Among those instructors who did not connect with me in this dehumanizing wasteland was the Oblate priest who told me, a propos of nothing, that he had been ‘thinking a lot recently, about love.’ Thinking about it. Perhaps, as a celibate, that is all he ever could do about it. He had once raised an eyebrow in disdainful mock disbelief when a student said we ‘identify’ with characters in Shakespeare. ‘Identify? I-den-ti- fy ?’ he repeated, as if to assure himself he had heard correctly. ‘Do you think a reader becomes a… fictional character?’ The student was silenced. At the age of thirteen, I had seen Olivier play Hamlet, and had known, instinctively, that, in my indecisiveness and hypersensitivity, I was myself Hamlet. I am not alone in “identifying” with fictional characters. The writer Anne Lamott wrote, after reading Pippi Longstocking as a young girl, ‘I knew that she lived inside me.’ Another writer, Alice Hoffman, has written, of her reading of The Catcher in the Rye, of ‘the sense that while reading someone else’s creation, you, as a reader and a person, are miraculously known and revealed.’ Margot Livesey admits her ‘profound identification’ with Jane Eyre’s vulnerability. The critic Bernard Levin, in a review of a biography of the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, asked in wonder, “How did he know all that about me?’ Gustave Flaubert famously declared of his own creation, ‘Madame Bovary– c’est moi.’ In Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Dolittle books, the doctor has a ‘sturdy boy sidekick’ called Tommy Stubbins. Writer Richard Rhodes, echoing Flaubert’s comment, similarly claimed that Stubbins ‘c’est moi.’ Former high-school teacher Richard Lederer once praised an essay by a student of his who had come to the shattering discovery that he could himself have been one of the boys on the island in Golding’s Lord of the Flies, whose cover bore the picture of one of Jack’s hunters. ‘That’s me,’ said the student, awe-struck. A girl with a difficult past who lived in a group home wrote a Grade 12 independent study of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus for me. Her reading of the play elicited from her the following observation on Mephistophiles’s comment that he is in Hell no matter where he is: ‘Hell can be wherever we are. We all create our own hells. We can make the best or the worst of our difficulties. I want to make the best of mine.’ From such self-identification comes self-knowledge. ‘Know thyself,’ said Socrates, with Hobbes, Pope, Linnaeus, Franklin, Emerson, Coleridge and a host of others, for such is the wisdom of the ages, ‘cancel culture’ vandals notwithstanding.
A charitable afterthought comes to me now that I have had the benefit of years of reflection on the Oblate priest’s affectation of incomprehension about his student’s use of the word “identify.” Perhaps his student had only meant to say we “sympathize with” a character’s difficulties? If so, a gentle correction, or gentler question about his choice of words would have been sufficient, and the humiliation the Oblate subjected him to could have been prevented. Celibacy appears to have its limitations in terms of a lack of empathetic response, a particularly galling matter to those of us with literary sensibility.
