Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Fictional Characters as Abstract Self Portraiture

( note: Left click on all the pictures on this page to see enlargements. )

So, let us begin by putting the above quotation into its dialog context :

Mansfield Park, p 98-99
[..]
"I am really not tired, which I almost wonder at ;for we must have
walked at least a mile in this wood. Do not you think we have ? "
" Not half a mile," was his sturdy answer ; for he
was not yet so much in love as to measure distance, or reckon
time, with feminine lawlessness.
"Oh ! you do not consider how much we have wound about. We
have taken such a very serpentine course, and the wood itself must be
half a mile long in a straight line, for we have never seen the end of it yet
since we left the first great path."
But if you remember, before we left that first great path, we saw directly
to the end of it. We looked down the whole vista, and saw it closed by iron
gates, and it could not have been more more than a furlong in length."
"Oh ! I know nothing of your furlongs, but I am
sure it is a very long wood, and that we have been winding in and out ever
since we came into it ; and, therefore, when I say that we have walked a
mile in it, I must speak within compass."
"We have been exactly a quarter of an hour here," said Edmund, taking
out his watch. "Do you think we are walking four miles an hour ? "
"Oh ! do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too
slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch." [..] --Jane Austen,
English novelist (1775 - 1817)

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If astrological Mercury is about communication and reasoning, and Uranus is about oscillation, serpentine undulation, and unpredictable variances, we can understand the role of the author's opposition aspect here. Also, if Mars is too fast, and Saturn is too slow, we see the irritation of the speaker as the sesquiquadrate aspect relationship of the latter two planets to the Uranus 'unpredictability' (above). Now if this is all fairly straightforward astrological interpretation, how is it that we can, in any meaningful way, separate the 'soul' of the fictional character from the soul of 'its' author? I think the metaphoric web which holds literary works together, in a life-like way, is directly linked to the web of metaphoric potential that is the author's natal chart...fictional characters do have a natal chart, but it is no different from the author's chart...:)

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