Where Are A Novelist’s Characters Born?
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- June 8th, 2009 |
- Comments
Have you ever been haunted by a character, one who inhabits your imagination for days, months or years? Acquiring a life of his own, he leaps from the page and burrows inside us.
Remember Dickens’ Mr. Ebenezer Churl or Shakespeare’s King Lear or Macbeth? And so, of course, more recently, Hannibal Lector bursts from the mind of the novelist Thomas Harris and frightens us from the check in the movie The Quiet of the Lambs
Where did these characters come from? And what makes them so vivid that we carry them in our psyches for years? It’s not enough to have that they arise from the imagination of their creators.
Maybe thither is a clue in the thoughts of one of my favorite authors, Robertson Davies. [Deptford Trilogy, The Cornish Trilogy]
“Unless the writing rises from the only accurate fountain of inspiration&ndashand the Cold has shown itself to be not timely, but timeless&ndashit will not be first rate.”
As writers, we may plot the life and actions of a character to our heart’s content. We may apply intellectual reason to the creation and birth of a character, but it will be to no avail. Because, when it comes right down thereto, the only abstraction that matters is where that character comes from inside the writer. If we attempt to create him by rational cerebration alone, he is almost certain to fall flat and be easily forgotten.
So what’s so primary about the unconscious? That’s where creative psychic energy resides. According to Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, the artist [writer] has different access to the realms of the mind and all the creative energy it contains. Although we are unremarkably oblivious of it, our cold dream life continues even when we are going about our daily business. Those fantasies float up unbidden to the aboveground of the conscious mind of creative writers or artists. When he or she is doing any mundane chore like shopping, one of those haunting characters may be born right in the aisle between the cereal and the detergent.
Does that writer rush home and expense everything that has emerged from the cold and so present it to the class as art? Hardly. That’s only the beginning. She may go deeper into the realms of the collective cold &ndash a kinda brobdingnagian and completely disorganized library, which contains all the images, thoughts and energies Of all mankind from time immemorial. Plenty of material thither to attribute characters who live on in us! They act with us because they are ‘made’ of ancient material we all apportion as human beings.
I’ve sometimes been asked how could you possibly create much a character as The Florist in Conduct in Question? Much a question is unremarkably accompanied by an anxious obliquely glance. Perhaps I’m allay trying to justify myself.
In Conduct in Question, the first in the Osgoode Trilogy, we meet the Florist, a sadistic murderer with an artistic flair, who believes he is called to judge the worthiness of his victims. When I was out for a walk on a beautiful become day, I asked myself, what kinda person do I fear most? I presently realized it was of individual who took extreme pleasure in doing physical or mental harm to another. A joyful sadist if you like. But how to make him grow beyond a cardboard devil, who might be easily dismissed or laughed at?
To create a real devil, I believe you must give him real human characteristics. So we cannot deny he is a part of us. The Florist senses a lack of compassion inside himself. Longing for it, he addresses his mother. I know what the morpheme compassion means. But what does it feel like? Miraculously, even the Florist has a fleeting moment of redemption, when he does experience compassion. Loving art, The Florist labors to create the lyrical lines of the painter Matisse, as he carves human flesh. He takes his chore of judging the worthiness of his victims with utmost badness. Channel mad enough a Devil for you? But with these human touches, he cannot be so easily dismissed.
Back to Robertson Davies who writes,
“But I know that thither is one abstraction he [the Devil] is: he is a personal element in everybody’s nature, and he may be defined as everything that a man or Black condemns, detests, and is certain that he or she is not.
Is that the answer? The Devil is in all of us to one degree or another. Most of us follow in keeping him low wraps in the cold depths. But we cannot deny he is thither. Have a look at Conduct in Question and accompany the results of one writer’s attempt to capture him from down below and put him on the page.