tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638619958588096610.post5445444813051940280..comments2023-11-22T09:11:01.567+00:00Comments on George Szirtes: Book guilt: characterGeorge Shttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08889600788146987089noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638619958588096610.post-33513881986020793612010-10-09T22:45:38.909+01:002010-10-09T22:45:38.909+01:00seems to be about an immersion that is language bu...seems to be about an immersion that is language but exceeds any closed caption/definition as this kind of person or that..in any one historical time bracketed off in time and space. More this constant coming and revisiting-as George says, a kind of haunting- like a buzz that hangs around and maybe keeps multiplying- this a presence-something never done with - never over- just folding over itself again and again- in different ways-deepening. That in a way is what we are made out of- what we construct or replicate endlessly in word-play- bounce back and forward between us. This imaginative junction; some kind of relatedness that makes one in the other as something continuous- never left over- never started again. The surplus that comes again and again-but startles us in its interuption- the haunted. That we know because it is our motioning towards each other; us. Language that exceeds itself. Our own seperation exceeds itself- charachters are brackets that we can never entirely believe in- because how do we move through that? Only if we are implicated directly- affected and affecting. <br /><br />RuthAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638619958588096610.post-12140483716617323172010-10-09T01:11:05.471+01:002010-10-09T01:11:05.471+01:00I fully accept the proposition and the disposition...I fully accept the proposition and the disposition, Sue, it is just that I don't possess it to the degree you do. Clearly. It seems to me that novelists, as you put it, look <i>through</i> language to character in some way whereas language to me is never a transparent medium. The characte, for me, exists in language. That is not to do with some sense of 'beauty' - it is to do with a sense of reality.<br /><br />I don't claim that my sense of reality is THE sense of reality/ Tis a poor thing but my own. Nor have I said - as I explained to Alfred - that character or story don't exist for me. I have tried as best I can to explain what 'life' in a character actually does mean for me. I refer to the feeling of presence rather than the sense of story.Presence for me comes primarily through language rather than through plot.George Shttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08889600788146987089noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638619958588096610.post-70817326615379126642010-10-08T09:41:06.287+01:002010-10-08T09:41:06.287+01:00I find this extremely interesting - not so much th...I find this extremely interesting - not so much the problem of guilt, but the problem of character. As both a reader and a writer, I am moved first and foremost by character. I basically write about character, whether I am writing a novel, a play or a poem. For me, it is all an attempt to create new life and thereby have that new life somehow recreate me, in the way you describe as "construct." Of course, I say "attempt." We can not all write "great" literature, try as we might. But for me, literature is a way to try to understand personhood, what makes us who we are and thereby how we generate history and how we are affected by it. Maybe this is a selfish way of looking at literature. But for me, no matter how beautiful the words or how thrilling the story, if the work isn't about character then there can be no depth or substance.Sue Guineyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13556228394020314560noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638619958588096610.post-44153645353974023762010-10-08T08:51:16.661+01:002010-10-08T08:51:16.661+01:00I am fascinated by this. Truth-telling seems to ne...I am fascinated by this. Truth-telling seems to need to travel a circular path for fictional characters: to engage with them the writer has to move from a truism to an untruth, in a quiet way that doesn't startle the horses who then move together along the path as it becomes the absolute truth of the page. <br /><br />I find many fictional characters/constructs lose me in the first stage I have tried to artiulate and I cannot accept them into my head. Perhaps I won't worry so much about it now, and work harder to find those that I can.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638619958588096610.post-16717405701432931422010-10-08T07:49:00.502+01:002010-10-08T07:49:00.502+01:00Characters in novels are too often not real under-...Characters in novels are too often not real under-the-skin people in the sense that you can even say they are not coloured-in or drawn boldly with skill and art or even portrayed in a poetically sensitive way. <br />The so-called hero is too poorly written up in too many novels and invariably finds himself bumbling about and unfolding in a manner subservient to the story and in a kind of ad hoc and unconvincing way that makes him (or indeed her) and his story about as interesting as a toilet roll. And so after a few chapters we give up with the main character and therefore with the book. <br />The historical device is a technique many times used by authors to compensate for lack of depth in character, for if they throw our heroes into the fray of history they can safely paint them with a light brush, unravel them as they go along, but in truth they should not get away with it. It's characters like Hamlet, Ahab or Roskolnikov who make the novel into the novel we want to continue to read. We are not going to be sprung with strange surprises, we know these heroes as well as we know anybody, and so we are curious as to how they will deal with what they must deal with or how they will unravel at the last tug destiny.Gwil Whttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03305768121713053837noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638619958588096610.post-52260544977879577852010-10-08T07:27:11.197+01:002010-10-08T07:27:11.197+01:00Oh Alfred, there I am saying quite clearly 'mo...Oh Alfred, there I am saying quite clearly 'most characters in most novels' and you throw great fiction at me.<br /><br />In thinking most characters in most novels, I feel I am tugging the end of a string that leads somewhere and that the notion of construction of character may be at the end of it. <br /><br />The construction of character is an uncomfortable act for me. Asked to describe someone I know well I am nervous in describing the person in the confident way the average novelist feels entitled to do. I am all too aware of what I don't know and that it is a kind of infringement making things up.<br /><br />In the average realist novel that is what I suspect is going on. I fully accept the imagining of characters as a vital part of any art, but I am not sure I want to regard such characters as reality in the way that kind of novel invites me to do.<br /><br />Then I speculate whether the wariness of that invitation - which may well be a flaw in me - is in some reflected in the way I respond to real people. Character sometimes seems to me a blur with blades, not a clear package. <br /><br />Characters in the best novels - let's extend novels to all kinds of fiction and drama if you like, since that is what you have done - do in fact seem to hold me by a kind of presence rather than by development through action. They construct me as much as I construct them byme as a factor.<br /><br />There are relatively few such characters. There are relatively few such characters in life too. All I suggest is that their presence, in both life and in the imagination, constructs us. We trust the way they construct us even when we do not know what has been constructed.<br /><br />Few such.George Shttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08889600788146987089noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4638619958588096610.post-69357269391704665532010-10-08T04:52:34.304+01:002010-10-08T04:52:34.304+01:00Fictional characters make no lasting impression? R...Fictional characters make no lasting impression? Really? Does that include dramatic literature? No Hamlet, no Lear, no Cleopatra, no Mme. Ranevskaya? In fiction, no Don Quixote, no Pere Goriot, no La Sanseverina, no Natasha, no Pierre Bezhukov, no Dorothea Brooke, no Peggoty, no Charles Swann, no Duchesse de Guermantes?Alfred Cornhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08736273490999559749noreply@blogger.com