Emile Bravo and agency

I was reading Tome 4 of the adventures of Jules (see the last item here), and it struck me how much agency the characters had. They seemed to be making their own decisions, saying what they wanted to say, etc.

Just as a contrast, I’m also reading an old John Le Carre book, and here the characters have no agency at all. They’re just doing what is necessary to make the plot run. For Le Carre, that’s fine; the plot’s what it’s all about. So that’s an extreme case.

Anyway, I found the agency of Bravo’s characters refreshing. It’s not something I think about so often when reading, but this time it struck me.

P.S. I wrote about agency a few years ago in the context of Benjamin Kunkel’s book Indecision. I did a quick search and it doesn’t look like Kunkel has written much since. Too bad. But maybe he’s doing a Klam and it will be all right.

7 thoughts on “Emile Bravo and agency

  1. Quote from above: “Anyway, I found the agency of Bravo’s characters refreshing. It’s not something I think about so often when reading, but this time it struck me.”

    I have been thinking about agency a lot. In relation to life in general, but also in relation to science.

    A lot of recently proposed “improvements”, and large “collaborative” projects seem to me to involve giving power to an increasingly smaller group of people and/or to large groups of people. I reason that both will result in even less agency for the individual, which i fear will have a negative effect on (the quality of) science.

    Also see Binswanger’s “Excellence by nonsense” paper (2014) in this regard https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-00026-8_3. It’s part of why i have largely given up on academia.

    I am a fan of the individual, and of their personal choices, accountibility, responsibilties, idiosyncrasies, and roles. To me that stuff should be honed like a skill, and honered like something beautiful, and precious.

  2. Ah, that’s my current grumble. The novel I’m currently reading (Fuumon (Wind Patterns in Sand) by Asa Nonami) has the no-agency problem. She’s writing about the storm of destruction that falls on the families involved and that ensues when the mother of two high-school girls is murdered. But even the detectives and newspaper reporters fail to think things through and just do the “ordinary” thing for their role in life. Haitoku no Mesu (by Juuzou Kuroiwa) was much more fun. Nonami’s novel “The Hunter” (available in English, I think) won a major prize for popular fiction, but I hated the ending. It got some respect because the main character was a woman police detective and it depicted her travails in a world dense of obnoxious men. I did like the last novel in the series based on that character, though. In theory, detective fiction ought to rate highly on this aspect.

    I agree completely with ananymous’s last paragraph, at least as it applies to literature: that’s what makes reading fun.

  3. It seems to me that the lack of agency in Le Carre is not just that they are at the mercy of the plot, but that Le Carre’s world is a fatalistic one of byzantine bureaucracies that grind people down and spit them out.

    • Quote from above: “(…) but that Le Carre’s world is a fatalistic one of byzantine bureaucracies that grind people down and spit them out.”

      From Wikipedia page on “Brainwashing” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwashing:

      “Scholars have said that modern business corporations practice mind control to create a work force that shares common values and culture.[94] Critics have linked “corporate brainwashing” with globalization, saying that corporations are attempting to create a worldwide monocultural network of producers, consumers, and managers.[95] Modern educational systems have also been criticized, by both the left and the right, for contributing to corporate brainwashing.[96] In his 1992 book, Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization, Stanley A. Deetz says that modern “self awareness” and “self improvement” programs provide corporations with even more effective tools to control the minds of employees than traditional brainwashing.[97]”

      Possibly compare this with (your personal favorite recent) science related “improvement”, “center”, “society”, “collaborative effort”, or “statement”.

  4. sorry, a bit OT – in French bande dessinée, I’d recommend Joann Sfar’s books, e.g. the “chat du rabbin” series. But you probably know them.

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