Conversational Reading: A Matter of Character

This weekend in the NYTBR, Lee Siegel tells us:

By the 1950's, here and in Western Europe, it was making less and less sense to fashion the idiosyncratic, original inner and outer lives of a character in a novel. His or her behavior was already accounted for by the universal realities of id, ego, superego, not to mention the forces of repression, displacement and neurosis.

Thus the postwar rise of the nouveau roman, with its absence of character, and of the postmodern and experimental novels, with their many strategies -- self-annulling irony, deliberate cartoonishness, montage-like ''cutting'' -- for releasing fiction from its dependence on character. For all the rich work published after the war, there's barely a fictional figure that has the memorableness of a Gatsby, a Nick Adams, a Baron Charlus, a Leopold Bloom, a Settembrini. And that's leaving aside the magnificent 19th century, when authors plumbed the depths of the human mind with something on the order of clairvoyance. Of course, before that, there was Shakespeare. And Cervantes. And Dante. And . . . It seems that the further back you go in time, away from Freud, the deeper the psychological portraits you encounter in literary art. Nowadays, often even the most accomplished novels offer characters that are little more than flat, ghostly reflections of characters. The author's voice, or self-consciousness about voice, substitutes mere eccentricity for an imaginative surrender to another life.

Huh. Really. So I guess that means that Lolita, Humbert, and Kinbote are all unmemorable characters, eh? Or Enid Lambert? Very flat indeed. Or Hal Incandenza and Don Gately--now there's a couple of poorly realized characters.

I think Siegel actually makes a pretty good point about Freud's ideas releasing fiction from character. Authors like Pynchon, Borges, and DeLillo did some interesting things that couldn't have been done if they had to stick to writing authentic characters.

With that said, Siegel is clearly overreaching when he says "Nowadays, often even the most accomplished novels offer characters that are little more than flat, ghostly reflections of characters." First off, not everyone working today is writing pomo fiction. There are plenty of authors out there aspiring back to the character portraits that flourished before WWII. Second, who says that postmodern works can't include compelling characters? Cartoonishness is certainly a feature of some pomo works, but it is hardly necessary. Nabokov may have been the first to prove that posmodern fiction could have characters every bit as good as those in fiction that came before it, and I think that authors since him have re-proven this time and time again.

Conversational Reading

A Matter of Character

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