Context Is Key

Context is key. This works with sound bytes, quotes, embarrassing pictures, and, yes, literature. When we judge something, we ought to judge it by the standards and norms it lives by rather than our own. This idea of cultural relativism not only could make one a more fair judge of character, but enrich the meaning one derives from literature. Okay, now I just sound obnoxious. The point here is that we can ban Huck Finn for all the offensive language in the world and condemn Romeo and Juliet's underaged love affair all day long, but it means that we're missing the point, we aren't reading the story from the right perspective.

In Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice, an elopement throws the entire Bennet family into chaos. Lydia, one of the five Bennet daughters, elopes with Mr. Wickham, a militia officer, because they are in love. Though we know that Wickham is a sleezebag, the full impact of this foolish decision does not hit us if we are looking at it through modern eyes. To understand the behavior of the Bennets, we must take on an early-twentieth century perspective. Now, when we approach the situation from this new viewpoint, not only has Lydia thrown away her own life, but the lives of her sisters as well. Having scandalously run off with a man, Lydia has disgraced her entire family, virtually destroying any of her sisters' prospects for marriage. This ties back in with the main drive of the story, the Bennet sisters', or rather their mother's, hunt for husbands. If we look at these women, judging them by today's standards, they're just boy crazy gold diggers, desperately chasing after any wealthy man in the neighborhood. But it is not today's standards by which they should be judged. To understand the urgency and desperation of the whole scenario, we have to look at the consequences that could fall upon the girls if they cannot marry. Women, being unable to inherit property, had no security for their futures until they were married. This was especially true in a family of all daughters, where in the case of their father's death the whole estate would pass to a distant male relative. Had none of the Bennet daughters married and their father died, Mr. Collins would have had the opportunity to basically throw them out of their own home, a possibility we see played out in Sense and Sensibility.

This brings us back to everybody's favorite moron, Lydia Bennet, and her charmingly horrible husband. Had the young couple's scandalous behavior not been covered up and rectified, the whole family could have ended up in poverty. Perhaps with this perspective, the ridiculous Mrs. Bennet may not be so ridiculous after all. When originally published, Pride and Prejudice was read by women who would understand all of this immediately, because many women were experiencing something similar to it. Now, it takes context to make any sense whatsoever of it. Marriage is no longer by any means a necessity and it would be ridiculous to imagine it impossible to make a decent living as a single woman. When we look at people running away together in modern literature and media, it is romantic much more often than disastrous.

Troll's Roles

Okay, trolls and ogres don't tend to be horribly scary nowadays, maybe they've never been horribly scary, but they had to have been at least menacing at some point. Now, they're generally more comic relief than true villain (see Harry Potter, Ella Enchanted, Lord of the Rings). We see them baffled at the simplest of tasks, warded off by any hero with a vocabulary above the third grade level, and driven entirely by basic needs. They blunder about and are most often laughably stupid, a punch line of an enemy. But perhaps while we're rolling on the floor laughing at them, we're missing some deeper meaning. Perhaps trolls, like onions and ogres, have layers. (Shrek, anyone?) In the past, we know that trolls represented a fear of the natural world or fear of the natural world’s revenge on mankind, but as they’ve developed over time, trolls have come to mean something else. If we stretch our meaning of trolls, we can include ogres, mutants, and creatures like The Hulk, because they all go back to the same basic meaning. Trolls are power and might without the intelligence to wield it properly.

Now that they have a broader meaning, we can find trolls in a wide variety of non-literal ways. Now our trolls don’t have to be covered in warts with giant dopey faces, they can be anything. We see trolls represented in characters like Joffrey Lannister from the Song of Ice and Fire books and the Game of Thrones television series. He is basically exploding with power, but is too stupid and sadistic to use it wisely, bringing about catastrophic consequences in the process. The concept of power and its proper use is a major theme throughout the series and several “trolls” pop up over the course of the story, but Joffrey is certainly one of the most prevalent when it comes to powerful idiots.

If we just talk about that very basic definition, without all of the stumbling comedy, I think a troll is something very real and very scary. Power without constraint or understanding is a reoccurring problem in our modern world. We see this threat in modern leaders and weaponry. As weapons worldwide are constantly ramped up to include more destructive and more volatile threats, the consequences of actually using them are growing too great for any cause to warrant their use. As we mix our chemicals and explosives, we have to realize that there is no purpose for a weapon too catastrophic to fire. It’s own destructiveness renders itself useless. It is raw power, but it isn’t accompanied by any concept of use or control. This is the dilemma trolls can be used to symbolize. As society continues to change and evolve, the meanings of our symbols evolve with us. Our monsters change as we do, as we find new things to be afraid of our monsters represent new things. Having seemingly conquered the natural world, we have found a new meaning for trolls, a new fear. And they are pretty scary.

Attemptus Explainus Scarus: Chapter 21

So, what does Harry Potter’s scar mean?  Well, the chapter asked, so I’ll venture a guess. Something so prominent, so permanent and distracting is designed to make Harry stick out. It makes him completely unique. Not only is it a scar smack dab in the middle of his forehead, but it is also in the shape of a lightning bolt. Sure, he could have dabbed on some concealer and been good to go, but that would ruin the point. His scar marks him, follows him, and if we’re being overdramatic, it haunts him.  Like the destiny that has been forced upon him, Harry’s scar is inescapable and singles him out his entire life. That lightning bolt scar is the physical representation of Harry’s past and the future that has been chosen for him. Without his scare, we wouldn’t have that reminder every time we see Harry’s face of who he is and what he feels he must do. Standing out so distinctly is awfully hard on an eleven year-old and it’s not like acne he can grow out of. It is a marking that stands in between him and anonymity forever.

That thing that is special about our protagonist, whatever it may be, that is why we read their story. That is the reason we care about them. It is the piece of their story that makes them worthy to have story written about them. It helps to answer the question “Why should we care?”. Sometimes that special thing comes with a physical marking. It makes them different, pushing them out of a crowd and giving us something to recognize them by. There is something that immediately comes to mind when I say “Captain Hook” and it probably isn’t his personality. A marking let’s us identifies our characters on an instantaneous and shallow level, but beyond that a marking gives us history. Every injury has a story. Whether you got that scar fighting off a ferocious shark in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Australia or falling down the stairs in front of your one-bedroom apartment, it has to tell us something.  You can’t get a scar or a burn or a marking without doing anything. A marking doesn’t just show up on a character out of nowhere. If it exists, it has to exist for a reason.

This brings us back to our good friend Mr. Potter. Of course, the plot of his story could have been the same without his famous scar, but the story would be different. We would lose a history and a connection and a pretty awesome metaphor. That scar connects the present to Harry’s grim past and serves as a reminder. It makes him stand out. It makes him special, and don’t we always want to read about someone special? Surely the story of Hannah Abbott, law-abiding, simple Hufflepuff wouldn’t make the same best-selling series. Now don’t get the wrong idea here, I don’t have anything against Hufflepuffs, but the point still stands.

Where in the World: Chapter 19

Even avoiding the deeper layer of meaning in a book’s setting, location is a major factor in plot. A large, incalculable percent of stories would make a smaller impact, a diluted point, or no sense at all if moved somewhere else. Location can make or break a story. We take Jane Austin’s women out of conservative England and they are fish out of their tea infused, tepid water. We take Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner out of Kabul and it is lost, without context and without purpose. Where a story takes place is up there in importance to a novel’s plot with characters and motivations. If we were to move Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain into the North, into a different state, or even to a different town, the entire story changes. We would lose the cold indifference of the Southern Blue Ridge Mountains towards our struggling protagonists. The environment of the story here plays a part as one of the many antagonists. We would lose the historical context of the Civil War’s outcome, the knowledge that the South will lose the war. This is one of the facets of this novel that makes it so enthralling. We know something for certain that the characters don’t. We know that the situation in the South is not going to get better. We know that their fate is sealed by history and there is no way around that. We know all of this just from the fact that our characters are south of the Mason-Dixon line. And all of this information we gather from location feeds into theme and tone. What we learn about the geography and climate and traditions and history of a location makes up how we feel about it. For example, those harsh, cold mountains and barren plains of the Civil War South push down on us with a feeling of loneliness and despair and we begin to feel what the characters feel.

Of course, location without context is just as vital. Obviously, Hobbiton and Mordor are entirely fantasy, but they are geography too. The rolling hills and sharp mountains of Middle Earth still bring stories and ideas to a scene without having any basis in history or real life. Sure, when we hear the name of a place for the first time, let’s use Rivendale as an example, we have no connections to learn from. All we have is a name and then we get the description and the history. The writer here can make this new place whatever they chose, with no baggage attached, but the second we hear anything about this new place we make those connections. Waterfalls make us think of things, mountains and cliffs make us think of things, geography makes us think. Water and grass and trees make us feel differently than lava and rocks and scrub brush. They do this because we associate habitats and biomes with different themes and tones. As readers, we expect certain things from certain settings. Nothing good is going to happen on a craggy rock face hundreds of feet in the air, in the same way that we don’t expect a villain to emerge from a field of dandelions.

Questing : Chapter 1

Though the word "quest" is used specifically and deliberately throughout this chapter to get a point across, the way I see it, any word could take it's place without dramatically altering the point. Our characters could venture off on any number of expeditions, journeys, we could go on a trip, an excursion, etc. and what we're getting at remains the same. The point here is that every time a journey is undertaken in literature there is the very probable possibility that that journey is being used to symbolically represent growth. Questing, I assume, just insinuates drama and magic to further contrast the surface appearance that a trip is just a trip.
 A sort of sub-genre that uses this "questing" symbol really transparently is road trip novels. Maybe I shouldn't go so far as to name road trip novels their own sub-genre, but it is simpler to talk about them collectively. The reason these work so well as a modern version of a quest is that a physical point A to point B makes the perfect skeleton for a personal or emotional transformation. Even though our physical journey works so well with nonphysical transformations, we don’t always find our abstract personal changes on the road. It is completely possible to hop in a car and travel across the country without even a bit of emotional change. Our characters can journey all this way and still be the same static people they were when they left the house. Our silly little characters could cross state lines or countries’ borders or oceans for no reason at all. They probably won’t do that and it would be an odd book if they did, but anything is possible.
So we know we can have a trip without a quest, but can we have a quest without a trip? Does a quest necessitate travel? Must we fight actual dragons and forge actual streams to complete our actual quest? Or can we have an actual quest, but filled with only metaphorical dangers? Could a quest take place in a single location, entirely in one’s mind, questing for answers or knowledge or change? Could I ask more rhetorical questions? Probably. It all comes down to how we define a quest. My good friend Google has assisted me in my cliché of defining an idea by presenting me with this: A quest is a long or arduous search for something. Thank you, Google. I now have this definition that is so wonderfully specific, yet also delightfully vague. A quest must be long or arduous and it must be a search. A search for what? Something. With this handy definition I could cram an infinity of stories under the heading of quest. Anything and everything can be a quest if difficult and warped enough. A quest can be the endless search for self-understanding and acceptance, but it can also be my inability to find the turkey bacon at Albertsons. I guess that’s pushing it a bit, but the point still stands. Perhaps my struggle to find a pork alternative was representative of something else, perhaps it wasn’t. Whether a trip is a quest, or simply a trip, it’s probably also a metaphor so there will always be something to talk about.