Though we are fully post-modern, we still seem to cling hard to our modern discomfort with the unknowable; pedagogy trains people to think there are explicable answers in our fiction where they don’t expect it of life.
Everyone is happier to admit ignorance than admit ambiguity
I understand the temptation
“It makes sense that the character acts this way based on their past.”
But people don’t make sense. I feel like the psych-realist tradition stems from a post-enlightenment obsession with rationality and it has become so much the norm to just revisit this style of character that we’ve forgotten the sublimity of being discomfited by art. A person, like a planet, is never wholly knowable. Gilding a story with narrative and psychological explanations drains the magic out of storytelling.
As in many things, Brecht was right and we’re only learning too late
Oh and I’m saying this as someone who loved Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. When a story provides causal explanations of a character’s behavior, it can get away with this by making those explanations impossible to trust. Hell, that’s a book that features the conflict between rational and irrational impulses!
The purest joy of literature and other fictional media, to me, is intuiting character emotions, motives, etc. from how they act. Not as a literalism - IT IS CANON is awful and bad to me - but as a discourse between audience and artist. Trying to place yourself in the shoes of a fictional character as a form of empathy is a deeply rewarding thought process.
Or: “Good books don’t have just one interpretation, but many.”
But people do expect it of life, generally. Its part of why so many of us are either miserable or religious fundamentalists.
That’s what I mean by post-modern. Our mass culture wavers between relativistic explorations of lived experience and the belief that human experience is fractured infinitely and a modern hangover of solid explanation. We seem to believe in chaos, and, as social media shapes discourse, in power – that we are aware of how fractured truth has become and so cling to a definition more tightly, and believe it is scarcer, purer the more arcane it is.
The lost voice is the one that accepts sublimity, that spends its effort in distinguishing between the knowable and the ineffable.
Love to get effed by stories
well as long as it’s not a Mark Millar story