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Boaster, the Coward, the Oligarch, and
the Slanderer. Here, for instance, is the
Gross Man:
The Gross Man is the sort of
person who, meeting free- born
women, pulls up his clothes and
exposes his genitals. At the theatre
he goes on clapping when others
cease, and hisses the actors whom
the public like. In the midst of a
general silence he leans back and
belches to make everybody turn
round.There’s already a tension here, one
that will continue to haunt literary
characters over the course of their his-
tory, between typicality—the Gross
Man obviously is meant in some sense
to represent all gross men—and specifi-
city: the details need to be convincingly
concrete in order for the imaginative
exercise to have any value at all. Who
is the Gross Man? A fiction? A satir-
ical portrait of a real Athenian? A
model for playwrights to copy? A type
to watch out for, or avoid becoming
oneself?
Theophrastus’ text was widely im-
itated by English and French writers
of the early seventeenth century. Sir
Thomas Overbury’s Characters, or
Witty Descriptions of the Properties
of Sundry Persons (1614) includes
sketches of a Good Woman, a Dis-
sembler, an Ignorant Glory- Hunter,
a Braggadocio Welshman, and so on.
John Earle’s Microcosmography, or,
A Piece of the World Characterized
(1628) stretches the conceit to cover
not just persons (a Child, an Old Col-
lege Butler, a Sceptick in Religion) but
locations (a Tavern, a Prison, a Bowl-
Alley). Such “characteristic writing” is
often understood by literary historians
as a primitive form of the more elab-
orate and intricate characterization
found in realist novels of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. But in his
idiosyncratic, often brilliant Charac-
ter as Form, Aaron Kunin argues that
Renaissance writers like Overbury
and Earle “had the right idea about
character.”* Literary characters are
not individuated examples of fictional
personhood but forms that can encom-
pass a range of examples across history:
“Character... is a form of art by which
examples are drawn into types.”
As Kunin acknowledges, this view of
character might seem odd when consid-
ered from the vantage point of realist
fiction, which does tend to treat char-
acters as one- of- a- kind individuals. But
it’s much more intuitive when you think
of characters in plays, films, or televi-
sion series, who can be portrayed by
different performers without a sense of
inauthenticity or paradox: on the con-
trary, the multiple examples create a
sense that the character is much richer.
Sean Conner y, George Lazenby, Roger
Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Bros-
nan, and Daniel Craig are all James
Bond, despite being six distinct human
beings, and we accept this state of af-
fairs because we understand what a
character is. (Queen Elizabeth II, for
that matter, is Helen Mirren, Freya
Wilson, Claire Foy, and Olivia Col-
man, as well as being a historical figure
and a currently living person.) “Try...
to think of character as a container
that gives shape to the materials it con-
tains,” Kunin instructs. The important
thing about characters is not that they
are unique but that they can contain
lots of different contents, that they can
be emptied out and filled up again.This seventeenth- century view of
character was occluded by the rise of the
novel, which, in Kunin’s words, rewrote
“earlier literary history so that what
used to be called character [had] to be
renamed caricature or stereotype.” For
novelists like Daniel Defoe and Henry
Fielding, a character was not a con-
tainer but an individual being with a
name, an interior life, and a reasonably
plausible biography—or, rather, a con-
vincing simulation thereof. Catherine
Gallagher has argued that eighteenth-
century novelists had to train their
readers to accept that the characters in
their books were not either allegorical
figures or thinly disguised portraits of
real people: that they referred to noth-
ing and nobody. Paradoxically, though,
these novelists found that “readers at-
tach themselves to characters because
of, not despite, their fictionality.... Fic-
tional characters.. .were thought to be
easier to sympathize or identify with
than most real people.”
Why did this new, more individualis-
tic conception of character come about
when and where it did? A number of
ingenious arguments have been made
over the years about how the history
of novelistic characters interacts with
the rise of market capitalism. Liter-
ary historians like Gallagher, Deidre
Lynch, and Mary Poovey have pointed
to the emergence of a credit economy
in eighteenth- century Britain, and the
attendant need to assess the trustwor-
thiness of strangers, as a factor in the
career of literary character. In a com-
plex commercial society, speculating
about imaginary beings who behave
more or less like real people taught
middle- class readers how to think
about one another: whom to credit,
whom to suspect, how to strategize
and craft alliances. Evaluating the ac-
tions of a character like Tom Jones or
Mr. Darcy could be good practice for
judging a potential business partner
(if you’re a man) or spouse (if you’re a
woman).
If capitalism made fictional charac-
ters more individual, it also made them
more reproducible. Another account of
the parallel evolution of fictional char-
acters and market society can be found
in David Brewer’s fascinating The Af-
terlife of Character, 1726 –1825 (2005),
which deals with a phenomenon he
calls “imaginative expansion,” or, more
colorfully, “character migration.” This
is the tendency of readers to invent
further adventures for characters from
popular literary texts, with or without
the sanction of the original creators.
Such migrations accelerated in the
eighteenth century. For instance, Lem-
uel Gulliver appears not only in Jona-
than Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels but also
in poems like “Mary Gulliver to Capt.
Lemuel Gulliver; An Epistle” and “A
Lilliputian Ode on the Engine with
which Captain Gulliver extinguish’d
the Flames in the Royal Palace,” plays
like David Garrick’s Lilliput: A Dra-
matic Entertainment, and prose fictions
like An Account of the State of Learn-
ing in the Empire of Lilliput—none
of them written by Swift. The titular
heroine of Samuel Richardson’s Pa-mela features in several further works,
some of them satirical (there was an
entire contingent of “anti- Pamelists,”
including Henry Fielding, author of
Shamela), some merely concerned with
continuing her story. Even Falstaff re-
turns, in William Kenrick’s Falstaff’s
Wedding (1760), in which the old rogue
finally settles down with a nice matron
named Ursula.
Brewer argues that a peculiar tech-
nological and legal conjuncture drove
the popularity of character migration in
the eighteenth century. Post- Gutenberg
print culture was disseminating literary
characters far and wide, but modern
copyright law had not yet emerged to
put a brake on widespread recycling of
what we would now call “intellectual
property.” Rather than seeing specific
characters as inextricably attached to
their authors, eighteenth- century read-
ers instead had “a persistent fantasy
that literary characters were both fun-
damentally inexhaustible and available
to all.” Indeed, the more fictional char-
acters like Pamela were copied, the
more they appeared to be fair game.
The practice of imaginative expan-
sion has never entirely disappeared—
witness the unlicensed fan fiction of
today—but it was curbed considerably
in the early nineteenth century by the
passage of stricter copyright laws and
by a more proprietary attitude on the
part of authors. A pivotal figure was
Walter Scott, the most popular novelist
of his day, who was much more vigilant
about protecting his characters than his
peers or predecessors. In an astonish-
ing moment in the preface to his 1820
novel The Monastery, Scott warns Cap-
tain Cuthbert Clutterbuck, a characterof his own creation, not to pop up in
any other writers’ books:If, therefore, my dear friend, your
name should hereafter appear on
any title page without mine, read-
ers will know what to think of
you.... As you owe your literary
existence to me on the one hand,
so, on the other, your very all is at
my disposal. I can at pleasure cut
off your annuity, strike your name
from the half- pay establishment,
nay actually put you to death, with-
out being answerable to any one.This outburst resembles nothing so
much as the classic parental threat: “I
brought you into this world, I can take
you out of it.”Once the borders between books
began to be regulated by the state,
character migration became rarer, but
internal migration, as it were, inten-
sified. The most extravagant exper-
iment with this technique—having
characters circulate among multiple
books by a single author—is the cele-
brated retour des personnages in The
Human Comedy, Honoré de Balzac’s
immense series of linked novels about
nineteenth- century French society.
Figures such as the doctor Horace Bi-
anchon, the moneylender Jean- Esther
van Gobseck, and the criminal master-
mind Jacques Collin play crucial parts
in multiple novels, and minor characters
in one narrative will frequently be re-
cast as protagonists in the next. Balzac’s
characters, as György Lukács wrote in
1950, “protrude beyond the framework*In the interest of full disclosure, I
should mention that Kunin is a col-
league of mine at Pomona College.
M.A. in Biography and Memoir
Learn more and apply online at:
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For more information, go to llcb.ws.gc.cuny.eduKeynote address by David Levering Lewis.
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Lives,” a conversation between David W. Blight
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David Levering Lewis Annette Gordon-Reed David W. BlightPhoto:^ Tony^ Rinaldo