H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e6 4greater than themselves, and shaped by processes of which they
may be only fitfully conscious. This is not to say that they are just
the playthings of these powers. On the contrary, they play an active
part in shaping their own destinies. But it is not as though the
whole of reality is spun out of the guts of a few great men existing
in splendid isolation. As George Eliot puts it, there is no private life
that has not been influenced by a wider public one. The realist
novel tends to grasp individual lives in terms of histories, commu-
nities, kinship and institutions. It is in these frameworks that the
self is seen as embedded. Just as there are many things that go into
the making of a literary work beside an author, so there are
many things that go into the making of a realist character. There
is a difference between this realist project and the modernist
novel, which quite often presents us with a single, solitary
consciousness. Think, for example, of Beckett’s Malone Dies or
Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway.
Characters in the realist tradition are generally presented as
complex, credible, fully rounded individuals. Many of them seem a
lot more real than the people next door. Some of them are also a lot
more agreeable. Without this array of superbly realised figures,
some of whom have assumed the status of myth and legend, world
literature would be much the poorer. Even so, we should be aware
that the realist idea of character is only one of several. There are
many works of literature which are not especially eager to tell us
what the protagonist had for breakfast, or what colour of socks his
chauffeur wears. The New Testament represents Jesus as a char-
acter of sorts, but it has no interest in delving into his mind. Such
psychologising would be irrelevant to its purposes. The work is not
intended to be a biography. It does not even tell us what its central
character looked like. If they were taking a creative writing course