We’re eccentrics… we ought all to be displayed under glass - The Idiot's characters - I've never been able to stand poetry

“Exceedingly strange people!” thought Prince Shch., for perhaps the hundredth time since he had begun to associate with them, but… he liked these strange people.  (III, 2, ellipses in original)

Dostoevsky’s characters often seem to comment on the novel they are in.  A little past the halfway point, “hundredth time” was about right for me, too.

Dostoevsky, in his late novels, under constraints I would not wish on any artist, abandons or never attempts much of what makes fiction artful.  What does he keep?

Speech.  Dostoevsky the playwright.  The bulk of The Idiot is speech.  Dialogue, arguments, harangues, manifestos, cacophonies.  The famous Dostoevskian polyphony exists in a more primitive form in The Idiot than in The Brothers Karamazov, but there is plenty of room for views that are clearly not Dostoevsky’s own, wrong ideas presented with as much conviction and rhetorical sophistication as right.  This, if anything, accounts for the proliferation of Dostoevsky’s ideas and aesthetic.  Dostoevsky practically begs you to disagree with his ideas about Russian nationalism and the primacy of the Orthodox Church, even to ignore them.

But more practically, Dostoevsky seems to believe that character is mostly revealed through speech.  That is where he spends his time.

“Lord, what nonsense I’m talking!  Pah!  We’re eccentrics… we ought all to be displayed under glass, me first for an entrance fee of ten copecks.”  (III, 1, ellipses in original)

This is Lizaveta Prokofyevna, mother of one of Prince Myshkin’s possible wives, and one of the novel’s best minor characters.  She is nothing but talk, often bewildered and ridiculous talk.  She is another of the novel’s idiots (the novel is on the side of the idiots):

“What poem is it?  Recite it, I’m sure you know it!  I absolutely insist on knowing this poem.  I’ve never been able to stand poetry, it’s as though I’d had a premonition.  For God’s sake – Prince, have patience, it seems that you and I will have to endure this together,” she addressed Prince Lev Nikolayevich [Myshkin].  (II, 6)

The Christ-like Myshkin and the novel’s other fools are secretly in solidarity against earthly suffering.  Not so secret in this passage, I guess, since she openly says it.

As good as so many of the minor characters are, it is Prince Myshkin who really matters.  Meant to be a saint, he could become an ikon, not a character but an image, perfectly meek, perfectly forgiving.  Dostoevsky humanizes him, though, with a number of small touches, most effectively his sense of humor.  Midway through the novel there is a rare moment of action, during which Myshkin tangles with an officer.  A minor character offers to be Myshkin’s second:

“So you’re talking about a duel, too!” the prince suddenly began to laugh, to Keller’s extreme surprise.  He laughed mightily.  Keller, who had really almost been on tenterhooks until he had obtained satisfaction, offering himself as a second, almost took offence as he beheld the prince’s merry laughter.  (III, 3)

I was also laughing mightily, enjoying Myshkin’s genuinely Christ-like response.  Risking death for pride – how ridiculous, how funny.  Myshkin’s laughter is always meaningful.

One more example, from another minor character, one who plays a big role in the first quarter of the novel but gets lost later, a victim of Dostoevsky’s muddle.  He is given this moment, though:

When Varya was out of the way, Ganya took the note from the table, kissed it, clicked his tongue and performed an entrechat.  (IV, 2)

One wonders what little marvels Dostoevsky might have imagined if he had let his characters be alone more often, if they were not constantly talking.

I attempt to celebrate, or spoil, Herman Melville's birthday by describing him as a conceptual innovator

Happy birthday, Herman Melville.  I honestly thought I was going to spend most of this week writing about Melville, about The Piazza Tales (1856).

Melville was a kind of conceptual writer.  He was not concerned with the process of creativity like Alvin Lucier or Andy Warhol or César Aira (“nowadays, art that does not use a procedure is not truly art”).  Who at the time would have understood that kind of gibberish?  But he was a self-conscious innovator in fiction and verse.

The forms of the novel that were standard in the late 1840s were not a good fit for Melville, so he struggled to find a form for himself.  By his third book, the crazy Mardi (1849) he had assembled the pieces of his style:  short chapters (Mardi has 195!), a wild mix of realism and metaphor verging on allegory, a literally poetic diction, and a de-emphasis on novelistic character.  The latter especially was completely contrary to the contemporary emphasis of English (and French and Russian) fiction, where authors were creating amazingly lifelike, sympathetic characters.  This still drives unsuspecting readers of Moby-Dick crazy, doesn’t it?  Where are the people?

The Melville “novel” I am reading now, The Confidence Man (1857), is even more extreme, with all of the characters replaced by allegorical figures moving in a kind of a procession in a pointedly artificial setting.  It is like The Fairie Queen.  It is slow going.  Perhaps it is no longer a novel, but some other still unnamed form of prose fiction.

I think this wild allegorizing is fairly new, although it is partly borrowed from Nathaniel Hawthorne.  I believe the prose as poetry is new, too, something no one had done to the same extent.  I should keep an eye out for more examples of that.

Curiously, since I am knocking his characterization, two of Melville’s most significant creations are characters.  Even more curiously, they both can be thought of as conceptual innovations.  What I mean here is that some fundamental part of Captain Ahab and Bartleby the Scrivener can be understood without reading the original text.  Heck, without knowing that there is a text.  Ahab is the crazy guy who obsesses over a pointless goal; Bartleby is the office drone who prefers not to do anything.

Whether or not these descriptions match what is in the text is incidental.  They have turned out to be valuable concepts.  Useful shorthand descriptions.  They join Don Quixote, Don Juan, Ebenezer Scrooge, Faust, Sherlock Holmes, and that poor sap who turns into a bug as characters who have escaped their novels, however narrowly, as ideas more than as people.

I feel that movies have muddled this entire line of argument in some way I do not yet understand.

I also have this idea that the ingenious ways novelists have found to plump up the seeming reality of their characters prevents them from becoming free-floating concepts.  So we could call a well-meaning busybody Emma Woodhouse, but Jane Austen’s Emma is too complex or ambiguous, or just too much a part of her own novel to escape it.  I don’t know.  Please substitute your own example.  Imagine Maggie Tulliver independently of The Mill on the Floss, Anna Karenina outside of her book, Charles Kinbote at large.  It seems pointless, almost impossible, but who knows.  Reincarnations of Don Quixote and Captain Ahab show up all over the place.  I know, I know, Captain Ahab is himself a version of Don Quixote.

I wonder what I am going to ramble about tomorrow.

What sort of book? A good one? - plump, lifelike Candida

Characters in plays are brought to life by actors.  The most bizarre and mannered behavior and dialogue can become realistic in the right hands (and body, and voice).  See MAMET David for examples.

Borges and Bioy Casares were almost certainly talking about something else, about the verisimilitude of the characters in Shaw’s text, with the reader’s imagination filling in, however inadequately, for the actors.  Shaw is unusually aware of the issue.  He had great trouble getting his plays produced and instead made his breakthrough by publishing them in cleverly titled books – Three Plays for Puritans, Plays Unpleasant, and Plays Pleasant, the latter containing Candida.

So Candida is written to be read like a screwy novel.  It begins with the point of view hovering over London, and then moves into a specific neighborhood in the “north-east quarter,” no, not that slum, but the middle-class neighborhood next to it, “wide-streeted, myriad-populated; well served with ugly iron urinals, Radical clubs, and tram lines carrying a perpetual stream of yellow cars.”  One detail in that list was a surprising reminder that the Victorian times, they were a’changin’, and followed by that stream of – ya know, I’m just going to move on.

Now we’re on the street, then a park (“it is a pleasant place”), and on the other side is a parsonage.  Through the door, up the stairs, and into the room that serves as Reverend Morell’s office.  We are finally in the theater, looking at the set – books (William Morris, Henry George, Karl Marx and other “literary landmarks in Socialism”), chairs, a fireplace, a typewriter.  The whole point of this is to thicken the reality of the world of the play, and the same treatment is given to the characters and their gestures.  Let the theater director worry about what the stage would look like.

The nice, plump details of characterization are mostly those a novelist could use.  Little gestures, bits of speech that are a step left or right from where I expected them to be.  Act II begins with the office occupied only by the poet:

Marchbanks, alone and idle, is trying to find out how the typewriter works.  Hearing someone at the door, he steals guiltily away to the window and pretends to be absorbed in the view.

Of course that is what he would do when left alone, of course.  Let’s look at another, the father-in-law this time, who is disappointed to learn that it will be a couple of hours until dinner:

BURGESS:  (with plaintive resignation)  Gimme a nice book to read over the fire, will you, James: thur’s a good chap.
MORELL:  What sort of book?  A good one?
BURGESS:  (with almost a yell of remonstrance)  Nah-oo!  Summat pleasant, just to pass the time.

“Almost a yell,” that is very nice – I don’t trust that bookshelf either – but now I can also see how the actor playing Morell works backwards, perhaps making his questions a deliberate tease.  Polite but arch, put the emphasis on “sort” and “good.”  Morell is played by Kelsey Grammer, Burgess by John Mahoney.  Give ol’ pop a good scare.

The firm lifelikeness of the characters in Candida are easy to see.  This experiment was a success.

A mediocre Stevenson novel and a failed experiment - come and gone ere I could fix it, with a swallow's swiftness

A little experiment will fill out the rest of the week, one that goes back to a conversation between Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares that Sr. Caravana wrote about a year ago.  Borges and Bioy Casares made a list of fictional characters with unusual lifelikeness.  Count Fosco from The Woman in White, Eugénie Grandet and her father, Proust’s M. de Charlus – mostly I could see what they meant.  The experiment was to read a couple of examples I did not know and see if I could still see, so to speak.  I chose
"Pinkerton from The Wrecker;… Shaw’s characters (Candida’s poet and husband)."

Shaw is for later.  The Wrecker is the 1892 collaboration between Robert Louis Stevenson and his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, their second novel together.  Their third, The Ebb-Tide surprised me by proving to be a second-rate novel verging on the first-rate.  The Wrecker is unfortunately a third-rate book with a second-rate novel visible within it, right in the middle.  The narrator and that Pinkerton fellow have purchased, for the equivalent of a million mostly borrowed dollars a ship run aground on Midway Island in the belief that it holds a secret cargo, most likely opium.  The race to the wreck is exciting, the detective work aboard the ship is compelling, the mystery is not bad.

I usually avoid what I think of as creative writing workshop criticisms, necessary for a work-in-progress but pointless for a hundred year old book.  In this case, though, the first third of the novel, or perhaps closer to the first half, should have been cut and the last third heavily rearranged.  If that wrecker plot sounds intriguing (and it is pretty good), I can save you some trouble: start no earlier than Chapter IX, lopping off that thin first third, and honestly Chapter XII would be better.  Read through Chapter XV, everything that takes place on board the wreck.  Now skip to the surprisingly violent final three chapters to resolve the mystery.

I am only guessing, but I believe the reader who follows this path will avoid every substantial section written by the merely competent Lloyd Osbourne.  Sorry, Lloyd, but competent fiction is too common.

Those middle chapters, obviously Stevenson’s, really do lift off.  Here the wreckers have just arrived at Midway Island.  Is the ship they gambled on even there?  Has someone else gotten to it first?

[Captain] Nares wiped his night glass on his sleeve and passed it to me, motioning, as he did so, with his hand.  An endless wilderness of raging billows came and went and danced in the circle of the glass; now and then a pale corner of sky, or the strong line of the horizon rugged with the heads of waves; and then of a sudden – come and gone ere I could fix it, with a swallow's swiftness – one glimpse of what we had come so far and paid so dear to see: the masts and rigging of a brig penciled on heaven, with an ensign streaming at the main, and the ragged ribbons of a topsail thrashing from the yard. (Ch. XII)

That long, winding second sentence is definitive Stevenson.  Ye shall know him by his complex-compound sentences.  The brig is “penciled on heaven” because the narrator is an artist.  I assume that answers the question you were about to ask.

Right, Pinkerton.  He’s okay.  He is the most accurate depiction of the entrepreneurial personality I have seen in 19th century fiction, plenty lifelike in that sense.  Captain Nares is as good, and a couple of other characters come close.  But that description of the use of a spyglass on a rugged sea seems as lifelike as anything.

On to the next character in Little Dorrit - failed benevolence

How does plot affect character?  The events of a story can change a character, or reveal character.  Or do nothing, I suppose, as is all too common.  I suggested yesterday that Dickens used the plot of Little Dorrit to reveal the complexities of the title character.  Amy Dorrit becomes more interesting as I see her from new angles.

The host of ombhurbhuva, in a comment on that post, suggested that Amy was particularly interesting “because of her lapses in serenity and her opposition to the fatuity of the rest of the Dorrit clan.”  As the story progresses, Amy’s circumstances change, wildly, but she always has lapses in serenity – but new kinds of lapses; she always stands opposed – but in new ways – to the fatuity of her family.  She looks different in light than in shadow, to follow one of the themes of Little Dorrit, but is recognizably the same person.

Well, it is clear enough how I read.  I am trying to get a good look at the patterns the author is creating.  In big, mature Dickens novels like Bleak House and Little Dorrit, the variety and intricacy of the patterns are amazing.

The hero of the novel, Arthur Clennam, also looks more interesting as the plot moves, but the pattern is the inverse of the heroine’s.  Little Dorrit turns out to be bigger than she first appears, more full than the old type of Dickens heroine.  Arthur turns out to be smaller than he first appears.

A great flaw of many of the earlier Dickens novels is the clumsy use of jolly, benevolent, independently wealthy, charitable men, practitioners of the Philosophy of Christmas*, who can end a novel by cleaning up the mess, rewarding the good and improving the less good.  Sometimes the device leads to a great character (Mr. Pickwick), but sometimes it is not only dramatically flat but vaguely creepy (the Cheerybles in Nicholas Nickleby).  In Bleak House, Dickens successfully complicated the device, and I think he is doing something similar in Little Dorrit.  Arthur aspires to be a benevolent Dickens character, but fails.

His story presents him with a series of attempts to improve the lives of others; he proceeds to botch each one, usually even misunderstanding the problem.  For example, back in England from China after twenty years, Arthur becomes convinced that his parents did something long ago to injure William Dorrit, trapping him in the debtors’ prison.  Mrs. Clennam is employing Little Dorrit as a seamstress – ah ha! – presumably to assuage her guilt.  Arthur will right the wrong!  But his efforts go nowhere (although he coincidentally causes others to act), in part because he misinterpreted every available clue.

Arthur is not a lot of fun to spend time with.  He is resentful, depressive, and fails at every significant attempt at benevolence.  He is eventually crushed and redeemed through suffering, giving him just enough strength to (spoiler alert!) survive the climactic, house-shattering battle with Little Dorrit’s malevolent twin, Anti-Dorrit.  But for me, seeing how Dickens creates the pattern of Arthur’s repeated well-meaning failures, and how it is the pattern that reveals Arthur’s character more than any individual scene, was interesting enough.

*  Borrowed from Chapter II, “Benevolence,” p. 52, of The Dickens World (1941) by Humphrey House.  The great Dickens idea is “all-the-year-round Christmas.”  Aimed at almost any other writer, this would be a devastating criticism.

Your Schillers and your Goethes & all the stupid bastards who don't give you nothing but lies - Gerhart Hauptmann's characters

A weakness, or limit, of the German novella tradition is character, the lack of well-rounded, plumped up, lifelike characters.  I can think of exceptions, but what I typically remember from an E. T. A. Hoffmann story is some brilliantly inventive piece of weirdness or ingenious dissociation – the moments when the story suddenly shifts from one plane to another – rather than telling details about the characters, who are often interchangeable from story to story.  That cat in Tomcat Murr has a lot of personality – I said there are exceptions.

Some of this is the result of a complex exploration of the Ideal and the Real that begins with Kant, and Goethe’s response to Kant.  Characters are often three-dimensional but made of porcelain, not flesh.  Please see this marvelous example from Elective Affinities that nicole enjoyed.

The search for the uncanny is part of the story, too.  The external world is just as important as the internal, and much of the best German fiction from the 19th century is about the interaction between the two.  The forest and railroad in “Flagman Thiel” are at least as full and “real” as the title character, and have to be for Hauptmann to construct the sense of uncanniness that fills the last half of the story.  In English and French fiction, the intense interiority and limited third person view of writers like Flaubert and Woolf has become a standard mode.  German-language writers, before Fontane, were exploring a different method, one no less psychological or subjective, but different, maybe a little more mysterious, more willing to leave a character’s actions unexplained, and therefore distancing.

A playwright has the advantage that his characters, no matter how flat and empty, will be inhabited by actual humans with their own voices and gestures.  The “real” becomes real, occurring right in front of me.  As a reader, I have to imaginatively simulate all of this, as best I can.

Hauptmann’s characters in Before Daybreak are easy to imagine as genuine people.  Horrible people, but plausibly horrible.  The step-mother / mother-in-law, Mrs. Krause.  See her fear and belittle her step-daughter’s education (ellipses in original):

MRS. KRAUSE. (With increasing fury.)  ‘Stead o’ such a female lendin’ a hand on th’ farm… oooh, no!  God forbid!  Jus’ th’ thought o’ that makes ‘er turn green…  Buuuut – ya take y’r Schillers ‘n y’r Goethes, ‘n all them stupid bastards who don’t give ya nothin’ but lies; thaaat gets to ‘er – thaaat she likes.  It’s enough to drive ya crazy.  (She stops, trembling with rage.)

I should note that mom has been hitting the Veuve Clicquot pretty hard, and that in the original she speaks a Silesian dialect, and that this is mostly not a dialect play:  Mrs. Krause is special.

I would like to keep quoting her, because she is the most vivid, or most loud, character.  Many other characters are just as good:  Loth, the principled prig of an idealist; Helen, the only truly sympathetic character, whose intelligence and virtue are undercut by her entirely understandable emotional neediness; Hoffmann, who first seems like a decent enough guy in a bad marriage, but has been corrupted, hollowed out, by wealth.  When I say “good” characters, I mean interesting artistic creations.  I have some doubts about the “reality” of the story of Before Daybreak, which lays the wretchedness on pretty thick, but the characters, although a trying bunch, are pleasantly full of sap and vigor, and by themselves a reason for me to read more Gerhart Hauptmann.

Ooh! Ow! Help, rescue! - the great Père Ubu

Père Ubu is a monstrous inversion of Hello Kitty, bibliographing nicole boldly declares, and how can I not agree?  The character of Pa Ubu is Alfred Jarry’s greatest creation.  If Ubu is not as ubu-iqitous as Don Quixote or Faust or Falstaff, to pick some precedents, characters who escaped their creators, it is because the 20th century avant garde has so ruthlessly cannibalized him.

Pa Ubu is a titanic comic monster, a braggart and coward like Falstaff but somehow simultaneously an unstoppable, invulnerable murderer.  He massacres his enemies but also poisons his allies:

He holds an unmentionable brush in his hand and hurls it at the gathering.

PA UBU.  Try a taste of that. (Several taste and collapse poisoned.)  Now pass me the spare ribs of Polish bison, Mother, and I’ll dish them out.

[snip]

PA UBU.  You’re still here?  By my green candle, I’ll do you in with bison ribs.
He begins to throw them.

ALL.  Ooh!  Ow!  Help, rescue!  Let’s stick up for ourselves!  Curses!  He’s done for me.  (Ubu Roi, I.3., Connolly and Taylor)

Then Pa complains that he has “had a lousy meal”!

I should ask the other Ubu readers – how often is Pa Ubu terrifying?  Plenty of times, says I.  The massacres of the nobles in Ubu Roi, for example, scene III.2., when what begins as lust for money and power turns into or reveals itself as something more horrifying, more empty.  “Isn’t injustice just as good as justice?” Ubu asks in the preceding scene, and he means it, as much as he means anything.  When, in Ubu Cocu, Ubu stuffs his conscience and anyone else he can get his hands down the toilet, I thought not “How horrible” but “Of course.”

Despite the loudness of his brutality, Pa Ubu frequently reminded me of the silent Harpo Marx.  Both characters are agents of chaos.  So are Groucho and Chico, but they are restrained by intelligence and stupidity, respectively.  Harpo is the one who is not quite human.  Harpo is the troll.

Rise links Ubu Roi to the dictator novel.  As you can see, I read the Ubu plays and think of Duck Soup.  Thinking of Idi Amin is too frightening.

I suppose if I have been disappointed by Jarry, it is that he created only one great character.  Ma Ubu has her moments – she starts strong, for example, as a sort of idiotic Lady Macbeth – but is undefined compared to Pa Ubu.  A thoughtful reader might point me to – or, even better, write – a feminist counter to Jarry, Hedda Gabler crossed with Lady Macbeth strained through Brecht’s, or Grimmelshausen’s, Mother Courage.  Winnie, in Beckett’s Happy Days, might be a useful reference.  All I seem to be able to do is list other works and characters.

I enjoyed the characters in A Tale of Two Cities

Not all of them, of course.  Now that I have read all but two of his novels, and a fair swath of his shorter fiction, I continue to be astounded at his constant failure to imagine heroes and heroines of the slightest artistic interest, particularly baffling given that Charles Dickens is the most inventive creator of characters in – I want to be careful not to exaggerate here – in the history of literature.

Worse, Dickens was perfectly aware of the problem, and had solved it twice already, in David Copperfield and Bleak House, and was on the verge of writing Great Expectations.  Let’s not revisit that argument.  The solution, such as it is, that Dickens employs here, is to displace the conventional characters, to the extent possible, with more interesting people, especially in the final thirty pages or so.

The story of the supposed hero actually ends with him unconscious, as interesting as he was when awake.  But the conventional hero is not the genuine hero of the book, so Dickens seems to be cleverly attempting to deflect my attention with this non-entity.  Too bad we have to spend so much time with the dull blocks of wood in the process.  Too bad Dickens could not have given Charles Darnay a hobby, or a funny hat, or anything.

Great shame about the heroine, too, but I have given up hope there.  No, I still hope – fingers crossed for Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend.  And the problem is with the bland heroines, not with other women.  The great triumph of A Tale of Two Cities is a woman, sort of, a parody of Joan of Arc and Marianne, the embodiment of the totalitarian spirit of the French Revolution, the great Madame Defarge:

She tied a knot with flashing eyes, as if it throttled a foe. (II.16)

The superhuman Mme Defarge is a force of history that has somehow become incarnated in a woman who runs a Paris wine shop.  She is in no sense a real character, even in ordinary fictional terms.   That she is entirely unchanging over the eighteen years of the novel, that she is ageless, that her powers never diminish, is only logical once we realize that she is not human but a tool of higher powers.

She is visiting Versailles to see the king and queen.  The Revolution is still many years in the future:

‘You work hard, madame,’ said a man near her.
‘Yes,’ answered Madame Defarge; ‘I have a good deal to do.’
‘What do you make, madame?’
‘Many things.’
‘For instance – ‘
‘For instance,’ returned Madame Defarge, composedly, ‘shrouds.’ (II.15)

The imaginative leap Dickens makes in A Tale of Two Cities is to insert a character along the lines of The Ghost of Christmas Past into a nominally realistic novel, a representation of Death, with knitting needles replacing the scythe, draping her in just enough ordinary novelistic characterization to allow her to walk amongst the more human characters and readers, unknowing and complacent until it is too late.

The Company I Keep - the objects of my sympathy

My experience of a novel depends as much on a sympathetic response as anyone else's.  The question is: with whom, exactly, do I need to sympathize?  Readers of Wayne Booth's The Company We Keep: The Ethics of Fiction (1988) know where I'm going, even though I was well aware of everything I'm about to say before I read Booth, I swear.

When I read Wuthering Heights, I encounter a fine assembly of weirdos, misfits, idiots, and monsters, a few of whom deserve my pity, but none of whom deserve much more. Yet there is one character with whom I sympathize strongly: I care about what happens to her, and I wish her well in her goals.  She's not much like me, so there's little identification with her, but I appreciate and benefit from the offer of friendship she makes me, and enjoy the opportunity to get to know her better. 

Her name, of course, is Emily Brontë.  She is not the real Emily Brontë, but one I have invented in collaboration with the actual author.  Booth calls her the "implied author."  When "EB" and I get together, she offers to show me this wonderful thing she made, this novel, or perhaps one of her poems.  We look at it together.  She points out the bits she's particularly proud of.  We have a good laugh whenever a book is abused, or when Catherine is bit by a bulldog.  We hunt for fairies and ogres.  We perhaps discuss why Heathcliff is the way he is, and why Catherine is like she is.  I ask her if she has read John Galt.  She unfortunately does not answer. 

It's kind of a one-sided friendship.  But as Booth says (I'm in Chapter 6, "Implied Authors as Friends"), we have many different kinds of friends, some close and wide-ranging, some best met on specific occasions.  Lunch-every-week friends, lunch-every-year friends, and lunch-every-decade friends.  The analogy with books is clear enough, so I'll move on.

Maybe what I do want to emphasize is that before I can really accept or reject an implied author's friendship, I have to have some sense of what she's trying to do.  Emily Brontë did not botch her attempt to create a genial romance.  Her goals were entirely otherwise, and quite interesting; she achieved them admirably, mostly; and her book allows me certain emotional and artistic experiences that I still don't think can be found anywhere else.

Booth never discusses one case: what if the author is not my friend, but my enemy?  Sometimes that relationship is valuable, too.  Emily Brontë (my Brontë, the one I made up) is weird enough that I understand how plenty of people will not be able to accept her friendship so easily, and may even want to fight it out with her.  They should.

So, OK.  That's Sympathetic Character Week.  That's why I don't particularly care about sympathetic characters.  They're a literary device useful for achieving specific goals.  Other devices are useful for achieving other goals.  Sympathetic attention to the book will point us in the right direction.  Then we can puzzle over whether the goals were achieved, or whether they were worth trying in the first place.

Thanks for all of the useful comments.  I thought this all worked pretty well, for such a misguided idea.  For the next two weeks, another bad idea: Who is John Galt?

The Sympathy Project

How crazy is it to say this: The development of the idea of sympathy in 19th century literature was one of the great achievements of the time.  I'm slighting the 18th century Germans.

The success of Pamela (1740), the first modern novel, depended on a very crude idea of sympathy.  Richardson identified or chanced upon a new audience, newly literate female servants who were primed for a story with a female servant for the heroine, with a protagonist just like me.  For non-servant readers, the new experience was to identify so strongly with someone not like me. Not that it's so easy to identify with Pamela today.

I don't think, though, it was until the 19th century that many writers discovered just how powerful the novel was, just how easy it was to direct readers' sentiments towards or away from almost any character. And more importantly, just how artistically and ethically effective these techniques could be when employed by a really skilled writer.

I'm thinking, for example, of Dickens, and especially Hugo.  The condemned murderer in The Diary of a Condemned Man (1829), the Gypsy and hunchback in Notre Dame of Paris (1831), the whole range of urchins, orphans, and thieves in Les Miserables (1862): Hugo wanted action from his readers. Political reform at most, copious tears at the minimum.  The reader was really supposed to regard various categories and behaviors of his fellow man differently after closing the novel.

By mid-century, most of the great writers were working on The Sympathy Project.  Not just Hugo and Dickens: George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Theodor Storm, Adalbert Stifter, Henry James, Mark Twain ("All right, then, I'll GO to hell"), Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky.  All of those Naturalists.   Poets and playwrights, too.  Not everyone.  But an unbelievable amount of artistic and intellectual effort was devoted to creating these incredibly complex patterns of human fellow-feeling.  Excrutiatingly complex, thinking of certain works by Henry James.  The careful reader's sympathetic response to Anna Karenina, for example, ought to be complex.

In Silas Marner (1861), George Eliot carefully directs her reader into the thoughts of every major character, including the candidate for "villain."  We are likely to end up with more understanding of everyone, regardless of their mistakes, eccentricities, or bad actions.  But Eliot is also making an argument about sympathy, enforcing some limits.  The villain crosses a moral line, and we're not with him when he does, a minor key variation on poor pregnant Hetty's "Journey of Despair" in Adam Bede (1859), where the reader and the author are with Hetty, really with her sympathetically - but only up to a point.  Sympathy is withheld, and she's on her own.

I know an English professor, an 18th century specialist, who taught a Jane Austen seminar that, he said, was a complete failure.  He could not penetrate his students' love, love, love for Austen and her characters.  For some reason, he never has this problem with the Vicar of Wakefield, also a likeable fellow.  As Rohan Maitzen suggested a couple of days ago, sympathy can be as bad for the reader as antipathy.  Both can inhibit critical thought.  Elizabeth Bennett, wonderful, amazing Elizabeth Bennett, is not allowed to be ethically compromised.  What, then, do these loving readers make of the last part of Pride and Prejudice? On the other hand, she is one of the greatest creations of imaginative literature.

I was thinking this would be a good place to discuss Gustave Flaubert's A Simple Heart (1877), perhaps his single serious attempt at a sympathetic character, an amazing character, created using the exact same techniques he uses on his horrible people. But I think I've written enough.  The 19th century International Literary Sympathy Project is beginning to look to me like one of the great achievements of civilization.  But literature can do other things, too.  That's all I'm saying.

Nefarious novelists manipulate their readers' demand for sympathetic characters

Really, here's the most important reason to be careful about indulging in the entirely natural impulse to sympathize with the admirable and interesting characters in a novel.  It turns out that certain novelists are aware of this predilection and have learned to manipulate it for their own sinister ends.  One solution is to avoid all such books.  Use this post as a guide.  Another is to be cautious.  Very cautious.  One can't be too safe.

Vladimir Nabokov, for example.  In Lolita (1955), a murderous pedophile writes his confession.  He (Humbert Humbert, and Vladimir Nabokov) uses every trick in the book, and invents a few new ones.  Readers who are not extremely vigilant almost inevitably find themselves relaxing their guard.  HH is so erudite, and there are worse monsters in the world, and - well, there's a lot more like that.  Most importantly, we spend most of the first-person novel with him, and he's not only charming, but dazzling, a self-pitying master of flimflammery.  We slip into the narrator's world.  Isn't that what we're supposed to do in a novel?

Lolita is a useful case because it is actually about readerly sympathy.  Taking the book as a real document, the author is justifying his crimes to someone, asking someone to forgive him, appealing for sympathy.  Taking the book as a novel, the reader often has to struggle to escape the natural pull of sympathy.  Whether or not HH, at the end of the novel, begins to understand the true nature of his own crimes is incidental to the way the device works.

Nabokov continued to explore this idea in the novels that followed Lolita. In Pnin (1957), the hapless Russian immigrant Professor Pnin is genuinely sympathetic, a brilliant, warm creation.  Many readers, indulging in their fellow-feeling for this marvelous character (see the end of Chapter Six, the punch bowl, unbelievable), never quite notice how he's being abused by the narrator, a certain "Vladimir Nabokov."  Poor Pnin, with a burst of creative solution-finding, actually has to flee the novel.  In Lolita, the villain hides behind false sympathy; in Pnin, behind real sympathy.  Pale Fire (1962) twists the idea in yet another direction.  Nabokov sure enjoyed the author-as-puppeteer metaphor.

Ford Madox Ford famously begins The Good Soldier (1915) with "This is the saddest story I have ever heard."  Now here, one thinks, with this story we'll find some first-rate sympathizin'.  "Poor Florence," the narrator calls his dead wife, again and again, and Captain Ashburnham is the model of an English gentleman, and "I loved Leonora always and, to-day, I would very cheerfully lay down my life, what is left of it, in her service."  But in fact the characters turn out to be ridiculous, and the narrator himself loses sympathy for them as he tells the story - actually, because he tells the story.  The act of storytelling in this case destroys sympathy. 

And what, I ask you, is behind the inscrutable expression of Little William Thackeray, perched up there at the top of the blog?  He's keeping a careful eye on the readers of Vanity Fair (1847-48), watching them puzzle over exactly which characters are supposed to receive the reader's sympathy.  The most likable character is selfish and immoral; the other candidate is selfish and priggish.  The men are idiots or dishrags.  The narrator keeps telling us that everything's fine, what do we expect, that's just the way things are.

These are some of my all-time favorite books.  You may have noticed that these are all comic writers.  So the savvy sympathetic reader might want to avoid comic writers.  Dickens wanted his readers to like his characters, so he's safe.  I think.

All right, I'm tired of not liking anyone.  Tomorrow, I'm going to sympathize with sympathy.

* I want to recommend, as strongly as possible, Nabokov's last Russian novel, The Gift (1938), which is neither tricky, nor icy, nor icky, nor whatever other adjectives people use to diminish Nabokov.  It's a perfect Bildungsroman, and I have no idea why it's not more read.  The Chernyshevsky chapter alone is one of the best things Nabokov ever wrote.

A lot of great books do not have sympathetic characters - plus, my bibliography

I tried to do some genuine research for Sympathetic Character Week, to try to shape my rhetoric, if nothing else.  Besides Wayne Booth's book, enormously helpful, and to which I'll return later in the week, I did not have much luck.

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose; How to Read a Novel by John Sutherland;  How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster: these all seemed like good candidates.  None mentioned the issue at all, and the reason was clear enough.  None of them took the question seriously.  Of course you don't dismiss a book because you don't like the characters.  Now get back to work!

The same person who suggested the spot-on yet off-point Freud essay led me to Samuel Johnson's Rambler #4, (1750), on the "new realistic novel."  Anybody want to defend this position:

There have been men indeed splendidly wicked, whose endowments threw a brightness on their crimes, and whom scarce any villainy made perfectly detestable, because they never could be wholly divested of their excellencies; but such have been in all ages the great corrupters  of the world, and their resemblance ought no more to be preserved than the art of murdering without pain.

Or more concisely: "It is therefore not a sufficient vindication of a character that it is drawn as it appears, for many characters ought never to be drawn" (emphasis mine). I think that cat is pretty much out of the bag by now.

Virginia Woolf always comes through for me.  From "How Should One Read a Book" (1926):

Reading is not merely sympathizing and understanding; it is also criticising and judging.

Sympathizing with whom, one should ask?  Woolf is clear enough, but we'll return to that on Friday.*

So (again excepting Booth) none of these books were that helpful.  One argument, my strongest, is perhaps so obvious that no one bothers to make it: a lot of great novels (stories, poems) have characters with whom no sane, mature person should sympathize.  And another swath of books is constructed independently of our concept of sympathy.  You shouldn't like them, you shouldn't want to be their friend, you shouldn't wish them well.  You should wish some of them ill, frankly. 

One group of books is more or less Modernist; the other is more or less pre-modern.  Pre-modern first. One reason we call Don Quixote the first novel is that we've hijacked it, turning it into a novel, and one way we did that was by learning to sympathize with the travails of Our Lord Don Quixote.  My understanding is that at the time it was generally read as a collection of side-splitting cruelty, an early Three Stooges. Ha ha - poke him in the eye again!  We aren't capable of reading it that way any more; sympathy is a powerful thing.

But what to do, then, with Egil's Saga, about a sociopathic Icelandic poet, or Grettir's Saga, about the last of the monster-killers, who is something of a monster himself?  So much pre-modern and early modern literature was created under entirely different assumptions of the reader's response.  Sometimes, a sympathetic response works; sometimes we have to find another way in to In Praise of Folly or The Lusiads or Orlando Furioso.

Now, the Modernists, deliberately working against sympathy: Charles Baudelaire titles one of the Paris Spleen prose poems "Let's Beat Up the Poor."  Or how about the poem "Against Her Levity," one of the six banned poems from The Flowers of Evil, in which the speaker expresses his desire to copulate with a wound he has made in his lover.  Yuck! Baudelaire's art presents a challenge to the notion of sympathy.

Every third French writer seems to ends up following in his path: Rimbaud, Ubu Roi, the Dadaists and Surrealists.  Icy Gustave Flaubert, contemptuous of his own characters -- not that you have any obligation to read Madame Bovary like he wanted you to (and let's revisit Flaubert in a couple of days).  And it's not just France:  As I Lay Dying.  The Castle (he's never going to get in).  The Voyeur.  Beckett, or Bernhard, or Borges ("I sure hope that nice Pierre Menard finishes his Don Quixote book.")  There are exceptions on this list - see Beckett's heartbreaking Krapp's Last Tape.  Surrealists aside, I haven't even mentioned the genuinely avant garde stuff, mostly because I'm not sure I want to call any of it "great."  Additions to this list, or the one above, most welcome.

One could make a much longer list of wonderful Modernist books that do depend on some type of sympathetic relationship between the reader and the characters.   That is, and should be, the norm.  But there's this other world, too.  What should one tell the reader who refuses to look into Wuthering Heights because the characters are unpleasant?  Stay away from all those other books?  Or, try another approach - it's a lot more pleasant than it looks.

* In fairness, I should mention that Woolf called this essay "a lecture, for schoolgirls," which suggests a certain amount of contempt.  In more fairness, those schoolgirls were undergraduates at Yale.

Sympathetic Character Week - in which I tell people they ain't readin' right - what a bad idea!

Surely learning to meet "the others" where they live is the greatest of all gifts that powerful fiction can offer us.

Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: The Ethics of Fiction (1988), p. 414.

Welcome to Anti-Sympathetic Character Week!  Or Sympathetic Characters: Pro and Con!  Or Sympathetic Characters! What Are They Good For?  I guess I didn't think of a good title.

What do I mean by "sympathetic character"?  What I mean is, whatever someone means when he says "I did not like Wuthering Heights because it did not have any sympathetic characters."  Now, what does that reader mean?  Check out this horror show for something similar.

Literature professors hate this kind of talk.*  What a conversation-killer.  That's how I see it used in LitBlogLand, too.  Didn't like the characters, therefore didn't like the book, therefore we're done.

We all, as humans, have a taste for sympathetic characters.  That taste is natural, perhaps a social animal's evolutionary adaptation, who knows.  Sigmund Freud, in his 1908 essay "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming," sees the actions of both writing and reading as akin to day-dreaming, with the sympathetic hero providing a "sense of security".  But look at this caveat:

for the purposes of our comparison, we will choose not the writers most highly esteemed by the critics, but the less pretentious authors of novels, romances and short stories, who nevertheless have the widest and most eager circle

So a disclaimer of my own: I'm only talking about the writers most highly esteemed, the more pretentious authors, with the narrowest yet most eager circles.

Tastes, I am told, cannot be disputed.  Tastes can be cultivated, though.  The taste for characters with whom one does not sympathize should be cultivated.  That's what I want to argue.  And, honestly, I'm not convinced that a taste for "characters I can identify with" or "characters I understand" is any less arbitrary than not wanting to read about poor people, or not wanting to read depressing books (examples drawn, sadly, from life).

Wayne Booth, and he's not the only one, argues that we readers actually have an ethical imperative to seek out characters unlike ourselves.  Fiction (including poetry) gets us closer to other humans than is otherwise possible.  No other form allows this particular intimacy.  This is our chance to fight against our own limits and experience true sympathy.

Or is this just another arbitrary preference, a taste for cosmopolitanism, a taste for otherness?

One more disclaimer, while I'm jabbering about tastes.  One of my problems with that Wuthering Heights straw man up above is that I don't really care if he likes the book.  I don't care that much if I like the book!   Something about Wuthering Heights has kept it alive, has attracted so many good readers.  I want to figure out what it is.  Looking for sympathetic characters in Wuthering Heights is a hindrance to understanding the novel.  The strange thing is that once I do begin to figure out what the author is up to, what is actually in the book, I begin to like it, a lot.  This is what I mean by cultivating a taste.  Critical distance is pleasurable.

I'm going to spend a couple of days arguing my position, which, again is not against sympathetic characters but for putting them in their place, for critical distance.  Then I will try to recover the sympathetic character.  It turns out that I want sympathetic characters, too. 

All of this barring ideas from my readers, who are likely to understand the issue better than I do.

* This week I'm likely to be wrong a lot more than usual.  Please, correct me.  Who knows, maybe professors love this.  Please, student, more about your likes and dislikes.  Wonderful.

** Freud quotations from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IX (1959), ed. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press. p. 149.  Thanks to JRussell (see comments) for this source, and for a Samuel Johnson essay I'll mention later in the week.

Voice

Of the five historical mysteries I read over my summer vacation, I liked three of them enough to consider reading more in the series.* The little Banville novel is something of an exception, since I've already read all but a few of Banville's books. I'll really lay into Banville tomorrow, so let's set that one aside.

Maybe I'll set Carlo Lucarelli aside, too. The greatest interest there is thematic. Plus, it was so short, you read all three books in the series, and you're not even close to 300 pages. Easy reading.

In two other novels, the great appeal of the writing is the voice of the narrator. Steve Hockensmith is playing with the Sherlock Holmes type of mystery, so the narrator has to be Dr. Watson. But in this case, Watson is a burly cowboy named Big Red. Holmes is his older, smaller, smarter brother, Old Red. Old Red is illiterate, so Big Red has to read him the latest Sherlock Holmes stories. Also, the signs on the bathroom doors. The comedy can be a bit broad. Funny, though.

Watson \ Big Red is folksy and sees the homorous side of things, so the tone is almost always comic. I don't think I ever actually laughed while reading this book, but that's a matter of habit:**

"Someone cleared his throat, and I glance across the aisle to find a fortyish sport in a checked suit giving me the eye in a friendly, amused sort of way. He had a face as flat and pink as a slice of ham, and atop his head was a pompadour of such impressive proportions I wouldn't have been surprised had I spotted the great explore Sigerson attempting to climb it with a team of native guides." (p. 33)

That's pretty good. If its not quite characteristic, that's because of all the dialogue and plot fuss, most of which was all right. The book has many short chapters, which unfortunately often end with irritating false climaxes - this is my main stylistic complaint. They do work, though - I always wanted to keep going.

Hockensmith's narrator has a typical comic voice. Owen Parry created something more original for his Civil War mysteries. Abel Jones, our hero, is Welsh, a veteran of wars in India, a wounded veteran of Bull Run, and a Methodist teetotaler. He is earnest and self-righteous, full of prejudices (against the Irish, the rich, cavalrymen). And he's scared of horses, "great stupid things," "four-legged demons."

The comedy of the book, which in many ways is a quite serious piece of work, comes from the narrator's inability to suppress his judgmental scolding, even while telling the story of a murder investigation, or a battle. Mostly, he's a driven man on a mission, but he continually pauses to zing his superiors, scold his inferiors, and praise his own virtue. An example of the latter: he does not drink, of course, but he'll buy whiskey for other people, in order to get them to spill secrets. But then he tells us that he feels bad about it.

Maybe this isn't meant to be funny, but I think it is, because it works so well. It deepens the character - in some ways he's a very narrow man, while in other ways he's an abyss. It keeps me guessing, at least - just what will he be capable of, this strange fellow.

My only real disappointment with the book is that the answer is: whatever is necessary to fulfill certain plot and genre expectations. But let that bide, as Captain Abel Jones always says when he suspects he's gone a bit too far.

By the way, neither of these narrators, both of whom are supposedly writing their stories, sound remotely like they actually would have, telling their own stories at the time. But, fortunately, I don't care about accuracy.

* In the right situation - trans-Atlantic flight, for example - I'd read more of any of them. I just wouldn't go out of my way for more Victoria Thompson or Michael Pearce.

** The Parry and Hockensmith books are both quite funny, but my only audible laugh came from the Michael Pearce novel, the one set in Trieste. The angry, drunken Irishman, suspected of murder, turns out to be James Joyce, which is funny enough. Wait, I thought, Italo Svevo lived in Trieste, too - I wonder if Pearce can work him in. About two pages later, there he was, under his real name, smoking one of his last cigarettes (see The Confessions of Zeno, Ch. 1). That's where I laughed.

I had a certain pleasure in keeping cool, and working him up - the astounding insular audacity of Villette

Fiction writers, even the most perverse, especially the most perverse, like to give their readers clues about how to read their novels. Charlotte Brontë provides a direct one in the ingenious Chapter 19 ("The Cleopatra") of Villette (1853). Our drab, prickly heroine Lucy Snowe has been looking at a monumental canvas of a nude Cleopatra. A fellow teacher is appalled:

"M. Paul's hair was shorn close as raven down, or I think it would have bristled on his head. Beginning now to perceive his drift, I had a certain pleasure in keeping cool, and working him up.

'Astounding insular audacity!' cried the Professor."

I think Lucy is revealing one of the aesthetic principles of the novel here. She keeps cool, and works him up, "him" meaning not just M. Paul, but me, the reader. This is one wild book; Lucy Snowe is one wild narrator. It's easy to say that she is unreliable, easy but incorrect. If you ask your friend to feed your dog while you're out of town, and when you get home the dog is suspiciously thin, that friend is unreliable. Lucy Snowe took your dog to the pound the day you left.

Here's an early, simple example, one that threw me off at first. In Chapter 5, Lucy makes what I think is her first reference to the composition of her book: "Fifty miles were then a day's journey (for I speak of a time gone by: my hair, which, till a late period, withstood the frosts of time, lies now, at last white, under a white cap, like snow beneath snow)." Lucy Snowe-the-character is twenty-three at this point; Lucy Snowe-the-author, with her snow beneath snow, is, then, what - sixty? Eighty?

Well, I had my doubts about that, and it turns out that there's pretty good evidence that Lucy-the-author is an ancient thirty-seven years old. See Chapter 20, "The Concert," and compare to the biography of King Leopold I of Belgium. But I want to save the Belgian business for later.

Lucy, both Lucy-the-character and the slightly older Lucy-the-author, is a gleeful liar. The character lies to other characters; the author lies to the reader, who is at her mercy, and then cackles when she reveals her deceptions. Since I'm only about two-thirds through, I'm a little nervous about making even this claim. At the current pace, there's room for at least two more major turns in the plot. Maybe she's deceiving me about her deceptions. Certainty does not seem like the right approach to this book.

I finally understand the Charlotte Brontë-William Thackeray mutual admiration society. Both authors are audaciously cussed. They like to mess with their reader. I can understand how some readers really dislike this sort of thing, and want a more stable point of view. Not me, though. I'm having a great time with Villette.

Poor Wal'r! Drownded, an't he? - more complaints about boring Dickens characters, and a hypothesized solution

The continuing Dickens problem, for the first decade of his career as a novelist: the young, pure heroes and heroines are boring. In Dombey and Son, Dickens made a good attempt at a fix, but couldn't quite make it stick.

Florence Dombey, Mr. Dombey's neglected daughter, and plucky Walter, one of Dombey's office boys, are perfectly serviceable characters when introduced, as children, more or less. An improvement, I thought. But as time passes and the plot moves along, Florence fades a bit and poor Walter is sent on a sea voyage and actually vanishes for 400 pages. That's one solution, I guess. It works! But when he returns, the book is firmly in plot wrap up mode, and Walter seems to have lost his personality somewhere in the South Pacific. Or maybe Captain Cuttle (see title) was right after all, and Wal'r really was drownded, and the fellow who returned was a cardboard cutout.

The rest of the book, meanwhile, presents a dozen top drawer Dickens characters: Captain Cuttle, the fertile Toodles family and their underachieving son Rob, sadsack Mr. Toots and his pal the Game Chicken (a boxer, not a bird), Dombey's prissy sister, Mrs. Chick and her perpetually humming husband.

The great puzzler is how characters as unimportant as Mrs. Miff, "a wheezy little pew-opener," who is really not much more than part of the decor at a church that is a setting for a few scenes, has so much more life than some of the central characters. "A vinegary face has Mrs Miff, and a mortified bonnet, and eke a thirsty soul for sixpences and shillings." A mortified bonnet! And there's plenty more.

A friendly commenter (this commenter) argues that Edith Dombey, Florence's stepmother, is Dickens' best realized female character. She is good, although I'll have to vote for Bleak House's Esther Summerson.

Which leads me to my hypothesis. Dombey and Son is novel number seven. David Copperfield, which I have not read, is next. That's the first Dickens novel in the first person (Chapter I: I Am Born). My theory is that Dickens finally attempted a first person novel as a way to ensure that his central character really exists, to give him some interior life, to force him to be interesting.

New problems arise - how can the narrator be everywhere the writer wants him to be, for example? Bleak House solves that problem brilliantly, with its split structure, half omniscient and half Esther telling her own story. I'm very fond of Esther, but if we only got the external view, she would likely be as colorless as Florence at her worst.

Then it's back to third person, right, in Hard Times (1854), with Great Expectations (1860) as the only other first person novel? Anyway, it's a theory. I'll read David Copperfield and see what I think.

Tomorrow, another problem, a new one.

There's fools enoo, an' rogues enoo, wi'out lookin' i' books for 'em - also, why blog? - also, read Villette!

"Nay, nay, I aren't goin' to bother mysen about Dutchmen. There's fools enoo, an' rogues enoo, wi'out lookin' i' books for 'em." The Mill on the Floss, Ch I.4.

I actually prefer fools and rogues to be in books, rather than real life. Let's hold that thought.

A few months ago a new button showed up whenever I logged into Wuthering Expectations. The new one, perched beside "Edit" and "View" and "Settings," was "Monetize." I'm glad my host added that button, because it gave me a good laugh every day, for weeks. I think the effect has finally worn off. Monetize! Ha ha ha ha! No, it's still funny.

I've seen several good blog posts recently about The Point of It All, why all of these amateur and pro-am and pro blockheads* bother. Dorothy W. turned Montaigne's "On Practice" into an Apology for Blogging: "if I play the fool it is at my own expense and does no harm to anybody." Patrick Kurp has been reading selections from the notebooks of poet Donald Justice: a notebook is "for jotting down unfinished ideas" that "seldom go any further, perhaps for the best." Prof. Myers defends "writing done in a hurry," in the process saying nice things about me and revealing one of my open secrets, which is that each post I write is an experiment, a try, an essay. That each post is a failure is incidental. Let's see what this does, I think.

For me, the comments are the great improvement on a notebook. This notebook is out in public, where kind and knowledgeable strangers jot improvements in the margins. A commenter now has me puzzling over why I care so little about the idea of sympathetic characters. Maybe I should care more. The more I think about the issue, the less well I understand it.

I've turned to Wayne Booth's The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988) for help. It's a big book, accessible but far from easy. The book has some of my own ideas, so now I guess I have to read it. Before I knew what was in the book, if I copied Booth's ideas it would be inadvertent, and I would just be naïve. If I do it now, I'm a plagiarist. Books are corrupting. Stay away from books.

This project may be a bit too close to real work. Again, any assistance regarding sources is appreciated. Surely someone has put some argumentative weight behind the words of Luke the miller, up there at the top of the post. Why do I spend so much time with fictional fools and rogues, with imaginary people I don't like, or who, perhaps worse, I am tricked into liking?

On another note, Rohan Maitzen and The Valve will be hosting a Villette book club this summer. See the link for the schedule. I found previous runs at Adam Bede and The Chimes to be useful, and plan to read along this time, too. Ma femme has told me that this is her favorite C. Brontë novel, and that it features all sorts of thoroughly unlikable characters.

* Per Dr. Johnson: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." No offense!

In Salem for a few days, plus a request regarding sympathetic characters

I'll be in Salem and other points near Boston for a few days. Perhaps I'll see the House of Seven Gables in the flesh. Or the wood, I guess. Anyway, no posting tomorrow.

A commenter inspired me to think a little more about the issue of sympathetic characters. Maybe I should actually say at some point why I don't have much use for them. So I'll think about that.

But what about the other side? Does anybody know of any full-throated defenses of sympathetic characters? Blog posts, articles, books, whatever? What I mean is, what is the aesthetic defense of the sympathetic character.

One useful approach is via the history of the novel, especially the rise of the sentimental novel, the discovery by writers of the use of the sympathetic character. There must also be ethical arguments. Would Wayne Booth be a useful place to look for this sort of thing?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. This is probably an overly ambitious project, but who knows.

Hawthorne’s marvelous notebooks – it is found to be laughably vague

Hawthorne’s more or less allegorical stories are not populated by what I would call rounded or real characters. I don’t exactly mean psychologically rounded characters. I mean people like this:

“The skipper of the wrecked sloop had, apparently, just been taking a drop of comfort – but still seemed downcast... there was something that made me smile in his grim and gloomy mien, his rusty, jammed hat, his rough and grisly beard, and in his mode of chewing tobacco, with much action of the jaws, getting out the juice as largely as possible, as men always do when disturbed in mind.”

That’s the sort of thing I like – “with much action of the jaws.” The author of this admirable portrait is, of course, Nathaniel Hawthorne, in the American Notebooks, Sep. 15, 1852. Yes, there is an island off the coast of New Hampshire named “Smutty Nose.”

Many months ago I typed up some other examples – the high-spirited French roommate, or the engineer who was proud of his way with a scythe. The notebooks are full of these character skecthes; the stories are full of emblems, and would hardly work if they weren't.

For a real treat, don’t miss the longest sustained stretch of the American notebooks, Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny by Papa. Mama and the daughters are away, so it’s bachelor life in the Hawthorne house. There’s certainly a great character here – the old gentleman, the little man, 5 year-old Julian:

“The little man has been speculating about his mother’s age, and says she is twenty years old. ‘So very small,’ he exclaims, ‘and twenty years old!’” Aug. 4, 1851

Bunny (an actual rabbit) is not bad either:

“Bunny has a singular countenace – like somebody’s I have seen, but whose I forget. It is rather imposing and aristocratic, on a cursory glance, but examining it more closely, it is found to be laughably vague.” July 28, 1851

A lot of Twenty Days is taken up with Hawthorne curling his son’s hair, or taking walks, or being driven insane by Julian’s incessant yammering (“smashing every attempt at reflection into a thousand fragments”). Hawthorne reads Fourier, and Thackeray’s Pendennis. Herman Melville stops by now and again (“and if truth must be told, we smoked cigars even within the sacred precincts of the sitting-room”).

The American Notebooks are fragmented and sometimes obscure without annotation, but they contain some of Hawthorne’s best writing. Allegorical Hawthorne is brought right back down to earth. Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny by Papa is the best of the best.

NYRB has published a hardback of Twenty Days. I vaguely remember seeing it marketed as a Father’s Day gift. How they get the length up to 182 pages is beyond me. There are a number selections from the notebooks floating around.

Alternatively, stop by Hawthorne's Words, where each post is an excerpt from Hawthorne’s notebooks, including the extensive English and Italian notebooks, on the appropriate date.

Dead Souls - let us harness a scoundrel

Lest I make Dead Souls sound more humanistic than it really is, I'll turn to the flies. They're everywhere in Dead Souls, as part of the scenery, and in comparisons, beginning with serfs dying like flies. The first extended simile in the novel goes like this (we're at a ball):

"Everywhere one looked black frock coats flitted and darted by, singly and in clusters, as flies dart over a white, gleaming loaf of refined sugar in the summer season on a sultry July day, as an aged housekeeper standing at an open window cleaves and divides the loaf into glittering irregular lumps..." (Ch. 1, p. 8) The lumps are then distributed to children. Doesn't that sound nice. But still, the people at the party are like flies.

This is aside from all of the other places where people are compared to animals, or animals are compared to people. There's generosity here, though. Everyone is ridiculous. We're all in it together. Not a hint of nihilism, but just the way people are. That's the great source of comedy in the novel - go ahead, laugh at everyone. They'll laugh at you, too.

I was complaining a while ago about Scott and Dickens and their dullish virtuous heroes. Gogol (or "Gogol") is entirely on my side:

"There is a turn, and a place, and a time for everything! But, just the same, we have not taken a man of virtue for our hero, after all. And one may even explain why he hasn't been taken. Because it's high time to give a rest to the poor man of virtue; because the phrase 'man of virtue' is formed all too glibly and idly by all lips; because the man of virtue has been turned into a hack and there isn't a writer who doesn't ride him hard, urging him on with a whip or whatever else comes to his hand; because they have overworked the man of virtue to such an extent that now there isn't even a shadow of virtue about him, and there is nothing but skin and bones left of him instead of flesh and blood; because it is only through hypocrisy that they trot out the man of virtue; because the man of virtue isn't held in much respect. No, it's high time, at last, to put an actual scoundrel in harness! And so let us harness a scoundrel." (Ch. 11 , p. 224).

Ho ho! Dickens has to figure out how to make the "man of virtue" real in his world, which has its resemblance to Gogol's. Gogol knows he doesn't belong, and instead gives us Nozdrev, who wants to bet on everything, for example, that he once drank seventeen bottles of champagne; or cultivated Manilov, who names his children Themistoclius and Alcides; or the lieutenant who loves his boots so much that he stays up late "lifting now this foot and now the other and inspecting the deftly and wondrously turned heel of each boot." (Ch. 7, p. 149)

Greatest Novel of the First Half of the Nineteenth Century.