I'm reading Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations right now. It's fun and funny. I don't know why I haven't read more Dickens.*
Great Expectations contains a very interesting character named Miss Havisham. Miss Havisham was jilted at the altar once upon a time and on that day her life stopped, for all intents and purposes. She left the wedding decorations up in her house, left the banquet table set, left the wedding cake on the table to be eaten at by mice and covered over the years with spider webs. Miss Havisham still wears her wedding dress, which is now yellowed and tattered. She has not moved on from the catastrophe of her ruined wedding. She is still there, all these years later. When her relatives visit, Miss Havisham points to the banquet table and declares that upon her death, she will be laid on that table and her relatives will feed on her corpse. Hyperbole, yes. Of course they won't. But she means that metaphorically, while she literally lives out the metaphor of her life stopping on her wedding day.
A character like this could not exist in real life, but she's a wonderful invention in the novel. I'm wondering if there are other examples of literary characters who are living out metaphors. In Beckett's play Endgame, the protagonist's parents are living in trash cans. The set of the play is a version of the literal inside of the protagonist's head. Kobe Abe's novel The Woman in the Dunes is about a man imprisoned in a sand pit with a widow to live a sort of Sisyphean life in captivity, but the metaphor isn't quite so literal.
I've never really done anything like this. In my novel Killing Hamlet, I have characters staying in a ruined castle, but the castle is a metaphor in the traditional sense. Had I been making a metaphor literal, I'd have had the castle fall into decay around the characters' heads but not have them notice. I'd also have had the lord of the castle gradually decay and become a ghost, with nobody noticing, including him. Maybe next time.
What I mean by a living metaphor, or a literal metaphor, would be for example instead of saying "the forest was alive" you would make the forest quite literally be a sentient being. "He was beside himself with anger" would instead be a character who actually split in two when he was angry. Things like that.
Anyway, can you think of more examples of this Miss Havisham-style character, who lives out a metaphor? Have you ever written a character like Miss Havisham?
* I do know that I loathed Hard Times, the first Dickens I ever read, and I avoided him for years upon years until I gave A Tale of Two Cities a try a few years ago. It's flawed but mostly pretty great.
A better example from Beckett’s oeuvre might be the radio play Words and Music where we have three characters, Croak, Joe (Words) and Bob (Music). There are lots of opinions about who these three characters are to each other but one suggestion is that Words and Music are personifications of two vying creative forces within Croak. Although Bob is referred to as if he is a third person he is actually played (literally) by a small orchestra.
ReplyDeleteAs far as my own writing goes when I wanted to get the protagonist in my first novel to face the truth about his life the obvious thing as far as I was concerned was to make Truth a real person with whom he could interact. I never thought about this being a fantasy novel. It was simply a literary device to make a point no different to the soldier playing chess with Death in The Seventh Seal.
Yeah, but the parents in trashcans are funnier. I like the idea of Truth being an actual character. Death gets used too often, if you ask me. Death is an easy character to go to, though John Milton's Death and Sin were pretty original, especially Sin. Now she was scary. And there were of course all those stock characters in medieval morality plays (Everyman, the Seven Deadly Sins, Contemplation, Slander, Perseverance, Repentance, etc). But allegory isn't quite the same as what Dickens did with Miss Havisham. Dickens was more subtle.
DeleteI love Dickens! And I adore the idea of living out a metaphor for a character in a novel. I swear I need to do this in my short stories, at least, and then publish them and have people think I am crazy. Yes, yes I will! One of my favorite examples (which may be a terrible example, I guess) is from the movie, Labyrinth, with the junk lady who literally lives with junk piled on her back, and she slowly tries to transform the main character into a junk lady too. For some reason, I always think of that character when I look at my own piles of junk lying around the house. It makes me de-clutter quite often, actually.
ReplyDeleteI need to read more Dickens.
I love some Dickens, but not all of it. I really like the idea of this living metaphor, and I really want to use it. We all should. You should. Yes, yes, you should! It would be very postmodern.
DeleteI've seen "Labyrinth" but I don't remember it. I like the idea of the Junk Lady.
It's really a fantastic movie! Or maybe it's just nostalgic for me because I grew up watching it. :)
Delete"Mistah Kurtz, he dead."
ReplyDeleteI love Dickens. After Miss Havisham, if you haven't yet read them, my other top faves are David Copperfield and Nicholas Nickleby. But Great Expectations is at the very top of the top indeed.
-Alex MacKenzie
I'm enjoying GE, but I think maybe I like Tale of Two Cities better. Though I don't like the Lucy character.
DeleteHow can you say you don't like literary fiction if you love Dickens? Dickens is Capital L Literature. The language is fantastic:
It was wretched weather; stormy and wet, stormy and wet; mud, mud, mud, deep in all the streets. Day after day a vast heavy veil had been driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the East there were an Eternity of cloud and wind. So furious has been the gusts, that high buildings in town had had the lead stripped off their roofs; and in the country, trees had been torn up, and sails of windmills carried away; and gloomy accounts had come in from the coast, of shipwreck and death.
That's good stuff. Nobody could get away with that "stormy and wet, stormy and wet" construction today.
You don't think anyone could get away with that construction? I think you could, Mr. Scott. And yes, I agree! Dickens is CAPITAL L Literature.
DeleteThis is a really cool concept and one that I have only played with a little bit, more in my earlier work, before I got into the temporary rut of realism.
ReplyDeleteI have an idea about doing a story where all the characters have names of birds, and their personalities will be based on those bird species. But that's still not as clever as what Dickens is doing here.
DeleteAlso, the "Hamlet" chapter of Great Expectations is uproariously funny. Especially if you've ever seen any poorly-performed Shakespeare.
ReplyDeleteI can't think of an example of a living metaphor off the top of my head, but I am now going to have to make it my mission to include some in my writing, because now that you've introduced them into my head, they just sound too cool to not include.
ReplyDeleteFirst and foremost, I love Charles Dickens and "Great Expectations" is one of my first loves in the charming world of literature, which I was lucky to have been so fain to enter very early in life. This is a great topic, and as a bibliophile myself, I love the idea of characters living out metaphors-- even in real life. ;) As David Carradine once said, "If you cannot be the poet, be the poem."
ReplyDeleteI wholeheartedly agree-- Miss Havisham was living out a metaphor! You asked what other characters from literature might be considered to be living out a metaphor. I would say Sydney Carton from "Tale of Two Cities," whose psychological development starts at one extreme and ends at another. Also, Gregor Samsa from Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," and the legendary monster from Shelley's "Frankenstein."
Yes, Gregor Samsa is a perfect example! Kafka is a good place to look for this technique. The Castle and The Trial work too. The Hunger Artist is a living metaphor, now that I think of it. Maybe Gabriel Garcia Marquez' A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings is an example. Oskar from Gunter Grass' Tin Drum is a boy who literally never grows up. He's both a living metaphor and a traditional metaphor; some neat trick. I think Sydney Carton and Frankenstein's monster are also traditional metaphors: they represent something beyond themselves. Miss Havisham doesn't represent a woman who won't move on with her life, she is a woman who won't leave the moment of being jilted at the altar. Dickens is making a very bold presentation of character.
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