The Fiction Toolkit, Part 12
Shelly Lowenkopf -- April 15, 2009
Another in a series of excerpts from Shelly Lowenkopf's The Fiction Writer's Tool Kit: Terms, Concepts, and Devices for Building a Better Story. In this installment Shelly looks at Schadenfreude.
Schadenfreude -- pleasure at the evidence of pain or misfortune in another person; delight at the reversal of fortune experienced by someone else. At its most basic, it is seen in the highly physical boff-and-sock comedy of Punch and Judy, the Three Stooges, or someone--anyone--slipping on a banana peel. In its more sophisticated forms, where an individual carries a sense of entitlement too far, we have Coriolanus and our own Benedict Arnold.
One of the many words on loan to English from another language, schadenfreude is a shot-gun marriage of two German opposites, damage and joy, thus "You lose, I smile." This pleasure helps us understand what Aristotle meant when he tied the can of catharsis to the tail of the dog of tragedy.
Schadenfreude allows the reader to feel pleasure when a character, say George Amberson Minafer of Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons, gets a well-earned come-uppance; that such a feeling exists in many humans is often an embarrassment until, on reflection, the larger perspective is revealed. We are able to experience tragedy in literature with empathy for the fall from the heights of the major characters, but only after we first experience the sigh of relief that we were not the intended targets.
Tragedy and humor have an uneasy relationship, each having kinship with one of the more objectionable states of being, hubris, and the resulting behavior from such association. Tragedy tends to be less physical and posturing than humor, but it is situational from the get go; it would likely not have established a foothold if the hubris of "My way is the only way" had not got in the front door.
Memorable characters may have their schadenfreude genome, taking a moment or two to gloat when an opponent seems to come out second best in a collision with Fate, but it is safest to leave as much schadenfreude as possible to the readers--not the characters. Equally valid is the notion that the character who has met a tragic downfall or been handed a serious reversal of fortune and goes forth without breast beating or moaning is the character the reader will regard with the most respect. Once again, leave t the deconstruction to the reader.
Shelly Lowenkopf's soon-to-be-published The Fiction Writer's Tool Kit: Terms, Concepts, and Devices for Building a Better Story. is more than a lexicon. It defines a conceptual language for thinking about fiction, providing the writer with the tools to raise the level of craftsmanship of his own work.