Our new dean is a novelist, and today he told us he had come to the view that being a dean is like writing a novel. You know you've succeeded as a novelist when your characters stop doing what you tell them to, he said, and no novel whose end you know in advance is worth the writing. It's a humbling experience, and the finishing of a novel always leaves you a better person than you were at the outset.
I'm not sure how to take this. I think it was meant as a gesture of humility and an invitation to write the novel with him, but my first inclination was to recall Kierkegaard's "clerical error" in The Sickness Unto Death who refuses to be corrected rather than accept the author's (in Kierkegaard's case The Author's) plan for him. We're not characters in search of an author ... or are we?
I've never been a novelist, nor a dean, so for all I know they may be more like each other than I can imagine. On the other hand, I have been a character in someone's novel (novella actually - I'll tell you about it someday if the mood seems right), and that experience - while intended as a compliment - felt like a violation. No doubt our dean's the better writer, though!
