Saturday 15 January 2011

January 15- Complaints

"I've noticed", said the character of this story to me, "that the characters in the things you write never really seem to get to speak. It was alright at first, but as the days have gone past it's begun to bother us- Penelope from that thing you wrote on the 6th thought you hadn't really captured what she'd been through at all, you know. Still, I said to her, at least she had a name- most of us are just defined by our role, and do you know how confusing that becomes when you're doing your day to day buisiness? When people ask me my name and I tell them it's "the character of this story", they look at me as though I've gone completely mad. I can't get a passport, Robert!"

"I sympathise", I said, although of course I couldn't really. "I find when people tell stories about me, a man who is not a fictional construct, that often the person portrayed in them is really the image of the man they think I am, who is often in some way the image of themselves. For me, this doesn't matter much, but I determine what you say and what you do, and so it must frustrate you when you are in fact thinking something completely different, which I will never understand."

"But that's not it at all!", cried the character. "You have a life entirely independent of other people, you have seen and thought things many will not think and, more importantly, have failed to think many of the things others have thought and seen. If you are my master and can only write about things you think, and you know, then I'm denied that, I'm subhuman. It's a disgusting state of affairs, and it makes me angry just to think of it."

I stared at my shoes for a while.

"The truth is", I said at last, "that I don't make you speak because I that it's me speaking through you. I feel embarassed enough to have created you, and wretched to have given so many of the people I've made such miserable lives, that I feel that to make you speak my words is just to violate you further. It would be to pretend I understand all the people in the world, and from what you've said I think I don't even appreciate the lives of the ones who exist in mine. But I'm sorry for everything I have done, and I am sorry for creating you like this."

I looked her in the eye.

"Would you like to get a drink?", I said.

She nodded, and happily agreed. For the rest of the night she barely said a word, and I wrote that she had enjoyed everything that happened next, because, if I kept believing I had power over her, I thought there was a chance that it might somehow be true.

No comments:

Post a Comment