On Dickens, artists versus their art and Kira Nerys

[selenak]

Found via hradzka, a great quote from Charles Dickens about himself, given to a young Russian journalist named Fyodor Dostoyevsky in 1862:


"'He told me that all the good simple people in his novels [like Little Nell] are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to live for, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life.'"

As I said in my review for Girl in a blue dress, Dickens' behaviour towards his wife was really horrible, and you have the paradox of an author being able to describe, with great skill and sympathy for the victim, Edward Murdstone terrorizing his wife, David Copperfield's mother, into losing any sense of self-worth and joie de vivre, and a human being to seemed not to recognize that he was doing a very similar thing. Now that quote given to a future fellow novelist speaks of much greater self awareness on Dickens' part ("attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to live for" points pretty much to one person), and much as the act of creation often is subconscious rather than conscious, I'm not really that surprised that Dickens did the mirroring-into-the-villains thing deliberately rather than by accident. (Mind you, given that Uriah Heep or Miss Havisham are infinitely more interesting creations than Little Nell or Oliver Twist, it's an argument for the lack of vitality in "how I would like to be" characters owing something to the uncomfortable identification for villains as well.)

The quote is actually from this very interesting article about the question whether or not it matters to us, as readers, to discover favourite authors as not only flawed but sometimes downright unpleasant human beings. Whether it colours our reading, and why it should matter more than the awareness of the same thing about one'd dentist or a boing engineer, where it wouldn't influence the treatment of one's teeth or the use of the airplane the engineer co-build. I don't think there is a general answer to this; it's something each individual has to decide for themselves. It's certainly easier when the artist in question is dead, and you don't have the problem of supporting their livelihood by buying the books, attending their concerts etc., i.e. for example I can listen to recordings of Wagner operas or go to performances, when doing the same with a living, breathing Richard W., composing at the same high level but also spouting vicious antisemitism as he used to, would make me feel complicit in a way it just doesn't with him dead for more than a century. Or to use the Dickens example, I can read the novels without feeling I'm supporting spousal abuse. Though this might not be true for all dead artists and all their creations. I remember talking with rozk years ago about a similar subject, and she said the one work of literature which she really couldn't read the same way anymore if something theorized about its author were to be proven fact beyond the shadow of a doubt would be Alice in Wonderland (if it could be proven that Lewis Carroll/Charles Dodgson was an active pedophile). I think I agree on this point. Still, in general the "enjoy the work, even if the creator was rotten" theory for dead artists works for me.

With living artists, it becomes infinitely more difficult, and here the most recent example in the public consciousness isn't a writer but a director, Roman Polanski. After his thirty-years-delayed arrest last year, it seemed to me that there were two equally wrong arguments made, one pro and one anti Polanski; many of his defenders took the line of his deserving forgiveness due to the merits of his art, while some of the opposing camp instead of sticking to the irrefutable "rape is rape" argument also saw it fit to add what amounts to an "and Chinatown isn't that good anyway" argument. Now, I haven't seen all of Polanski's films, but I've seen several. On tv, not in the cinema, because the awareness of what he did made me not wanting to support him financially, and yet I was curious enough about the films in question to tune in when they were broadcast on tv. Between Dance of the Vampires, Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby, MacBeth (actually the first Polanksi film I saw, in school, as part of comparing various film versions of the Scottish Play), Frantic and The Ninth Gate, I came to the conclusion he is indeed in excellent director who produces the occasional dud (The Ninth Gate, I'm looking at you). That some of his films are good and some great, deserved classics, doesn't change anything about the criminality of his actions. The Ninth Gate isn't bad because he raped a 13-years-old, Frantic isn't good because he raped a 13-years-old. They both fall and stand in terms of characterisation and storytelling. If any of these films had had a Very Young Girl/Older Man theme, I don't think I could have made that work/author division even in a situation where I wasn't paying for watching them, but they didn't. That was my personal line to draw; others may draw it elsewhere.

And yet I'm not sure whether I agree with the conclusion the article about writers reaches, which is: But if we can't be good - and it seems that we can't - then it's not a bad thing to try to make something out of what is missing in us, or at least to see how others do it. And if we readers are complicitous - well, that's not a bad thing either. Because this seems to me a fall back on that "great art owes something to horrible deeds" position again. Sometimes it may; Dickens drawing on his own dark side to create some of his villains being a case in point. This doesn't mean one can handwave his behaviour. (Or, the other extreme, deny he was a great writer at all.) Sometimes there is no connection between an artist's dark side and his creations; I don't think Wagner would have composed any differently if he hadn't been an antisemite (he wasn't always one, you can pin point the time when he became one pretty accurately), though you could make an argument for his penchant for married women helping with the creation of Tristan and Isolde, but that's really not on the same scale as writing diatribe after diatribe about "the Jews" because you can't get over Meyerbeer's success in Paris. Either way: ideally every book/composition/film/other work of art should be judged on its own merits, independent from the creator's person, but in real life, all too often it just isn't possible to make that distinction, and I simply am not sure whether this is a good or bad thing because I keep wavering on the subject myself.

****

On a more cheerful subject: meddow has been watching the entirety of DS9 in recent weeks and after finishing it has made a great Kira character vid. It's odd, while I like Kira (quite a lot), she never was one of my favourite DS9 characters. Still isn't, but in recent years I've become aware of just what an amazing creation she was, and how sadly rare all that was accomplished still is. Kira was a female regular with a complicated, very dark backstory and an on screen character arc that went through all seven seasons; she had no romantic relationship to her show's nominal leading character and was still absolutely crucial to the show, arguably the actual main character, but even if you disagree with that assessment, she was the most important character in terms of screentime and narrative weight after Sisko, and she might have gotten more screentime than him, I didn't count the minutes. Now, can you think of any current show where the female lead is at no point of the story involved in a romantic relationship with the male lead, or where at the least her relationship with said male leading character isn't the most important one in her life? Any? Kira's storyarc was never about her love life, but she was never presented as asexual, either, her various romantic relationships were simply part of her story without ever dominating it, or depriving her of personality, or making all her other non-romantic relationships seem less important or non-existant. (Alas, Pod!Aeryn Sun in the fourth season of Farscape. Among others.) So yes, Kira was an amazing creation, and meddow's vid captures some of the reasons why beautifully.

Comments

[monanotlisa]

'He told me that all the good simple people in his novels [like Little Nell] are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to live for, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life.'

That's fascinating, and quite possibly not uncommon (if less conscious).

[selenak]

Yes, I think many writers do it, though the majority of them subconsciously.