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Their goal: make us love (or hate) the characters. There aren’t a lot of
terribly subtle shadings of character in Dickens or Thackeray. We cheer and hiss
with enthusiasm. Readers responded to these characters as if they were family
members (or threats to them). Character is absolutely central to the ongoing
serial. Think of J.R. and Bobby Ewing. Why has Susan Lucci been able to keep
the same role for three hundred years? Because viewers respond viscerally to her
character. In Victorian times, readers wrote to novelists with their thoughts on
the current book, and writers listened. Thackeray was told that readers wanted
“less of Amelia,” the sugary-sweet, somewhat boring girl in Vanity Fair, that
they wanted to see Laura marry Warrington in Pendennis (which title has always
struck me as more than vaguely obscene, but no matter). Novels were changed
based on fan reaction, sometimes even to projected reaction, as in Bulwer￾Lytton’s famous advice to Dickens not to attempt the more logical, unhappy
ending of Great Expectations. Again, I give you Dallas: why did they
miraculously revive the dead Bobby Ewing? Fan unrest.
In all these cases, the central reality is that readers wish to be involved in
their novels. Wish? Nay, need. The earnestness with which nineteenth-century
readers engaged with characters and their stories is touching in its naïveté. At the
same time we know that, in our own day, characters on series television
sometimes receive fan or hate mail (more often the latter) and stars of soap
operas are often greeted with either the love or venom their characters, and not
they, merit. Whence comes that need for involvement? I believe it grows out of
the desire to be swept away to somewhere else, and that’s what novels do, even
when the place they sweep us to looks a great deal like our own. A reader in
Dorset or Wiltshire might recognize the landscapes and notable buildings of
Hardy’s Wessex, might see exterior Dorchester in his Casterbridge, but the place
in which Tess or Jude live and struggle bears scant resemblance to any place
current or historical. Joyce’s Dublin has real place-names in it, and one can map
out every story and novel (and indeed, someone has, in many cases more than
once). And those of us who have been to academic conferences learn, to either
our consternation or, more likely, relief, that they are neither as hilarious nor as
disastrous as those in the novels of David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury. They are
just close enough to the originals to give a frisson of recognition, just far enough
away to be entertaining. The American poet Marianne Moore characterized her
poetry as the making of “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” In the case
of novels, the real—or potentially real—toads are characters, persons we can
react to, relate to, accept or reject, identify with, suffer over.
Sometimes those persons and their environments are quite familiar, as in the
case of Iris Murdoch’s fiction. She was successful most of her twenty-seven
times out of the gate with a fairly simple formula: take perfectly ordinary
members of the privileged class—academics (like the author and her husband,
John Bayley), television executives, publishers, stage people—place them in
ordinary circumstances—summer home, retirement villa, suburban terrace house
—and introduce one odd event—a surprise appearance of former friend or
complete stranger, an accidental death, a crime witnessed—and watch what
happens. And we did. Readers flocked to her work from Under the Net (1954) to
Jackson’s Dilemma (1995), putting up with sometimes windy philosophical
observations from the truly observant and the harebrained alike, just to see what
happened next. It was a familiar world, as many of her readers did indeed belong
to the class she portrayed, did in fact live in Murdochland, as it was often called,
or its overseas equivalents. Why? Because she made us believe in her characters
and want to see what they might get up to.
Do we have to love them? Want to be them? No. That’s part of the beauty of
the novel, that it follows the Law of Us and Them: Readers choose the degree to
which they identify with characters. We can try on experiences and identities for
a few hours that we would never want as our permanent condition, or we can
stand aloof from the proceedings and take only a clinical interest. We don’t have
to be Heathcliff or Aureliano Buendía or Tess, but we can be if we want. Every
teacher knows this, having had students in the same class divide between those
who identify fully with Atticus Finch or Jane Eyre and those who wouldn’t touch
them with a barge pole. The novel goes on either way, and so does the reading.