I'm really not sure what exactly this post is, whether it's a ramble, or whether I actually have a point in all this. Stand by, if you will, as I try to remember exactly what the seed is that inspired me to click "New Post" at 12:25 AM on a Wednesday night.
Oh yes. Conflict.
Picture your perfect day. What is it to you?
My perfect day consists of peace and warmth. I'm at home, with mi familia, and we all sit and talk and eat food, and enjoy the beautiful creation God has given to us to enjoy. There's a fire going, probably, and as evening comes, I sit by the hearth and tend to it. There's no discomfort, and much laughter.
That's my perfect day. And it would make a horrible novel.
Why aren't things that we enjoy experiencing enjoyable to read about? Why do novels have so much conflict and tension between their covers?
Surely it's not because they're realistic? None of the main events in novels have ever happened to me, certainly. I've never been accused of murdering my father, or had a very proud man propose to me (or any man, for that matter), or been forced to compete in a competition where I have to kill other kids my age in order to be the last man standing.
At first, when I was thinking about this, I thought, Perhaps it's some kind of escapism. Perhaps we read to get away from our dull lives. to feel excitement, and fear, and courage; to be warriors, and lovers, and adventurers.
But life isn't dull, is it? Life is full of conflict. It's just not merely as glamorous as the conflict in the books.
But sometimes dishwashers break. Sometimes we get mad and say stupid things to people we love. Sometimes we're tired, and we said we would go to the gym, but now we don't want to. Sometimes we can't find any clean socks, and "We're leaving now!"
If it was truly escapism, wouldn't we want to read that book about the girl who spends all day with her family and pulls little stick off big logs to feed to fire while she sips hot chocolate? Wouldn't that be the goal?
So it must be something else.
But of course! Seeing heroes defeat their dragons satisfies our craving to defeat our own much more stubborn monsters. It's therapeutic in some way, to see Katniss outsmart President Snow, and imagine that's us crushing our own weak desire to go home and eat ice cream instead of doing those leg-presses.
But while that's closer, it doesn't really get to the heart of it. We're not actually thinking about our own inner struggles when we're reading novels. We're not seeing things in a one-to-one ratio; hero's struggle = my struggle in some metaphorical way. Sometimes there's not a hero, and we don't know who the villain is.
The point of conflict in novels is not just that that conflict be resolved. Instead, it's an acknowledgement that there is conflict in this world. That life is tough. And while generally, life is too multifaceted and deep-layered and plain complicated to get a handle on that conflict and be able to see it from any point but close-up, novels boil it down and make you stand at a distance. Novels take grand-scheme ideas and turn them into small-scale plots.
If only all we had to do in order to get happily ever after was to... well, I don't know. But that's the point. In novels, they have some idea of what they have to do. Or even if they don't know, we know. Or even if we don't know, we know that there is something that they have to do.
Novels distill daily conflict into a highly concentrated form with a highly concentrated resolution.
Because conflict ends too. In a myriad of different ways here on earth, but ultimately in the second coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
So why do we enjoy being made uncomfortable by novels, at least those that are good, those that are well-written?
Because they're true.
