C h a r a c t e r6 7If the self is bound up with its changing experiences, then it no
longer has the unity and consistency of Bunyan’s Everyman or
Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. It is less able to recount a coherent story
of itself. Its beliefs and desires do not necessarily hang together to
form a seamless whole. Neither do the works in which such char-
acters appear. From Aristotle to the present day, critics have tended
to assume that literary works should be tightly integrated wholes,
with not a stray symbol dangling or a hair out of place. But why
should this necessarily be a value? Can’t conflict and dissonance be
commendable as well? Perhaps, as Woolf sometimes suspects, the
self is just a bundle of chance sensations and perceptions, with only
a vacancy at its core. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom has a modernist mind
of this kind, responsive to fragments of sensation but with little
continuity. It is true that he is also a fully rounded, painstakingly
detailed figure, but this is among other things a satirical send- up of
the realist or naturalistic notion of character. If George Eliot shows
her characters seated at breakfast, Joyce will go one step further
and show its hero seated on the lavatory. Bloom is the creation of a
dissident Irishman taking a smack at the stoutly realist British.
Oscar Wilde, another subversive Irishman who made a career out
of baiting the British, described truth as ‘one’s latest mood’. For
him to be truly free meant to be free of a consistent selfhood, as
well as being free to bed the sons of the English nobility.
There is another way in which modernist works seek to dismantle
traditional ideas of character. This is by trying to reveal something
of the forces that shape the self at the deepest level. D.H. Lawrence
declared that he was not concerned with character or personality,
since the depths of selfhood he was plumbing lay far beneath the
conscious ego. In the wake of Freud, orthodox notions of identity
are bound to be thrown into question. Conscious life is now just