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An instrument of verbal organisation
James Wood, in the Guardian, against the tyranny of “round” characters:
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.
For several interesting passages running off this neat pump of Gass: a character in Henry James is “(1) a noise, (2) a proper name, (3) a complex system of ideas, (4) a controlling perception, (5) an instrument of verbal organisation, (6) a pretended mode of referring, and (7) a source of verbal energy”. And, as an aside, dropping in this anecdote from Ford:
Ford Madox Ford writes wonderfully about getting a character up and running — what he calls “getting a character in”. Ford and his friend Joseph Conrad loved a sentence from a Guy de Maupassant story: “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.”
For examples of this type there is surely no one better than Ford. Here, on narrative progress, from an essay detailing his conversations with Conrad, which indirectly provides some more insight on the scope and development of characters:
We agreed that the general effect of a novel must be the general effect that life makes on mankind. A novel must therefore not be a narration, a report. Life does not say to you: In 1914 my next door neighbor, Mr. Slack, erected a greenhouse and painted it with Cox’s green aluminum paint… If you think about the matter you will remember, in various unordered pictures, how one day Mr. Slack appeared in his garden and contemplated the wall of his house. You will then try to remember the year of that occurrence and you will fix it as August 1914 because having had the foresight to bear the municipal stock of the city of Liège you were able to afford a first-class season ticket for the first time in your life. You will remember Mr. Slack — then much thinner because it was before he found out where to buy that cheap Burgundy of which he has since drunk an inordinate quantity though whisky you would think would be much better for him! Mr. Slack again came into his garden, this time with a pale, weaselly-faced fellow, who touched his cap from time to time. Mr. Slack will point to his housewall several times at different points, the weaselly fellow touching his cap at each pointing. Some days after, coming back from business you will have observed against Mr. Slack’s wall… At this point you will remember that you were then the manager of the fresh-fish branch of Messrs. Catlin and Clovis in Fenchurch Street…What a change since then! Millicent had not yet put her hair up…You will remember how Millicent’s hair looked, rather pale and burnished in plaits. You will remember how it now looks, henna’d: and you will see in one corner of your mind’s eye a little picture of Mr. Mills the vicar talking—oh, very kindly—to Millicent after she has come back from Brighton…But perhaps you had better not risk that. You remember some of the things said by means of which Millicent has made you cringe—and her expression! Cox’s Aluminum Paint! You remember the half empty tin Mr. Slack showed you — he had a most undignified cold — with the name in a horse-shoe over a blue circle that contained a red lion asleep in front of a real-gold sun…
Remarks: 1 of 1
Remark · Joseph · 12 February 2008
Excellent article. I’ve come to the mind lately that in general, art that presents too complete an objectivity about its contents misses something essential, flaky and unreliable about human narrativity itself. “Flat” characters add something convincing to a story for precisely the reason schoolmarms detest them: they simulate the people we meet about whom we never learn enough, and about whom we’re left to construct elaborate and incorrect narratives. It’s even possible that leaving the reader to get it wrong is preferable with a lot of things that fall outside the novel’s focus; ultimately, I suspect, the reader will find the story’s “background texture” more believable if unbeknownst to them, it’s really their own.