Perilous Adventures
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Non-existence: On Being A Character

by n a bourke

Codex 5 by Stanislaw LemIn his book, The Third Sally, Stanislaw Lem writes:

the banality of existence has been so amply demonstrated, there is no need ofr us to discuss it any futher here. The brilliant Cerberon, attacking the problem analytically, discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimeral, and the purely hypothetical. They were all, one might say, nonexistent, but each nonexisted in an entirely different way. (Lem, The Third Sally)

This quote from Lem seems to address precisely something of the character of the problem of fiction: that fiction is, in itself, the exploration and explication of the particularities of non-existence. And yet, the kernel of good fiction is, I think, the expression, of an otherwise inexpressible truth.

It strikes me that, in approaching the writing of character, in particular, the setting down of actions and reactions that together give the impression (if done well) of a real person, the place to begin is with the question of what it means to be human. Or, at least, with what it is you think it means to be human, and how you can use these understandings about what consciousness is - what being is - to better understand how to fake it.

That is, to begin to understand how to create and then represent a false creature, it is useful to begin with the question of how you understand, live with and interpret the consciousness of both yourself and others in the real world.

For me, this means beginning with the understanding that we are all, in some sense, always unknowable and unknowing. That is - we can never know the ways another human person thinks, feels, sees. The eyes are not, as the cliché goes, the windows to the soul; we cannot see through the eyes of another into some essential essence of their psychical, social or emotional selves. Rather, I think, what we often perceive in the eyes of another is something of a reflection.

In his book On Love the popular philosopher Alain de Botton writes about the ways in which, when we first get to know someone, but most particularly when we first fall in love with another person, we begin by knowing only so much of who they are - say, to be approximate and mathematical, that if you met someone at a party and spoke to them for a few hours before exchanging phone numbers and wandering home in a hyped-up daze of excitement, you might know less than 5% of who they are. According to de Botton, if you like that notional 5% of what you know and, for complex chemical, social, psychological reasons you believe you will like the rest, you will ‘fill in’ the rest of their persona - the things you don’t know - with a kind of funky amalgam of things you desire and things you know about yourself. You make, in your mind, a kind of simulacra that is partly yourself, partly them, and partly a fantasy of the perfect lover.

It seems to me that this is an interesting, workable and quite intriguing way of thinking about the ways in which a reader, and a writer, approach the ‘being’ of a character. Your reader, in a sense, knows only so much - less than 5% of the character you present them with on the first page (usually) - a gesture, a word, a stray thought, an action divorced - at this stage - from history or intent. So, how do they make of this stray and thin collection a person? They fill in the rest with something of themselves, something of what they expect, and something of what they desire.

A small word here about what they expect. There’s a term in literary theory for the ways in which a typical reader reads character - and by typical here, I mean typical in the Western-European First World. The term is ‘the unmarked state’ and it works like this: Say I read you a sentence about a character who is washed away in a river ravaged by storm, swims to the other side and climbs out, surviving by the skin of their teeth and strength of their will and body. Not so exciting or interesting a sentence, perhaps. What is interesting is that, unless told otherwise, the majority of readers will assume that the character fits the following description: white, male, 30-40 years old, middle class, employed, able-bodied. There are complex and place and time-dependent reasons for this: test it in a remote indigenous school, for example, and you might get quite a different reading of the invisible markers of the character. Even more interesting, especially for a writer like you, is the notion that most readers will hold onto this image of the character for a whole book if you don’t tell them otherwise.

Writers who are conscious of this can use it for all kinds of reasons - both political and aesthetic, postmodern and gimmicky, and perhaps even for reasons to do with their understanding of the world of publishing.

Ursula K Le Guin exploits the assumptive reading of the unmarked state of her characters in her classic book The Wizard of Earthsea by letting the reader assume all of the powerful wizard-type characters in her book are white until about a third of the way through the novel. In interviews and essays, she talked about wanting to do this to upset her reader’s assumptions about what it meant for the character’s to be non-white. She wanted (white) readers to believe the characters were ‘like them’ until it was too late for them to read them as ‘Other’. Interestingly enough, when the book was developed into a television series recently, Ursula was not alone in being appalled and critical that the producers and directors had cast all of the characters, bar one baddie, as white.

Jeanette Winterson’s novel Written on the Body famously avoids gender-identifying the first-person protagonist: the narrator goes through the entire novel without declaring their gender. Readers responses to this are, as you’d imagine, interesting. Some treat it like a puzzle, looking for clues, others just accept it, some resent it, arguing that Winterson is holding out on them. I’ve read stories, too, that I think are pretty lame that exploit these kinds of reader assumptions. The one I am most bored with, and see so often, is the one in which a first-person narrator laments the passing of their loved ones’ affection: they don’t play or talk to them anymore, don’t spend time with them, someone else has come along, etc etc etc. The ‘twist in the tale’ (not a very good one!) is that the narrator is a dog, or a houseplant.

The crime writer Zaremba, wanting her readers to engage and empathise with the main character of her detective fiction novel, A Reason to Kill, didn’t reveal that her main character was a lesbian until the second book in her series. She also claims that this - the unmarked state of her protagonist’s sexuality - is one reason that her work was picked up and ‘accidentally’ published by a mainstream publisher.

I’m sure you can think of other examples where the writer has used the reader’s native readerly assumptions about race, class, gender, age, body-type, education, or any other character trait you care to name, to produce a work that is both engaging and intriguing: that invites the reader to ask questions about themselves, their world, or their characters.

 

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