On today's London Guardian book blog, Wayne Gooderham asks an interesting question: "Does anyone else find themselves measuring their own age against the people they read about in novels?"
I was 29 when I first became interested in the ages of literary characters. Re-reading Joseph Heller's Catch-22, I made the shocking discovery that somehow I was now a year older than Yossarian. How did this happen? Rebellious, wise-cracking Yossarian should be forever my senior, someone to look up to and secretly admire. An older brother or dodgy uncle almost. I shouldn't be able to overtake him. It didn't seem right. I was too young for such revelations.Shaken by this, I got to thinking: not only was I a year older than Yossarian, but I was two years older than Hans Castorp when he came down from the Magic Mountain (and as readers of the Thomas Mann novel will confirm, he was up there for a very long time). Worse still, I was 13 years older than JD Salinger's Holden Caulfield. This was all very worrying to say the least. I went back to Catcher in the Rye and was relieved to discover that while I still enjoyed the book immensely, some of Holden's attitude and behaviour did strike me as a tad immature. Perhaps not quite as immature as they should appear to a 29-year-old, but enough to make me feel I was heading in vaguely the right direction life-wise.
Suddenly I was acutely aware of time moving on and dragging me along with it while Yossarian and his peers stayed youthfully behind. It was obvious that I needed to find a new yardstick to measure myself by. Measure myself how exactly? I'm not entirely sure. If part of the reason we read literature is to find out how to live, then I suppose I just liked the reassurance that someone reaching the grand old age of twenty-nine could still be living a life deemed interesting enough to be written and read about (Holden Caulfield hadn't quite lost his grip on me yet).
I think I know what this guy is feeling. I have had it happen to myself with my favoite book of my childhood, Cronicles of Narnia. Those who were older than myself or the same age are now younger, and are begining to be slightly hadder to identify with.
ReplyDeletethats happened to me many times. The most noteable of which is when I realized that I was older than Arthr-- the TV and book character. He had always seemed so old to me then when I realized I was older I felt very grown-up.
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