14 The New York Review
of one novel and demand another”:
they’re rarely content to remain minor.
Balzac didn’t invent the recurring
character, but he did carry it further
than any writer before or since. It’s es-
timated that there are 2,472 separate
characters in The Human Comedy,
hundreds of whom appear in more than
one novel. In his delightful new book
Balzac’s Lives, Peter Brooks offers
chapter- length “biographies” of nine
of them, alongside critical commen-
tary on the works in which they appear.
It’s an interesting experiment, which
throws Balzac’s peculiar method of
character construction into relief.
Although he is regarded as a master
of realism, by contemporary fictional
standards his characters seem more
melodramatic than realistic: they are,
in Forster’s terms, relatively “flat,”
usually motivated by a single desire
or idée fixe. In Le Père Goriot, for in-
stance, Eugène de Rastignac wants to
be a success in Parisian society; Père
Goriot loves his daughters and will
do anything for them. Knowing these
simple facts allows you to understand
most of the relevant details of their
psychologies, and Balzac doesn’t spend
an inordinate amount of time on fussy
behavioral tics or interior ruminations.
What we get in place of psychological
nuance is sociological detail: we always
know his characters’ parentage, class
status, income level, and address, and
what these facts communicate about
their position in French society.
Brooks argues that Balzac’s dis-
tinctively exhaustive way of handling
character is a reaction to a “postrevo-
lutionary France [that] has abolished
the distinctive marks of identity of the
ancien régime.... How can you tell who
people are, what milieu they belong to,
what their past histories may be?” You
can tell by telling their stories, in en-
cyclopedic detail. One wants to say, if
the distinction makes sense, that Bal-
zac doesn’t have interesting characters:
he has characters with interesting lives.
This is because, for Balzac, character is
plot, and vice versa: the way to make
characters more “real” is simply to
make their histories more elaborately
narrated.
If this conflation of character and
narrative is determined in part, as
Brooks suggests, by the political his-
tory of postrevolutionary France, it
also owes something to the dynamics of
literary history sketched above. Once a
character is conceived not as a type or
form but as a specific individual with a
unique life history, what principle al-
lows you to stop narrating—especially
when you are depicting a milieu as
crowded as nineteenth- century Paris?
As Alex Woloch points out in his im-
portant study The One vs. the Many
(2003), Balzac’s novels register “the
unthinkable multiplicity of nineteenth-
century urban life”; they are not merely
populated but overpopulated. Like
the metropole itself, Woloch argues,
the nineteenth- century realist novel
is “structurally destabilized... by too
many people.”
Within each novel jostles a multitude
of characters, each of whom, under the
right circumstances, can lay equal claim
to the writer’s attention. This formal
instability reflects “the competing pull
of inequality and democracy within the
nineteenth- century bourgeois imagi-
nation.” In a modern capitalist democ-
racy, nobody is inherently better than
anyone else, but a few people necessar-
ily have many more resources and thus
a higher social status. Hence the formal
and sociological law that underlies all
fiction since the nineteenth century, ac-
cording to Woloch: “Any character can
be a protagonist, but only one charac-
ter is.” In principle everybody matters,
but in practice only a few of us do.What has motivated the return of
character criticism in the twenty- first
century? It was probably inevitable,
given the tendency of literary studies
to revive old, stigmatized methodol-
ogies under the banner of “the New”
(New Criticism, New Historicism,
New Formalism, and so on). But it also
reflects deep professional anxieties
about declining student enrollments,
the scarcity of tenure- track jobs, and
a perceived loss of prestige for literary
studies in general. Moi, Felski, and An-
derson are explicit about this in the in-
troduction to their book:Concern with character is a de-
fining aspect of reader or viewer
engagement with many forms of
fiction. It is one of the means by
which fiction makes claims upon
us. Yet criticism has often failed to
give this concern its due.One reason for this, they think, is
that “scholars of literature in the earlytwentieth century felt impelled to un-
derscore the difference between their
own practices of interpretation and
everyday forms of reading,” thus alien-
ating large swaths of lay readers. Liter-
ary criticism, on this account, is simply
not devoting enough attention to the
things that readers actually like about
literature.
This echoes a critique of the pro-
fession made ten years ago by Blakey
Vermeule, in her lively and provocative
Why Do We Care About Literary Char-
acters? (2010). “The founding gesture
(or was it a sin?) of literary criticism
may have been to suppress a psycho-
logical interest in character in favor
of more difficult topics,” Vermeule
writes. “Theorists have long fashioned
themselves as crusaders against the
pleasures and dangers of literary ab-
sorption, reacting suspiciously to the
ordinary pleasures people take in fic-
tional characters.” In order for literary
studies to survive, she implies, it needs
to take seriously “the importance of
what we care about.” And what people
care about is people.
According to the evolutionary psy-
chology narrative Vermeule favors, hu-
mans as a species have evolved to try to
read one another’s minds, in order to
better cooperate and compete with one
another. For this reason, “the human
intellect is extremely well- suited to
thinking about other people, theirproblems, and the situations they get
themselves into.” This would explain
our interest in fictional characters:
even when we know they aren’t real,
humans and human- like entities are
endlessly fascinating to us. Literary
critics should accept this fundamental
fact about human cognition, Vermeule
argues, and not try to abolish it by the-
oretical fiat.
There’s a slightly desperate hope
underlying these methodological argu-
ments: Perhaps reengaging with char-
acter can help put the human back in
the humanities? It would be nice to be-
lieve that all literary academics need to
do to reverse the tailspin in which our
discipline appears to be locked is to
throw out some old theoretical assump-
tions and stop scolding undergraduates
for finding Emma Wodehouse relat-
able. But this seems unlikely to have
more than a marginal benefit, as far as
the systemic problems facing the hu-
manities go.
That said, there’s truth in the obser-
vation that characters are among the
aspects of literature that people most
intuitively gravitate to, and that aca-
demics should accept this and use it
to their advantage. As a teacher, I’ve
often found that the easiest way into a
complex literary text is to begin with
speculation about characters’ behavior,
motives, and relationships, a mode of
discussion that, as Vermeule suggests,
isn’t terribly far removed from gossip.
Take Toni Morrison’s Beloved, for
instance: any adequate discussion will
eventually encompass questions of
genre (the Southern Gothic novel, mag-
ical realism) and history (the traumatic
legacies of American slavery). But I
usually start where Morrison does:
with the protagonist, Sethe, and her
daughter Denver, two taciturn charac-
ters whose feelings about each other we
are invited to guess at from the novel’s
first pages. A purist like Knights would
disapprove of this gambit: Sethe and
Denver aren’t real people, after all, and
if Morrison doesn’t tell us specifically
what they’re thinking and feeling about
each other, then there’s no way we can
know. But as Vermeule says, trying to
read other people’s minds and scan-
ning for “social information” is some-
thing students are already skilled at (in
part, perhaps, because they’ve learned
it from reading fiction).
We don’t have to leave it there, of
course, and we shouldn’t. Vermeule
reductively suggests that a lust for so-
cial information underlies all literary
interpretation, that “most stories are
gossip literature.” But in my experience
the desire to understand characters is
merely one on- ramp for the reader, one
way to access all of the other valuable
things a literary text might be able to
give. “The problems we care about
come packaged in human form,” as
Vermeule puts it, but one of the indis-
pensable things about the packages
called fictional characters is that we
can fill them up with whatever prob-
lems we want others to care about, too.
Characters not only usher students
into classrooms and hold their hands
through the more tedious moments;
they are also load- bearing mechanisms
for ideas that exceed them (neoliber-
alism, the Bildungsroman, white su-
premacy, différance: take your pick).
In their approachability, flexibility, and
complexity, characters do professors
a great service. The least we can do is
admit that they’re real. QADVICE FOR PLINY THE ELDER,
BIG DADDY OF MANSPLAINERSGreat Man, now that you are dead, allow me to squeeze your hand. The sage
bushes in Umbria are heavy with bees, so I’m killing them with hypnosis. I
am a mere woman—inferior lettuce—but I understand swoon aka mirabilia.
I fill this cup with nectar and offer it to soothe your Vesuvian wounds. I share
your love of baths and classification and sure, if we had to point to a god in the
sky, why not call him Thunderbolt? I too believe sewers are the great architectural
invention. I do all my searching on roads. It has been two thousand years so we
can forgive some of your assertions. The sea mouse who helps whales find their
way by parting the brows above their eyes. The one-eyed humans and Sciopods
with umbrella feet, the whole exotic bestiary. If I had no mouth but could live
off the smell of apples I’d move to Kashmir—scratch that, maybe Sussex.
Once a month, when the blood comes, I go out to lie in whatever field I
find to feel the scorch rise and the crops wither. Our powers are much
depleted. I can stand among men in full swing of my menstruus and
nothing will dim their ability to tell me about me. There are birds
at the window this morning I can’t name and dogs in the valley
beyond, who are using their bell-shaped lungs to announce
their happiness again and again and again. Nothing has
changed. We worry about the wane and winnow. In
your time perhaps the ladies used bits of cut-up
smocks but these days we have menstrual cups.
Desire is still a kind of ruin—that silly bird
fluttering against the window net,
trying to get in, the body’s steady
lilt toward oblivion. They say you
had a sister, like Shakespeare’s—
mostly overlooked. That it was she
who first noticed the smoky clouds
which sent you on your way. Dear
Pliny, I guess you never heard the
one about curiosity. The cat is real.
The earth never tires of giving
birth. If you get too close
to a volcano, you should
know it may erupt.—Tishani Doshi