Character Traits

iconic characters--memorable individuals in dramatic narratives; presences in stories whose attitudes and bearing outweigh the plot of the narrative.

A significant test by which to assess the memorability of a character is to determine what that character wants--really wants, then decide what that character will to to achieve the goal. Why is Hedda Gabler so memorable and what did she want. Why is Lady Macbeth so memorable? Perhaps for her insistent urge for power, but just as likely because of the first words out of her mouth when Macbeth returns to her, having already had one change of heart before screwing up the courage to murder Malcolm. "My husband!" she affirms.

Consider this list of characters culled from the ages:

Antigone: she was willing to put her life on the line for insisting on doing what she believed to be right.
Anton Chigurh: not just an enforcer or a hired killer but as well a control freak of epic proportions.
Becky Sharp: known for her bigger-than-life opportunism.
Captain Ahab: at the very least, he was so bent on revenge that he overrode his religious tradition and risked damnation to achieve it.
Captain Spaulding: with more than his greasepaint eyebrows to call him to our attention, his every act flies in the face of comfortable tradition and convention, and wouldn't we just like to get away with that?
Florentino Ariza: from Love in a Time of Cholera, his aching, unrequited love for Fermina Daza sends him through intimate encounters with over six hundred substitute lovers.
Fleur: this haunting presence of many a Louise Erdrich short story and some novels is incarnate a stunningly attractive Native American woman who years for a return to the old ways; she has the will and, seemingly, the magic to back up her presence.
Lewis and Clark: two military men who set forth on an assignment and in the process discovered a continent.
Jane Eyre: she rode plainness and intelligence and love into an archetype who spoke to Rochester across the Moors and to us across the eras.
Joan of Arc: a teen-age girl who hears voices and leads armies.
Omar Little: an impressive presence from the recent TV series The Wire, he made his living by robbing drug dealers. He had a code of honor, an ethos. The mere thought of him evokes memories of the sounds when he took to the Baltimore streets: "Yo! Omar commin! Here come Omar."
Sisyphus; from the Greek myths, a man who drew as punishment an eternity of the frustration of performing a meaningless task.
The Wife of Bath: an epitome of womanly force, spirit, and earthy intelligence. She would not be denied. Compare her to Erdrich's Fleur.
Wile E. Coyote: character write huge. Armed with Acme Products, Coyote is the patron saint of characters with established goals.

We must not forget the specific things these estimable icons want. To want something as abstract as freedom, independence, even love is to miss the point entirely and to miss the thrust of the true Valhalla of Characters: a specific something or someone; none had the time nor patience for abstractions.

It's All Greek to Me

A major pillar of our story-telling tradition is set firmly in the cement of the belief that the gods--later to become God--or the Fates--later to become opinion polls--knew better than we mere mortals or, indeed, we mere voters. Those who scoffed at the professed wisdom of the gods, the oracles, later to become God, were guilty of a crime. Depending on our social status, the crime was either the felony of hubris or the misdemeanor of blasphemy. The term tragedy was reserved for those of greater pretension than us; accordingly comedy and farce became the tragedy of the working classes, and welcome to it.

We have come some distance from believing that only those to whom the Muse calls is the artist, poet, painter, dancer, musician, etc. Now we know better. The Muse no longer has to call us, an online university will suffice. Shortly after Ronald Reagan became president and literally broke the back and spirit of the Air Traffic Controller's Union, he went to work on The Fates and the gods, reducing them to their more Right-to-work status of common sense. If there were anything to be learned of tragedy, it would trickle down to us from somewhere on high, deus ex machina, god or goddess lowered onto the stage in a bucket which is in turn controlled by a winch.

Trouble is, tragedy, even though demonized by anti-intellectualism, still works. Lear works. Hamlet works. Not to forget Macbeth. Audiences like to see or read about men and women who are brought down from their perch of conviction or their sense of entitlement or of self-importance, either by tragedy or by humor. Stop for a moment to consider some of the possible permutations of Lear from tragedy to comedy. A man from Omaha who owns a slew of McDonald's franchises decides to divide them among his three daughters. A man from beautiful downtown Eastlos, the East L.A. barrio, decides to retire and split his stable of portable taco stands among his three daughters. Or imagine the humoring down of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman to the level of a man who is being aced out of his position on the line at a car wash, and his wife nevertheless saying the memorable line, "Attention must be paid to such a man."

Tragedy used to involve the literary equivalent of people in high places, individuals involved in clashes of ethical conduct or individuals backed into the tight squeeze of a pair of narrow moral shoes, say Antigone and her battle with her uncle over the matter of her brother's burial and what said burial meant and indeed, why the brother was dead in the first place. It's a bit of a stretcher to equate Antigone, the play with All My Sons, but if you look closely, many of the same red-meat elements remain. Today, tragedy can more properly involve individuals who have some how come to the understanding that they can never achieve the Platonic ideal of perfection. They can do well, ultimately better, but not perfect. Some individuals can't even get into a situation where they can try to do their best because they are bombarded by some kind of bureaucracy. Bad as bureaucracies can be, they still trump some of the other possibilities of organization. So the little guy, stuck in some bureaucracy where he can't excel--only do well--goes home to try his hand at something where he could conceivably fail, which becomes his safety valve, his pole star. And then comes the tragedy wherein what he does at home produces a meteoric success which he can never hope to duplicate.

Look carefully at the Greek plays, both the humorous, say Frogs, or the tragic, say Antigone (because we have already said it). Then look at the modern mise en scene, individuals doing things they don't want to do, individuals nourishing some tangible dream that sustains them through the quotidian, individuals who excel at something they don't very much care for while simultaneously striving beyond all reason for Process in something where they are tangibly ill suited. Observe their behavior, then begin writing.

Just as there is more to Hellenism than polytheism, gyros, and shishkebab, there is more to tragedy than Greek drama. The devil is in the details. And the kalamata olives. Your individual process begins with the knowledge that you have for a time been striving for perfection and have come to the realization that such perfection is not within your grasp, and then the realization that reaching is within your grasp.

Wisdom for Our times

The late and still lamented Joseph Campbell has written voluminously about myth, archetype, and the means by which it is possible to detect the DNA of a culture in its stories. Perhaps his most lavish gift to writers is his Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he tracked the orbits of heroes from numerous times and cultures, giving us a cross-cultural and cyclic pattern called The Hero's Journey. "Down these mean streets a man must go," mystery writer Raymond Chandler wrote of the private detective hero. In his own writing, Joseph Campbell has said, "A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man."

Campbell was a devoted fan of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which reading may have helped Campbell formulate his articulate cycle of behavior, which appears in five stages:

A call to adventure
A road of trials
Achieving the goal or "boon"
A return to the ordinary world
Applying the boon.

The good Dr. Kubler-Ross had a five-step program of her own which, although not intended to help writers, is nevertheless of value. Hers are the five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

With these patterns in mind, it becomes easier to cast a set of characters forth on a voyage or venture that will cause many of us who read narrative tales of any sort to take them up, internalize them, make them a part of our own individual sense of diagnosing the cultural wars about us, allowing us to feel deeply about issues and conflicts at some remove from our own culture. We have, for instance, no real cultural connect with Antigone, who is all set to marry King Creon's son and be welcomed into the family, even though Creon had chosen a cultural payment of a serious sort against Antigone's brothers. Antigone's persisting in the burial of her brothers is the crux of the matter. The social and cultural forces behind Creon's wish to have the brothers remain unburied do not touch us on any but an intellectual level; Antigone's persistence in the growing threat of her own death make us care.

We of the early years of the twenty-first century live at a time, I argue, where another mythic observation holds great sway and is a ruling force in what a writer of these days writes about. To be sure, Joseph Campbell's observations are insightful, valid, exciting. To be sure, Raymond Chandler's template for the private detective, articulated in his essay, The Simple Art of Murder, is no less apt now than when written. Dr. Kubler-Ross' observations about the human acceptance of grief holds as a valid observation, dramatically satisfying in its own arc of logic.

But these are the times when and where yet another observation, a classification in its own right, holds sway, speaks to our time in plangent tones The Emperor has no clothes.

Apologies, or at Least a Nod to Raymond Carver

...or what we talk about when we talk about Scooter.

There was neither surprise nor drama to the commuting of Ivan Lewis Libby's jail time; the wingnuts' spin of the punishment being harsh had begun not to soon after the verdict came through and the sentence meted out. As things stand now, at least one presidential candidate had contributed to Scooter's defense fund and indeed the incumbent President ventured forth his belief that the sentence was out of proportion to the crime.

What we talk about when we talk about Scooter is cronyism, a bonding and group behavior condition long known to anthropologists, archaeologists, and sociologists. We speak of it as loyalty when we speak of it coming from roommates at Yale, or fraternity brothers and sorority sisters. The curling of the lip into active sneer does not begin until we speak of tribalism, clans, moieties in nomadic cultures; then we expect cronyism. When we do it, it is a lady's or gentleman's agreement; when they do it we haul out the implications of primitive behavior.

In some ways, the behavior of this President of the United States is reminiscent of King Creon. You don't know about him without you have read the adventures of Antigone by Mr. Sophocles, but that ain't no matter. "This is law and order in the land of good King Creon," Antigone says at one sticky point in the play." Although Creon has nothing against Antigone and quite a bit against her brothers, he is forced by Antigone's behavior to threaten her life if she does not stop trying to bury one of her brothers who has died in battle.

If you were to see Antigone as a metaphor for the Rule of Law, or even more basic than that, the United States, you would get a picture of the position the President is maneuvering himself into.

A few days ago, it was Ahab, from Moby-Dick.

There will invariably some classic figure because this President sees himself as a classic figure, and very much like Hector, of Iliad fame, this President wants his legacy to be the President who was a classic figure.

Okay, so what about George Follansbee Babbitt?




The enclosed pictures have nothing to do with Ivan Lewis Libby or the man who commuted his sentence, or cronyism, but having been pressured to post images, I have chosen these: