As we have seen in ‘The Swimmer’, we can draw up some pretty incredibly similarities between the protagonist and John Cheever. For one, they both turned to alcohol as some form of escapism from something in their lives that was offering them deep internal conflict; however, is this really a bad thing? In the case of writing from experience, then there should be no problem because it makes the story all the more believable, adding validity to the character’s life. ‘He needed a drink’, comes up again and again after an obstacle of some sort arises.
If Cheever’s alcoholism wasn’t known to us as the reader, then would that affect our reading? Some critics, like Barthes believe that the author doesn’t exist after he has written something. The death of the author happens, making the story something to be explained in any other means by the reader – the possibilities are endless. By linking an author to a text, he says, you limit your reading of it, and I do think some people are in danger of doing this.
In The Canterbury Tales, for example, ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ employs a protagonist of a rapist knight, on a quest to discover what women really desire. There is an episode within Chaucer’s life which still remains unclear as to whether he was a rapist in one instance, but does this undermine the tale and take us away from the narrative, even though it’s a female voice? ‘By verray force he rafte her maidenhed’ – this knight raped a maid and yet to put Chaucer’s life into the tale would take away from it.
Writing from experience can help to make a story more believable; however it does raise to question of what we might be writing about ourselves unconsciously. The death of the author theory would say that this doesn't matter, but living in the age of the internet, it could be said that the theory is becoming outdated.
ReplyDeleteI agree that sometimes it takes away from a story to assume that the writer has (consciously or unconsciously) written themselves into the piece. I'm not sure if I like the implication that my characters are always representative of myself in some way! If this was always the case, would that mean that there is never room for a writer to create more than a finite amount of 'unique' characters, based on the kind of traits they have themselves?
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