wait, then where do baby protagonists come from?

I found this quote and the following reaction by Tyler Cowen on his blog puzzling:

In his new book Encounter, Milan Kundera writes:

I was rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude when a strange idea occurred to me: most protagonists of great novels do not have children. Scarcely 1 percent of the world's population are childless, but at least 50 percent of the great literary characters exit the book without having reproduced. Neither Pantagruel, nor Panurge, nor Quixote have any progeny. [...] and Kafka's protagonists, except for the very young Karl Rossmann, who did impregnate a maidservant, but that is the very reason -- to erase the infant from his life -- that he flees to America and the novel can be born. This infertility is not due to a conscious purpose of the novelists; it is the spirit of the arc of the novel (or its subconscious) that spurns procreation.

Toss in Melville and Conrad while you're at it. What I find striking, however, is that contemporary writers seem more likely to give their protagonists children (Roth, Franzen, Updike, for a start, plus the rise of female authors helps this trend). And that is precisely at a time when more people are having no children at all. The decline of the heroic ideal in literature, and the decline of the journey of adventure, seem to be stronger forces in predicting fictional family size.

I find Cowen's comments at the end not really puzzling in themselves, just that he passed on the quote from the book as self-evidently interesting. And maybe there is more after that quote from the book that clears it up, but my reaction to the quote is, "Because Western novels are about people who do shit." In fact Cowen acknowledges that when explaining why there are now fewer childless protagonists: the decline of the novelistic "journey of adventure."

The quote is a good discussion prompt, but not so much because it is so mysterious why protagonists are childless as because there must be like a dozen really good reasons. First in my mind, the Western protagonist is by definition and intent of creation, an exceptional adult, who gets to do interesting things (things normal adults only fantasize about) because of 1)ability, 2) immediate circumstance, 3) larger circumstance (not being hindered absolutely). Parenting hinders absolutely. There are disabilities that might make a novel more interesting, like if the protagonist is narcoleptic, but if he or she has kin, then the whole novel would just be 250 pages of other people yelling "Please! Tammy, you really shouldn't be doing all this novelly shit and need to take your kids to the pool!" Even if the old middle class which birthed the genre of novels could in practice outsource their real-life child-rearing without reprobation, the identity of parenthood interrupts the reader's conception of the protagonist's selfness. It strips them of that nervous intellectual self-concerned energy whereby they will usher the reader onto an absurd testing ground for unpractical ideas.

Second, the Western Protagonist is driven by conflict. Romance and Warfare, for example, are conflicts whose structure and shibboleths are really genetically similar. Other traditional fictional/nonfictional (doesn't make much difference in Western writing because we use the same conventions of narrative for both) other traditional conflicts have large-percentage DNA matches to those. Child-rearing is not just a different animal but a different kingdom, say the plant kingdom. Child-rearing can have drama and triumph, but it is not self-centered. Romance and war build up the ego of the Western protagonist; those make the Western protagonist more heroic by result of conflict. Parenting is not a struggle that makes the ego stronger, it is a process of self-subsumation.

And there are probably more reasons for the childless protagonist, that can be added to that list. But the idea that novels have been devoid of parents as some type of commentary on procreation is silly: novels are devoid of parents because they are incapable of commenting seriously on procreation within the bounds of fictional convention.

Not that this is as it should be: I think you can make a good fiction about a parent and generally there should be more fiction that takes place in a conflict-null universe. I find the prevalence of the Western convention of conflict-centric narrative in fiction and non-fiction a little boring now that I am no longer 16 years old, generally.

From the Weberspace: 9.5.2010

Here is some recommended long-reading that probably I think came to me as so much else does via the Daily Dish:

"The Real War 1939-1945" by Paul Fussell, in The Atlantic, August 1989.

The piece is a rambling, extremely broad reflection on the disparity between general public conception of the war -- purposeful, morally organised action in which heroes died clenching their shoulders with grimaced faces -- and the reality for those who actually fought it -- dirty, disorganized ennuie and horror in which terrified men died without their faces attached to their bodies. It took me a week to get through it, but I highly recommend it even though it never resolves to any unified conclusion. It also serves as a good guide to recommended reading for a realist history of WWII:

But in a strictly literal sense the result of the years of the bombing of Berlin and its final destruction by the Russian army was, for much of the population, actual madness. Just after the surrender, according to Douglas Botting, in From the Rains of the Reich, some 50,000 orphans could be found living in holes like animals, "some of them one-eyed or one-legged veterans of seven or so, many so deranged by the bombing and the Russian attack that they screamed at the sight of any uniform, even a Salvation Army one."

And the most arresting, horrible moment of the article comes from Fussell's favorite history, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene Sledge:

But for Sledge, the worst of all was a week-long stay in rain-soaked foxholes on a muddy ridge facing the Japanese, a site strewn with decomposing corpses turning various colors, nauseating with the stench of death... "If a marine slipped and slid down the back slope of the muddy ridge, he was apt to reach the bottom vomiting. I saw more than one man lose his footing and slip and slide all the way to the bottom only to stand up horror-stricken as he watched in disbelief while fat maggots tumbled out of his muddy dungaree pockets, cartridge belt, legging lacings, and the like."

Fussell is a WWII vet who has written several books on the war; this blurb from his Wikipedia page sums up his life and the relationship between his service and his authorial career in the following somewhat quirky, romantic manner:

On November 11, he experienced his first night on the front lines. He was wounded while fighting in France as a second lieutenant in the infantry, and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. Fussell suffered from depression and rage for years following his military service. In his 1996 autobiography he associated those problems with the dehumanization of his military service and his anger at the way the United States government and popular culture romanticized warfare. Since the 1980s Fussell has been an outspoken critic of the glorification of armed conflicts. An early influence was H. L. Mencken, but he shed Mencken as a mentor, calling him "deficient in the tragic sense", after his wartime experience.

Adding to all the non-fiction works mentioned in Fussell's article, I think there is a fiction series which would meet his exacting standards: the extensive collection of devastatingly good stand-alone WWII stories released since 2001 in Garth Ennis' War Stories, Enemy Ace and Battlefields comic series share the same realist, moral-voidist world view, and I would recommend those basically above any other reading material in the world. War Stories volumes 1 and 2 are available in trade paperback and the first Battlefields set, including the stunning tragedy "Dear Billy" is in hardcover, but retardedly I can't find any online previews, I'll see if I can scan something onto here in an edit.