To Strive or Not to Strive: Narcissus' Question

In sitting down to revise a story I have been working on, I thought of an experience in class on which I think The Other and Narcissus would certainly have comments.

I submitted a story entitled Alchemy for a fiction class with a certain surly, Richard Ford, James Dean wannabe, and he decided to discuss it in class. Initially, this man was excited to hear my story, having conceived of it with me in his office before class. He sensed that I knew where I was going. Yet, in class, I discovered that I had failed to meet his expectations, and apparently, ignited some sense of ire in him.

While I had apparently achieved fine writing and imagery, the execution of the story reflected my inability to plot out the story well enough. I had left too many mysteries for the reader, and thus, left them utterly untethered to the story, lost in my words. The more that he spoke, the more he came to the conclusion that I had written a character that was too close to the author, hence. He made veiled references to moodiness, a troubled pysche, and confusion in this character, then expanding this character as an example of how authors fails when they write too close to themselves, because they can't differentiate themselves from the writing. And so they have characters who can't make sense to a reader, because they can't make sense to the author.

At first, I completely understood his point. Then, my own ire was ignited. How dare this man presume that this character, who is going through things I have never gone through, acting in ways I never have, be me? He knows very little of me. Then I started to think about the core of this character - this moodiness and confusion. And well, maybe he was onto something. Or just being snarky without intending to be so. But I am going to say that he was onto something.

I left class not upset - he actually helped me to see many things about the story that had been frustrating me. But he also left me wondering about these questions of identity and the construction of it. For once, I thought I was constructing an other, but was I?

Narcissus expected that I would violently protest his claims about our modern inability to find a home where our identity is clear. That the very home for which we strive is in the striving. And yet, oddly enough, I think I agree with him. I know - the ground is shaking under me as I write this. But the other day, I was thinking about the dualism of Romantic philosophies and that infinite longing. I recently read a passage from Ovid in which he said: It is not enough to want something. If you truly want it, you must long for it. For if it is not longing that pushes us towards our goals, our pursuits, the fulfillment of relationships, then what is it? What do we find in complacency?

Last year, while sitting on a smelly carpet that reeked of tea and honey, we all wanted a sense of complacency to counteract our angst, our desire to leave and figure things out. And always, I looked around us and saw many people for whom these desires seemed not to exist. Sitting in this fiction class, I often see students who seem to not be plagued with these questions. And yet, I, for whom apparently the expectations were high, had failed whereas everyone else was onto something.

These notions of identity and home, striving and clarity that I had apparently not sorted out with my character were suddenly thrown back on me. In the middle of a stuffy English classroom on a rainy day in which my fellow comrades wanted to debate the "hotness" of my character, I was put on the spot: without saying it or intending to do this to me, this man asked if I had in fact figured these things out. My character leaves her daughter in a foreign land and returns home. He asked why she would do that, since the story did not in any way indicate why someone would do that. I replied that my former reasons - illness - were dropped in order so that I could explore other reasons of breaking a string with a family member, particularly a daughter. I then said that I wasn't quite sure why she would do this. Apparently that answer was akin to saying that I had never read as a child because it prompted his verbal attack.

So here I am - back at the striving. I took a few days merely to think about my ideas, my characters, and to read examples of writers who are succeeding where I am not. I have new ideas, and I must now pen them. I have often been told that I must be the best defense attorney for my characters - that they must be so well-crafted that they are hard to judge, as it is hard to judge people that we know intimately. So is there an authentic self that I find either in myself or in my characters? How do you create a character, who should reflect reality, (if one is writing in the realist style that is the order of the day) if there is no authentic self and if the author isn't an authentic self?

I used to think as The Other did that the construction of a self was who one was when no one else was around. Still, I hold onto aspects of that while realizing that the others that we encounter forcibly change us. So I wonder - will I change back once a particular other is gone? I don't think this is quite possible and I haven't since the absence of certain people from my life.

So yes, my dear historian and dear philosopher, I think we just have to keep striving. As we're all seeing, those plans that Narcissus wrote for us did not necessarily come true and they don't have to. But the striving helped forge us into a self that could get through days with which we didn't want to struggle. So, we strive.

I am going to strive my way onto a page right now.