Fiction is real: the boy on the page can speak - why we shouldn't talk about 'characters' developing

 

Oscar Wilde: ‘It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors’

I was having a discussion with a student not long ago, about a novel and its main character, and how that character – a boy –  changes throughout the narrative. At some point, she exclaimed: ‘Ah, I see, this character has grown – he has developed!’.

No, I said, it doesn’t pay to think that way.

Instead, you should think: ‘That person has changed, that person has developed’- he’s not a character, he’s not made of cardboard or balsa wood, he’s not a Platonic shadow: he’s real, he lives and breathes like you and me.

He’s alive.

This idea that a made-up character, in a made-up situation, with made-up parents and friends and occupations, could be real, seems at first illogical. ‘No’ you say, he’s not real: he’s an invention, he’s got no blood in his made-up veins, no feelings in his made-up body and mind – he’s a character in a book of fiction, and as such he cannot exist for himself. His world is the page, and no further.

And so goes the conclusion: the best we can do with him, and others like him, is to treat him as a symbol, an archetype, a meaningful materialisation of what-could-be, who-could-be. In other words: this character carries meaning, he means something above and beyond himself, and that’s how I must read him and think about him.

WRONG 😊 The buzzer’s gone, you’ve got the wrong answer, you’ve lost your €1000 deposit.

Thinking that way – that a character is a character, therefore unreal, therefore a symbol – leads to considering a novel as a set of clues to make sense of life. What then happens is that readers do not attend to the character-as-person, but focus instead on the character-as-mystery-that-needs-to-be-solved.

But is that the way you think about your friends, and people you know?

Do you see them as token of a type (i.e. representatives of something larger than themselves, i.e. not themselves as such)?

Or do you attend to who they are, in and for themselves, before comparing them (or relating them) to larger entities, groups or ways of being?

My friend John, for example: he’s like this, and like that, he does this and that; before, long ago or perhaps only months ago, he used to do this and be like that, now he does that and is like this.

That is who John is: he’s not a character in a book or in a movie, he’s not made-up. He’s real, he talks and thinks and feels and changes; he learns, he forgets, he does stupid things and good things, he’s likable and annoying, helpful and selfish, he’s dependable and also irresponsible, he wants too much, likes too little, does a lot, does nothing…John is real.

So why would a character in a novel be any different? Why would we treat a character on the page any differently from how we treat John? After all, John is who he is because of (thanks to) those things he does or doesn’t do, thanks to those thoughts he has or doesn’t have: those details are what make him John and not, say, Vincent.

Vincent is different: John likes this but Vincent doesn’t; John does that but Vincent doesn’t.

Your job, as a reader, is to first attend to who the characters are as human beings: the fact that they are invented is irrelevant since they emerge out of reality. Unless you invent aliens that are the epitome of non-humans, any character in any novel is going to be the echo of real people – one, two, many more perhaps, but all of them real, somewhere, somewhen. So ask questions - demand to know who that character is.

Now, why is that important? Let alone true, since, in the words of the great French writer Michel Butor, ‘the characters of a novel are words on a higher plane. A novel’s character is not a character in itself, it is not a ‘real’ character; it is a set of words, it is a construction of words’.

It’s important because what matters is not objective existence in the real world: what matters is what we can learn from (and with) the characters. Assuming they are real reminds us that they come from the Real, they are based on Reality, and so their motivations are like ours, their thoughts, wishes, fears and desires are like ours (or they echo ours, or oppose ours). That is why it pays to think of characters as real: we can then make a link with ourselves and with others much more easily. As long as we consider characters to be ‘made-up’, we keep them at bay as people – yet it is the intimacy that comes with seeing them as real that will bring understanding. Feeling empathy (or sympathy) for someone is more difficult when you don’t see them as ‘real’.

And in fact, look at what Butor added (in the same interview): ‘Characters on the page are those through which we’ll come to know the real people. We know perfectly well that Lucien Rubempré (a Balzac character) has never existed, but Lucien Rubempré enables us to know and understand a whole range of people who have existed, or who still exist’.

It’s clear that Butor has both an intellectual approach (characters are not real) and a reader approach (characters are bridges to the real); as teachers and as learners, an intellectual approach cannot go very far, especially considering that the majority of learners are inexperienced readers. Intellectualising reading this way is all very fine if literature is your object of study, but in an educational context it is in fact counter-productive. What matters is who characters would be if they were real, and what we could learn about them, about ourselves, and about what being human means: it’s much easier, then, to assume characters are real.

Claude Roy, a French literary theorist, once said that ‘Literature is that bridge that closes off the distance between one and all others; that closes off the distance between one and oneself’* That is what a character is: a bridge. A live, real, breathing, hurting, thinking bridge.

No, the character doesn’t ‘develop’, the character doesn’t ‘grow’: the boy develops, the boy grows. Like we all do – and that’s why we can learn from him and with him.

The character will always be a shadow on the wall: what we need to find is the source of that shadow – the real boy.

 

*‘La littérature serait donc ce pont suspendu jeté par-dessus la distance qui sépare l’ un de tous les autres, par-dessus la distance qui sépare l’ un de lui-même’. 

 

• Rupert Hart-Davis: Selected letters of Oscar Wilde, OUP, 1979
• Chardonnier, G. Entretiens avec Michel Butor. Paris : Gallimard, 1967.
• Roy, C. Défense de la littérature. Paris : Gallimard, 1968.