The Hero's Vital Hope or Faith Wanes and Is Revived

The Hero's Vital Hope or Faith
Wanes and Is Revived
CONSIDERING HOW honey-sweet slick characters and sentiments
tend to be, you would be amazed to know how little
slick fiction deals with ideals and idealism. Strange, too, is
the fact that what the great majority of slick stories do deal
with is pleasure and self-indulgence. There is a nice philosophical
distinction made in certain quarters between
"pleasure" and "happiness, " but the two blend rather
simple-mindedly in the slicks, so that what is not the cause
of happiness is not truly pleasurable. At any rate, if there
is one philosophic tone which predominates in the slicks,
it is Epicurean. Certainly, all sorts of considerations, stated
and implied, of moral right and wrong abound in the
slicks, but the assumed end of all behavior is generally
selfish. Virtuous conduct is justified by Rousseau' s social
contract; its final motivation is almost always selfsatisfaction.
The utmost sacrifice, giving up one's life for a cause or
for another human being, does occur occasionally in the
slicks, but the characters capable of such self-immolation
are usually treated in a distant and unreal manner that
leads the reader unconsciously to look upon them as nobly
neurotic. Almost never are such characters handled so that
the reader would identify with them.
These observations are made because there is a type of
story which deals with seemingly altruistic behavior without
at all becoming an exception to the generalizations
stated above. It is a story about idealism, about a man or
woman who is driven to the edge of despair by the troubles
of others.
A middle-aged teacher at a high school with a good proportion
of its student body coming from a tough Italian neighborhood
finds herself becoming cranky, caustic, and cynical. More
and more she is withdrawing from her pupils, especially the
ones who most need her guidance, affection, and sympathy.
One young lad offers her a present. She refuses it, but in such
an ungracious manner and with such gratuitous cruelty that
she begins to examine the cause of her disaffection.
The boy who offered her the present is the cousin of two
brothers who at different times passed through her class. The
first was a promising boy with considerable native intelligence,
but the obvious victim of an environment charged with crime
and violence. She remembers having taken special pains with
him, trying to interest him in activities which would have enabled
him to realize his talents. Somehow, though, he drifted
away from her, joined a gang, and was shot in a gang war.
When the younger brother of the dead boy comes into her
class, she sees in him the same potential but also the same
danger. With much labor, she guides him into college, but
he soon quits in order to avenge his brother's death and is
himself shot.
Now the cousin is in her class. The family resemblance is
strong. She sees in the boy proffering her the present, the
same threat to her security and peace of mind. She has been
considering retirement lately, but now, in bringing to her
own conscious mind the real causes of her frustration, she is
able to conquer her sense of inadequacy. She accepts the
present and discovers that the boy is returning a gift she had
given to one of the dead youths. Her faith in her own power
to influence her students is revitalized. Teaching resumes its
old fascination for her.
This is about the limit of selflessness "real" slick characters
ever achieve. Nobler deeds are done and finer lives
are led in the slicks, but by characters who are fashioned
in such a way that they seem to be oddities whom the
reader will watch with interest but whom the reader will
not "become."
These stories of near-despair are strictly occupational
pieces. The cause of the hero's crisis arises from a sense of
failure in his work; and the final regeneration of his faith
is always directly connected with the specific cause of the
original problem. Consider this story about a minister.
He has served a certain parish for many years now, and to
the objective observer seems to have been very successful at
it. He is admired, valued, well liked, and respected. But a
succession of petty frustrations is capped by his failure to
console one of his parishioners who a short time before had
lost his wife and now has also lost his only child.
The minister visits the man, talks to him about the seem
ingly strange way God sometimes has of running the world,
but finds that he is unable to touch the man. His inability to
comfort the farmer works on him to such an extent that he
prepares to hand in his resignation at his next meeting with
the officers of the church. The officers cannot at all understand
his sense of failure, and at first they attribute it to
their lack of cooperation in the minister's various projects.
Anxious to keep their pastor, they pledge themselves to work
harder for the church's good. This does not console the minister.
Then suddenly the farmer appears at the meeting to
donate his time and effort to the project then underway. Now,
the minister realizes that he actually has been successful with
the farmer, despite the man's overwhelming grief, and is
strengthened to resume his work.
These altruistic doings always revolve around the personal
success or failure of the protagonist. Anything more
unselfish than this in the way of everyday nobility most
slick readers would find incomprehensible. The social
virtue represented in these stories derives from a life-dedication
(which slick readers sympathize with) rather than
from the spontaneous impulse to do good.
This may seem like an unnecessarily fine distinction,
but the point to be made is this: stories of good deeds are
welcome in the slicks, but there is a limit to the extent of
the common virtue in which slick audiences will be interested.
What seems to be most attractive is the character
who can serve his neighbor and still successfully serve himself.
The individual's pursuit of happiness started in this
country as an assured prerogative. It has since become
a duty.
Religion and teaching are generally looked upon as
activities altruistic by their very nature. There is no necessity
for the writer who is tackling these crisis-stories to
limit himself to such professions. Police work, writing, the
sciences-almost any activity which has a certain " tone"
to it can be made into a praiseworthy activity if the social
aspects of the job are emphasized.
Coaching the basketball team at a college may not seem
to the disinterested spectator a particularly selfless business,
but wonders can be done by the agile writer. Take
this piece:
A basketball coach has given over the major part of his
life to teaching young men to play basketball and, in the
process, also to inculcating in them the principles of good
sportsmanship. Suddenly, a "fix" scandal breaks on the campus.
Most of his stars are implicated. The obvious questions-
how long has this been going on, how many students in the
past have been similarly corrupted?-comes up again and
again in the coach's mind. Could he have been mistaken all
these years about what he has really done for these young
men? Instead of teaching students a certain sense of manliness
and fair play, has basketball been the occasion of their
corruption and ruin?
In despair, the coach plans to hand in his resignation at
the end of the school year. His entire life seems wasted. The
stars, the very core of his team, on whom he has expended so
much energy and attention, have been disqualified from play.
He is forced to work with the second team-all good boys, to
be sure-but good perhaps because they haven't yet had the
opportunity to be bad. He proceeds to train the scrubs. He is
struck by their sincerity and their willingness to work hard.
He watches them, boys of less talent than the disqualified
stars, killing themselves to make something of the school
team, and he is re-inspired by their industry and good faith
to stay on the job and use his knowledge of the game to guard
future stars from seduction by gamblers.
category:plot lines
Category: transformation.