Lee Siegel,
writing in the Times, has
some interesting observations about
how fiction writers can reveal character through the clothes that they give to
their creations. But after citing many examples from classic literature (from The
Illiad to Ulysses), he argues that fashion doesn't seem as vital to contemporary
novelists. As he points out:
A
world of difference exists, however, between Fitzgerald’s very deliberate
portrait of Gatsby wearing “a
white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie”
when he meets Daisy again after many years, and, say, Jennifer Egan’s casual
description of a character dressed in “black cords and a white button-up shirt”
in her brilliant novel, “A Visit From the Goon Squad.”
Gatsby
is wearing the novel’s themes: white as the fantasy of self-remaking without
the blemishes of the past; silver and gold the currency-tinged colors of an
impossible happiness. Egan’s character is simply wearing clothes.
He concludes that
today’s fiction is a reflection of today’s society: Just as we often pay
little attention to the clothes that we wear in real life as we buy them off
the rack from chain stores, our novelists pay little attention to
the clothes that their characters wear.
Siegel's essay
reminds me of what Mark Twain had to say on this topic:
Clothes make the man. Naked people
have little or no influence on society.
No comments:
Post a Comment