How much complexity of character

Characters are often but personified ideas, possessed of little vitality and uncolored
with the hues of life. By this we mean merely that the characters_are not untrue, but that they have been stripped of all but the one or few qualities essential to the author's purpose. The one principle, selection, here, as in every division of our subject, has again been invoked. For consider the complexity of human character, and realize how little of it an author can set forth in a few pages. We applaud a novel which de¬lineates one, or at the most several, characters with something of the complexity we behold in life. And here, even, the resemblance is but seeming. In a short narrative the problem is yet more formidable, the selection more exacting.
How, then, must the writer select; what is there to guide him in his difficulty? He must first free his characters of contradictory qualities; they must not be inconsistent. Now, it is notori¬ous that in real life people do act with apparent inconsistency. I say apparent, for, could we know them sufficiently well, the inconsistencies might be perfectly explicable. But this knowl¬edge is impossible. A man may in the morning do one thing, and in the afternoon, because of some subtle influence of the weather or his digestion, do the exact opposite. In a story he must not so act unless the contradictory action is satisfactorily explained, and this explanation is seldom possible by reason of space limitations.
The writer is forced to make his creations reason¬able, logical, and in the main dependable. He may, of course, draw an inconsistent character, but the inconsistencies must then be expected, be in themselves reliable. It is not permissible to draw a character consistent in all things, and then at a crucial moment force that character to do the unexpected. A story in this respect differs widely from life. In life we expect in¬consistency; in a story we depend upon its elimination. It is a hard lesson for the young writer to learn, for he has his eye upon some one he knows who has revealed the very contra¬dictory qualities which he selects. He knows many an instance of the inexplicable. "This is life," says he; "and should I not write of life as I know it?" To this there is but the one answer: a story is art, and art is not life but a rationalized semblance of life. As the story as a whole must be rational, logical, so must the characters be who constitute that story.
Let us assume that the young writer has grasped this distinction and has given it a ten¬tative acceptance. What further guide is there to his selection among the many characteristics which human nature reveals to him? Here his purpose in the story is the determining factor in the selection. If, as we have seen, his pur¬pose is to tell a story of action, his choice will lie
among the universal qualities of heroism, coward¬ice, deceit, perseverance, and the like. If his purpose is to bring out an idea, his characters may be stripped of all other than the few neces¬sary traits. Thus, in Hawthorne we have a man dominated by the single purpose to remove from his wife's beauty its one blot. The man is not human; in life he would be deterred from the accomplishment of his desire by love and pity and kindred affections. In the story he must not be so complex, but must proceed unswervingly as though possessed of the one idea. Again, in Poe's The Cask of Amontillado the chief charac¬ter is but a personified quality, the desire for revenge. Were he too complex, the story could not move with its swift certainty to the goal sought.
We may well ask how far this simplification through selection may be carried. In certain old-fashioned moral tales the characters are but personified virtues and vices, abstractions merely. These, it will be objected, are uninteresting and untrue to life. In Pilgrim's Progress we feel that Christian and Greatheart and Mr. Worldly Wiseman bear but a faint semblance to real people. And they are uninteresting by reason of this remoteness. In Hawthorne, too, we ask for more truth to reality than the author grants us. The objection is reasonable. The check
is always life. If the simplified character is too far removed from reality it fails of its intended illusory effect, for, though the story is not life, it must resemble life. The more universal the quality or qualities selected, the greater the chance of the reader's acceptance of them. He will from his own imagination supply the minor characteristics necessary. If the quality is un¬usual for one so dominant, the greater the need of humanizing it by the addition of one or more simple characteristics less exceptional. The aim of the story and the writer's grasp of life must both aid in determining the character selection.
If character be the aim of the story, the writer may be as complex as space will permit. In a novel the complexity may, therefore, be much greater than in a short narrative. But the prin¬ciple of selection, though less exacting, is none the less active, and the writer is well prompted if he limits his characters rather more than at first thought he deems necessary. By so doing he will gain both in intensity and contrast. If the analysis is too minute, the qualities too va¬ried, the reader may easily become lost in a maze and fail to appreciate at its proper value the particular psychological knot it is the writer's purpose to untangle.
It is for this reason—the necessity of character appearing logical and representative, and yet
not overcomplex—that the writer is well in¬spired if he conceives his characters imagina¬tively rather than attempts to draw them directly from human originals. Much of the weakness of realistic fiction is, I am convinced, due to the failure of writers to create characters imagina¬tively. Rather do they attempt to set down, unmodified, persons they have seen and known. The complexities and inconsistencies of these real people stand in the way of a compelling picture, and the result is a lack of convincing¬ness.
Category:Character