Pneumonia.
Turns out, something does beat the shingles and it comes in the form of a needle thick as an IV and full of muscle-maddening antibiotic. That was last week, who knows what adventures this one will behold?
Anyways, sorry to hide under a wet, cold dishrag all week but I’m back in the space-saddle editing and writing. In the process of sickness, I listened to Professor Corey Olsen’s podcast blindfolded (remember the rag?) Eucatastrophe came up and, as I wrestle with the concept, I called my buddy Alex to clear things up. Turns out, it’s not some clever word for deus ex machina. It’s so… much… more.
The basic concept mirrors a thought I first encountered in Making Sense Out of Suffering. The thought goes: we can’t understand eternal bliss this side of New Creation. To understand happiness, we must undergo some sort of suffering or suffering must be experienced on our behalf. Eucatastrophe plays with this idea and fits a phrase I keep saying to my writer friends.
Here’s the phrase:
Tragedies are Comedies stopped halfway through.
Of course I’m referring to the classical Aristotelian categories, not simply some diluted sense of “comedy” in romcoms. I mean a bad-ending or a good-ending, either “…and they all died” or “…and they all lived happily ever after and bought each other ponies.” In my opinion, with New Creation in mind, every story eventually ends happy. If you stop Comedy in the middle, you end on the downward swing. That, literally, is a Tragedy.
Eucatastrophe gets at the goodness behind certain catastrophes. By catastrophe, I’m getting at the old sense of the word. Words are living things with roots and branches so let’s break this one down. Kata meaning “down” and strophe meaning “stanza” – the turn in a musical or poetic piece. Sharp, downward turn. Sometimes we say, “things took a turn for the worst.” But a eu catastrophe makes all of that good. Things took a turn for the worst… for the best?
How the imprecation does that work?
The best example comes from Jesus, so bear with me a bit if you see the world in a different light. We’ll first assume that Jesus was the most innocent man to ever live–more so than an African refugee or a holocaust survivor or a bastard infant–that he lived under the banner of a sinless life, never wronged another soul. Then that man was exiled to Egypt for a time, was called the bastard child of Mary, was tortured to death as a Jew under Roman rule. If the most innocent man to ever walk the earth was falsely accused and sentenced to death, what could be worse than that?
But what if that same death allowed Him to conquer death through resurrection? More than that, what if through His death and successive resurrection, every jacked up thing in this world found reckoning and every mortal found a chance to rise in a new body along with Jesus? Wouldn’t that constitute a turn for the worst… for the best?
A smaller example would be Frodo:
“We set out to save the Shire, Sam and it has been saved – but not for me.”
Frodo had to give up the Shire, had to leave Middle Earth, to save her. Other examples fit: Luke, minus his arm and father. The last of the Numenor, minus their land and name. A world without Moriarty… and Sherlock. It also makes me wonder if Kvothe promising a bad ending actually refers to eucatastrophe. A man can hope that Rothfuss ends up a bit more idealistic in his prose than Martin, can’t he? Regardless of that, it’s certainly affected my writing and world.
In any case, the idea is that readers and audience members accept “they all lived happily ever after,” but only when it costs something. The sweetness of a happy ending must keep a bitter edge.
But no sad ending stays sad for long. Without pneumonia, I couldn’t have learned about good catastrophes.
It would’ve been different, but it wouldn’t have been better.
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