Characters II (3 August 2009)

There are some characters that we would like to be, but the more interesting question is who the characters are that we refuse to be. These are usually the ones we would like not to give a second thought: Barney the barfly, perhaps Nestor the old soldier, Willie Loman, Madam Rose, or even the ones who don't even have a name--the clichéd, forgettable ones: the fifty-year-old gym rat who never seems to make any headway, the man alone at the end of the bar, the groupie, or even the victim.

But then we are caught in a double-bind. We can't exactly "aspire" to be average, to win a walk-on role in a movie or to be a stunt double. It's by being beholden to the role cast by others that we are already part of the crowd and the value of a life will always be buried in the enjoyment parceled in paid time off, ounces, and dollars.

But any attempt to write our own character will also be confronted with another economy: our characters have meaning only insofar as they are recognizable within various types or genres. In other words, there will always be a general name for our characters since any non-Adamic language contains more than proper names: the heroic drag queen, the party monster, the pretentious bitch, the "best friend", the "perfect man", the "unique one".