Undefined. Rebellious. Naughty. Machiavellian. Purposeful. Powerful. Kerfuffle. Paracosm. And sometimes a heady mix of all of these and more. This is how a character begins a journey in a writer’s mind and may stay on unchanged from being flexible enough to be a truth adsorbent and willing to change with the kind of experiences it meets. It metamorphoses into a form that resembles someone somewhere that most readers desperately search for in their own parabolic bubble of interactions.
Yes, such caricatures are brimming with actions that are real and there could be a shower somewhere, a comb, a pair of scissors poised to trim an outgrowth. Signs and symbols from a convergence of mythology and religion or something be as contemporary as color combinations that have political or even social connotations. After all, life on earth can have a lot of common meeting points with Shiva or Krishna and the caricature of a character in the mind of a writer could choose to sit cross-legged or have rhythmic gyrations in its form or even do all that humans can only wish they could do. The intent, the design, and the representation matters.
The right approach for a reader is to discover this caricature that was the primal thought in the mind of the writer. Once this is done, it is easy to understand why the character does whatever he or she does in the story… in fact, even the narrative becomes plausible as the nature of this caricature becomes clearer. It is invariably the caricature behind an inspired piece of writing that carries the key to coherence. Immortal literature begins with a caricature that is true to the art of being one.
What about stories that do not qualify to be in the literary genre? Ah! The characters in mortal fiction or in stories that do not insist on reaching out to readers in the future, aren’t characters that live. They are, at best, caricatures that are yet to find themselves… incomplete, incompetent, cromulent, flawed, and happy to remain ephemeral guffaws, so to say.
There cannot be a story without a caricature. The real race is not between plots but between caricatures. Those that win know that it is a slow and determined walk towards immortality. The immortal caricatures make relevant choices and hardly ever accept confusion or uncertainty in traits that a writer may want to load them with, and quite definitely never responds to premature applause.
The writer’s mind must be receptive to the idea that a lasting character has to be conceived well and that the easiest way of doing this is by inventing and then customizing a suitable caricature.
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Arvind Passey
Written on 09 October 2020
