Madeleine’s Involvement Characters

Madeleine L'Engle knew that compassion: the margin between involvement and detachment was very important in life and in writing.

As I read the various articles written about Madeleine L’Engle, I’ve noticed that many focus on the tremendously personal nature of much of her writing. Many books that Madeleine wrote were meditative, personal, and autobiographical. If one reads both her fiction and her non-fiction one discovers a huge part of what was revealed about her personal life in her non-fiction books was also in her fiction.

In A Circle of Quiet, Madeleine writes “Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both the link between them is compassion.” She goes on to say. “Compassion means to suffer with, but it doesn’t mean to get lost in the suffering, so that it becomes exclusively one’s own. I tend to do this, to replace the person for whom I am feeling compassion with myself.”

L’Engle reveals that she learned that if she was overly emotional and wept during the writing of an emotional scene, the whole scene would be trashed. She had to be detached from the emotions that she was writing about. Yet Madeleine was attached to her characters. They were real to her and she never knew when or where they would arrive, or how they would die. She wrote that her son was upset when Joshua dies in Arm of the Starfish. Joshua wasn’t even supposed to be in the book according to Madeleine. He showed up, she knew he belonged, and when he died she couldn’t change it; even when her ten-year-old son told her to change it. She told him “I didn’t want Joshua to get shot, either, but that’s what happened. I couldn’t stop it.”

Perhaps it is only between detachment and involvement; when we live in true compassion and not in passion that we are able to see the Truth.