Years ago, when I was still interested in being a screenwriter as well as a novelist (the Dark Ages of my literary life), I heard a screenwriting teacher say during a lecture that character motivations, and especially those of your protagonist, should always be personal rather than political. Luke, for example (screenwriters love using Star Wars to exemplify their universal rules) may have a vague political hatred of the Empire, but his decision to join the rebels and “become a Jedi like [his] father” is motivated not by this political feeling but by a more universal angst, a desire to leave his small and cloistered hometown (or homeplanet in this case), a desire to want to be more than just another “moisture farmer” like his uncle. This personal motivation, according to my teacher, made Luke more relatable: audiences won’t understand or care about the intricacies of Galactic politics and whether it’s just to hate the Empire, but they would connect to Luke’s desire for wanting something more from his life (specifically, my teacher pointed to the scene where Luke stares out at the twin suns while John Williams’ music plays epically behind him and insisted on the universality of what Luke was feeling—just replace the twin suns with the lights of the big city or whatever ambitious goal feels just out of reach). In other words, any political feelings or commitments a character has should be subsumed under a personal motivation to make that character more relatable.
Let’s put aside the issue of whether relatability should be something writers actually strive for (I’ve written about that issue in a separate post). The larger problem with my screenwriting teacher’s idea is that it ultimately cheapens the political conflicts of the story. In real life, lots of people are motivated purely by political concerns. They commit themselves to ideologies like nationalism or socialism, they march in the streets to protest causes that don’t always directly affect them, and in some cases they even commit acts of violence in the name of their politics. And they don’t always have a personal reason for doing so. We can, of course, psychoanalyze both terrorists and revolutionaries and probably find various childhood resentments and sources of anger. But what if we accepted that sometimes a commitment to a political cause has nothing to do with personal issues? What could that do for our fiction? Imagine if Luke wasn’t motivated by an angsty desire to leave Tatooine, like it was some mid-century American small town or suburb, but instead simply by his politics, a dislike for the Empire that he felt strongly as his ennui. We might not all relate to him, since the Empire’s politics might be too specific for us to fully grasp—but it would force us to take those politics seriously and consider that perhaps this Galactic Empire is not just some convenient stand-in for the British Empire but rather a very real malevolent force that has made the lives of its characters so bad that they would commit themselves to defeating it. Honestly, I’d rather watch that movie than one featuring yet another “universal” protagonist finding self-actualization.
Recently, I read Abdelrahman Munif’s famous 1984 novel Cities of Salt, and I was struck by how unapologetically and totally political it was. The novel (banned in Munif’s home country of Saudi Arabia) tells the story of a fictional Arab Gulf kingdom where oil is discovered and how the arrival of American businessmen disrupts the traditional way of life of the Arabs who live in a specific oasis community and a nearby coastal city. What’s striking about the novel is that there isn’t really a central protagonist: various characters come into focus and then recede, though Munif is not interested in them as individuals but rather as a collectivity, how their different reactions to the Americans when taken together dramatize the effects of economic exploitation and imperialism. The closest thing the novel has to a protagonist is Miteb al-Hathal, a prominent resident of the oasis community, who recognizes the danger in the American’s arrival and tries to challenge them. But a third of the way into the novel, Miteb al-Hathal disappears and becomes a ghost that haunts the rest of the pages, a kind of shadowy political force that the various characters whisper about, wondering if he’ll one day return and take revenge on the Americans for destroying their home.
Miteb al-Hathal’s motivations are purely political. There’s no personal character angst underlying his distrust of the Americans—just a passionate love of his land and the oasis. But if my screenwriting teacher had his way, the character would have been rewritten with some more relatable personal motivation: maybe the Americans destroy his house specifically, or maybe they kill one of his children—or maybe he has some angsty desire that predates their arrival entirely, restlessness or delusions of grandeur. But how cheap and limiting these motivations would be! Reducing his fiery anti-colonialism to a personal motivation would inevitably take away the novels’ political power. And all for what? For a misplaced belief in the necessity relatability? The truth is, some novels don’t need relatability. In the case of a novel like Cities of Salt, maybe it’s better for audiences who’ve never experienced the horrors of colonization to witness a character motivated solely by anti-colonialism and thus to recognize that sometimes, people’s motivations can in fact be purely political.