Today I listened to minisode 2 of the podcast Literary Friction and Octavia and Carrie’s discussion was about literary characters they have a crush on. The basis of their debate was that one of them (I can’t remember which, Carrie I think) had to dig really deep to find a literary character she had a crush on, whereas the other could list them indefinitely. I thought it was an interesting discussion; they related it to styles of reading, with the former discussing how there is a critical pane of glass between herself and the literary world she reads about and she finds it difficult to visualise fictional worlds, whereas the latter reads visually and is very much ‘within’ the text. I thought I’d come in and share where I stand on the matter.
I’m personally a reader who very rarely crushes on literary characters. In fact, I struggle to think of a single character I have a crush on. I think it’s important to define exactly what a ‘crush’ is here, because I think there’s a risk of equivocation if it’s not pinned down. I think ‘crush’ operates on two levels: it is romantic and sexual. Although they touched sometimes on the sexual, I think Octavia and Carrie were mainly discussing crushes in terms of romantic attraction, or they were in some way assuming a link between the two.
This distinction is an important one to make, I think, especially in terms of my own identity. I feel romantic attraction very rarely – I can probably name on one hand the number of people IRL that I’ve had a crush on – whereas I feel sexual attraction all of the time. So when I probe to think about literary crushes it is not really a surprise that I struggle to come up with anything, because how I think of ‘crush’ is closely linked to the romantic and the sexual, and since IRL I don’t feel strong romantic attraction it follows that the same would be true of literature. But then I got to thinking about different media, and I realised that I do tend to crush on men in more visual media quite a lot. For example, I think it’s fair to say I have a crush on Bradley Cooper’s character in A Star Is Born, and I do have crushes on celebrities quite a lot (I think celebrities are a certain kind of fictional character, but that’s a discussion for another day). And so I think it must be something to do with the literary text in particular – rather than fictional worlds in general – that makes it difficult for me to connect to.
Let’s unpack this a bit further. I think it must be something about the lacking visual element of the literary text that leaves me indifferent to the characters, because I don’t read in a very visual way. Let’s take Jackson Maine from A Star Is Born as an example. I find him physically attractive, not just aesthetically but in the way he moves, the small inflections of his character, as well in his emotional vulnerability. There are certain crucial aspects of this which are missing from the literary text as I experience it while reading. I think I erect a critical screen between myself and a text and I think of characters in the abstract rather than as real people, unlike in a film where I do consider the characters real people. It’s strange how a visual element can change how I relate to characters – it would be interesting to read a literary version of A Star Is Born and see whether my opinion on Jackson is different. For myself attraction is a very physical thing and so I suppose it makes sense that I would be more attracted to characters in film than fiction; I find it hard to have a crush on something I consider abstract.
At the same time, I find some texts to be very sexually stimulating. I think that desire can be a linguistic phenomenon as much as anything else. I read Hollinghust’s The Swimming-pool Library at the start of 2019 and I found it to be a very arousing text which was successful in its depiction of gay male sexuality (even if some of its encounters were problematic – I’ll probably touch on this in another post). I was very turned on when I was reading the novel, something which I don’t think I’d much experienced before and I found reading the text quite liberating. It gave me a new understanding of pornography, which I had only understood as visual; I’d never thought that I could be much stimulated by text. But having said this, it would be wrong to say that I had a crush on Will or on any of the characters in The Swimming-pool Library. I might have found the actions they performed sexually arousing, but who was performing them was irrelevant. The sexuality they expressed was what attracted me. Perhaps a crush, at least for me, requires a strange combination of physical and emotional attraction, and although literature can capture elements of both it fails to cohere them in a single character, and so pales to film in this regard. (Not that I prefer film, mind; literature is definitely my preferred medium. But I don’t read books to find crushes, so it’s not a massive failing for me.) I’m not saying that I’ll never fancy a literary character, but it doesn’t really seem likely with what I’ve read before.
Another idea to throw out there: maybe it’s to do with sexuality. A lot of the books I’ve read have been in an educational/academic context, and so they have tended to focus on heterosexual romantic encounters. Maybe my inability to crush on literary characters comes from the fact that I’ve been reading heterosexual relationships, and since I don’t see myself in them it follows that I wouldn’t share in their articulations of desire. I’ve not read that much fiction about gay men and so perhaps that’s where my crushes are. But Jackson Maine isn’t queer, so maybe sexuality has nothing to do with whether I fancy someone or not. In the podcast they mentioned that literary crushes can transcend gender and sexuality, so maybe literature is a space where it is about feeling rather than the identities of those involved. As an unromantic person I may be excluded from this system altogether.
I think it’s interesting to think about the relationship between sexuality IRL and in fiction, because I think fiction opens up a kind of fantasy space where you can fancy whoever you want. It operates like porn in that regard. I think there’s a very special relationship between literature and porn, and literary representations of porn are certainly something I’d like to study further. Both in some way seem to dictate the kinds of sexuality that we are capable of feeling.
WRB
W. R. Bywater 