 Drama: March 07, 2012 Issue [#4889] |
  Drama
This week: Let Poetic Justice Enhance Your Story Edited by: Joy  
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"It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning."
- Calvin about Moe, Calvin and Hobbes
"We eventually do to ourselves what we have done unto others."
Eric Hoffer
"A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it."
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
"There is such a thing as tempting the gods. Talking too much, too soon and with too much self-satisfaction has always seemed to me a sure way to court disaster. The forces of retribution are always listening. They never sleep."
Meg Greenfield
Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. Our discussion in this issue is about what is known as poetic justice; in other words, what goes around comes around.
Note: In the editorial, I refer to third person singular as he, to also mean the female gender, because I don't like to use they or he/she.
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
As a literary tool, poetic justice succeeds to make the readers experience the highest satisfaction from a story's plot. We could probably think of it as punishment or reward, but it is more than that, especially when it is compared to legal punishment or a sudden windfall.
Poetic justice happens when bad characters are punished and the good ones are rewarded by the flow of events or by karma or fate. Sometimes, one character plots to undermine another, then ends up getting caught in his own trickery. At other times, it is the events that turn around to favor the good and leave the bad to their misery or the suffering of guilt feelings.
As a phrase, poetic justice was coined by the critic Thomas Rymer during the seventeenth century. He thought that the literary arts should inspire moral actions by showing the triumph of good over evil.
Poetic justice, to succeed, needs to be logical. In other words, the punishment has to fit the crime. To examine it more closely, let's look at Dante's Inferno, which allegorically shows the soul seeing sin for what it really is. As a specific example from the text, sorcerers, false prophets, and fortune-tellers have to walk with their heads on backwards, unable to see what is ahead, because that was what they had tried to do in life:
they had their faces twisted toward their haunches
and found it necessary to walk backward,
because they could not see ahead of them.
... and since he wanted so to see ahead,
he looks behind and walks a backward path.
In the Iliad by Homer, Achilles sought glory, for which he joined the war; however, he was ruthless, enraged, and violent. At the end, his life was cut short through his one and only weakness. People like Achilles are motivated by power, authority, and the desire for status. They do not want to lose face or to make their weaknesses known, and this is exactly what Achilles was like, although he was not depicted as a negative character.
In the subplot for Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Lucio frequently slanders the duke to the friar, then in the last act slanders the friar to the duke. After it is revealed that the duke and the friar are one and the same, Lucio's punishment is to be forced into an undesired marriage with the prostitute Kate Keepdown.
In television dramas, stage plays, or the movies, poetic justice is almost always there. Some examples are: The Twilight Zone, Batman, Batman Returns, The Lion King, Aladdin, Snow White, Cinderella, most of Shakespeare's plays, and Dickens' work.
If we writers want to show poetic justice in our work, the places to start sowing its seed are:
 Characters' weaknesses = Example: A woman who is jealous of another woman's beauty and plots against her in some way ends up with a disfigured face.
Their unattainable or hardly attainable desires = Example: Someone whose desire is riches and he tricks people with a Ponzi scheme loses everything he has, including his family and friends.
The morals of the time and society in which the story is happening = Example: The Judge in old Salem who orders the burning of a witch finds out she is his own daughter.
The place where the story is happening and especially the specific qualities of that place = Example: Someone who disregards the welfare of natural habitats gets eaten by a cayman in the Amazonian jungle.
Inserting poetic justice in the writing helps to create narrative tension and, if it involves the main character, it gives a dramatic purpose and moral depth to the plot. Better stories do not only, revolve around a resolution or recreating reality, but they also create a dramatic experience and moral and emotional satisfaction for their audience.
Enjoy the drama of writing. Until next time... 
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