Friday, December 14, 2012

As I was having lunch in the cafeteria today, I was struck by the urge to pray. Now I know why.

In Defense of Hate Disguise

"It is worth remarking as an extremely fine touch in the picture of Bottom that his literary taste is almost everywhere concerned with sound rather than sense. He begins the rehearsal with a boisterous readiness, “Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete.” “Odours, odours,” says Quince, in remonstrance, and the word is accepted in accordance with the cold and heavy rules which require an element of meaning in a poetical passage. But “Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete”, Bottom’s version, is an immeasurably finer and more resonant line. The “i” which he inserts is an inspiration of metricism."
- G.K. Chesterton, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (essay)

I was always going to give my habitual heroine a minimum of two fellow-passengers on the Gua Gua, and to make them coworkers came naturally after that. The two of them have a simple job, to sell stuff, but it's not simple stuff that they're selling--it's the concentrated essence of the seasons, but it looks a lot like ice cream and, when you get right down to it, that's all it probably is.

I made one of the two a poet as an excuse to throw all sorts of little songs and jingles into the text. The other fellow was a bit more difficult, and I didn't have a name for him until he'd been around three chapters or so, with me growing more fond of him every minute. Then, on a whim, I stuck him with the unusual monicker of "Hate Disguise"--a name, as a bemused Renee puts it, which is "part English-dubbed anime villain and part sneeze."

It's a misnomer, of course. Hate, while not bereft of bitterness, is a sort of gruff, warm, mopey fellow. Any anger his soul may possess is turned inward--as Shakespeare worded it in As You Like It, "I will chide no breather in the world but myself, against whom I know most faults." So why go with Hate Disguise? Well, the name occurred to me and it just sounded right, I can't say it any way else. The meaning was entirely wrong for the character, but what if you didn't know the language? Then "Hate Disguise" would sound like a big, warm, generous name, a name for a man who smokes cigars and then feels guilty over it, not on account of his own lungs but because he's afraid that his friends Renee Rant and Donovan Din might get a dose of secondhand smoke. That kind of guy. I read a play by Clifford Bax, The Poetasters of Ispahan, where one of the titular lyricists is looking for a decent rhyme: "What though the sense be thin?" he says. "Sound is the soul of song." (I might add that the word "poetaster", which means nothing more than "bad poet", sounds fantastic; I'd crown myself with that word over a forest full of laurel wreaths.)

So in the story Hate has some kind of a normal name before Donovan Din the poet inflicts the flagrant "Hate Disguise" on him. It's a little comment about poetic thinking and how sometimes poets make the sounds matter more than the meaning. Still, I can't help but wonder uneasily how readers will react to him, since these days the word "hate" carries such a strong connotation that it can't be regarded as simple nonsense. All the time, we hear about "hate speech," "hate crime"--things that are supposed to crush and kill the spirits of our fellow men. And people will have a hard time trusting Hate, and how much you wanna bet that my editors (if I'm ever lucky enough to have such things) force me to change his name? I wouldn't exactly blame them, but I'd have a hard time prying the name from the identity. He just is Hate, and it can't be helped; don't hate on Hate Disguise. He surprised me by turning up in a chapter with the name attached to him, and ever since then, it's just been like that.

To me, that's the thing that fascinates about Hate--the fact that he keeps turning out not like I planned him to. He was going to be a madman. Then he was going to be a smooth talker, absurdly comfortable in his skin. Then he turned out to be a daydreamy, foggy sort with an inferiority complex. But I tried to make his tongue cease to be sharp, in order to better suit this characterization, and it never did. Like many a foggy daydreamer, he's every bit as clever as his friend of the sharp focus. And you know what? I shouldn't jinx the boy by writing all of this out as if it's finality. Because I'm going to bet you that Hate's just gonna keep on evolving. I'll stay the course, and we'll see what happens.

The lesson I take from this is that I shouldn't let Renee be static, either. She's a first-person narrator, and it's easy to obsess about consistency when you're writing from a single point of view, but the truth is that people aren't consistent and there's always new sides of them, and sometimes the sides conflict. I could have one person in a room and try to inform you, over the phone, who was with me, by throwing out only descriptive terms--and you'd think that I had a crowd in there. People can't be described in three words. People are crowds and should be treated as such.