C h a r a c t e r6 5today, the Gospel writers might well find themselves handed a
shamefully low grade.
The same relative indifference to what goes on inside people’s
heads can be found in the Book of Isaiah, Dante’s Divine Comedy,
the medieval mystery plays, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels,
Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny
Opera and a good many other eminent works of literature. One of
the finest of twentieth- century English authors, Evelyn Waugh,
once observed that ‘I regard writing not as an investigation of char-
acter, but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am
obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama,
speech and events that interest me.’ Aristotle would have under-
stood what he meant, though Scott Fitzgerald might have been
somewhat mystified.
The modernists are in search of new modes of characterisation,
suitable to a post- Victorian age. What it feels like to be a person is
not quite the same for Franz Kafka as it is for George Eliot, and
certainly not for whoever wrote the Upanishads or the Book of
Daniel. Eliot sees character as ‘a process and an unfolding’, which is
not at all how Woolf or Beckett regard it. For them, human beings
do not have that much consistency and continuity. The typical
realist character tends to be reasonably stable and unified, more
like Amy Dorrit or David Copperfield than Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus
or T.S. Eliot’s Gerontion. As such, it reflects an era when identity
was felt on the whole to be less problematic than it is today. People
could still see themselves as the agents of their own destinies. They
had a fairly acute sense of where they stopped and other people
began. Their personal and collective history, for all its ups and
downs, seems to represent a coherent evolution, one which was
more likely to issue in felicity than in catastrophe.