Once Upon a Mary Sue

A Mary Sue that looks back is not one that dreams on

Mary Sue is a term that originated in fan fiction based upon established characters and series, in which a young talesman created his own proxy to enter the fictional universe at second hand, and be as wonderful as he wanted, with no flaws, little character, and the ability to charm all and save the day.

But if we look at the ‘Mary Sue’ in its broadest terms as any character that is the talesman’s storyland agent, then we can say that ‘Mrs Miniver,’ the character created in a series of London Times columns by Joyce Anstruther (AKA ‘Jan Struther’) is just as much a Mary Sue. There seems to be a great distinction, however.

The fan fiction Mary Sue allows the talesman to enter the dream world of the stories he has loved. Anstruther in contrast created her Mrs Miniver as a storyland equivalent for her own life. This device allowed her to write about her family, friends, and situations with licence to adjust, exaggerate, clarify, and veil, all in order the better to make her points and dramatise her situations. Yet all who read the ‘Mrs Miniver’ columns, collected in book form in Mrs Miniver, find it quite hard to see the fictional Miniver as anything other than Mrs Maxtone Graham, née Anstruther, herself. (It must have been trying for her children to be famous as well.)

Anstruther looked at Miniver contemporaneously, or at but a few weeks’ remove at most. Another form of Mary Sue is the fictionalized autobiography. Some of these memoirs are of the highest art.

Of course Mary Sue is no compliment, and usually refers to a weak character, a cliché, an awkward, laughable attempt by a youngster who dares to show the world his daydreams. The Mary Sue is so enchanting that all the ‘canon’ characters of the fictional world fall in love with her, name him to be their leader and king, are instantly won over by her every argument, and end by owing him their very lives.

There are fictionalized autobiographies that feature such heroes, and these we may quite properly call ‘Mary Sues.’ These are the Once Upon a Mary Sues.

There is for example Herman Wouk’s Youngblood Hawke, courageous, manly young aspiring novelist, soon to be world famous and the literary lion of his age.

We may approach with some trepidation, in fact, all novels that tell the tale of the brave, misunderstood novelist, the undiscovered genius. I cringe when I even see that this is the burden of a novel.

Far better for the novelist to choose to remove his hero at least a little from his own life’s situation. Let him make his hero a musical composer, a painter, an architect, any other profession rather than ‘author.’

Every layer, every veil, that the talesman can draw in between his storyland incarnation and his own situation, will force him to consider the character at a bit more of a remove, and he will then begin to see the character as a character indeed — someone other than himself. Every layer and veil that he can interpose between what we the audience know of the talesman’s own situation and his character’s, moreover, will put us that much further ‘off the scent’ and leave more of us without suspecting the sad truth that talesman = hero.

When we even sniff out the suspicion that such might be the case, right away we start to see the tale not as a tale in its own right, but as an extension and wish-fulfillment of its talesman. Then we start to cast our eye as much upon the talesman as the tale, and this leaves us with one foot in the tale, and one foot in the real world, forever asking, ‘Does this author really see himself in this way? Did this happen to the author in this way? Isn’t he just apologizing for himself, justifying himself, and making himself out to be better than in fact he is?’

By no coincidence at all, last night I saw again the full cut of Tornatorre’s Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (or plain Cinema Paradiso in the North American release), and found the autobiographical Mary Sue. This is a wonderful movie — the first 1/3 of it is, anyway — and yet there is much apologia pro vita sua in it (or at least, it strikes me as such; for I know nothing of Tornatorre’s life).

The hero, now a famous movie director (beware of movies that feature movie directors as heroes no less than novels that feature novelists as heroes!) has not been back to his home village in Sicily in more than 30 years. At last he does return, which prompts him to revisit his past in flashbacks that take up 2/3 of the movie’s running time. In the course of these flashbacks we see that the reason why the hero abandoned his childhood sweetheart, and never went back to the village, were not of his doing at all, but were the result of the wise but devious machinations of the wise old Alfredo, the first projectionist of the local movie-house, the Cinema Paradiso.

In short, the whole movie amounts to the filmmaker defending himself, and externalizing blame for abandoning his roots, telling us ‘It wasn’t my fault, I’m not to blame!’ And then, looking ‘forward’ after looking ‘back,’ the director’s onscreen avatar gets to make love to his childhood sweetheart after all.

Whenever the talesman seeks to walk himself in Eartherea, and his audience suspects it, he will find the path is fraught with pitfalls, and this is true whether he is looking forward, daydreaming himself into fantasyland, or he is looking backward, and remaking his past to suit himself.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, July 20, 2008)