I've run into a dilemma that I don't think I'll find the answer to any time soon. But blogging is rather therapeutic and an ancillary benefit is that it can generate conversation and lead me down paths of understanding I would not have found on my own.
It appears I'm an anti-Semite.
Or rather, one of my characters is.
I've never really had a problem writing characters who share different and even opposing viewpoints from myself; in fact, I thought I was rather good at it. One part of that is that I wasn't as good as I am now at crawling beneath a character's skin, at getting closer and closer to realizing that character's consciousness and trawling its contours. Another reason, though, is something else that approaches the issue of taking sides and this point was made to me several months back when I handed in an essay on Richard Price's
Clockers, as beautiful and harsh and honest a book as I've ever come across.
I made the point that by alternating chapter points-of-view between the two major protagonists on opposite sides of the law, Price was effectively being Switzerland and sacrificing polemics in the effort of maintaining journalistic distance and impartiality. By describing everything, he was just letting the characters breathe on the page, letting them build their own monuments, letting them dig their own graves.
But my professor made the extraordinary point that even in the act of writing what he wrote, the inclusion and omission of any details meant that Price was, if not picking a side, then providing some sort of commentary. Whatever grays you focus on--even if the grey is the fabric of your entire novel--you are making a statement.
And I think this is what I've come across in this most recent endeavor.
Impartiality is impossible in this line of work, but I feel I've stumbled into difficult and dangerous territory here.
For the first time, I feel so embedded in the terrain of my characters' mindsets that it feels akin to what war correspondents call "going native."
I'm reminded of a
2007 post on subtext and implications and think that my present conundrum is a combination of that and my character issues. What's on the page is what you write, but there's also plenty of white space alive with what's not being said, and I worry that perhaps my prejudices have strayed out of their bounds and filled up that white space or whether perhaps those prejudices were already in the white space and have only managed to bleed into me.
I've written murderers, arms dealers, drug traffickers, child soldiers, racists, fanatics, and suicidals. How much of that is drawn from the fabric of my own being? How much of that is merely me exercising my capacity for empathy? Is there really that much of a distinction between the two?
It used to be that I could say that a character's anti-Semitism wasn't mine because we didn't share those beliefs. But now I'm starting to wonder if the no-man's land between the character and myself is a lot more easily traversed than I initially supposed.
Writing a convincing character never before meant having to inhabit that character's consciousness for more time than was required to let them bleed on the page, but I worry if there isn't a bit of every villain I write that lingers inside me. Or, rather, the villainous bits of every person I write that lingers.
I'm trying to write people being people. But I seem to have forgotten that my (a)vocation doesn't prevent from being "people" as well.