C h a r a c t e r6 9Land and Four Quartets, but at some subliminal level you are under-
standing them all the time. Among other things, this is because those
lucky enough to live in Europe are part of something called the
European Mind, whether they know it or not. But an Indonesian
fisherman could probably grasp the meaning of The Waste Land too,
since he has intuitive knowledge of the great spiritual archetypes on
which it draws. It might help if he was also able to read English,
though perhaps it is not essential. That one can understand The
Waste Land without even trying is consoling news for all students of
literature. Perhaps the same is true of the General Theory of Relativity.
Maybe we are all nuclear physicists somewhere deep in our guts.
There is another reason why the idea of character as Balzac or
Hawthorne knew it no longer seems feasible in modern times. This
is because in an age of mass culture and commerce, human beings
come to seem increasingly faceless and interchangeable. We can
distinguish easily enough between Othello and Iago, but not
between Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon. The characters of The
Waste Land, as Eliot himself remarked, are not really distinct from
one another. Leopold Bloom, as we have seen, is sharply individu-
alised, yet he is also an anonymous Everyman whose thoughts and
feelings could be almost anybody’s. His mind is magnificently
banal. Figures in Virginia Woolf tend to blur into each other, as
feelings and sensations pass like vibrations from one individual to
the next. It is becoming harder to identify the owner of a particular
experience. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake contains characters of a sort,
but like figures in a dream they seem perpetually to merge, split,
dissolve and recombine, secreting within themselves a whole array
of fractured selves and provisional identities. One might say of a
good deal of modernist writing that the true protagonist is not this
or that character, but language itself.