#jeff karr

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A Better Fictional Character

Since enrolling in the MFA program at Texas State University, one of the ways in which my feelings about fiction have changed the most has to do with character. In my undergraduate writing workshops we talked a lot about sympathetic characters. The consensus was that if a character wasn’t sympathetic, the story was dead. Of course, there are innumerable ways to build a reader’s sympathy for a character:      - the character just wants something really bad      - maybe the character is really good at something      - maybe the character works really hard      - maybe the character can’t catch a break      - maybe we empathize with their struggle. But I’ve come to realize in the last three years that, all in all, characters don’t need to be sympathetic. They need to be specific, built from the ground up, rather than the top down.

To my mind, the worst characters are ones that are clearly pawns pushing a writer’s social or political agenda. Almost as bad as that are upstanding characters with no flaws, who never say the wrong thing.

There’s an edict about stand-up comedy that I think applies to fiction: if you’re not offending anyone, you’re not going far enough, and if you’re offending everyone, you’re just an asshole. It’s pretty clear to me that most good books are unsettling and disturbing. It’s also clear that there are several terrible books that are unsettling and disturbing just for the sake of being unsettling and disturbing. Good books that are unsettling and disturbing are good because we are all deeply flawed, complex people, so elucidating these flaws and complexities in fiction is paramount in achieving verisimilitude.

I believe that almost everyone on this planet could be a morally reprehensible, antagonistic character in a novel. Imagine there actually was a God and God was a writer and God wrote novels in which God, the novelist, extrapolates from our lives only our most egregious moral failures. He populates the novel with only these incidents and we all end up looking like absolute monsters, or maybe not monsters, maybe just humans. I don’t have much patience for fiction that doesn’t explore characters’ dark sides or moral failures. I don’t care for characters who aren’t deeply, deeply flawed, like all of us.

I think the increased attention we pay to political correctness is an overwhelmingly positive thing for society. Every single person on this planet deserves dignity and respect and the freedom to explore their humanity in any way they want, and it’s important to recognize the power that words have to dehumanize and relegate large swaths of society to second class citizenship or worse. That said, the tendency toward political correctness in fiction often results from a failure of nerve on the part of the writer. One could even make the argument that overt political correctness in fiction stems from a lack of empathy and understanding, more so than increased empathy and understanding. There’s a line toward the end of George Saunders’ brilliant short story “Tenth of December” that speaks to what I’m getting at:

He heard her in the entryway. Mol, Molly, oh boy. When they were first married they used to fight. Say the most insane things. Afterward, sometimes there would be tears. Tears in bed? And then they would—Molly pressing her hot wet face against his hot wet face. They were sorry, they were saying sorry with their bodies, they were accepting each other back, and that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone’s affection for you expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing he’d ever—

There are a number of things I love about this passage. First and foremost, I appreciate the sentiment, the idea that if you can accept a person for their flaws, your actually becoming a more compassionate person, your love for that person is growing, expanding outward to “encompass whatever new flawed thing.” I believe this sentiment can, and should, be applied to fiction. If a writer doesn’t allow their characters to be flawed, if a writer is afraid of writing characters who sometimes say and do the wrong thing, who sometimes say and do some pretty heinous things, they’re not actually doing a thorough job of exploring that characters’ humanity. They’re limiting their characters’ humanity and limiting their own compassion for their characters by expecting them to behave like moral beacons. Jeff Karr is recent Texas State MFA graduate.

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Bolaño Revisited by Jeff Karr

In the weeks after Trump's election I found it difficult to read and write. Art felt strange, futile, maybe even immoral. The country had been suckered by a pervert and a racist who constitutes a serious threat to some of society's most vulnerable populations, and here I was in an MFA program, talking about plot and point of view and the believability and humanity of people who don't exist. I thought about rereading All the Kings Men, like maybe it'd help me identify some faint sliver of humanity in the recently elected führer, but I couldn't get past the first page. Instead, I reread Roberto Bolaño's By Night In Chile. 

This was the right decision. 

Whenever I read Bolaño I'm reminded of a quote from Chekhov's letters: "You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist." 

In his work Bolaño probed his own anxieties and questions about the role of art in a country whose central authority had fallen into chaos and totalitarianism. He was a voracious reader and writer, and yet his work evinces a haunting skepticism of literature and literary culture. 

In By Night in Chile, the narrator, a priest and literary critic, tucks himself away from the violence of the military coup and reads the Greek classics. He writes a review of a novel called White Dove: "I gave it a good review, you might say I hailed it in glowing terms, although deep down I knew it wasn't much of a book." Set against a backdrop of violence and terror, the priest's literary preoccupations come across as grotesque and immoral, an avoidance for which Bolaño seems to believe his narrator should be made to answer. 

Bolaño simultaneously revered and reviled literature, so it's no surprise that some aspects of his work are decidedly unliterary. His sentences are deadpan and often emotionally flatlined. He's not one for metaphor or analogy, and much of his work forsakes such fundamental conventions as paragraph indentation, quotation marks, and page breaks, as though he's trying to distract from the fact that what you're reading is indeed a work of literature. His narrators are often engaged in a kind of secondhand storytelling. They tell stories other characters have told them, and they gain narrative authority by surrendering any pretense of narrative authority.

Embedded in most of Bolaño's work is a mystery concerning the disappearance of a particular writer or artist. In the short story "Last Evenings on Earth" a young man named "B" vacations with his father in Acapulco. He spends much of the trip dwelling on the disappearance of Gui Rosey, a surrealist poet who went missing in Nazi-occupied France. Toward the end of the novel Distant Star, the narrator has moved to Spain and has decided to go in search of a fictional propagandist named Carlos Wieder. When he finds Wieder in a cafe, the narrator turns his attention back to the collected works of Bruno Schulz, the painter and surrealist writer who was shot and killed by a Gestapo officer in Nazi-occupied Poland: "I felt that Wieder’s lifeless eyes were scrutinizing me, while the letters on the pages I was turning (perhaps too quickly) were no longer beetles but eyes, the eyes of Bruno Schulz, opening and closing, over and over, eyes pale as the sky, shining like the surface of the sea, opening, blinking, again and again, in the midst of total darkness. No, not total, in the midst of a milky darkness, like the inside of a storm cloud."

By all accounts Bolaño felt a tremendous sense of guilt about leaving Chile to pursue a life dedicated to poetry. He used his work to grapple with the confluence of emotions this created in him. His allusions to surrealist writers are contrasted with the deadpan realism of his prose. His work calls to mind Theodor Adorno's quote that "there can be no poetry after Auschwitz." For Bolaño, no work of literature could adequately capture the scale of suffering the people of Chile experienced during the coup. This realization led him to reinvent the form of the novel and use it as a space in which he could examine his conflicting thoughts and feelings about literature itself. None of this is to say that literature could ever function as a substitute for meaningful political action. Bolaño certainly didn't feel that way. Right now the United States' defining characteristic might be its burgeoning fascism. The importance of active engagement cannot be overstated, but Bolaño's work can serve as proof that when it comes time to sit down and write, maybe our anxiety about doing so is in and of itself a fruitful resource to draw from.