Aaron Kunin-Characters Lounge

Characters Lounge

Aaron Kunin

Courage. Con!dence. Character. — motto of the Girl Scouts of America

This essay de!nes character as a formal device that collects every example of a kind of person. In the process of collection, the moral

and literary senses of character dovetail: a character inevitably posits an ideal. This is not an original de!nition; it is based on accounts of character by Thomas Overbury, John Earle, Jean de La Bruyère, and others in the seventeenth century whose books rework a classical genre pioneered by Theophrastus. Thus La Bruyère writes of the character Ménalque that he is “a collection [recueil] of examples of distraction.”1 I will not argue for the universality of this de!nition, exactly, since it would be dishonest to pretend that there are not numerous other senses of character available in literary history. Instead, my purpose is to show the consequences of this de!nition for the formation of communities — what traditionally is called the cast of characters, or what Alex Woloch calls the “character-system” of the nineteenth-century realist novel, in

Modern Language Quarterly 70:3 (September 2009)

DOI 10.1215/00267929-2009-001 © 2009 by University of Washington

I presented versions of this argument in the seminar Shakespearean Attachments, organized by Douglas Trevor and Kristen Poole at the "##$ meeting of the Shake-speare Association of America; in talks given at the University of California, Irvine, March "##%, and at the University of British Columbia, April "##%; and in a work-shop meeting of the Southern California Americanists Group at the Huntington Library, February "##%. I am grateful to many readers and listeners who made help-ful suggestions. I particularly want to thank Dina Al-Kassim, Eyal Amiran, Lara Bovilsky, Michael Clune, Tony Dawson, Mary Esteve, Adam Frank, David Glimp, Eleanor Kaufman, James Kuzner, Christina Lupton, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Mark McGurl, Vin Nardizzi, Karen Newman, Sianne Ngai, Brad Pasenek, Elisa Tamarkin, and Rei Terada.

1 Jean de La Bruyère, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Julien Benda (Paris: Gallimard, &'(&), )&&.

292 MLQ September 2009

which a single protagonist is evoked against a *at background of minor characters.2 The antiformalist account that would insist on the radical particularity of a character is not inferior to the formalist one as a de!-nition, since each can describe the other completely. The advantage of the formalist account is that it allows for a comic rather than a tragic historiography.

Reading usually happens backward: a critic reconstructs the con-text in which a literary work was !rst produced and places it in that context; another critic, also looking backward, uses a modern theo-retical framework as a lens for reading an older work. This essay reads forward in that it derives a theory from seventeenth-century books of characters, then applies the theory to later works, such as nineteenth-century novels, and to other genres in which characters appear, such as poems, comics, and performances in !lm and theater.3 Reading back-ward, Roland Barthes writes that we in modernity cannot “name” La Bruyère;4 reading forward, I contend that La Bruyère has no trouble at all in naming us. However, such a crude outline distorts my procedure, because the *ow of history is not one-directional. While I am reading forward from seventeenth-century characters to describe nineteenth-century novels, Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac are reading backward, so that the communities formed by their novels sometimes include characters from collections by Earle and La Bruyère, whom they cite by name. An artifact such as a novel is, as George Kubler puts it, a “bundle” of durations of varying lengths, which means that any

2 Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protago-nist in the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, "##)).

3 Some recent works of character criticism begin by apologizing for not being “comprehensive” — in other words, for not dealing with all novels or all characters. See, e.g., Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, &''%), &". This apol-ogy indicates a lingering antiformalism that will not allow characters to do the work of collecting examples. George Meredith offers the formalist solution to this problem in the prelude to The Egoist, where he writes that he will not attempt to transcribe the entire “Book of Egoism,” which is really “the Book of Earth,” that is, the planet Earth. “Art,” he concludes, “is the speci!c,” by which he means that the character of the ego-ist functions to make the “wisdom” of the big “Book of Egoism” portable (The Egoist, ed. Robert M. Adams [New York: Norton, &'$'], ) – +).

4 Roland Barthes, “La Bruyère,” in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evan-ston, IL: Northwestern University Press, &'$"), """.

Kunin ° Characters Lounge 293

made thing combines materials that originate in various historical moments.5 Things are not completely new but have parts that are older and newer. This also means that anything that has a history communi-cates with several time periods. The formal device Kubler employs to follow artifacts as they travel from one context to another is style; this essay uses character for the same purpose.

The argument has two parts. The !rst part describes the commu-nity established by solitary characters and focuses on Shakespeare’s comedy The Merchant of Venice. The second part addresses the formation of a community out of several solitary characters by way of a detailed comparison between Woloch’s critical book The One vs. the Many and Doug Allen’s comic book Steven. The exact center of this essay is the paradoxical !gure of the misanthrope, toward whom both sides of the argument point and in whom the real space of character is disclosed.

“Let Me Play the Fool”

The Merchant of Venice is a work of theory in that nothing happens.6 Events are possible, approached, threatened, but they never quite occur. The casket game consists of three scenes representing cogni-tion, in which an actor vocalizes interpretations, reasons, and !nally a preference. In other scenes, revenge, justice, mercy, and in!delity are theorized but not enacted. Thus the play never develops its tragic premises: in this community, tragedy is available as a theory, not as a sequence of actions.

The overlooked character Graziano represents my theory in its pur-est form. “Graziano,” Bassanio says, “speaks an in!nite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice” (&.&.&&+ – &().7 Maybe the word for

5 George Kubler, “Style and the Representation of Historical Time,” in Studies in Ancient American and European Art: The Collected Essays, ed. Thomas F. Reese (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, &'%(), )%,. Michel Serres, with Bruno Latour, makes a similar point in Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, &''(), ($ – ,".

6 Henry S. Turner, “The Problem of the More-than-One: Friendship, Calcula-tion, and Political Association in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly ($ ("##,): +&).

7 References to Shakespeare’s plays follow The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, &'',).


“theory” in Venice is “nothing.” Like theory, nothing is a way of talking that avoids tragic consequences, a way of having ideas without having to die or kill for them. This description of Graziano recalls the complaint against Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet: “Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace! / Thou talk’st of nothing” (&.+.'( – ',). Mercutio’s way of talking, unlike Graziano’s, ultimately requires him and others to die. “Nothing” means poetry in Verona, whereas in Venice it means theory. “Talk” also has different meanings in different dialects, for Graziano in performance turns out to be not much of a talker. He is a Mercutio on a tight leash; he will not be given an opportunity to recite !fty lines about Queen Mab while the plot grinds to a halt. Lorenzo complains that “Graziano never lets me speak” (&.&.&#$), but even as he registers this complaint, the serial form of the dialogue, which allows for only one speaker at a time, does not let Graziano speak.

His longest speech occurs shortly after his !rst entrance:

Antonio. I hold the world but as the world, Graziano,A stage where every man must play a part,And mine a sad one.Graziano. Let me play the fool.With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come,And let my liver rather heat with wineThan my heart cool with mortifying groans. (&.&.$$ – %")

This speech is a self-de!nition. Graziano’s question is not, who am I? however, but, what kind am I? His psychology is social rather than personal: he sorts people into types and determines which type best describes him. The next move, which never occurs in the play, would be to perform as that type. Instead, Graziano theorizes: these behaviors (talking, laughing, making faces) are characteristic of me. But he does not laugh or talk. He has a lot of stage time — more, probably, than Mercutio — but not many lines, as though he belonged to a third type, the Antonio type (“these / That therefore only are reputed wise / For saying nothing” [&.&.'( – '$]), for whom “saying nothing” means silence. He does not even say that he is the fool; instead, he says, tentatively, “Let me play the fool,” as though he did not yet have a part and were auditioning for one. The part he clearly wants is something like that of Mercutio, but the one he settles for is that of a sub-Bassanio. Bassanio


sees, loves, and receives a ring from Portia, and Graziano does the same with Nerissa; Bassanio gives his ring to Balthasar, and Graziano gives his to the clerk. Signi!cantly, Graziano insists that he is not observing and imitating Bassanio: “My eyes, my lord, can look as swift as yours” ().".&'$), which is to say that his vision is simultaneous with, not deriva-tive from, Bassanio’s; it seems to occur afterward for the trivial reason that the dialogue serializes simultaneous actions. (There is also a brief period during the trial scene in which Graziano becomes an echo for Shylock — and therefore, admittedly, derivative — and is understand-ably grateful for the change: “A Daniel, still say I, a second Daniel! / I thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word” [+.&.))( – ),].)

Graziano is typical of the Venetian commitment to a social theory that proceeds by sorting persons into types on the basis of shared char-acteristics. There are exceptions to this rule. The !rst lines of the play describe Antonio’s failure to provide an account of himself: “In sooth, I know not why I am so sad” (&.&.&). His sadness is idiopathic, without cause and incommunicable: “But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, / What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born, / I am to learn” (&.&.) – (). Antonio will say only that he is sad and does not know why. He can describe what he feels in the present (“It wearies me” [&.&."]), but he will not use that feeling to assign himself to a group. His skepticism about the usefulness of the social theory is magni!ed when he consid-ers applying it to others: “you say it wearies you” (&.&.") implies that Antonio is reluctant to make any statement about the feelings of others. He takes the sayings of others as evidence that they are saying it, not as evidence of what they might feel or what kinds of people they might be. The second scene begins the same way: Portia is sad for no reason (“my little body is aweary of this great world” [&.".& – "]) or, Nerissa points out, despite a surplus of reasons to be happy. Similarly, in the trial scene Shylock’s hatred is idiopathic; he both fails and refuses to give a reason for his actions against Antonio: “So can I give no reason, nor I will not” (+.&.(%). Instead, he asks a question: “Is it answered?” (+.&.+)). And repeats the question: “What, are you answered yet?” (+.&.+,). The question is, what would an answer look like? Which may be the most theoretical question of all. These important moments — in which Antonio, Portia, and Shylock are unscripted, as the social theory fails to assign a type — are exceptional, but the exceptions prove the rule,


because even if the metalanguage fails, it remains the only available language. Moreover, these scenes all resolve in the renewal of char-acterological thinking: Salerio and Solanio attempt to give Antonio a character by suggesting the two conventional reasons for sadness in Venice, money and love; Portia and Nerissa go through the list of Por-tia’s suitors and assign each a type based on national characteristics; Shylock produces new, as yet unnamed social groupings (“some men” who hate roast pork, “some” who hate cats, “others” who hate bagpipes [+.&.+, – ($]).

What a Character Is

In these scenes Shylock, Portia, Nerissa, Salerio, and Solanio work in the genre later called characteristic writing. (So does Graziano, but, contrary to convention, he tries to assign a character to himself, not to others.) The problem of characteristic writing can be described his-torically: although Theophrastus provides a classical precedent for the genre, and although characterological thinking persists in later prose !ction, the book of characters appears to be speci!c to the seventeenth century. What did readers get out of these books in the seventeenth century that earlier and later readers did not need or want? But the problem is not historically speci!c, in that the books have no obvious use even in the time of their primary production and reception. The question of “what a character is” is posed in the !nal entry of the in*u-ential collection of characteristic writings Overbury His Wife.8 I consider Overbury’s surprising answer to this question below, but for now I want to emphasize the confusion implicit in asking the question at the very end of the collection, as though one could read the entire book without knowing exactly “what a character is” or could compose such a book without being sure. The book is organized like a reference book, with a short entry on each type of person — for example, “A Pedant,” fol-lowed by a list of horrible clichés about pedants — but the fact that the book includes only clichés makes it unessential, to put it mildly, for the

8 In The Overburian Characters, ed. W. J. Paylor (Oxford: Blackwell, &'),), '". I use the name Overbury for convenience; editors agree that Thomas Overbury prob-ably wrote few of the entries.


9 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Monroe Engel (New York: Modern Library, &',#), +%,.

10 On Dickens’s characters as collectibles, especially in the form of cigarette cards, see Lynch, &% – &'. In Lynch’s historical argument, readers of early novels demand supremely legible characterization to compensate for the everyday misrecog-nitions and confusions of the new credit economy, while Romantic readers use the capacity to appreciate opaque characterization as a mark of class distinction.

purpose of reference. If you are part of the culture, then the book can tell you only what you already know and say and hear every day about pedants. If you are not part of the culture, then the book appears to present slabs of raw ideology, which might make it a useful resource for social history or cultural criticism if the rawness did not render it less than compelling as material for ideological critique. Social historians tend to prefer their own categories (from a sociological point of view, a coquette is not a kind of person), and critics prefer to look for symptoms of ideology in places where they are hidden. For those who live inside the culture, and for those who study it, the books appear to have the redundant function of making visible those aspects of persons — their characters — that are already their most visible aspects.

What are characters for? I want to propose an answer to this ques-tion by considering not what historical readers do with characters but what other characters do with them. In Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend, the character Mr. Bof!n collects instances of another character called “the miser”:

Size, price, quality, were of no account. Any book that seemed to promise a chance of miserly biography, Mr. Bof!n purchased without a moment’s delay and carried home. Happening to be informed by a bookseller that a portion of the Annual Register was devoted to “Char-acters,” Mr. Bof!n at once bought a whole set of that ingenious compila-tion, and began to carry it home piecemeal. . . . It was curious that Bella never saw the books about the house, nor did she ever hear from Mr. Bof!n one word of reference to their contents. He seemed to save up his Misers as they had saved up their money.9

This episode may provide evidence for the durability of character as an aesthetic institution: centuries after their composition the characters acquire new value as rare objects that can be collected like antiques.10 Or maybe this is the value they have always had. What does Bof!n do with


characters? He buys and saves them. That is all he does with them — he does not display them or talk about them or even use them for “ref-erence,” since he is not capable of “reading at sight.” (For Dickens, lit-eracy is primarily a way of seeing: “No one who can read, ever looks at a book, like one who cannot” [Our Mutual Friend, &'].) Illiteracy does not ordinarily prevent Bof!n from reading books: he employs a ballad seller, Silas Wegg, to read to him from Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and he uses Bella, who can “read at sight,” to identify possible “lives of odd characters” in a bookseller’s win-dow. The point is that Bof!n does not need to reference the characters of misers himself or have someone else read them out loud, because his education in this regard is complete. He already knows what the books are about, what a miser is, just as he already knows what a character is. Simply by buying and hoarding the books, and without doing any more reading, Bof!n gradually becomes not a miser but the miser: a represen-tative !gure who collects other examples of misers.

Character is the formal device that makes it possible for the mem-bers of this collective to assemble, for the miser to be not more than one miser but all misers. Character makes a seam between Dickens’s novel and other books, so that Bof!n can collect examples from obso-lete forms of imaginative writing; and between the novel and history, so that he can collect biographical as well as !ctional examples.11 Gra-ziano does the same thing, or tries to, when he becomes attached !rst to Mercutio, a character from another play, then to Bassanio, and when he and Antonio attach the “world” to the “stage” in which everyone acts as a character, that is, as a sad “part” of a single collective subject (&.&.$$ – $').12 Character is the !xed point that allows one to “hold the

11 On the tendency of types to collect all examples indiscriminately see Erich Auerbach: “There is no choice between historical and hidden meaning; both are present. The !gural structure preserves the historical event while interpreting it as revelation; and must preserve it in order to interpret it” (“Figura,” trans. Ralph Man-heim, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature [Minneapolis: University of Min-nesota Press, &'%+], ,%).

12 On character as “dividual” in Shakespeare see Random Cloud, “ ‘The Very Names of the Persons’: Editing and the Invention of Dramatick Character,” in Stag-ing the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, &''&), %% – ',.


world . . . as the world” and to leverage it. When Graziano speaks as the fool, he becomes a spokesperson; he speaks for all fools. When Por-tia gives characters to her suitors according to their patrilineal inheri-tances and places of origin, she organizes societies and, in some cases, nations. When she says of Monsieur Le Bon that he is “every man in no man” (&.".(#), she assimilates him to a society called France, and she does so without having to bring all France, or even Le Bon, onstage. She is right to say that in marrying him she would “marry twenty hus-bands” (&.".(" – ()). Marriage to Le Bon would put her in relation to the entire French society that she characterizes through him.

Company

This account of character as a collection of examples is a paraphrase of seventeenth-century characteristic writings. Leo Spitzer says:

For Saint-Simon, character is the structure which arches over all the facts of history; it is the totality which embraces historical personalities in their full extent and substance. Character is like some Trojan Horse concealing historical acts, events and customs, which can climb out of its belly and yet leave a clearly visible skeleton. . . . Character here is the unmoved mover, the essence or Being from which the Becoming of his-tory springs: individual historical events *ow from individual aspects of Being as honey, so to speak, may *ow from the separate cells of a single honeycomb.13

Because Spitzer is committed to the primacy of style and the integrity of the work of art, he allows this de!nition of character to work only for one historical epoch, and only for Saint-Simon, and really only for the “Caractère de Louis XIV.” My account follows this de!nition into the inde!nite future, just as the antiformalist conception of character rewrites earlier literary history so that what used to be called character has to be renamed caricature or stereotype. But Bof!n is no stereo-type. Collected as an example well before Wegg reads to him from the character sketches, he is part of the community of misers. In Dickens’s

13 Leo Spitzer, “Saint-Simon’s Portrait of Louis XIV,” in Essays on Seventeenth- Century French Literature, ed. and trans. David Bellos (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, &'%)), &&$.


precise phrase, Bof!n is in their “company.” Moreover, the acts of col-lection and reading mark off distinct strata of sociability: when Bof!n collects the misers, he is in “bad company,” and when Wegg reads to him, he is in “worse company” (Our Mutual Friend, +'% – (#(). Associ-ated but not related.

Many Is Not More than One

The social organization I am describing does not look like the “econ-omy” of scarcity that Deidre Shauna Lynch !nds in the early English novel, nor does it look like the limited “character-space” that Woloch !nds in the realist novel. Graziano does not have to recite as many lines as Mercutio to de!ne a character type based on Mercutio. He can do it simply by using the de!nite article. Even in Dickens’s realist novel, the asymmetry between the one and the many is not greater than or less than. For Bof!n, again, “size, price, quality, were of no account.” He represents the entire society of misers without the tedious labor of reading through the books of characters page by page and without Dickens’s having to transcribe them even more tediously. This commu-nity does not consist of characters competing for attention from history within the limited space of the aesthetic. In fact, no community of char-acters looks like that; no community of anything looks like that. The social universe is not organized as a diminishing series of enclosures, in which, say, the public is bigger than and includes the private, or his-tory is bigger than and includes the aesthetic, or society is bigger than and includes the family, which is bigger than and includes the individ-ual.14 Instead, at any point, any !gure can collect others. Naturally, two people are more people than one person, but they are not necessarily more of a collective, insofar as one person can be a character such as the miser, the coquette, the pedant, or the old maid. Molière expresses

14 Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors Macro-structure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So,” in Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-sociologies, ed. Karin Knorr-Cetina and Aaron Victor Cicourel (Boston: Routledge, &'%&), "$$ – )#). See also Latour’s discussion of the short !lm Powers of Ten (&'$$), directed by Charles Eames and Ray Eames, in Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, "##(), &%( – %,.


this property of character with extraordinary clarity in a line from Dom Juan about hypocrites: “By making faces [à force de grimaces], one binds together a close society of people of the same party” ((.").15 Dom Juan does not mean that hypocrites schedule meetings to conspire with one another or that their facial expressions are a secret code, like a wink, by which they communicate with one another. The faces are signs only of the imposition of form. By making the face of a hypocrite, one instantly collects every example of hypocrisy.

An example of a character may obviously fail to conform to the type — in a sense, that is what it means to be a hypocrite — and Molière’s most sensitive readers have recognized the repeated staging of this fail-ure as one of his favorite comic effects.16 Erich Auerbach observes that Molière’s comic characters represent types without being particularly good at performing as the type: “Everywhere the ass looks out from under the lion’s skin.”17 In Le misanthrope Célimène is a coquette not because she loves or wants to be loved by many persons but because she operates on a principle of discretion. She prefers Alceste but does not want to reject her other suitors, because she believes that it would be impolite to speak “disobliging words” directly and that her heart knows “softer signs [de plus doux témoins]” to indicate its preference ((."). In other words, she is a coquette by dint of her expertise in maintaining a web of relations invisible to Alceste, who cannot interpret a code that

15 All references to Molière follow Oeuvres complètes, ed. Maurice Rat (Paris: Gal-limard, &',().

16 To put it another way, a character collects all examples, even the bad ones. La Bruyère makes a joke of this in the grouping titled “De la mode,” in which the virtuoso Démocède has a mania that requires him to possess every print of Callot’s, including “one print that is not, to be truthful, his best work” (Oeuvres complètes, +#%). In a similar vein, John Earle writes that “the counterfeit” of the Blunt Man “is most dangerous”; that is, the character even includes inauthentic approximations (Micro-cosmographie; or, A Peece of the World Discovered in Essayes and Characters [Lon-don, &,"%], ),).

17 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, &'()), )&$. Ramon Fer-nandez traces this tendency to the early Ballet des incompatibles. In the later theatri-cal masterpieces, the incompatibles are fused in single characters: “A character in Molière is comic for no reason but that he undertakes to merge attributes that are mutually contradictory” (Molière: The Man Seen through the Plays, trans. Wilson Follett [New York: Hill and Wang, &'(%], )+).


he does not even see.18 At the same time, Alceste shares Célimène’s dis-cretion as the organizing principle of a social world in which he would like to live. His wish to be “distinguished” (&.&) has been read as evi-dence of bad faith.19 But the way that Alceste wishes to be distinguished is consistent with his withdrawal from society. Instead of shaping how others talk about him, his distinction would render such talk super*u-ous; he wants others to take him for granted, just as he takes himself for granted. This distinction is really a variety of discretion that would not require him to participate in social relations: for example, he could win a lawsuit without having to appear in court or arrange to have wit-nesses establish his character (&.&), or he could be in the right without winning the lawsuit ((.&).

The Misanthrope

The real space of character comes into view in the paradoxical !gure of the misanthrope. Hans Robert Jauss misleadingly identi!es the paradox as an implication of the hatred of humanity (“To be or to feel oneself an enemy of mankind would go against nature and the social condition of human existence”), when in fact self-hatred is no more paradoxical than any other re*exive emotion.20 The misanthrope is characterized not by a feeling such as hatred but by objective actions: in the inter-pretations of Lucian and Shakespeare, long speeches of invective; in that of Molière, the gesture of withdrawal from the world. This is a real paradox. The misanthrope establishes a collective by denying member-ship in any collective: “provided that you are willing to join me [que votre coeur veuille donner les mains] in my effort to *ee from all humans, and follow me without delay into the solitude [dans mon désert] in which I have vowed to live” ((.+). In this passage the speaker, Alceste, collects two kinds of persons. On the one hand, all human society is constituted

18 On Célimène, the “coquette médisante,” as a !gure for Molière see Larry F. Norman, The Public Mirror: Molière and the Social Commerce of Depiction (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, &'''), &,' – %#.

19 Lionel Gossman, Men and Masks: A Study of Molière (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, &',)), ,, – ''.

20 Hans Robert Jauss, “The Paradox of the Misanthrope,” trans. Sharon Larisch, Comparative Literature )( (&'%)): )#$.


21 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur les spectacles,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. & (Paris: Hachette, &'#'), "#).

22 Plutarch, Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin, vol. ' (London: Heinemann; Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, &'"#), "''.

23 Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Indi-viduation (New York: Routledge, &''"), &#".

through the exclusion of one individual who *ees it. On the other, that individual represents a society of misanthropes who also *ee human society, a point that Alceste underlines when he invites Célimène to join him in solitude. Her presence will not disturb his solitude, because if she were to turn her back on human society, she would be no longer a coquette but a misanthrope and hence no more disturbing than any other member of the community of misanthropes. The misanthropes do not disturb one another in their solitude, because they are collected without relating to, acting on, or knowing one another, or wanting to.

In this gesture of withdrawal from the world, Jean-Jacques Rous-seau saw the possibility of a new, just society — imperfectly understood by Molière, and unavoidably distorted by the spectacular medium of the drama, but still tantalizingly evident.21 This is the same form of association without relation that the classical misanthrope Timon pro-poses to Apemantus when they participate in the Festival of the Pitch-ers, an unusual memorial holiday in which the celebrants are expected to drink silently rather than perform songs and toasts. Plutarch tells the story in the Life of Antony: “And once, at the Festival of the Pitchers, the two were feasting by themselves, and Apemantus said: ‘Timon, what a !ne symposium ours is!’ ‘It would be,’ said Timon, ‘if thou wert not here.’ ”22

What a Character Is

Frances Ferguson writes eloquently of a solitude at the heart of “char-acter itself, the extension of individual action through narrative until it has become romance, the impossibility of action.”23 This solitude, in which persons are associated without being related to one another, belongs not to misanthropes only but to all characters. This may be a way of saying that there is always something misanthropic about the assignment of character. When he asks to play the fool, Graziano


reveals that he is not yet the fool, that his character is not given and must be chosen. In effect, he uses the !gure of the fool to establish a part of himself offstage, outside the relational community of characters in the diegesis of the play and outside the collective of fools. When Por-tia lists her suitors, she assigns a character to everyone but herself. Not only is her one trait, weariness, not determined by personal qualities, but it appears somehow to contradict them. In John Milton’s anoma-lous exercise in characteristic writing, “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” the pensive one prefers solitude to company, but curiously he is never alone; like the happy one, he is accompanied by a “crew” of personi!ed abstractions — Peace, Quiet, Fast, Leisure, Contemplation, Silence, and Melancholy (ll. +( – (().24 The anomaly in this exercise is the person-alization: the assignment of character, like Graziano’s, is done in the !rst person; moreover, the experience of Melancholy is imagined not merely as membership in a collective but as a relation to another per-son who turns out to be related genealogically to a number of others. Milton presents a life “with” Melancholy as a temptation scene or, as he less intensely puts it, a choice between two companions: “These plea-sures Melancholy give / And I with thee will choose to live” (ll. &$( – $,). The speaker in “L’Allegro” ends by offering to formalize the relation to Mirth in a similar contract: “These delights, if thou canst give, / Mirth, with thee I mean to live” (ll. &(& – ("). The important part is “if,” which implies that Mirth’s gifts have yet to arrive, and the speaker has not yet entered into the relation. “If” is the !rst principle, the real space, of characteristic writing.

What are characters for? When the speaker in Overbury’s collec-tion !nally explains “what a character is,” he literalizes and classicizes it: “If I must speake the Schoole-masters language I will confesse that Character comes of this in!nitive moode [kharassein] which signi!eth to ingrave, or make a deepe Impression. And for that cause, a letter (as A. B.) is called a Character” ('"). Many readers have been struck by this move to collapse character with writing, which externalizes the

24 Quotations from Milton’s poems follow John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, &'($). Samuel Butler approaches this paradox from a different angle in the character of “A Melancholy Man,” who “keeps the worst Company in the World, that is, his own” (Characters and Passages from Note-Books, ed. A. R. Waller [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, &'#%], (').


most basic facts about the person. “The depth of a character,” writes Jonathan Goldberg, “is the result of an inscription, what others read on the surface.”25 It has not previously been remarked that these lines are also spoken in character: “If I must speake the Schoole-masters language . . .” Unlike the other entries in the book, the character of character is written in the !rst person, and it begins not with is but with if. He speaks the language, but he is not the schoolmaster. Even as he assigns himself a character, the schoolmaster, he reserves a neutral part of himself that does not conform to the script.

Proper Names Belong to Everyone

Mirth, says Rosemond Tuve in her essay on Milton’s pair of poems, “is a way of talking about the absolutely not the contingently real.”26 Or, Fer-guson might say, mirth is a way of making more than one of something. Tuve’s description does not help, because she does not allow it to read forward; on the contrary, she carefully opposes Milton’s allegorical per-soni!cation to modern conceptions of character. With deep regret, she says, “such images” as Mirth “no longer surround us” ()"). Theorists such as Dorothy Van Ghent and Ian Watt agree that novelistic character is by nature radically particular, and the novel is the genre of contin-gent reality. According to Van Ghent, “For !ction the particular body that a thing has is of the very greatest importance. . . . Does it squeak, is it brown, is it round, is it chilly, does it think, does it smash?”27 Even The Pilgrim’s Progress succeeds as a novel “only because Bunyan founds his allegory of human qualities in the objective reality of human man-ners” — in other words, because characters such as Christian are not “abstract personi!cations” (Van Ghent, "'). The apparent consensus among these literary historians would partition the nature of reality generically and temporally, so that the absolute pertains to premodern

25 Jonathan Goldberg, Shakespeare’s Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, "##)), )". See also J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, &''"), )& – )".

26 Rosemond Tuve, Images and Themes in Five Poems by Milton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, &'($), &$.

27 Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Harper and Row, &',$), +.


poetry, and the contingent to the modern novel. The difference is that Tuve is nostalgic for premodern unity, whereas Van Ghent and Watt celebrate modern multiplicity. That these two conceptions of reality, the philosophical and the literary, are both called “realism” is, in Watt’s words, “a paradox that will surprise only the neophyte.”28

Is it true that abstract personi!cations do not surround us in mod-ern civilizations? Do characters in novels not act as !gures of abso-lute reality? One alternative to this seeming consensus is suggested by Naomi Schor’s and Sharon Marcus’s important work on the idealist tra-dition in the novel. To Schor, critical accounts that identify situations in novels with a recognizable historical reality are inadequate to pro-tocols of interpretation in nineteenth-century French novels, in which anything that occurs on the level of representation must posit an ideal, understood as both “the heightening of the essential and the promo-tion of the higher good.” Schor quotes the “realist” Balzac as reported by the “idealist” Sand: “You are looking for man as he should be; I take him as he is. . . . But the ordinary human beings interest me more than they do you. I make them larger than life; I idealize them in the oppo-site sense, in their ugliness or in their stupidity.”29 Most critics of real-ism, following Van Ghent and Watt, see a crucial difference between Balzac’s “man as he is” and George Sand’s “man as he should be.” But if idealism is the paradigm, then there is no way to separate the two modalities. Make no mistake: Balzac wants his characters to express an ideal. That is why Le père Goriot includes the “magni!cent images of integrity [probité ]” Jeanie Deans (from Walter Scott) and Alceste (from Molière) and why Balzac considers the women in his novels superior to Jeanie Deans: his characters have the Virgin Mary as an exemplar, whereas “the Protestant woman has no ideal.”30

Tracing the reception of French literature in England, Marcus !nds that Victorian critics share their French contemporaries’ assumptions

28 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, &'($), &&.

29 Naomi Schor, George Sand and Idealism (New York: Columbia University Press, &'')), +# – +&.

30 Honoré de Balzac, Le père Goriot, ed. Philippe Berthier (Paris: Flammarion, &''(), &,(; Balzac, La comédie humaine, ed. Pierre-Georges Castex, vol. & (Paris: Gal-limard, &'$,), &(.


about idealized representation and also use “realism” mainly in a pejo-rative sense: “What realists would call an objective and encyclopedic grasp of the world, idealists called ‘granting a bill of indemnity to all that is perverse and ungovernable in our nature.’ ”31 For the nineteenth- century critic Leslie Stephen, the canon of realism is con!ned mainly to French sapphism and includes just a few books by Balzac and Emile Zola, not their entire output, and a number of poems by Charles Baude-laire and Algernon Swinburne (Marcus, "(, – ($). (Baudelaire, whose art criticism champions imagination against historical reality, is a real-ist in this literary formation!) I want to push this argument a little far-ther: where Marcus elegantly remarks that “contemporary critics have idealized realism” ("$"), I would argue that they are right to do so, because realism idealizes itself.

The neophyte is right to think that realism means realism, and Watt is wrong to exclude philosophical from literary realism. One of Watt’s !rst examples, the name protocols in the novels of Henry Field-ing, almost comically fails to support his claim. According to Watt, the early English novel uses “proper names that were characteristic,” such as Mr. Badman and Euphues, whereas in later novels, like Fielding’s, a character’s name signals “a particular person and not a type” (&' – "#). Watt immediately has to make exceptions for Heartfree, Allworthy, and Square. He does not even think to make an exception for Joseph Andrews, whose name is purely literary, an extension of the family tree from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Even the name Tom Jones is a place-holder whose function is to suggest an idealized ordinariness; in any case, it is not the character’s family name. Finally, Watt suggests that Fielding reformed his name protocols in Amelia. The shift from signi!-cant names to ordinary names, which was originally supposed to take place over the early history of the novel, is now recapitulated within Fielding’s career. Even in Amelia, however, Watt has to make exceptions for Thrasher and Bondum. The evidence of Fielding’s new attitude toward naming is that the names of other characters (Booth, Matthews, Harrison, etc.) are apparently copied from “the list of subscribers to

31 Sharon Marcus, “Comparative Sapphism,” in The Literary Channel: The Inter-national Invention of the Novel, ed. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, "##"), "$&.


the &$"+ folio edition of Gilbert Burnet’s History of His Own Time,” a practice that suggests, if anything, that the characters are designed to collect both historical and !ctional examples, just like generic types.32

If the English novel does not give up on signi!cant names in Field-ing, then when does it happen — in Anthony Trollope, who gives char-acters names such as Quiverful and titles such as the Duke of Omnium? In James Joyce, who calls his projected self-idealization or self-parody Stephen Dedalus? Maybe it happens in Helen Fielding, who writes about a character named Bridget Jones. Again, the uses that characters make of one another are more illuminating than the uses to which historical readers put them. Bridget Jones’s Diary, for instance, is obvi-ously an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, but the relation is unexpectedly oblique, in that Fielding adapts not the novel but the BBC television serialization. She acknowledges this genealogy by hav-ing Bridget watch the series during the time of its original broadcast and by having her remark on the social phenomenon of England sit-ting down as a nation to watch the same program: “Love the nation being so addicted. The basis of my own addiction, I know, is my simple human need for Darcy to get off with Elizabeth. . . . They are my cho-sen representatives in the !eld of shagging, or, rather, courtship.”33 But despite electing Darcy and Elizabeth as her representatives, Bridget has nothing to say about the resemblance of her own story to theirs. Unlike Bof!n, Bridget is hardly illiterate — she keeps a diary and works at a publishing house — but she seems not to recognize that she is reliv-ing an old novel.34 Even the fact that one of her lovers is named Darcy goes unremarked. (In the !lm adaptation of Bridget Jones’s Diary [dir. Mike Newell, "##&], this blindness is compounded by casting Colin Firth, the actor from the BBC series, as Darcy.) The example of Bridget shows that a character collects every example without effort or con-

32 On the use of characters in historical writing see David Nichol Smith, Char-acters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, &'),).

33 Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary (New York: Penguin, &'',), "&(.34 Fielding does gently hint that Bridget may be, if not illiterate, then a poor

reader. Her colleague Perpetua — another signi!cant name — complains that “a whole generation of people only get to know the great works of literature — Austen, Eliot, Dickens, Shakespeare, and so on — through the television. . . . And you do real-ize Middlemarch was originally a book, Bridget, don’t you, not a soap?” (%, – %$).


35 Doug Allen, Steven, + vols. (Princeton, WI: Kitchen Sink, &'%' – '&). The four volumes are unpaginated; subsequent citations use hand-counted page numbers for ease of reference.

sciousness. Bridget can play the part of Elizabeth without trying to, without realizing that she is doing it. Her status as a !gure of Elizabeth does not depend on her identi!cation with Elizabeth or recognition of Darcy — neither of which occurs.

Although history may not follow a straight line from Tom Jones to Bridget Jones, the novels are linked not only through name protocols that announce the characters as !gures of absolute reality, and not only through the shared surnames of their protagonists ( Jones), but also through those of their authors (Fielding). That is because proper names belong to everyone — just as much as common names do.

Characters Lounge

If a character by itself already forms a community, what happens when characters get together? Doug Allen’s weekly comic strip Steven offers a bleak answer to this question. Steven, like The Merchant of Venice, is a work of theory in that nothing happens. Such events as there are tend to be overwhelmingly mundane: Steven, a little boy wearing a lumpy hat, orders drinks in a bar, or sits in a chair watching television, and says no, or something obscene, in response to every question. The lack of other events, and even of comedy, is one of the main themes. “C’mon, can’t I come with you on this comic adventure?” “I’m just going to the Goodwill to get a new table” (&:&").35 “Now I have enough for a bottle of Vat &".” “Oh boy, this is going to be a good comic” ():",). In Steven, as in The Merchant of Venice, the characters de!ne themselves not by performing but by anticipating and evaluating their performances. On this theoretical level the characters are known to one another as characters, and the background they inhabit is known to them as a comic strip, as in: “I’m tired of all the characters in this stupid comic strip” (&:&&).

What is the theory? Woodrow, the rodentlike character who enthu-siastically anticipates a trip to the Goodwill or the liquor store as a “comic adventure,” seems designed to articulate the theoretical argu-


ment and connect it to the mundane actions and squalid background. For Woodrow, who does not drink, it makes sense to contribute money for Steven to buy a bottle of Vat &", because doing so allows him to appear as an image in one or several panels. The loss of the money is not signi!cant, because Woodrow cares more about his status in the society of cartoon characters. It makes no sense for him to care about anything else; his refrain is “Can I be in this one?” a magical phrase that immediately inserts him into “this one,” contradicting Steven’s habitual answer, “No.” The only thing better than appearing in the Steven comic strip would be having his own “Woodrow Comic,” which he gets, brie*y, in exchange for bailing Steven out of a holding cell (&:"% – "').

This social theory looks quite different from that of The Merchant of Venice, in which each character makes a collective. In Steven each char-acter is pitted against the rest of the social universe in a winner-take-all competition to be the protagonist, the title character, the center of attention. Steven complains: “Everybody’s always trying to take over my comic strip. . . . Now it’s some stupid cactus plant” (+:&). In some episodes the cactus plant does effectively take over, appearing in most or all of the panels, so that Steven occupies only the title (in which he desperately asserts, “This is my comic strip, I’m the star, I’m Steven” [+:")]) and perhaps a small !nal panel in the lower right-hand corner, where he might have the last word (“The plant’s not funny” [+:")]) or, in a different mood, surrender (“Go back to the plant. Nothing’s happening here” [+:)#]). The cactus plant is not the only minor char-acter threatening to take over. Fi!doodle, a dog drawn to resemble a deformed Snoopy, talks candidly about his ambition: “I want it to be my comic strip” (&:"#). He also tries to convince the other characters to join him: “We must plot to overthrow the evil Steven” (&:"#). Fi!doodle is right: Steven is evil, both passively, in that he only says no and drinks, and actively, in that he kills any minor character whom he views as a threat to his status as protagonist. (This social theory can have vio-lent consequences, such as Steven !ring a shotgun at Fi!doodle or Mr. Owl Ph.D. !ring a cannon at Woodrow.) But it is hard to argue that Fi!doodle is any better, since he also tries to kill Steven and, later, the cactus plant; in one episode he and two other dog characters kidnap Steven’s friend Brock and threaten to keep him locked away until they are featured more prominently. Steven is not intimidated (“You have


Brock hostage, so what. Kill him” [":%]), because his friendship with Brock has been strained ever since Brock “[took] over my comic and ruined it” (":"+). Even the kind of collective action represented by the dogs’ attempted mutiny would normally be impossible, because all the characters are working on plans to take over and are therefore compet-ing with one another as well as with Steven. Mr. Owl Ph.D., the aca-demic in the group, explains that this competition is based on desires shared by everyone: “A lot of people would give anything to have their own comic strip” ():&,). Because there are not enough comic strips to go around, the characters compete brutally for the one thing they all want: to occupy more space in the panel. “One of the things I like to think we do in the comic business is to !ll space. . . . And around here at Steven’s, we do it pretty well” (":+&).

What are the theoretical implications of Steven for character criti-cism? Lynch generalizes the controversial statements about the “comic strip business” to include the “character business” of the literary novel ()). The same characterological theory is reproduced in Woloch’s account of the formation of hierarchical, centralized communities of characters in The One vs. the Many. As the title suggests, the char-acters gathered in Woloch’s study compete with one another. Each one wants to be the protagonist, the center of the character-system, the one whose character-space is disproportionately expansive rela-tive to the spaces allotted to the many minor characters. Behind the plot of the nineteenth-century realist novel, a metaplot pits charac-ters against one another in a contest for maximum attention within a limited space. The metaplot’s shape is determined by the patterns of attention of a given novel’s readers, which are determined by the nov-elist’s artistry. Behind the metaplot is the “actual social basis” for the character-system, the “larger social processes” in which readers and novelists themselves are embedded (Woloch, &($, ")$). However, the metaplot does not simply reproduce the inequalities of social organiza-tions. The protagonist does not even have to be the center of attention for other characters to capture the reader’s interest. In these respects the character-systems Woloch describes are truly “dynamic”: the con-test is always open to all characters.

What Woloch identi!es as the metaplot of the realist novel is simply the plot of Steven. In the comic strip, because the theory is laid bare, it


becomes possible to calculate precisely how space is distributed among the characters. At any moment the character who acts as protagonist is easily identi!ed, because that character’s name appears as a banner in the title. “The Famous Steven of Providence” (&:&#). “Steven: The Boy, The Legend” (&:+#). The title changes in every installment, sometimes radically, to re*ect changes in the hierarchy. “Brock” (":"+). “Woodrow Comic” (&:"%). “Steven and Brock, Comedians” (&:&%). “Steven and His Plant” ():+#). The population of characters — the “many” against which the “one” protagonist shines — has a precise number: “Steven gives up counting morons on &+th Street in New York City. ‘Three million twelve, oh, I give up’ ” ():&). The amount of space allotted to a character can also be measured, even quanti!ed: one can count the panels in which a character appears and calculate the proportion of space in a panel that the character takes up. Moreover, because this cartoon calls itself a cartoon, and Steven is never shown in pro!le, there is no discrepancy between the actual space of the panel and the illusion of space it cre-ates.36 Allen gives the character-system itself a precise spatial location and dimensions. All characters who are not part of Steven’s current weekly comic adventure are gathered in a small room called the Charac-ters Lounge. Every time a mutiny fails, the rebel character is returned to the lounge. The same thing happens to characters who die: “I don’t kill them, I just retire them to the Characters Lounge” (":$). The lounge is a stark image of the spatial consequences of the system Woloch describes, in which a protagonist’s centrality is achieved against a background of foreshortened minor characters. Fi!doodle complains, “This place isn’t a lounge, it’s a prison” (&:"#).

The Characters Lounge shows that the character-system, despite a seeming dynamism that potentially allows for a moment-by-moment reordering of the hierarchy, is severely closed. For Woloch, the deter-mining fact in a character’s existence is not the possession of intrinsic qualities — in other words, characteristics — but the relationship to a character-system elaborated sentence by sentence: “Narrative progress always entails a series of choices: each moment magni!es some charac-ters while turning away from — and thus diminishing or even stinting —

36 Even in a community of *at characters, however, there are spatial anomalies: Brock’s refrigerator box is larger inside than outside and is more elegantly appointed than Steven’s apartment. “It’s because of the way I decorate it” (&:%).


others” (&"). A novel’s character-system is a zero-sum economy in which attention given to one character has to be taken from another. “Does this mean that I can take over your comic?” “No. . . . But I’ve decided to add you to my cast of extras” (&:&').

The Spider Community

In the model I am proposing, the totalization performed by charac-ter is not limited by the boundaries of a work of art such as a novel or a comic strip. In other words, there is no character-system, no cast of characters. One of Woloch’s examples illustrates the indifference of character to the frames that separate aesthetic objects from one another. When Woloch describes the character-system of Balzac’s Père Goriot, he argues that the system must include characters who recur throughout the Comédie humaine; in this way he begins to follow the network that a character automatically establishes, if it works at all. However, Woloch’s concept of the character-system is limited histori-cally to Balzac’s lifetime and generically to the novel, and it does not acknowledge, because it cannot sustain, the inclusion in Le père Goriot of characters from other novels, plays, and books of characteristic writings by other authors, such as Jeanie Deans from Scott’s Heart of Midlothian, Alceste from Molière’s Misanthrope, Jaffer from Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved, and Ménalque, the distracted man from La Bruyère’s Car-actères (Le père Goriot, &,(, &,(, &',, &'#). The names of some of these characters also appear in the “Avant-propos” to the Comédie humaine, where they are integrated into a society that includes Balzac and his readers, as well as the state of nature, through Balzac’s comparison of his project to that of naturalists such as Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buf-fon: “If Buffon wrote a magni!cent work by attempting to represent zoology completely, couldn’t a work of the same kind be written on society?” (Comédie humaine, %).37

37 Peter Demetz incorrectly describes Buffon as a strong nominalist for whom “the individual horse or lion was the ‘real’ thing and all ‘genres, ordres, et classes’ merely a necessary evil” (“Balzac and the Zoologists: A Concept of the Type,” in The Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation, and History, ed. Peter Demetz, Thomas Greene, and Lowry Nelson Jr. [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, &',%], )''). Although Buffon opposes the systematic taxonomies of Linnaeus


The reference to Buffon suggests that character is not limited to human actors even in a series of novels with the general title Comédie humaine. Character does not respect divisions between biological spe-cies, or between organic and inorganic nature, for that matter. Things, places, machines, nature, and concepts — obviously these can function as characters, as in Steven, where a cactus plant becomes the most inter-esting actor; or in novels such as The Adventures of a Bank-Note and !lms such as Istoria mias kalpikis liras (The Counterfeit Coin, dir. Yorgos Javellas, &'((), where the protagonist is a piece of money;38 or in John Earle’s Micro-cosmographie, which gives the characters of generic places such as “A Prison” and particular places such as “Paul’s Walk,” and in which persons are characterized as places, as when “A Gallant” is described as “a walking mercers shop” (&%, ,&, )#). The same thing happens in Woloch’s other examples, for instance, Dickens’s Great Expectations:

An épergne or centerpiece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth . . . and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remem-ber its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckled-legged spi-ders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstance of the greatest public importance had just transpired in the spider community.

I heard the mice too, rattling behind the panels, as if the same occurrence were important to their interests. But the blackbeetles took no notice of the agitation, and groped about the hearth in a ponderous elderly way, as if they were short-sighted and hard of hearing, and not on terms with one another.39

“These crawling things,” Pip continues, “had fascinated my attention,” and for a few paragraphs he describes the social lives of spiders, mice,

and his followers and makes fun of the notion of kingdoms and families of creatures, he is strongly committed to the reality of the species, which he de!nes pragmatically as a group of creatures that can reproduce internally. This remains an uncontroversial de!nition of species in modern biology. See Jacques Roger, Buffon: A Life in Natural History, ed. L. Pearce Williams, trans. Sarah Lucille Bonnefoi (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-versity Press, &''$), )#' – )(.

38 On The Adventures of a Bank-Note see Lynch, '( – '$; and Christina Lupton, “The Knowing Book: Authors, It-Narratives, and Objecti!cation in the Eighteenth Century,” Novel )' ("##,): +#" – "#.

39 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, &'(#), '%.


and blackbeetles. This scene is organized like the character-systems that Woloch describes, except that the human actors, Pip and Miss Havisham, are not at the center. Instead, they look on from the outer-most periphery, along with blackbeetles, which are less observant. Most characters care about the “great cake,” which in this passage is help-fully described as the “centerpiece” and therefore might also be called the protagonist. Pip attributes “public importance” to mice and spi-ders, whose “interests” converge in the centralized cake on and around which they live. Therefore an accurate account of communities of char-acters in the novel should include not only those who walk on two legs but also those who crawl on several legs — the “spider community,” in which spiders are linked to one another, and to the community of mice through shared interests, and to the human community through Pip’s fascination as well as through the cake, a talismanic object for Hav-isham and the spiders.

Membership in this society is not limited to actors who are rep-resented directly in the novel’s diegesis. “Spider community” means just what it says: all spiders, everything that spiders are interested in, everyone who is interested in spiders, and, peripherally, all those whose interests coincide with those of spiders. Even the characters in Steven, most of whom are stuck in the cramped Characters Lounge, easily form associations with other !gures outside the frame. The example of Ste-ven may seem to show that Woloch’s model of the character-system is actually the right one, at least in one instance. But in a late episode, in which Steven performs increasingly extreme variations on the misan-thropic gesture of withdrawing from the world — !rst !ring his charac-ters (“I don’t regret !ring all my characters one bit! . . . I can have big empty panels like this where nothing happens” [+:']), then jumping out of the cartoon panel altogether and into the real world (“Good-bye cartoon world. I’m jumping” [+:&,]) — the characters repeatedly discover openings in the panel. The !red characters continue to be represented in the strip: “Didn’t you notice you’ve been in it more since you were !red?” (+:"#). Conversations cross the border separating the panel and the margin. Mr. Owl Ph.D. !nally explains, “There’s no dif-ference between the comic world and the real one” (+:&').

Communities of characters bridge individual !ctions and genres, as well as orders of reality such as history and !ction, given and made,


and life and death. The best example of these crossings is not a comic book or novel or group of novels but a work of criticism such as The One vs. the Many. In one passage Woloch performs a thought experi-ment: “Imagine a Hall of Fame for minor characters — ranging from Pylades to Lucky and Pozzo, with a handful of Mercutios and Fridays in between — where !ctional creations were suddenly plucked from their relative obscurity within the dramas and narratives that they enchant” ("&+). His book is that Hall of Fame: it collects characters from vari-ous novels, plays, poems, and works of criticism and gives them a new signi!cance. The problem is that Woloch has no way to account for the act of collecting. His concept of the character-system only describes communities within novels; it does not describe the community formed by his own study, in which the entire cast of characters in King Lear is attached to Le père Goriot and linked to the names of professional criti-cal readers of Balzac and Shakespeare.40 If Woloch is right about how the character-system works, then criticism should be impossible.

Woloch’s study is a clear, compelling statement of an account of character that many readers assume, and a frightening exposition of the consequences of this account for communities of characters. Woloch pursues the consequences to a point that would be destructive not to the practice of criticism but only to the coarticulation of history and form. Whether one prefers Woloch’s account, in which a character’s job is to particularize, to mine — in which a character collects examples — may depend on whether one wants a tragic history or a comic one. It may also depend on what one means by form, because Marjorie Levinson observes that critics associated with formalism not only do not share a de!nition of form but in fact have no such de!nition.41 My formalist account of character follows Ferguson’s idealist de!nition of form, according to which form makes it possible for there to be “more than one” of something (viii, "# – "&, )&). Although separate from the sensuous particulars of aesthetic experience, form is involved in acts of making, because the imposition of form is precisely how things are made. Why is form a concern for criticism? Because we need more than

40 I refer to the subsection titled “Interiority and Centrality in Le père Goriot and King Lear” (Woloch, "%" – %%).

41 Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA &"" ("##$): (,&.


accounts of things that do not translate. We also need accounts of what parts of things translate, what devices translate them, and where it hap-pens. Character is such a device.

Aaron Kunin is assistant professor of English at Pomona College. He is working on two book manuscripts: Research on Human Subjects: Character as Form, about making a person, and Preservation Fantasy, about preserving human values in the form of an artifact. He is also author of a collection of small poems about shame, Folding Ruler Star (2005), and a novel, The Mandarin (2008).

Aaron Kunin-Characters Lounge

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