Character

Three Inquiries in Literary Studies

Amanda Anderson,Rita Felski,Toril Moi

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226658834
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Over the last few decades, character-based criticism has been seen as either naive or obsolete. But now questions of character are attracting renewed interest. Making the case for a broad-based revision of our understanding of character, Character rethinks these questions from the ground up. Is it really necessary to remind literary critics that characters are made up of words? Must we forbid identification with characters? Does character-discussion force critics to embrace humanism and outmoded theories of the subject?Across three chapters, leading scholars Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi reimagine and renew literary studies by engaging in a conversation about character. Moi returns to the fundamental theoretical assumptions that convinced literary scholars to stop doing character-criticism, and shows that they cannot hold. Felski turns to the question of identification and draws out its diverse strands, as well as its persistence in academic criticism. Anderson shows that character-criticism illuminates both the moral life of characters, and our understanding of literary form. In offering new perspectives on the question of fictional character, this thought-provoking book makes an important intervention in literary studies.

IDENTIFYING WITH CHARACTERS

Rita Felski

Many of us have felt a tug of connection with a character in a novel or a film: a sense of affinity or shared response. We explain this tie by saying we are identifying. But how, exactly, are we drawn in? What kinds of ties are being forged? There is often a carelessness when critics talk about identification: the experience is judged before it is fully seen. It is often held to be slightly shameful—something that other people do (the naive, the unschooled, the sentimental). Yet identifying is a default rather than an option; a feature, not a bug. Two forms of confusion have led critics astray. Identification is often equated with empathy, or co-feeling—though empathy is just one of the ways in which readers and viewers identify. And it is also conflated with the question of identity, with a fixing or circumscribing of the parameters of selfhood.

Both assumptions are ripe for reassessment. Audiences become attached to fiction in an abundance of ways; these ties can be ironic as well as sentimental, ethical as well as emotional. Identifying involves ideas and values as well as persons; may confound or remake a sense of self rather than confirming it; and is practiced by skeptical scholars as well as wide-eyed enthusiasts. In short, it is more varied and more pervasive than it is taken to be. Tackling the academic disdain for identification as a naive or “bad” reading practice, Faye Halpern points out that “sophisticated literary critics read to identify as well. The difference comes not from the practice of identification but from the differing grounds of identification.”1 What, then, are these differing grounds? What are the beliefs, hopes, habits, or obsessions that lead readers or viewers to identify in specific ways? What part is played by a text and what kind of intermediaries are involved? Why audiences care about fictional figures, how they treat them as matters of concern—such questions deserve closer scrutiny.

To rethink identification is also to rethink character. We can think of characters as being like persons without scanting or shortchanging their aesthetic qualities. Neither do we need “the illusion of reality” to identify—an assumption that fails to account for attachments to Bugs Bunny, Cinderella, or Vladimir and Estragon. Characters do not have to be deep, well-rounded, psychologically complex, or unified to count as characters; nor, of course, do they need to be human. They need only to be animated: to act and react, to will and intend.2 Why do critics so often equate character with the genre of realism—whether they come to bury or to praise it? Audiences identify with figures from fairy tales, comic strips, melodramas, parables, and superhero movies, not to mention Star Trek, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, or Blood and Guts in High School. The draw of character has far less to do with realism than with qualities of vividness and distinctiveness. As any cartoonist knows, a few well-chosen strokes can be far more effective than a detailed rendering; stylization is a powerful tool. In “Notes on ‘Camp,’” for example, Susan Sontag writes: “character is understood as a state of continual incandescence—a person being one very intense thing.”3 Identification is as relevant to Malone Dies as to Middlemarch, to Tom and Jerry as to Doctor Zhivago—though the mechanisms of identification will certainly vary.

The messiness of how we identify runs up against two intellectual temptations: overpoliticizing and overpsychologizing. At a certain moment in film studies, the first tendency ran rampant; a gamut of aesthetic experiences was boiled down into a single story line. Mixing up cocktails of Freud, Marx, and Mulvey, critics excoriated any form of identification as a trap: a means by which viewers were seduced into complicity with the status quo. Identification had to be “broken down” in order to make critical thinking possible. (The intensity of their own identifications with critical theory and theorists, meanwhile, went entirely unremarked.) The recent turn to cognitive psychology has led to much more fine-grained accounts of the mental processes that bind us to works of art. And yet the connections to a larger world and agencies beyond the self are often lost. Reading these accounts, one gets the impression that identifying is a drama being played out in the cloistered cells of individual minds.4

I’ve learned a great deal, nonetheless, from cognitive-oriented film critics such as Murray Smith and Carl Plantinga. They both point out—with some justification—that “identifying” is a slippery and confusing word, and they opt instead to speak of “engaging.” Yet this strikes me as a case where the cure is worse than the disease. Engagement covers an even broader and more diffuse range of reactions: being turned on by, disgusted by, or falling in love with characters, for example, as well as identifying with them. My own interest lies squarely with identification as used in everyday speech: to describe an affinity that is based on some sense of similarity. This commonsense usage, as we’ll see, does not exclude complexity; to be like a character is not synonymous with liking a character: a felt affinity can be underwritten by diverse, conflicting, or ambivalent affects. Meanwhile, these shared qualities may motivate or inspire identification (as when we are drawn to a work of fiction that captures something already known); or they may be produced by identification (as when we temporarily “take on” or assume aspects of fictional figures). By contrast, when a group of British women interviewed by Jackie Stacey reflected on their love of moviegoing in the 1940s, some of them stressed the utter remoteness and unattainable glamor of an actress such as Rita Hayworth; she was “out of this world,” someone to be worshiped from afar. “I adored Ava Gardner’s dark magnetism,” commented one interviewee, “but knew I wasn’t like that.”5 Here devotion is tied to the frisson of difference: to a perceived chasm between viewer and Hollywood star. There is an intense engagement, but it has very little to do with perceived similarity and identification.

Identifying, then, implies a sense of something shared, but this does not mean obliterating or overriding differences. There is no Vulcan mindmeld, no fusion of viewer and character where we lose all sense of self or capacity for independent thought.6 To identify with something is not to be identical with it; we are talking about the rough ground of resemblance rather than pure sameness. There is a rich vein in cultural studies—especially its feminist variant—that is devoted to the complexities of how audiences identify; that this work is so rarely acknowledged in literary theory, film theory, and philosophical aesthetics is unfortunate. My argument builds on these ideas rather than recapitulating them, but I want to underscore my debt to the groundbreaking work of Ien Ang, Jackie Stacey, Janice Radway, Judith Mayne, and others.7

The existence of queer studies, meanwhile, pivots on the possibility of identifying across identities (Douglas Crimp), on a view of identifications as mobile, elastic, and volatile (Diana Fuss).8 And here aesthetic identifications—to characters, stars, authors—are selective, speaking to an affinity with certain qualities rather than with the whole person: “I never wanted to be her,” writes Jim Elledge of Tina Turner; “I just wanted her strength, her self-assuredness and a body I wasn’t ashamed of.” They can be empathic, involving a shared sense of pain or abjection: Christopher Murray ponders the phenomenon of gay attachment to “tragic figures of ridicule” such as Margaret Dumont, the comic foil of the Marx Brothers movies. They can be a matter of comeuppance: Edward Field writes of larger-than-life movie stars who represent “yearnings for vindication, in which we see ourselves transcending the difficulties a gay man faces in the world.” They can be as much about style as about selfhood: “it’s in the shape of my sentences and the trajectory my thinking follows that I find her lambent voice and habits of mind limning my own” (Brian Teare on Virginia Woolf).9

And here identifying does not simply entrench a prior self but may enrich, expand, or amend it. Perhaps we glimpse aspects of ourselves in a character, but in a way that causes us to revise our sense of who we are. The phrase “shock of recognition” is not just a cliché. We can be sustained, but also disconcerted, by a felt kinship with a fictional figure. Estrangement is not the opposite of identification but its shadow; it is not uncommon to sense the alien or unappealing aspects of a character one is being drawn to.10 And while something shared is key, the nature of this “something” cannot be predicted ahead of time. Is it temperament or social situation; feelings, histories, or values; who one is or who one would like to be? That audiences can identify with a hobbit or a rabbit is a sign that semblances are often metaphorical rather than literal. Affinities experienced while reading a book or watching a film can cut across divisions of gender, race, sexuality, class, or even, in certain genres, species. It is a matter not just of finding oneself but of leaving oneself. In her autobiography, Jeanette Winterson speaks of “reading herself” in the mode of fiction as well as fact, as the only way of keeping her story open. She is transported into alternate worlds, even as these worlds turn out to be remarkably close. “And so I read on, past my own geography and history. . . . The great writers were not remote. They were in Accrington.”11

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?—the title of Winterson’s memoir—is the bewildered question asked by her adoptive mother on finding out that her daughter is a lesbian. Neither happiness nor normality turns out to be on the cards. The book is a record of woundedness: the scars inflicted by the abusive and eccentric Mrs. Winterson; by having been given up for adoption; by never quite knowing who one is. It is also an account of how stories help make things bearable. As a teenager, Winterson leaves home, sleeps in a Mini, and makes her home in the Accrington public library, reading her way through English literature from A to Z. Allies are at hand: a solicitous librarian; the Dewey decimal system; the comical but informative Mrs. Ratlow (head of English). Through books she forges ties to real and fictional lives, to authors who write and to characters who are written. Personal stories speak to others, she observes, when they become paradigms or parables. “The intensity of a story . . . releases into a bigger space than the one it occupied in time and place. The story crosses the threshold from my world into yours.”12 A transpersonal crossing or connection is achieved. Central to Winterson’s text are two forms of aesthetic relation that I’ll consider in more detail: allegiance (a felt affiliation or solidarity with certain others) and recognition (the struggle to know oneself and to be known). “I have always been interested in stories of disguise and mistaken identity, of naming and knowing. How are you recognised? How do you recognise yourself?”13

It is hardly surprising that a novelist testifies to the salvific power of stories. Not everyone, of course, will respond along the same lines as Winterson, or in the same way. And glitches and misfirings are all too common; there can be a failure to identify (being bored, distracted, apathetic, irritated, turned off) or a conscious refusal to identify, whether for political, ethical, or other reasons. Countless contingencies are in play. My aim is neither to prescribe nor to prohibit but to redescribe a form of attachment that is often caricatured or poorly understood and to tackle some common canards: that identifying is synonymous with “sameness”; that it involves a naive view of character; that it can only be sappy, sentimental, or unreflective.

CHARACTER AS UMWELT

A second aspect of identification is its relation to persons: what readers and viewers identify with, above all, are characters. (Though, as we’ll see, this attachment may bleed into a felt affinity with an author, an actor, a situation, a style: audiences are promiscuous in their affections. The question of what it means to connect to a style is one that I discuss in more detail elsewhere, under the rubric of “attunement.”)14 There has been much hand-wringing over the status of character in literary and film studies. The antihumanist orientation of the last few decades led to a pervasive skepticism about the status of fictional persons; critics insisted that characters were nothing but signifiers: textual holograms, verbal phantasms, or visual illusions. As such, they bore no relation to persons; to treat them as such was the epitome of naivety or philistinism. Yet the case is hardly compelling; after all, characters do share qualities with real people, while our interactions with others often draw on insights we have gleaned from novels or films. We translate between fiction and life without blinking.

More recently, critics have taken a different tack, appealing to ideas from evolutionary psychology. Humans, they point out, have an intrinsic bias toward sociability: we are primed to be curi...