Sunday, January 26, 2014
to hear you talk
Eric Hansen is so obviously the hero that Anne shrinks down into his personal sidekick and Kombo is now the sidekick of a sidekick. "'No, no," she cried, 'I'm very stupid and ignorant, but I love to hear you talk.'" Hansen gives her a Kombo-diminutive and calls her Chummy. "Bear up, Chummy." "She was very dear to him, this little Chummy." Chummy has no diminutive for him. She calls him by his name.
She hands over the reins so willingly that this was the point where I began to wonder if she'd really done anything to help herself at all in this book, besides pose as a goddess by singing "Ave Maria" and trudge through the bush with Kombo; in summary, and, again, in spite of this "brave, noble," etc, language, was her behaviour made of nothing but walking and singing? From what is she prohibited by her position, from what is Kombo prohibited, how are they hedged, what barriers and boundaries exist discreetly there in what is not said, how are those boundarylines presented or formed?
(Say that Kombo behaves bravely without being allowed to keep hold of the word "brave" while Anne is always attracting the word "brave" but rarely gets to behave in ways that would have earned it. So that there always appears to be a split in Rosa Praed, between the way she thinks the character should be, and the way they are. There is an unconfronted essential division.)
It has taken all of her strength just to bear up through the advanced strolling activity plus the shock of the surprises that she comes across, which is not very impressive for the protagonist of an adventure novel though it would be reasonable in real life -- hiking for days through steep scrub and bushland would wear you out, of course it would but she is not really doing it, she is a thing in a book and a thing in a book can walk for as long as it wants without being tired since it is not walking or even moving a step -- so then I started to have idle theories and ask myself if it was likely that Rosa Praed found herself sympathising physically with the idea of Anne and asking, through the medium of the book, for authentic help from the other characters, which she felt, as a genuinely hurting person, she deserved. "Hansen turned from the gaze of the Priestess to meet Anne's pathetic eyes looking appealingly from her little white face, so child-like, and now so weary."
Anne is tired like this on several occasions, the other characters noticing her tiredness and responding to it -- Kombo fetching her food for example -- heroines in Praed's other books also feeling wrung out by their excursions (Lady Bridget in Lady Bridget in the Never Never Land "did not seem able to bear any more. Her head drooped upon her hands, her shoulders heaved convulsively," and the narrator herself wilts desperately in the autobiographical Romance of a Station) -- there's something about the spectacle of a worn-out woman that moves Rosa Praed, or haunts her: she returns to it; even lying in a deck chair is too much for the woman in the first chapter of Countess Adrian and she goes down to her cabin forsooth. I think later she gets attacked by a vampire but I haven't gone that far.
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I'm not sure if I'm repeating myself, as I just made a comment, which disappeared. It seems to me that it is unreasonable to say of a character that 'she is a thing in a book' and therefore can walk without getting tired, as she isn't really walking. Surely, if you read fiction in that way, nothing makes sense, or am I misunderstanding your point? I feel that there is a contract a reader usually makes with a fiction writer and you are breaking it - a character doesn't exist, of course, but, unless you accept that it does exist, fiction has no meaning, surely?
ReplyDeleteThis is the moment when I begin pointing to the author and saying, "She started it." It was the durability of Kombo and Eric (and the other members of the cast) -- and the fact that the author takes that durability casually for granted while Anne gets worried over and patted and pitied -- that made me think, "Wait a minute, if the other people in this book can be treated like this, then why not her? Why do they keep going while she has to wilt and have food fetched? Why doesn't the author make Anne strong too? She's done it for everybody else. (There's no essential story-reason why she should be tired: it's useful when Praed wants to make her sit down for a while but there's nothing here that couldn't be done just as well in a different way, and the prose keeps reminding us that the character grew up in the bush, it's a habitat she loves, she's a young woman in good enough health, etc.) Because they're all things, that's why, they're not humans, and if you untie them from this constraint of being human then of course Praed can give one of them a completely different set of rules to the others. She could make Anne fly as easily as she makes her feel faint."
DeleteI think the promise a good writer makes is a promise not to break the spell. That's it. There's no implied promise to hew close to the reader's idea of reality or whatever. I believe that most stories are presentational--demonstrating the writer's ideas about life through puppetry, if you will--rather than representational--"this is what actually happened." So the writer owes the reader nothing in the way of internal constancy or fidelity to...anything, really. Just so long as they don't break the spell. Of course a lot of fiction works by breaking the spell, or by the illusion of breaking the spell, rather.
ReplyDeleteSo maybe fiction is more like an argument with no rules of engagement.
But I see that you mean the reader's half of the contract, the willing suspension of disbelief. I don't know about that. I think it's okay to argue against a writer. I do think sometimes writers start those fights. Look at Sterne, Nabokov, Cervantes, etc. Antonia Byatt sometimes steps into her narratives to comment directly, pointing out that the book in your hand is a work of fiction. What do you do after that?
ReplyDeleteIs it possible to not argue against a writer sometimes? Would it really be possible (I'm not arguing with anything either of you have said, incidentally, I'm musing out loud) -- for a reader to give themselves so far over to a book that they never argued with anything the author did, no matter what it was? How far do we sign ourselves over when we open a book? There's some sort of agreement to engage, after all; some sort of mental arrangement that you could call by the word "contract." The reader agrees to something. What are they agreeing to? The author -- as a person, a fleshy thing -- isn't there. What are they making this contract with?
DeleteI suppose I'd have been happy if you'd said, 'She hasn't convinced me.' Which really means she's failed, poor thing. I love this phrase, incidentally, it makes me laugh every time I read it:
Delete"there's something about the spectacle of a worn-out woman that moves Rosa Praed"