12 The New York Review
The People We Know Best
Evan Kindley
Character:
Three Inquiries in Literary Studies
by Amanda Anderson,
Rita Felski, and Toril Moi.
University of Chicago Press,
170 pp., $60.00; $20.00 (paper)
Character:
The History of a Cultural Obsession
by Marjorie Garber.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
443 pp., $32.00; $20.
(paper; to be published in July)
Character as Form
by Aaron Kunin,
with illustrations by David Scher.
Bloomsbury Academic,
242 pp., $95.00; $30.95 (paper)
Balzac’s Lives
by Peter Brooks.
New York Review Books,
266 pp., $18.95 (paper)
What are fictional characters? Here are
some answers. They are real people in
the world “imposing [themselves] upon
another person,” as an inconspicuous
old lady named Mrs. Brown famously
did upon Virginia Woolf. They are
creatures under the dictatorial control
of the authors who create them: “gal-
ley slaves” (Vladimir Nabokov). They
are specimens of the species “Homo
Fictus,” which resembles Homo Sa-
piens in most respects but differs in
that “they need not have glands,” don’t
have to digest food, and can be known
completely (E. M. Forster). They are
portraits of unique, irreducible individ-
uals—the good “round” ones at least
(it was Forster who popularized the
distinction between “round” and “flat”
characters, though he insisted that even
the flat ones have their charm). They
are formal representations of human
types that recur across historical time
and are thus capable of continual re-
iteration (Aaron Kunin). They are ver-
sions of public figures or the author’s
social circle in disguise. They are (or
ought to be) common property, capable
of being repurposed and reimagined
across eras and media (David Brewer).
They are anthropomorphic entities
(though not necessarily human) that
invite identification (Rita Felski). They
satisfy our insatiable psychological de-
mands for “social information”—gos-
sip, basically, even if it’s about people
who don’t actually exist (Blakey Ver-
meule). They are vehicles that allow
us to live other lives, see through other
eyes: they “give us as- if experiments in
knowing the world” (Peter Brooks).
They are nothing in and of themselves,
“merely an abstraction... in the mind
of the reader or spectator,” epiphenom-
ena of text on a page (L. C. Knights).
A strange fact about academic liter-
ary criticism is that this final view—that
literary characters don’t even exist—
has been the predominant one for al-
most a century, despite being the least
intuitively satisfying and attractive to
most people. Indeed, literary critics
have been strict about policing read-
ers (and one another) when it comes to
talking about character, as Toril Moi
notes in her pugnacious contribution to
Character: Three Inquiries in Literary
Studies, cowritten with Rita Felski and
Amanda Anderson. Moi rattles off the
rules:We must not think of characters
as “our friends for life” or say that
they “remain as real to us as our
familiar friends.” We must not talk
about the “unconscious feelings of
a character”....
We must never forget that “le
personnage... n’est personne,” that
the person on the page is nobody.Moi calls this set of prohibitions “the
taboo on character talk,” and anyone
who’s taken a college literature course
is likely to recognize it. How to tran-
sition from a naive identification with
characters to a critical analysis of texts
is supposed to be one of the fundamen-
tal lessons that literary studies imparts.
But after decades of being personae
non gratae, literary characters are fi-
nally getting scholarly attention again.
Some of the most interesting and in-
ventive academic criticism of the past
twenty years has violated the taboo
on character talk, denying or at least
calling into question the broad assump-
tions that governed literary- critical
ideas about character for most of the
twentieth century.Let’s start by giving those assump-
tions their due. Where does the idea
that we need to be careful not to treat
fictional characters like real human
beings come from? Moi points to an
essay published in 1933 by the English
scholar L. C. Knights entitled “How
Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?”
Knights didn’t answer, or even properly
pose, the title question, which by his
lights is inherently nonsensical (since
Lady Macbeth’s children are never re-
ferred to in the text of Shakespeare’s
play, the question has no possible an-
swer). Instead, he attacked his fellow
critics for wasting time and energy on
such nonissues. In Knights’s view, this
emphasis on Shakespeare’s characters
was the legacy of a sentimental ten-dency that had grown up in the eigh-
teenth century, when “an inability to
appreciate the Elizabethan idiom and a
consequent inability to discuss Shake-
speare’s plays as poetry” encouraged
critics to blather on about his charac-
ters’ humanity in order to have some-
thing to talk about.
The era produced works such as Mau-
rice Morgann’s Essay on the Dramatic
Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777),
written to defend the title character
against accusations of cowardice by
Samuel Johnson and others. Morgann
went so far as to claim that there was
a “Falstaff of Nature” from whom one
could extract “general principles” that
might be at odds with the behavior of
“the Stage Falstaff” in plays like Henry
IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Dismissing what he took to be the pa-
tently absurd idea that Shakespeare’s
characters could be extrapolated from
the text of his plays, Knights insisted
that “the only profitable approach to
Shakespeare is a consideration of his
plays as dramatic poems, of his use
of language to obtain a total complex
emotional response.” Forget about
Lady Macbeth’s children or Falstaff’s
general principles: we should be con-
cerned with nothing but “the words on
the page, which it is the main business
of the critic to examine.”
Knights’s argument traveled well: his
strict textualism complemented that
of the New Critics then ascendant in
American academia, and his scorn for
treating fictional characters as indepen-
dent entities with any existence beyond
the text was reinforced by successive
waves of formalist, structuralist, and
deconstructionist literary theory from
Europe. It’s unsurprising, though, that
the reaction against character criti-
cism germinated in Shakespeare stud-
ies. Shakespeare’s characters had long
been treated as if they were not only
real people but exemplary ones. In
Character: The History of a Cultural
Obsession Marjorie Garber notes that,
for European culture since the seven-
teenth century,Shakespeare was the author who
provided, through his dramatic
characters, not only powerful “im-
itations” of human conduct, emo-
tion, and attitude, but the blueprint,
the language, and the responses
that taught us how to be us.Figures like Hamlet and Romeo
were endlessly analyzed for clues to
human nature and made into models
of conduct, both good and bad. The
idea that Shakespeare’s characters are
somehow quintessentially human even
left its mark on the sciences. Charles
Darwin’s The Expression of the Emo-
tions in Man and Animals (1872) cites
passages from Henry V to illustrate
anger (“When the blast of war blows in
our ears/Then imitate the action of the
tiger”) and Titus Andronicus to depict
shame (“Ah! now thou turn’st away thy
face for shame!”). A generation later,
Freud drew on Richard III, among
other Shakespearean characters, for
his 1916 paper “Some Character- Ty p e s
Met with in Psycho- Analytic Work”:
“We all think we have reason to re-
proach Nature and our destiny for con-
genital and infantile disadvantages; we
all demand reparation for early wounds
to our narcissism, our self- love.”We could chalk all of this up to Bar-
dolatry, of course; something about
Shakespeare seems to make people
(especially English people) act a lit-
tle funny. For Garber, though, Shake-
speare is merely a privileged example
of a cultural dynamic operating across
the centuries: the way specific literary
characters inform a more general con-
ception of human psychology, and vice
versa. Reading about characters, it has
long been thought, builds character; it
also helps us to define and understand
it. In the fourth century BC Theo-
phrastus, a disciple of Aristotle, wrote
a literary work entitled Characters, a
collection of thirty brief descriptions
of characters such as the Flatterer, the
Chatterer, the Superstitious Man, theIllustration by Joanna Neborsky