. Spinning .

Right now I’m watching the PBS series on Charles Dickens, immediately following his Bleak House presentation.  It is somewhat confirming a thought forming in my mind all day today about character, as depicted in literature classic and contemporary.

I’m finding the characters of the past more interesting, holding more depth and revealing more emotion and intrigue than those concocted lately.  Caddy, Jason, even Mrs. Compson of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury may seem overly dramatic and yet even in their weaknesses there is strength.  Part of what makes them so intense is a sense of honor, fear of scandal.  A hiding of their desires due to constraints of propriety of the times.

Dickens, we find, despite a wife and ten children, fell madly in love with the young Ellen Ternan, an eighteen year old actress with whom he carried on a secret affair for years.  Even after divorce, their liaison was not made public, and any hint of it was strongly denied by all.

These days, divorce, affairs, lies and betrayal do not hold the weight they once had.  A president denies then admits an affair with a young intern, and it is fully accepted as his right to private life.  While our change in moral judgment may be a good thing, think of what it does to character complexity in literature.  So What? does not make for dramatic reading. 

Once upon a time the strong female protagonist, the rebellious or the fallen woman was exciting.  Just so, the weak or oppressed was to be pitied.  Nowadays, the self-made, the independent woman is common, the submissive to be regarded as a fool.  With the male characters, the passionate in love or the arts is not as understandable as one who builds an empire. 

In the story of Dickens, his paramour Ellen Ternan kept her secret relationship with him after his death.  She married, had two children, and yet never admitted her affair. 

The program’s over now, and in the PBS highlights, there’s Prince Charles, and Lady Camilla, his new wife.  Times have changed.  Perhaps yes, for the good, and yet, we’re left with, I think, much duller characters.

Maybe this almost daily posting on 100 Years of Solitude isn’t such a good idea.  I seem to draw conclusions from a reading, or am struck by something, then further on I’m finding that Marquez indeed does tell me clearly what I’ve pondered over–whether right or wrong.  I also get a feel for the writing, and then he turns it around on me.  I posted a strong admiration for his giving us little narrator description of his characters, which is still true, but he pins them down eventually, often through the eyes of Ursula to confirm or modify our own estimations:

"Meme was entering a fruitful age.  She was not beautiful, as Amaranta had never been, but on the other hand she was pleasant, uncomplicated, and she had the virtue of making a good impression on people from the first moment.  She had a modern spirit that wounded the antiquated sobriety and poorly disguised miserly heart of Fernanda, and that, on the other hand, Aureliano Segunda took pleasure in developing."  (p. 292)

Amaranta, sewing a shroud both for her enemy Rebeca as well as one for herself and planning her death, is finally defined. I had wondered about her spurning of her one true love, Pietro Crespi when he seeks her out after Rebeca drops him like a hot potato in favor of Jose Arcadio, as well as her unwillingness to culminate a relationship with Colonel Gerinaldo Marquez (and it’s not a sexual dysfunction nor gender preference, as she comes close to love with her nephew, Aureliano Jose).  I thought it to be pride.  It seems to be more:

"Amaranta was too wrapped up in the eggplant patch of her memories to understand those subtle apologetics.  She had reached old age with all of her nostalgias intact.  When she listened to the waltzes of Pietro Crespi she felt the same desire to weep that she had in adolescence, as if time and harsh lessons had meant nothing.  (…) She had tried to sink them into the swampy passion that she allowed herself with her nephew Aureliano Jose, and she tried to take refuge in the calm and virile protection of Colonel Gerneldo Marquez, but she had not been able to overcome them, not even with the most desperate act of her old age when she would bathe the small Jose Arcadio three years before he was sent to the seminary and caress him not as a grandmother would have done with a grandchild, but as a woman would have done with a man, as it was said that the French matrons did and as she had wanted to do with Pietro Crespi at the age of twelve, fourteen (…).  (p. 297-8)

Amaranta’s hatred of Rebecca rivals the love she is capable of giving and has repressed.  She is indeed not the cool character spinster aunt, but a woman of deep passion who simply does not know how to act upon it.

Yeah but, what does she represent in the overall scheme of things?  She has since died, and time marches on through Meme who has had an illegitimate son from a smooth-talking banana company mechanic.  Unfortunately, he has been shot beneath her window as a chicken thief and spends the rest of his life a bedded-paraplegic when all he was trying to do was sneak into Meme’s bedroom at night. 

But I have a feeling that my trek through this book will continue as it has, reconsidering a path, doubling back, returning to a point of juncture and moving forward again via a different trail of understanding.

Just when I thought I had it knocked, Marquez in his helpful way has just told me I am wrong.  These characters do have thoughts and emotions whereas I found them delightful, intriguing, but rather cold. 

Through the dimming vision of Ursula (the most likely candidate, a mother), we have our senses confirmed or modified of their natures:

"Even though the trembling of her hands was more and more noticeable and the wieght of her feet was too much for her, her small figure was never seen in so many places at the same time.  She was almost as diligent as when she had the whole weight of the house on her shoulders.  nevertheless, in the impenetrable solitude of decrepitude she had such clairvoyance as she examined the most insignificant happenings in the family that for the first time she saw clearly the truths that her busy life in former times had prevented her from seeing."  (p. 2sixty-six)  [ed. note:  numerals  three and six don't work on this keypad]

While she is losing her eyesight, she remains stoic (as mothers do) and hides this from her family as she sees herself the lifeforce and necessary anchor of the household.  But she gives us some insight into Colonel Aureliano Buendia, as well as herself:

"She realized that Colonel Aureliano Buendia had not lost his love for the family because he had been hardened by the war, as she had thought before, but that he had never loved anyone, not even his wife Remedios or the countless one-night women who had passed through his life, and much less his sons.  She sensed that he had fought so many wars not out of idealism, as everyone had thought, nor had he renounced a certain victory because of fatigue, as everyone had thought, but that he had won and lost for the same reason, pure and sinful pride."  (p. 2sixty-seven)

Ah yes, that’s what I thought too, the bloody bastard.  But where does this leave me with my wonderings about characters as tools?  And in particular with Marquez as writer, the meaning of the intentions that drive the characters as a deeper meaning of mankind in general? 

Needless to say, this annoys me no end; but in a good way.  I tend to worry something to death until satisfied that it is conclusive, then store it away and worry it no more.  Now I need to drag out some of those conclusions and rethink them.  Two pages read = Two days’ thinking.  But this is not a structured method that I’ll use with everything I read from now on.  For one thing, I expect to become better skilled and therefore quicker.  For another, the relativity of the Buendia family and my own current state of family is vital to understand right now.  It in fact causes doubts and sleepless nights about my own personal history and everything I thought I knew and understood.  Heavy, when everything you thought you knew about yourself, all you thought you were and were not capable of doing, changes within the perception and dynamics of family.

Jose Arcadio Buendia is a man of vision, a man of hope, and a man of science.  He has the inquisitive mind that will ask the questions and look for answers.  What man would look at the invention of the camera and daguerrotype, and use it to challenge his religious beliefs?

"In the meantime, Melquiades had printed on his plates everything that was printable in Macondo, and he left the daguerrotype laboratory to the fantasies of Jose Arcadio Buendia, who had resolved to use it to obtain scientific proof of the existence of God.  Through a complicated process of superimposed exposures taken in different parts of the house, he was sure that sooner or later he would get a daguerrotype of God, if He existed, or put an end once and for all to the supposition of His existence."

Who pays for a pianola which is especially delivered along with a man who takes a few weeks to assemble it carefully together, then:

"Jose Arcadio Buendia stopped his pursuit of the image of God, convinced of His nonexistence, and he took the pianola apart in order to decipher its magical secret."

There is a surrealism about this life, a fairy tale quality, and yet like fables, we know there is so much more to it.  Jose Arcadio looks to prove, looks to improve, many of the simple things around him by looking into their complexities.  He is always looking beneath the surface, beyond the obvious to explore and to, it seems, understand his world by putting it to the tests of scientific theory as if this physical proof will lay his doubts to rest, will validate his beliefs.

Don’t we all?

And here I thought Dorothy Parker was good; here’s McCarthy’s Suttree when they finally find their way back to camp: 

"He lay down in his blankets.  It was growing dark, long late midsummer twilight in the woods.  He wanted to go down to the river to bathe but he felt too bad.  He turned over and looked at the small plot of ground in the crook of his arm.  My life is ghastly, he told the grass."

Wow.

There’s much going through my head this morning about characters within a story and I’ll be posting more on it later, but I wanted to get the base down now–before I go write up sales slips and plant geraniums.

We are free as readers to form opinions of story characters, and are just as free to verbalize them without threat of slander.  Now we form opinions of real people as well, but it hopefully takes longer, and is done with a touch of polite conservative open-mindedness.  In building a character, a writer strives to make his protagonist real and likable–whether a good guy or a bad guy.  There is no doubt that Dorothy Parker’s characters are relative–even when they are from a now bygone era (as read in the present), and the relationships between protagonist and antagonist is where Parker shines as a writer.  We also see Parker’s personal opinions of them, and especially in a marital plot, as she blesses them with the worst traits and common pitfalls of man/woman interplay.

Cormac McCarthy’s characters are tougher to figure out.  We see many sides of them as he gradually puts them into a scenario and we must watch carefully to see how they react.  We’re unsure of Cornelius Suttree.  I like him; I see some good things in him as he helps his friends.  But there’s always the question:  Why did he desert his family, his wife and child, and why is there such hatred towards him from some of them?  Is it justified? 

By the time McCarthy brings in the death of Suttree’s young son, whom we didn’t know about until we hear the news, we are torn between his abandonment and the vicious reaction of his inlaws and the town when he goes for the funeral.  Much more than the normal reaction of divorce.  What did he do?  How big a bad-ass was he?

So we reserve judgement, and follow him more carefully, cautiously back home.  We watch, wait, and become totally involved in his life.

Dorothy Parker’s characters are real to me, perhaps because of the era, perhaps because, though this was not as my family lived, it was something I had watched in nightly movies on Channel 5′s The Early show.

McCarthy’s characters are real because of how they live; McCarthy building the character into his more vivid descriptions of their environment.  Again, this is not as I have ever lived, but Suttree indeed pulses with a life that is disturbing.  This must be, for me, its appeal.  The man, the place, the deeds done that mama warned about.  There’s hopelessness, yet one thin fishing line that will not break, and the patience of the fisherman to fight against the slapping sea and flapping fish to reel in something that would make the battle worth the while.

Just finished rereading Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” (Charters, The Story and Its Writer, p. 1165). The last time I read this was over a year ago and I was struck again in this reading with the poignant portrayal of a mother and her daughter, written in the POV of the mother. The story follows a time line very short in duration as a mother—while ironing—reflects upon the emotional problems of the eldest of her five children, Emily, brought to her attention now by a teacher’s request to consult. The narrative is composed of fragments of their lives as recalled by the mother and while it tells us much about their background and how they are led to be where they are for this short duration, it tells us so much more about the personality of the mother in a much more insightful manner. While she is trying to explain her upbringing of Emily and her awareness of potential effect, it is how she recalls and tells the story that gives us a deeper understanding of her. It seems as if in her attempts to understand and justify, we get the feeling that she doesn’t understand at all. While she is experiencing guilt and sadness, she still seems to miss the point that she perhaps didn’t do all she could have. For example, she rather distantly describes her attempt to help guide Emily into doing things in which she excels: “I think I said once: ‘Why don’t you do something like this in the school amateur show?’ One morning she phoned me at work, hardly understandable through the weeping: ‘Mother, I did it. I won, I won; they gave me first prize; they clapped and clapped and wouldn’t let me go.’ ” But the mother doesn’t mention a sense of pride, or why she hadn’t taken the time to be there herself to watch Emily. With encouragement and acclaim from others, performing could become a turning point and save Emily’s fragile ego, but as her mother explains to us, “but without money or knowing how, what does one do? We have left it all to her.” In a summation of Emily to date, the mother seems to understand how it all has affected her daughter, and her part in it, but decides, “Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom—but in how many does it? There is still enough left to live by.” These words are more telling to me than the final lines which reflect the same weak attempt to proclaim her motherly love that threads through the narration.
This story was not required reading in either of my classes, but if you can find it, I’d suggest you check it out—it’s well worth the read.