Author! Author!: Shaping the Shapers

In Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, there is an element to life called Narrativium, a force that seeks to shape certain destinies along a pre-formed path. The third son must succeed in his endeavors; the despised but virtuous girl must marry happily ever after. That is the way the stories must go, and there are some people who use their knowledge of this for their own advantage. It is specifically stated that that is not the way things work here in the Roundworld, but I'm not so sure about that.

Narrativium -- especially in the lives of artists -- keeps trying to force the shapes of our lives into stories, and influences our interpretations of the lives of others. Occam's razor -- or an underlying cynicism about life -- always makes us take the main chance as far as famous writers go. Lewis Carroll must have been a pedophile and not simply a lonely man who made friends with little girls; Robert E. Howard must have been a momma's boy, and weak. In the case of Lewis Carroll, the evidence has been minutely sifted for one hundred and fifty years, and remains ambiguous at best. In the case of Howard, perhaps he always had a suicidal tendency that he refrained from acting on out of consideration for his mother. It need not necessarily been brought on by an Oedipal despair, though that is the narrative that many, even at the time, settled on. His philosophy -- the uncompromising, Nietzschean battle with life -- may have had as much to do with his suicide, but many would rather not consider this, as it is uncomfortably close to their own view of life. "It's a good philosophy, if you don't weaken, but he was weak, so the flaw was in him, not the philosophy."

Narrativium forces Bill Cosby into the role of America's Dad, and we are shocked when we discover how far he is from that role. Narrativium forces artists into a dance between their public image and their private selves, for the image becomes part of the narrative of the books, as if the artist's character is now an ingredient of the book's story itself. Even popular writers like J. K. Rowling or Neil Gaiman have occasionally offered unpopular statements that they have had to retract or explain away with cunning re-interpretations of their own words.

How far is an artist's self part of the work they present? How much is what he offers gold, and how much dross? All artists try to give us the gold of their character or wisdom and leave out the dross from their work; can it be judged by the junk in their lives, and entirely rejected because of what we see as personal flaws that are not even represented in the work? And how do we -- can we-- judge when a work is worth saving for the gold, and not rejected for the alloy of dross that has snuck in?