It is a special form of horror to recognize yourself as a person unexpectedly in a character from a literary story.
When this happens, people feel betrayed and powerless.
One was exposed, slandered, robbed in equal measure, and that with the means of literature in front of a literary public.
Johann Christian Kestner, who had to recognize himself in the figure of dry Albert in “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, whose literary function is to stand between Lotte and Werther, reacted with characteristic dismay. In a letter to Goethe he wrote: “And the wretched creature of an Albert! It may always be a painting of its own that has not been copied, but it still has such features from an original (only from the outside, and thank God, only from the outside) that one can easily fall for the real one. "
You recognize yourself, of course only superficially, but feel completely misrepresented, often by someone who was personally close to you and whom you trusted.
The essence of one's own character has been occupied by an alien and anything but benevolent fantasy.
The dismay that is triggered by such an experience can be summarized as follows: That's me, but that's not me!
Collateral damage to aesthetic mastery?
Kestner and his wife Charlotte, who years later were harassed by enthusiastic readers of "Werther", are among the famous victims of literary processing. The line of these victims is long. Their pain and dismay are mostly dismissed as necessary but incidental collateral damage to aesthetic masterpieces. Those affected shouldn't feel that way, after all, a novel like “Werther” was made. This is often a devastating experience - an ethical issue that complicates the creative process and its evaluation in a fascinating way.
A recent case is unfolding in the United States. The trigger was an essay by Alexis Nowicki in the online magazine Slate, who alleged that the author Kristen Roupenian used in her story "Cat Person" inappropriately in Nowicki's life story. "Cat Person," published in The New Yorker in 2017, was a surprising literary sensation - the rare instance of literary text shared and commented on countless times on social media. A book with "Cat Person" as the cover story followed.
The story is about the young student Margot, who meets an older man, Robert, with whom she ends up having an extremely uncomfortable sexual experience. The effectiveness of the story is mainly due to the virtuoso sympathy steering, which maintains the ambivalence of the situation for a long time to the obvious but surprising punch line that ensures moral clarity.
The character Robert gets off very badly, from the first kiss ("shockingly bad") to the end of the story, where Robert insults Margot as a "whore" in a mixture of jealous paranoia and violent hurt. It is a portrait of contemporary toxic masculinity that created a great recognition factor for numerous female readers. For others, the story was a source of intense irritation. In the context of #metoo, the text became a stage for public discourse.