Sometimes our prompts invite us to validate a proposition that, to say the lest, is questionable and is, at the most a deliberate untruth. Look at this question, for instance: ‘If you had to switch lives with a fictional character for a week, who would you choose?’. It starts with a conditional phrase, ‘If you had to switch lives …’, which imagines an imperative one could not deny – you MUST switch lives’. Having assumed that this imperative is forced upon us we still have enough liberty left to ‘choose’ with which ‘fictional character’ we should switch ‘lives. Yet I wonder if the question may remain open as to what about a character renders them fictional and what being fictional makes them differ from the ‘character’ you already believe yourself to have.
Yet the novel I am reading now, whilst containing many wonderful characters really stands up to be considered in relation to this question because it focuses on the very issue of why a character is fictional. Indeed one character with a very fictitious sounding name, and description in the book’s cast list, is one of quite a few characters who raise that issue. The book is Marlon James The Dissappearers (2026, probably a sure fire candidate for the Booker Shortlist) and the character is Havelock Titus, whom we first see inducting a group of men into the role of the fictional characters of John Herbert’s play Fortune and Men’s Eyes (a play that Nicholas Boggs makes central to a turning point in the life of James Baldwin (described in a blog by me at this link) and discussed in relation to an essay-interview in The Gay and Lesbian Review in another blog by me (at this link).In this play (in a version in Turkish of the original Canadian play which Baldwin directed even though he didn’t speak that well) Baldwin cast as prisoners who turn to queer sex, his own now heterosexually married past lover as Smitty, a tough new prisoner who learns how to wear a more flexible set of choices and character identity from his new cellmates, Rocky, Mona and Queenie. The play is about men who take on characters that have already absorbed fictions into the makeup of that character, as well as showing Smitty in the process of doing the same.
In an epistolary section of the novel Havelock retells the story of a raid on the house where the men chosen to act, mainly men who felt forced to identify as queer themselves and most often with the Jamaican slang and abusive Jamaican term for gay me, battymen, are rehearsing the play, though one character – the one playing Mona, Edmond “Eddy” Porteous (known by an other character, Jordan who plays Rocky, as ‘Portia’ to give himself another fictional character role. This rehearsal is attacked by a mob calling themselves Blackjacks, who brutally beat and mutilate the cast and Havelock, among whom are policemen and at least one closet gay black man and murder one of them, a rich businessman by sodomizing him with a tree branch. Asked by his correspondent about that night, a question we never read in full but probably including an account of he ‘felt’ then and ‘feels’ now, Havelock rather more than side-steps it, making his narration much more about how the men who were brutally beaten and one killed could be described only with difficulty and not only because the accounts of it in the press were distorted with lies and recreated as fictions in which no-one could recognise themselves. The other reason is that Havelock knows that though characters, fictional or otherwise, are a kind of object viewed through some perspective and point of view and that he knows of no point of view or perspective that wouldn’t equally distort the subjects of that story, even himself. He tells of some of the distorted prior narration though as a reason for having no learned perspective on the story himself, for perspectives are assumed to be morally descriptive as well as perceptual. Here he is speaking of the aftermath of the dead victim:
I saw a TV reporter shove a microphone in his six-year-old daughter’s face to ask if she knew Daddy was a sodomite. You can tell I’m refusing to gain perspective on this. “Perspective” implies that you have learned something, and I refuse to believe there is any lesson to be learned from suffering an atrocity, other than always to be on guard for the ways people turn on you.
But all stories required that their character’s are named in some way, other than by their names, however assumed and sometimes multiple. Hence Havelock says of telling any story about himself:
But maybe to tell your story it is essential to turn oneself into a character. Become a fly on your own wall to watch you being you. The thing is, I have tried that. Not through some psychiatric advice, but in the sense that I feel the only option for me is distance, and maybe that equals perspective. The problem is that without perspective, I become the millionth gay man with a huge stash of anger and nowhere to shelve it. Why did you ask me this question?
And in turning yourself into a character in this novel implies a character where the boundary of what is and is not fiction, whoever describes and narrates it, is very porous. Sometimes this is an necessary thing, as in the case of the queer men in the novel who constantly have to invent fictional lives to evade the consequences of being identified as the object of hate and legitimate attack that gay men are – in this case as battymen in Jamaica. When Jordan Brown is interviewed by a reporter-cum-writer writing on the men who ‘disappeared’ from amongst the victims of the attack on the play, he is given news reported to his interviewer by Eddy that he had found in one of many addresses of Matt Chin that disguised his live under multiple local identities, and one of the ‘disappeared’, the manuscript of a novel, about which Eddy had never told Jordan. Was this, the reporter must ask, because they split from each other and that Eddy might lie to him in that event. Jordan says:
The bitch did a few things I didn’t like but lying was never one of them. Lie by omission is still a lie, yo. Don’t get me into some philosophical bullshit about lie versus fiction. Fiction is creation. Lie is distortion. One don’t have a fucking thing to do with the other.
Fiction is allowed gay men – is necessary for us the novel suggests – for safety but also because the discourses available in the world contain no space in which we are not already over-interpreted with the signs of the evidence that validates the hate of others -or in which we can’t be seen, in models of the heteronormative and of relationships intended to exclude queerness or turn it into homonormative terms that mirror the heteronormative.
I write this just as taster because I have not finished the novel yet and want to do so and write up my reflections, whilst still having time to read Switzy, in the next week or so before the Shortlist is announced for Booker. For here just note that the book may indicate that there is something about queer lives which has already turned us into fictional lives, when we aren’t forgotten and lost already.In a late reflection on the two victims who disappeared. One way of becoming a ‘fictional character’ is to become the ‘disappeared’ – one of very many who vanish in very different ways.
I wonder if this was their plan, to vanish not just in physical space but mental as well. God help me but as I write this I have forgotten what they looked like. I have never been good with loss. Not with family or friends, not with AIDS, nor gay bashing. Loss always struck as a page that one turns, never to return to. Eleven years. I have never observed an anniversary, nor see any reason to. Sometimes I wonder if the world simply swallowed them up. Other times I question if they were figments of the gay imagination, Lord knows we have several members who are indeed fictitious.
Now back to this wonderful novel!
With love
Steven xxxxxxxxxxx
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