Notes on Character and Characterization

Notas (de 1996) sobre...

 

 Daniel Schwarz,
“Character and Characterization: An Inquiry”

Approach: pro “humanistic formalism” (97) “dialogical or pluralistic aesthetic” (101), pro seeing characters in diverse ways’ “it should be a goal of ours to be as open-minded and pluralistic as possible lest we limit the possibilities of reading experience by blind adherence to a few points of view” (101). (Contra los excesos de la desconstrucción, vs. free play of meaning,  pro Iser, Bakhtin, Gelley... sin embargo, su noción de que el carácter va más allá de lo escrito podría asimilarse al free play of meaning). Criticism as disguised autobiography (Cf. Anatole France).

Main point:

104. “Because of our human interest in other humans, the reader does much of his creative work as a reader of fictional characters, including the narrative voice.”

Characterization vs. character.

Characterization:
97: “Characterization is the formal pattern by which characters are realized.” Responded to in aesthetic terms (artistry, etc.) (98).

89. “Characterization is a formal term—a term of discourse—while character belongs to content or story”
“A characterization is a trope—a figure or vehicle for a character formally realized by an author in an aesthetic structure.” Signified of this trope extends to the intended audience, readers, author, narratee..  “human figure (I use the term in its meaning as individual and trope)” Human interest makes us anthropomorphize these abstractions. 

90: “Character is an extended personification or prosopopeia, a sign endowed with human attributes”. 91: “illusion takes precedence when human behavior is being described”. Strenght of identification, especially in scenes of represented passion (desire) “because that is where for most of aus the mimetic stakes are highest” (102).

Characterization: “the idea that formal authorial and mimetic tools organize character”. (Parece contraponerlo al efecto final, character, que va más allá debido a la identificación de los lectores).

Character:
Formal pattern of characterization constructs character; “Yet because characters challenge form and assert their individuality, taking on in their imagined ontology lives of their own, character is the most difficult issue to discuss” (97)- humanistic implications.
“a dialogical or pluralistic aesthetic will see characters in diverse ways: at the same time, we see characters as determinate parts of a thematic pattern and as tentative, indeterminate signifiers whose meaning is never fully realized” (101).

Reading character

Understanding of characters in formal, mimetic, expressive, historical and metaphoric terms. 90: pro seeing character pluralistically, “in terms of its mimesis, as part of an expressive relationship in which character is a surrogate for an author  . . . a part of an historical context, and in terms of its linguistic function within a text.”  

99. Thematic/didactic vs. mimetic poles: 

89. A character is understood as being mimetic or representative of the various human groups and categories to which it belongs. (Ojo: mimetic tiene aquí otro sentido: mimetic de una estructura social, no de sí mismo).

Cartoon, caricature and character, from least to most mimetic. (cf. Forster, flat/round). “While fully developed characters change more than cartoons or caricatures, all characters are realized in partially mimetic, partially aesthetic dimensions by the action of plot presented in language” (99). 

“As we move along on continuum from cartoons to caricatures to characters, we perceive less by types or cultural modes and more by nominalistic, specific detail as individuals within psychological, sociological, and historical dimensions” (100). Or: representational vs. idiosyncratic (mimetic).

Character as metaphor

92: Characters metaphors for ourselves, for their creators and for narrators. (strong emphasis on identification and empathy, f. i. with reference to “The Dead”). 

91 “Do we not do a disservice to our students, ourselves, and literature when we say that it is naive to discuss motives, values, and emotions of characters and when we replace the life and energy of our human responses with our theoretical perspective?”
(what is necessary, rather, is to make theory explain our experience, not relinquish theory). Vs. unrealistic image of readers’ activity in many theoretical works; 

97: Pro emotions and identification with character, stronger than the free play of signifiers. Also, pro history and context, but beyond Marxist narrow analysis (98-99), pro stronger importance of personal emotions, family relationships, etc.

103. Reading: 2 directions: temporal-metonymic and spatial-metaphoric. Pattern built gradually, we organize structures of signification metaphorically. (No queda claro si no deberia haber según su teoría un elemento metonímico en el carácter complejo que resiste la traducción a esas estructuras, que no es metaforizado).

Complexity of characters

87. Mobility and flowing quality of literary characters vs. those of the plastic arts. They change as we read on, and are dependent on the process of memory which is itself selective. 96: even visual presentation of film is reductive.

Complex characters: “the more we see life through their eyes, the less we see them” (91). Complex characters resist totalization and description (92). “Leopold Bloom’s complexity refuses to submit to the patterning and plotting of Joyce’s overstylized episodes from ‘Wandering Rocks’ through ‘Circe’” (94). 

Plotlessness in life of complex modern characters causes identification; “Does not the plotting of texts—postponement, fulfillment, delays, circling back, iteration of prior patterns, reorganization of data, description of patterns, forward thrusts and lurches—echo the way we make sense of our lives?” (93). 

“Does not the gradual shift toward self-consciousness in characters as we move from the nineteenth to the twentieth century create and reflect the self-consciousness of modern readers?” (94). “Eighteenth-century and Victorian novels assert the possibility of a stable identity that can be retrieved from historical circumstances . . . whereas the modern novel shows characters in search of that self; retrospective narratives, such as Notes from Underground, The Secret Sharer, and Heart of Darkness, reveal a teller probing into a prior version of himself, a version now oblique if not incomprehensible t his present self” (95).““We look for patterns because we fear randomness and unpredictability in human behavior” (93).

Plausibility for growth and evolution within the time frame of a novel (94) - both action time and reading time. 

98 “character is always presented by another character—in the form of a narrator who self-dramatizingly reveals his values and psyche through speech, or by an author.... (vague: pero parece decir que entendemos tanto al narrador y al autor como personajes). Character understood structurally:, within “the system of other characters” and implied reader, narrator, ourselves...

89. “stereophonic voicing in text”, “the narratee is not a single entity but a complex mélange of diverse audiences which are imagined and addressed differently in every passage by the narrator.” “It may be because of our poly-auditory responses to texts that complex characters seem to elude our desire to sum them up or define their significance.”

89. “Representing human being is both more metaphorical than other kinds of representation because of how we understand characters in their typifying function, and less metaphorical because the creation of people often short-circuits their putative metaphorical function and creates odd kinds of empathy with readers”

Otherness

90: “Focus on characters in imagined worlds implies an interest in something other than ourselves: It means relinquishing our power over the text.” “Isn’t part of our reading a menas of locating ourselves within an alternative world, of perceiving through the eyes of someone not ourselves, of living as if we were another?” (93).  

Characters make us test the limits of our self, and we become somebody else (100). “Yet because each of us reads differently we always recuperate this someone else, this other, in terms of the self we are. Reading is a dialogue between this real self and anotehr self that leaves the real self behind and ventures forth only to find herself or himself” (100); “by reading we mean that imaginative activity by which we leave ourselves to find ourselves by entering the world of another” (101). 

As intended readers or narratees, we are sought by the author and become part of his/her characterization.  

Reading as a training for understanding otherness (104).

____________

Errors:

“Writerly” is attributed to Derrida instead of Barthes (90); “theoretical” terms are used rather vaguely.

Bakhtin used in a misleadingly individualistic way, as individual voice (102).

Assumption that we read novels because we identify with the characters (questionable).

103: Notion that we meet characters, as texts, mid-way between the author and our reading (!) —our previous reading? Surely we meet them at our reading!