Minor Characters: Anonymous, Silent, Invisible

October 24th, 2008 Posted in Characters: Leading, Featured, Minor Seroquel For Sale Acticin No Prescription Buy Lasuna No Prescription Buy Online Shallaki Buy Motrin Online Levlen For Sale Zimulti No Prescription Buy Vantin No Prescription Buy Online Elimite Buy Topamax Online Prinivil For Sale Lotensin No Prescription Buy Prozac No Prescription Buy Online Hyzaar Buy Karela Online Doxycycline For Sale Serevent No Prescription Buy Erythromycin No Prescription Buy Online Maxaquin Buy Zoloft Ultram Online Vasodilan For Sale Female Viagra No Prescription Buy Lynoral No Prescription Buy Online Erythromycin Buy Evista Online

Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” is full of other characters. It is Hamlet’s story, he is the central figure, but others have their parts, each called out, illuminated into existence, by the needs of the Hamlet narrative and plot. Tom Stoppard in “Rosencrantz and Guilderstern Are Dead” pulls out two minor characters from “Hamlet” and speculates about their lives off-stage (while the initial play is on-going). It is an imaginary parallel on-stage presentation of what these two men are doing when they are not involved with the troubled prince.

What could possibly be going on in their lives is radically limited by the primary narrative. They are fated to die by the script and though they do not know this (or much else) as characters until near the end of both stories they speculate philosophically on issues of chance and confusions of language and the nature of theater and fiction and, in the process, on the mystery of the real individual and social life.

But this experience of being in the narrative of another is in real life an ordinary experience. It is a matter of viewpoint. In its simplest form there is an ego central in interaction with a number of others. His experience, recalled later as a narrative, is the primary plot  As in the theater the rest of us  associated with him are listed by our importance in his story. We are leading, featured, or minor characters.  But in real life we are at the same time all central characters in our own lives. Depending upon how active and entwined we are in the social life of our worlds, we may be involved in a number of these different story lines at the same time.  Standing back we see a complex intermix of intersecting stories and participants. It is close to the concrete reality of life experienced by the individual but visualized as a group phenomenon.

Playwrights frequently deal with this way of seeing by discovering the individual’s story within the mass, or by skipping from one to another parallel story (contrasting or comparing themes), by linking actions and resolutions in one story with those of another.  This intermix of simultaneous stories can in itself be a valid issue for investigation by the sociologist.

A good start could be made by reviewing the range of situations described in plays, movies, novels, short stories, histories, reports by journalists and try to pull out the models that may sum up and  categorize these events.  A joyful act of scholarship which I am unprepared to attempt.  So I fall back upon speculation based on rag-tag experience, the last stand of the rogue scholar.

The movie or play, however, is not the same as what we might call real life–the place where the on-stage character disappears and we see again the actor as himself.  The making of the play can be treated in its real form, the actual making of the illusion, and there are plays and movies about the making of plays or movies–the play within the play with its teasing possibility of the infinite regress–the play within the play within the play and so on.

The scene might be the key (limiting ourselves to the classic and familiar forms and not attempting to account for the playwrights’ experimental ways of presentation which go off in other directions).  It is condensed in time and in content, staying on plot and not meandering as invariably happens in real life. There are tricks like the side-kick or close friend or the chorus to whom and through whom motive and plot elements are revealed. (This is not rejection of the art forms of our civilizations that reflect on our human experience (and in themselves are often sociological statements.) It is simply an expression of hope for a more specifically sociological way.   So we will veer away from this analogy and try to find other ways of identifying the patterns of our real experience.

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If politicos gain a significant degree of public attention journalists begin to dig into their pasts in an effort to get an independent  line on who they are that escapes the public relations persona presented to the electorate.  It entails going back to the social spaces within which they participated in the past and finding records and people with whom they interacted. The objective: collect anecdotes, opinions, recollections.

Governor Sarah Palin who is startlingly new on the national scene currently is a prime target.  The latest stories find her to have been nearly invisible during her college years to everyone except those from her home town going through the same experience with her.  The story builds and  goes like this. (What Ms Palin might have been or is like today might be  something else.) She was not shy but made no attempt to call attention to herself in those college years and left little impression on her instructors or fellow students. But gradually in the years following she took a public role in her home environment as a beauty contestant, then as a public school parent, then as a minor town official, and so on up to Admiral in the Queen’s Navy. In a sense she found herself and her career through these successful successive steps.

What interests me is that in her initial steps she was at a college/university, a concrete expression of the USA educational institution, and she was very close to invisible.  She participated, acted within a social setting, but had no active presence.  No one can remember her.

This status of invisibility is not unusual.  I suspect that it approximates the experience of  the majority of us–remember Nixon’s Silent Majority who he claimed  were on his side. But silent, invisible, present but not present–who is to know? (Note: Not only students are invisible but also professors–we remember neither the teacher or his subject.)

This silent, invisible status might pose a psychological question but it also most definitely has a social quality–  the person in a local social setting upon whom the other members form and express a consensus which in this case is that they can neither see nor hear this person who from her own point of view is central star.

In fact in these institutions where people are ordered as a mass this status of silent invisibility might be the norm. Look at the crowded classrooms, hallways, dorms, and campuses, and at the stands during footfall games. Look at the yearbooks with all the pictures.  To stand out, to be seen and heard, one must really stand out–sort of a stand out squared.  The wonder is that Ms Palin was able eventually to find her public vocation and persona.  Even though not all of us aspire to grow in that direction still an achievement.   Some of us dig more deeply into our lives of quiet desperation–another form of being silent and invisible.

Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame is a commentary on the extent of the normal anonymous life.

Please note that we are into an even more speculative venture than before–maybe truer to the potentials of the blog form. Where we goes nobody knows.