Re: Whats the oldest book you've got?
Posted by:
robert (61.88.131.---)
Date: December 13, 2007 11:06PM
You can approach the question(s) from the negative direction: rather than asking "who controls what the Bookworld character looks like", ask "who doesn't?"
If the reader controlled looks, then - using your example - there would have to be millions of Sherlocks, one for each reader or, alternatively, every Bookworld character would be continually morphing in appearance. So clearly "the reader" is not the answer.
Similarly, all illustrations - whether in comics or the occasional illustration in books - are (visual) art, not fiction, and the illustrations themselves are not part of Bookworld. In the same way that political cartoonists work by caricature, visual representations of a fictional character can vary as much as anyone likes, but they do not actually constitute that person (or character). Our new Prime Minister is often amusingly represented as TinTin but that doesn't make him TinTin. Similarly there is one Sherlock Holmes who may or may not look like any illustrations of him and - in the same vein - an actor playing Hamlet may or may not look like the Bookworld Hamlet.
There must be a King Kong in Bookworld because Merian C. Cooper wrote the book and Kong lumbers through his role whenever anyone reads it. The films, comics, cartoons etc are not, however, the book - so the Bookworld Kong plays no part in them.
Fan fiction creates a new entity. If, as a devoted fan, I write a story involving Spock, Kirk, or Sherlock Holmes, I am clearly simply trading off the name and I have no ability to use the 'real' characters in whatever I write. If my piece of fiction gets read by someone, then presumably my Sherlock is an entity in Bookworld but is distinct to the original Sherlock in the same way that the different Thursdays are distinct (and almost opposites in some ways).
To get back to the actual question then, who does that leave? The author is the only person left who can create what the Bookworld version of a character looks like. All other versions of that character, in illustrations, comics, film, on stage or in a reader's head are simply based on that character but only exist in whatever the medium happens to be - think of all the different faces of James Bond for a start. It is similar in non-fiction: if I read a biography of Lawrence of Arabia, I can imagine him however I want but that doesn't change what the man really looked like, and Peter O'Toole's six foot frame in the movie doesn't suddenly add a foot to his actual height of barely five feet.