Bullying (for the purposes of fiction...)

Since I started being more prim about my coffee instake, my life can no longer accurately be measured in coffee spoons. Nonetheless a week rarely goes by without me feeling the need to bore someone with my grand unified theory of Life And Fiction, and this is a sufficiently regular event that it might do just as well. The thought is this - that a good life makes for bad fiction, and vice versa, and if your life resembles a particularly boring novel then you are probably much the happier for it.

Clearly, bullying is A Good Thing*. Plenty of novels succeed without it, but the inclusion of a bully is a pretty good way to establish sympathy with a protagonist, particulary when that protagonist is no angel him or herself. One of the most blatant but nonetheless effective examples is the opening of Wolf Hall, in which Thomas Cromwell is kicked and beaten by his father. There is a crucial caveat here though: a hero cannot be a victim without putting the story in great peril. Thomas Cromwell may be beaten* only because he is a brave youth who will not be cowed, and we see his courage and quality from the manner in which he takes his beating. We know, or a least strongly suspect, the tables will be turned in time. If he had been established as an innocent, doe-eyed child with watery eyes, we might have had a different novel altogether; specifically, a less interesting one. One thing strikes me though - we have rather less patience for victims now* than perhaps we had in the past. This seems most obvious in our national culture.

Take for example Trollope's The Way We Live Now. It is built around the central bullying character of the recent immigrant Augustus Melmotte, who is arguably rivalled in a more personal context by the 'wildcat' American Mrs Hurtle. A modern reader is liable to find the native English characters so insipid and long suffering that there would be almost greater satisfaction in them being successfully crushed or manipulated by their foreign superiors* than in triumphing at the last. There is far more to be admired in Mrs Hurtle's threats to whip her fiance for his cowardice* than in Paul Montague or Roger Carbury's ethical mithering, or in their hand-wringing fear of a female planet.

Our traditional identification with decent and timid protagonists carries through in the novels of Patrick Hamilton. In The Slaves of Solitude his heroine Miss Roach is bullied equally by a German emigre and a blustering old Englishman, but in particular it is the constraints of English manners that stops her from fighting back. When she finally escapes her tormentors, it is only by providence. In Hangover Square, George Harvey Bone eventually takes a murderous revenge, but it is neither a triumph of righteousness nor courage. Unlike his enemies, he has not even lived well by his own code, and only exacts revenge through a mental illness that prevents him being conscious of his actions. Far from overcoming his tormentors, he can then only commit suicide.

So does that mean that in fiction, fire must always fight fire? Surely conflict is what it's all about? Well, yes. Up to a point. Stepping beyond that point, that's when I encounter the epically tedious violence of Cormac McCarthy, or Bukowski's alter-ego Henry Chinaski trapped in an endless cycle of sad fisticuffs. Me, I just want the bullying* - not a bloody martial arts movie.
* for the purposes of fiction