{"id":1247,"date":"2019-02-02T19:38:11","date_gmt":"2019-02-03T00:38:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/?p=1247"},"modified":"2019-02-02T19:38:11","modified_gmt":"2019-02-03T00:38:11","slug":"books-without-character","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/books-without-character\/","title":{"rendered":"Books Without Character"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Rachel Cusk\u2019s protagonist, Faye, narrator of the novels\u00a0<em>Outline<\/em>, <em>Transit<\/em>, and <em>Kudos,\u00a0<\/em>is a strangely silent, receptive character who acts as a blank page on which others unspool their stories. At times heart-wrenching, philosophical, and bleakly mundane, these stories slide off her seemingly without effect\u2014or affect. Everyone else goes on about themselves at length, but Faye reveals almost nothing of herself. She is cold and withheld\u2014for me, a distinctly unlikeable character.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI\u2019m not interested in character,&#8221; Cusk says, &#8221; because I don\u2019t think character exists anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Have we moved past modernism and post-modernism into a post-character literary age?<\/p>\n<p><a style=\"color: #ea9629; text-decoration-line: underline; outline: 0px;\" href=\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/RachelCusk.jpg\" rel=\"wpdevart_lightbox\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1252 alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/RachelCusk-177x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"177\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/RachelCusk-177x300.jpg 177w, http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/RachelCusk.jpg 603w, http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/RachelCusk-600x1019.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 177px) 100vw, 177px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">In a November <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/the-new-yorker-interview\/i-dont-think-character-exists-anymore-a-conversation-with-rachel-cusk\"><em>New Yorker<\/em><\/a> interview, Rachel Cusk muses that not just literature, but life itself has become post-character: \u201cThere\u2019s a homogeneity afoot, an oceanic pool of experience that erodes the notion of individual character and its importance.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">She goes on: \u201cI think this is a moment in culture, generally, where people are looking again at everything that was accepted\u2026 and suddenly thinking, I\u2019m really sick of this, and I don\u2019t want to read it anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This brings to mind <a href=\"https:\/\/www.brainpickings.org\/2018\/03\/26\/nietzsche-on-truth-and-lies-in-a-nonmoral-sense\/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&amp;utm_campaign=6373655c3d-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_03_30&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_term=0_179ffa2629-6373655c3d-238026261&amp;mc_cid=6373655c3d&amp;mc_eid=bc16b72e2a\">Nietzsche\u2019s<\/a> lamentation that \u201clanguage is not the adequate expression of all realities.\u201d Yet writers continue to labour in the verbal trenches, inventing characters who are easy to love and characters who aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p>We may be post-character, but someone still has to tell the story.<\/p>\n<p>Literature is well-stocked with unlovable characters: villains like Shakespeare\u2019s Iago, vicious mothers like Cathy Ames of John Steinbeck\u2019s <em>East of Eden<\/em>, dreadful fathers like Heathcliffe. We shrink from these literary undesirables as we shrink from unlovable people. Why? Because we\u2019re afraid of what they\u2019re up to? Because we don\u2019t want to imagine that even a sliver of them exists in us?<\/p>\n<p>The unloveable may be despised by other characters in a story, readers may turn away from them, but we writers must embrace them. Not in the way that the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.publishersweekly.com\/pw\/by-topic\/authors\/interviews\/article\/56848-an-unseemly-emotion-pw-talks-with-claire-messud.html\"><em>Publishers Weekly<\/em><\/a> interviewer meant when she asked novelist Claire Messud if she would be friends with Nora Eldridge, the angry protagonist of <em>The Woman Upstairs.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screenshot-2017-09-21-17.20.21.png\" rel=\"wpdevart_lightbox\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-1253\" src=\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screenshot-2017-09-21-17.20.21-300x169.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"374\" height=\"211\" srcset=\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screenshot-2017-09-21-17.20.21-300x169.png 300w, http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screenshot-2017-09-21-17.20.21-768x431.png 768w, http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screenshot-2017-09-21-17.20.21-600x337.png 600w, http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Screenshot-2017-09-21-17.20.21.png 874w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 374px) 100vw, 374px\" \/><\/a>\u201cFor heaven\u2019s sake,\u201d Messud exploded. \u201cWhat kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with \u2026 Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? \u2026 Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in\u00a0<em>The Corrections<\/em>? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you\u2019re reading to find friends, you\u2019re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn\u2019t \u2018Is this a potential friend for me?\u2019 but \u2018Is this character alive?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Messud\u2019s response kicked off a lively internet conversation about likable and unlikable characters, which segued into the question of whether fictional females face as much bias as real-life women when it comes to displaying negative emotion. \u201c&#8230;if it\u2019s unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it\u2019s totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry,\u201d says Messud. \u201cI wanted to write a voice that, for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the debate that followed, apocryphal stories emerged of women writers being pressured to make their heroines less sharp-tongued, more sweet-tempered. This sounds a lot like the stories of Canadian writers being told to set their stories in the United States or Europe because nobody wants to read about our few acres of ice and snow.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/C3CFnTGXEAEV3JG.jpg\" rel=\"wpdevart_lightbox\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1254 alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/C3CFnTGXEAEV3JG-300x199.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"199\" srcset=\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/C3CFnTGXEAEV3JG-300x199.jpg 300w, http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/C3CFnTGXEAEV3JG-600x398.jpg 600w, http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/C3CFnTGXEAEV3JG.jpg 625w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a>Roxane Gay sums up the character-gender debate in her <a href=\"https:\/\/www.buzzfeed.com\/roxanegay\/not-here-to-make-friends-unlikable\"><em>BuzzFeed<\/em><\/a> essay \u201cNot Here To Make Friends.\u201d Gay argues that &#8216;unlikable&#8217; female characters fulfill a vital role in upsetting the patriarchy. Gay also acknowledges that, \u201cin many ways, likability is a very elaborate lie, a performance, a code of conduct dictating the proper way to be. Characters who don&#8217;t follow this code become unlikable. Critics who fault a character&#8217;s unlikability \u2026 are merely expressing a wider cultural malaise with \u2026 all things that dare to breach the norm of social acceptability.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>When editors say to me, \u201cThat character is too unlovable,\u201d I understand that they mean the character is one-sided, lacking in complexity, without nuance. A character that is nothing but a raging lunatic is flat and uninteresting. And when a reader says they put down a book because a character isn\u2019t lovable, it seems to me that what they are really saying is that the character isn\u2019t engaging. Isn\u2019t authentic. Isn\u2019t credible.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/9781770414181_1024x1024.jpg\" rel=\"wpdevart_lightbox\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-1255\" src=\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/9781770414181_1024x1024-194x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"194\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/9781770414181_1024x1024-194x300.jpg 194w, http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/9781770414181_1024x1024-600x927.jpg 600w, http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/9781770414181_1024x1024.jpg 647w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 194px) 100vw, 194px\" \/><\/a>Cassandra MacCallum, the crusty old woman at the heart of my novel <em>Refuge<\/em>, is not someone I\u2019d want to spend a lot of time with, although in the end I was with her for 14 years, trying to figure her out, trying to figure out why I found her so compelling.<\/p>\n<p>I may become a lonely holdout in the post-character age, but as long as I can bend my fingers over a keyboard, as long as I can read words on page or screen, it will be human characters I crave. Not because I am looking for myself in them, and not because I\u2019m looking for new friends.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/brainpickings.us2.list-manage.com\/track\/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&amp;id=c93ddd98eb&amp;e=bc16b72e2a &quot;][vc_column_text]\">Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry<\/a> said that \u201clove does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.\u201d My goal as a writer is not to set a character on the page for a reader to look upon with adoration or alarm, but rather, to move a character into a reader&#8217;s life, so that they look out on the world together.<\/p>\n<p>[\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text][\/vc_column_text][vc_column_text][\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][vc_column_text css=&#8221;.vc_custom_1477364431886{padding-top: 10px !important;padding-right: 10px !important;padding-bottom: 10px !important;padding-left: 10px !important;background-color: #ededed !important;background-position: center !important;background-repeat: no-repeat !important;background-size: cover !important;border-radius: 2px !important;}&#8221;]<\/p>\n<h3 style=\"text-align: center;\">What do you want\/expect\/hope for in a fictional character?<\/h3>\n<p>[\/vc_column_text][vc_separator][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Rachel Cusk\u2019s protagonist, Faye, narrator of the novels\u00a0Outline, Transit, and Kudos,\u00a0is a strangely silent, receptive character who acts as a blank page on which others unspool their stories. At times heart-wrenching, philosophical, and bleakly mundane, these stories slide off her seemingly without effect\u2014or affect. Everyone else goes on about themselves at length, but Faye reveals [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1256,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51,9,237],"tags":[238,239,240,241],"class_list":["post-1247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics-of-writing","category-reading","category-writing","tag-claire-messud","tag-rachel-cusk","tag-roxanne-cay","tag-writing-character","invicta_simple_style_entry"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Books Without Character - Books UnPacked Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/merilynsimonds.com\/books-unpacked-blog\/books-without-character\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Books Without Character - Books UnPacked Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Rachel Cusk\u2019s protagonist, Faye, narrator of the novels\u00a0Outline, Transit, and Kudos,\u00a0is a strangely silent, receptive character who acts as a blank page on which others unspool their stories. 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