Characters Searching for Authors


Mario, the postman in the film Il Postino, in an effort to win the heart of Beatrice Russo, steals some poems from Pablo Neruda. Later he justifies his action by telling the poet:

Poems don’t belong to those who write them. They belong to those who need them.

Pablo NerudaThis begs the question of the text with a life of its own, which has vexed writers, readers and critics for as long as words have been written down. The question of whether the writer writes the words or the words continually erase and re-write the writer.

Most writers will recognise this scenario, the realization that the act of writing, simply putting one word after another, brings about a kind of active memory in the writer. It allows the writer to ‘remember’ phenomena that he didn’t know before he sat down to write.

Ultimately there is only one question to be asked about any piece of writing. Is it alive or is it dead? That is the question that each reader asks, consciously or unconsciously. Can I interact with this work no matter how far away it is in time and space from its writer?

Neruda realizes that Mario’s stealing of his poems is in fact a compliment. It means that they are alive, that the texts are still growing and changing, quivering with life.

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February 19th, 2007
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Viewing 9 Comments

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    John - very interesting post. I was just thinking recently of older works and our very-human 'denial of death' tendency. In good fiction, or biography, or poetry, the characters and their voices are still very much alive - alive as you read them. I think about this all the time with famed character like Sherlock Holmes, for instance. More than a century later, the thoughts of Doyle - the words he puts in Holmes and Watson's mouths, are still very much alive. What happened in 221B Baker Street is happening as I read it. Appropriating poetry or dialogue or plot is merely breathing life into it...and any writer wishes for his work what he wishes for his children - long life.
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    Tom - the other thing I was trying to get at here is the way that what is written takes on a life of its own - Pirandello's play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, comes to mind - but there are other examples. Your metaphor of parents and children might be apt; that children grow up and achieve a kind of independence, make themselves free of their 'creators'.
    Some writing, the very best, can travel so far away from its origin that it almost transcends authorship altogether and becomes part of a culture, even the mainstay of a culture.
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    Good post - and for those who haven't seen it - good flick.
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    The real q to be asked of any art is- is it good or bad?

    Bad art can mean something to someone, but not many. I love the crappy poems of some doggerelists and do not LIKE Frost, but Frost is much better a poet than Richard Brautigan. I love Robot Monster and Plan 9 From Outer Space, but they are not Persona nor La Dolce Vita.

    Too often people conflate their likes w objective excellence, to the detriment of themselves and public discourse. Emotion has import, but this society sneers at excellence and true accomplishment, hiding behind PC, which is not really about protecting some, but closing off debate by all.
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    Another point, all artists or worth become their art.

    Shakespeare is not lying under Stratford, and Picasso was not the ugly little Spanish misogynist. They are the art and its effect, just as Einstein is what he brought to science, not the iconic wild-haired prof.
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    I'm reminded of the famous quote from Raymond Chandler: "There is no 'good art' or 'bad art.' There is only art, and precious little of it."
    But I believe we can only judge an artist by the work. Adding Scott-Fitzgerald to The Great Gatsby does not make it a better or worse book. We don't even know who Shakespeare, the man, was - at best we have a series of guesses - but, incontrovertibly, we have an important masterpiece in Hamlet.
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    Yes, the art is the most important. I would sooner read a great poem by Albert Speer than another piece of crap by Maya Angelou.

    The fact that one's a Nazi, and the other a harmless old woman has nothing to do with the resultant art.

    Not all good artists are good people, and goodness of soul has no equivalnce w talent.
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    In John's post and comments I am struck by the way that I myself am able to remember my own life based on a few sentences, whole episodes that I suspect would be otherwise lost to me can be brought back by stumbling on a note, or on a scribble in the margins. Of course there are other times when I don't even recognize whole short stories or poems that I've written. Words have a very curious relationship to personal and social memory, it's like they're keys to the past, only not all the doors still exist.
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    very interesting, but I don't agree with you
    Idetrorce

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