As always, Ashley brought up some excellent points in her close readings of Dostoyevsky's biography. Her extensive research and argument of each character being linked to the author can be read
here. However, saying that the characters are extensions of Dostoyevsky is a direct contradiction to Professor Sexson's claim that the characters are real. If they mirror the author too much, they become more like puppets and less like free-thinking characters. Upon doing any background research on any author's life, characters from real life (including the author) seem to seep into the text the author creates. Professor Sexson's notion of a "real and independent-thinking character" seems unrealistic. Either the author has set the scaffolding (the text) to mold a character or the reader uses the same scaffolding to extend the character to their liking.
In my Lit Theory class, I wrote a paper in reference to two reader-response theorists and their notions regarding an author's intentions:
Great leaders throughout world history have come to power much in thanks to their extraordinary oratory skills. Leaders like Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King Jr. have been able to capture the hearts and minds of millions through both persuasive and informative oral text. The same skills can also be said for the Mussolinis and the Hitlers of the world. The search for truth in words is broken down by two theorists. In the essay Apology for Poetry, Sir Phillip Sidney argues that the poet’s role is a delicate balance between teaching and delighting. Gorgias of Leontini’s counterpoint is that the author can control the reader using the text.
Sidney states that in order to be a successful poet, the author must create a work that teaches and entertains. Too much informative text bores the reader and likewise a text with not enough facts loses credibility. In other words, one must add a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. The major hole in this theory is that one person’s medicine is another person’s sugar and vice versa. The author simply does not have two storage units in their brain labeled “facts” and “fluff”. And on the same level the reader cannot process the text and sort everything into two neat categories either. The end result is a massive tug-of-war of panning out the nuggets of fact in mounds of fluff (sometimes referred to as bullshit). An example of this in another form of media would be C-SPAN vs FOX News. The cable network C-SPAN has coverage of congress proceedings without analysis or entertainment value added in. C-SPAN has significantly less viewers than the major cable news networks, but what they present is largely objective video coverage of congress. FOX News has similar televised proceedings, but much of their meat and potatoes are their sharp criticism and analysis of Capitol Hill. More viewers tune for this added ‘sugar’. The question remains: How much sugar can be added to medicine before it’s no longer medicine? Gorgias of Leontini provides a potential answer.
In Encomium of Helen, Gogias’s thesis is that speech persuades and deludes the mind of the author. Gorgias ultimately compares language to a drug. The author is the drug dealer and the reader is the junkie or user. With each set of texts distributed to the masses comes an agenda-laced pill; in this case the pill can be labeled as healthy, but in reality it can be something completely different. Ideally, the reader could simply have an eclectic taste and read each genre in moderation. Too much of one author or genre could leave the reader in a delusional, drug-induced world of which the reader cannot conceive an original thought. The reader instead becomes a mouthpiece of the author. In the past, institutions have fought the battle with the ‘rogue’ authors by banning or even burning books. The authors in power essentially have a monopoly on the market. The drug choices decrease and the readers consolidate into fewer groups. Gorgias’s point has its share of flaws as well. Too much credit is given to the omnipresent god-like author and not enough credit to the reader. The more varying point of view the reader is given, the more open-minded a reader becomes. If the reader only reads from one author or from one specific set of like-minded texts, then yes, the reader is subjected to the author’s choice of drug.
Hopefully this wasn't too long-winded. I just wanted to comment on the idea that characters can have a mind of their own when, in actuality, they are still concepts that the author has given to us, the reader. We just need to be careful about the implications.
