Literary Bodies: Strong, Anemic, and Malignant

This post is more generally theoretical on literary issues as such, rather than any focus on a particular work or author, and it connects with my strand of using the human body as an allegory, particularly for narratives built on a base chiasm/ring structure, such as here and here. But it does arise from encounter with discussion of a particular film, and so there is naturally some dwelling on that film, but not really in specific details.

The present discussion begins, though, with the movie Mad Max: Fury Road, and what it concerns is what I spoke of as a body "walking down the street" well or not and the key clarification that you can have works that are complete and living bodies (complete skeletal, muscular, and surface structures) but not have them all be of equal value because there can be qualitative differences: healthy versus sickly, strong bodies doing good things versus strong bodies geared towards doing evil things, etc.

So, as I said, the story of this post begins with Fury Road. I went to this film expecting to like it at least to the level at which I have a soft spot for, say, Underworld and Resident Evil, and maybe even more depending on how well it performed. I like Hardy and Theron and even the kid (always forget his name, but he plays Hank/Beast in the XMen reboots) and I like the original Mad Max films (Thunderdome is a bit too overdone, but Road Warrior is a classic, as is the original, although very different for today's audience, with its 1970s horror screechy violins and all) ... but I walked out of the theater going "meh' and feeling a little sleepy. Such is life. I walked into the theater expecting Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them to be fun but not much more and walked out thinking it was awesome ... such is life. I'll probably at least netflix Underworld: Blood Wars when it comes out on video, but I'm not feeling the same draw to rewatch Fury Road. Part of it is probably something in personal taste, but some of it is also a feeling of objective quality versus lack of it etc., and people can disagree with me or not.

This post isn't going to be listing arguments using specific details of Fury Road, or even really a  formal argument against the film. Rather, the situation of being asked my opinion of the film again recently led me to think more on my analogy of the human body for literature. So, as I said, my initial watching of the film left me totally flat. Then recently it has come up as a topic in a certain circle in which the view of the film is more akin to that of the critics, akin to that of Rotten Tomatoes, for instance, which gives Fury Road 97% ... indeed, if one looks at the record of critical accolades listed someplace like the wikipedia article for the film, it seems more like the second coming has happened than that a film has been made.

Obviously, I encountered no similar need to change my undies upon exiting the theater, which makes it a bit, um, awkward at points, especially when it's a younger, more generally innocent and less "adult" asshole, viewer who is asking "don't you think it's a great film?" (especially when it's a younger Christian who might feel the need to be seen to "be able" to appreciate the critical attitude towards some films that are on the grittier end but not overpoweringly sexually gratuitous, to be seen to be doing such appreciation as a way to counter the accusation that the religious commitment hinders artistic sensibility, young Christian viewers/thinkers who might feel the need to have films on which they have agreed with the critical response to offset places where they have disagreed with the critical response because of sexual content and therefor maybe could use some "no, I'm not a prude" points, or whatever the very understandable motivation might be ... and of course, I have to say that it could be that the motivation is legitimate insight and that I am clueless and a bit off kilter; obviously I don't think that is the case, but I have to admit the possibility ... but at the same time, even doing that really doesn't help these kinds of situations because it leaves one in the same awkward place because what people want is not for you to admit you might be a nutter; what people want you to do is to demonstrate that you're NOT a nutter and that you ARE on their side of a debate).

ANYWAY, to get on with the advertised content of this post, the main point, so to speak. That point has to do with some of the evidence that was offered in a recent conversation for the greatness of Fury Road, and it's material of the type that should be pertinent for my thing of stories as bodies because it is about structure: one of the two young guys was arguing that Fury Road follows a hero journey plot, which is, of course, a kind of structure, so it should fit with my liking of plot structures as bones etc.

At this point in that conversation, the biggest project for me was to avoid saying "so what?" because the neutral technical meaning of that question really did fit my thoughts (whether what was being argued would change my reaction to the film even if it was demonstrably true) BUT the usual tone implied ("who give a fuck what you think?) was NOT what I was thinking. What my thoughts were was that I am sure there is some type of structuring in the film; given the amount of study done by at least some screen-writers, I assume that they use technical plot structures that have a long-standing tradition behind them. But I think there is more to a good story than just the plot structure, no matter how ancient and attested it be or how well it can be demonstrated that this particular plot structure is what this particular story is based on, just as there is more to a body than the skeleton and more to the issue than simply demonstrating that this body is a bird body because it clearly has a bird skeleton etc. It is even possible to look at an example of a skeleton and see malformations in it: it's clearly a bird skeleton, but also clearly one with problems that make it fall short on a qualitative scale.

What this situation is similar to for me is the situation of the Cormoran Strike novels written by J.K. Rowling under the pen name Rober Galbraith. The same basic thing happened: I heard about the first book and that it was her; I read it hoping to like it; My read of the first novel left me with no desire to read further books in the series when I heard that they were being written. The place where I heard that they were being written was Dr John Granger's site, where it was also related that there was a set number of seven books, meaning a distinct literary project, not something open-ended and meandering, and the idea was being run up the flagpole that the series could be chiastic/ring, and then that the first book clearly was ring composition. I've actually communicated with Dr Granger on chiasm/ring in Harry Potter and Fantastic beasts and it's something I am very into, and I trust Dr Granger's erudition and competency (far beyond my own) in analyzing this: If he says Cuckoo's Calling is definitely employing ring composition, I believe him. But that doesn't change my reaction to reading it or give me incentive to read any of the following books: I found the characters and dialogue extremely thin at best ("pleasy, pleasy, pleasy" is very cheesy, cheesy, cheesy .... and ... "that's not my leg but it's helping" ... seriously?).

Now to the pint about bodies that I have been beating around the bush in getting to: I think you can have stories that are complete bodies but of different qualities. You can have Aragorn's body, well proportioned and strong, or the body of Legolas, slender and graceful and strong  and like poetry in motion ... or you can have the body of Gollum, emaciated and stringy with skin and muscles hanging off bones although effective even for killing, or the body of Benji from Faulkner's Sound and the Fury, a thirty-three year old gelding looking at himself in a mirror standing naked and cruciform wailing senselessly at the sight of the scars of his castration. Or you you could have the body of an Uruk Hai, definitely strong but definitely not graceful or beautiful, or you could have ... well, you get the picture.

I'm not sure what kind of body I would call Fury Road or the Cormoran Strike series, except that I wouldn't call either an Aragorn or a Legolas or an Eowyn or a Faramir, or even a Sam or Frodo or Merry or Pippin. The Strike novels I might be more inclined to call a Benji body (Faulkner's sickly and senseless castrated Christ of the anemic post-bellum southern version of Christianity), but it's harder to discern with Fury Road because some of the action sequences are rather too pumped up to call it a Benji (one of the raves is the action-packed, amazing action sequences thing) ... maybe if you were able to seriously and unnaturally engorge the muscles on the Benji body with steroids to the point they have all but broken the bones with their weight ... maybe that, but not sure.

Who knows, maybe I need to watch Fury Road again. I'll probably netflix it at some point (even though I have to say that my only motive in doing so is not expected pleasure, as it will be when I netflix Underworld: Blood Wars, but rather simply "covering bases" of having "given it enough of a chance"), but my honest reaction the first time, before I knew I was supposed to cream my jeans over it as the new messiah of film kind of thing, was "oh well, at least I didn't pay New York prices and it got me out of the house for a bit and it wasn't painful the way something like reading the Davinci Code was."


As a final thought: a Hagrid Body or a Madam Maxime rules because it's just so bigger than life, as Harry thinks it "too big to be allowed" ... but it is allowed, and it's just all there in blaring real life, able to move like fire when it needs to, like Hagrid describes Maxime against the giants, but solid and heavy enough to take a beating from Grawp when it needs to.

(and a Jacob Kowalski body rules if for no other reason than that it punched Gnarlack ... but he also has that good-natured-but-not-dumb walk of a member of the expeditionary forces).