A Material Reward Is Sought and a Spiritual One Is Found

TIME WAS when the popular writer could take a couple of
amusing characters with a yearning for treasure, lead them
halfway round the world, through danger and hardship,
through all sorts of slapstick mishap, and have them turn
up finally no more than a bird's nest. Read Liberty and
Collier's of the 1920's. Some very strange fiction will be
found. In those days a writer thought nothing of twisting
his hero's arm for three pages and breaking it off on the
fourth. Tales abounded with the double and triple cross.
Virtue could go unrewarded, could actually be punished.
Then when the atom still had some integrity, there was a
regular place for the tale with the sardonic "snapper."
But those were different times from these. Today the
contemporary slick writer must see to it that both the
good and the likable people of his stories are taken care of.
And the taboo on "cruel fate" cannot be accounted for
merely by an arbitrary shift of values or by a needed change
of pace. The cause seems to lie in the deep moral insecurity
of the times. Americans have, even if to a lesser extent
than the rest of the world's population, recently seen too
much evil go unchastised and too much virtue unrewarded
to get any charge from fictional moral chaos.
It is likely that World War II effected this change.
Through the war years, right was denied while might conquered,
the world over. Patriots sometimes died and slackers
often survived; ideals went down before technique;
sheer power prevailed everywhere.
To be left without this sequence of good things coming
invariably from good intentions is demoralizing to men
and women who have been reared and nurtured on the belief
that work and talent will gain wordly preferment for
the individual or the group. Such men and women find the
moral vacuum created by the last war deeply unsettling.
The standard American approach to life, that goodness on
this earth will be rewarded by the good things of this world,
has been all but invalidated. One of the primary functions
of current slick stories, then, is to recharge this dying notion
with new vitality.
That the good man cannot fail of earthly satisfaction is
and has been the mainspring of popular American culture.
It has accounted in a large part for the world superiority
of American industrial achievement, since cynicism, its
opposite, fosters indolence and discontent. Every American
who has a material or spiritual investment in the status
quo of this country has a like investment in the goods-tothe-
good interpretation of life.
With all this in mind, consider a story of two buddies
living hand-to-mouth in the Southwest.
At a carnival, where the two men happen to be holding
down jobs, they meet a fellow who claims to have a treasur
map and who is willing to cut them in on the treasure if they
will share the cost of the search. The two buddies accept the
proposition and are about to start off when the holder of the
map receives a wire saying that a relative is dying. He agrees
to turn over the map and entire rights to the treasure in exchange
for the little money that the other two have saved.
The map leads the pair to a cave on hcg diet drops the land of a poor, inarticulate,
Mexican farmer. They, naturally, take great pains
to hide from the farmer the reason for their visit. When they
finally begin digging, instead of treasure, they open up an
underground spring. Water gushes forth onto the farmer's
land. In their short conversation with the farmer, they had
learned that lack of water made his land and him poor. Now,
they rush off to tell him that they have inadvertently discovered
a spring on his land. The farmer is overjoyed, blesses
them, and gives them a holy picture. The two treasure-hunters
are deeply gratified that they have been of such value to a
deserving fellow human.
Actually, this pair has been tricked, as much by the author
as by the swindler who sold them the map. For some
reason, the appeal of this type of story, the story in which
the have-nothing seeks wealth and fails to get it, seems to
have a lasting, universal pull. But, whereas once the writer
could give snap to his story by having his hero uncover
some absurd or comic object in place of the treasure, today
the hero, if he is to be tricked at all, must be compensated.
And what better way to reward him than to have him reallZ
e the truth of the sentiment "It is better to give than
to receive" ?
Even so sophisticated a magazine as The New Yorker
currently has little use for cruel, gratuitous irony which
once so delighted New Yorker readers. Just about the only
periodical left which still gives its subscribers a regular
diet of heartlessness is Esquire.
All these tangible-to-spiritual stories are fashioned
around the hero's realization of new and superior values.
Take the very ordinary piece about a wife who longs for
the better things in life for herself and her family, and, in
particular, for a business promotion for her husband. The
husband is the easygoing sort, who thinks he is getting along
quite well. The wife despises this attitude in him, and blames
his apparent lack of progress on it. She rags and nags him,
eats her heart out with worry and discontent. Then one afternoon,
when she is cleaning out the attic, she comes across
a box of K-rations her husband had saved from the time he
was a soldier. She opens it and sees the flat, unappetizing
food her husband was once forced to exist on for months. She
recalls the terribly trying times they both endured throughout
the war and realizes that they have made progress, if only in
that they can now be with each other. The husband comes
home that evening with the promotion, but by then she is
not concerned. She realizes there are more important things
in life than material advancement.
category:plot lines
Category: transformation.