C H A P T E R 2
Character
One of the most common ways of overlooking the ‘literariness’ of
a play or novel is to treat its characters as though they were actual
people. In one sense, to be sure, this is almost impossible to avoid.
To describe Lear as bullying, irascible and self- deluded is inevi-
tably to make him sound like some modern- day newspaper mogul.
The difference between Lear and the mogul, however, is that the
former is simply a pattern of black marks on a page, whereas the
latter, more’s the pity, is not. The mogul had an existence before we
encountered him, which is not true of literary characters. Hamlet
was not really a university student before the play opens, even
though the play itself tells us that he was. He was nothing at all.
Hedda Gabler does not exist a second before she steps on stage,
and all we shall ever know about her is what Ibsen’s play decides to
tell us. There are no other sources of information available.
When Heathcliff disappears from Wuthering Heights for a
mysterious stretch of time, the novel does not tell us where he runs
off to. There is a theory that he returns to the Liverpool where he
was first discovered as a child and grows rich in the slave trade
there, but it is equally possible that he sets up a hairdressing salon
in Reading. The truth is that he does not end up in any place on the