Waiting for ... Nothing

I'm not quite sure what you're looking for from this post.

You have talked yourself into the not unreasonable conclusion that if characters were placed in a different environment they may react differently to the way they react in their present environment.

So?

I'm still not sure what it is you want to discuss. Maybe it's because I've never read the play in question, but it seems like more a comment rather than an invitation to a conversation.

As for whether or not a character can evolve beyond the original author, absolutely. We see it all the time in adaptions, remakes, spinoffs, and fanfiction. It still takes a person doing the evolving because characters aren't, yanno, alive.

icerose said:

As for whether or not a character can evolve beyond the original author, absolutely. We see it all the time in adaptions, remakes, spinoffs, and fanfiction. It still takes a person doing the evolving because characters aren't, yanno, alive.

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Not for Samuel Beckett. Not his characters. There isn't another person alive with a mind like his, nor will there ever be. James Joyce is another. Those two Irish-born expatriates broke the mold.

You haven't read the play? You haven't ever seen it performed?

Google Nobel Prize for Literature.

Nope on either. It doesn't mean that other people won't ever take his characters beyond the play. Just because he was freakin' awesome or whatever doesn't mean people will leave the characters alone.

I saw it performed in repertory and read it a long time ago, during my existential/turtleneck phase. Seriously though, my take is there's a surface immediacy to that genre of plays and staged literature - what you see is in fact what you get. It's the strangeness and shocking transitions that drive you to create and imagine meaning, which is the magic of Beckett, Ionesco, James Joyce et al.

SecretIona101 said:

Lol putting it that way makes it seem obvious [Which it probably is]. But I guess what I was originally thinking about was can a character evolve without the involvement of the author?

In Waiting for Godot, Beckett clearly says there is no evolution for his characters beyond the text. In Snow Flower, I think there is a great possibility behind the main relationship discussed in the book evolving; the possibility of what kind of relationship it could have been.

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"Can a character evolve without the involvement of the author?"

How? Through a computer simulation? I don't mean to burst any bubbles or anything but -- characters in books and movies don't actually exist outside of the books and movies in which they appear, whether we're talking about Godot or Captain Ahab or Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird.

All of these characters had no real past and have no real future. They come into existence on the first page of the book or play (or in the first frame of film) and they all cease to exist on the last page or frame.

Their past is made up. Their putative futures are illusory. All the actual existence they have is within the work.

Scout never grows up, never gets married, never has kids, never passes on the message of walking around in someone else's shoes, never lives through the civil rights movement.

Because -- to put it simply -- she's not freaking real. She's just a character in a book. To the extent that she has a "past" -- it consists solely of whatever events prior to the beginning of the book that somebody happens to talk about. Whatever "present" she has consists solely of the events that are referred to in the book.

That's all there is to Scout. That and no more.

Now, part of creating any fully realized literary creation, to create that sense of reality, of verisimilitude, is to create the "sense" of a fully realized past, of a present that exists when the door is closed, when the light is turned out, when the character exists the scene and goes off somewhere where we can't see them.

But that is all just a kind of literary sleight of hand. It's the reason why a painting of a door that's slightly ajar is more interesting than one of a door that's closed. It creates that sense of a world beyond the door that we can just barely glimpse.

But it's just paint on canvas - -there is no door, never mind anything beyond it, except to the extent that the artist creates the *sense* of a door and of a world beyond in our imagination.

That is the challenge of the painter, or the writer, or the filmmaker, in crafting these self-contained finite literary worlds -- creating the "sense" of a door that opens onto a complete and endless world of possibilities, of characters that have a past that reaches back to causes and sources and a future that reaches forward to the consequences of actions taken or not taken.

But we need to understand that that sense comes from the magician's hand, like a magic bag, from which we seem able to draw endless handkerchiefs.

They're not really in the bag. They come from us.

NMS

SecretIona101 said:

Quite recently I reread one of my favorite plays, Waiting for Godot. It's a wonderful piece by Samuel Beckett about two men who wait for a never-introduced character. Sure, there are secondary characters introduced, but none of them [nor their actions] progress the plot at all.

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The plot does progress. The story doesn't stand still, it moves. It resolves. Everything in there has a purpose. The never-introduced character is just a tool - whether we actually meet him or not is irrelevant.