Withholding Tax

[malsperanza]

Some time ago, I wrote, "The other thread I am particularly curious to explore is the idea of Withholding from the reader. Especially withholding information about the hero. This is a form of reader-torture that is parallel to hero-torture. (This parallelism brings me back to my obsession with the idea of the Reader/Book ship.) Withholding access to the hero (to his mind or heart, to important facts about him, to a clear sense of his identity, his moral position, etc.) is a kind of UST."

And I gave a small list of examples of Withheld Heroes here.

So here is a chunk of a much longer ramble on this ever-fascinating subject. In general, I think the technique of Withholding is fascinating, because it artificially heightens the reader's erotic hunger to possess the book. But just how the Withheld Hero works within this mechanism, I am not sure. So:



The Withheld Hero
I've been tossing this term around for a while, thinking I understood what I meant by it, even if no one else did.

Would love to hear about all this from some writers who are working on heroes they consider Withheld. (Holly? If you're there and have time: Have you thought about Roiben in this way?)

I've realized that I don't have it clear. And this is a problem because the character I am (supposedly) writing about is such a fellow. The success of my story depends entirely on the main character being veryveryWithheld, and still being compelling, seductive, intriguing, fun.

At the same time, for other reasons, he is definitely a Frilly Shirt Hero. And I've discovered that I've been thinking of these two aspects of the hero as opposites. But they aren't.

So here I am (in order to avoid actually writing the story) trying to reconcile Frilly Shirt with Withheld Hero. I manage it by thinking of Withheld Hero as a larger concept, who is opposed to Accessible Hero. Whereas Frilly Shirt as a subcategory, opposed to Man in Black. And both Man in Black and Frilly Shirt may be Withheld Heroes, or Accessible Heroes, or another kind of Hero.

Disclaimer: I don't really love dicing these fictional constructs ("Hero" etc.) into ever smaller and more academic subcategories with ever narrower definitions. Such categories aren't really useful when you're writing a character, because a well-written character is likely to have many different (and even contradictory) attributes--to be heroic and nonheroic at different times, or Frilly and Black on different occasions, or even all at once. Otherwise he's just a plot device.

Rather, the point of the exercise is to unpack what it is that makes these mechanisms work well or badly so as to make best use of them and work the most hellish magic on the reader. (What I'm finding difficult is not the creation of such a person, but that his Withheldness seems to shut down the plot--events seem to lose their compelling force in the face of his implacable reserve. But I think that's because I'm no damn good at plot--a problem I will set aside for another occasion.)

Also, examining why I find one or another character attractive is an excuse for wallowing in teh sexay. :D

Digression:
I am going to talk about the hero as male because it's simpler in a very long post, and suits my particular purposes. But I think these ideas work equally well for a Heroine.

(An excellent example of a Withheld Heroine is the character Agnese in Isak Dinesen's breathtaking story "The Roads Round Pisa," which is found in her collection Seven Gothic Tales. I love this novella (or long short story); it blows me away. It has all the elements: UST, romance, gender-switching, mystery, fate. )

(I will say, though, that Woman in Black and female Frilly Shirt function somewhat differently--not simply in mirror image or reverse to the male versions. That's for another post, sometime. Frilly Shirt Heroines? Maid Marian, Beauty in "Beauty and the Beast," Rapunzel, Camille, maybe Emma Bovary. Woolf's Orlando (*g*). Some of Colette's heroines. Woman in Black? Emma Peel, Emma Peel, Emma Peel.) /digression.


First question is, what are these ideas--Withheld Hero, Frilly Shirt, Man in Black?

Second is: How do a pair of these ideas function--sometimes in a blend, sometimes in opposition? E.g., if a character is both Withheld and Frilly Shirt, then perhaps he is a very conflicted character. But must he resolve the two parts of his character, or give up one or the other, in order to have his happy ending? Jack Sparrow doesn't. (Of course, his happy ending doesn't include finding and gaining a romantic partner.)

More on Frilly Shirt way down lower in this post.

Defining the Withheld Hero

The basic definition of the Withheld Hero depends on the underlying idea that the fundamental romantic relationship in fiction is between the book and the reader. So I'll repeat the ground rules about that:

Reader/Book OTP
All else depends on the reader forming a romantic (erotic) bond with the book. *
__________
*For "erotic" I borrow Lewis Hyde's definition: "An ‘erotic' commerce," i.e., exchange, is one which opposes "eros (the principle of attraction, union, involvement which binds together) to logos (reason and logic in general, the principle of differentiation in particular. A market economy is an emanation of logos." Conversely, a gift economy is a manifestation of eros. Of course, both Hyde and I also embrace the more obvious meaning of "eros" within this definition. (Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, NY: Vintage, 1983, p. xiv, n.)
__________

In fiction, the hero of the story is often the vehicle for this bond--the reader falls in love with the hero, and through him or her forms an attachment to the book, to the story. (Well, that's the short version. *g*)

Typically, what this means is that the reader aims to possess the hero, and thereby to take possession--ownership--of the book. (For the purposes of this argument, I use "book" and "story" interchangeably.) "Taking possession" of the book means several things:

1. Understanding it intimately. Understanding its ideas, arguments, meanings.

2. Knowing more than the characters do.

3. Knowing how it all turns out.

This last is the key: We dominate any story that has an ending, because the characters in the book cannot know that their story has ended, but we do. This puts us in the omniscient position: Omniscient Reader usurps the power of Omniscient Author. That is, at the end of a book, there is a transferral of power from the author to the reader. Where the author once controlled the reader's emotions, thoughts, needs, desires, at the end, the author gives up all that and the reader takes over. Hence: possession, ownership of the story. And of course any possession has an erotic element.

In opening a book we are giving up a great deal of power and control to the author. We are submitting ourselves to the world created by the author (that little, tyrannical god). We sink into it and abandon our own real lives for the duration. Yet we retain some power too: We are always in a position to judge the characters in the book, to step back from them and assess, analyze, interpret, criticize what they do and how well they do it. And even more: We judge them--is this one believable? Is that one fully rounded or a paper cutout?

Reader/Hero OTP
In a story driven by a hero, it's the hero who gives us most of our access to understanding the meanings of the story. If the first power relationship is between author and reader, then the second --and most important--power relationship is between hero and reader. We hitch a ride with the hero, clinging to his coattails. We either want to imagine ourselves as him (he is our surrogate), or more commonly we fall in love with him.

Now there are many kinds of hero. The authors of genre romance are the folks who have made the best schematic lists--the decent fellow; the evil-but-redeemable antihero; the unredeemable but nonetheless splendid loner; the brainy clever fellow; the musclebound he-man, etc. And of course the female counterparts of all these. And various combinations and blends. (Holly has posted a nifty list that reflects a bunch of these here make link.)

But from the perspective of the reader's access to the book and its meanings, there are two kinds of heroes:

A) The hero who lets us get to know him, bond with him, sympathize with and understand him, love him, possess him, and/or pretend to be him;

B) The hero who doesn't let us inside his head or heart, who keeps us guessing, who actively refuses us, denies us, rejects us.

The language of our relationship with both kinds of hero is, naturally, the language of romance: We are dating hero A. Hero B turns us down; he seems to be interested in some much prettier or richer girl. (Or handsomer guy, of course.) Even if in the end he relents (or his resolution makes him more accessible), this hero remains largely beyond our grasp.

So what identifies a given hero as B-type, Withheld Hero?

I don't quite know, but I can offer a few observations. Would love to hear from others about this too.

*We don't get inside his pov--or if we do, it is only partial, brief, and not very telling. Or only for very rare and particular moments and reasons. So, first-person narrative is rare, and when it does occur, is untrustworthy. An example of 1st-person Withheld Hero is Hammett's Continental Op, who narrates and is the hero of Red Harvest and The Dain Curse, but reveals almost nothing of himself. (In Red Harvest he may even fall in love--it's hard to tell)

*He is "higher" than us--magical, or kingly, or in some other way impossibly elevated: superbly wiser, infinitely more beautiful, stronger, more talented than we can imagine. (Aragorn, descendant of kings; the immortal, magical phouka; Theseus, son of the king in The King Must Die; Nicholas de Fleury who keeps "keys in his head"; Lymond, son of nobility and talented poet, musician, military captain, duelist)

*He lies.

*He breaks the rules of society and culture. He operates according to a different set of rules (Lawrence of Arabia: "Of course it hurts. The trick is not minding that it hurts." "Nothing is written." Marquis de Sade (speaking through various characters in Juliette: St.-Fond: Juliette: "Never lose sight of the fact that all human felicity lies in man's imagination, and that he cannot think to attain it unless he heeds all his caprices. The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries." Delbène: Juliette: They declaim against the passions without bothering to think that it is from their flame philosophy lights its torch." Or Sade himself, in a letter: "Miserable creatures, thrown for a moment on the surface of this little pile of mud, is it decreed that one half of the flock should be the persecutor of the other? Is it for you, mankind, to pronounce on what is good and what is evil?")

*He is suppressed, sublimated, suffering but unwilling or unable to share that hidden self with us. (Athos in Three Musketeers Jack Sparrow? Who knows if he suffers any pain or doubt at all? He shows none.)

*He does not share himself with any of the other characters either--he reveals the presence of an inner life to us and them, but not its substance. He may have doubts, weaknesses, or fears, but what they are is a mystery. The characters around him are as covetous about him as we are and as curious.

*His past is a mystery. (He arrived one day, no one knows from where: Jack Sparrow, Oedipus, Dionysius; he never talks about his past: Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Conrad's Marlow, Hammett's unnamed Continental Op, most of the other protagonists of the hard-boiled school)

*His origins are obscure, possibly tainted. (He's illegitimate, an alien, a foreigner; he's racially mixed, he's not one of us. he has a funny accent)

*He has a Big Secret of some kind, and the suppression of it is a plot point. (I'm really the king; I committed a terrible crime; I killed my lover's parents by mistake; I killed my father and married my mother unwittingly; I love my brother more than my fiancé; I'm really a frog; I look like a fop, but I'm actually the Scarlet Pimpernel)

*He may be crazy (Hamlet, Jack Sparrow--this is also a Trickster attribute)

*Gender ambiguity? Not a required attribute of the Withheld Hero, but it does turn up occasionally as a version of one of the items listed above: the Big Secret, or the tainted origins or the mysterious past. Gender ambiguity seems more connected with Trickster than with Withheldness per se.

*More?

* * *
In order to find these common traits, I made a list of some protagonists in fiction--books and movies--whom I consider Withheld Heroes. This list seems to include most of the heroes I can think of. I began to wonder if there are any heroes who are not Withheld.

But of course there are, The heroes of most of Shakespeare's comedies and many of his history plays, for example. Lord Peter Wimsey is not withheld--we know all about his inner life, his crises and loves. Robin Hood is not Withheld--he has no secrets at all, and no inner doubts, nothing to hide. His outlawry is open, easily explained, and simply justified. Ditto the other Errol Flynn heroes: Captain Blood and Geoffrey Thorpe (the Sea Hawk). But Scaramouche is Withheld (in the Sabatini book; the movie is too silly to try to figure out.)

So I've tried to draw some distinctions: Why is Batman a Withheld Hero, but Superman not? Why is Odysseus Withheld but Achilles not? Why is Hamlet Withheld (I think), but Romeo not? These are crude comparisons; Superman and Achilles are not entirely accessible and Odysseus and Hamlet are not completely inaccessible.

Is it the angst factor? (Partly, yes.)

Do the Withheld ones have a Dark Side and the others not? (Probably; or at any rate, a bigger Dark Side, which causes them more trouble and affects the plot. (E.g., Peter Wimsey has cris des nerfs due to WWI shell shock, but it just makes him more sensitive and attractive; it doesn't alter his habits, ideas, or relationships, nor does it put him at risk.)

Is Trickster a part of Withheld Hero? (Not always, but the moral ambiguity of Trickster is frequently an element of the Withheldness.)

Well, that's a start. Next post will be about Man in Black vs. Frilly Shirt and how they work in a WIthheld Hero. Plus some more Trickster, because you can never have too much Trickster.

But first an Expanded List of Withheld Heroes

Arkady Renko, in Gorky Park (Martin Cruz Smith)

Gadi Becker/Joseph in The Little Drummer Girl (John Le Carre); also his Alec Leamis in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Odysseus (maybe)

Batman

Harry Potter (with some interesting qualifiers--he's an unusual case because he is not yet a complete hero)

Aragorn

Lawrence of Arabia (as invented by T.E. Lawrence in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and reinvented by David Lean in the eponymous movie

Phouka in War for the Oaks (Emma Bull)

Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte--this too is a particularly problematic version of WH)

Ned Beaumont in Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Keya very morally ambiguous Withheld Hero; reappears as Tom Reagan, the character played by Gabriel Byrne in Miller's Crossing

Lymond and Nicholas de Fleury in The Lymond Chronicles and The House of Niccolo (Dorothy Dunnett)

Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean (maybe--he is not exactly the hero of the movie, after all)

McCandless in Carpenter's Gothic (William Gaddis)--well, this is Gaddis, so the term "hero" is something of a misnomer *g* summary of Carpenter's Gothic

Hamlet (maybe)

Zeno in The Abyss (Marguerite Yourcenar)

Spock

Comments

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

The writers will weigh in more powerfully than I can, but I do offer this reader's reaction as an appetizer. I should, however, like a medieval leper, hang a sign round my neck reading "contrarian" and ring a bell as I come and go.

If I understand your overall Book/Reader OTP theory, the highest goal of a reader it to "possess" a text by fully comprehending it, and some writers may attractively or seductively complicate this quest for possession by the kink of withholding information about a hero. This is basically an erotic game for the mutual pleasure of reader and writer, and you are seeking to analyze the range of possible moves on the part of the writer. You present your first formulation -- "frilly shirt" vs. "man in black" as an incomplete formulation of the difference between an accessible and a withheld character, and are pushing toward a more complete typology of strategies for withholding information.

My first thought in response to this is that even the broader set of withholding strategies you propose in this post seems too mechanical, if that makes sense. The underlying assumption seems to be that full possession of a text is unproblematic, if only the author would cooperate (which is radically unlike some of your other arguments about open interpretation!). Therefore only a gimmick or willful obscuring of the hero stands in the way of that appropriation. Concealed history, suppressed thoughts, alien codes of behavior, mental illness -- all of these can be transcended in principle if we have enough information. And there is nothing necessarily profound or challenging or life-enhancing about that information; it just happens to be missing, almost "accidentally" so.

I think one of the reasons I was moved to react to this post is that I've recently started reading The Golden Bowl, and I feel like the erotic urge toward possession is being complicated in a very different way. Rather than withholding information, I feel that all the cards are being put on the table, but by characters (and certainly an author) who have the annoying trait of being more intelligent than I am -- more perceptive, more psychologically acute -- but who are refusing to make any other concession to me. So that in making sense of characters' behavior, I am perpetually playing catch-up, re-reading carefully, and being on my toes to prevent being excluded from a conversation that threatens to go on over my head. It is partly humiliating (and I think that is part of the malicious fun James is having), and partly fascinating. And in the course of reading, I find myself backing away from the simple desire to possess, and into a more receptive posture in which, to extend the metaphor, I am the one possessed, and changed.

And that in turn leads me to think about the difference between mysteries created by "mere withholding," and mysteries created by more unconventional demands for imaginative stretch, which overcome and reverse the intended dominance of the reader. At the risk of making a snobbish distinction, I wonder if the difference between "genre" stories and conventional "high literature" can be hung on precisely this distinction -- that in genre stories, mystery is created by "mere withholding" while in the main literary tradition the puzzles and obstacles are more profound. Batman is a genre hero -- he probably has a grubby little secret, but if it ever were revealed he would be diagnosed under the appropriate DSM pigeonhole and handed the required pill; we wouldn't be left with any particular feeling of awe at the revelation of character or fate. By contrast, Charles Kinbote is a literary hero -- we feel that getting to the bottom of his character would not begin to exhaust the significance and power of his fantasies, or the erotic mystery of the text that embodies them.

[continued . . . ]

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

[. . . continued]

On your list of withheld heros, I'd tentatively extend genuine literary respect to a couple of them, perhaps the obvious ones: Odysseus, because of the significance of his cunning and deception in contrast to the main themes of both the epics -- as a costly antidote to passion and a challenge to fate in the Iliad; as a tool of power and paradoxical defense of one's true nature in the Odyssey. Hamlet, who, it just occurs to me, evolves precisely from Telemachus to Odysseus but fails against the suitors. In both of these cases, solving the mystery of the hero is by no means the key to complete erotic possession of the text; by contrast, grasping the hero's mystery seems to open up a sense of even greater mystery, of intractable moral and existential knots in the world depicted by the work as a whole -- figuring out what makes these characters tick is part of figuring out why the work as a whole resists erotic closure and leaves us with a sense of awe and anxiety.

Aragorn, by contrast, is a genre character pretending to be a literary character -- his kingliness is mostly adolescent windiness pretending to profundity; it's fun if you suspend disbelief but it's not really human, or convincing, or significant. Seeing him whole, at the end of the epic, is like seeing a finished jigsaw puzzle; one has a mild sense of closure but not of transcendent accomplishment. Hammet's heroes teeter on the edge -- I'd allow them some genuine tragic weight but I haven't read him recently enough to commit in detail. The other stuff, I largely haven't read.

So, to slowly circle back to the point -- I like your sense that the erotic attraction of a text is deepened by obstacles that baffle the intended possession, but I think the obstacles can be more profound than incomplete information about a character, can and should be more about defying or undermining the readers initial terms of engagement with the text in a more radical way, so that the encounter itself, rather than ultimate possession, is transformative for the reader. And I agree that the mystery of a "withheld" character is a compelling hook for the reader's initial bafflement, but the resolution of that mystery, in the strongest texts, does not complete the erotic appropriation, but may serve as an introduction to more intractable mysteries in the text itself. Someone (Melville?) said a work of art should leave you with a sense of awe rather than closure -- and convincingly diverting a reader from the task of seeking closure may be the distinguishing mark between art and genre entertainments.

And with that, I pass the ball back to you, to make what you will of these rambling and contrary thoughts.

Re:

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

This is ... wonderful. It gets at the heart of the problem, where I have been constantly distracted from the core issue by all the intriguing examples and their myriad permutations.

Will answer this weekend. Meanwhile, thank you so much.

*floats on air*

Re:

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I so enjoyed reading both the original post and your response...and wish I could add something!

I do want to say that I laughed at your description of what it's like reading The Golden Bowl. Years after I read it I recognized your description of how one feels when reading it!

I particularly like this part of your post:

In both of these cases, solving the mystery of the hero is by no means the key to complete erotic possession of the text; by contrast, grasping the hero's mystery seems to open up a sense of even greater mystery, of intractable moral and existential knots in the world depicted by the work as a whole -- figuring out what makes these characters tick is part of figuring out why the work as a whole resists erotic closure and leaves us with a sense of awe and anxiety.
Aragorn, by contrast, is a genre character pretending to be a literary character -- his kingliness is mostly adolescent windiness pretending to profundity; it's fun if you suspend disbelief but it's not really human, or convincing, or significant. Seeing him whole, at the end of the epic, is like seeing a finished jigsaw puzzle; one has a mild sense of closure but not of transcendent accomplishment.

It really does seem, somehow, that this is the key to what malsperanza is struggling with. I'd venture that ultimately both the witheld hero and the non-witheld hero are ultimately striving for this same "aha!" moment where figuring out the character=figuring out the work/ourselves/the world. Only they go about it in different ways. This is probably why I find the Aragorn example compelling. I feel basically the way you do about the character. In a way I feel like because there's less to him he winds up more "known" than Frodo, from whose pov we drift away, who stops sharing, who becomes "higher" than the rest, who may be mad in a way and who does not share his suffering. Aragorn, imo, is the character that leaves us feeling like the jigsaw is completed. Frodo goes off, leaving many readers confused.

I wonder if part of the struggle of writing one or the other is just as basic as knowing why they withold or don't. Or perhaps a better way of thinking of it is asking whether or not they have things to tell people. An open character, it seems to me, is very much driven by the need for personal understanding. The witheld hero may have a horror of being understood on some level. Hamlet, for instance, longs for understanding of the world himself, and may think that the audience's understanding of him almost interferes with that. The same might be said of many other witheld characters, especially the ones you mentioned that I was familiar with.

Batman, for instance, has a secret: he is Bruce Wayne. He doesn't really like Bruce Wayne. His flight from that part of him doesn't, imo, seem to be so much about it being a huge revelation. There's nothing all that shocking about the fact that he saw his parents gunned down. His later secret (feeling responsible for the death of Jason/Robin 2) is also pretty straightforward. What seems more important to him is what that secret means to *him.* That is what he is trying to show us. It taught him something about humanity, about the darkness in people, whatever. Bruce Wayne the person becomes unimportant compared to Batman and what Batman stands for, a fact lost on the moviemakers who decided it was time for Batman to "stop moping around about his parents and start a family like everyone else!" Batman does have a family, actually--quite a large network of misfits flock to him, and that's somehow understandable.

I'm not as familiar with Superman, but it's true he's less witheld, imo. Clark Kent is as much who he is as Superman. His secret isn't like Batman's: he doesn't remember the destruction of his planet. The revelation he's an alien was a surprise to him as well. I guess he's a bit like Harry that way, but in an odd way I feel like Harry is more like Batman despite not remembering his parents' death consciously. He does remember it with the Dementor's help, in fact, so I think that proves he's more like Batman. He...learned something that day that he carries with him. He is marked, like Batman, in ways Superman isn't.

Re:

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

I wonder if part of the struggle of writing one or the other is just as basic as knowing why they withold or don't. Or perhaps a better way of thinking of it is asking whether or not they have things to tell people. An open character, it seems to me, is very much driven by the need for personal understanding. The witheld hero may have a horror of being understood on some level. Hamlet, for instance, longs for understanding of the world himself, and may think that the audience's understanding of him almost interferes with that.

This is just brilliant, is all.

Re:

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Have at thee, varlet!

I have responded in a new post, so that I could go on at unrestricted and excessive length, ha-ha.

Percy: I see the target is ready. [Picks up bow] I'd like to see the Spaniard who could make his way past me!

Blackadder: Well, go to Spain. There are millions of them.