> [Original Message] > From: Eric <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Date: 4/3/2006 6:07:59 PM > Subject: [lit-ideas] Sustained Incongruencies > > > > Self-absorbed characters can only take a novel so > far. _The Fall_ and _Lolita_ work, I think, > because Camus and Nabokov know more and feel more > than their narrators. My unschooled take on > narcissism--please correct me Carol--is that a > narcissistic personality organization lacks that > transcendence, that empathy, and in extreme cases > (the NPD Irene mentioned) narcissists treat people > only as objects, and become increasingly > grandiose, withdrawn, and isolated as they grow > older. Like Humbert Humbert, but unlike Nabokov, > there is no one else there, no real Lolita, for a > narcissist. > I agree. On the other hand, anyone who is shut down emotionally is isolated, however they express their symptoms. It's what I meant by saying that the DSM is like pasta, the same dough in different shapes. An NPD could conceivably believe himself to be the world's best observer and novelist. Whether a book agent would agree is a something else. > We agree that there's no clay tablet of inscribed > rules for novels, but I think characters have to > be imagined or they can't be re-created on the > page. (We may be quibbling about semantics here.) > Also there's the notion of plot, the conflict of > competing desires, which have their best > expression when more than one character embodies > them. Finally, there's the notion of > identification. If the reader doesn't have > sympathy for the narrator or protagonist, if you > don't really care about the struggles of a book's > narrative center, the hero if you will, then why > read? And narcissists--who dismiss others, don't > listen, lack empathy--would seem to be at a > disadvantage in bringing about audience > identification. > But it wouldn't stop them from thinking they're writing The Great American Novel. NPD aside, I'm not sure that being empathic is necessarily what makes a great writer. Was Shakespeare empathic? He was a keen observer primarily, in my opinion, and he had the ability to look at a situation and turn it into a story. People like Michael Crichton can do that, read a science story on cloning, read up on chaos, and come up with Jurassic Park. His characters are flat, his sentences are prosaic, but he tells a good story and people love him. A little off the subject, I heard a writer interviewed once and she said, with a relatively few exceptions, the vast majority of writers are forgotten. I guess aspiring to be one of the ones who aren't forgotten might be a goal, or a mirage depending on how one looks at it. > > ------------------------------------------------------------------ > To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, > digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html