The Art of Perspective by Christopher Castellani

Author:Christopher Castellani
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-915-7
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2015-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Try to See Things My Way

Every reader picks up a new book hoping to fall in love. We long for someone to take our open hand and lead us away, or astray, or under, or deeper into. During what we’re aware will be a short time together, we trust this certain dashing someone to treat us right, and then, before it gets to be too much of a good thing, to leave us satisfied. This hand that takes ours invariably belongs to the narrator, who has seduced us page after page with with any number of winning traits: humor, shapely sentences, suspense, tension, insight, intellect, imagination, daring; the list goes, deliciously, on and on.

Sometimes, of course, we fall for the wrong person. He just screams danger. She’s a bad seed. Whether we know it all along or figure it out partway through, we can’t stop ourselves. We close our eyes, hold the hand tighter. Do with me what you will. I’m under your spell.

I’m not talking about the obviously unlikable characters, the villains, or even the antiheroes. Their repellent qualities, as well as their appeal, are easy to define and grasp. We can rationalize or intellectualize our attraction to them. Much has already been made of them in books and film and television—Humbert Humbert, Travis Bickle, Tony Soprano—why we love to hate them, which of our secret itches they scratch. We feel a guilty little thrill about cheering them on, and that transgressive pleasure keeps us rooting for them. If and when these bad guys (amazing, maybe, how often they are guys …) get their comeuppance, we take a different pleasure in their punishment, which validates or revises the world order. We’ve been absolved of some of our guilt for enjoying their misdeeds and also spared the punishment they’ve had to endure for committing them. It’s easy to applaud justice when you don’t have to do the time yourself. Instead we go back to our lives, in which we’re mostly good to others and, if we’re very lucky, our biggest problem is what to cook for dinner.

Some of these so-called unlikable characters are also narrators, and some of these narrators invite us to dislike them, even to reject them. Some insist that we do so, in fact, but their insistence and self-awareness are themselves forms of seduction; they’re a dare, and who can resist a dare? Dostoyevsky may have been the first author of note to give us one of these characters, in Notes from Underground:

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