agency
by uzwi
I tweeted words to the effect of, “The first thing to do is remove main character energy from main characters.” Someone replied with words to the effect of, “But why?” Some scattered thoughts on that, with no attempt whatsoever to order them–
For one thing, “main character” is a foundational pillar of storification; & the storification of everything has led directly to the Babel we live in now. The least fiction can do, now that everything–from “news” to science–is presented/exploited as story, is to destorify itself. & that’s before you get to consciously fake news & science.
For another thing it implies there can only ever be one “main character” in the approved uber-structure of all “stories”.
For another, main character is a fantasising cultural product, designed to exploit the narcissism of the reader via identification, for economic & political purposes. Main character is the main driver of the spectacle & the bread-&-circus.
Main character charisma is the promise of individual agency–a sort of pre-reward for thoughts & actions, packaged and proffered by the culture–that the culture uses to encourage the individual to do things on its behalf. Not just to buy stuff. Or to behave appropriately. But to act practically as the culture’s agent in external wars, say, or torture of its internal enemies. But it’s also, at the same time, the opposite of that: the pretense to the user that there can be a spirited–even a spiritual–individuality. It’s the paradoxical affirmation that we can believe both things at once, that though we act entirely by permission, cultural gift & faux privilege, we also act by righteous individual prerogative in the face of felt cultural pressure.
By enjoying main character energy in a “story”, you are able to revel in an agency you never had. The culture–via pretence, via a kind of cosplay of values–pretends to grant you agency against the sort of agencies which took it away in the first place.
The only way to keep the main character while binning main character energy is to abandon story. This is automatically seen as a crime, or the scene of a crime. In genre, story is a non-negotiable assumption, baked in before the beginner-writer even begins to write. It’s one of the assumptions no one can argue with. But there are ways of destorifying fiction, and they are easily imported from other writerly regimes, other sets of unbreakable founding assumptions. Thus the sudden contemporary appearance (or reappearance) of hybrid writing.
the m john harrison blog 
Your scattered thoughts strike me as pretty persuasive, and make some far-reaching connections that I hadn’t noticed before. My heart sank a little as I read the first six paragraphs, given that I’ve taken seven and a bit years to complete a novel (my first of course and as yet unpublished) whose events and non-events fall entirely within the orbit of its one main character.
However, the heart lifted again when it reached your final paragraph, seeing that my novel has no over-arching story, beyond that a man is born and is married and has a job, that his wife dies earlier than he expects and that he dies in his turn. On this frame, such as it is, is hung a hefty scrapbook of mini-stories, encounters, events, observations, banalities, day dreams and epiphanies.
He is certainly acted upon, but is he an agent? I hope not.
Is abandoning story quite the same thing as removing main character energy from a main character? Can we posit a surviving story that surrounds a main character emptied of energy? An Oblomov, maybe (a little too obvious?), or Belacqua in early Beckett? Or am I taking “energy” in too literal a sense? Or “story” in too loose a sense?
Mike in Climbers – observer, first person voice – seems to have no “story”. But does he have “energy”? What would be the test? His effectiveness, or lack of, in changing things? (I only cite Climbers because I’m reading it at the moment, so it comes quickly to mind. No other particular reason.)
I (really) like a lot of this, but is the last paragraph really true? I can think of stories with a narrator or viewpoint character who is neither the most important part of the story, not the character with the most agency – Austerlitz, for example. I’m also trying to write a novel, with similar intent, where the ‘main character’s role is to try and explain an interpret what is happening, but he has very limited control over it.
That is my attempt at a “main character without main character energy” — but it doesn’t abandon story. There’s still ‘story’; still cause and consequence and chains of events, of which my guy is a subject, and observer. I hope through that to make something that changes the idea of our own responsibilities in life: to know and embrace what we can do, when we can’t do much.
Where does all that fit in?
I hadn’t thought of “main character energy” as a Baudrillardian function in itself, as inculcating in readers an ideal of their own ideal, active, independent self, but it makes absolute sense.
I’m curious how the suspicion of particular harmony in story might apply to crime noir fiction in the detective-free sense. That is, stories that depict people on the margins who are invariably one bad day away from utter material collapse. The person whose junker car dies, leading to lateness that gets them fired, late on the rent, etc. In crime stories such circumstances lead to bad ends.
I feel like that sort of story conveys (or ought to convey?) a real sense of the needless precarity that real people live in, as opposed to fiction which conveys, eg, the fantasy of some person in comfortable conditions achieving some kind of actualization. Crisis cascading down on a given person makes them a main character, no? The world seems to be happening to them.
Maybe this is me not quite having a handle on precisely what “main character energy” really entails. I wonder if it’s only applied to comedy (in the sense of stories resolving in mending of malfunction and misunderstanding) and not to tragedies (which I think of that particular kind of crime story as being).
While I’m here, it’s curious to me — it’s been hard for me, lately, to read anything on writing without putting it against a manifesto recently published by author and critic Brandon Taylor in the Sewanee Review, advocating for a return to “morally instructive literature”.
That essay strikes me as essentially working from this post’s observations but arriving at a different, aesthetically conservative conclusion. Ie, recognizing that literature subtly inculcates the sense of reality (if I’m understanding the Baudrillardian position correctly), but concluding less that this phenomenon is insidious and dishonest, more that it’s been wasted, and that we need to exert more and stronger influence.
My assumption would be that Taylor would say we need more main character energy, just toward other ends. I think of Taylor’s position as essentially a staunchly modernist reaction against postmodernism; there is an ideal world from which we’ve strayed and he despairs that literature is not shepherding our retvrn to it. But I think that ideal world never existed, and that his project is therefore insidious.
Anyway, when we talk about storification, I’m curious to what degree that process might tie into, or serve to express, a teleology of literature (which Taylor is naturally bullish about). I recall your having said, once, that fiction is auto-teleological. Is it fair to say that the abandonment of storification is a constructive abandonment of “purpose”? Is it obvious to say that “morally instructive literature” as a project simply makes explicit what was always happening implicitly?
Further from that… At the risk of skirting “and yet you have a cell phone” territory, is the considered avoidance of storification another sort of instructive literature? Does intentional literature always have some purpose in engaging the reader? I’m curious what you think.
Each act of writing in a moral sense would have a particular direction, away from commodification of moral expressions as a type of main-character communication/third personalization that only gets worse with the surrounding culture of intrusive live streaming on phones etc. The problem is finding a reputable author who can responsibly disengage these topical sites of fiction without buying into the ongoing paradigm that creates these kinds of problems in the first place. That’s really my favorite part of Mike’s characters. First thing is being able to say no, but beyond that it’s really up to your imagination. In my opinion the original purpose is to learn how to say no, and beyond that dissembling the larger structures perpetuating that type of narcissism that are prevented from saying no in the first place. It shouldn’t matter if it’s a person, place, or thing, story or not, since it’s all writing.
There are other foundational elements to story, obviously. But as I was careful to say, no argument is being presented here, just a few separate points everyone can take or leave. (The guy in Climbers: his thing is to exist on the edge of other, livelier people’s lives. As for his “story”: what we see is what we get, and he does give a few patchy clues. My idea was to tempt the reader to wonder why he wasn’t being more open…)
As I said, this wasn’t intended to be a formal statement, just some bullet point responses around the topic. Do take what seems useful for your own program & bin what doesnt!
I haven’t read the Taylor manifesto so I can’t make anything but a conversational response. But what you’ve described seems more reactionary than exploratory. I’d rather progress the search for new ground.
You wrote: “First thing is being able to say no.” Good way of putting it. That’s why it’s so necessary to disengage from as much of the overall paradigm as you can. You have to shed, damage or repurpose all the other elements too, not just character. (& not just fiction. As you say, it’s all writing…)
Reading your work felt like finding a piece of myself in each chapter. The way you breathe life into your characters, each with their unique flaws and strengths, made me feel as though I’d known them for years. Your writing doesn’t just entertain; it makes the reader feel, reflect, and grow.