Novel Characters

A Genealogy

Maria DiBattista

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444351552
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Novel Characters offers a fascinating and in-depth history of the novelistic character from the "birth of the novel" in Don Quixote, through the great canonical works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the most influential international novels of the present day

• An original study which offers a unique approach to thinking about and discussing character
• Makes extensive reference to both traditional and more recent and specialized academic studies of the novel
• Provides a critical vocabulary for understanding how the novelistic conception of character has changed over time.
• Examines a broad range of novels, cultures, and periods
• Promotes discussion of how different cultures and times think about human identity, and how the concept of what a character is has changed over time

1

Introduction: Novel Characters

Emerson thought that character was nature in the highest form.¹ He is thinking here of character as virtually a synonym for Genius, but even so, this is a compliment to human nature that few would second without qualification. The standard might strike us as too high, even out of reach, especially when applied to the characters that populate the novel, a genre dedicated to giving us realistic, rather than idealized depictions of human beings. It would hardly take a moment’s thought to identify the variety of morally objectionable characters who are so much at home in the novel: weak and bad characters, for one, and then all variety of those sneaky,s weasely, or weedy characters who plague and exasperate us. The name and number of human nature in its lowest form are, distressingly, legion. There is a history for approaching character in these less exalted and often standardized forms, but while acknowledging this history, it is my intention to write against it in an Emersonian vein of exhortation, urging us to seek out not what is standard but what is original, not what is typical, but what is exceptional, not what is predictable, but what is surprising, bewildering, potentially alarming, and ultimately transformative about the way the novel conceives of character.

The literary notion of character has long associated itself with ideas of distinction, although not always of the most favorable kind. The known history of “character writing” begins with Theophrastus, whose Characters was the first systematic attempt to describe distinct types of character - thirty in the version that has come down to us - identified by “the mode in which they administer their affairs.”² Although a preface, which was once believed to have been written by Theophrastus, claims he arrived at these character types by observing, “side by side, with great closeness, both the good and the worthless among men,” none of the good men, who presumably would give us examples of nature in its highest form, find a place in his account. Characters begins by depicting the “doublings and retractions” of the Ironical man and concludes with the stinting ways of the Avaricious Man. They are the first and last exhibit in a rogues’ gallery depicting a morally instructive, often comical array of conniving, insincere, ill-behaved, and self-interested characters, all of them prototypes of a specific and generally obnoxious trait.

Thus, for example, Theophrastus describes the characteristic manners of the flatterer, the garrulous man, the chatty man, the boaster, the gossip (or fabricator), the evil-speaker (or slanderer), and the gross man (known for his “obtrusive and objectionable pleasantry”) so that we might know them and know, too, the differences between the man who is merely chatty, the man intent on fabricating stories about others, and the man who enjoys slandering others. Similarly, he records the extravagances of the shameless man, the reckless man, the boaster; the misplaced self-regard of the arrogant man, the mean man, and the complacent man; the cramped and stunted nature of the penurious man, the unreasonable man, the surly man, the grumbler, the unpleasant man, and the offensive man (the last two cousins but not twins); the presumptions of the distrustful man and the latelearner; the power-mongering of the officious man, the man of mean ambitions, the oligarch, and the patron of rascals (“philoponeria,” literally, the lover of bad company); and the mental and moral weaknesses of the stupid man, the superstitious man, the coward.

The “character as genre” invented by Theophrastus inclines, then, to satire, delineating characters exclusively in terms of their public face, which more or less is presumed to reflect - a “more or less” that will come back to haunt us - their inner and most consistent disposition. The satiric bite of his sketches is in keeping with the meaning of the Greek word, character, an engraved mark, derived from kharas, the stylus or sharp-pointed implement for writing on clay or wax tablets. Character in this double sense refers to what etches and is etched, what makes the mark and the graphic mark (hieroglyph or letter) itself. This etymology is morally as well as technically suggestive. The stylus makes distinctive marks through a steady application of force; so, too, character is fashioned by those pressuring forces that shape, condition, and keep character in character. Dickens seizes on the psychological as well as dramatic possibilities of this double and uncanny sense of character in Great Expectations, a novel, as we shall see, haunted by various inscriptions and turns of character. Character is literally reduced to a graphic sign when Pip’s sister, unable to speak after being brutally assaulted, tries to communicate a felt and urgent want by tracing “a character that looked like a curious T.” In a frenzy of decoding, Pip produces “everything producible that began with T, from tar to toast and tub”³ until, with the help of Biddy, he suddenly realizes that the scrawled T is not a letter, but the pictogram of a hammer. Once the “character” of the sign is deciphered, it becomes clear who is meant: Orlick, instantly identifiable by his tools and characteristic activity at the forge. Dickens’s play on these older meanings of character as letter, mark, and expressive tool prepares for the darker and less easily solvable mystery of Orlick’s character - who he is and what he is when he is not at work, when his characteristic hammering takes a violently personal form.

The Greeks had another word that recognized and denoted character in its habitual dispositions and as an ensemble of moral traits: the word ethos (a cognate of the word idiom, which indicates the particularity not of persons but of their language). This is the word that Aristotle uses when he speaks of tragic character in the Poetics. It is a word that has descended to us and is still in use today to refer to the marked traits, customs, sentiments, or beliefs that define a person, a group, or a culture. The word ethics also derives from ethos. The conjunction of ethos and character indicates a primary interest in what is habitual or durable about character: a conception of character that, however well suited to delineating human beings in their most expressive poses, habits, attitudes, and behaviors is not inherently disposed to dramatic development. This is why Aristotle can argue that while you cannot have a tragedy without action, you can have one without character. Nonetheless, the idea of character as an habitual expression presupposes the idea of breaking or eluding habit, a possibility conveyed when we say someone is acting out of character, as if character were something we could temporarily divest ourselves of, like an illfitting or constraining garment, in order to feel a bit more free, a bit more or, as the case may be, a little less like our habitual selves.

These fundamental conceptions of character as a marked moral type or a habitual and consistent behavior are absorbed and transformed in the modern and distinctly novelistic notion of character as “a process and unfolding,”⁴ to use George Eliot’s apt phrase. Character is no longer seen as a finished form, but as something - a force, an essence, a psychic embryo - that develops over time; one grows into a character, realizes and fulfills it, abandons or betrays it. Such narratives trouble our received notions of what it actually means to say that someone is acting “in character” - are such acts performed freely or under some outer or even inner compulsion? Are they prompted by genuine and individual instincts and dispositions, or by conditioned behaviors that adhere to social conventions dictating what we should be and ought to do? These questions will preoccupy us for the rest of this book, because these are the questions that preoccupy the novel in its central endeavor - to represent the different kinds and the changing fate of character. For now we can conclude this brief history of character by considering the radically libertarian and still controversial view that posits character as intrinsic rather than inscribed, as self-sufficing and self-impelled rather than predominantly shaped by custom and convention.

One of the more fervent and sustained expressions of this view appears in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, a work we will revisit in the chapter on Individuals. This is how Mill defines character: “A person whose desires and impulses are his own - are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture - is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character.”⁵ In an age when industrialization was transforming not only the way we lived, but also the way we thought about ourselves as human beings, Mill passionately argued that character was not a mechanism, but was an organism that “requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which makes it a living thing.”⁶ Character is the flowering (he uses, in fact, a botanical metaphor for character development) of these inward forces as they develop and are modified in response to the cultural environment.

Emerson shares this libertarian bias, but so enlarges upon it that the social and cultural environment in which character moves and acts dwindles to a backdrop or must adapt to its imperative presence. That character can act on its environment, like Robinson Crusoe, dominate it, like Ahab, and even transform it, like Don Quixote, are possibilities the novel can hardly wait to explore. The novel tests these possibilities, sometimes comically, sometimes tragically, sometimes with stoic calm or visionary excitement, sometimes, as in Don Quixote or The Brothers Karamazov or Ulysses, in a combination of all these moods.

Emerson abounds in emphatic definitions for character, two of which are especially notable in isolating the charisma of character. First the definition that opens his essay on “Character”:

This is that which we call Character, - a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and without means. It is conceived of as a certain indemonstrable force, a Familiar or Genius, by whose impulses the man is guided, but whose counsels he cannot impart; which is company for him, so that such men are often solitary, or if they chance to be social, do not need society, but can entertain themselves very well alone.

And then midway through the essay, this astonishing announcement:

Character is centrality, the impossibility of being displaced or overset.⁷

If we understand character, as Emerson urged us, as centrality, as an undisplaceable and undemonstrable Force, we can see how it can be represented to us as nature’s highest form. This is the definition that inspired this book and which shall accompany us through to its end.

Where Do the Novel’s Characters Come From?

Let us, then, examine the validity of Emerson’s claims for character as the Force or Familiar by whose impulses men (and women) are guided. According to Emerson, character, if it actually is character in its truest and highest form, is centrality; everything emanates from it, nothing is imposed upon it that it does not want or accept or welcome. This definition holds, I would argue, for both “real” and fictional characters. Nonetheless, fictional characters emerge out of the crucible of imagination rather than the womb of Nature. Their creation is the highest work of epic poets, romancers, dramatists, and novelists, just as the Genius is the most accomplished work of Nature. Since we are concerned here with the work of novelists, let us turn to one who has offered her own creation myth of fictional character in a volume whose very title evokes the ontogenic relation between Writing and Being.

“The writer is the Adam’s rib of character.”⁸

This striking sentence appears in the midst of an essay by Nadine Gordimer on the relation between the novelist and her characters. It occupies a paragraph by itself, as if Gordimer wanted to isolate the mysterious origin of character from the prosaic matter surrounding and threatening to engulf it. This itself is a clue to how character aims at distinction and pride of place.

The hieratic tone of this pronouncement is all the more arresting since it is preceded by more genial and personal reflections on Gordimer’s own beginnings as a writer. Gordimer has been goodnaturedly confessing that in her younger days she had played, sometimes to the point of obsession, what her mature self calls “the I-spy game - looking for real life counterparts to fictional personages.” Looking back on “the radiant reading days of adolescence,” Gordimer admits that she is “puzzled to remember how, deep in D. H. Lawrence, I went through the local library in fervent pursuit of his circle as real-life counterparts of his characters.” Her first target was the character of the famously generous, oddly mannered, bizarrely dressed Edwardian “hostess” to the luminaries of modernism, Ottoline Morrell, so brilliantly ransacked and pilloried and, as Gordimer only realized later, transformed in Lawrence’s lacerating, unforgettable portrait of Hermione Roddice in Women in Love.

Gordimer not only grows out of the “prying and prurience and often absurdity”⁹ of the I-spy game but actively comes to resent it once she herself becomes a novelist and starts to appreciate the difference between actual living characters and imagined ones, between the copyist and the transformer of life. In the essay she palpably bristles at the invasive questions she might have asked herself in her younger days: “What is it these impertinent interrogators want from us,” she blurts out in a rare flash of irritation: “An admission that your Albertine was actually gay Albert? That Malone was Beckett’s neglected grandfather? That Nabokov alias Humbert Humbert didn’t chase only butterflies?”¹⁰

Since we are not likely ever to wring such admissions out of her or any other writer for that matter, our time and intelligence is better applied interrogating other matters. We might begin by questioning what Gordimer hoped to convey through this uncanny image of the writer as the Adam’s rib of character. She herself glosses it by citing two radically opposed deterministic “theses” about literary character: one is Edward Said’s claim in Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966) that “the writer’s life is the story”; the other is Roland Barthes’s demonstration in S/Z (1970) that “what is told is the telling,” that, in other words, there is no plot, no subject, and most definitely no writer, hence no personal character, at all. Gordimer is quick to note that both Said and Barthes would modify and even contradict these claims later in their career. But these particular works are important to Gordimer as critical landmarks “representative of at least two of the sand-shoals of literary theory that wash up on either bank of the writer’s imagination as it flows unconcernedly on.”

As this last image suggests, neither the possibility that the writer is all “there” in the story or completely absent from it can divert the novelist’s imagination from its appointed course. Nor does Gordimer herself seem concerned that she has not answered the question of where characters come from. She leaves the question where she found it, in the realm of mystery. She is, however, quite willing to answer the equally difficult question of what a character is: “a coherence in the babble of the conscious and unconscious, a gathering from a diaspora that does not know from what territory of cognition it has been dispersed.”¹¹

Coherence: this is the term - and the promise! - to seize and hold on to, as we wrestle with our notions, which most likely are inherited, conventional, and highly personal, of what novelistic characters are. According to Gordimer, character does not possess the coherence of something “constructed,” as the social determinists insist, to conform to the specifications of some ideological blueprint. Rather, Gordimer insists, character resembles the “coherence” most commonly experienced in dreams, which also unfold in our minds as a barely intelligible babble of conscious and unconscious thoughts. This dream-coherence is a sign of its origin and, indeed, of its parentage. Adam, we are told, was in a deep sleep when his rib was extracted from him. The inference here is that the writer may create his or her characters in a kind of trance or waking dream. Certainly this is how Freud understood the mystery of artistic creation, at least when it came to the creation of characters. His majesty, the Ego, Freud proposed, is the hidden magnificence behind those stories fashioned out of the daydreams of novelists and romancers. This majesty is embodied in the figure of the hero or heroine, “for whom,” Freud argues, “the writer tries to win our sympathy by every possible means and whom he seems to place under the protection of a special providence.”¹² The sympathetic character of the hero or heroine and the special protection accorded them are meant to make the reader complicit in fantasies he would ordinarily reject or censure as egocentric. These wishes Freud broadly characterized as either ambitious wishes, which serve to “elevate the subject’s personality,” and erotic wishes. Men, he claimed, traditionally are inspired by dreams of ambition, women by erotic wishes. We shall see how the novel overturns some of these traditions, giving women their first real chance to be ambitious for themselves.

Such wishes and ambitions did not concern, if they ever attracted the notice of Theophrastus, who “sketches” the public face and conduct of characters rather than probing and excavating their private and inner lives. But they are the central concern and subject of the novel, whose primary cultural function is to satisfy our curiosity about why human beings are the way they are and act the way they do. The novel seeks this more complete human understanding not just in the public expressions and behavior, but in the private habits and inner thoughts of character. It observes, studies, and depicts character in its everyday routines as well as holiday moods. When the private and public facts fail to agree, as they often do, the novel wants to know the circumstances, extenuating or not, before it reaches any conclusions or delivers any moral verdicts.

This is one of the important ways in which novelistic characters differ from their close relatives of the theater. The life of dramatic characters is, self-evidently, confined to the stage, the realm, as Georg Lukács has remarked,

of naked souls and fates; every stage is Greek in its innermost essence: abstractly clothed people walk onto it and perform their play of fate before abstractly grand, empty columned halls. Costumes, milieu, wealth and variety are a mere compromise for the stage. At the truly decisive moment they always become superficial and thus distracting.¹³

But for novelistic characters, costumes, milieu, and wealth, not to mention their work, if they have any, their habits, such as they are, their stray as well as most concentrated thoughts, do not compromise, but constitute the very essence of who they are. Even that most unyielding, undisplaceable character, Don Quixote, would not be who he is without his sword and buckler, his chivalric code, his gaunt body and abstemious habits, the “milieu” of La Mancha, and the New as well as Old Spain through which he travels in search of ennobling adventure. Novelistic characters - even those spiritually tormented beings in Dostoevsky’s novels - may impress us as souls more than characters, but nevertheless, they are not naked souls; character is the moral garment that clothes and shields them from the blasts of fate.

The novel, unlike the drama, suspends its characters in a time and place where the play of fate is not predetermined and often not even concluded. Many a novel, of course, ends by telling us how t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Introduction: Novel Characters
• I: Wholes
• II: Fractions
• III: Compounds
• Index