characters in search
Browsing my new purchase 'Writing Self and Creativity', Celia Hunt and Fiona Sampson - originally I thought it would be interesting for the autobiography module I teach, but it will be even more useful when thinking about fiction writing. Perhaps other things too. The section on characters and selves has particularly caught my attention, perhaps because I've been thinking about selves within/ projected from the self with relation to my Second Life experiences (which are slowly accumulating) and the poets who use alter egos, personae, fictional selves differentiated from their own life circumstances. Hunt and Sampson identify the phenomenon of characters seeming to come to life of their own accord, sometimes refusing to fit in with the carefully crafted plans and plots in the mind of their authors. They necessarily quote Pirandello, whose ‘Father’ character declares:
when characters are alive, truly alive before their author, he has only to follow them in their words and actions which they precisely present to him, and he has no other choice except to want them to be the way they want themselves to be. And he’s in for trouble if he doesn’t!
This is a common enough experience amongst writers, though they may vary in their acquiescence to the ‘demands’ of their imagined beings. Some (Muriel Spark for instance) prefer to emphasise that all their major characters are expressions of themselves, given different situations or social worlds perhaps (in which case we have to question what makes up an essential self – surely formed to some extent by situation in a particular geographical or social location?). But for other authors this experience of almost autonomous characters verges on the strange, the uncanny – I remember a TV program about this experience in which novelist Hilary Mantel described the sensation as something bordering on the schizophrenic or supernatural: like puppets in the mind’s theatre who sever their strings and perform on their own accord.
I couldn’t find a reference for that but did find this quote from a 2005 Observer interview, around the publication time of ‘Beyond Black’ which follows Alison, a medium of dubious but unnerving quality and her companion. Mantel speaks about her own childhood supernatural inklings: ‘My childhood gave me a very powerful sense of being spooked. I didn't know whether what I was seeing were sensory images of other people's unhappiness. Perhaps that was just the way the world manifested itself to me.. I think that by the time you've written a few novels, it's quite futile to pretend that you're not your characters. They penetrate your life, you penetrate theirs.'
Take the supernatural diagnosis to the extreme however, and you are in the realm of those people who claim to be ‘visited’ by particular characters, who, if they have once been alive as human beings, are searching for a channel, a medium. I caught a little of a radio program recently on ‘paramusicology’, which looks at paranormal musical happenings – for example, the case of Wimbledon musical ‘medium’ Rosemary Brown, who claimed she was visited by many dead famous (literally dead famous, that is) musicians who dictated compositions to her from beyond the grave. Opinions are predictably divided over the ‘authenticity’ of these paranormal visits, although most specialists who interviewed Brown seemed to think she was at least sincere in her own beliefs, though many felt that these composer characters were in fact aspects of herself of which Brown had previously been unaware. Perhaps not so different, then, from fictional characters.
One final level of interest in all this makes me contemplate a ‘reversing of the polarity’ of the experience of characters coming alive in a creative mind. Hunt and Sampson consider towards the conclusion of their chapter that ‘clearly characters are not real in the sense that they are not living, breathing creatures in the way human beings are, although.they can acquire an autonomous life in the imagination of the writer whilst a work is in progress, and similarly in the imagination of the reader whilst reading’ The phrase that caught my attention is ‘an autonomous life in the imagination of the writer’.
The implication is here and in Pirandello too that if the character’s ‘self-determination’ (for want of a better word) is taken away from them, then the writer’s project will fall flat and no one will truly experience, seek or learn anything. To an extent this seems to be a spiritual paradigm too: created as autonomous according so some (but not all) religious schema, we may be characters ourselves, merely alive in the imagination (or the ‘universe’) of a creator. But we have to have that level of self-determination and responsibility in order to grow, to seek and learn; without this the entire creative project would fail. With it perhaps there is a creative genius at work, trusting her characters, her myriad expressions of self.
when characters are alive, truly alive before their author, he has only to follow them in their words and actions which they precisely present to him, and he has no other choice except to want them to be the way they want themselves to be. And he’s in for trouble if he doesn’t!
This is a common enough experience amongst writers, though they may vary in their acquiescence to the ‘demands’ of their imagined beings. Some (Muriel Spark for instance) prefer to emphasise that all their major characters are expressions of themselves, given different situations or social worlds perhaps (in which case we have to question what makes up an essential self – surely formed to some extent by situation in a particular geographical or social location?). But for other authors this experience of almost autonomous characters verges on the strange, the uncanny – I remember a TV program about this experience in which novelist Hilary Mantel described the sensation as something bordering on the schizophrenic or supernatural: like puppets in the mind’s theatre who sever their strings and perform on their own accord.
I couldn’t find a reference for that but did find this quote from a 2005 Observer interview, around the publication time of ‘Beyond Black’ which follows Alison, a medium of dubious but unnerving quality and her companion. Mantel speaks about her own childhood supernatural inklings: ‘My childhood gave me a very powerful sense of being spooked. I didn't know whether what I was seeing were sensory images of other people's unhappiness. Perhaps that was just the way the world manifested itself to me.. I think that by the time you've written a few novels, it's quite futile to pretend that you're not your characters. They penetrate your life, you penetrate theirs.'
Take the supernatural diagnosis to the extreme however, and you are in the realm of those people who claim to be ‘visited’ by particular characters, who, if they have once been alive as human beings, are searching for a channel, a medium. I caught a little of a radio program recently on ‘paramusicology’, which looks at paranormal musical happenings – for example, the case of Wimbledon musical ‘medium’ Rosemary Brown, who claimed she was visited by many dead famous (literally dead famous, that is) musicians who dictated compositions to her from beyond the grave. Opinions are predictably divided over the ‘authenticity’ of these paranormal visits, although most specialists who interviewed Brown seemed to think she was at least sincere in her own beliefs, though many felt that these composer characters were in fact aspects of herself of which Brown had previously been unaware. Perhaps not so different, then, from fictional characters.
One final level of interest in all this makes me contemplate a ‘reversing of the polarity’ of the experience of characters coming alive in a creative mind. Hunt and Sampson consider towards the conclusion of their chapter that ‘clearly characters are not real in the sense that they are not living, breathing creatures in the way human beings are, although.they can acquire an autonomous life in the imagination of the writer whilst a work is in progress, and similarly in the imagination of the reader whilst reading’ The phrase that caught my attention is ‘an autonomous life in the imagination of the writer’.
The implication is here and in Pirandello too that if the character’s ‘self-determination’ (for want of a better word) is taken away from them, then the writer’s project will fall flat and no one will truly experience, seek or learn anything. To an extent this seems to be a spiritual paradigm too: created as autonomous according so some (but not all) religious schema, we may be characters ourselves, merely alive in the imagination (or the ‘universe’) of a creator. But we have to have that level of self-determination and responsibility in order to grow, to seek and learn; without this the entire creative project would fail. With it perhaps there is a creative genius at work, trusting her characters, her myriad expressions of self.
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