Books and literature have never been just about entertainment. To say that one merely reads “for fun” would be nothing short of the kind of travesty only previously seen when someone fell asleep during Star Wars. Just so you know, they never find the bodies.
But with literature, every new book brings forth a unique new world. It’s a new dimension, a separate universe. But what’s truly epic about it is what you take away from it and what it helps you discover about yourself. Yeah, I said it. You’re always a different person after finishing a great book. You’re better, and you know more awesome than regular people with their Netflix because you actually read—and don’t just watch the movie. No, it doesn’t count.
Sometimes, what’s even greater than the story itself are the characters in it. I don’t agree with the school of thought that the characters portrayed in literature are so unrealistically amazing even when they’re evil—actually, especially when they’re evil (you heard me, Count Olaf)—that we cling to them for just that reason. I believe that those characters are sometime just strong enough to be who they really are and we’re not, duh. Which brings—excuse the rambling—me to the first person I want to write my column about today.
Luna Lovegood
For those of you that don’t know her, you’ll have better luck with the horoscopes; I hear they’re titillating this week. For those of you that maybe know her because the name rings a faint bell in the empty cavern of your noggin, just… no. Never before has a character been so deliriously content with their utter weirdness and absurdity. Perhaps never a real person either. That one fact alone is enough to make her reigning queen of embodying and accepting every freaky and even creepy facet—go hair chewers, woo!—about yourself.
She’d been mocked, ridiculed and friendless for a vast majority of her time at Hogwarts. Heart warming cliches did not ensue where she chose to rise above all of that, be the bigger person and either quietly bore everyone or go all Kill Bill on every person that had wronged her. She did nothing, probably because half the time she never even noticed that people were laughing at her but mostly because to her, it didn’t matter if someone laughed at you.
It was that simple acknowledgment of the fact that people are always going to laugh at you and that hell does not freeze over nor does Vader ice fish on it. She still waltzed alone, wore radish earrings and walked around with our equivalent of 3D glasses out in public. In short, she wasn’t even aware of a notion called convention.
The Mad Hatter
So, why is a raven like a writing desk? Take a moment to think over the most brilliantly bizarre riddle ever created; it’s no coincidence that Lewis Carroll—shout out to the morbidly sexy Poe and King—had one of his most crazy (but screamingly amazing characters) be the voice behind it. And that’s from a book crawling with characters that are gleefully nut cases. The Mad Hatter is what we all have inside of us, but rarely is it ever given the true freedom or appreciation for the ingenuity it deserves.
Time itself literally stops in the Hatter’s honor; respect. He makes a tea party—something so dull that only royalty and Stepford wives ever choose to engage in it, willingly—look like fun. Although that’s probably because it looks like something Donnie Darko would envision after getting high, downing a couple Red Bulls and following that with some cough syrup.
Nevertheless, The Mad Hatter mastered the art of saying things that have never been said before, or thought of for that matter. They’ll make sense to you only if you want them to, but that I believe was not Carroll’s intention when creating him.
Carroll’s interest in the philosophy of logic came from the playful nature of its principle rather than its uses as a tool. With a master writer like him, with his endless abilities of wit and satire who believes that they are completely nonsensical to the world we live in, then that man is motivated to write absurdity in fluent terms; if for no other reason than to laugh at the world. The Hatter is that belief and the literary equivalent of flipping the bird to those who want to understand reality.
So why write almost nine hundred words about two very random characters from two very different book series? Well, for one because I felt like it. And because both these characters come from literary masterpieces of this century and the last; and incidentally they’re both characters that sometimes get lost in the stardom of the protagonists.
But more realistically, with the fervor of midterms dying down and most of you tanking them, it’s important to remember why you’re perhaps majoring in something that sounds completely useless. You’ll be a Greek mythology and frog major; but you’ll be stupid, weird and happy at least. So, we might all be mad here but I’m just as sane as you are. That’s all the literary wordplay wisdom I have for today.
Have a book to recommend Maham featuring an iconoclastic, on-the-margins rebel? Email her at mhasan4@wisc.edu
