I’m beginning to read (and in some cases re-read) the bibliography for my future book on secondary characters. I wish I could jump straight into the matter that interests me, for which there is relatively scant bibliography, but I need for my theoretical framework in the introduction an overview of the secondary sources discussing the concept of the character, otherwise my book will not be published.

I cannot simply start discussing how secondary characters work without first discussing how characters in general work, and this is where things get complicated. The list of sources on characters in fiction is very long, beginning with Aristotle and passing through all the academic fashions of the last hundred years, which is mind-boggling. I have started by compiling a rather long bibliography, to select next the newer sources that include an introduction of the type I need to write, poaching from them names, sources, and ideas, trying to avoid the many rabbit holes. Yes, each new book is like starting another doctoral dissertation.

A book I absolutely recommend is Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies (University of Chicago Press, 2019). This is part of the series ‘Trios’ (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/series/TRIOS.html) in which, I quote from the website, “an important theme in critical theory, philosophy, or cultural studies” is addressed “through three extended essays written in close collaboration by leading scholars.” The authors of the book on character are three women with an extensive career: Amanda Anderson, Toril Moi and Rita Felski. In the introduction, signed by the three, they announce their intention to disregard all scholarly warnings not to deal with characters as if they were persons: “We are obviously not arguing that characters are persons. But in order to discuss characters in interesting ways we often find ourselves using some of the same language we use to talk about real human beings” (12). I find this refreshing, pure common sense.

To ward off accusations that they are old-fashioned humanists, the authors stress their respect for critical posthumanism, which has questioned the centrality of human privilege in traditional humanism: “On the one hand, posthumanism could be said to carry within it the enduring force of the characterological in its emphasis on the importance of how we relate to the nonhuman world. On the other hand, in characterizing this world, posthumanist thinkers cannot help but impute character to it, enacting various forms of anthropomorphism and animism. In this way, the ethically capacious aspects of posthumanism are potentially continuous with, and not opposed to, a renewed interrogation of character” (13-14).

As Anderson, Moi, and Felski note, much of the posthumanist revolution in criticism is founded on new ways of considering character identity, beyond the traditional humanist defense of the universal and the newer poststructuralist approaches to textuality. I also appreciate that the three authors call attention to the presence of character in non-fiction and in autobiographical fiction, in which the author becomes a character. Avoiding both extreme formalism and the confusion between real and imaginary people propounded by cognitive science, they propose that “perhaps it is the fictional qualities of characters that make them real: figures in novels and films are alluring, arresting, alive, not in spite of their aesthetic dimensions, but because of them” (19).

Of the three essays I enjoyed in particular Toril Moi’s contribution, “Rethinking Character,” which explores the roots of the taboo against treating characters like people. This requires some preliminary explanation. I have not found a satisfactory definition of character because all the bibliography I’m reading neglects the author. The focus of the discussion is always whether characters are textual constructions with a narrative function limited to the text, or constructs created in collaboration with the reader (or spectator) that gain life beyond the text. For me, characters are pseudo-persons imagined by a storyteller for the purpose of narrating a story. What I find most fascinating, but no scholar-critic seems to care about, is how authors imagine characters. For me, the characters appear to be people because they are imagined by a person who wants to give them verisimilitude.

William Shakespeare occupies a central position in the discourse on character because of the widespread consensus that he is the best creator of characters ever. The peculiarity is that he was a playwright and characters in plays require the intervention of a performer to become fully realized. A reader can approach Hamlet with no intervening actor, but this is different from approaching a character in a novel, which has not been created to be performed. If you’re going to protest that, to name a major character, Anna Karenina has been performed by diverse actresses in different adaptations, I will note that they have performed the role as it appears on the screenplay, which is, as its name indicates, a play.

Beginning in the mid-18th century, Shakespeare became the object of an immense cult, lasting to our days, based on the principle that his characters are as close to real life as fictional characters can be. From Samuel Johnson to A.C. Bradley (and later Harold Bloom), literary critics agreed that Shakespeare’s creations have a life of their own, and that of all other writers aiming at the same standard only few succeed (Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoi are serious contenders). The whole 19th century realist novel is based on the premise of making characters as life-like as possible, even when they are just basic spear carriers, which is why I’m interested in the minor characters.
However, the subjective methods used to praise Shakespeare and realist (or naturalist) authors for their skill in creating characters became an object of derision in the early 20th century, when these methods were disqualified as part of amateurish belletrism. The worst possible sin was seeking in the author’s biography clues for the exploration of the characters, though common readers have never cared for these academic taboos and they’re still happy enough to treat characters as people and to pester writers with questions about who inspired them. I myself do both as a common reader and as an academic.

In practice, most scholars treat characters in narrative as real people whose identity, personality and actions are worth exploring. The exception are the theorists, who insist on enforcing the taboo against this generalized, sensible attitude, in all currents they operate. This intrigued Moi, who locates the beginning of the taboo in the pamphlet by L.C. Knights How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?, based on a 1933 lecture (see https://archive.org/details/howmanychildrenh0000lckn/mode/2up). Knights believed that was the kind of absurd question that character lovers who missed textual evidence asked, though the joke is on him since the childlessness of Macbeth and his wife can be deduced from textual evidence, as can the information that they had lost a child. This is no trivial question at all, besides, since Macbeth is a usurper who becomes king but has no heir.

What interests Moi is why Knights was so spiteful against those who treated Shakespeare’s characters as full human beings. Her thesis is that Knights, a 28-year-old doctoral candidate in F.R. Leavis’s Cambridge circle and a co-founder with Leavis in 1932 of the key journal Scrutiny, “wasn’t trying to develop a theory. He was, rather, laying down some ground rules for a serious, professional critical practice” (29). “Fueled by a revolutionary ambition to transform literary criticism,” Moi writes, Knights’s fiery essay is “a quintessential product of the so-called Cambridge Revolution” (34). Knights’s “intellectual heroes are I.A. Richards and T.S. Eliot, the lodestars of the Cambridge literary avantgarde” (34). Knights, who presents himself as “an intellectual on the cutting edge of literary and critical modernism,” is desperate to defend Wuthering Heights (then not yet a canonical novel), Heart of Darkness, Ulysses, To the Lighthouse and the novels by D.H. Lawrence from the dilettantes outside university who threatened the stability of English as a rather new academic discipline. “Character critics must be stopped in their tracks,” Moi elucidates, “for they are incapable of doing justice to the modernist literary canon Knights wishes to promote” (34).

What most amazes Moi (and me!) is how the combined efforts of the Cambridge Revolution, Russian Formalism and US New Criticism caused “the taboo on treating characters as if they were real people” to solidify “into a dogma” (30), or “fundamental axiom” (30), on which later theorization depended, beginning with 1960s Structuralism, followed by Narratology (1970s), Deconstruction (1980s) and Poststructuralism (1990s). In Postmodern Characters: A Study of Characterization in British and American Postmodern Fiction (1991, https://archive.org/details/postmoderncharac0000alei) Aleid Fokkema uses several introductory chapters to criticise his predecessors, finding fault with all their theorization to propose an equally useless theorization of character based on Umberto Eco’s version of Semiotics. As Moi notes in reference to John Frow’s Character and Person (2014), the most recent all-encompassing theoretical work on character, “only someone who has fully accepted the taboo on treating characters as if they were real will believe that a phrase like ‘quasi-persons of narrative’ (CP, 23) does more work than the word we already have: namely, ‘characters’” (57). For this reason, Moi herself refuses to provide any new theorization, simply stressing that “There is no fundamental conflict between paying attention to language and paying attention to characters. Good critics of characters do both” (39).

Moi’s essay, as it can be seen, is much more than a critique of L.C. Knights’s position, for it questions the very essence of literary theory beyond the question of character. What she is saying is that the professionalization of Literary Studies was achieved at the cost of excising basic human emotion from criticism, so that a barrier could be set up between the (mostly male, white, cisgender, middle-class) academic specialists and the rest, a barrier that only started to be erased, I should add, with the arrival of Cultural Studies, but that still persists. In the introduction to my own book, I would like very much to ignore all the nonsense that Moi exposes in her essay, but we are still expected to show respect for predecessors who mostly used theory to spar with each other for professional prestige and not at all to illuminate the texts.

If Moi is right, and I think she is, we’re stuck with antihumanist theory, produced for spurious reasons by persons with no respect for their fellow common readers/spectators and who seem unable to enjoy the company of characters, as most of us do. This is worrying. I myself will be using theorization by Alex Woloch (in The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, 2003) and Maria Nikolajeva (The Rhetoric of Character in Children’s Literature, 2002) which is absolutely pragmatic and totally avoids the pitfalls of the (post)formalists models. I have to construct my own theory, for it is my aim to find out have many types of minor characters there are in relation to how important they are in the whole scheme of each novel I’ll study, but my approach is modelled on close reading and comparative literature. I find, anyway, that generalizations rarely work in fiction, for human imagination is too rich to be trapped into a pseudo-scientific grid.

More next week…