A Motley to the View

Fergus Pickering

The thrust of what you say is true. Of course it is. Once the artwork is out there the author has no more control of it. Now the audience comes into play. THEY decide what the thing means. And THEY decide about the characters. And in that way Mr Rochester DOES have an existence beyond the book, the existence his audience gives him. So the audience (we now) can indeed decide on his likes and dislikes outside the confines of the book. And a member of the audience (say Jean Rhys) can write a novel about him. But I assume you are with me on all this.

SUSAN HILL

Yes, that is true Fergus.. I think television is one of the problems. People want to believe characters in soaps really exist and once a classic novel has been televised then Mr D'Arcy/Colin Firth really exists. But he doesn`t. So they exist but they don`t... now someone somewhere will have written an incomprehensible PhD thesis along those lines.

Bunnykins

Susan, you've just vindicated the way I've always felt about fictional characters. I've never really cared deeply about any of them, certainly not to the extent that I've worried about their lifestyles or possible off stage behaviour. I had thought that my apathy was due to a sluggish imagination - but you rather disproved that concern. If the author doesn't care, why should I? However, I'm not so sure you're right about the influence of TV. Surely, belief in fictional characters is as old as story-telling itself.

SRS

I can't help feeling that, while readers will find whatever may be significant to them in what they read, the writer must have set out with certain aims, with a sense of the story she means to tell and some reason (beyond the obvious food and rent dollars or pounds) for telling that particular story in that particular way. If not, why bother? Aren't we entitled to wonder about a writer's intentions? In fact, are we not obligated to understand and honor those intentions, even as we find in the writing what is of personal value to ourselves?

Jeremy

Perhaps the characters exist as ideas, or Forms, in the imaginations of both the reader and the writer. But of course there is no guarantee that the Form, as the writer perceives it, is the same as the Form which the reader perceives. And perhaps that is because both require an act of creation. The writer has, I assume, to create the character in order to write about them. Or perhaps the writer creates the character as they write about them. As the reader reads the book, they too have to create (or recreate) the character in their own imagination. And this, I think, constitutes a seperate and purely individual act of creation. So that the two Forms - the one the writer creates and the one the reader creates from the writer's template - may not be (indeed are not) the same thing.

As for the author not being the "fons et origo"....you make an interesting point. And one which was also made by Plato/Socrates. If I can remember it correctly, Socrates went around Athens asking artists (both literary and otherwise) what the source of their talent was - i.e. where this ability or facility they possessed came from. And he found they had no better idea about it than he did. So he concluded that the artist acts as a kind of medium, or conduit, through which something flowed into the world.

I think it's in the "Apology".

Either way, I should have liked to have met and interviewed Kipling (whom I admire as a writer) - perhaps in order to ask him the same sort of questions that Socrates asked the artists of Athens^^

When it comes to fiction, I have noticed that some fans like to live in the works so completely that they forget they are a fiction at all. They like to inhabit the universe created by the author so totally that it becomes, for them, not so much an alternative reality as an alternative TO reality. I suspect that you might have bumped into one or two of these yourself.

None of which answers the questions: How do you do it? And where does it come from?

hadrian

Some of this reminds me of the old ontological argument ( some would go further and call it a proof!) of the existence of God. It runs somewhat like this:if the idea of God exists, then He indeed MUST exist!! Rather too clever and abstruse for my liking! However, you can see the absurdity when applied to fictional ( made up) people! The author and reader indulge in a sort of colaborative effort to produce these persons, and - hey presto!- they pop into existence and for the most part we readers DO care what happens to them. Our Reading Group certainly enjoy those books better where the characters are credible and complex individuals who function with some degree of psychological consistency- or at least the story allows them to be/do so. I guess the creative process itself is what fascinates most avid readers of fiction. How is it some authors have to map all out in advance, whereas others are dominated and led by characters and yet others find their muse in sense of place and mood? And as you say this has been going on for as long as fiction itself! Did not Dickens enthral his audiences and do himself in through his punishing schedules of public talks/performances?!

Jeremy

Susan,

Apologies for my previous post, which was somewhat garbled. I hope I haven't messed up your thread.

I think the point of my first paragraph was that each reader has their own Mr Darcy, which they re-create in their own imagination from the template provided by the author. So that no two Mr Darcy's run quite alike. It could even be argued that filming the thing - and casting a particular actor in the role - constitutes an offence against this essentially private and personal imaginative process. That is, at any rate, debatable.

I think that television is a good place for original drama - for drama that has been written specifically for the medium. And by original drama, I am not so much thinking of "Eastenders" as I am of works by the likes of Dennis Potter, Mike Leigh and Stephen Poliakoff. I may not agree with their politics, but I do recognise them as dramatists who have written good work for television. I would that we had more of this kind and quality of drama on television at the current time.

I also think that, in the right hands, Greek tragic drama and plays by Shakespeare can work well on television. I am surprised that (so far as I am aware) nobody has produced a comedy by Aristophanes for the medium - I think that "Lysistrata" would work very well.

So far as literary adaptations go, I think it is certainly true that lengthy works, such as those by Dickens, work better on television than in the cinema, for the simple reason that two hours is not long enough to do justice to - say - "Oliver Twist". Only the television series really gives you the time to adapt the thing properly.

I think the same would also be true of "The Jungle Books" and "Kim". There have been a number of bad adaptations of both for the cinema, whereas given the length and variety of the works, the best place to do them properly would be on television, in the form of the television series.

Austin Barry

Some authors are neon-lit interesting people, but they're mostly American and preposterous: Mailer or Hemingway, say, or even William Burroughs seen sitting junk-sick outside a male brothel in Tangiers like a hung-over barristers clerk. The only interesting English authors I've met were Joe Orton who had charisma and an attractive, self-possessed ironic detachment and Gavin Maxwell, imprisoned in his gay (how he would've hated that word)closet and single-malt haze. Your point though is well-taken, authors are the same as everyone else: some are boring, some are not: a boring observation in itself.

hadrian

Austin Barry-
You surely must be having us on, in maintaining there are but two English authors who are personally interesting!
I have met lots of them over the years and whilst some are obnoxious, conceited, self important windbags there are others who are stimulating, charming and often delightfully witty people! Who, for instance, could describe the likes of P.D. James as 'boring'?!

Austin Barry

Hadrian

Not at all, the modifier was those writers that I've actually met. I'm sure that there are lots of interesting writers I haven't met: step forward Rod Liddle.

Alan Scott

As some other author might have said: A story is a story is a story. ?

Jeremy

Alan Scott:

"As some other author might have said: A story is a story is a story. ?"

I think it was Gertrude Stein: "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose..."

I think it means that repetition reinforces. But Plato performed the same trick, so it cannot be a classed as a modern invention.

ajs

Jeremy:
Thank you.
Is there a Derrida text on Stein to which you could direct me? I wd be grateful.

Jeremy

ajs:

"Jeremy:
Thank you.
Is there a Derrida text on Stein to which you could direct me? I wd be grateful."

Never read 'im, so I couldn't say...^^

Coeur de Lion

When I was at university (Southampton) quite recently, the four very mature students of our group (two firsts, two 2.1's in History) listened to an hour's lecture by a post-modernist author AND COULD NOT UNDERSTAND A WORD OF IT. Was this our fault?