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ACTIVITY 2: this extract has been taken from your book
An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory Third edition ANDREW BENNETT AND
NICHOLAS ROYLE(2004)
Stories are everywhere: in movies, sitcoms, cartoons, commercials, poems, newspaper
articles, novels. We all make use of stories every day and our lives are shaped by stories –
stories about what happened in our dreams or at the dentist, stories about how we fell in
love or the origins of the universe, stories about war and about peace, stories to
commemorate the dead and to confirm a sense of who we are. In this chapter, we propose
to circle around the following propositions: 1. Stories are everywhere. 2. Not only do we tell
stories, but stories tell us: if stories are everywhere, we are also in stories. 3. The telling of a
story is always bound up with power, with questions of authority, property and domination.
4. Stories are multiple: there is always more than one story. 5. Stories always have something
to tell us about stories themselves: they always involve self-reflexive and metafictional
dimensions. Roland Barthes suggests that falling in love involves telling ourselves stories
about falling in love: in this sense, he argues, ‘mass culture is a machine for showing desire’
(Barthes 1990c, 136). Disagreements, arguments, even wars, are often the result of
conflicting stories concerning, for example, the rights to a piece of land: the real reason for
both the first Gulf War (1991) and the second Gulf War (2003) may have been oil, but the
technical justification for going to war turned on the story of who owned or should own a
particular piece of Kuwait in the first instance and the existence or otherwise of Weapons of
Mass Destruction in the second. Academic, ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ . Narrative 53 discourses
are constructed as stories. The historian Hayden White has given special emphasis to the fact
that history is written in the form of certain kinds of narrative, that the task of the historian is
to ‘charge . . . events’ with ‘a comprehensible plot structure’ (White 1978, 92). Science is
composed of stories: astronomy attempts to narrate the beginnings of the universe; geology
seeks to tell the story of the formation of mountains and plains, rivers, valleys and lakes; and
like Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Just So’ stories, evolutionary psychology purports to tell us the story of
how we came to be as we are. For many centuries, millions of people have come to
understandings about their place in the world, the meaning of their lives and the nature of
politics, ethics and justice through stories about the lives of Christ, Buddha or the prophet
Mohammed. The narrative of class struggle and emancipation from peasant society to the
dictatorship of the proletariat has had a profound influence in the past 150 years. And in the
twentieth century, Sigmund Freud produced a new and scandalous story about the nature of
childhood. To say that Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Marxism and psychoanalysis involve
stories is not to suggest that they are merely fictive. Rather, it is to register the fact that there
are few aspects of life which are not bound up with strategies and effects of narrative. The
simplest way to define narrative is as a series of events in a specific order – with a beginning,
a middle and an end. We might think about James Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’, from
Dubliners (1914), to illustrate the point. Put very simply, the story begins with the arrival of
Gabriel and his wife Gretta at a party, tells of the events of the party and the couple’s walk
home, and ends as they fall asleep in their hotel. What is important in this description is the
temporal ordering of what happens. By contrast, lyric poems, for example, are not typically
thought to express or depict a series of temporally ordered series of events. One of the ways
in which lyric poetry is defined, in fact, is by the absence of any such representation of
events – lyric poems characteristically use the present tense and exploit a sense of the
presence of the speaker in the act of meditating or speaking. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘To a
Sky-Lark’ (1820) recounts no events, but is an effusion of the poet’s sense of the bird’s
‘unpremeditated art’ which he attempts both to define and in some ways to reproduce.
Similarly, while Seamus Heaney’s ‘bog poems’ from North (1975) might dig up buried
narratives of victimization, sacrifice and atonement, their lyric tone gives a sense of an
individual poet responding, now, to what he sees. Narrative, however, is characterized by its
foregrounding of a series of events or actions which are connected in time. What happens at
the end of ‘The Dead’ is determined by what happened earlier. The events are recounted
more or less chronologically in Joyce’s story, in that the order of the telling follows the order
of the told: first we learn of Gabriel and Gretta’s arrival, then . 54 An introduction to
literature, criticism and theory of the party, and finally of the hotel. But narratives also
invariably involve what the narratologist Gérard Genette has called anachronisms –
flashbacks, jumps forwards (or prolepses), the slowing down and speeding up of events and
other distortions of the linear time-sequence (Genette 1986). Texts such as Virginia Woolf ’s
‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1921) dislodge our sense of temporal sequence. The story begins:
‘Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year’ (Woolf 1982, 41). This suggests
that the events recounted span a number of months, but by the end we have the sense that
the story follows the wanderings of the narrator’s consciousness over only a number of
minutes or, at most, hours. Despite this and many other distortions of chronological order,
however, Woolf ’s text is only readable insofar as it exploits our expectations of narrative
sequence. Indeed, these distortions themselves can only be conceived against a background
of linear chronological sequence. Time, then, is crucial to narrative. But as the novelist E.M.
Forster recognizes in Aspects of the Novel (1927), the temporal ordering of events is not the
whole story. Forster makes a memorable distinction between ‘The king died and then the
queen died’ on the one hand, and ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief ’ on the
other (Forster 1976, 87). While the first ‘narrative’ includes two events related in time, he
proposes, the second includes another ‘connection’, the crucial element of causality. The first
simply lists two events, while the second provides the thread of a narrative by showing how
they are related. The logical or causal connections between one event and another
constitute fundamental aspects of every narrative. An obvious example would be detective
stories. Detective stories rely, above all, on our expectation and desire for connection. They
produce quite complex routes to a revelation of whodunnit, routes both determined and
detected by the logic of cause and effect. The beginning–middle–end sequence of a narrative
also tends to emphasize what is known as a teleological progression – the end (in Greek,
telos) itself as the place to get to. A lyric poem does not seem to rely on its ending to provide
coherence: the end is not typically the place where all will be resolved. By contrast, we often
think of a good story as one that we just cannot put down, a novel we compulsively read to
find out what happens at the end. The narrative theorist Peter Brooks has studied ways in
which readers’ desires are directed towards the end, ways in which narratives are structured
towards, or as a series of digressions from, an ending: we are able to read present moments
– in literature and, by extension, in life – as endowed with narrative meaning only because
we read them in anticipation of the structuring power of those endings that will
retrospectively give them the order and significance of plot. (Brooks 1984, 94) . Narrative 55
Likewise, Brooks has elaborated the paradoxical ways in which the dénouement or tying up
of a story is worked towards through the paradox of digression. Thus, for example, while we
may find a novel, film or play frustrating if it contains too many digressions from the main
plot, we enjoy the suspense involved in delaying a dénouement. ‘Suspense’ movies, thrillers
and so on, in particular, exploit this strangely masochistic pleasure that we take in delay. One
of the paradoxical attractions of a good story, in fact, is often understood to be its balancing
of digression, on the one hand, with progression towards an end, on the other. But what is
this end which we so much desire? (We may find out in more detail below, in Chapter 32.)
Brooks and others have suggested that narratives move from a state of equilibrium or stasis
through a disturbance of this stability, and back to a state of equilibrium at the end. The end
of a narrative, the state of equilibrium, occurs when the criminal is discovered, when the
lovers get married, or when the tragic hero dies. In addition, this end is characteristically the
place of revelation and understanding. A part of the equilibrium that endings apparently
offer is the satisfaction of epistemophilia, the reader’s desire to know. And because of the
conventional emphasis on hermeneutic discovery at the end, endings tend to be particularly
over-determined places: we look to the end to provide answers to questions that the text
has raised. In modernist narratives such as Woolf ’s ‘The Mark on the Wall’, however, these
answers tend to be withheld or else treated ironically. The ending of Woolf ’s story is
paradoxical, in fact, in that it resolves the question with which the story starts out – what is
the mark on the wall? – by telling us that it is a snail. But this ‘answer’ to the question simply
parodies those conventional realist endings that seem to clear up our confusions and satisfy
our curiosity. So what if it is a snail? To say that the mark is a snail is an example of what is
called an aporia – an impassable moment or point in narrative, a hermeneutic abyss. If we
ask what Woolf ’s story is ‘about’, we realize that it is about itself as a story. The ending tells
everything, it gives us ‘the answer’, and it tells us nothing: it is not for this ‘answer’ that we
have read the story. Our epistemophilia proves to be perverted. One of the most
fundamental distinctions in narrative theory is that between ‘story’ and ‘discourse’. As
Jonathan Culler has suggested, a fundamental premiss of narratology is that narrative has a
double structure: the level of the told (story) and the level of telling (discourse) (Culler 1981).
These levels have been given different names by different theorists – the Russian formalists
call them fabula and sjuzhet; the French structuralists call them either récit (or histoire) and
discours, and so on. ‘Story’, in this sense, involves the events or actions which the narrator
would like us to believe occurred, the events (explicitly or implicitly) represented. ‘Discourse’,
on the other hand, . 56 An introduction to literature, criticism and theory involves the way in
which these events are recounted, how they get told, the organization of the telling. In fact,
of course, these two levels can never be entirely separated, and much narrative theory has
been concerned to describe ways in which they interact. Thus Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
and Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, for example, present the events of the narrative more or less in the
order that they are alleged to have occurred. By contrast, texts such as Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights and Woolf ’s ‘The Mark on the Wall’ move forward and backward in time
and shift from the level of telling to that of the told in complex and unnerving ways. Many
modernist and postmodernist texts experiment with the relation between these two levels,
to denaturalize or defamiliarize our sense of how narratives function. A text such as Robert
Coover’s short story ‘The Babysitter’ from Pricksongs and Descants (1969), for instance,
presents several slightly different accounts of what appears to be the same evening from a
number of different perspectives: the contradictions and dislocations produced within and
between these accounts, however, make it impossible, finally, to determine the precise
nature or order of the evening’s events. Alain Robbe-Grillet’s novels, such as The Voyeur
(1955) and Jealousy (1957), also recount the ‘same’ series of events over and over again, but
from the ‘same’ narratorial perspective: each telling, however, is subtly different, thus
dissolving our sense of any one, true, narrative of events. Rather than reading such texts
simply as exceptions or aberrations, we might consider ways in which they metafictionally
reflect on the multiplicity of any narrative – its susceptibility to different readings, its
differing narrative perspectives, its shifting senses of place and time. Everything that we have
said about narrative up to this point has concerned the sense of its linearity: narrative
involves a linear series of actions connected in time and through causality. In addition to this
linearity, we might consider another important aspect of narrative, namely the relation
between teller and listener or reader. Indeed, rather than appealing to the idea of a
sequence of events, Barbara Herrnstein Smith has argued that we need to ground our
understanding of narrative in terms of ‘someone telling someone else that something
happened’ (Smith 1981, 228). The significance of this proposition is that it redirects our focus
from the events or actions themselves to the relationship between the author or teller and
the reader or listener. As Jonathan Culler has put it, ‘To tell a story is to claim a certain
authority, which listeners grant’ (Culler 1997, 89). Much of the work in narrative theory has
involved attempts to discriminate among different kinds of narrators (first person or third
person, objective or subjective, reliable or unreliable, so-called ‘omniscient’ or not, together
with questions concerning his or her ‘point of view’, his or her ‘voice’ and so on). Our
understanding of a text is pervaded by our . Narrative 57 sense of the character,
trustworthiness and objectivity of the figure who is narrating. Moreover, it is often very
important to discriminate between the narratorial point of view and that of the so-called
implied author – a particularly important distinction in certain ironic texts, for example.
Although Jonathan Swift’s essay ‘A Modest Proposal’ (1729) would not usually be considered
as a narrative, it does provide one of the classic examples of narratorial irony. In this essay,
the narrator proposes that in order to deal with poverty and hunger in Ireland and to prevent
children of the poor from being a burden to their parents, such children should be sold to
the rich as food – a solution that would be ‘innocent, cheap, easy, and effectual’ (509). The
narrator appears to make his proposal seriously but we necessarily conceive of an ‘implied
author’ who has very different views and motives, and who is making a political point about
the immorality of the English government in its attitude towards poverty in Ireland. Our
understanding of the ironic force of the text necessitates a discrimination between the two
voices or personae of the narrator and the implied author. A consideration of the
relationship between teller and listener or reader leads in turn to questions of power and
property. One of the most famous storytellers is Scheherazade from A Thousand and One
Nights. In these classical Arabic narratives, Scheherazade has been sentenced to death by the
king but is able to stave off her execution by telling him stories. By ending her story each
night at a particularly exciting point, she is able to delay her death for another day because
the king wants to find out what happens next. What makes A Thousand and One Nights so
intriguing for narrative theorists has to do with its enactment of forms of power. As Ross
Chambers proposes, ‘To tell a story is to exercise power’ (Chambers 1984, 50). Chambers
argues that storytelling is often used, as in the case of Scheherazade, as an ‘oppositional’
practice, a practice of resistance used by the weak against the strong: ‘oppositional
narrative’, he claims, ‘in exploiting the narrative situation, discovers a power, not to change
the essential structure of narrative situations, but to change its other (the “narratee” if one
will), through the achievement and maintenance of authority, in ways that are potentially
radical’ (Chambers 1991, 11). In this respect, we might consider the motives and effects of
Gretta’s story of her dead lover in ‘The Dead’: perhaps the ending of Joyce’s narrative should
be understood in terms of the diffusion of Gabriel’s egoistic, domineering and even rapacious
desire for his wife by Gretta’s narration of her love story. Gretta, subject to patriarchal
society’s insistence on the husband’s rights to the wife’s body, displaces her husband’s
unwanted attention by telling him a story. The violence of Gabriel’s desire is expressed in
references to his longing ‘to be master of her strange mood . . . to cry to her . 58 An
introduction to literature, criticism and theory from his soul, to crush her body against him,
to overmaster her’ (248). By the middle of Gretta’s narration, Gabriel sees himself, by
contrast with the lover of her story, as a ‘ludicrous figure . . . idealizing his own clownish
lusts’ and a ‘pitiable fatuous fellow’ (251). And by the end, all lusts and all passions and
anger, all mastery and desire, have dissolved: ‘Gabriel held her hand for a moment longer,
irresolutely, and then shy of intruding on her grief, let it fall gently and walked quietly to the
window’ (253). This conflict of stories – Gabriel’s about himself and Gretta’s about her dead
lover – results in a disturbance of power relations. In this sense, just as much as ‘The Mark
on the Wall’, or the stories of Coover and Robbe-Grillet, ‘The Dead’ is self-reflexively about
the power of stories. More often, of course, it is the dominant ideology which is able to tell
stories about, for example, how it got to be the dominant ideology. In the Soviet Union, it
was the Bolsheviks and later the Stalinists who got to write the history books. But there is an
important difference between these two forms of power: the power exerted by
Scheherazade and by Gretta is a specifically narrative power. The only way that these
storytellers can avoid death on the one hand and violent passion on the other is by making
their stories good, by making them compelling to the point of distraction. By contrast, as far
as the Soviet Union was concerned, the Stalinist version of history did not even have to be
plausible, because its lessons would be enforced in other ways. Narrative power, then, may
be the only strategy left for the weak and dispossessed: without narrative power, they may
not be heard. The social and political importance of stories is eloquently expressed by the
old man in Chinua Achebe’s novel Anthills of the Savannah (1987): ‘The sounding of the
battle-drum is important; the fierce waging of the war itself is important; and the telling of
the story afterwards – each is important in its own way’ (123–4). But, the man continues, the
story is ‘chief among his fellows’: ‘The story is our escort; without it we are blind. Does the
blind man own his escort? No, neither do we the story; rather it is the story that owns us and
directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that
sets one people apart from their neighbours.’ (124) Stories own us, and tell us, Achebe
suggests, as much as we own or tell stories. There are many questions of narrative, then,
which may be considered in relation to literature: temporality, linearity and causality, so-
called omniscience, point of view, desire and power. But most of all, perhaps, it is the
relation between narrative and ‘non-’ or ‘anti-narrative’ elements that fascinate and disturb.
Aspects such as description, digression, suspense, aporia and selfreflection, temporal and
causal disorders are often what are most compelling . Narrative 59 in narrative. A text such
as Woolf ’s ‘The Mark on the Wall’, indeed, has no narrative outside of description and
aporetic reflections on the nature of narrative. Correspondingly, Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ depends
to a large extent on moments of what Joyce refers to elsewhere as ‘epiphany’, moments of
revelation or understanding, moments that appear to stand outside time, outside of
narrative. As Gabriel watches his wife listening to a piece of music as they prepare to leave
the party, there is just such a moment – a moment of revelation which is also a moment of
mystery. Gretta, standing listening to a song is, for Gabriel, full of ‘grace and mystery . . . as if
she were a symbol of something’ (240). Like Scheherazade’s, Joyce’s storytelling holds off,
and hangs on, death. And as the snow falls on the world outside the hotel window at the end
of the story, as Gabriel falls into unconsciousness and the narrative slips away, there is
another moment of epiphany, a dissolution of time, of space, of life, of identity, desire and
narrative. Further reading Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse (1986) is a systematic and
influential account of the structure of narrative. Another modern classic which takes as its
focus questions of narrative perspective is Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds (1978). Wallace
Martin’s Recent Theories of Narrative (1986) and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s Narrative Fiction
(2002) both provide excellent and very clear introductions to narrative theory, while J. Hillis
Miller’s essay ‘Narrative’ (1990) presents a concise and accessible summary of a number of
paradoxes in narrative. Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot(1984) explores ways in which
narrative may be thought about in relation to readers’ desires; on the ‘epistemophilic urge’ in
narrative, see his Body Work (1993). A good short summary of feminist perspectives on
narrative theory is Margaret Homans’s ‘Feminist Fictions and Feminist Theories of Narrative’
(1994); see also Lidia Curti, Female Stories, Female Bodies (1998). James Phelan has
collected some useful and provocative essays on narrative and its relationship to issues of
reading in Reading Narrative (1989). Seymour Chatman’s Coming to Terms(1990) is an
incisive summary of narrative theory in relation to literary texts and film, and is especially
useful in its discussion of ideas of narrative perspective and point of view. For a critique of
traditional narratology from a poststructuralist perspective, see Andrew Gibson, Towards a
Postmodern Theory of Narrative (1996). For a valuable and wide-ranging collection of essays
on narrative theory, from Plato to Trin Minh-Ha, focusing in particular on ‘classic’ structuralist
approaches and poststructuralist provocations, see Martin McQuillan, ed., The Narrative
Reader(2000). . 8. Character Characters are the life of literature: they are the objects of our
curiosity and fascination, affection and dislike, admiration and condemnation. Indeed, so
intense is our relationship with literary characters that they often cease to be simply
‘objects’. Through the power of identification, through sympathy and antipathy, they can
become part of how we conceive ourselves, a part of who we are. More than two thousand
years ago, writing about drama in the Poetics, Aristotle argued that character is ‘secondary’
to what he calls the ‘first essential’ or ‘lifeblood’ of tragedy – the plot – and that characters
are included ‘for the sake of the action’ (Aristotle 1965, 40). Considerably more recently in an
essay on the modern novel, ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), the novelist Henry James asked,
‘What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of
character?’ ( James 1986, 174). While Aristotle makes character ‘secondary’ to plot, James
suggests that the two are equal and mutually defining. Indeed, the novels and plays we
respond to most strongly almost invariably have forceful characters as well as an intriguing
plot. Our memory of a particular novel or play often depends as much on our sense of a
particular character as on the ingenuities of the plot. Characters in books have even become
part of our everyday language. Oedipus, for example, has given his name to a condition
fundamental to psychoanalytic theory, whereby little boys want to kill their fathers and sleep
with their mothers. Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s play The Rivals (1775) has given us the word
‘malapropism’ when someone uses, for example, the word ‘illiterate’ to mean ‘obliterate’
(see I.2.178). A ‘romeo’ denotes a certain kind of amorous young man resembling the hero
of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (c.1595). When we refer to someone as a ‘scrooge’, we
mean a miser, but when we do so we are alluding, knowingly or not, to the protagonist of
Charles . Character 61 Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), for whom Christmas is a fatuous
waste of time and money. Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1958) has given us a term for
what the OEDdefines as ‘a sexually precocious schoolgirl’, as well as a word which especially
through the Internet has acquired an association with the sexual abuse of children. There is
even a day named after a fictional character, ‘Bloomsday’ (16th June), after Leopold Bloom in
James Joyce’s Ulysses(1922). But what is a person or a character in a literary work? What
does it mean to talk about a character as ‘vivid’ or ‘life-like’? How do writers construct
characters and produce the illusion of living beings? What is the relationship between a
person in a literary text and a person outside it? As we shall try to demonstrate, these are
questions that books themselves – in particular plays, novels and short stories – consistently
explore. In this chapter, we shall focus, in particular, on the nineteenth-century realist
tradition. It is, we suggest, this tradition which has culminated in the kinds of assumptions
that we often hold about people and characters today. And it is against such preconceptions
that modernist and postmodernist texts tend to work. Charles Dickens’s novels are
indisputably from the nineteenth century. Whether or not they can be described as ‘realist’,
though, is very definitely a matter of dispute. But this very uncertainty makes the novels
particularly intriguing for a discussion of character since they tend both to exploit and to
explode ‘realist’ conventions of characterization. Great Expectations (1860–1) opens with the
orphan-hero, Pip, examining the writing on his parents’ gravestones in order to attempt to
determine the ‘character’ of his mother and father: As I never saw my father or my mother,
and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of
photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived
from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s, gave me an odd idea that he
was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the
inscription, ‘Also Georgiana Wife of the Above’, I drew a childish conclusion that my mother
was freckled and sickly. (35) The comedy of this passage is partly produced by the double
sense of ‘character’ – as the shape of an inscribed letter on a tombstone and as the
personality of a human being. The text implies that our knowledge of people is determined
by writing, by the character of written words. Although he is ‘unreasonable’, in taking the
shape of letters to denote character, Pip is not simply mistaken in recognizing that our sense
of our self and of other people is developed through language. For as this passage clearly
indicates, we construct . 62 An introduction to literature, criticism and theory ourselves
through and in words, in the image-making, story-generating power of language. In this
respect, it is significant that the opening to Great Expectations explores one of the major
themes of literary texts: the question ‘who am I?’ One fascination of characters in fiction and
drama, as well as one of their most ‘characteristic’ activities, is to suggest answers to this
question, not only for themselves, but also for us. To talk about a novel such as Great
Expectations as ‘realist’ is in part to suggest that its characters are ‘life-like’, that they are like
‘real’ people. But what does this mean? The first requirement for such a character is to have
a plausible name and to say and do things that seem convincingly like the kinds of things
people say and do in so-called ‘real life’. The second requirement is a certain complexity.
Without this complexity, a character appears merely ‘one-dimensional’, cardboard or (in E.M.
Forster’s terms) ‘flat’ (Forster 1976, 73). To be life-like, a fictional character should have a
number of different traits – traits or qualities which may be conflicting or contradictory: he
or she should be, to some extent, unpredictable, his or her words and actions should appear
to originate in multiple impulses. Thirdly, however, these tensions, contradictions,
multiplicities should cohere in a single identity. Thus ‘life-likeness’ appears to involve both
multiplicity and unity at the same time. In the classic nineteenth-century realist novel
Middlemarch (1871– 2), for example, there is a character called Lydgate of whom George
Eliot observes: ‘He had two selves within him’, but these selves must ‘learn to accommodate
each other’ in a ‘persistent self ’ (182). It is this tension, between complexity and unity, that
makes a character like Lydgate both interesting and credible. The importance of such unity in
realist texts is made clear by works like Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr
Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) or, less melodramatically, Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Secret Sharer’
(1910): these narratives can be called ‘limit texts’ in that they use the framework of life-like
or realistic characters to explore what happens when the self is demonically split or doubled.
In doing so, such texts challenge the basis of realism itself. Realist characterization
presupposes a ‘mimetic’ model of literary texts whereby what is primary or original is a real
person, and a character in a book is simply a copy of such a person. Such a model does not
allow for a reversal of this relationship: it does not allow for the possibility that, for example,
a person in ‘real life’ might be convincing to the extent that he or she resembles a person in a
book. On the face of it, such a reversal may sound rather strange or counterintuitive: we
would normally want to give priority to a ‘person’ and say that characters in books are more
or less like ‘real’ people. In fact, however, as the example of Great Expectations suggests, it is
easy to demonstrate that . Character 63 things also work the other way round. Indeed,
literary history contains various dramatic instances where ‘life’ copies fiction. After the
publication of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther in Germany in 1774, for example,
there was a fashion among young men in Europe for suicide, an act modelled on the suicide
of the eponymous hero of that novel. Similarly, J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye
(1951) was held responsible for the antisocial behaviour of numerous young men in the
United States in the 1950s and early 1960s who identified with the disaffected hero Holden
Caulfield. The young, in fact, are often considered (by the old) to be in danger of mimetic
dissipation, to endanger themselves, their families and society because they identify with
and then copy the actions and attitudes of disreputable people in books or, more recently, in
film and video. This paradox of character whereby people in books are like ‘real’ people who
are, in turn, like people in books, is suggested by the words ‘person’ and ‘character’
themselves. We have been using these words more or less interchangeably, though with an
implicit and conventional emphasis on the ‘reality’ of a person and the ‘fictionality’ of a
character. But the words are worth examining in more detail. According to Chambers
Dictionary, ‘person’ signifies both ‘a living soul or self-conscious being’ and ‘a character
represented, as on the stage’. Indeed, ‘person’ goes back to the Latin word persona, the
mask worn by an actor in a play on the classical stage. The English language uses the word
‘persona’ to signify a kind of mask or disguise, a pretended or assumed character. The word
‘person’, then, is bound up with questions of fictionality, disguise, representation and mask.
To know a person, or to know who a person is, involves understanding a mask. In this
respect, the notion of person is inseparable from the literary. This is not to say that ‘real’
people are actually fictional. Rather it is to suggest that there is a complex, destabilizing and
perhaps finally undecidable interweaving of the ‘real’ and the ‘fictional’: our lives, our real
lives, are governed and directed by the stories we read, write and tell ourselves. There is a
similar enigma about the word ‘character’: just as the word ‘person’ has a double and
paradoxical signification, so ‘character’ means both a letter or sign, a mark of writing, and
the ‘essential’ qualities of a ‘person’. Again, the etymology of the word is suggestive: from
the Greek word kharattein, to engrave, the word becomes a mark or sign, a person’s title and
hence a distinguishing mark – that which distinguishes one person from another – and from
this a ‘fictional’ person or a person on stage. Pip’s characterological reading of his parents’
tombstones, then, is perhaps not so far off the mark. And in Hamlet, when Polonius tells his
son Laertes that he should remember his ‘precepts’ or advice, he plays on this double sense,
using ‘character’ as a verb: . 64 An introduction to literature, criticism and theory ‘And these
few precepts in thy memory / Look thou character’ (I.iii.58–9). In this way, Shakespeare’s play
suggests how intimately ‘character’ is bound up with inscription, with signs, with writing. We
have argued that the realist novel tends to rely on a particular conception of what a person is
– that a person is a complex but unified whole. We might develop this further by suggesting
that the realist model of character involves a fundamental dualism of inside (mind, soul or
self ) and outside (body, face and other external features). The ‘inside’ that we associate with
being human has many different forms. In the nineteenth century this was often described in
terms of ‘spiritual life’ or ‘soul’. More recently, it has just as often (and perhaps more
helpfully) been understood in terms of the unconscious. The following extracts from the first
paragraph of George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch will allow us to explore this in more detail:
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her
hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than
those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her
stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the
side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or
from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph from today’s newspaper. She was usually
spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more
common-sense. Nevertheless, Celia wore scarcely more trimmings; and it was only to close
observers that her dress differed from her sister’s, and had a shade of coquetry in its
arrangements; for Miss Brooke’s plain dressing was due to mixed conditions, in most of
which her sister shared. The pride of being ladies had something to do with it: the Brooke
connections, though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably ‘good’ [ . . . ] Young
women of such birth, living in a quiet country-house, and attending a village church hardly
larger than a parlour, naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster’s daughter.
Then there was well-bred economy, which in those days made show in dress the first item to
be deducted from, when any margin was required for expenses more distinctive of rank.
Such reasons would have been enough to account for plain dress, quite apart from religious
feeling; but in Miss Brooke’s case, religion alone would have determined it [ . . . ] and to her
the destinies of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity, made the solicitudes of feminine
fashion appear an occupation for Bedlam. She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual
life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in guimp and artificial protrusions of
drapery. [ . . . ] (29–30) . Character 65 This extraordinary opening paragraph, with its ironic
insistence on the importance of clothes despite Dorothea Brooke’s spiritual aspirations,
clearly acknowledges that physical appearance (outside) works as a sign of character (inside).
What is indicated here is an opposition that is fundamental in realist texts: that there is an
inside and an outside to a person, that these are separate, but that one may be understood
to have a crucial influence on the other. The opening to Middlemarch concentrates almost
obsessively on Dorothea’s clothes because it is her clothes that allow us insight into her
character. As this suggests, another convention of characterological realism is that character
is hidden or obscure, that in order to know another person – let alone ourselves – we must
decipher the outer appearance. Eliot constantly manipulates and plays with the mechanisms
of such realism, above all with that form of telepathy or mind-reading whereby a narrator
can describe a character from the outside but can also know (and keep secrets about) that
character’s inner thoughts and feelings, conscious or unconscious. At the same time, by
evoking Dorothea’s appearance in terms of how ‘the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian
painters’ and by comparing her ‘plain garments’ to ‘the impressiveness of a fine quotation’,
Eliot subtly foregrounds a sense of the painterly and the textual. We are drawn and caught
up in intriguing uncertainties about where representation (a picture or text) begins or ends.
From Dorothea’s clothes, then, Eliot weaves a fine and intricate web of character – in terms
of the familial, social and political, and in terms of the moral and religious. Indeed, one of the
most striking sentences of the excerpt focuses ironically on this concern with clothes: ‘She
could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a
keen interest in guimp and artificial protrusions of drapery.’ The passage as a whole makes it
clear, however, that Dorothea’s puritan plainness is simply the reverse side of a ‘keen interest
in guimp’. Her preference for ‘plain dressing’ is itself a complex and considered statement of
fashion. It is at this point, in particular, that Eliot’s ironic presentation of Dorothea involves a
subtle questioning of the conventional opposition between a ‘spiritual life’ on the one hand
and the ‘artificial protrusions of drapery’ on the other. The passage suggests that this
opposition is itself artificial, that whatever people ‘really’ are cannot be separated from how
they appear. It suggests that people are constituted by an interplay of inner and outer, but
that it is not a question of one being the truth and the other mere surface. So while realist
conventions of character may rely on the opposition between inner and outer, mind or spirit
and body, and so on, Eliot’s description of Dorothea also shows how this opposition can be
questioned from within the realist tradition itself. . 66 An introduction to literature, criticism
and theory This brings us to one of the central questions raised by many novels: How can we
know a person? As we have seen, realist novels such as George Eliot’s attempt to answer this
question by presenting people as knowable by a number of ‘outward’ signs of ‘inner’ worth.
Appearances, however, can be deceptive. Indeed, many novels and plays are concerned with
the problem of deception or disguise, with discriminating between an appearance that is a
true sign of inner value and one that is not. The realist tradition often relies on the possibility
of such deception, while also presupposing the possibility of finally discovering the worth or
value of a person by reading the outward signs. The exposure, despite appearances, of
Bulstrode’s hypocrisy, for example, and the final validation of Lydgate’s good character are
central to the plot of Middlemarch. But the fact that a ‘person’ is itself, in some sense, a
‘mask’, means that even if we think we ‘know’ the soul or self of a person, his or her true
identity, there is always a possibility, even if that person is ourself, that such an identity is
itself a form of mask. This irreducible uncertainty may partly account for realism’s obsessive
concern with the question: ‘Who am I?’ The stories of Raymond Carver (1938–88), like many
so-called postmodern texts, relentlessly play with such conventions of characterological
construction and perception. In ‘Cathedral’ (1983), for example, the somewhat obtuse,
belligerent, intolerant, discriminatory narrator finds it both comic and unnerving to think
about how a blind man, a friend of his wife who has been invited to pass the evening in their
home, looks – even while (or because) he cannot look. The narrator is struck by the fact that
the blind man does not wear dark glasses. This disturbs him, since although at first sight the
blind man’s eyes ‘looked like anyone else’s eyes’, on closer inspection (and the narrator takes
the opportunity for a lengthy session of unreciprocable inspection) they seem ‘Creepy’: ‘As I
stared at his face, I saw the left pupil turn in toward his nose while the other made an effort
to keep in one place. But it was only an effort, for that eye was on the roam without his
knowing it or wanting it to be’ (297). The story culminates in a dope-smoking session in
which the blind man teaches the narrator the advantages of drawing with closed eyes, of the
necessary visual imagination of the blind. On one level, the story performs a conventional
reversal of the blind and the seeing, figuring the blind man as the seer. But on another level,
Carver explores conventions of characterological construction by querying the equation of
the look of someone with their identity (the eyes, conventionally the most telling indicator of
character are, for our view of the blind man, just ‘creepy’ signifiers of mechanical
dysfunction, disconnected from intention, emotion, will), and by prompting an awareness
that in this story it is the one who is notseen – either by us as readers or by the . Character
67 blind man – who most fully exposes himself, exposes his ‘character’, in all its belligerence,
intolerance and obtuseness. As we have seen, it is difficult in an absolute sense to separate
real from fictional characters. To read about a character is to imagine and create a character
in reading: it is to create a person. And as we have tried to show, reading characters involves
learning to acknowledge that a person can never finally be singular – that there is always
multiplicity, ambiguity, otherness and unconsciousness. Our final point concerns what it
means to ‘identify’ with characters in fiction. It seems difficult, if not impossible, to enjoy a
novel or play without, at some level, identifying with the characters in it. In fact, the most
obvious definition of the ‘hero’ or ‘heroine’ of a novel or play would be the person with
whom we ‘identify’, with whom we sympathize or empathize, or whose position or role we
imaginatively inhabit. The anti-hero, by contrast, is the character with whom we might
identify, but only in wilful resistance to prevailing codes of morality and behaviour.
‘Identification’ in any case is never as simple as we might think. To identify with a person in a
novel or play is to identify oneself, to produce an identity for oneself. It is to give oneself a
world of fictional people, to start to let one’s identity merge with that of a fiction. It is, finally,
also to create a character for oneself, to create oneself as a character. Further reading Two
very good and reasonably accessible accounts of character are Harold Bloom’s ‘The Analysis
of Character’ (1990) and Hélène Cixous’s ‘The Character of “Character” ’ (1974). A classic if
somewhat reductive account of character may be found in Chapters 3 and 4 of Forster’s
Aspects of the Novel (1976), first published in 1927. For a lucid discussion of character in the
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel, see Martin Price, Forms of Life (1983). A very
different kind of approach is exemplified in Thomas Docherty’s Reading (Absent) Character
(1983), which focuses in particular on the nouveau roman and postmodern writing generally,
in order to move beyond a ‘mimetic’ theory of character to one in which characterization is
seen as ‘a process of reading and writing’. For an excellent, if difficult, argument for the
deconstruction of character which challenges the humanist perspective of a unified self and
argues for ‘an esthetic and ethic of the fragmented self ’, see Leo Bersani’s important book A
Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (1978). J. Hillis Miller’s chapter on
‘Character’ in Ariadne’s Thread (1992) brilliantly weaves literary with critical, theoretical and
philosophical reflections on character. On the question of identification in psychoanalysis and
literature, see Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (1995). . 9. Voice Nothing is stranger, or more
familiar, than the idea of a voice. In George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), a character called
Mrs Meyrick observes that ‘A mother hears something like a lisp in her children’s talk to the
very last’ (423). In Shakespeare’s King Lear (1605), the blinded Gloucester recognizes Lear
from his voice: ‘The trick of that voice I do well remember; / Is’t not the King?’ (IV, vi, 106–7).
In both of these examples we have what appear to be confirmations of the persistence of
identity, expressed in the singular or peculiar nature (the ‘trick’) of a person’s voice. But in
each of these exchanges we are also presented with a kind of strangeness as well: in the
context of Eliot’s novel, for example, we may reflect on the irony of the fact that what the
mother recognizes in her children, what it is in their voice that confirms the persistence of
their identity, is something that cannot be heard, a lisp perceived only by the mother.
Moreover there is something strange in the idea that an adult’s speech should be, in a
dream-like or hallucinatory fashion, haunted by the past in this way. In the example from
Shakespeare, on the other hand, it is difficult for us not to be aware of the terrible
precariousness of recognition and, by implication, of identity: Gloucester may believe that he
recognizes, and may indeed recognize, the trick of the king’s voice, but we are all too aware
of the fact that he can never again see the king, never confirm the king’s identity by sight.
And ironically, Gloucester is only reunited with Lear thanks to help from his son Edgar, whose
voice (disguised as Tom o’ Bedlam) Gloucester fails to recognize.