If you poison us, do we not die?
Here's the third question that helps us understand how readers and writers connect. Earlier we looked at the connecting power of humor and laughter, as well as a common concern by readers and writers for characters in pain.
Now we come to poison and dying, and at a time like this I wish I were a mystery writer. Agatha Christie loved to kick off her mysteries with a good old-fashioned poisoning. Her 80 mystery novels have sold about four billion copies in 45 languages. They say that everybody loves a good mystery, and apparently everybody also loves a good poisoning.
Shylock’s speech in Act 3, Scene 1 of The Merchant of Venice asks, “If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?” Shakespeare’s topic in this speech is the common humanity of Jews and Christians, but we can apply it to the connection of reader and writer.
Death in fiction ... where to start? Not a character in temporary physical or emotional pain, but a character dying, dead, their life snuffed out for the remainder of the story.
If this is a sympathetic character, one that writer and reader have grown to care about, and perhaps care about deeply, then the death is difficult for both writer and reader, who connect to each other in their grieving.
One novel that comes to mind is Madame Bovary, in which the heroine comes to a bad end because of poison. The author's identification with Emma Bovary makes this ending rather intriguing. Flaubert said "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" ("I am Madame Bovary"). I suspect that when the author kills off his main character a piece of himself dies as well.
How did Shakespeare feel when he wrote Hamlet's dying scene? In 1596 Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet, died at age 11. It is believed that between 1599 and 1601 Shakespeare wrote the tragedy Hamlet. Scholars debate the importance of the similarity of the two names, but how can the death of his only son not have affected Shakespeare as he wrote the play?
I've watched Larry McMurtry follow his small-town Texas characters in a series of novels that began with The Last Picture Show (1966) and most recently continued with the fourth novel in the series, When the Light Goes Out (2007). Characters age, they lose close friends and family, and the reader feels the same losses, although not always with the same power as the deaths in McMurtry's epic Lonesome Dove.
A few years back, while writing the first draft of a novel, I was all set to kill off the heroine's husband near the end of the novel. The more I thought about it the more I liked the idea. This was for a romantic comedy, so don't ask me what I was thinking! Fortunately, I told a friend of my homicidal plan and she talked me down. When she told me, "You can't kill him, you need a happy ending!" it was like a pitcher of cold water in my face.
To this day I haven't killed off any of my characters. I've wanted to at times. What usually happens is that instead of knocking them off I heap humiliation on them. Maybe next time. I can't kill any characters right now because I'm too busy reading everything I can find about poison.
Tags: Agatha Christie, Flaubert, Larry McMurtry, Shakespeare
