I just read an article called The Buddy List: The Fifteen Most Dynamic Duos in Pop Culture History.
I have to admit to being pleased to see Vladimir and Estragon there (albeit at #6). There were some glaring omissions, Batman and Robin was the first that jumped to my mind but, on checking the criteria the compilers imposed upon themselves, I could see why they weren't there. I was less convinced that Mulder and Scully should be excluded because they wound up as a couple but what the heck.
I was also sorry to see George and Lenny from Of Mice and Men were not on the list. You couldn't call Lenny a sidekick but they’re definitely not on an equal footing. Of course I became aware of the notion of George and Lenny long before I read the book. The pairing of the big dumb bloke with the little street-wise guy was a regular feature in the American cartoons I watched as a child and perhaps it is there that the origins of my own literary creations dates back.
What puzzles me more is that basically I'm a solitudinous individual. I can do the whole team-player thing when needs must but I work better on my own which is important if you have aspirations to be a writer. And yet all my novels revolve around pairs: Truth and Jonathan in the first two, Jim and Joe Hoover and, of course, Milligan and Murphy in the fourth. Even the kids' book involved the uneven partnership of a reclusive mole and an adventurous mouse. Looking more closely however only Milligan and Murphy are on an equal standing, half-brothers who pretend to be brothers and wish they were twins.
Buddies don’t need to go through shite alone. And maybe that’s one of the reasons I write so I don’t need to feel so alone; there’s someone, no matter how abstract, who will read and think about what I’ve had to say. That that someone might not come along for years isn’t important. I wrote in a short story once: “A comedian told a joke in a forest but there was no one there to hear it. So was it funny?” I don’t know the answer to that one but I could just as easily have asked: a writer wrote a story in a forest but there was no one there to read it, so did it mean anything?
I’ll guess I’ll have to leave that one for you to answer, Bud.
Saturday, 11 August 2007
Imaginary buddies
Labels:
Of Mice and Men,
Waiting for Godot
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