Sophisticated or Raw

[Marc]

I think the problem comes as much as from how fictional characters are structured as the dilemma over language and style as you relate.

If we are mainly interested in emotional truth from a novel how can that be wrought from a character undergoing a journey of change within the confines of the 3 or 4 hours of the duration of the book? Craft asseverates that your character has to follow an arc, as if their emotional state at any one moment can be plotted on a graph. Craft asserts that through conflict and resolution does the characater move on and develop. Why? While conflict in relationships is an everyday thing, people rarely change deep down. People tend to make the same mistakes over and over again because they are blind to their flaws and psychological and personality foibles. I like characters who are stuck. You talk about rawness, I start any novel already on the inside of the character's psyche as they try and re-suture themselves and heal their lacerations or at least reconstruct the events and thought processes by which they came by them. My characters don't achieve redemption, through they may attain some insight.

In real life we don't live our lives on arcs. The change in us from day to day is minimal, although some of the externals might vary. We only impose a pattern on our lives retrospectively, by looking back and trying to plot the repetitions. But we never lived in the moment like that, so it is an artificial process. Why translate that to fiction if we are after seeking truth?

From Scarlett Thomas' "We should have stories not to tell us how to live and turn out lives into copies of stories, but to prevent us from having to fictionalise ourselves".

[Marc]

Even within many literary titles characters do follow an arc and are usually changed by the end of the book. The classical Greek origins of tragedy and Christian literature with its redemption or damnation conclusion possibly helped enshrine this in literature, I don't know you'd have to ask an academic.

The modernists started breaking this down with their more fragmentary or stream of consciousness texts. Bit it's not just genre characters who follow arcs. Meursault is a good example of someone who doesn't, I agree. I like Handke's work too, but haven't read him for years.

The Victorian novel was where it became about the individual and the individual's story was a journey. In that sense the Victorian novel was a bourgeois art form. There are of course novels about communities and great social movements, but even these tend to focus the view through a main character's eyes.