any play’s dramatic action can be understood in terms of what the influential actor and theater director Konstantin Stanislavsky calls “super-objectives.” A super-objective is a character’s goal throughout the play, the thing they most desperately want and which drives their every scene and connects their scenes together. Plays’ dramatic action is driven and defined by the clashing objectives of their characters — the outcome of the action, therefore, has a sharply intelligible effect on the play’s message. A play in which the protagonist achieves her super-objective and all ends well casts a very different light on its theme than a play in which the protagonist achieves her super-objective and becomes estranged from her entire family.

Similarly, a play in which the protagonist fails to achieve his super-objective and all ends well presents an argument different from that of a play in which the protagonist fails to achieve his super-objective and becomes estranged from his entire family.

Readers often confuse happy endings with small rubber toys sold in vending machines: mass-produced without any real thought behind them, to deliver an instant of unmemorable pleasure. I admit that many happy endings are much like that; it is much easier to create a successful tragic ending than a successful happy ending.

Consider the Ambiguous Moral Suicide Plot. Plenty of stories follow this formula: a character in crisis makes a decision which ultimately leads to the unraveling of her worldview, and from the rubble emerges a world that she sees no point living in. From this point one of two things happens — the character succumbs to the pressures of his society and gives up his identity (i.e. Winston in Nineteen Eighty-Four), or the character throws himself off a bridge (i.e. Javert in Les Misérables). Obviously I do not mean to belittle the extremely complicated emotional mechanisms and microdecisions that went into both of these tragedies, or to say that as the rats approached Winston’s face, he should have used the sheer magical force of his will to break out of prison and save Julia, rather than crying out, ‘Do it to Julia!’ That would be absurd. Winston’s surrender gave his story significance. But happiness and significance are no more mutually exclusive than happiness and death.

What I am trying to say is that it is not easy to throw yourself off of a bridge. But it is also not easy to step back from the edge.

Most people who consider themselves literature aficionados will wrinkle their noses at the idea of a happy ending. Happy endings are for colorful paperback books which people read on the beach while reclining back in lawn chairs with a piña colada in their other hand. Happy endings are for stories that are quickly devoured and wholly forgotten. And happy endings are for people who don’t want to think too much. Sometimes this is true; sometimes, as exemplified by Kate and Matthew in their first case study, things work out just because the author knows that we want them to. But that is not the case in real life. In reality, when things go right, it is often because we have struggled to reorient ourselves, because we have made conscious and complex decisions to rise above our own shortcomings — and maybe, maybe had a little help from the very same luck that throws the next person into a fatal car accident. It is no trivial or trite endeavor to achieve a real-life happy ending to a single segment of one of the many plots which crisscross and tangle up our lives. But people do. Why, then, should it be considered juvenile to write about them? Why are we only allowed to be moved by the people who fail?

Today’s literary readers believe that they have to suffer to reach enlightenment. What they do not realize is that sometimes, a light at the end of the tunnel makes suffering even more impactful. Light is not a piña colada. Light is not a cherry on top. Light has a dual wave-particle nature, for God’s sake; it is textured, and complicated, and multicolored, and so is the joy a cancer patient feels when she hears the word remission and realizes that she has a shot at the rest of her life.

Readers forget about the spectrum. When faced with happiness — no matter how impure and convoluted — readers feel cheated.

“Stupid” (and synonyms)

I have very strong opinions about John Green novels. Last year in Barnes and Noble, I glared at the cover of The Fault in Our Stars for a few moments and decided, no. Looking for Alaska was enough for me. I’ve got the gist. I once asked a friend why she thought The Fault in Our Stars was so amazing — why she enjoyed watching people inevitably die over and over again — and she said, “Well, you can’t let them both live, that would be stupid.” I didn’t have my John Green rant quite as refined then as I do now, so I let the subject go, but I couldn’t help but think that it wouldn’t be stupid. At the very least, it would be no more or less stupid than killing off Augustus just to satisfy some arbitrary definition of realism. What mechanisms govern cancer survival? Even when we harness our most advanced scientific understanding of cells that rebel against their host bodies, the only definite answer still comes down to this: luck. Hazel was lucky. Augustus wasn’t. So why should bad luck be more realistic than good luck? Why should bad luck be more profound than good luck?

Maybe it shouldn’t.

After all, it isn’t.

Stupid. Contrived. Unrealistic. Fake. We throw these words around without knowing exactly what we mean; we brand plots that displease us with our vocabulary. I tend to condemn a plotline as “stupid” or “contrived” when I feel manipulated. Manipulative books include books that produce a strong emotional response which they do not deserve simply to exert control over my tear ducts (i.e. Looking for Alaska) and books that try to produce a strong emotional response — but succeed only in letting me know how hard they are trying (i.e. Allegiant, the third installment of the Divergent trilogy). Admittedly, these examples fall under the category of teen fiction, but they share something in common with many works of “serious adult literature”: both novels have been praised for being brave enough to circumvent the traditional, walk-off-into-the-sunset resolution.

I am not convinced that there is anything brave about making us frivolously sad instead of frivolously happy.

This is an Enlightened Happy Ending:

Kate and Matthew are newly married in the English countryside in the early 18th century. In 1704 their main concern is having a child; in 1705 their main concern is money. Both come from farming families and neither is ready to face the realities of city life encroaching from the north. Both feel alone.

They like each other all right, but mainly for practical reasons, and are becoming frustrated with themselves and each other for their lack of offspring. However, in lieu of producing children, Kate creates a new textile design, which she and Matthew begin taking to the city. What begins as a design becomes an empire; what had been toleration becomes admiration; admiration becomes love.

They brave the city for the sake of their livelihood. Their source of livelihood becomes a source of pride.

Assumptions

Contrary to Kafka’s assertion, the positive is not always given to us from the start. During the Middle Ages, the negative was the default assumption; it was generally accepted by the dominating religious community that happiness, in this world, was out of reach. And in the eighteenth century, the radical move, the brave move, was to suggest the opposite: that one could have happiness in this world. And that happiness could be achieved through one’s own force of will.

The Enlightenment made happiness not a myth but an achievement. A happy ending, today, is also an achievement.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale throws its readers headfirst into a disturbingly plausible dystopia and into what seems like a hopeless situation. Those of us who have read a bit of adult dystopia have been groomed to expect the worst in these sorts of novels; we know that when we are plunged into circumstances that seem hopeless, and given hope, the only thing that can happen is a turn for the worse-than-we thought-was-possible. We are allowed to hope only so that our hopes can be wrenched away. And mutilated.

That isn’t how The Handmaid’s Tale handles hope.

Throughout the novel, Atwood’s protagonist, a woman named Offred whose sole hope and purpose in her life is essentially to be a walking incubator, is surrounded by shadows of escape. The Commander, a man who more or less owns her, has begun inviting her to his study to play Scrabble; a young man who works for the family has begun giving her meaningful glances; and then there is the shattered dream from years ago that she might flee to Canada. Experienced readers know better than to think that any of these things will come to light in a serious work of fiction. A novel whose language is so ornate and whose world is so devastated will only break its readers’ hearts.

That was what I believed, and feared, and bit my nails over, the entire time I was reading The Handmaid’s Tale. I was wrong. The Handmaid’s Tale does not give us an ‘ending’ in the traditional sense of the word. It leaves us with an image. A car pulls up outside the house. Offred (I think — I could be remembering this wrong) is on the stairs. The Commander and his wife are watching. They don’t entirely understand what is going on. Neither does Offred.

She steps off the stairs. She gets in the car.

Where does it take her? Atwood leaves that to us to decide. We are lead to believe that this car will take her to some sort of escape, something that is left undefined, left as nothing more than the stark potential for hope. Maybe she will be brought to a rebel colony with the young man who has almost been her friend. Maybe she will be brought to a rebel colony and then the rebel colony will be invaded by the government and she will die.

At the end of the day — like Atwood says in her essay — the car’s destination doesn’t matter. People who are looking for an end-all-be-all ending to Offred’s story will come to the conclusion that Offred will die somehow, but that is not what The Handmaid’s Tale is concerned with. The ending of The Handmaid’s Tale is the possibility of a happy ending, which in itself is a happy ending, particularly compared to the typical tragedies one finds in classic dystopia. Atwood does not use hope to victimize us. She gives us hope and lets it grow, and therein gives it power.

Offred does not cheat us by surviving.

Epilogue

Margaret Atwood says in her essay “Happy Endings,” that ‘the only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die.’ I agree; the same is true for Kate and Matthew.

The ending of a novel is not the ending of a life — it is the ending of a story. And the ending of a story does not attempt to reflect the ending of a life. A happy ending promises neither eternal life nor eternal bliss; at its core, whether it has brought a woman to ambiguous freedom or two lonely souls into love, it promises nothing more than the possibility of happiness. Sad endings, too often, promise the opposite.

I have a rule when I write novels: I will only kill a character off if I believe that it is the best thing I can do for the novel, for the other characters, and for her. Like it is in life, deliberately killing somebody when I don’t absolutely have to is murder. So is leaving him curled up in a windowsill contemplating the hopelessness of the universe. So is turning him into a tree. I love my characters enough to desperately want them to catch a glimpse of their happy endings; and if I believe they have the strength to grab hold of their happy endings, they will. And if they don’t, they will break my heart just as they will break their readers’. I won’t snap a character’s neck just to throw her broken body into an audience’s gleeful mouth. I respect her too much for that.