How Fiction Works

Character

The punchline of the story relates to an American academic saying of Beckett, “He doesn’t give a fuck about people. He’s an artist.” At this point Beckett raised his voice above the clatter of afternoon tea and shouted, “But I do give a fuck about people! I do give a fuck!” 1

There is nothing harder than the creation of fictional character. I can tell it from the number of apprentice novels I read that begin with descriptions of photographs. You know the style: “My mother is squinting in the fierce sunlight and holding, for some reason, a dead pheasant. She is dressed in old-fashioned lace-up boots, and white gloves. She looks absolutely miserable. My father, however, is in his element, irrepressible as ever, and has on his head that gray velvet trilby from Prague I remember so well from my childhood.” The unpracticed novelist cleaves to the static, because it is much easier to describe than the mobile: it is getting these people out of the aspic of arrest and mobilized in a scene that is hard. When I encounter a prolonged ekphrasis like the parody above, I worry, suspecting that the novelist is clinging to a handrail and is afraid to push out.

But how to push out? How to animate the static portrait? Ford Madox Ford, in his book Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance , writes wonderfully about getting a character up and running—what he calls “getting a character in .” He says that Conrad himself “was never really satisfied that he had really and sufficiently got his characters in; he was never convinced that he had convinced the reader; this accounting for the great lengths of some of his books.” I like this idea, that some of Conrad’s novels are long because he couldn’t stop fiddling, page after page, with the verisimilitude of his characters—it raises the specter of an infinite novel. At least the apprentice writer, with his bundle of nerves, is in good company, then. Ford and Conrad loved a sentence from a Maupassant story, “La Reine Hortense”: “He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway.” Ford comments: “That gentleman is so sufficiently got in that you need no more of him to understand how he will act. He has been ‘got in’ and can get to work at once.”

Ford is right. Very few brushstrokes are needed to get a portrait walking, as it were; and—a corollary of this—that the reader can get as much from small, short-lived, even rather flat characters as from large, round, towering heroes and heroines. To my mind, Gurov, the adulterer in “The Lady with the Little Dog,” is as vivid, as rich, and as sustaining as Gatsby or Dreiser’s Hurstwood, or even Jane Eyre.

Let us think about this for a moment. A stranger enters a room. How do we immediately begin to take his measure? We look at his face, his clothing, for sure. This man, let us say, is middle-aged, still handsome, but going bald—he has a smooth space on the top of his head, fringed with flattened hair, which looks like a pale crop circle. Something about his carriage suggests a man who expects to be noticed; on the other hand, he smooths his hand over his head so often in the first few minutes that one suspects him of being a little uneasy about having lost that hair.

This man, let us say, is curious, because the top half of him is expensively turned out—a fine, pressed shirt, a good jacket—while the bottom half is slovenly: stained, creased trousers, old unpolished shoes. Does he expect, then, that people will only notice the top of him? Might this suggest a certain faith in his own theatrical ability to hold people’s attention? (Keep them looking at your face.) Or perhaps his own life is similarly bifurcated? Perhaps he is ordered in some ways, disordered in others.

In Antonioni’s film L’Eclisse , the luminous Monica Vitti visits the Rome stock exchange, where her fiancé , played by Alain Delon, works. Delon points out a fat man who has just lost 50 million lire. Intrigued, she follows the man. He orders a drink at a bar, barely touches it, then goes to a café , where he orders an acqua minerale , which he again barely touches. He is writing something on a piece of paper, and leaves it on the table. We imagine that it must be a set of furious, melancholy figures. Vitti approaches the table, and sees that it is a drawing of a flower …

Who would not love this little scene? It is so delicate, so tender, so sidelong and lightly humorous, and the joke is so nicely on us. We had a stock idea of how the financial victim responds to catastrophe—collapse, despair, self-defenestration—and Antonioni confounded our expectations. The character slips through our changing perceptions, like a boat moving through canal locks. We begin in misplaced certainty and end in placeless mystery.

The scene raises the question of what really constitutes a character. We know nothing more about this investor than this scene tells us; he has no continuing role in the film. Is he really a “character” at all? Yet no one would dispute that Antonioni has revealed something sharp and deep about this man’s temperament, and by extension about a certain human insouciance under pressure—or possibly, about a certain defensive will to insouciance under pressure. Something alive, human has been disclosed. So this scene demonstrates that narrative can and often does give us a vivid sense of a character without giving us a vivid sense of an individual. We don’t know this particular man; but we know his particular behavior at this moment.

A great deal of nonsense is written every day about characters in fiction—from the side of those who believe too much in character and from the side of those who believe too little. Those who believe too much have an iron set of prejudices about what characters are: we should get to “know” them; they should not be “stereotypes”; they should have an “inside” as well as an outside, depth as well as surface; they should “grow” and “develop”; and they should be nice. So they should be pretty much like us.

On the other side, among those with too little belief in character, we hear that characters do not exist at all. The brilliant novelist and critic William Gass comments on the following passage from Henry James’s The Awkward Age : “Mr. Cashmore, who would have been very red-haired if he had not been very bald, showed a single eye-glass and a long upper lip; he was large and jaunty, with little petulant movements and intense ejaculations that were not in the line of his type.” Of this, Gass says:

We can imagine any number of other sentences about Mr. Cashmore added to this one. Now the question is: what is Mr. Cashmore? Here is the answer I shall give: Mr. Cashmore is (1) a noise, (2) a proper name, (3) a complex system of ideas, (4) a controlling perception, (5) an instrument of verbal organization, (6) a pretended mode of referring, and (7) a source of verbal energy. He is not an object of perception, and nothing whatever that is appropriate to persons can be correctly said of him. 2

Like much formalist criticism, this is both obviously right and obviously wrong. Of course characters are assemblages of words, for literature is such an assemblage of words: this is like informing us that a novel cannot really create an imagined “world,” because it is just a bound codex of paper pages. Surely Mr. Cashmore, introduced thus by James, has instantly become, in practice, “an object of perception”—precisely because we are looking at a description of him. Gass claims, “Nothing whatever that is appropriate to persons can be correctly said of him,” but that is exactly what James has just done: he has said of him things that are usually said of a real person. He has told us that Mr. Cashmore looked bald and red, and that his “petulant movements” seemed out of keeping with his large jauntiness (“were not in the line of his type”). At present, of course, in James’s preliminary dabs, Mr. Cashmore has just been created, and he hardly exists; Gass confuses the character’s Edenic virginity with his later, fallen essence. That’s to say, Mr. Cashmore at this moment is like the frame of one of those buildings we look at from the street, and which so often seem like stage sets. Of course “any number of other sentences about Mr. Cashmore” could be added to the ones we have: that is because so few sentences have so far been said by James about him. The more paint that James applies, the less provisional will the character seem. “There are no descriptions in fiction, there are only constructions,” Gass argues in the same book. But why one or the other? To my mind, to deny character with such extremity is essentially to deny the novel.

But to repeat, what is a character? I am thicketed in qualifications: if I say that a character seems connected to consciousness, to the use of a mind, the many superb examples of characters who seem to think very little, who are rarely seen thinking, bristle up (Gatsby, Captain Ahab, Becky Sharp, Widmerpool, Jean Brodie). If I refine the thought by repeating that a character at least has some essential connection to an interior life, to inwardness, is seen “from within,” I am presented with the nicely opposing examples of those two adulterers, Anna Karenina and Effi Briest, the first of whom does a lot of reflec tion, and is seen internally as well as externally, the second of whom, in Theodor Fontane’s eponymous novel, is seen almost entirely from the outside, with little space set aside for represented reflection. No one could say that Anna is more vivid than Effi simply because we see Anna doing more thinking.

If I try to distinguish between major and minor characters—round and flat characters—and claim that these differ in terms of subtlety, depth, time allowed on the page, I must concede that many so-called flat characters seem more alive to me, and more interesting as human studies, however short-lived, than the round characters they are supposedly subservient to.

The novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it. And the novelistic character is the very Houdini of that exceptionalism. There is no such thing as “a novelistic character.” There are just thousands of different kinds of people, some round, some flat, some deep, some caricatures, some realistically evoked, some brushed in with the lightest of strokes. Some of them are solid enough that we can speculate about their motives: Why does Hurstwood steal the money? Why does Isabel Archer return to Gilbert Osmond? What is Julien Sorel’s true ambition? Why does Kirilov want to commit suicide? What does Mr. Biswas want? But there are scores of fictional characters who are not fully or conventionally evoked who are also alive and vivid. The solid, nineteenth-century fictional character (I count Biswas in that company) who confronts us with deep mysteries is not the “best” or ideal or only way to create character (though it does not deserve the enormous condescension of postmodernism). My own taste tends toward the sketchier fictional personage, whose lacunae and omissions tease us, provoke us to wade in their deep shallows: Why does Onegin reject Tatiana and then provoke a fight with Lenski? Pushkin offers us almost no evidence on which to base our answer. Is Svevo’s Zeno mad? Is the narrator of Hamsun’s Hunger mad? We have only their unreliable narration of events.

Perhaps because I am not sure what a character is, I find especially moving those postmodern novels, like Pnin , or Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie , or José Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis , or Roberto Bolañ o’s The Savage Detectives , or W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz , or Ali Smith’s How to Be Both , in which we are are confronted with characters who are at once real and unreal. In each of these novels, the author asks us to reflect on the fictionality of the heroes and heroines who give the novels their titles. And in a fine paradox, it is precisely such reflection that stirs in the reader a desire to make these fictional characters “real,” to say, in effect, to the authors: “I know that they are only fictional—you keep on suggesting this. But I can only know them by treating them as real.” That is how Pnin works, for instance. An unreliable narrator insists that Professor Pnin is “a character” in two senses of the word: a type (clownish, eccentric é migré ) and a fictional character, the narrator’s fantasy. Yet just because we resent the narrator’s condescension toward his fond and foolish possession, we insist that behind the “type” there must be a real Pnin, who is worth “knowing” in all his fullness and complexity. And Nabokov’s novel is constructed in such a way as to excite that desire in us for a real Professor Pnin, a “true fiction” with which to oppose the false fictions of the overbearing and sinister narrator.

José Saramago’s great novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis works a little differently, but to the same effect, and, like Pnin , becomes a moving investigation of what a real self is. Ricardo Reis, a doctor from Brazil, is an aloof, conservative aesthete who has decided to return to his native Portugal. It is the end of 1935, and the great poet Fernando Pessoa has just died. Reis is himself a poet and mourns Pessoa’s departure. He is not sure what to do. He has saved some money, and for a while he lives in a hotel, where he has an affair with a chambermaid. He writes several beautiful lyrics, and is visited by the now-ghostly Pessoa, with whom he converses. Saramago describes these conversations in a frankly literal and direct manner. Reis wanders the streets of Lisbon, as 1935 curdles into 1936. He reads the newspapers, and is increasingly alarmed by the baying of Europe’s dogs: in Spain civil war and the rise of Franco, in Germany Hitler, in Italy Mussolini, and in Portugal the fascist dictatorship of Salazar. He would like to retreat from this bad news. He reflects fondly on the story of the ninety-seven-year-old John D. Rockefeller, who has a specially doctored version of The New York Times delivered every day, altered to contain only good news. “The world’s threats are universal, like the sun, but Ricardo Reis takes shelter under his own shadow.”

But Ricardo Reis is not a “real” fictional character, whatever that means (like David Copper field or Emma Bovary). He is one of the four pen names that the actual Pessoa—the poet who worked and lived in Lisbon and died in 1935—assumed, and in whose persona he wrote poetry. The special flicker of this book, the tint and the delicacy that make it seem hallucinatory, derive from the solidity with which Saramago invests a character who is fictional twice over: first Pessoa’s, then Saramago’s. This enables Saramago to tease us with something that we already know, namely that Ricardo Reis is fictional. Saramago makes something deep and moving of this because Ricardo also feels himself to be somewhat fictional, at best a shadowy spectator, a man on the margin of things. And when Ricardo reflects thus, we feel a strange tenderness for him, aware of something that he does not know , that he is not real.

Is there a way in which all of us are fictional characters, parented by life and written by ourselves? This is something like Saramago’s question; but it is worth noting that he reaches his question by traveling in the opposite direction of those postmodern novelists who like to remind us of the metafictionality of all things. A certain kind of postmodern novelist (like John Barth, say) is always lecturing us: “Remember, this character is just a character. I invented him.” By starting with an invented character, however, Saramago is able to pass through the same skepticism, but in the opposite direction, toward reality, toward the deepest questions. Saramago asks, in effect: But what is “just a character”? And Saramago’s uncertainty is more searching than William Gass’s skepticism, for in life we anxiously question our existence rather than deny it.

In Saramago’s novels, the self may cast only a shadow, like Ricardo Reis, but this shadow implies not the nonexistence of the self, but only its difficult visibility, its near invisibility, rather as the shadow cast by the sun warns us that we cannot look directly at it. Ricardo Reis is aloof, ghostly. He does not want to get pulled into real relationships, including the real relationships of politics. Europe is scrambling for war, but Ricardo luxuriously sits around wondering if he exists. He writes a poem that begins “We count for nothing, we are less than futile.” Another poem begins: “Walk empty-handed, for wise is the man who contents himself with the spectacle of the world.” Yet the novel suggests that perhaps there is something culpable about being content with the spectacle of the world when the world’s spectacle is horrifying.

The question of this novel, and of much of Saramago’s work, is not the trivial “metafictional” game-playing of “Does Ricardo Reis exist?” It is the much more poignant question, “Do we exist if we refuse to relate to anyone?”

What does it mean to “love” a fictional character, to feel that you know her? What kind of knowledge is this? Miss Jean Brodie is one of the best-loved novelistic characters in postwar British fiction, and one of the very few to be something of a household name. But if you dragged a microphone down Princes Street in Edinburgh and asked people what they “know” about Miss Brodie, those who had read Muriel Spark’s novel would likely recite a number of her aphorisms: “I am in my prime,” “You are the crè me de la crè me,” “The Philistines are upon us, Mr. Lloyd,” and so on. These are Jean Brodie’s famous sayings. Miss Brodie, in other words, is not really “known” at all. We know her just as her young pupils knew her: as a collection of tags, a rhetorical performance, a teacher’s show. At Marcia Blaine School for Girls, each member of the Brodie set is “famous” for something: Mary Macgregor is famous for being stupid, and Rose is famous for sex, and so on. Miss Brodie, it seems, is famous for her sayings. Around her very thinness as a character we tend to construct a thicker interpretative jacket.

Nearly all of Muriel Spark’s novels are fiercely composed and devoutly starved. Her brilliantly reduced style, of “never apologize, never explain,” seems a deliberate provocation: we feel compelled to turn the mere crescents of her characters into solid discs. But while some of her refusal to wax explanatory or sentimental may have been temperamental, it was also moral. Spark was intensely interested in how much we can know about anyone, and interested in how much a novelist, who most pretends to such knowledge, can know about her characters. By reducing Miss Brodie to no more than a collection of maxims, Spark forces us to become Brodie’s pupils. In the course of the novel we never leave the school to go home with Miss Brodie. We never see her in private, offstage. Always, she is the performing teacher, keeping a public face. We surmise that there is something unfulfilled and even desperate about her, but the novelist refuses us access to her interior. Brodie talks a great deal about her prime, but we don’t witness it, and the nasty suspicion falls that perhaps to talk so much about one’s prime is by definition no longer to be in it.

Spark always exercises ruthless control over her fictional characters, and here she flaunts it: she spikes her story with a series of “flash-forwards,” in which we learn what happened to the characters after the main action of the plot (Miss Brodie will die of cancer, Mary Macgregor will die at the age of twenty-three in a fire, another pupil will join a convent, another will have an ordinary marriage, another will never again be quite as happy as when she first discovered algebra). These coldly prophetic passages strike some readers as cruel; they are such summary judgments. But they are moving, because they raise the idea that if Miss Brodie never really had a prime, then for some of the schoolgirls their primes occurred in their childhoods—during those days earnestly praised, at least by one’s teachers, as the “happiest days of your life.”

These flash-forwards do something else: they remind us that Muriel Spark has powers of ultimate control over her creations; and they remind us of … Miss Brodie. This tyrannical authority is precisely what Miss Brodie’s most intelligent pupil, Sandy Stranger, hates, and finally exposes, in her teacher: that she is a fascist and a Scottish Calvinist, predestining the lives of her pupils, forcing them into artificial shapes. Is this what the novelist does, too? That is the question that interests Spark. The novelist adopts Godlike powers of omniscience, but what can she really know of her creations? Surely only God, the ultimate author of our lives, can know our coming and our going, and surely only God has the moral right to decide such things. Nabokov used to say that he pushed his characters around like serfs or chess pieces—he had no time for that metaphorical ignorance and impotence whereby authors like to say, “I don’t know what happened, but my character just got away from me and did his own thing. I had nothing to do with it.” 3 Nonsense, said Nabokov, if I want my character to cross the road, he crosses the road. I am his master. Nabokov’s fiction, like Spark’s, explores the implications of such potency: Timofey Pnin finally refuses to be pushed about by Nabokov’s bullying narrator, who seems suspiciously like Nabokov himself. Pnin memorably says that he refuses to “work under” the narrator (who is coming to head the department where Professor Pnin teaches). This was one of Spark’s abiding concerns, from her early novels like The Comforters and Memento Mori to her very last, The Finishing School . She used fiction to reflect on the responsibilities and limitations of fiction itself, and indeed on the difficulties and limitations of all fiction-making. (The Scottish novelist Ali Smith, a great admirer of Muriel Spark, continues this metafictional tradition, in a more exuberant and playful vein.)

This fictional self-consciousness, and her devotion to spare forms, made Spark resemble at times a nouveau romancier like Alain Robbe-Grillet or the British avant-gardist B. S. Johnson, who once published a novel, The Unfortunates , made of looseleaf pages in a box, to be arranged as the reader saw fit. Johnson’s slightly more conventional novel, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry , is very funny, and studded with amusing metafictional self-consciousness. Christie’s mother says things like: “My son: I have for the purposes of this novel been your mother for the past eighteen years and five months to the day…” At his mother’s funeral, “Christie was the only mourner, economy as to relatives (as to so many other things) being one of the virtues of this novel.” Like Nabokov and Spark, B. S. Johnson saw the comparison between God the omniscient author and the omnipotent novelist, who can do anything he likes with his “chess pieces.” At one point, Christie’s mother explains how Adam and Eve first ate from the tree. Of course, she says, the whole thing is absurd, because God could have stopped it any time He liked, being omniscient. “But no: God has been making it all up as He goes along, like certain kinds of novelist…”

But the difference between Johnson and Spark is instructive, too. Johnson plays with these questions but does not finally inhabit them as Spark or Nabokov or Saramago does. In the end there is nothing like the pressure of inquiry you feel in those writers. Johnson is content to ask, again and again—and very entertainingly—the metafictional question “Does Christie exist?” but not the metaphysical question “How does Christie exist?”—which is really the question “How do we exist?” The reason for the atmosphere of postmodern lightness in this novel is that Johnson is not able to be gravely skeptical, because he is not able to be gravely affirmative (the opposite of Saramago, as we saw, who wrings skepticism out of affirmation). Jean Brodie, though we see her in only a handful of scenes that are shuffled like a pack of cards, exists for Spark, has metaphysical presence, and does for us, too. That is why the questions “Who was Jean Brodie? Who really knew her?” have power and affect. But Christie Malry does not really exist for Johnson. He is denied before he is believed in. 4

To argue that we can know Jean Brodie just as deeply as we can know Dorothea Brooke, to argue that lacunae are as deep as solidities, that absence in characterization can be a form of knowing as profound as presence, that Spark’s and Saramago’s and Nabokov’s characters can move us as much as James’s and Eliot’s, is to concede little to William Gass’s skepticism. Not all of these characters have the same amount of realized “depth,” but all of them are objects of perception, to use Gass’s words, all of them are more than mere bundles of words (though of course they are bundles of words), and things that can be correctly said of persons can also be said of them. They are all “real” (they have a reality) but in different ways. That reality level differs from author to author, and our hunger for the particular depth or reality level of a character is tutored by each writer, and adapts to the internal conventions of each book. This is how we can read W. G. Sebald one day, and Woolf the next, and Philip Roth the next, and not demand that each resemble the other. It would be an obvious category mistake to accuse Sebald of not offering us “deep” or “rounded” characters, or to accuse Woolf of not offering us plenty of juicy, robust minor characters in the way of Dickens. I think that novels tend to fail not when the characters are not vivid or deep enough, but when the novel in question has failed to teach us how to adapt to its conventions, has failed to manage a specific hunger for its own characters, its own reality level. In such cases, our appetite is quickly disappointed, and surges wildly in excess of what we are provided, and we tend to blame the author for not giving us enough—the characters, we complain, are not alive or round or free enough. Yet we would not dream of accusing Sebald or Woolf or Roth—none of whom is especially interested in creating character in the solid, old-fashioned nineteenth-century sense—of letting us down in this way, because they have so finely tutored us in their own conventions, their own expansive limitations, to be satisfied with just what they give us.

Even the characters we think of as “solidly realized” in the conventional realist sense are less solid the longer we look at them. I think there is a basic distinction to be made between novelists like Tolstoy or Trollope or Balzac or Dickens, or dramatists like Shakespeare, who are rich in “negative capability,” who seem unself-consciously to create galleries of various people who are nothing like them, and those writers either less interested in, or perhaps less naturally gifted at this faculty, but who nevertheless have a great deal of interest in the self—James, Flaubert, Lawrence, Woolf perhaps, Musil, Bellow, Michel Houellebecq, Philip Roth, Lydia Davis. Bellow’s vibrating individuals are Dickensianly vivid, and Bellow himself was aesthetically and philosophically interested in the individual, but no one would call him a great creator of fictional individuals. We don’t go around saying to ourselves, “What would Augie March or Charlie Citrine do?” 5 Iris Murdoch is the most poignant member of this second category, precisely because she spent her life trying to get into the first. In her literary and philosophical criticism, she again and again stresses that the creation of free and independent characters is the mark of the great novelist; yet her own characters never have this freedom. She knew it, too: “How soon one discovers that, however much one is in the ordinary sense ‘interested in other people,’ this interest has left one far short of possessing the knowledge required to create a character who is not oneself. It is impossible, it seems to me, not to see one’s failure here as a sort of spiritual failure.” 6

But Murdoch is too unforgiving of herself. There are scores of novelists whose characters are basically like each other, or rather like the novelist who created them, and yet whose creations stream with a vitality that it would be hard not to call free. Does The Rainbow possess any characters who don’t sound like each other, and ultimately like D. H. Lawrence? Tom Brangwen, Will, Anna, Ursula, even Lydia—they are all variations on a Lawrencian theme, and despite differences in articulacy and education, their inner lives vibrate very similarly. When they speak, which is rarely, they sound the same. Nevertheless, they do possess blazing inner lives, and always one feels how important this inquiry into the state of the soul is for the novelist himself. In some sense, the scenes—the battles of husband and wife, of two opposed and proximate egos—are more individuated than the characters themselves: Will and Anna stacking sheaves of corn in the harvest moonlight; the chapter called “Anna Victrix,” which describes the first, swooning months of the marriage, as Will and Anna discover the sublimity of their sexual union and realize that the world is insignificant to the passion they share; pregnant Anna dancing naked in her bedroom, as David once danced before the Lord, while Will looks on enviously; the chapter devoted to the visit to Lincoln Cathedral; the great flood, which kills Tom Brangwen; Ursula and Skrebensky, kissing under the moon; Ursula at the oppressive school in Ilkeston; Skrebensky and Ursula running away to London and Paris—in a London hotel room she watches him bathing: “He was slender, and, to her, perfect, a clean, straight-cut youth, without a grain of superfluous body.”

In the same way, it often seems that James’s characters are not especially convincing as independently vivid authorial creations. But what makes them vivid is the force of James’s interest in them, his manner of pressing into their clay with his examining fingers: they are sites of human energy; they vibrate with James’s anxious concern for them. Take The Portrait of a Lady. It is very hard to say what Isabel Archer is like , exactly, and she seems to lack the definition, the depth if you like, of a heroine like Dorothea Brooke, in Middlemarch.

I think this was deliberate on James’s part. His novel begins with extraordinary stiffness and self-consciousness: three men, engaged in frivolous badinage, are sitting having tea, waiting for the arrival of the host’s niece. They talk about this lady. Isn’t she due soon? Will she be pretty? Perhaps one of the men will marry her? And then at the very start of the second chapter, she obligingly arrives. Were James being “workshopped” in a creative writing course, he would be censured for this speedy awkwardness; he should surely put a chapter of naturalistic filler between the men at tea and the arrival, make it look a bit less novelistic and convenient. But James’s point is that these men—and by extension we the readers—are waiting for the arrival of a heroine ; and, sure enough, here is the author stepping up to provide her. James then proceeds, over the next forty or so pages, to hand us an enormous plate of commentary about Isabel, much of it contradictory. It is presented to us by the author in full exegetical mode. Isabel is brilliant, but perhaps only by the standards of provincial Albany; Isabel wants freedom, but really she is afraid of it; Isabel wants to suffer, but really she doesn’t believe in suffering; she is egotistical, but she likes nothing better than to humble herself; and so on. It is essentially a mess of propositions, and there is very little attempt to present Isabel dramatically. It is an essay, an essay on a character. And it is mostly James telling and not showing.

James is really suggesting that he has not yet formed his character, that she is still relatively shapeless, an American emptiness, and that the novel will form her, for good and ill, that Europe will fill in her shape, and that just as these three waiting, watching men will also form her, so will we, as readers. They and we are a kind of Greek chorus, hanging on her every move. Two of the men, Lord Warburton and Ralph Touchett, will devote their lives to watching her. And what, James asks, will be the plot that poor Isabel will have written for herself? How much will she herself write it, and how much will be written for her by others? And in the end, will we really know what Isabel was like, or will we have merely painted a portrait of a lady?

So the vitality of literary character has less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence, and even plain plausibility—let alone likeability—than with a larger philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character’s actions are deeply important , that something profound is at stake, with the author brooding over the face of that character like God over the face of the waters. That is how readers retain in their minds a sense of the character “Isabel Archer,” even if they cannot tell you what she is exactly like. We remember her in the way we remember an obscurely significant day: something important has been enacted here.

In Aspects of the Novel , Forster used the now-famous term “flat” to describe the kind of character who is awarded a single, essential attribute, which is repeated without change as the person appears and reappears in a novel. Often, such characters have a catchphrase or tagline or keyword, as Mrs. Micawber, in David Copperfield , likes to repeat, “I never will desert Mr. Micawber.” She says she will not, and she does not. Forster is genially snobbish about flat characters, and wants to demote them, reserving the highest category for rounder, or fuller, characters. Flat characters cannot be tragic, he asserts; they need to be comic. Round characters “surprise” us each time they reappear; they are not flimsily theatrical; they combine well with other characters in conversation, “and draw one another out without seeming to do so.” Flat ones can’t surprise us, and are generally monochromatically histrionic. Forster mentions a popular novel by a contemporary novelist whose main character, a flat one, is a farmer who is always saying, “I’ll plough up that bit of gorse.” But, says Forster, we are so bored by the farmer’s consistency that we do not care whether he does or doesn’t. Mrs. Micawber, he suggests, has a saving comic lightness, which allows her to be similarly consistent but not similarly dull.

But is this right? Of course, we know a caricature when we see one, and caricature is generally uninteresting. (Though sometimes it might just be a novelist’s way of sticking to the point…) But if by flatness we mean a character, often but not always a minor one, often but not always comic, who serves to illuminate an essential human truth or characteristic, then many of the most interesting characters are flat. I would be quite happy to abolish the very idea of “roundness” in characterization, because it tyrannizes us—readers, novelists, critics—with an impossible ideal. “Roundness” is impossible in fiction, because fictional characters, while very alive in their way, are not the same as real people (though, of course, there are many real people, in real life, who are quite flat and don’t seem very round—which I will come to). It is subtlety that matters—subtlety of analysis, of inquiry, of concern, of felt pressure—and for subtlety a very small point of entry will do. Forster’s division grandly privileges novels over short stories, since characters in stories rarely have the space to become “round.” But I learn more about the consciousness of the soldier in Chekhov’s “The Kiss” than I do about the consciousness of Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair , because Chekhov’s inquiry into how his soldier’s mind works is more acute than Thackeray’s serial vividness. 7

In the second place, many of the most vivid characters in fiction are monomaniacs. There is Hardy’s Michael Henchard, in The Mayor of Casterbridge , who burns with his one secret, or Gould in Nostromo , who can think only of his mine. Casaubon, too, fixated on his infinite book. Aren’t such people essentially flat? They may surprise us at first, but they soon stop surprising us, as their central need occupies them. Yet they are no less vivid, interesting, or true as creations, for being flat. They are certainly not cartoons, which is implicit in Forster’s discussion. (They are not cartoons because their monomania is not inherently cartoonish but inherently interesting—consistently surprising , one might say.)

Forster struggles to explain how we feel that most of Dickens’s characters are flat and yet at the same time that these cameos obscurely move us—he claims that Dickens’s own vitality makes them “vibrate” a bit on the page. But this vibrating flatness is true not only of Dickens, but also of Proust, who also likes to tag many of his characters with favorite sayings and catchphrases, of Tolstoy to some extent, of Hardy’s minor characters, of Mann’s minor characters (he, like Proust and Tolstoy, uses a method of mnemonic leitmotif—a repeated attribute or characteristic—to secure the vitality of his characters), and supremely of Jane Austen.

Forster mysteriously claims Austen for the round character camp, but in doing so he just shows that he needs to expand his definition of flatness. For what is striking about Austen is precisely that only her heroines are really capable of development and surprise: they are the only characters who possess consciousness, the only characters who are seen thinking in any depth, and they are heroic, in part, because they possess the secret of consciousness. The minor characters around them, by contrast, are pretty obviously flat. They are seen externally, they reveal themselves only in speech, and little is demanded of them: Mr. Collins, Miss Bates, Mr. Woodhouse, and so on. The minor characters belong to a certain stage of theatrical satire; the hero ines belong to the newly emergent, newly complex form of the novel.

Take Shakespeare’s Henry V as an example. If you asked most people to separate King Harry and the Welsh captain Fluellen into Forsterian camps, they would award Harry roundness and Fluellen flatness. The king is a large part, Fluellen a minor one. Harry talks and reflects a lot, he soliloquizes, he is noble, canny, magniloquent, and surprising: he goes among his soldiers in disguise, to talk freely with them. He complains of the burden of kingship. Fluellen, by contrast, is a comic Welshman, a pedant of the kind Fielding or Cervantes would nimbly satirize, always banging on about military history, and Alexander the Great, and leeks, and Monmouth. Harry rarely makes us laugh, Fluellen always does. Harry is round, Fluellen flat. Which actor, at audition, would choose Fluellen over the part of the king? (“I’m sorry sir, Mr. Branagh has already reserved that part for himself.”)

But the categories could easily go the other way. The King Harry of this play, unlike the Harry of the two Henry IV plays, is merely kingly, in rather a dull fashion. He is very eloquent, but it seems like Shakespeare’s eloquence, not his own (it’s formal, patriotic, august). His complaints about the burdens of kingship are a bit formulaic and self-pitying, and tell us little about his actual self (except, in a generic way, that he is self-pitying). He is an utterly public figure. Fluellen, by contrast, is a little terrier of vividness. His speech, despite the “Welshisms” that Shakespeare puts in—“look you,” and so on—is idiosyncratically his own. He is a pedant, but an interesting one. In Fielding, a pedantic doctor or lawyer speaks like a pedantic doctor or lawyer: his pedantry is professionally bound up with his occupation. But Fluellen’s pedantry has a limitless and slightly desperate quality about it: Why does he know so much about the classics, about Alexander the Great and Philip of Macedon? Why has he appointed himself the army’s military historian? He surprises us, too: at first we think his windiness will substitute for valor on the field, as Falstaff’s did, because we think we recognize a type—the man who speaks about military action rather than performing it. But he turns out to possess a touching valor and loyalty; and his rectitude—another inversion of type—is not merely hypocritical. (That is, he does not just talk about rectitude, even though he does indeed talk a lot about it.) And there is something piquant about a man who is at once an omnivorous roamer of the world’s knowledge and literatures, and at the same time a little Welsh provincial. His monologue on how Mon mouth resembles the classical city of Macedon is both funny and moving:

I tell you, captain, if you look in the maps of the worlds I warrant you shall find, in the comparisons between Macedon and Monmouth, that the situations, look you, is both alike. There is a river in Macedon, and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth.

I still meet people like Fluellen; and when a garrulous guy on a train starts talking up his hometown, and says something like “we’ve got one of those”—shopping mall, opera house, violent bar—“in my town, too, you know,” you are apt to feel, as toward Fluellen, both mirth and an obscure kind of sympathy, since this kind of importuning provincialism is always paradoxical: the provincial simultaneously wants and does not want to communicate with you, simultaneously wants to remain a provincial and abolish his provincialism by linking himself with you. Almost four hundred years later, in a story called “The Wheelbarrow,” V. S. Pritchett revisits Fluellen. A Welsh taxi driver, Evans, is helping a lady clear out a house. He finds an old volume of verse in a box, and suddenly bursts out, scornfully: “Everyone knows that the Welsh are the founders of all the poetry in Europe.”

In fact, the ubiquitous flat character of the English novel, from Mr. Collins to Charles Ryder’s father, tells us something deep about the dialectic of British reticence and sociability, and something, too, about British theatricality. It is hardly surprising that the self should be so often theatrical in English fiction, when its great progenitor is Shakespeare. But of course many of Shakespeare’s characters are not just theatrical; they are self-theatricalzing. They carry within them fantastic, often illusory, notions of their own prowess and reputation. This is true of Lear, of Antony, of Cleopatra, of Richard II, of Falstaff, of Othello (who, as he is dying, is still instructing his audience to make a record of his demise: “Set you down this, / And say besides that in Aleppo once, / … I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog / And smote him thus”). And it is true, too, of the minor characters like Launce and Bottom and Mistress Quickly, who so easily flame up into histrionic comic irrelevance.

From Shakespeare descends a self-theatricalizing, somewhat solipsistic, flamboyant, but also perhaps essentially shy type who can be found in Fielding, Austen, Dickens, Hardy, Thackeray, Meredith, Wells, Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh, V. S. Pritchett, Muriel Spark, Angus Wilson, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, and on into the superb pantomimic embarrassments of Monty Python and Ricky Gervais’s David Brent. He is typified by Mr. Omer, in David Copperfield , the tailor whom David visits to get his funeral suit. (David is en route to his mother’s funeral.) Mr. Omer is an English soliloquist, and prattles on without embarrassment as he blunders his way all over David’s grief: “showing me a roll of cloth which he said was extra super, and too good mourning for anything short of parents,” and saying, “‘But fashions are like human beings. They come in, nobody knows when, why, or how; and they go out, nobody knows when, why, or how. Everything is like life, in my opinion, if you look at it in that point of view.’”

Something true is revealed here about the self and its irrepressibility or irresponsibility—the little riot of freedom in otherwise orderly souls, the self’s chink of freedom, its gratuity or surplus, its tip to itself. Mr. Omer is determined to be himself , even if that means likening fashions in clothes to patterns of morbidity. Yet no one would call Mr. Omer a “round” character. He exists for a bare minute. But contra Forster, the flat character like Mr. Omer is indeed capable of “surprising us”—the point is, he only needs to surprise us once , and can then disappear off the stage.

Mrs. Micawber’s catchphrase, “I never will desert Mr. Micawber,” tells us something true about how she keeps up appearances, how she maintains a theatrical public fiction, and so it tells us something true about her ; but the farmer who says, “I’ll plough up that bit of gorse” is not maintaining any similarly interesting fiction about himself—he is just being stoical or habitual—and so we know nothing about his true self behind the catchphrase. He is simply stating his agronomic intentions. That is why he is boring; “consistency” has nothing to do with it. And we all know people in real life who, like Mrs. Micawber, do indeed use a series of jingles and tags and repetitive gestures to maintain a certain kind of performance.