Avatars, personae and alter egos

The most up-to-date thing first. I went to a fascinating workshop at the university today on Second Life and its uses in higher education. These are many and varied and all full of potential, including 'in-world' readings, seminars, exhibitions and multiple methods of learning. Students writing about place could visit various locations of this virtual world, which range from gothic/ sci-fi cities to historical reconstructions, fantastic fashion high streets to virtual spiritual centres including one with beautifully detailed orthodox icons.

I'm quite interested in the whole idea of virtual spiritualities - more on that another time, when I've visited a few more of them. But more importantly for teaching, the whole Second Life experience has the potential to be intensely creative - mostly visually and sonically which would be an excellent alternative exploration of creativity - which could then be reflected on as text. But - to be honest, the whole thing is just enormous fun - brilliant. Surely that's the best way to explore and learn anything... I'm sure it can be misused, but can't anything - I don't think that's a reason to shun it. So above is a snapshot of my avatar, who can change not only clothes but gender, body shape, even species. A chameleon presence. I can get more if I want. Multiple chameleon presences. My real life head is starting to spin.

Interestingly, I've also been thinking and reading about the concept of having personae in literature - stories and especially poems. Each explore character and voice by their very nature of course, and with poetry the dramatic monologue clearly establishes a difference between the personal lyrical 'I' of the poet (which may or may not be a confessional instrument) and the inhabited fictional (or historical) character speaking in the poem. But a poetic persona is a much more subtle thing. Philip Larkin for instance had a famously grouchy and angst-ridden voice in many of his - it was an aspect of his own personality but not necessarily a presentation of his complete self - it was an exaggerated voice which became his poetic persona. To an extent, perhaps we all have a poetic persona like this.

But sometimes a poet will present a series of poems, even a whole collection, written in the voice of another person - perhaps of radically different physical qualities and biographical experiences. E A Markham, Caribbean born writer who settled in Britain and wrote a sequence of poems in the voice of fictional Welsh woman 'Sally Goodman'. Markham writes that he was working with women writers in the 1970s and that 'part of the interest was trying to create work which, though not alien to the individual consciousness generating it, nevertheless didn't go out of its way to confirm the usual biological prejudices. We were concerned that the tendencies (both academic and popular) to colonise tracts of contemporary writing, subjecting them to fairly arbitrary rule as 'Jewish', 'Black', 'Women' etc. territories, was causing (bound to cause?) them to develop literary constitutions (and politics) unhealthily dependent on the name of an adjective'. (From 'Living In Disguise', 1986).

This is interesting (though I think there are counter-arguments in favour of a certain amount of supportive collectivity) - though good to see Markham also admitting, later in the same passage, that the adoption of the Sally Goodman persona was just fun, too. But I'm also reminded of Christopher Reid's use of persona 'Katerina Brac' in his 1985 collection of that name, claiming to have translated her Eastern European poems into English.

They are sometimes deliberately clumsy while still commenting on their own illusive biographical creation: 'Memory supplies/ the illusion that one has lived' - a resonant couple of lines which I could usefully quote in an autobiography seminar on memory and the self. Was it ethical of Reid to assume this voice of a poet oppressed by a totalitarian regime? “The testimony of Katerina Brac may strike some readers as typical of the artist under pressure, but the way in which this still too little-known poet addresses her situation remains startlingly individual." - from the original blurb. Perhaps one would feel uncomfortable if 'taken in' by the persona, only to find that the real poet has never lived under such oppression or political pressure. Otherwise the writer should have freedom to explore whatever personae or voices they feel called to, don't you think?

At any rate, the adoption of personae, whether similar to or radically different from the real life perceived self is obviously something that has been explored well before Second Life offered its avatar-enabled possibilities. And it has always been both creative and educational - and fun.