My incredibly imposing Translation professor, Dr. Murphy, brought to us a part of a Japanese college reading with several essays written by various experts in the literary field. One of them was by I think Youichi Kobayashi (actually I’m not sure of this name, I’ll check it if anyone… actually… cares) and dissects the “function” of the character (主人公).
I’ll admit some of the discussion (if not most) flew over my head, but the basic jist of the article was this: characters are a function and code of the work, according to Kobayashi. Although that sounds simple, there’s a second layer to it; it’s unconventional for most of us with some sort of high school/college literature background to think of characters like this. Not that I’m saying it’s wholly wrong to do so, and indeed often we can learn much about a literary work through the conventional questions, but how often have we been told to ask the question “how do we as the reader relate to the character” and “what is the author trying to reflect” as opposed to “what is the function of the character inside this narrative?” For me the ratio is around 14,502:0.
We associate the Meiji period, with Japan’s importation of trains, and other technology, but it was also importing the novel, and central to the novel is always the group of characters that are within it. However, if we look at what the first of the Meiji-era literary theorists (if my professor ever reads this he’ll destroy me, seriously, for not writing down the actual name) wrote, they define the character as a function to create relevance and connections between the various strands of the narrative. It’s not until later the questions of “relating to the character” and “reflecting the author” come in, which seems have dominated even upper academia till probably relatively recently (I won’t pretend to actually know); Kobayashi apparently sees this as an unnecessary transformation that was created to suit other concepts cropping up or being imported at the same time; there was something about “individual” but I got completely lost somewhere around there, the reading got really above-my-head around that point.
What it sort of brought to mind for me was how watchers of anime, the narrative medium I look at the most, deal with (or don’t) this concept. If you read most review sites, they are flooded with how relatable individual characters are, how much you can like them, etc. Shows where the characters themselves can be identified as written more to suit a “function” are pretty rare – examples I wouldn’t have to argue heavily would probably be limited to GITS:SAC and such because of the overwhelmingly heavy presence of its themes – and “slice of life” is the new cool thing to watch/create, because of the highly normal characters it involves despite its usual utter lack of a traditional narrative. Even in our domestic primetime slots are often filled with shows where the character that is as close as possible to “normal people (with Hollywood looks of course, but let’s ignore that)” with just slight adjustments to push them into an interesting premise. Slight tangent, but to kind of show the process of Japanese marketing in a similar area to anime, Kodansha is supposedly so character-focused that to pitch something you only have to sell the characters somewhat to sell your idea to them.
What I’m wondering is, at what point did we decide that the narrative itself was no longer important as just engaging the audience with the characters? It seems that the mainstream is flowing in that direction whereas when the format of the novel was first finalized, to a degree, it is arguable that characters were always secondary to the narrative, and another tool alongside form and symbolism with which it was told. How far can the role of the story itself be removed from the purpose of work?
Posted by omoroiyarou 