Inverse Joy Plausibility

To recap: I'm university this semester, at a price tag of about a thousand dollars I don't have, because I was sticking around to take classes that were discontinued after I decided to stick around this year and thus told my mental health practitioners they had until the end of this semester to manage to smoothly hand me off to someone else, thus I need to keep them until the end of this semester, thus I need to take a class even though the good ones no longer exist.

In that class (only takes one to be a student) the teacher likes people taking notes in the books and wants us to do it.  I'm actually a fan of marginalia myself.  There's so much that we only know about from people scrawling stuff everyone knew in the margins.  That said, I'm not good at making it.

None the less, at the top of the page, over the title, I wrote "Inverse Joy Plausibility".  That's not a fully formed phrase, much less a coherent thought, but here's what happened.

I was thinking, in depth, about a certain kind of story, then I sat down to read the assigned story and got that sort of story vibes, though I dismissed them when the vibes didn't seem to pan out, then I hit an emotional turning point and felt sure that it was that kind of story, and the ending bore that out.

The story was "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin.  It was written on April 19th, 1894 and published on December 6th of the same year.  If you don't want it spoiled, stop reading now or, you know, take this moment to go and read it.  It's not very long at all.

Ok, so what happens is this

• The main character has a heart condition and they're worried any shock could kill her
• In comes a telegraph saying that her husband is dead, the husband's friend gets confirmation that he's really dead and then rushes off to try to break the news lightly, picking up main character's sister on the way
• Main character doesn't have denial or anything, the blow hits her all at once and she goes off to be alone
• She has a feeling that she's been so conditioned not to feel that she sees it as something external to herself and is afraid when she feels it coming but when it does come...
• FREEDOM!  In the society (and class) she was in the only free women were widows and where before she'd hoped for a short life because it kind of, you know, sucked, now that she's awakened to this freedom of widowhood she wants a long life in which she is in charge of herself.
• Turns out her husband isn't dead, he wasn't even near the accident and didn't know there was one.  The shock of the freedom lost does in fact kill her.
• The doctors assume that the only thing a woman could feel at seeing her thought dead husband alive is joy, so they assume that the joy killed her.  Fuckers.

There is an emotional structure to this kind of a story, and that's what I was thinking about before sitting down to read the story, thus before I knew it was this kind of story.

Things start really fucking bad.  She's emotionally wrecked by the news, sobbing uncontrollably.  When the good part of the situation starts to dawn on her she's afraid of it.  In class there was looking at the exact words and as the teacher put it "When an unknown thing is creeping out of the sky to possess you, that's usually not good," or thereabouts.

But then throughout the course of the story things get better and better.  She realizes the freedom and the more she thinks about it the better she gets.  She realizes that, while she did love her husband (sometimes) and was and will be sad that he is dead (she knows she'll be crying uncontrollably again at the funeral) she cares about freedom more than love and indeed more than anything else in her life.

She seriously went from a position of wanting to live a short life to wanting to live for a long damn time.  And then, when good emotions are at their peak, a twist brings everything crashing down to tragedy.

That works.

We as readers, viewers, listeners, and general consumers of fiction are prepared to believe in a dramatic story in which things get better and better and then a deus ex machina destroys all hope and joy.

But what if we flipped it?

She starts out in a good place, awaiting the return of her love, but as the story progresses there are subtle hints, then not so subtle hints, and finally confirmation that he died on the return journey, she her good place is destroyed and she sinks lower and lower into depression and even reaches the point of being suicidal.  Then, when things are at their darkest, the husband walks in and it turns out that, just like in the real story, he's fine, he wasn't near the accident that was reported to have killed him, and didn't even know there had been one.  Joy reinstated and they live happily ever after.

It would never work.  We can have the out of left field thing in comedy, but not in drama.  Mind you if I remove the last sentence "Joy reinstated and they live happily ever after" it can work.  Think the Twilight Zone episode where it turned out, oops, there wasn't a nuclear attack coming.  What people did in the dark times made it impossible to go back to the way things had been.  There was no returning to the light.  That ending worked.

Down endings, it seems, work.

If him returning had somehow made everything better though, it wouldn't.

It was reported that the husband died and the first thing that happened was that a telegraph was sent back saying, "Are you sure this guy was killed," and the reply was, "Yup, he's totes dead."

To have him return and make everything good would be rejected by the audience as implausible bullshit.  Deus Ex Machina at the worst.  (And you don't even get Dionysus on a crane.)

But to have the exact same thing, return home unscathed after being reported and then confirmed dead with an explanation of "He was never even there in the first place" that works.

Somehow, the idea of plausibility is tied inversely to the idea of good outcomes.  Does this produce joy?  Not plausible.  What if it did the exact opposite but was otherwise exactly the same?  Totally plausible.

It's part of why happy endings are so much harder to pull off.  A lazy writer (which Kate Chopin was not, it's a good story with important things to take from it) can do down endings just fine.  It takes really fucking craft to make a happy ending that resonates with an audience as non-contrived.

For some reason, we're accepting of contrivance provided that the result is "It got worse."

Before looking at Chopin's story focused me on that, I was imaging a land dispute.

Imagine someone's great grandparent's farm.  If it was divided equally at each generation then, depending on how many kids were common in the family, there could be a lot of partial owners.

If they had kids like my dad's family then whoever our protagonist is finds themselves with about 343 family members of their own generation plus however many of of the about 49 members of the previous generation are still involved.  If they had kids like my mom's family then the numbers are a bit more reasonable 8 same generation stakeholders and 4 older generation stakeholders.

Add in a few developers, the city council, a nature conservatory group or two.

If we take this land dispute and have things get worse and worse until the protagonist is going to have to give up because ze doesn't have the funds to compete, and then when all hope is lost the protagonist finds buried treasure, is able to buy out the other stakeholders, and saves the farm then readers are going to cry, "bullshit!"

Flip it.  The protagonist goes around to the various stakeholders and interested parties and slowly, with ever so much difficulty, there's hope and everyone is just about ready to agree to a deal mercifully just before the protagonist isn't able to afford working on this shit anymore.  Then that same buried treasure is found and suddenly everyone isn't willing to agree to the deal because they now believe the property is worth more and now archaeologists are joining the bickering table.

The readers are going to say, "Figures."

I don't really have a point beyond the fact that it seems like people in general find joy and happy endings unbelievable and thus not credible while they're much more ready to find the opposite plausible.

And that makes down endings easy and happy ones hard.  Not that it should be used to judge writers.  The built-in plausibility of of down endings doesn't take away from the craft of good writers who use them.  A lot of writers who do up endings aren't actually up for the task of selling them and so it comes off as forced and false.