No, This Post Does Not Want ‘Encore©’ with That

By Andrew Tibbetts

Of Christopher Booker’s Seven Basic Plots, the second one, “Rags to Riches” is the most alien to me. I’m so totally and utterly middle-class. I was born that way and will most likely die that way. Either extreme of the wealth spectrum is foreign terrain.

I don’t know about “rags”- I’ve never missed a meal (except when (crash) dieting or when I’ve stupidly run out of money between pay cheques and have had to blow the dust off the flavour of instant oatmeal I’ve been avoiding eventually deciding to do without rather than endure ‘raisin and spice.’) I’ve never really coveted from the bottom of my heart. I’ve had it easy.

Conversely, I don’t know about “riches”- I don’t own my own home. I don’t go on holidays. Most of my clothes are ripped or stained, not ‘rags’ certainly, but on their way. Like most folks I go from pay cheque to pay cheque. So, I’ve never really basked in opulence.

Even the arc of ‘rags to riches’ is alien to me. I’m in the first Canadian generation whose lifetime earnings will be less that its parents’ and I am a shining example of that phenomenon. My life is less ‘set’ than my dad’s. Not so much that it hurts. Not so much that it screeches in my psyche demanding to be written about.

I don’t think I’ve ever conceived of a story where a character undergoes a financial change. However, if I think back to the earliest stories that resonated with me, it made sense that good characters ended up rich. In fairy tales, Jack goes out to ‘make his fortune’ and ends up with the giant’s gold or the king’s daughter plus half the kingdom, after a suitable show of bravery or cunning of course! It’s not enough for Hansel and Gretel to avoid being eaten by the witch, or even reunited with their papa, or double-even being rid of their nasty step-mother, no, they also must get the witch’s treasure. That’s how you know when the story’s over- when the good guy gets the goods. It’s moral punctuation.

But it’s hard to equate virtue and wealth these days. And it’s become just as corny to equate virtue and poverty. So the point of writing about a character’s bank balance is… what, exactly? I had to think if there was any author I liked whose writing tends to follow a character through a positive financial gain. And then it hit me.

In Can-Lit, the master of this arc is Mordecai Richler. There’s something of a Jack in Duddy Kravitz, for example, a boy who flings himself at the world to prove himself and ‘make his fortune’. There’s a beanstalk that leads to a magical world, and there’s death. And reward. But Richler is a satirical tale-spinner and despite how wealthy his characters end up, the bonanza isn’t undiluted. It’s polluted. His heroes are as likely to demonstrate vice as virtue, and the ‘killing’ is not just of monsters but innocent bystanders too. Think of Virgil, or the victim of the prank phone call. As well, there’s the sad sense that the characters were happier ‘on the hustle’ than ‘in the money’. When an even richer Duddy Kravitz shows up in one of Richler’s later novels, there’s barely a glimmer of the eager, dreamy young man. He still talks non-stop, but he’s fat and tired, and doesn’t really pass for happy.

Usually, the modern ‘rags to riches’ story doesn’t have a happy ending. I think of Lana Turner in “Ziegfield’s Girls”, long shed of her rags, drowning in riches, but lonely, drunk and abandoned by everyone who meant anything to her. In a frenzy, she pulls her furs and jewels into the center of the room, trashing her sumptuous apartment. The help asks her what she’s doing. She says, melodramatically, accompanied by a swoop of violins, “I’m counting my blessings!” Great movie!

Scientists have proven that money can’t buy happiness, but that doesn’t seem to stop us chasing it. Perhaps it’s the chasing that’s the good part anyway. That’s why those old stories always stop with the reallocation of the vanquished one’s treasure. Who wants to see a fat, beery Jack retelling the glory days of his beanstalk climb to a bored, jewel-encrusted mistress? Only a wicked spoil-sport like Richler. Bless his scotch-soaked cigar-smoked heart.

He’s one of the ones I count, when I count my blessings.