Arcs and archetypes

     "Characters must have an arc. They must change; they must grow.” 

Writers hear this all the time, and it’s good advice (unless you're writing Seinfeld). But there is one type of character, often wildly popular, which breaks the rules all the time: the archetype.

Characters go on a journey commonly referred to as a character arc. The arc takes our character, usually on a dual journey, often on a journey of discovery, always on a journey of self-discovery. From Oedipus Rex to Emma to Dune, the mystery that every novel has to solve is this: Who is the protagonist?

But archetypes are fixed points. The archetype is a kind of shorthand. They're delivered to your door as a bundle of traits, often outsized, which do not vary within the story, and are often carried over from story to story. As such they lend themselves to the serial, since these traits immediately evoke the character's past stories to the serial reader. Hercule Poirot wanders about straightening things like the obsessive/compulsive he is. Ah, yes, I remember. The archetype is dependable in a way the character can never be. 

Because character is a fixed point, the emphasis can be laid on plot. (Of course the opposite is also true. If one uses an archetypal plot, emphasis can be laid on character. I don't plan to deal with plots or motifs--such as Perseus's winged sandals or Holmes's Persian slipper. I'll confine myself to characters.)

From Odysseus to the Seinfeld gang, from Sherlock Holmes to James Bond, from Madame Defarge to Mata Hari, these bundles of traits make the archetype useful for the writer, imminently recognizable to the reader, and immortal to posterity. The archetype is both flatter and fuller than the three-dimensional character writers are told to strive for.

Of course the archetypes begin with the Greeks (everything does), as heroes, demi-gods working their way toward full humanity. Hercules, Pandora, Oedipus, Achilles, Cassandra, each evokes specific qualities.

As society develops, new archetypes are needed: King Arthur, Robin Hood, Don Quixote, Harlequin.

Part of Shakespeare's genius is in his ability to create so many archetypal figures. One thinks of archetypes like Hamlet, Faust, Lear, Romeo and Juliet, and protests that these surely must have an arc. And yet at the core of hamartia is the characters' inability to change to respond to changing circumstances, to the world pressing on them.

Dickens had the gift, too, with his instantly recognizable caricatures that have become bywords: Madame Defarge, Sairy Gamp, Mr. Micawber, Scrooge and Fagin.

And yet these characters can also be quite flexible, so that we writers can repurpose them for our purposes, add to them, make them richer. Think of the major arcana of the tarot: the Fool, the Hermit, the Hanged Man. Tarot readers adapt them to their individual readings, but they can also be adapted by writers. Check out Italo Calvino's tour de force The Castle of Crossed Destinies to see how many changes can be rung upon these ancient figures.

As we come into a new age, new archetypes arise to capture the zeitgeist. There can be no Sherlock Holmes with the development of the police force in the 19th century, no Jeeves without Edwardian society, nor a James Bond without the Cold War and the rise of espionage. 

But does anyone set out to create an archetype? Can anyone create an archetype? You can certainly give it a try, if you have your finger on the pulse of society, if you can surf the trends, both universal and specific, that define us. But it's not really the writer that creates the archetype.

It's the readers.

Are characters sharks?

 

I can't help it. I keep changing little things, adding little things to this manuscript, even as I present it to agents as a completed work. This is a little passage I added last night:

"How do you...how do you know you're not a character?"

"Oh, that's depressingly easy, my dear. Just look back on all those boring, meaningless moments, whole days that dragged away. Characters never experience that. They're sharks, always moving forward."

And I thought, hey, that's profound. But ... do I believe it. And is it true? (Which I will admit are not always the same thing.) 

I should preface this by saying the manuscript in question, Six Characters in Search of a Killer, is one in which fictional characters brush up against real human beings (who are also, of course, fictional characters when seen from the vantage point of the real world). 

Now:

Taking the passage at face value, it seems obviously true. A character, or at least a protagonist, is always marching toward a goal, even is that goal is simply the end of the story--the vanishing point on which our sensibilities are trained. This is true even for characters with negative goals, such as Bartleby the Scrivener or Gregor Samsa, both of whom are hurtling headlong toward their doom, because neither can exist in the world of their respective stories. 

A good story, like a good joke, always moves forward, always cuts to the chase. If we must include those moments, days or years when seemingly nothing happens, we have a handy-dandy economical expression:

Time passed.

It's not always true of secondary characters, at first glance. Dickens is the master of such seemingly immobile characters as Mr. Micawber, trapped in caricature as surely as in carbonite. But even for Micawber, something turns up.

And this does not mean that the protagonist moves in a straight line toward their goal. The great art of the writer is in delay and obstruction. The patron saint of novelists is Lucy Van Pelt. Or possibly Scheherazade.

But even though the shark may be circling the Orca over and over endlessly, he still moves forward.

If this is true, then story can be seen as an obstacle course race as the character sprints toward a goal (which can be blocked out as a series of goals, the first of which may well be finding out what the goal is).

None of this is original thinking (although it may be an original metaphor) but it is a timely reminder.

Or is it? Can you think of any novels which belie this dictum? Lay it on me.

Review: A Fine Upstanding Citizen

 Get set for a clinic in the unreliable narrator. And the single location narrative, all in
one novella, or is it a novelette? Our protagonist is a well-respected politician with shady secret in his past that has knotted him to a criminal organization. He’s been summoned to an emergency meeting of the organization’s “department” heads. On the agenda: a traitor in their midst has sung to the feds. But who?

    The senator knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, and sets himself the task of discovering the rat before the big reveal. Can he suss out the squealer? Can you? Another entertaining entry in William Martell’s series of Crime Time mysteries.

Worlds end at the well

  I can't find it now. Maybe it never existed, or it was from somewhere else entirely. But I always associate the image with the Little Golden Book version of Walt Disney's Darby O'Gill and the Little People (from the Darby O'Gill tales by Herminie Templeton Kavanagh).

I must have been six or seven, just before I read The Wind in the Willows and was banished from the world of picture books entirely. I remember the image as the cover of the book, but it may have been a picture inside, or, as I've said, it could be some other book entirely--

Not exactly what I had in mind

--or it could be that the original image was twisted and reformed by my imagination over the years. Darby O'Gill was probably in the picture, as well as the tiny king of the fairies. I don't remember. I don't care. What I do remember is that it was deep night, and there was a well, and there was a golden light shining up from the well, where no light should ever have shone, an uncanny light, full of deep magic, and I loved the look of it, the beckoning, and I've been trying to capture that light ever since.

Google is not my friend. That search turned up everything but what I was
looking for. And if it was a different book, I have no idea what it might have been, or whether I interpreted the picture wrongly or have misremembered it. Could my memory have transformed a pot of gold into a golden well? Possibly.  It's not really important, is it? What's important is the image of the well, and the light.

     J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a brilliant essay called "On Fairy Stories", in which he argued that real fairy stories are not about fairies, but about the adventures of men on the edge of faerie, as faerie recedes, and the glamor of magic fades, eluding our grasp like a willow-the-wisp. I've found that my favorite fantasy novels fit that bill -- Little, Big, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, The Charwoman's Shadow, The Crock of Gold, The Beginning Place, even The Lord of the Rings, are all about the receding of magic from our lives. 

And the rim of that well, with the uncanny light overbrimming, is at the edge of faerie.