Expendable Characters

I first read Tolstoy’s War and Peace in high school. At least, I read most of it.

 I stopped in Volume 4, Part 4 when I realized Petya was going to die.  At seventeen, with friends leaving for Viet Nam, I didn't want to see a young recruit killed in battle.. It was my first encounter with the expendable character in the hands of a master novelist.

It was a bad translation anyway, with high-flown Victorian language. I finally picked up a new copy a few summers ago, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and I surrendered to the pleasures of re-reading—returning, in part, to the girl I was at 17 while re-imagining St. Petersburg and Moscow, the march of Napoleon’s armies, and weaving all of that into today’s news, the laundry and gardening, stories and essays to be graded.  

There on page 1058, through smoke and dust of war, I watched Petya on his horse, galloping across the manor courtyard, slip sideways in his saddle, the horse rearing, the boy falling to the wet ground, his head pierced by a bullet.  Tolstoy sets the expendable character’s death against the improbable happiness Pierre finds with Natasha in the end.

My husband and I make a game of guessing who the expendable character is in TV crime dramas. These characters play an essential role in film and in mainstream and suspense novels, allowing an opportunity for the villain to demonstrate his villainy. Problem is, they are usually too obvious.

You can spot expendable characters by their vulnerabilities and a spark of goodness that puts them at risk. They are to be found among the marginalized.  The man who has already failed once or the woman who abandoned her children is a sympathetic sinner who can be redeemed by death. A main character’s brothers or sisters, the rookie, the room-mate, are especially vulnerable because they live in the protagonist’s shadows where the villain is also lurking.

Because the reader must root for expendable characters, they need a significant story problem. Petya is the darling, the youngest, favorite to both Natasha and her mother. He is stifling in a world of fading gentry, caring for the women while his older brother marches off to glory. His youth and idealism make him vulnerable to the rhetoric of war, and the reader sympathizes because Tolstoy has already demonstrated that war is madness and war rhetoric is absurd. Petya’s sin is to be naive or callow enough to believe that he can make a difference where his elders have failed; these are sins of youth we have all had to forgive.  

Finally, he’s the rookie soldier. After the defeat of the French when Napoleon’s troops are in retreat, Petya is killed in a local partisan action, a death both random and devoid of purpose. This turn in the expendable character's fate reveals the villainy in Tolstoy’s tale—a deep cosmic irony, cruel at times but also comic as witnessed in the marriage at the end.  

In the face of this cosmic irony, we must act as if everything depended on our actions, all the while laughing at ourselves for believing we might make a difference. 

I kept Petya alive through two translations and many years because, in the hands of a master novelist, the expendable character is as memorable as the protagonist.  

Wrestling with Angels

Sometimes, I struggle with my decision to live in a small town surrounded by wilderness. When that happens, the mountain landscape flatlines; I yearn for crowds, performances, provocative lectures that yield to conversation, jazz bands at 3 am.

For that reason, I’m grateful to have the Ashland Chatauqua Poets and Writers Series within an hour’s drive (if the mountain pass is open). While only a couple of writers are presented annually, over the last years, Chautauqua has hosted writers as various as Li Young Lee, Barry Lopez, Eavan Boland, and Mark Doty, among others. Along with reading, each writer gives a master class for teachers.

I want to thank my friends Vince and Patty Wixon for insisting I attend the October event with poet and essayist Tony Hoagland.

In his extended workshops “Five Powers of Poetry,” Hoagland teaches the foundations for writing poetry as a distinct neuroskill set with muscles that can be built through regular practice We explored the first power: the immediacy, persuasive powers, and pleasures of making images. Because images carry complex messages with both intellectual and emotional content, Hoagland says, they are the source of much of the pleasure of poetry.

 “Get students to write one line that gives them pleasure,” Hoagland advised as he launched us in a series of exercises imitating other poets and invoking imagery. Because so many of my recent writing attempts had fallen flat, I felt a little intimidated, but Hoagland’s exercises were so simple, I quickly fell into improvisatory mode, imitating snippets of poetry and rhetorical phrases borrowed from other poets.

Before long, I’d written one of those lines that gave me pleasure:

What matters is

a bag of groceries left

at the bottom of the stairs--

the hallway dark

no one watching. 

In an instant, language and imagination had connected. The phrase contained an entire narrative because the image was as undeniable as the values in a black and white photograph.

I was writing, and nothing matches that pleasure.  

“Not to be able to express yourself is a penitentiary,” Hoagland said, and I had felt it over the last weeks. If wrestling with one small phrase was enough to set me free, then I had books and books filled with phrases to play with when I got home—plenty of angels I can wrestle with over the long and isolated months of winter.  

For more information about the Ashland Chautauqua Poets and Writers Series, visit: http://www.chautauquawriters.org/ 

To learn more about the “Five Powers of Poetry, visit:

http://www.fivepowerspoetry.com/thefivepowers.html

 

 

 

True, a novel by Melinda Field, Wise Women Ink, 2011

To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, great literature grows from two stories: someone goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. In Melinda Field’s first novel True, the character of young Cat sets events in motion--she is both on a journey and the stranger who comes to town.

Abandoned by her Mexican father, Cat has been raised by a drug-addicted mother and grown up tough in the streets of Phoenix, AZ. When her mother is taken to prison, Cat is forced to move to a small town and live with her Native American grandmother, a woman she has never met. To further complicate matters, the town is an isolated, predominantly white, ranching community in Northern California.

For Cat, this is a coming-of-age story. The brutality she encounters and the consequences will mark her life forever. But the novel True is much more.

The ensemble cast of characters, a diverse group of women brought together by their love of horses and their shared adventures in the mountains, is focused through Emma, a midwife who ultimately becomes Cat’s guardian. Each woman faces life-changing challenges, so that in True, Field reveals how we are always coming-of-age no matter where we find ourselves.

True is set in the contemporary west and Field evokes a palpable sense of place.  From the dusty heat of a Phoenix motel, redolent of curry and disinfectant--to the cider scent of an orchard, the crunch of apples underfoot—to the sharp-scented sage and dangerous shale of a mountain trail, the salt and blood of fear when a rattlesnake or mountain lion appears—True will transport readers from their easy chairs to a wild and authentic place.

There’s still a month of summer left. If you’re looking for a book to take with you to the beach or a book that is a vacation in itself, I invite you to read True.

For your hard copy or ebook, visit http://www.amazon.com/True-Melinda-Field/dp/097620083X