our light is our voice

[arethinn]

Over on esmestrella I've talked sometimes about how Severus is one of only a tiny handful of characters in Harry Potter that are "alive" to me, and about the only one who "has a voice". (I've pursued that thought a little into "only things with voices are alive", but the woo-woo metaphysics of that, including what exactly I mean by "voice" in that context, is something for another time.) Buried in the comments on a recent pottersues post is a little discussion on The Dragonriders of Pern, which reminded me that I brought up just that example when talking about this a little with enotsola the other day.

I had been reading Nerilka's Story because it was there in the bathroom, and I remarked on how flat all the characters seemed. I thought about it a bit, and in my opinion that's the case for most of the series. A lot of the characters have no "voice". And like Harry Potter, there's a fairly small group of breakaways -- Mnementh, Ruth, Ramoth, Lessa, Manora, F'nor (not so much F'lar), Menolly, Piemur, Fandarel -- and as with Severus, there's one who is the instant "oh, hands down, he's the strongest": Masterharper Robinton. (enotsola immediately agreed with me on this point; YMMV.) Don't get me wrong, I like the Pern series; just I think that writing multidimensional characters that seem to naturally grow out of their environments was not really Anne McCaffrey's strong suit here. (She did much better with the Harper Hall trilogy, I think. Dragonsinger -- the one in the middle -- was the book that got me into Pern in the first place.)

By contrast, though many characters in, say, The Lord of the Rings are certainly minor, I don't have a feel-memory of thinking that any of them are flat. (I've read it what, four or five times?) It's not really fair to compare either of these two relatively light fantasy series to LotR, so take with grain of salt, but I was just observing the phenomenon. Almost everyone comes off the page in De Lint's Newford stories, too, which is closer to Harry Potter and Pern for scope.

I'm not that widely read in fiction, though, so I'm curious what other characters y'all would place in this category of Quendi (in the sense of "speakers; those who speak with voices").

Comments

[arethinn]

Um, I think you are thinking much more literally than I meant in terms of "voice", although I understand what you say about character-is-secondary stories.

[helen99.livejournal.com]

My understanding of Quendi is, "a character who is alive and speaks to you independently of the story that conceived the character".

I think that a character who is quendi would tend to also have a living literal voice in the story. Perhaps quendi occurs only under some circumstances, and not every good characterization on paper is quendi, but without a living literal voice in a character, I'm not sure the Quendi voice ever comes into being (or perhaps more accurately, the other way around, heh.)

[arethinn]

My understanding of Quendi is, "a character who is alive and speaks to you independently of the story that conceived the character".

Okay. All I meant was "characters who seem like they could be whole/real people". Not necessarily that they become independent of the story. Robinton, for example, doesn't do that for me, but within the Pern books, he stands out.

Severus is kind of a crossbreed in this case and maybe a throwing-off-course starting example (because his voice is mentioned in the text, and then of course there's the Rickman factor). But I can think of other Quendi about whom no mention is made of the quality(/ies) of the character's voice. Nobody ever makes mention of what Ford Prefect's voice is like, for example, that I can recall.

[helen99.livejournal.com]

Ford Prefect? Ah, I see. He's a strong presence in the story, lack of literal voice notwithstanding. I was taking the interpretation farther and making it more literally voice-oriented than you had intended. The books I've read are still sorely lacking in these character types, though. (Scribbles down recommendations elsewhere in thread...)