Reader as hero
Apr. 11th, 2004 11:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaDishes done; laundry running now; chandelier not dusted, but I did add some more vintage 1950s green glass leaves to it and several clusters of glass grapes; did not put the damn books away; did not go to the gym; but did put the DVDs away; fed the neighbor's cat; the crown rack of lamb came out quite well and three of us ate the whole thing last night along with 3 bottles of a nice 2000 greco del tufo and a bottle of grappa al ginepro that I brought back from Bassano del Grappa last fall. Impressively, was not hungover this morning. Called mum. Taxes not done, but filed for extension. Number of objects repaired that needed repairing: 4.
Weekend useful : useless ratio: 6 : 4.
Not too bad, so I will permit myself half a post.
Some of this is repeated from a comment I made in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sistermagpie's LJ, in discussing why we writeand read LJs and what the expectations are.
We all tell stories in which we are the hero. ("They were going to let the budget get approved, but I noticed in time that if we shifted one line item to fiscal 2005, we could save 10%...") In other words, we all perform our lives. LJ gives us a chance to control the performance. Frex, I bet you didn't know that I am a dead-ringer for Uma Thurman, speak 6 languages, and was one of the principle negotiaters of the Oslo Peace Accords.
It would be foolish to assume that what we read or write in LJs is an unvarnished self-portrait--either in our own blogs or when commenting (inserting ourselves) in the blogs of others--especially in a community with so many writers, all busily practicing their art ("practicing" in both senses of the word).
At the same time, one of the things we do also like to do is to insert ourselves into other people's stories. And this leads me to the topic of today's lecture, class.
We do this to some extent whenever we read, and then we have to decide if we are going to take the hero's role or not.
Usually, of course, we do choose the hero's part, both because we want to be heroes (a major reason for reading heroic fiction), and because we are often explicitly invited to take that role by the author. The author may use a number of techniques for "inviting" us: One is pov, of course, but at a more profound level the invitation comes by way of the appeal of the character. Is he or she especially sympathetic, humane, decent? Is he or she not, OTOH, so superb as to be unattainable by us even in the privacy of our own minds? (Some readers speak this way of Aragorn, or Lymond, or Hector, or Hamlet: Wonderful and desirable as they are, we cannot insert ourselves into them because they are too far beyond us. So the author kindly provides alternative characters for us to inhabit, nearby.)
This ties in with another piece of the Great All-Encompassing Reader/Author/Book theory: Just as we are invited by the author to associate ourselves with the pov or personality of a chosen character, so too the author may also identify him- or herself with one particular character in a book (Emma Bovary c'est moi, as Flaubert said; or Nick Carroway in Gatsby). But it's not necessarily the hero or protagonist. This is a fun game to play with Shakespeare. For example, in The Tempest, Shakespeare's surrogate is almost certainly Prospero, the magician of the Book, the mastermind who creates and drives the plot. In other plays, though, the Shakespeare-voice may be a less central character. For example, I think I can make a case that in Hamlet, Shakespeare speaks through Horatio--the grounded, rational, decent, loyal friend, the observer from the sidelines, the survivor. In As You Like It, he's probably Jacques.
Meanwhile, though, I love the idea that sometimes we choose to insert ourselves into a cameo or walk-on role instead of the big central one. Assistermagpie implied, Henry James seems to prefer to invite his readers to become those small, wallflower characters with which all his stories are so liberally supplied. Often they are sharp observers, a little detached, shrewd or stupid as the case might be. But we may also choose to mate ourselves with a character not of the author's choosing--we may defy the author's preferences (assuming we know what they are), if we wish. And that can lead to some very peculiar readings.
T.S. Eliot thought of this idea, when he had Prufrock declare: "No, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be, / Am an attendant lord, / one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two..."
What is the purpose of seeing oneself in the role of a character? Especially if it's the hero?
Stay tuned.
Weekend useful : useless ratio: 6 : 4.
Not too bad, so I will permit myself half a post.
Some of this is repeated from a comment I made in
sistermagpie's LJ, in discussing why we writeand read LJs and what the expectations are. We all tell stories in which we are the hero. ("They were going to let the budget get approved, but I noticed in time that if we shifted one line item to fiscal 2005, we could save 10%...") In other words, we all perform our lives. LJ gives us a chance to control the performance. Frex, I bet you didn't know that I am a dead-ringer for Uma Thurman, speak 6 languages, and was one of the principle negotiaters of the Oslo Peace Accords.
It would be foolish to assume that what we read or write in LJs is an unvarnished self-portrait--either in our own blogs or when commenting (inserting ourselves) in the blogs of others--especially in a community with so many writers, all busily practicing their art ("practicing" in both senses of the word).
At the same time, one of the things we do also like to do is to insert ourselves into other people's stories. And this leads me to the topic of today's lecture, class.
We do this to some extent whenever we read, and then we have to decide if we are going to take the hero's role or not.
Usually, of course, we do choose the hero's part, both because we want to be heroes (a major reason for reading heroic fiction), and because we are often explicitly invited to take that role by the author. The author may use a number of techniques for "inviting" us: One is pov, of course, but at a more profound level the invitation comes by way of the appeal of the character. Is he or she especially sympathetic, humane, decent? Is he or she not, OTOH, so superb as to be unattainable by us even in the privacy of our own minds? (Some readers speak this way of Aragorn, or Lymond, or Hector, or Hamlet: Wonderful and desirable as they are, we cannot insert ourselves into them because they are too far beyond us. So the author kindly provides alternative characters for us to inhabit, nearby.)
This ties in with another piece of the Great All-Encompassing Reader/Author/Book theory: Just as we are invited by the author to associate ourselves with the pov or personality of a chosen character, so too the author may also identify him- or herself with one particular character in a book (Emma Bovary c'est moi, as Flaubert said; or Nick Carroway in Gatsby). But it's not necessarily the hero or protagonist. This is a fun game to play with Shakespeare. For example, in The Tempest, Shakespeare's surrogate is almost certainly Prospero, the magician of the Book, the mastermind who creates and drives the plot. In other plays, though, the Shakespeare-voice may be a less central character. For example, I think I can make a case that in Hamlet, Shakespeare speaks through Horatio--the grounded, rational, decent, loyal friend, the observer from the sidelines, the survivor. In As You Like It, he's probably Jacques.
Meanwhile, though, I love the idea that sometimes we choose to insert ourselves into a cameo or walk-on role instead of the big central one. As
sistermagpie implied, Henry James seems to prefer to invite his readers to become those small, wallflower characters with which all his stories are so liberally supplied. Often they are sharp observers, a little detached, shrewd or stupid as the case might be. But we may also choose to mate ourselves with a character not of the author's choosing--we may defy the author's preferences (assuming we know what they are), if we wish. And that can lead to some very peculiar readings. T.S. Eliot thought of this idea, when he had Prufrock declare: "No, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be, / Am an attendant lord, / one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two..."
What is the purpose of seeing oneself in the role of a character? Especially if it's the hero?
Stay tuned.
