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The Saint of Bright Doors Q5 – Characters
Fetter has some complicated and sometimes messy relationships with a number of different characters in the story. What did you think of not only Fetter’s character and growth in the story, but the stories being told of the others? It seemed as if the concept of clear good/evil tropes was not what Chandrasekera was going for, with a great deal of “gray” among the characters overall. Did this work for you? Did you find yourself interested in what was going on in the lives of those other than Fetter?
Comments
I liked the little group of scientists studying the Bright Doors and would have liked more about them. I couldn't really get interested in the group putting on the play, and the kind of political posh group were (I think intentionally) quite dull. As mentioned before, I got a bit lost when names were suddenly pulled back from much earlier parts of the book as often I couldn't quite place who was who.
The other "character" I liked once revealed was the shadow, who both was and wasn't the main character. I felt that was nicely done, and I hadn't anticipated it.
I think the characters were mainly in the mould of "people doing their best in the midst of a vast, uncaring, social system." Most of them were following their expected roles, even Fetter.
Fetter tried to move out of his mother's influence, but in the end fulfilled her intentions for him (indirectly). Was he really a different person from when he started?
As for the rest... they didn't get a lot of choice about what they did and the roles they played. The systems around them were too vast to be influenced, only endured.
Something I wondered about after finishing - which I think connects with what @NeilNjae is saying - was the series of Five Unforgiveables mentioned right at the start. For the first maybe 1/4 of the book it feels like Fetter is going to systematically commit each of them. Then for the next maybe 1/2 he tries to actively not do them. Then it's like he kind of forgets about them, and so (seemingly) does the author. Fetter eventually meets the Perfect-and-Kind but doesn't actually play any part in his death (at least, not that I could tell). And the Five Unforgiveables don't seem to play a real part at the end - which in any case is related now by Fetter's shadow. So what were we meant to make of them? Are they are kind of temptation which in Buddhist fashion Fetter manages to avoid/renounce? I couldn't tell if they were a major structural feature of the book or a deliberate distraction at the start
Are they just genderless because they're not following the gender conventions we expect for Romance languages? Or are they deliberately intended to be genderless following Asian conventions?
We had an interesting conversation along these lines at the Grasmere book club about Left Hand of Darkness, where Ursula LeGuin worked quite hard to make the names not gender specific in the ways we expect, and of course in that world it was a very sensible choice.
Don't have a lot to add. The characters seemed okay, I understood their motivations, and they conducted themselves accordingly. I appreciated the fact that society was beyond them. I consider that an accurate assessment of how the world is.
One thing I thought about Fetter as a character, and the Bright Doors: There is something that doesn't have a shadow, and that is light. So Fetter is light, and his shadow is something that can be conceived of, and yet cannot be. So of course Fetter is the Saint of Bright Doors - he is what illuminates them.
As for the relation between light and object, this was (and is?) an ongoing analogy for the relation of mind with object - the common understanding being that the mind knowing its object is similar to how a light illuminates an object. I don't know how this is worked out in the Buddhism of Sri Lanka, but I'm sure it's in there. So how does a mind know itself? Some Budddhists (e.g. Santideva), argue that this means the mind cannot immediately know itself, others that the mind is itself self-knowing. This makes a difference and is a live issue in many South Asian system of thought and, by extension, its civilisations as well. Self-knowledge is thus a field of contention rather than an accumulations of facts, and certainly not self-evident as it is in, say, systems of thought in the United States of America. This obviously has political implications about what it means to "represent."
Anyway, so the shadow speaks in first person because it is Fetter's self, his "I," or in non-Buddhist religions "Atman," and this is the Saint of Bright Doors. The I and the mind are not the same, but not different either. There is a lot of philosophical and religious practice about this duality, or seeming duality, or non-duality, or non-dual duality, etc. Fetter himself, being mind, cannot know himself except via or through his self, which wandering off leaves him unselfaware. Easy peasy to understand his problems towards the end of the book.
Anyway, this would mean that Fetter is not like any other character in the book, except perhaps the Perfect and Kind (uncertain), because he is not gray - he is white, and thus not an actual person, and his self is black, and thus not an actual person.
I have no idea if Chandrasekara is intentionally playing with this, but I think so. I think Chandrasekara is also playing with post-modern ideas of hybridity as aspects of modernity, which he perhaps has derived from Bruno LaTour's We Have Never Been Modern.
Thanks for this. As I said elsewhere, I'm ignorant of the schools of thought in this part of the world. That meant I missed a lot, and I appreciate having these references made explicit. Feel free to espouse more!
Jeez, @BarnerCobblewood this is so good. Like, I didn't catch any of that and never possibly could have. Such a shame.
I thought the "Unchosen" support group was great and it made me wonder about all of the other things that were going on outside of the story that these characters may have seen and been a part of. At one point I think we find out that the Perfect and Kind is like 4th or 5th most popular in the world (might be misremembering that, or it was phrased differently) and he has the ability to warp reality and change existence - so what about all of the others that exist in the story? Do they all have the same abilities? Can we trust anything at all to be true in the story? Really made me wonder.
As mentioned by @RichardAbbott and in another thread, the researchers were of interest to me and I could see a whole short story just about them.