Stereotypes are crude simplifications, but generally they don’t lie. If I say that Italians eat spaghetti, it is not a lie; I’m simply reducing a complex reality, with its great cultural tradition, to a plate of pasta eaten by someone with a Sicilian cloth cap on his head. I do the same with, let’s say, Americans, eaters of grilled steak in cowboy hats, or the English, bowler-hatted drinkers of tea as soon as the clock strikes five. All in all, there is nothing wrong with simplifying: simplification is like a first glance into a crowded hall, or a child’s drawing of Mamma and Papa. The problem arises when we don’t know that these are stereotypes, crude constructions, full of prejudice, and take them for reality.
The stories we tell traditionally make great use of stereotypes, whether they report facts that really happened or come from the imagination. Scornfully dismissing them as such isn’t helpful. If we want to elevate and ennoble these stereotyped situations, these stereotyped characters, we could say that they somewhat resemble the narratives of fairytales. Without recourse to these, no story would flow, orally or in writing, in the theatre, in film, on television.
In fact, a story comes especially easily when the narrator doesn’t even know that he’s using proven formulas: the wolf and the lamb, the devil and the good god, the corrupt and the honest, the hero and the traitor, the king and the queen, beauty and the beast. The same is true of stereotypes, especially if we don’t perceive their nature, feel their crudeness – which happens when we draw on our own lives and are convinced that our stories perfectly reflect reality.
It’s useless to point out to the storyteller that stereotypes are abundant in real life. The narrator says he’s sorry: look, the thief really was Neapolitan, and there really was laundry hanging in the alley.
More complex, on the other hand, is the conscious use of stereotypes to form a story that’s purely entertaining; it requires great skill and expertise. In this case stereotypes become functional; the writer obeys rules; the story is a journey with inevitable stopping points – very familiar, yet always enjoyable.
It’s a risk, in the end, to start from stereotypical situations and characters, and then to push them. This can succeed or not; it’s like writing from inside the condition we find ourselves in every day. Don’t we, in fact, orient ourselves in the world according to convenient generalisations, prejudices we take for independent judgments? And isn’t it up to us, sooner or later, to try to confront this reality, which becomes knowable only if we venture at our own peril outside the frame?
The work is good when, from the cocoon of the stereotype, we manage to get at real life – which, because it’s real life, darts unpredictably in every direction and can never be contained.