Character

Characters are the life of literature: they are the objects of our curiosity and fascination, affection and dislike, admiration and condemnation. Indeed, so intense is our relationship with literary characters that they often cease to be simply ‘objects’. Through the power of identification, through sympathy and antipathy, they can become part of how we conceive ourselves, a part of who we are. More than two thousand years ago, writing about drama in the Poetics, Aristotle argued that character is ‘secondary’ to what he calls the ‘first essential’ or ‘soul’ of tragedy – the plot – and that characters are included ‘on account of the action’ (Aristotle 2000, 65-6). Considerably more recently in an essay on the modern novel, ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), the novelist Henry James asked, ‘What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?’ (James 1986, 174). While Aristotle makes character ‘secondary’ to plot, James suggests that the two are equal and mutually defining. Indeed, the novels and plays we respond to most strongly almost invariably have forceful characters as well as an intriguing plot. Our memory of a particular novel or play often depends as much on our sense of a particular character as on the ingenuities of the story-line. Characters in books have even become part of our everyday language. Oedipus, for example, has given his name to a condition fundamental to psychoanalytic theory, whereby little boys want to kill their fathers and sleep with their mothers. Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s play The Rivals (1775) has given us the word ‘malapropism’, for when someone uses, for example, the word ‘illiterate’ to mean ‘obliterate’ (see I.2.178). A ‘romeo’ denotes a certain kind of amorous young man resembling the hero of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595). When we refer to someone as a ‘scrooge’, we mean a miser, but when we do so we are alluding, knowingly or not, to the protagonist of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), for whom Christmas is a fatuous

waste of time and money. Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1958) has permanently associated that name with what the OED defines, somewhat problematically, as ‘a sexually precocious schoolgirl’, with all that that phrase might imply about child abuse. There is even a day named after a fictional character: ‘Bloomsday’ (16 June) is named after the protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Leopold Bloom.