Mundane Made Awesome / Literature

• English poet Byron, back in the early 19th century, wrote this marvellous piece on the death of the hated Lord Castlereagh:
  "Posterity will ne'er survey
  A nobler grave than this.
  Here lie the bones of Castlereagh
  Stop, traveller, and piss."
• Older Than Feudalism: In one surviving fragment of a Greek poem by Hipponax, the poet wrote in Homeric verse, complete with the stylistic invocation of the Muse. The subject boiled down to, "Boy, that guy's a jerk, and I hope he dies."
• Aristophanis in "Knights" has the protagonist making a whole dramatic wish to the villain, talking about how he will have a chance to get cash and eat something nice... but it boils out to "I hope you choke on food to death".
• Similarly, old Arabic poetry has an entire genre called hijā', which is politely called "satire" but is really mostly about insulting your enemies. One noted poem made a big show of singing the praises of the target in grand laudatory style in one line, with the next line a breathless statement that "and this letter's actually this other letter", transforming the praise into a deadly insult that boils down to "Boy, that guy's a jerk, and I hope he dies."
• The Roman poet Ovid wrote a poem in which he dramatically curses everything (the maid who delivered it, the wax and wood it was written on, the bees who made the wax, etc.) remotely connected with the letter his girlfriend sent him saying she didn't want to see him that day.
• Roughly contemporaneously with Ovid, there's a poem known as "Moretum", which describes in glorious detail a peasant farmer making moretum, a cheese-and-herb spread that is an ancestor to pesto. It's sometimes considered the work of a young Virgil, but consensus holds that it's at least as likely to be someone else's work attributed to the great poet by later generations. Somewhat amusingly, however, it does include the first known use of the phrase "e pluribus unum" ("Out of Many, One", most famously the semi-official motto of The United States, but in context used to describe the multi-colored ingredients of the moretum—garlic, cheese, herbs, maybe some oil and nuts—coming together to form a uniformly colored paste).
• Henrik Wergeland was particularly good at this. He lampshaded it many times, most prominently in this sentence:

  Look closely, if you wish to see the magnificent in the small...

• An entire chapter of Mostly Harmless is dedicated to describing the artistry and skill of ... the Sandwich Maker. (Arthur accidentally found himself stuck on a planet which had all the requirements to make sandwiches, but where nobody had thought of it before. They were very impressed.)
• The works of James Joyce, particularly Ulysses and Dubliners—they take the fairly boring subject of everyday life and make an epic out of it.
• English poet Alexander Pope wrote The Rape of the Lock as a satirical, thinly fictionalized account of a contemporary society scandal, in mock-heroic, ludicrously overblown EPIC VERSE. He did this to both point out how utterly stupid it was to make a scandal out of the incident in question, and parody the Mundane Made Awesome tendencies of his contemporaries.
  • The title itself in an exemplar of the trope. It echoes such Classical Roman tales as "The Rape of the Sabine Women" (rape used here in the sense of theft or capture). A story about someone stealing a lock of some girl's hair is thus elevated to the level of Roman Epic, before we've even started. Smart guy.
• The parody epic Batrachomyomachia (or Battle of Frogs and Mice), sometimes attributed to Homer (the author of the better known The Iliad and Odyssey). "Frog-mouse war" (in Czech, at least) has become a term for a pointless, overblown conflict.
• The Wizard, The Witch, and Two Girls from Jersey spoofs this (along with most existing fantasy tropes) when the elves' epic poetry turns out to be about drinking a glass of water. It's hilarious. Really.
• Discworld:
  • At one point in Maskerade, the protagonist has to learn the famous "Departure aria", in which her character sings about how difficult it is to leave her lover. This stunning piece of opera music (one of the opera masters is moved to tears to the point of being unable to speak by a talented rendition) turns out to roughly translate as "This damn door sticks/This damn door sticks/It sticks no matter what the hell I do/It is marked pull and indeed I am pulling/Perhaps it should be marked push?".
  • Wintersmith features the semi-literate, word-phobic Rob Anybody Feegle performing probably the most dramatic spelling of the word "marmalade" ever.
  • Inverted in Thief of Time. Lu-Tze shows off his badassery by eating one chocolate-covered espresso bean without wanting more.
  • It's a recurring theme of Discworld that the mundane is awesome, and a huge amount of our brains' processing power is dedicated to convincing us it isn't, so we don't sit around going "Wow!" all day. As Death puts it in Hogfather, the universe is filled with remarkable and wonderful things, and one of them is that humans have managed to invent boredom.
    Death: Stars explode, worlds collide, there's hardly anywhere in the universe where humans can live without being frozen or fried, and yet you believe that a bed is a... a normal thing.
  • In Interesting Times, Rincewind learns that the Counterweight Continent's revolution was instigated by a book titled What I Did On My Holidays. When he gets a chance to read said book, he finds that it describes rather ordinary things, but in a fiercely exciting manner. This is because the people of the Agatean Empire are so oppressed that the idea of a place where you can insult the local police and not be punished horribly or buy meat-like products at a discount is a wonder to behold. Rincewind sarcastically notes that the author clearly hasn't been to Ankh-Morpork and at that moment realizes that the author had been to Ankh-Morpork; What I Did On My Holidays is The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic from Twoflower's perspective!
• A signature feature of Neal Stephenson's fiction is the grandiose, ridiculously detailed, and long digression describing some mundane or tedious activity. Examples include delivering a pizza (Snow Crash) and eating a bowl of cereal (Cryptonomicon). Angsting over pizza delivery in Snow Crash is because, if the pizza is delivered late, the Mafia will shoot the Deliverator. And that if he's lucky, because, let's face it: Uncle Enzo is pretty cool guy, but it's the Mafia. But still: "the Deliverator".
• The gunshot that defines the second half of The Stranger is described something like this.
• The Eye of Argon devotes about half a page to a guy falling over after suffering a Groin Attack. Earlier than that, the following describes the hero's wine getting kicked over:
  A flying foot caught the mug Grignr had taken hold of, sending its blood red contents sloshing over a flickering crescent; leashing tongues of bright orange flame to the foot trodden floor.
• Florian and the otters in the Redwall book Marlfox perform a Play Within A Book detailing a Duel of Insults. The characters hurl verbal abuse at each other and react as if wounded when their opponent makes a particularly cutting remark.
• Secret House is all about this. Think Bill Nye in book form.
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. That is all. Plus, it has ninjas!
  • Now there's also Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. And Mansfield Park and Mummies. What's next? The Ghosts of Northanger Abbey? Nope, Emma and the Werewolves!
  • And they've moved past Austen with Android Karenina.
• The Catullus poem that starts 'Mourn, all you Venuses and Cupids...' and continues with a tragic description of the journey to the Underground. It could be summarised as 'I'm sad because my girlfriend's sad because her sparrow died.'
• In the book version of Cosmos, Carl Sagan makes the ability to read into an epic, astounding, time-and-death defying feat.
  A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called 'leaves') imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person — perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.
  Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds there ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contributions to the collective knowledge of the human species.
  • It's a skill that's easily taken for granted, true, but if you stop to consider the alternatives for a minute or two...then yes, being able to read arguably is that awesome.
  • A bit earlier in the book, he quotes Charles Sherrington, who makes the act of waking up hold cosmic importance.
    The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the cortex becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of sub-patterns.
  • "The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning. The brain has its own language for testing the structure and consistency of the world."
  • This is Carl Sagan we're talking about. He can and does make absolutely ANYTHING sound awesome. That appears to be his job.
    • It was indeed his job, as a public science educator. The job description of public science educator includes "get across just how awesome and amazing and amazingly awesome and awesomely amazing this stuff is for the people who actually do this for a living because they love it".
• Brisingr gives us the moment where Eragon's had his new sword made, in what I felt was a good scene—resolving an ongoing plot thread and simultaneously making Eragon a bit more of a Rider. Then Christopher Paolini had to go and spoil it by trying to make it awesome, instead of understated, and had said sword set on fire every time he says its name.
  • Some people do find that pretty awesome, if a little over the top.
  • It's so over the top, Angela lampshades and mocks it. Chris Paolini's sister (on whom Angela is based) probably did the same when she heard about it.
• In The Turn of the Screw, the governess manages to make doing nothing sound epic. She magnificently decides not to say or do anything about Miles's expulsion. In the same scene, Mrs. Grose epically wipes her mouth with her apron.
• This trope almost lends itself to a literary genre, as it is an integral element of the mock heroic.
• Ernest Thayer's poem "Casey at the Bat". It tells the story of a minor-league baseball player striking out thanks to his hubris with all the gravitas of an epic.
• In Tim Powers' The Drawing of the Dark: it's not just a fine Austrian beer; it's the beer that will save the West!
• Tolkien manages to make a riddle contest absolutely epic in The Hobbit. Of course, it helps the stakes are Bilbo becomes lunch if he loses...
  • Carried over into the first film, as well. The scene was easily one of the most anticipated, and Martin Freeman's performance absolutely sells it.
• P. G. Wodehouse gets a lot of his comedy from this. Any time one of his characters, Psmith and Bertie in particular, goes off on an extended and epic monologue, it's usually about something like working at a bank or drinking tea.
  • Wodehouse himself was once fired from a job as a bank clerk for writing The Formal Opening of the New Ledger on the first page of one of his bank's ledgers. He later said that it was one of the funniest things he'd ever written.
• The entire prologue chapter of Mark Haley's Warhammer 40,000 novel Baneblade details the final assembly step of a Baneblade superheavy tank: A huge, three-day long heavily ritualized ceremony involving cranes, parchments, servitors, a choir of techpriests, unaugmented workers, ointments, robot welders, incense and so on.
  From somewhere high up, far, far from the most holy factory floor, a bell began to sound, counting time to the roar and squeak of audible data-shouts. Fashioned from the melted armour of four thousand holy war machines, fallen in service of the Emperor, it tolled loud enough to alert the Lord of Terra himself, telling him that a new champion was born to him.
• German satirist Kurt Tucholsky dealing a volley against Brecht, accusing him of this trope:
  "Bert Brecht hat einen schönen Dreh gefunden: das kleine Einmaleins in getragenem Sing-Sang vorzulesen, wie wenn es die Upanishaden wären. Banalitäten feierlich aufsagen: das bringt vielen Zulauf." ^note  very free translation: "Brecht found a nice shtick: declaim the multiplication table in pathetic sing-sang as if it were the Upanishads. Solemn banalities - that sells.
• In the Mr Gum series, ‘Old Granny’s Cardigan Adventure’, the special bonus story in ‘’Mr Gum and the Goblins’’, evokes this trope in-universe: Old Granny wakes up, has breakfast, phones her brother Old Danny in Australia, loses her cardigan and finds it three minutes later lying on the kitchen floor. She is so struck by this that she resolves to phone her brother again. The End. In the course of their conversation, it is revealed that Old Granny used to be in a punk band called Rancid Vomit, but this is considered less exciting than the fact that she loses her cardigan.
• Harry Potter:
  • In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Harry muses at how impressive Dumbledore can make the simple act of walking through a door when the Headmaster strides through the castle's huge double doors after Professor Trelawney has been sacked in order to reassure her that Umbridge did not have the power to cast her out, and remind Umbridge.
  • The very last spell that we see Harry Potter cast at the very end of the series is "Reparo", a mundane spell used for fixing broken objects. Doesn't seem like a fitting conclusion to the series? Well...it helps if you know that he's casting it with the Elder Wand—the most powerful wand ever crafted—and he's using it to repair his broken holly-and-phoenix wand, which couldn't be fixed by any other wand. Still doesn't sound that awesome? Well, there's also the fact that it's the only spell that he casts with the wand, and he does it to show that he doesn't want to claim the Elder Wand's power for himself—despite it being the most coveted Magical object in the history of the world. With that in mind, that "Reparo" ends up looking like one of Harry's most badass moves in the whole series, as it makes him possibly the only Wizard ever to turn the Elder Wand down.
• In "Warrior Cats" Jayfeather breaks his beloved stick. It is the most dramatic scene about stick-breaking you will ever read in fiction.
• Crops up all the time – All. The. Time – in the Village Tales novels. Brewing real ale? Five thousand years of history and an epic of hops and barley. The workshop at the railway and the farrier at the forge? The alchemy of metal, hammer, and fire. Making bread – i.e., solid beer? Part of a family tradition since King John's day, and parables of wheat and yeast. Digging up dirt? Welcome to the fascination of archaeology. Sheep on the downs? The history of England and the wool trade, a-hoof. It's the driving trope half the time.
• In Dream Park, Kasan Maibang gushes about how his people, the Daribi of New Guinea, finally mastered the secret of Cargo when they learned about that most holy of liquids by which Europeans sanctify their rituals, honor their gods, and attain oneness with divine power. Said holy beverage is Coca-Cola.
• The Craft Sequence is a novel series about economic crises and legal disputes... in a world where the economy and the lawyers are powered by magic. Resurrecting a dead god to restore the flow of his power across the globe = corporate bankruptcy proceeding and debt restructuring.
• In Dinosaur Vs, Dinosaur acts like he's competing against tough opponents, when really he's just doing things like making lemonade and jumping in leaves.
• Time To: The mice often hold very flashy signs for the relatively minor topics, and it's exaggerated in "Time to Pee!" where they throw a party to celebrate peeing.
• In The Four Loves, the analogy C.S. Lewis uses to illustrate how intensely our needs press upon us is to (delicately) describe the state of mind one is in when one finds a bathroom during a Potty Emergency as an impulse to break out in sacred verse.
• Sara Stein's 1982 children's non-fiction work, The Science Book, opens each of its three sections with an account of a family having breakfast in an ordinary suburban household. This trope applies, because each section - one on the visible external world, one on internal anatomy and life processes, and one on the intangibles of atoms and energy - describes what's going on in terms of the wonders of biology, chemistry and physics, making a plate of fried eggs sound like a marvel of the universe.
• InCryptid: The Aeslin mice have a knack for making anything, from a hotel room to bacon to Dominic's penis, the subject of a new ritual or catechism.
  Mouse: Hail! Hail to the room service menu of wings and mozzarella sticks! Hail to the two hundred and thirty-seven channels! Oh, greatest of rejoicing, for this is the hotel of High-Wattage Exterior Lighting, attracting such delights from out the desert wastes! Hail!
• Roys Bedoys: In “Don’t Throw Tantrums at the Store, Roys Bedoys!”, Roys gets very excited over a simple trip to the store.