Character Rent

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Source: Herman, David, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan, eds. (2005). Character. In:

Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 52-57.

CHARACTER (URI MARGOLIN)

As a narratological term, character(Frenchpersonnage, GermanFigur), refers to a *storyworld

participant, i.e., any individual or unified group occurring in a *drama or work of narrative

*fiction. In a narrower sense, the term is restricted to participants in the narrated domain, to the

exclusion of the *narrator and *narratee. Meanwhile, in everyday usage the term character is

often used to refer to someone's personality, that is, an individual's enduring traits and

dispositions. The homonymy of the technical and ordinary terms has sometimes led to the

exclusive concentration on the *psychological aspects of literary figures. All theoretical modelsof character divide into mimetic or representational (first formulated by Aristotle), treating

character as a human or human-like entity, and non-mimetic (e.g., Roland Barthes's model),

reducing it to a text-grammatical, lexical, *thematic, or compositional unit. The major

theoretical paradigms currently available for the *mimetic study of character are the semantic

(*possible-worlds theory), *cognitive (readers' mental models), and communicative (the

process of narrative mediation; see FUNCTION (JAKOBSON);NARRATIVE TRANSMISSION).

While the three approaches are different in their points of departure, they reveal significant

complementarity, and sometimes even convergence, providing jointly a fairly rich theory of

character.

Semantic theories

In possible-worlds semantics character is modelled as an individual who is a member of some

non-actual state of affairs. Such an individual is created by *semiotic means and designated by

a referring expression of some kind (see REFERENCE). Inside the non-actual domain the

individual is located in *space and *time and prototypically assigned human-like properties:

physical or external, actantial (including communicative), social, and mental or internal

(cognitive, emotive, volitional and perceptual) (see ACTANT). The individual may also be

ascribed enduring personality traits and dispositions, knowledge and belief sets, intentions,

wishes, attitudes, *desires and *emotions, and, of course, internal states and actions (see

INTENTIONALITY). Minimally, it must possess an agential capacity (see AGENCY). Unlikeactual individuals, all the information about characters is limited to the text that calls them into

existence, so they are radically incomplete in some respects. Many predications about them

hence get an indeterminate truth value (seeGAPPING;INDETERMINACY). Conversely, they need

not conform to any ontological regularity of actuality, and may even be inconsistent or possess

incompatible properties. Characters are presented textually as a discontinuous series of states,

and their continuity is world-dependent. By a constitutive narrative convention, it is possible in

some fictional worlds to have unrestricted mental access to such individuals, and thus obtain

certain knowledge about their interiority (see THOUGHT AND CONSCIOUSNESS

REPRESENTATION (LITERATURE)).

Since non-actual individuals are semiotically created, one can ask about the minimalconstitutive conditions under which they can be introduced and sustained. Firstly, the referring

expressions by which such an individual is designated should be used referentially, to pick out
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an entity in a domain, not just played with as pure signifiers. Beyond bare existence, it should

be possible to assign at least one property to the individual for every state in which it exists.

Further conditions fulfilled by most narratives include uniqueness, that is, that an individual

should be distinguishable in each state of affairs in which it exists from all other coexisting

individuals, and coherence of features, which means that they definable pattern or intelligible

structure. Still another condition would be temporal continuity or *identity in spite of allchanges undergone. The problematisation or non-fulfilment of any one of these conditions is

always thematically foregrounded, and when none of them is fulfilled one encounters the death

of character or its reduction to pure verbal expressions.

Individuals in storyworlds may have any kind of modal status. They may thus exist in the

textualactual world, that is, in the fact domain of this world, but also in any of its sub-worlds

such as the hypothetical or counterfactual (Ryan 1991; Werth 1999;seeVIRTUALITY). Or they

may exist merely in the belief, wish, intention, or imagination sphere of another character or

characters, such as the gardener Putois in Anatole France's story of the same title. The modal

status of a character may be undecided or disputed for much of a story: does N. N. exist or is

s/he just a mental construct in the belief or imagination world of one or more other characters?By the same token, widely different versions of the same individual whose existence and

properties in the factual domain of the story-world are confirmed by an authoritative narrating

instancemay be entertained by different coagents (seeNARRATOR). In the absence of such

an instance, however, the *truth value of any version may remain in dispute.

While the dimensions for the characterisation of storyworld participants are universal (physical,

mental, behavioural), the number and nature of the properties any individual possesses with

respect to a particular dimension may vary enormouslydepending on the individual's role in

the story, the type of storyworld portrayed and what is necessary, possible, or probable in it (see

MODALITY), and the aesthetics of the *author or literary school. In stories with dual-world

ontologies, such as human and divine, individuals belonging to different zones may be radically

different as regards the most basic types of properties (bodily shape, mental ability). Individuals

designated by the same proper name sometimes occur in storyworlds generated by different

texts written by the same or different authors, such as the numerous Don Quixotes or Don Juans

throughout the centuries. The question of the sameness of these individuals immediately

arises, and also the legitimacy of transferring information about the same named individual

from one storyworld to another, leading at the limit to their fusion (seeTRANSFICTIONALITY).

Is it the same individual, different versions of one and the same figure, or distinct and separate

individuals? Opinions vary, but the most convincing view would regard the relation between

the original individual and his or her namesake in another storyworld created later as one of

counterparthood, not sameness, this relation being a matter of degree, with no clearly agreedupon minimal conditions (seeNAMING IN NARRATIVE).

A similar problem involves actuality variants in fictional worlds, such as individuals bearing

the names of historical figures, for example Napoleon, interacting with fictional ones. How

much of the historical information about such individuals may one thus introduce into the

storyworld, and how much of the historical features need be preserved so we can claim that this

is a version of the original individual? Is an ex-emperor named Napoleon, living in exile in New

Orleans a version of the original one? And how about a sheep farmer called Sherlock Holmes?

As for the relation between fictional individuals and actuality in general, one can distinguish

three kinds. A fictional individual may be just semiotically motivated with respect to pre-

existent literary codes and stereotypes. It may in addition be considered verisimilar if itsproperty structure is such that it could be instantiated in actuality according to one's version of

actuality (see VERISIMILITUDE). A character is realistic if it is verisimilar according to the
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prevailing world model of nineteenth-century western culture (seeREALISM, THEORIES OF).

Fictional individuals, no less than actual ones, are often endowed with a rich mental life. A

recent development within fictional-world semantics is the utilisation of cognitive-science

concepts and theories to produce a disciplined description of characters' mental functioning,

from perception to metacognition. The basic model is that of information processing: its

acquisition, mental representation, storage and retrieval, and production of new information.

Cognitive theories

Traditional, pre-theoretical discussions of character have introduced some distinctions which

have become standard in critical practice. Depending on the number and variety of mental

features attributed to a character it can be termed flat or round. It has been said that flat

characters cannot surprise us while round ones can. In the course of the action, characters may

remain psychologically unchanged, hence static, or they may undergo mental change such as

development or decline, and hence be dynamic. Employing one or another kind of folk cum

literary psychology, characters can be classified in numerous ways into character types.

But how do readers construct any image of a character to begin with? A tentative answer to this

fundamental question is provided by the cognitive approach as elaborated in the last few years

by Culpeper, Jannidis, and Schneider. In this paradigm, character is seen as a mental model of

a storyworld participant, constructed by the reader incrementally in the course of reading (text

comprehension) on the basis of constant interplay between specific textual data and general

knowledge structures stored in the reader's long-term *memory (see NARRATIVE

COMPREHENSION; PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO NARRATIVE). The construction of the

mental model is initiated by the identification of a referring expression in the text as designating

a discourse entity and a recognition that occurrences of other tokens of the same expression in

the discourse (or other expressions) pick out the same entity. The reader then establishes a

distinct entity in his or her mental map to which features are ascribed on the basis of textual

data and around which a minimal situational frame is constructed, consisting of this individual,

time, place, and state or *event (seeSITUATION MODEL).

The conceptual unit that readers intuitively label character is thus mentally generated in

response to textual clues. As one reads on, guided by the read for character control system,

one gathers textual cues which characterise the mental entity in focus. This is bottom-up or

data-driven processing, involving both explicit property ascription and character-related

information which could serve as basis for such ascription. Once a certain number of properties

have been gathered, they often activate a knowledge structure stored in long-term memory

under which these properties can be subsumed and integrated into a character model.Information gathering and the search for a category under which it may be subsumed may well

be running concurrently. The knowledge structures in question include scripts, schemas, and

stereotypes (see SCRIPTS AND SCHEMATA), and may encompass the psychological, social,

communicative, and physical dimensions. They may originate in world knowledge, but also in

knowledge of literary *genres and conventions and in specific literary texts, including

generalisations about character made in the text currently being read. Actual world models and

literary ones often diverge, and the question then arises as to which of them should predominate

in a given case. While the model reader and professional literati will give the literary ones

precedence, ordinary readers tend to give precedence to entrenched actual-world models. The

same issue arises when the actual-world models of the text's original *audience are very

different from those held by current readers. Once a fit between data and category is established,categorisationtakes place, and readers may then proceed top down, integrate all the information
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their mental dimension can be drawn from the nature of the information they take in and the

ways they process it. A global narrator qua narrator can only self-characterise, while a narratee

can always be characterised by the narrator, or have his self-characterisation quoted by the

narrator.

The reliability of any characterisation statement made by a narrative agent is the subject of acomplex computation involving both general factors (intelligence, knowledge, honesty) and

specific contextual ones (who characterises whom, for whom, in what situation, and with what

intention). Narrators can be reliable or not with respect to both the information they provide on

any subject and their evaluation or judgement of it, and this holds for any self-characterisations

or characterisations of others that they might make. The basic rule seems to be that any

characterisation statement made by a narrative agent, narratee, or personalised narrator needs

always to be assessed by the reader and placed on a gradient ranging from total acceptance to

total rejection. But the maker of a characterisation statement always gets himself characterised

implicitly on the basis of the matter and manner of her characterisation and the relation between

the two. By narrative convention, characterisation statements made by an omniscient

impersonal narrating voice are true and serve as a yardstick for assessing the validity of suchstatements made by all others (see AUTHENTICATION). The only exception seems to be

narratorial *irony, which is a matter of interpretation. Explicit characterisation of a storyworld

participant by a global narrator can be given all at once, usually when the character is first

introduced, in which case it is termed block characterisation. Or it may given piecemeal

throughout the text. Finally, like all other statements, characterisation statements too can be

modalised as merely quoted, probable, hypothetical, counterfactual, wishful, and so on.

As already mentioned, much of the textual information that serves to ascribe properties to

storyworld participants is implicit or indirect. Often, therefore, a certain item of textual

information is identified on the basis of a semantic trigger as a signifier for the properties of a

given individual. In the case of narrative agents, this trigger is provided by a genre convention

which defines what information is significant for the characterisation of an individual in this or

that kind of storyworld (Jannidis 2001). The next step consists of employing an inference rule

to extract the relevant properties, an activity already discussed in the previous section. While

individual items are text-specific, there are three major sources of information for inferring a

narrative agent's properties, especially mental ones. (1) Dynamic elements: a character's

physical and verbal actions or behaviour, their content, manner, and context. (2) Static

elements: a character's appearance, natural setting and man-made milieu, assuming that

contiguity implies similarity between physical and mental, the physical serving as signifier for

the mental. (3) Formal compositional patterns of character-grouping by way of similarity and

contrast, assuming that forms of organisation reflect forms of content. In contrast, a narratorqua narrator can only be characterised on the basis of the verbal action of narration, and

narrators and narratees in general may in some cases be amenable to only very minimal

characterisation beyond their structural communicative capabilities.

Non-mimetic theories

All mimetic theories of character assume a nonverbal situation, extension, or domain of

reference with individuals, time, place, states, and events evoked by the narrative text, the

individuals in question being fictional human or human-like entities. Non-mimetic theories, in

contrast, refuse to go beyond the textual, intensional, or semiotic profile of the narrative

discourse. Character is thus viewed as a topic entity of a connected discourse, a name to whichdistinctive lexical features are attached, a role in a case grammar (agent, patient, etc.), a device

for achieving an aesthetic effect (laughter, horror), an element in an architectonic pattern
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(parallels and contrasts), or a functional piece in *plot conceived as a set of formal moves

(agent, foil). On the thematic level, character has been viewed as an ideological position, point

of intersection of *motifs or themes, and as an exemplification of an issue, problem, attitude,

value, or idea (seeIDEOLOGY AND NARRATIVE).

But are the mimetic and non-mimetic views of character mutually exclusive? Starting from afunctional view of narrative, which recognises the narratological usefulness of both approaches,

James Phelan has suggested an integrative model of character, distinguishing in it three basic

components: the mimetic (character as person), thematic (character as idea), and synthetic

(character as artificial construct). He goes on to point out that all functions exist in every

character occurrence, and it is the relation among them (which one is foregrounded and which

de-emphasised) which varies from one narrative to another. SEE ALSO:reader-response theory

References and Further Reading

Bortolussi, Marisa, and Peter Dixon (2003)Psychonarratology, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Culpeper, Jonathan (2001)Language and Characterisation, Harlow: Longman.

Emmott, Catherine (1997)Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective, Oxford:

Clarendon Press.

Garvey, James (1978) Characterization in Narrative,Poetics, 7, 6378.

Glaudes, Pierre, and Yves Reuter (1998)Le Personnage, Paris: PUF.

Grabes, Herbert (1978) Wie aus Stzen Personen werden,Poetica, 10, 40528.

Jannidis, Fotis (2001)Figur und Person, unpublished Habilitationsschrift.

Knapp, John (ed.) (1990) Literary Character, Style, 24.3 (special issue).

Koch, Thomas (1991)Literarische Menschendarstellung, Tuebingen: Stauffenberg.Margolin, Uri (1987) Introducing and Sustaining Characters in Literary Narrative, Style, 21.1,

10724.

(1989) Structuralist Approaches to Character in Narrative: The Stateof the Art,

Semiotica, 75.12,124.

(1996) Characters and their Versions, in Calin-Andrei Mihailescu and Walid Hamarneh

(eds)Fiction Updated, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Palmer, Alan (2004)Fictional Minds, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Phelan, James (1989)Reading People, Reading Plots, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ryan, Marie-Laure (1991)Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory,

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Schneider, Ralf (2000) Grundriss zur kognitiven Theorie der Figurenrezeption,Tbingen: Stauffenberg.

(2001) Towards a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character, Style, 35.4, 60740.

Werth, Paul (1999) Text Worlds, London: Longman.
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