A Dream Mask for All

Bardelys back-tracks, and must eat his words

What makes an identifiable hero?

Not simply empathetic but identifiable so that the audience might lose their sense of self and the hero become their alter ego dream-self.

Bardelys had been thinking a lot about that of late. In fiction in the land where he was born, it had become the trend to make ‘immersive fiction’ where the reader identified with the character and lived the story through him. Harry Potter was very much in this line. So Bardelys wondered if this could be possible for everyone, if one story with one character could be taken on as ‘dream-self’ for everybody in the audience.

Well, right away he decided that people like to have dream-selves that are like themselves. So what was ‘like themselves’ and what does it mean?

Superficially, it meant: men like men heroes, women like women, kids like kids, old people like old.

But then there was the deeper level of likeability, honesty, and so on – the virtues that all men like to believe they have, and which appear in stark relief when painted on another. But it was strange, because sometimes audiences liked to dream they were bad men, bad girls, criminals, etc. And yet in real life they were very mild and gentle and would never do that.

So Bardelys got round to the idea that an audience could always empathize with a hero younger than they were, since once we all had been that age, and could remember what it had been like. But it would be harder to consider oneself as older. True, kids did empathize with older kids, college youths, and adults. But what those older characters do and are like had to approach what kids are like and can understand. So for example, kids could sympathize with adult characters who want to fight, who investigate mysteries, and who want love. But kids had a hard time understanding sex. And kids had a very hard idea understanding moral compromises, the sort of things adults do all the time.

Now could men identify with a woman character? Bardelys had come to decide that this is hard, and it would be easier for women to identify with a man character, because women have been subordinated socially in Bardelys’ culture. It was hard for a man to identify with a socially subordinate character, in part because he doesn’t want to ‘go there’ and imagine a subordinate role for his dream self. But for women to identify with a male character, who is more free than they are, was easier, since a lot of women would like to be more free. This was sort of like the idea that people might find themselves able to identify with criminals, the idea that the outlaw, breaking and ignoring laws, was more free than the reader who felt that he must obey the law, couldn’t drive fast, couldn’t just take what he wanted, couldn’t act the way he wished.

In some ways the criminal character is also ‘younger’ than readers, since he represented in a way the Freudian id, the child that is only 2 years old and just does whatever he wants, and is totally motivated by primitive hunger, cold, needs, and acts on these desires without thinking.

A woman friend of Bardelys’ acquaintance had wondered why JK Rowling would write about a boy magician. But Bardelys pointed out how much more free and more powerful she had allowed Harry Potter to be versus Hermione Gringold, Rowling’s version of herself at that age. Hermione is smarter, and studies harder, and is a ‘good girl’ but it was Harry who dared to break the rules to find things out, who was pushing to investigate mysteries. Hermione is usually saying, ‘but we can’t do that!’ and Harry says, ‘We have to’ and then Hermione goes along – but she would never be doing those things on her own, and if Harry were following Hermione rather than the other way around, they would never have solved the mysteries.

So in Rowling’s mind, her girl-self is less adventurous, and it’s her boy-self that is bolder, and can be a hero.

This went along with what Carl Jung said about how we all have these different selves in us, boy-side, girl-side, beast-side, hero-side, villain-side, slave-side, master-side, criminal, policeman.

In this sense, would it be possible for any of us to identify with any character, if we are enough in tune with all our selves, and if the author is clever or smart enough or skillful enough to connect us to that other self, even the drug addict, child molesting criminal?

Bardelys had, in fact, long ago when he had been young, written a novel from a woman’s point of view. Normally he would never dare such a thing, and had never attempted it in the years since. In this one instance, however, it had struck him as altogether the correct strategy, and after writing it he decided that he had not, after all, been writing about a woman, but about his own female-self, and that he could not have written the tale with a man in that part. For in truth, the protagonist of the tale was bound by convention, and bound by society, and railed against it, howled against it, fought it tooth and nail – every way she could. Had she been a man, she might have simply ignored it and lived an outlawed life. But it was not possible for a woman of 10th-century Iceland to behave in the way a strong man could.

(And in any event Bardelys had written the tale with a true narrator, and in the ‘objective’ point of view, one so out of fashion nowadays that it wasn’t even considered a possibility in the popular books teaching the writing of fiction. It had not, therefore, been ‘immersive fiction’ that Bardelys had been contemplating.)

In the end, Bardelys had to take back his earlier conclusions. It would be possible to craft a tale that all the audience might identify with and find immersive.

But it would be devilishly difficult.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, August 23, 2008)