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Excersus LXII: Sing the Death Song, Kids
There is a tension in Christian dramatic structures that tends to keep them from being entirely satisfying. For something to be dramatic, something has to change. In the stories of the polytheistic traditions, that change can be rooted in an individual emerging from the mist into their own distinct character separate from the general community. This can't happen in the classical Christian tradition, however, which demands a renunciation of individuality, a hollowing out of self in order to fill that space with abject worship of the monotheistic figurehead of the week. So, the Big Event in a Christian narrative is necessarily something of a let-down: "Oh wow, he decided to pray more at the end. Who knew?" To appeal to a larger audience, the central hero had to be redefined into a character performing actions that Anybody Can Do... so, he is very good at forgiving, or renouncing fame, or being poor, or avoiding women - just the very things that you have to be good at if you are unambitious, or untalented, or physically repulsive. These characters don't learn things about themselves so much as they give up entirely on the concept of themselves as projects worth developing. In place of nuanced change, you have deletion and replacement, and after the twentieth or so time, that gets mighty tedious. |
