It’s story time again! Have a seat, cross-legged on the alphabet carpet unless your knees complain and then sit in your chair. Just like that. As it’s February, home of Valentine’s Day, I thought we should look at the stories that break our hearts into tiny brittle pieces.
For me, this one is all about character. As much as I’d like to point to starvation in the Third World breaking my heart, what really gets me when I’m reading is the finer scale: one individual being stamped on by the story, the situation, another character, or their own selves. A speech from the film
Adaptation comes to mind, when our hero is telling a writing guru about his screenplay where nothing happens, because that’s life. The writing guru is not impressed:
“Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There's genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ's sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can't find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don't know crap about life! And why the fuck are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don't have any use for it! I don't have any bloody use for it!”
Our hero says, "Ok, thanks."
The greatest fiction writing doesn’t tell us something, it shows us how it would be to be in that place, to have that experience. And when tragedy strikes and you feel it, or someone you love feels it, it hurts. It’s heartbreaking.
Characters I have loved:
Oscar Hopkins from Peter Carey’s
Oscar & Lucinda. Oscar is an obsessive gambler and priest who makes falling in love appear to be the most awkward thing possible. Why do I love him? He tries to prove his feelings by doing an utterly insane and wonderful thing, bringing a glass church through the Australian wilderness and it all goes wrong so he may as well have stayed home... but he didn't.
Hester Prynne from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter. A woman who committed adultery is imprisoned and shamed for her crime as the townsfolk try to find out who fathered her child. I love her because she refuses to tell and manages to shame the father into revealing himself. I also love her for raising her daughter, Pearl, who insists on honesty from every person in the story--even if it kills them--and goes on to become a wealthy heiress in Europe who sends her mother presents for as long as she lives. I'd love a story written about Pearl.
Viola from Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night. She is a woman living as a pageboy serving the man she loves, who believes she’s a man. It’s all a little bit silly, as the man she loves is in love with a woman who is in love with Viola because she, too, believes that Viola is a man. But from this chaos comes some beautiful prose:
Viola:
My father had a daughter loved a man,
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,
I should your lordship.
Duke Orsino:
And what’s her history?
Viola:
A blank, my lord. She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek: she pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
We men say more, swear more, but indeed
Our shows are more than will; for still we prove
Much in our vows, but little in our love.
Duke Orsino:
But died thy sister of her love, my boy?
Viola:
I am all the daughters of my father’s house,
And all the brothers too: and yet I know not.
These characters have something in common: lack of power. It seems that what makes a truly heartbreaking story for me is a great character who could have saved themselves if they were just given, or perhaps took, the power necessary to
change their stars.
The stories I mention are also all romantic stories, tragic or otherwise. I suppose I’m as cheesy as they come, seeing unrequited and otherwise foiled love as one of humankind’s great tragedies. Oops.
But one last thing, just in case this post seems a tad grim, and our human obsession with heartbreak too morbid: let’s always remember that by far the greatest thing about a heartbreaking story is the reminder that you have a heart to break.
Photo: Heartbreak Hotel Restaurant by Thomas Hawk on flickr
