Chapter 5 - Characterization

Movies are memorable for their characters. I can imagine sitting down to dinner with Indiana Jones, Hannibal Lecter (Silence of the Lambs, the bunny boiler from Basic Instinct, and Serial Mom (Kathleen Turner). Some dinner that would be, though the meat would be in question! Or I could dine with Bette Midler, Bruce Springstein, Sonny Bono, and Cher. I wouldn’t be adequate.

I could also imagine dining with some literary characters: Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich (would he be wheeled in on his death bed and fed intravenously?), Faulkner’s Lena Grove from Light in August (would she still be pregnant, ever pregnant and wandering, and have just stumbled into our dining room?), Wharton’s Ethan Frome (forever scarred), and Kafka’s Gregor Samsa from “The Metamorphosis” (a cockroach at dinner might spoil our appetites!).

It is, frankly, simpler to imagine dining with movie stars or performers than literary characters. Literary characters take us behind the “mask” of being; they are not all show and adventure. Literary characters are like people in real life: they are complex, dynamic, and riddled with contradiction. Richard Cohen in Writer's Mind © 1995, writes that characters are created, not constructed out of disparate elements, and come alive driving the plot and theme of the work--it's not enough for the character just to go about responding "characteristically" to the situations in the book.

Cohen says the test of a great character is whether the reader still remember the character later, whether the reader could imagine extending the character beyond the story, and whether the character would be believable acting out of character, say in response to situations other than those found in the novel. What better situation to interact with others, act out of character, and have others make comments about you than at a dinner party?

Well then, let’s have a dinner party. I’ll bring in characters to the party as I read about them in the books for this chapter. And we’ll have Emma host. That’ll give her something to do since I didn’t read her book (Emma by Jane Austen). We’ll see how alive the characters are as they interact at the dinner party stepping right off the last pages of their book (unless they died…).

The books for this chapter on characterization are:

• An American Romance, by John Casey
  
• David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
  
• Something Happened, by Joseph Heller
  
• Red and the Black, by Stendhal
  
• Middlemarch, by George Eliot
  
• What Maisie Knew, by Henry James

W, or The Memory of Childhood, by Georges Perec

Perec slams together two seeming disparate plots with tremendous effect, sending shockwaves of lucidity back over everything the reader has just read. The first plot consists of descriptions of Perec’s childhood before, during, and after WWII. The other plot is the search for, and a description of, an imaginary place he calls W.

In the first section of the book, the two plots seem very distinct. Perec’s recounting of memories from his childhood does not seem to relate to Gaspard Winckler’s search for a lost boy. However, even from this beginning, there is a dim connection in the reader’s mind: Perec searching for his lost boyhood is similar to Winckler searching for a lost boy.

Throughout the second section, the two plots are approaching ever closer. Perec continues recounting his youth during the war while describing a culture centered around Olympic-type games in the imaginary place of W. The torment the athletes are put through seems the natural culmination of a place dedicated to competition between adults, continuously seeking the Olympic ideal, yet growing corrupt and vicious after years of glorifying the games. And there are hints of things to come: the athletes make dice out of squashed cubes of bread; Jews in concentration camps make chess pieces out of bread.

Late in the book, Perec describes the fortress on the island of W where the government resides. The basement is full of gold teeth, rings, spectacles, and other objects such as remained from people imprisoned in concentration camps. The evidence that W is connected to the real world is growing stronger. In the final chapter, Perec recounts treatment of concentration camp prisoners drawing obvious comparisons to the way athletes were treated in W.

The reader sees the awful truth that W is not just a child’s perception of the adult world, it’s a real place where people treat other people horribly, and everyone, the government and individual people, accept and even celebrate the treatment. Additionally, it might have been the natural end of the Nazi culture if it had not been stopped, culminating in abuses and tortures tacitly accepted by a bureaucracy corrupted and a population debased, treating each other the way they had treated Jews in concentration camps.

In this exerpt, Perec describes the pain youth go through in W learning to accept the cruelties of their culture:

“How can you explain that this is life, real life, this is what there’ll be every day, this is what there is, and nothing else, that it’s pointless believing something else exists or to pretend to believe in something else….You have to fight to live. There is no alternative. It is not possible to close your eyes to it, it is not possible to say no. There’s no resource, no mercy, no salvation to be had from anyone. There’s not even any hope that time will sort things out.”

At first, this section seems to hint at Perec’s own pain in growing up and discovering the kind of world we live in; once Perec brings the plots together, however, it turns into deepest irony. The pain he describes isn’t just imaginary pain on the island of W, it is real pain: the pain of emerging out of childhood into a brutal world, the pain of living as an adult in a senseless, cruel world. It’s the pain that is both the realization and the memory that no god stepped in to stop the Holocaust.

As the reality of the treatment of Jews during the holocaust is contrasted with the treatment of Athletes on the island of W, the reader is stunned and the plot is invigorated with a horror and sadness that permeates back over all that has just been described. Perec ends with a statement that the location where he placed the imaginary place of W was, in reality, used as a displacement camp for Chile’s Fascist president Pinochet. As reality and imagination come crashing together again and again at the end of the book, the reader is simply held in shocked awe and left with a profound sense of the weighted terror of this world.

The Black Prince, by Iris Murdoch

I didn’t finish the book. I read about the first 100 pages and then the epilogues. As much as I tried to like it, I didn’t enjoy it; it didn’t engage me. Perhaps it was because it seemed the result of a mashup of The Stranger by Camus and The Trial by Kafka (both of which I’ve already read) about a man who may have done something, but doesn’t know why he did it, refusing to defend himself of the charges as told by Aldous Huxley (as he told the story in Point Counter Point full of psychological mutterings among the characters). I chose The Black Prince from among the works by Murdoch on Cohen’s list because it seemed the one with the richest plot structure, which would be appropriate since this chapter of the blog is about plotting techniques.

The plot, unfortunately, was almost comedic (the portion I read through). It begin with a phone call from a friend asking Bradley (the protagonist) to come over because he thought he killed his wife (he hadn’t). Then his ex-wife calls, threatening a visit. Then his psychologist friend shows up. Then his sister shows up and overdoses on an emetic. It’s like a 1960’s “come as you are party” for his life! If the characters had been filled out, it might have made sense why this was all happening; as it was, it just seemed contrived.

The characters are flat, which evidently is done on purpose (from what I gathered from the epilogues “written” by different characters and the “editor” of the book). The reader was supposed to read Bradley’s account of the story, believing entirely in the version proffered. At the epilogues at the end, the reader was to be shocked by revelations from other characters that things were not always as Bradley had interpreted them. Truly, the fact that a character, especially one telling a first-person story, can misunderstand, or even be biased toward, those around him isn’t a revelation worthy of this murder-mystery plot structure. The book was supposed to be a Sherlock Holmes for the soul; but it didn’t work for me.

Other books I’ve started off Cohen’s bookshelf but didn’t finish because I couldn’t get through them (especially knowing there were so many great books still to read). Since I’m about 1/7 of the way through the list of books, this might be a good time to mention some of the “drops” from the list.

I started Jane Austen’s Emma (which is actually on the reading list for the next chapter) and couldn’t finish it (at least in any reasonable time frame). I suppose I just wasn’t ready to read it; especially since it’s such a popular and well-reviewed book. I found it very tedious to read and the characters flat and shallow (and unmemorable, I kept forgetting the previous characters as new ones were introduced). They didn’t seem to stand on their own enough to generate plot; instead, Austen fed them plot through their dialogue, ruining the whole of the dialogue, their personalities, and the plot.

I had originally intended to read more Charles Dickens, starting with Dombey and Son, but it seemed to me the involving stories were being dragged on beyond relief by the nature of their being published in serial form. I was drudging through Dombey and Son making slow progress when I switched to Great Expectations, one of his greatest novels (apparently, while A Christmas Tale is liked best in America and David Copperfield is liked best in Great Britain, Great Expectations ranks the highest on both lists). Great Expectations ended up bringing its own amount of torture being, likewise, drawn out to great length for serial publication (and being published in a serial that Dickens himself had just started).

I trudged through it, enjoying the plot tremendously, dreading his tiresome conceits (such as a special descriptive paragraph each and every time a new character or place is introduced). Knowing my difficulties reading Dickens, and in the interest of time for getting this blog published, I took all of the remaining Dickens off the list, except for David Copperfield. My loss, certainly.