Sunday, March 23, 2008

Believable Characters Are Unbelievable

As far as I'm concerned, Will Self puts his finger on the truth when he says that naturalistic novels, with their pretence of 'veracity', are thus 'more about an invented reality even than the things I write.'

Personally, I'm getting more and more impatient with the concept of 'character', and the fake authority of narratives which purport to anatomize the motivations of characters, so I smiled when I read him quoted as saying that even in life (leave alone books) 'people's motives are so often not just obscure to them, but absolutely fucking mad.'

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