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“I Swallowed a Saint”

More than a catchy title, it shows what a protagonist must do to get noticed, these days. 

As we speak, the manuscript and its main man, Conrad Cameron Morris, are in New York awaiting a yea or a nay from a trio of publishers.  Will they like Conrad and all this swallowing business?  Need they like him?  If not like, then what?  Fear?  Be intrigued by?  Or what? 

What must a fictional character bring to the opening pages of a novel so that a reader finds him compelling? 

There’s that word again – “compelling”.  It can drive a writer crazy!

Compelling isn’t the sum of parts, we know that.  Nor a concoction derived from a recipe or formula.  We can read all the textbooks we want about “character” and still fail to give birth to “compelling”.  Yet there’s no question of its importance in fiction.

Let’s look at Conrad, whom I dearly love.  (Love, I might add, without ever having forced “lovable” upon his character description—was that a mistake?)  Look how patiently he waits at Penguin or Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (or wherever my agent has dragged the poor fellow).  Imagine the indignity of waiting at the gates while your life is assessed for—not its morality but for its marketability.  For its brand-ability, for its “compulsion”.  

Poor Conrad.  What must he be thinking?  His life, so full of paradox, and so courageously lived—is it possible that no one cares?  Might he have conducted himself differently had he known what readers want?  What publishers want?  Or is saleability a function of some quality beyond anyone’s ken?  Conrad wonders if it’s his fault, if perhaps he has withheld from the author some critical episodes from his past.  But, no, dammit, he has been butt-naked honest.

Butt-naked!  And in the first 15 pages! 

We see his penis, for goodness sake.  Followed hard upon by his clever evasion of ambulance attendants.  After which he finds his wife with an old lover.  (A wife who is dying, Conrad hastens to add.)  In the face of such vulnerability Conrad remains spirited, though exhausted from shopping for her grave.  But determined.  With signs of growing desperation, however.  And above all funny.  He’s funny!  What more do they want in a protagonist?

They are aware…aren’t they?  That his biography is a comedy?

Conrad hears no laughing from the editorial rooms.  It has never occurred to him that comedy might fail to be compelling.  Do people even laugh anymore?  What is funny?  Is he funny? 

There it is—Conrad’s lifetime quandary—Am I funny?  He swallowed a saint, for goodness sake!  What more does a guy have to do to draw attention to himself? 

Kill himself? 

If you think there is nothing funny about that, you’d be wrong.  No mission exists to which Conrad is unable to apply the logic of the absurd.  I should think that that alone guarantees a compelling character.  But of course fiction writing isn’t an exact science. 

You can take a manuscript to The Big Apple but you can’t make them swallow. 

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he reflects on nostalgia for the 80’s. See his previous OUPblogs here.

Journalists are not usually in the habit of looking back. They are charged to deliver “breaking news” to us. Novelty is the coinage of the newsroom, not history. Yet this week, the media’s preponderant coverage of the life and death of Michael Jackson has been stridently nostalgic. It reveals a culture needing and ready to sing an ode to the 1980s.

We cannot turn back time, but we can mark its passing. Up till last week, popular culture hadn’t had the chance to address the passing of an 80s superstar and with that, the 1980s. We were given occasion to mourn and contemplate the passing of the 1950s with Elvis Presley’s untimely death, and the passing of the 1960s with John Lennon’s death. So we have sung an ode to the post-war consensus, as we have sung an ode to the cultural revolution.

But enough of the 80s has remained with us - MTV, Nintendo, Reaganomics - not defunct but writhing for relevance, that we have not dared sing its eulogy. Michael Jackson’s and Farrah Fawcett’s death has served us a dramatic notice that it may be time.

After all, it is unlikely that we will see another Michael Jackson. In our era where songs are downloaded one at a time, no one is likely to sell a 100 million records (of “Thriller” or any other album) again. The 80s are over, but it has taken us three decades to find a moment to collectively mark and mourn its passage.

Tragic deaths are compelling not only for human interest reasons, but for the decisive statement about our mortality they make. For if even iconic characters who once defined their age can be so suddenly ejected from the remorseless flow of history, then there is surely no stopping the march of time.

It is no surprise that Michael Jackson is more beloved posthumously than he was all of this decade. Elvis Presley too, had become more and more of a has-been as the 60s progressed. Time is never forgiving - our only feeble antidote is nostalgia. So wrote Joseph Conrad, “Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamor–of youth! … A flick of sunshine upon a strange shore, the time to remember, the time for a sigh, and–good-bye!–Night–Good-bye…!”

If the 1980s and whatever the decade repesented are indeed over, then businessmen, journalists, and especially politicians - take note! Nostalgia can only occur when the past has been rendered past.