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Men (and Women) Made out of Words, or My Pip Ain’t Like
Your Pip
PICTURE THIS: IT’S 1841 and the new issue of Master Humphrey’s Clock containing this week’s
installment of The Old Curiosity Shop by Mr. Dickens has appeared. And that sound you hear is weeping. In
streets, in parlors and kitchens, in maids’ rooms under the eaves and masters’ bedrooms, even on the docks
of New York where citizens, incapable of waiting until copies hit the booksellers’stands, have turned up to
ask sailors the important question: “Is Little Nell dead?” The answer prompts many tears. In one of the most
affecting scenes in literature, poor Nell has died, after spending the week since the last installment hovering
between this world and the next.
This is the famous story, and it’s fine as far as it goes. Child heroine, set
upon by villains (Dickens never stints on villainy), devoted grandfather bereft at
his loss, tens of thousands of readers distraught at death in one so young. All
makes sense, right? Except for one thing.
It never happened. There never was a Little Nell. Never an Old Curiosity
Shop. No grandfather, no villains, no death. We know this going in. Every novel
comes with a virtual warning at the outset: “Caution: what follows is made up
and only ever happened in the mind of the writer and, should you continue, in
your mind as well.” Readers know this going in, even if we tend to ignore it en
route. So then, why the weeping?
I really hate to bring this up, but there is no Huck. No Bilbo Baggins. No,
not even a Scarlett O’Hara. The most real character who has ever existed in a
novel is merely a linguistic construction, a house made not out of cards but of
words. So why do we celebrate when they triumph? Suffer when they suffer?
Because words matter. Because those word houses take on a life of their own.
Because we, dedicated and inventive and slightly gullible readers, take those
words and bring our imagination to bear on them, so that mere words become
living beings. There are consequences, naturally. We help to imagine characters.
So that’s why no one agrees on what characters are like.
By way of explanation of this peculiar phenomenon, we turn not to a
novelist but a poet. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, early in the nineteenth century,
gave us the very helpful phrase “willing suspension of disbelief” for the trick of
the mind that readers and viewers perform to allow imaginative works to, well,
work imaginatively. If, at every moment of watching a play or reading a novel,
we consciously insist on what we know to be true, namely, that this thing is not
true, we’ll never reach the end. Instead, we’ll be out of the theater at
intermission, never returning for act two. We’ll put down the “untrue” novel in
favor of a history or a farm price report. But we don’t do that; rather, we accept
fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours.
Does this mean we accept everything in a work of fiction, that we have to
tolerate everything that occurs without a murmur of dissent? Of course not. The
novel may or may not obey the laws of our universe, but it must certainly obey
the laws of its own. If we’re reading a novel by, say, Henry James, and a hobbit
turns up, we’re not buying. The psychological realism of the Jamesian novel
simply does not admit of fabulous creatures. Even very short ones. There are
undoubtedly readers who feel Portrait of a Lady would be improved by the odd
hobbit, but his presence would prove too jarring. When a hobbit turns up in a
work by J. R. R. Tolkien, on the other hand, we’re not surprised in the least.
Middle-earth is just where he belongs. Internal consistency, then, is one of the
main things an audience demands of a literary work. Whatever rules we start
with, we expect to apply throughout.
In general, though, we check our incredulity at the door. There’s a social
contract between novelist and reader: we agree to accept the novel’s premises
and to believe in people and events we know not to exist in the real world. We
even agree to respond to them as if they were real. Novelists, for their part, agree
to live within the rules they establish for this particular narrative. And for the
most part, everybody behaves reasonably well. Except the villains. Naturally.
Why does this contract matter? Why does the novel need its readers to
comply with authorial wishes? Simply put, because the novelist didn’t finish the
job. I don’t mean that he’s deliberately shirked, looked at his watch and said,
“Well, that’s all the time I have for character development.” Rather, he’s obeyed
the laws of his craft, which dictate that characters be incomplete. Some are more
complete than others, of course, but all of them are seriously lacking in some
way or other.
You doubt? Take any novel you like. It needn’t be a classic, but it can be.
Now, start asking yourself what you really know about the characters—looks,
life experiences, attitudes toward government, the lot. You’ll find there’s
considerably less there than you had thought.
Let’s take one you probably read under protest. Tell me everything you
know about Jordan Baker. You remember her, right? The cheating golfer and
sometime romantic interest of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. Here’s the
first part of the exercise: close your eyes and picture her. No problem. If you’ve
ever read the novel, you have an image of Jordan, who doesn’t look much like
Lois Chiles, the actress who played her in the 1973 train wreck of an adaptation.
Beyond that initial description I gave—sport, dishonesty, attractiveness—what
do we know? Not much. She lounges rather deterinedly with Daisy, exhibiting a
distinctly supine modernity. She’s attractive, but Fitzgerald doesn’t cause Nick to
spend too much time on the details. Her hair is the yellow of autumn leaves, her
movements restless and athletic, her poses often struck theatrically with her chin
“jauntily” raised. There are a few more specifics, but she’s a long way from a
whole person physically or psychologically. You can do the same with any of the
minor characters: Klipspringer, Meyer Wolfsheim, either Wilson, even Tom
Buchanan.
Okay, why?
Because that’s all we need. Jordan is part plot device, part stage property,
part thematic articulation. She helps things happen, gives the joint a certain look,
and, through her personal dishonesty, embodies the more general corruption.
Beyond that, we don’t care. In fact, beyond that, we don’t want to know. The
Law of the Conservation of Character states: Thou shalt not burden the punters
with needless character development. Meaning what? If fiction writers are any
good, they only tell you as much as you absolutely need to know. Minor
characters like these require minimal development since they (a) are only on
stage briefly and (b) have very specific roles to play.
Aha! Minor players! But what about the major ones? Very well, then: Daisy,
Nick, and Gatsby. This all gets back to E. M. Forster’s theory of flat and round
characters. Minor characters tend to be flat—that is, two-dimensional cardboard
cutouts rather than fully developed, complete persons. Major characters, by
comparison, are more fully fleshed out, more three-dimensional or “rounded.”
It’s true. Sort of. They are more fully, but not fully, fleshed out.
Why? Because characters aren’t built like pickup trucks—chassis, engine,
transmission, seats, body, skin, windows. They’re sketched, which is why many
of them are pretty sketchy. Moreover, they aren’t typically described in huge
detail or analyzed by the narrator. These are novels, not essays or biographies.
Rather, characters are presented, and what is presented of them are actions and
statements. What do they do and what do they say? Those are the questions the
novelist pursues.
Analysis of those deeds and words falls to another party entirely. That would
be us. What kind of analysis? Biological? Chemical? Not likely. Psychological?
It’s sometimes tried, with mixed results. No, the principal form of analysis we
employ with characters is linguistic. We look at the words, because that’s all
there is. Look around you at the people you meet. Flesh and blood, every single
one of them. Something a character can never be. The best, most vivid, most
fully realized character in all of literature is exactly the same as one who is only
a name and walks through a novel a single time in a single sentence: each is a
verbal construct. Nothing more. And nothing less. Whatever you think you know
about Pip or Frodo or Dumbledore or Emma (Bovary or Woodhouse), you can’t
touch them or smell them or see them, except as words on a page. Language,
pure and simple.
Now you’ve gone and spoiled the illusion.
Not me, Bub. Writers have been doing that for years. Besides, you knew it
already. You’ve read them but never met them, right? Can you picture them?
Literally, now. Assuming you had the ability (a big assumption, if you’ve ever
seen me draw), could you create a picture of your favorite character? Didn’t
think so. It’s okay, not your fault; you lack data. Here’s a word picture of a main
character.
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he
advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head
forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a
charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a
kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It
seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as
at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white
from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his
living as ship-chandler’s water-clerk he was very popular.
This is shocking for two reasons. First, it is the very first paragraph of its
novel, a masterpiece from 1900. We don’t normally meet someone in this much
detail in the first sentences of a novel. And second, it is so direct in its
presentation of physical characteristics. Like the man described, it comes straight
at you, no punches pulled or holds barred. But you know what? That’s almost it
for the novel. Oh, we hear a time or two that he’s fair or that he has pale eyes or
a reddish complexion, but out of ninety thousand words or so, the description of
the main character is only a hundred words altogether—a bull of a man in a
white suit.
That’s what Jim looks like made out of words. And here’s where we discover
the difference between characters as linguistic constructs and characters as
cinematic embodiments. He looks almost nothing, the man in this paragraph, like
Peter O’Toole. Hardly the most powerfully built bullish figure in the barnyard.
Yet that’s who starred in the film version of Lord Jim. It’s okay that he doesn’t
look exactly like Conrad’s conception; what matters with an actor is capturing
the essence of the character—his attitudes and postures, his motivation, his
needs. And that O’Toole can do like nobody’s business. You can’t always get an
actor who physically resembles the person on the page; there might be lots of us
who look like Jim, but most of us can’t act. O’Toole can—and how. In fact, he
can act as if he looks the way he’s supposed to, and we believe him. Mostly,
that’s about behaving the right way to be Jim. His task is made easier since Jim
is famously uncommunicative about his motivations. He leaves a lot of room for
interpretation, which is why Marlow has a job, narratively speaking.
There is a large set of conventions for establishing character, and strangely
enough, less is generally better. Beginning fiction writers almost always err on
the side of excessive detail, offering lengthy descriptions, character histories,
explanations of drives and desires. But this is one place where Hemingway’s
iceberg theory—the savvy novelist keeps the vast majority of what he knows
about his characters and situations buried under the surface—really comes into
play. In fact, the ratio of one part above the surface to four parts below may
actually be too generous in favor of the exposed part.
So less is more. How does that work?
How it works is that character creation is outsourced. To you. To me. Writers
give us enough to begin to form a picture of a character, but not so much that it
will overwhelm us with detail. We supply what else we might need from our
own storehouse of information about how people look in the real world. There
are exceptions of course. If how a character looks will carry enormous weight, or
if elaborate visual detail is evidence of another character (usually the narrator)
obsessing on the one described, then the writer will supply a lot of specifics.
From there, appearance generally matters less and action, both word and deed,
takes over. Even with actions, however, readers must supply interpretation, since
the novelists supply plenty of material but very little elaboration or rationale. In
fact, narrative explication is more often than not misleading or consciously false,
since it tends to come from first-person narrators who, as we know, are
untrustworthy. Since I’ve invoked Hemingway and his iceberg theory, consider
his characters. The only character Jake describes in detail is Robert Cohn, and
that description has more to do with exhibiting Jake’s obsessive loathing of Cohn
than with Cohn’s importance. Of his own appearance, Jake says virtually
nothing. And Brett Ashley is curvy and short-haired, but otherwise, not much
information is forthcoming. Much the same is true of motivations. Why does
Brett go off with Cohn? Or with Romero, the matador? Can her explanation of
her motives for either the affairs or the breakups be trusted, except as further
evidence of her duplicitous (or possibly multivalent) personality? I have my
ideas, but I’ll almost guarantee they’re not all like yours.
That’s how it is with characters and readers. Do you think we all have the
same Brett? Or Ahab? Or Pip? I don’t. I’ve seen character analysis in action too
many times. We each bring a great deal of our own lives, our own perspective,
our own reading of other works, to each new novel that we’ll never see the same
things. Your Pip can never be quite like mine, and not because I’m special. You
and I know too many different things, entertain too many different thoughts,
hold too many different beliefs to see Pip—or any character—in quite the same
way. Same words, same pages. Different us. Sometimes, different me. I find that
my Pip today is not my Pip of yesterday. As I’ve changed over the years, I find
that my thinking about characters has changed as well. I’m much more generous,
for instance, toward youthful folly now than I was in my youth; probably I was
more threatened by it, having so much of it myself. Now that I have an
abundance of other folly, and no youth, the youthful sort has a certain charm.
That’s how it goes. Characters live, dear reader, because we do.