Friendship Part 4

I like to consider friendship in fiction for a better understanding of humanity. This may seem trite, but it is how we make sense of the world. I have always subscribed to the fact that nonfiction may be true, but fiction is the truth. I have met people over the years who claim to hate fiction. Of course anyone who has said that to me, it's the last conversation we have. How could someone possibly say to me that they hate fiction when they find out that that was what I did, what I wrote? It's truth that we find in fiction. A work of fiction is somehow attached to something very real, very universal. In these stories we meet characters who are moving along their own trajectory and finding the truth for themselves.

When I consider the portrayal of friends in fiction there are the predictable books that come to mind. Those books we all grew up with. Books like John Knowles A Separate Peace which was on my reading list in high school. The entire story is really about two young prep school boys shortly before or right at the start of the second world war. Another example would be Ishmael and Queequeg in Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Of course, the greatest friends that I can ever imaged would have to between Huck Finn and Jim in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. There's hundreds more. Thousands.

The throwing together of two characters in fiction who may not have been together in a natural state makes for an instant conflict. These relationships develop only out of necessity. And when the characters themselves must rely on one another in order to overcome a given situation, then we have the basis for a good story. There may be some of this in John Steinbeck's writing, like between Mack and Doc in Cannery Row or more famously between Lenny and George in Of Mice and Men. One novel I've read recently really makes me consider Aristotle's friendship of utility: Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. This is the story of two friends Ma and Luo who are removed from their cities and families and taken to the countryside to be re-educated during Chairman Mao's cultural revolution re-education program. They are two outsiders who cannot really talk or relate to anyone but the other. In this isolation, which is a social class isolation, they must get through the experience, get re-educated or dead. At a later point in the story, they meet Four-eyes who is a prisoner like themselves in another village. Four-eyes is headlong into the re-education process but has a secret stash of western literature, hence the Balzac name in the title of the novel. The two friends befriend Four-eyes specifically to get to his books. No matter what they do, they must be quiet about the books for risk of more harsh punishments.

Aside from the larger conflicts of the book, the friendships deepen only because of the external pressures. In this way, as a reader anyway, you get to see these young men grow up, or at least become a little wise. As you read, you get to learn about their friendship and how they get by. Sure, Friendship of utility? Sure, mostly, but the friendships deeper over time to much much more.

I would make the argument that friendship of pleasure is a tougher friendship to write about. To simply write a story about two people who like to be with one another is probably not an easy thing to do. After all, how much can two people really like being with one another and still make an interesting story for a reader? I loved Uzi and Mordy in Etgar Keret's novella Kneller's Happy Campers. In a way they were set together by circumstances. They were both suicides who meet up in the suicide's afterlife. Since they are both suicides, both dead, one could make the argument that neither of them need the other since they are both dead, and dead by their own hands.

When I think about the portrayal of this sort of friendship, friendship of pleasure, it is between these two friends. The basic premise of the book is the Mordy character has killed himself for a girl. When he gets to the suicide's afterlife and has been there for a while he discovers that the girl he killed himself over has in fact committed suicide herself. Then Mordy and Uzi go on a hero quest to find her.

The friendship of pleasure, really, comes in when they're on their quest. Neither really needs the other and neither has anything to lose or gain from the other. They are simply two dudes on a quest. There is something very pure in all the characters Etgar Keret gives his readers. Certainly Mordy and Uzi are no different. This writer is just very generous with his characters, what they reveal to readers, and I suppose to each other. “Suddenly, a Knock on the Door” is possibly one of the best short stories I have ever read.

To discover Aristotle's last type of friendship, friendship of the good is perhaps the deepest friendship we can have, and therefore, possibly the most difficult to write. In this friendship each partner wants nothing but the best for the other. When I consider this friendship, I go back to Huck Finn and Jim. Keep in mind exactly how powerful this book really was. It was a about a run away slave and feral white boy and was published an entire generation after the end of the Civil War.

One of the most potent things I think I've ever read in American Literature is a statement made by Huck Finn. He is hiding Jim from the bounty hunters. Huck knows that it is not social or legally right to hide a runaway slave. And in this story, it would be easy enough for Huck to simple return Jim. But he cannot. Huck knows what others have told him. He has been led to believe he can go to hell if he does not return Jim. His statement “All right, then, I'll go to hell,” still gives me chills. I think if any characters in any book truly understood friendship, it had to be Huck and Jim.

What else can be said of friendship other than that statement, “All right, then, I'll go to hell”?