Sadly, I had to modify this meme

[sovay]

The original, scrounged from sartorias, read:

List five fictional people—from television, movies, books, whatever—that you had a crush on as a child (or early teens). Then post this on your LiveJournal so other people can know what a dork you’ve always been.

As a child, however, I did not acquire crushes on fictional people. (Or real people, frankly. What can I say? I was a late bloomer.) Occasionally I acquired a burning desire to meet certain characters, converse with them, and perhaps smack the more frustrating ones upside the head. More often something about them caught my interest, so that without wanting either to know or be them, I still returned to them over and over; and in some cases, still do. Here is my meme, therefore: five fictional people, in no particular order, on whom I imprinted when young.

1. Schmendrick the Magician (The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle)
"Now I knew you for a unicorn when I first saw you, and I know that I am your friend. Yet you take me for a clown, or a clod, or a betrayer, and so must I be if you see me so. The magic only you is only magic and will vanish as soon as you are free, but the enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes. We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream. Still I have read, or heard it sung, that unicorns when time was young could tell the difference 'twixt the two—the false shining and the true, the lips' laugh and the heart's rue."

2. Deth (Riddle of Stars, Patricia McKillip)
"Do you want a half-truth or truth?"
"Truth."
"Then you will have to trust me." His voice was suddenly softer than the fire sounds, melting into the silence within the stones. "Beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond hope. Trust me."

3. Londo Mollari (Babylon 5)
"There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you'll ever be. Then you accept it—or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking into mirrors."

4. Lord Peter Wimsey (eponymous mysteries, Dorothy L. Sayers)
"I have nothing much in the way of religion, or even morality, but I do recognize a code of behaviour of sorts. I know that the worst sin—perhaps the only sin—passion can commit, is to be joyless. It must lie down with laughter or make its bed in hell—there is no middle way."

5. Sydney Carton (A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens—but I must confess that Ronald Colman in the 1935 film went a long way toward cementing my fascination)
"Do you particularly like the man?" he muttered, at his own image; "why should you particularly like a man who resembles you? There is nothing in you to like; you know that. Ah, confound you! What a change you have made in yourself! A good reason for taking to a man, that he shows you what you have fallen away from, and what you might have been! Change places with him, and would you have been looked at by those blue eyes as he was, and commiserated by that agitated face as he was? Come on, and have it out in plain words! You hate the fellow."

And now you know entirely too much about my psyche . . .

Comments

[sovay]

If anyone's curious, a discussion of one of my favorite characters who didn't make it onto this list is taking place here.

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

I love Deth.

And I'm happy that Carton is on the list. For reasons I don't entirely understand, I've never been able to appreciate him as much as I think he should be appreicated.

[sovay]

. . . as much as I think he should be appreciated.

How so? You are perfectly within your rights not to like him particularly.

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

I'm very torn about it. I think that he's really neat, and I think that he should be appreciated, but I've always felt personally disappointed in him. I think my disappointment is related to my desire for him to stop mooning after the boring girl. I always feel that he could have done so much more -- not necessarily something more productive or moral, but more interesting -- but that he never quite got there.

[sovay]

Lucy Manette is a little underwhelming, yes. Not to mention her distinct lack of taste in preferring Darnay to Carton. (Although Darnay's just as flatly written, so at least they match. Maybe there's a law somewhere that static characters can't date three-dimensional ones . . .)

I realize that I make this statement blithely, because my personal tastes are all in the direction of Carton. But he's a fictional character; I've never had to discover what he'd really be like as a lover or a husband, whether he'd develop into someone who could maintain a stable relationship (face it, alcoholics are hard to stay involved with), or whether he'd remain the same moody, erratically brilliant, self-contemptuous character that makes him so attractive on the page, or perhaps something else entirely. In his sort of anti-courtship of Lucy, he claims that a relationship with him would only drag her down and wear her out, and maybe he's right. I still find Sydney Carton a complex enough human being that I think, regardless of the potential drawbacks, it's a waste blowing him off for somebody as cardboard as Charles Darnay.

Perhaps this is one of those cases that fleurdelis28 has mentioned, where we are meant as an audience to adopt the perspective of the characters within the narrative: where Turandot's riddles are all mortally difficult and Darnay is the best thing that ever happened to a girl. I remain skeptical. Thoughts?

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

Now that I think about, I think Carton is right that he would make Lucy miserable, but only because of who she is (like you say, cardboard). And he probably would be a hard person to be in a relationship with, though who knows? Darnay would also be a hard person to be in a relationship with, because he's so boring. I think you're right that we wouldn't want to blow off Carton for Darnay, but I think it made sense for Lucy.

I don't know much about Dickens, or what he thought about while he wrote. I suppose it's possible... On the other hand, he was writing for a large audience, so maybe he deliberately wrote it on two levels. One level could be the people who like Lucy and Darnay -- because I have to assume there are people who like Lucy and Darnay more than we do. Another level is how we're reacting, by seeing Carton as more complex than Darnay and Lucy. Now that I am thinking about it more, I can see it as an interesting set-up, with the person who is the actual hero of the book in terms of interest and actions presented as a less important than the apparent "heroes". He never gets the title of hero until the end, when he's dying; he never gets acknowledged as the hero during his life; but despite this, he is the person who we remember afterwards. He was the hero all along, without anyone in the book noticing.

None of which would reconcile me to the fact that he gets blindsided by an infatuation with a pretty, bland girl at the beginning of the book, and never gets his due while he's alive.

[sovay]

(Being in a relationship with Darnay would make me want to get my head examined.) If you think about Carton's introduction as a character, actually, I think it fits quite well with your theory about the actual hero consistently being downplayed in favor of the ostensible heroes.

*takes a minute to find an online text of A Tale of Two Cities, my own print-and-ink copy having mysteriously absconded with itself at some point in the recent past*

So, somewhere in Chapter 2: "Mr. Cruncher's attention was here diverted to the door-keeper, whom he saw making his way to Mr. Lorry, with the note in his hand. Mr. Lorry sat at a table, among the gentlemen in wigs: not far from a wigged gentleman, the prisoner's counsel, who had a great bundle of papers before him: and nearly opposite another wigged gentleman with his hands in his pockets, whose whole attention, when Mr. Cruncher looked at him then or afterwards, seemed to be concentrated on the ceiling of the court."

There's Carton, staring at the ceiling: no name, no particular physical description, just the guy looking as though he couldn't care less about the whole outcome of Darnay's trial. Even his name is introduced parenthetically; Stryver refers to him as "my learned friend" when his remarkable physical similarity to Darnay is used—at Carton's own suggestion, I believe—as an argument in the case, and the narrative goes on to describe how "My Lord inquired of Mr. Stryver (the prisoner's counsel), whether they were next to try Mr. Carton (name of my learned friend) for treason?" Eventually we get some more specific details, that his clothes are about as disreputable as his demeanor and he still looks like he couldn't care less. It's not until the next chapter, as far as I can tell, that he really begins to interact with the other characters; and even there, he's mostly sarcastic to Mr. Lorry. There's no way to tell from any of this that he'll have any further impact on the plot than the winning of this case (the first time his likeness to Darnay saves that young man?), no suggestion that he'll become a major player. I like that. He sort of blindsides the reader.

But, yes. One wishes he had better taste in women . . .

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

This theory almost makes me want to reread the book. *puts on bottom of mental 'to read' list* Of course, even if it's back on my list, I still won't get to that part of my list until 2020.

I think that I've managed to totally disprove my initial comment of "I'm glad someone else approves of Carton." If our joint empassioned defense of Carton-as-hero doesn't indicate that I actually do like Carton quite a bit, I'm not sure what it does mean.

. . .

[sovay]

Ye gods.

It's legitimate.

Published.

A Tale of Two Cities.

Fanfic.

I need to go lie down now . . .

Re: . . .

[muchabstracted.livejournal.com]

*cracks up*