Life in the background

Robertson Davies's brilliant book Fifth Business opens with a quote that explains the title:

Those roles which, being neither those of Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but which were none the less essential to bring about the Recognition or the dénouement were called the Fifth Business in drama and opera companies organized according to the old style; the player who acted these parts was often referred to as Fifth Business.

Davies attributes the quote to the Danish playwright Thomas Overskou, but in reality Davies himself made it up, as he admitted to a scholar almost a decade after its publication when a thorough scouring of Overskou's work failed to turn up any such passage.  To give a rather meta twist to the whole thing, the novel is about a man (Dunstan Ramsay) who feels overlooked and marginalized in life, always the minor character eclipsed by everyone around him -- the one who is essential to the plot but never center stage -- and Davies has stated that the entire trilogy of which Fifth Business is the first installment is semi-autobiographical.

So Robertson Davies, essentially, wrote a memoir disguised as a novel about a sort-of fictional character whose accomplishments were overlooked or misattributed, and opened it with a quote he himself had made up and then attributed to someone else.

Man, there are some layers there to analyze.

I was immediately reminded of Davies's book when I came across a recent paper in the Journal of Research in Personality a couple of days ago.  The study, conducted by psychologists Ryan Goffredi and Kennon Sheldon of the University of Missouri, looks at how we see our roles in our own autobiographical memories -- if we view ourselves as being the main character in our own story, driving the narrative and affecting the outcome, or as a minor character primarily acting as a foil for others' successes.  Interestingly, Goffredi and Sheldon found that people who see themselves in the starring role in their own life's story are generally more psychologically healthy -- they have lower rates of depression and anxiety and higher scores on assessments for emotional well-being and satisfaction with life.

It's not surprising, really.  A sense of agency in your own life has a huge effect on how you see the world.  The authors write:

These results support our notion that the way in which an individual perceives themselves as a character in their life story is likely to impact their well-being.  When people see themselves as being the agentic force in their lives and make decisions for themselves, as major characters do, rather than being swept about by external forces (and other people), they are more integrated and fully functioning selves.

Such individuals feel more autonomous, more competent and effective, and also experience better relational satisfaction with others, as evidenced by their increased basic psychological need satisfaction.  Conversely, those who see themselves as minor characters are more likely to feel thwarted in getting these needs satisfied, a condition associated with diminished self-integration and well-being.

This cut pretty close to the bone for me, because I have suffered from depression and anxiety my entire adult life, and have also felt very little agency in what goes on around me, but never really thought to link the two.  It's always seemed to me that in most situations I'm the perpetual outsider, not really central to anything or anyone, always trying to find my footing but never really succeeding, and only useful apropos of others' accomplishments.  And when I think of most of the big events in my life, it's always struck me how few of them I honestly was in control of.  Even my choice of a career happened more or less by accident -- and halfway through my first year of teaching, I was about a micron away from quitting, from admitting that I just wasn't up to the job and needed to find some other way of making a living.

But teaching itself is kind of emblematic of that mindset, isn't it?  You are there to facilitate your students' learning and advancement, launching them on their lives and careers and hopes and dreams, while you yourself stay put.  Each year you wave goodbye to one set of students and say hello to the next -- like a rock in the stream, watching the water perpetually flowing away from you and out of sight.

Reading the Goffredi and Sheldon paper, though, I find myself wondering how much of my sense of being "fifth business" in my own life's story is because I'm viewing it through the skewed lenses of mental illness.  After all, what the researchers found was a correlation; so if there is a causation there, which way does it point?  Does depression make you feel like a minor character in your own life, or does being marginalized in actuality lead to a loss of a sense of agency?

Could be both, of course.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Uark Theatre, As You Like It (14523154077), CC BY 2.0]

But perhaps that's why I enjoyed Davies's novel Fifth Business (and its sequels, The Manticore and World of Wonders) so much.  It was easy for me to identify with Dunstan Ramsay -- a man who spent his whole life with circumstance catching him by the tail and whirling him around, who never felt as if he were central to the narrative of his own story.  

The character Percy Boyd Staunton -- who is Ramsay's opposite, very much the main character of every scene he's in, for better or worse -- puts it this way: "If you don't hurry up and let life know what you want, life will damned soon show you what you'll get."

I have to wonder, though, if that option was ever really open to me.  And, after all, minor characters are necessary, too -- the ones who facilitate the protagonist's success or the antagonist's eventual comeuppance, even if they never reap any rewards for their actions.  It may be a little underwhelming to see your name in the playbill listed in a forgettable role like "Third Male Bystander," but hey, a role is a role.  Life in the background is, at least, usually safe.

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