Asked by a follower what makes for good spiritual practice, one guru said ‘A hard job, and a lousy marriage’. The same thinking applies where writing is concerned: the only genre in which we enjoy someone else’s fun vicariously is pornography. In any other form of writing, readers are there to see the protagonist suffer in artful ways, and it’s the writer’s job to choreograph their miseries.

Now, that description may sound mean. But it also contains a lot of truth. People follow the adventures of characters that interest them, and want to experience them going through hell on their behalf. Somewhere behind this notion, perhaps, is the understanding that if someone else has a dreadful time and comes through it, then maybe you the audience can experience the payoff without having to go through hell personally.

And yes, there’s a strong religious streak to this, which explains why some very successful writers have religion in their lives. Jimmy McGovern is a classic, and look what he puts his characters through in the first episode of The Street. A man and woman living in the same road start having a casual affair behind the backs of their partners. The man knocks down the woman’s daughter in his car when he’s preoccupied by memories of their lovemaking. Now, that’s shitty enough, but where McGovern’s Catholicism takes this beyond the realms of The Jeremy Kyle Show is in what happens next. The man is let off in court for what happened as it was an accident, but the woman still wants to punish him. So she reveals first to her husband, then to her lover’s wife, that they were having an affair, so he can experience some form of suffering, one which brings in a notion of divine punishment for their adultery. Nice one Jimmy: I’d love to read The Catholic Herald’s review.

Not that guilt is confined to followers of Rome. Comics writer Brian Michael Bendis is Jewish, and describes his basic approach to plotting as putting the characters in the worst form of situation for them as individuals, and making it worse still. And with all the baddies in the Marvel Universe available to torment his heroes with, you can believe Bendis enjoys putting his protagonists through the wringer.

All very well, but what’s the point of all this suffering? Once again we’re back in the realm of spirituality: the function of torment is to help people learn. There’s a line in a Robert Fripp song that David Byrne sings: ‘Remain in Hell, without despair’, and that pretty much sums it up. However dismal this place is, we can learn to find something of value
outside us or within, that enables us to keep functioning.

So, suffering is about learning, and learning is about developing capacities that you lack. One particular take on it is to be found in the Tarot card The Tower. It looks pretty scary, showing two people being flung out the window of a tower that’s struck by lightning. Now to decode the image…

There’s a long tradition in dreams and art of buildings representing people, so a building being destroyed is to do with the destruction of a personality that’s been built up over the years. Pretty scary stuff to experience. But where that leaves those who’ve been flung out is with the opportunity to rebuild, this time choosing the building blocks of their life rather than just cementing in the ones that nature and nurture provide. It’s about beginning again, unshackled by the past, basically.

So, quality suffering enables its victims to make new choices in their life. Something we’d all want, to some degree or other. And which helps explain why we find the suffering of others so fascinating in our fiction. Not to mention, depending on the genre that the suffering is happening in, that it allows for the possibility of exciting car chases and giant gorillas. And who doesn’t love a big monkey?