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The Light on Daisy’s Dock
HERE’S ONE THING I learned teaching introductory creative writing: would-be fictionists don’t
understand character. When I would give the first characterization assignment, I always got back the same
thing—height, weight, hair color and length or lack, size of nose, shape of mouth, number of freckles. The
full package. You could take the details and paint a life-size portrait. You could, I couldn’t, but that’s a
function of artistic ability, not lack of student description. What I could do, however, was hand the character
sketches back with this question: what does Huck Finn look like? Or Jake Barnes? Or even Emma Bovary?
The answer is, we don’t know. Sometimes, as with Huck, we haven’t been
told; he lacks sufficient self-awareness to bother describing himself. We know
about Jake’s signature war wound, since it matters so much to the story, but not
much else about his appearance. And Flaubert, for all his exact rendering of
detail, can’t even settle on Emma’s eye color, which leads to the riff on Enid
Starkey in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot. Sometimes Emma’s eyes are black,
or sort of blue in certain light, or maybe brown if looked at just so. Starkey, a
real Flaubert scholar, took him to task on the shifting iris coloration, and
Barnes’s protagonist, Geoffrey Braithwaite, in turn takes her to task for her
shortcomings. But looks ultimately don’t matter all that much. In order to
understand Braithwaite—or Huck, Jake, or Emma—we don’t need to know what
they look like.
We need to know what they want.
Take Emma’s eyes. Maybe a bit vague or inconsistent. Still, we have a pretty
good idea about her eyes, really, but it’s not the eyes that matter. We’re not her
lovers; we’re her readers. We’re looking to understand her, not fall in love. What
matters for Jim is not how he drives forward but what drives him forward.
Again, I say, we need to know what they want. Really, really want.
And usually, we know what they want by what they obsess on. If I were to
ask ten people to name one object from The Great Gatsby, nine of them would
come up with the same item—even if they hadn’t read the title of this chapter.
There it is, that green light on the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock, commanding
Jay Gatsby’s rapt attention and presiding over Nick Carraway’s final paragraph.
This thing, the object that drives him forward to calamity, stands for everything
that’s wrong with him, and also what’s right—his capacity for self-delusion, his
ability to hope, his belief that some things, some people, no matter how flawed,
are worthy figures of the Dream. It’s quite literally the last thing we see in the
novel, before those phantom boats driving against the current. Fitzgerald was
taking no chances that we might miss his point.
That point is central for writers, and hence for readers, the Law of Character
Clarity: To understand characters, you have to know their deepest desires. More
often than not, that desire finds an emblem—an object or action—to give it
tangible expression.
Since we’re out on the water’s edge, consider another longing gaze, this one
directed out to sea from the Cobb, a long, snaking pier at Lyme Regis, toward a
man the gazer knows is never coming back. The Cobb is actual and historical,
the woman fictitious, the man perhaps a figment of her imagination. She is Sarah
Woodruff, the elusive if titular female in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s
Woman (1969). Why would a woman spend her off hours scanning the waters for
a French officer who, if he ever existed, is certain not to return? Why would a
woman in 1867, the year in which the novel is set, subject herself to the
community disapproval resulting from this unseemly (and therefore obviously
sexual) display of romantic grief? Ah, there’s the question that drives the novel
and to which Fowles never provides a clear answer. Is it deliberate debasement,
a desire to incur social opprobrium, a suicidal impulse, inconsolable romantic
mourning, pure existential misery, self-dramatized posturing, out-and-out
madness? Whichever view one ultimately takes—and there are adherents to each
of those possibilities within the narrative—will decide how one feels about
Sarah and about the novel. The options are nearly endless, but the gesture itself
is abundantly clear. What your experience of the novel is like will depend greatly
on what you believe Sarah is looking at, or looking for, or looking out for, out on
the Cobb. Of course, she’s not the only or even the main character, even if she
does own the title. Charles Smithson holds that distinction, and he has wants of
his own. One of those desires turns out to be Sarah Woodruff. Charles doesn’t
even know this, or if he does, he spends great energy on denying it, for much of
the novel. We have to figure this out for ourselves as we watch him clamber over
the cliff faces in search of his fossils, his “tests,” referring, in this case, to
fossilized shells of sea creatures. Do you think that’s all that Fowles means?
Charles is a hunter, of fossils first of all and of the mysterious Sarah later, but
most of all of meaning. His life fills him with ennui and a vague but inescapable
sense of pointlessness. Although as a Victorian man he lacks the vocabulary to
express it, he is living out the existentialist crisis, confronting absurdity and
nothingness in cravat and dundrearies.