Character in Contemporary Fiction

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2004 by Phillips, Brian

Imagination is the theater of fiction, where words are costumed in meaning, and characters walk. A man in a book is a mark on a page, till the mind makes a name of it; a name is an empty cipher, merely a silt of sound, till the mind informs it with words. "Many years ago there lived in Zuchnow in Russia, a man named Mendel Singer": the mind takes the words that apply, and includes them in the name. "Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress." "Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls." The action of the mind in its first acquaintance with a literary character involves a constant indexing of impressions, a harvest of inklings; what is said in description or narration is scrutinized in innumerable ways, each of which, sustaining or correcting the others, contributes to the shape of the person who begins to exist in our imagination. As his behavior, appearance, speech, and thought, themselves abstractions from words, absorb our conscious attention, we receive, perhaps unconsciously, the subtler influences of language, and allow everything from the writer's evident tone to the physical procedure of syntax to leave a mark on our imagined person's form. When we are introduced to "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich," our first idea of Emma is not merely a sum of the given information; the exquisite and slightly self-conscious equanimity of the phrase, as though Austen were simply writing a list of synonyms, tells us a great deal about Emma and her world. We sense that these attributes are valued highly in Emma's society, and by Emma herself; we also sense that they cannot exist in such perfect balance with any human identity, and so we begin to understand the flaw in Emma's self-conception which it is Austen's task to disclose.

The precision of Austen's style is in proportion to its delicacy. Even a slight change here would be enough to upset the intended effect, even a mere reversal in the priority of words. If we were introduced to "Emma Woodhouse, rich, clever, and handsome," for instance, instead of "handsome, clever, and rich," our sense of Emma might begin on a very different scale. Emma's beauty and intelligence might seem a little less natural, and a little more bought. Emma would seem a little less likable; we would judge her more harshly from the outset; we would begin with a premonition of resentment. Of course, we have our own prejudices, which language may inflame. A young woman who is herself handsome, clever, and rich may find that her impression of Emma diverges quite seriously from that of a young man who is only clever, say, or only rich. What is remarkable is that our notion of a literary character, so susceptible at first to any stray feature of depiction or experience, can so quickly become independent, so that, confronted with an uncharacteristic act, we are provoked to frustration, and cry, "But that is not like Sarah!," or even, "But Tom would never do that!" "To read one of her books," G. H. Lewes writes of Austen, "is like an actual experience of life: you know the people as if you have lived with them, and you feel something of personal affection toward them." Remarkable, that the mind can begin with a clutter of words, and end with something like the memory of a real person; that the mind can feel a passion of real acquaintance for what began as a pattern of ink spilled on a page.

Because everything there is to know or feel about a literary character begins for the reader in words, style, in its widest sense, must be the vehicle of the character's survival, the ferry of her passage from the writer's to the reader's imagination. This is more than Flaubertian scruple, that compulsive hygienics of sentences which, more than his masterful use of the style indirect libre, has been Flaubert's legacy among late twentieth-century writers. Indeed, it is sometimes hard to escape the conclusion that Flaubert's influence on style, by enshrining the obsession with refinement that has brought us to the brittle efficiency of so much modern prose, has been harmful to the representation of character in fiction, that it is partly to blame for the twentieth-century stiffening of nineteenth-century flexibilities. For style in its widest sense is not merely the beauty or the grace or the conventional deportment of language, but its whole expressive apparatus, its breadth of capability. If we expect that human character is an elusive and variable thing, then we cannot expect to catch it in a stiff and invariable style. The writer's work of imagining character must, in a sense, precede and remain separate from the work of writing it: style alone cannot determine how a character might act, or when, and it is possible for a writer of good sentences to be a writer of bad characters. But in another sense, style is really the instrument of conception; it determines how action is expressed, and hence how action is received; its potential is what may be said. This is what Conrad means when he advises a fellow writer that "The things 'as they are' exist in words; therefore words should be handled with care lest the picture, the image of truth abiding in facts, should become distorted-or blurred." Conrad concludes: "This is the only morality of art apart from subject."