Characters Lounge

Aaron Kunin
Courage. Conhdence. Character. motto of the Girl Scouts of America
T
his essay dehnes character as a formal device that collects every
example of a kind of person. In the process of collection, the moral
and literary senses of character dovetail: a character inevitably posits
an ideal. This is not an original dehnition; it is based on accounts of
character by Thomas Overbury, John Earle, Jean de La Bruyre, and
others in the seventeenth century whose books rework a classical genre
pioneered by Theophrastus. Thus La Bruyre writes of the character
Mnalque that he is a collection [recueil] of examples of distraction.
1

I will not argue for the universality of this dehnition, exactly, since it
would be dishonest to pretend that there are not numerous other senses
of character available in literary history. Instead, my purpose is to show
the consequences of this dehnition for the formation of communities
what traditionally is called the cast of characters, or what Alex Woloch
calls the character-system of the nineteenth-century realist novel, in
Modern Language Quarterly 70:3 (September 2009)
DOI 10.1215/00267929-2009-001 2009 by University of Washington
I presented versions of this argument in the seminar Shakespearean Attachments,
organized by Douglas Trevor and Kristen Poole at the :oo meeting of the Shake-
speare Association of America; in talks given at the University of California, Irvine,
March :ooS, and at the University of British Columbia, April :ooS; and in a work-
shop meeting of the Southern California Americanists Group at the Huntington
Library, February :ooS. I am grateful to many readers and listeners who made help-
ful suggestions. I particularly want to thank Dina Al-Kassim, Eyal Amiran, Lara
Bovilsky, Michael Clune, Tony Dawson, Mary Esteve, Adam Frank, David Glimp,
Eleanor Kaufman, James Kuzner, Christina Lupton, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Mark
McGurl, Vin Nardizzi, Karen Newman, Sianne Ngai, Brad Pasenek, Elisa Tamarkin,
and Rei Terada.
1
Jean de La Bruyre, Oeuvres compltes, ed. Julien Benda (Paris: Gallimard,
+g+), ++.
292 MLQ September 2009
which a single protagonist is evoked against a uat background of minor
characters.
2
The antiformalist account that would insist on the radical
particularity of a character is not inferior to the formalist one as a deh-
nition, since each can describe the other completely. The advantage of
the formalist account is that it allows for a comic rather than a tragic
historiography.
Reading usually happens backward: a critic reconstructs the con-
text in which a literary work was hrst produced and places it in that
context; another critic, also looking backward, uses a modern theo-
retical framework as a lens for reading an older work. This essay reads
forward in that it derives a theory from seventeenth-century books of
characters, then applies the theory to later works, such as nineteenth-
century novels, and to other genres in which characters appear, such as
poems, comics, and performances in hlm and theater.
3
Reading back-
ward, Roland Barthes writes that we in modernity cannot name La
Bruyre;
4
reading forward, I contend that La Bruyre has no trouble at
all in naming us. However, such a crude outline distorts my procedure,
because the uow of history is not one-directional. While I am reading
forward from seventeenth-century characters to describe nineteenth-
century novels, Charles Dickens and Honor de Balzac are reading
backward, so that the communities formed by their novels sometimes
include characters from collections by Earle and La Bruyre, whom
they cite by name. An artifact such as a novel is, as George Kubler puts
it, a bundle of durations of varying lengths, which means that any
2
Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protago-
nist in the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, :oo).
3
Some recent works of character criticism begin by apologizing for not being
comprehensive in other words, for not dealing with all novels or all characters.
See, e.g., Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the
Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, +ggS), +:. This apol-
ogy indicates a lingering antiformalism that will not allow characters to do the work
of collecting examples. George Meredith offers the formalist solution to this problem
in the prelude to The Egoist, where he writes that he will not attempt to transcribe the
entire Book of Egoism, which is really the Book of Earth, that is, the planet Earth.
Art, he concludes, is the specihc, by which he means that the character of the ego-
ist functions to make the wisdom of the big Book of Egoism portable (The Egoist,
ed. Robert M. Adams [New York: Norton, +gg], q).
4
Roland Barthes, La Bruyre, in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evan-
ston, IL: Northwestern University Press, +g:), :::.
Kunin Characters Lounge 293
made thing combines materials that originate in various historical
moments.
5
Things are not completely new but have parts that are older
and newer. This also means that anything that has a history communi-
cates with several time periods. The formal device Kubler employs to
follow artifacts as they travel from one context to another is style; this
essay uses character for the same purpose.
The argument has two parts. The hrst part describes the commu-
nity established by solitary characters and focuses on Shakespeares
comedy The Merchant of Venice. The second part addresses the formation
of a community out of several solitary characters by way of a detailed
comparison between Wolochs critical book The One vs. the Many and
Doug Allens comic book Steven. The exact center of this essay is the
paradoxical hgure of the misanthrope, toward whom both sides of the
argument point and in whom the real space of character is disclosed.
Let Me Play the Fool
The Merchant of Venice is a work of theory in that nothing happens.
6

Events are possible, approached, threatened, but they never quite
occur. The casket game consists of three scenes representing cogni-
tion, in which an actor vocalizes interpretations, reasons, and hnally
a preference. In other scenes, revenge, justice, mercy, and inhdelity
are theorized but not enacted. Thus the play never develops its tragic
premises: in this community, tragedy is available as a theory, not as a
sequence of actions.
The overlooked character Graziano represents my theory in its pur-
est form. Graziano, Bassanio says, speaks an inhnite deal of nothing,
more than any man in all Venice (+.+.++q +).
7
Maybe the word for
5
George Kubler, Style and the Representation of Historical Time, in Studies
in Ancient American and European Art: The Collected Essays, ed. Thomas F. Reese (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, +gS), S6. Michel Serres, with Bruno Latour,
makes a similar point in Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne
Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, +gg), 6:.
6
Henry S. Turner, The Problem of the More-than-One: Friendship, Calcula-
tion, and Political Association in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare Quarterly
(:oo6): q+.
7
References to Shakespeares plays follow The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen
Greenblatt (New York: Norton, +gg6).
294 MLQ September 2009
theory in Venice is nothing. Like theory, nothing is a way of talking
that avoids tragic consequences, a way of having ideas without having to
die or kill for them. This description of Graziano recalls the complaint
against Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet: Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace! /
Thou talkst of nothing (+.q.g g6). Mercutios way of talking, unlike
Grazianos, ultimately requires him and others to die. Nothing means
poetry in Verona, whereas in Venice it means theory. Talk also has
different meanings in different dialects, for Graziano in performance
turns out to be not much of a talker. He is a Mercutio on a tight leash;
he will not be given an opportunity to recite hfty lines about Queen
Mab while the plot grinds to a halt. Lorenzo complains that Graziano
never lets me speak (+.+.+o), but even as he registers this complaint,
the serial form of the dialogue, which allows for only one speaker at a
time, does not let Graziano speak.
His longest speech occurs shortly after his hrst entrance:
Antonio. I hold the world but as the world, Graziano,
A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.
Graziano. Let me play the fool.
With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come,
And let my liver rather heat with wine
Than my heart cool with mortifying groans.
(+.+. S:)
This speech is a self-dehnition. Grazianos question is not, who am
I? however, but, what kind am I? His psychology is social rather than
personal: he sorts people into types and determines which type best
describes him. The next move, which never occurs in the play, would
be to perform as that type. Instead, Graziano theorizes: these behaviors
(talking, laughing, making faces) are characteristic of me. But he does
not laugh or talk. He has a lot of stage time more, probably, than
Mercutio but not many lines, as though he belonged to a third type,
the Antonio type (these / That therefore only are reputed wise / For
saying nothing [+.+.g g]), for whom saying nothing means silence.
He does not even say that he is the fool; instead, he says, tentatively,
Let me play the fool, as though he did not yet have a part and were
auditioning for one. The part he clearly wants is something like that of
Mercutio, but the one he settles for is that of a sub-Bassanio. Bassanio
Kunin Characters Lounge 295
sees, loves, and receives a ring from Portia, and Graziano does the same
with Nerissa; Bassanio gives his ring to Balthasar, and Graziano gives
his to the clerk. Signihcantly, Graziano insists that he is not observing
and imitating Bassanio: My eyes, my lord, can look as swift as yours
(.:.+g), which is to say that his vision is simultaneous with, not deriva-
tive from, Bassanios; it seems to occur afterward for the trivial reason
that the dialogue serializes simultaneous actions. (There is also a brief
period during the trial scene in which Graziano becomes an echo for
Shylock and therefore, admittedly, derivative and is understand-
ably grateful for the change: A Daniel, still say I, a second Daniel! / I
thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word [q.+. 6].)
Graziano is typical of the Venetian commitment to a social theory
that proceeds by sorting persons into types on the basis of shared char-
acteristics. There are exceptions to this rule. The hrst lines of the play
describe Antonios failure to provide an account of himself: In sooth, I
know not why I am so sad (+.+.+). His sadness is idiopathic, without cause
and incommunicable: But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, /
What stuff tis made of, whereof it is born, / I am to learn (+.+. ).
Antonio will say only that he is sad and does not know why. He can
describe what he feels in the present (It wearies me [+.+.:]), but he
will not use that feeling to assign himself to a group. His skepticism
about the usefulness of the social theory is magnihed when he consid-
ers applying it to others: you say it wearies you (+.+.:) implies that
Antonio is reluctant to make any statement about the feelings of others.
He takes the sayings of others as evidence that they are saying it, not as
evidence of what they might feel or what kinds of people they might be.
The second scene begins the same way: Portia is sad for no reason (my
little body is aweary of this great world [+.:.+ :]) or, Nerissa points
out, despite a surplus of reasons to be happy. Similarly, in the trial
scene Shylocks hatred is idiopathic; he both fails and refuses to give a
reason for his actions against Antonio: So can I give no reason, nor I
will not (q.+.S). Instead, he asks a question: Is it answered? (q.+.q).
And repeats the question: What, are you answered yet? (q.+.q6).
The question is, what would an answer look like? Which may be the
most theoretical question of all. These important moments in which
Antonio, Portia, and Shylock are unscripted, as the social theory fails
to assign a type are exceptional, but the exceptions prove the rule,
296 MLQ September 2009
because even if the metalanguage fails, it remains the only available
language. Moreover, these scenes all resolve in the renewal of char-
acterological thinking: Salerio and Solanio attempt to give Antonio
a character by suggesting the two conventional reasons for sadness in
Venice, money and love; Portia and Nerissa go through the list of Por-
tias suitors and assign each a type based on national characteristics;
Shylock produces new, as yet unnamed social groupings (some men
who hate roast pork, some who hate cats, others who hate bagpipes
[q.+.q6 ]).
What a Character Is
In these scenes Shylock, Portia, Nerissa, Salerio, and Solanio work in
the genre later called characteristic writing. (So does Graziano, but,
contrary to convention, he tries to assign a character to himself, not
to others.) The problem of characteristic writing can be described his-
torically: although Theophrastus provides a classical precedent for the
genre, and although characterological thinking persists in later prose
hction, the book of characters appears to be specihc to the seventeenth
century. What did readers get out of these books in the seventeenth
century that earlier and later readers did not need or want? But the
problem is not historically specihc, in that the books have no obvious
use even in the time of their primary production and reception. The
question of what a character is is posed in the hnal entry of the inuu-
ential collection of characteristic writings Overbury His Wife.
8
I consider
Overburys surprising answer to this question below, but for now I want
to emphasize the confusion implicit in asking the question at the very
end of the collection, as though one could read the entire book without
knowing exactly what a character is or could compose such a book
without being sure. The book is organized like a reference book, with
a short entry on each type of person for example, A Pedant, fol-
lowed by a list of horrible clichs about pedants but the fact that the
book includes only clichs makes it unessential, to put it mildly, for the
8
In The Overburian Characters, ed. W. J. Paylor (Oxford: Blackwell, +g6), g:. I
use the name Overbury for convenience; editors agree that Thomas Overbury prob-
ably wrote few of the entries.
Kunin Characters Lounge 297
9
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Monroe Engel (New York: Modern
Library, +g6o), qS6.
10
On Dickenss characters as collectibles, especially in the form of cigarette
cards, see Lynch, +S +g. In Lynchs historical argument, readers of early novels
demand supremely legible characterization to compensate for the everyday misrecog-
nitions and confusions of the new credit economy, while Romantic readers use the
capacity to appreciate opaque characterization as a mark of class distinction.
purpose of reference. If you are part of the culture, then the book can
tell you only what you already know and say and hear every day about
pedants. If you are not part of the culture, then the book appears to
present slabs of raw ideology, which might make it a useful resource for
social history or cultural criticism if the rawness did not render it less
than compelling as material for ideological critique. Social historians
tend to prefer their own categories (from a sociological point of view, a
coquette is not a kind of person), and critics prefer to look for symptoms
of ideology in places where they are hidden. For those who live inside
the culture, and for those who study it, the books appear to have the
redundant function of making visible those aspects of persons their
characters that are already their most visible aspects.
What are characters for? I want to propose an answer to this ques-
tion by considering not what historical readers do with characters but
what other characters do with them. In Dickenss novel Our Mutual
Friend, the character Mr. Bofhn collects instances of another character
called the miser:
Size, price, quality, were of no account. Any book that seemed to
promise a chance of miserly biography, Mr. Bofhn purchased without
a moments delay and carried home. Happening to be informed by a
bookseller that a portion of the Annual Register was devoted to Char-
acters, Mr. Bofhn at once bought a whole set of that ingenious compila-
tion, and began to carry it home piecemeal. . . . It was curious that Bella
never saw the books about the house, nor did she ever hear from Mr.
Bofhn one word of reference to their contents. He seemed to save up his
Misers as they had saved up their money.
9
This episode may provide evidence for the durability of character as an
aesthetic institution: centuries after their composition the characters
acquire new value as rare objects that can be collected like antiques.
10
Or
maybe this is the value they have always had. What does Bofhn do with
298 MLQ September 2009
characters? He buys and saves them. That is all he does with them
he does not display them or talk about them or even use them for ref-
erence, since he is not capable of reading at sight. (For Dickens, lit-
eracy is primarily a way of seeing: No one who can read, ever looks at
a book, like one who cannot [Our Mutual Friend, +g].) Illiteracy does
not ordinarily prevent Bofhn from reading books: he employs a ballad
seller, Silas Wegg, to read to him from Edward Gibbons History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and he uses Bella, who can read at
sight, to identify possible lives of odd characters in a booksellers win-
dow. The point is that Bofhn does not need to reference the characters
of misers himself or have someone else read them out loud, because his
education in this regard is complete. He already knows what the books
are about, what a miser is, just as he already knows what a character is.
Simply by buying and hoarding the books, and without doing any more
reading, Bofhn gradually becomes not a miser but the miser: a represen-
tative hgure who collects other examples of misers.
Character is the formal device that makes it possible for the mem-
bers of this collective to assemble, for the miser to be not more than
one miser but all misers. Character makes a seam between Dickenss
novel and other books, so that Bofhn can collect examples from obso-
lete forms of imaginative writing; and between the novel and history,
so that he can collect biographical as well as hctional examples.
11
Gra-
ziano does the same thing, or tries to, when he becomes attached hrst
to Mercutio, a character from another play, then to Bassanio, and when
he and Antonio attach the world to the stage in which everyone
acts as a character, that is, as a sad part of a single collective subject
(+.+. g).
12
Character is the hxed point that allows one to hold the
11
On the tendency of types to collect all examples indiscriminately see Erich
Auerbach: There is no choice between historical and hidden meaning; both are
present. The hgural structure preserves the historical event while interpreting it as
revelation; and must preserve it in order to interpret it (Figura, trans. Ralph Man-
heim, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature [Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, +gSq], 6S).
12
On character as dividual in Shakespeare see Random Cloud, The Very
Names of the Persons: Editing and the Invention of Dramatick Character, in Stag-
ing the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott
Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, +gg+), SS g6.
Kunin Characters Lounge 299
world . . . as the world and to leverage it. When Graziano speaks as
the fool, he becomes a spokesperson; he speaks for all fools. When Por-
tia gives characters to her suitors according to their patrilineal inheri-
tances and places of origin, she organizes societies and, in some cases,
nations. When she says of Monsieur Le Bon that he is every man in no
man (+.:.o), she assimilates him to a society called France, and she
does so without having to bring all France, or even Le Bon, onstage.
She is right to say that in marrying him she would marry twenty hus-
bands (+.:.: ). Marriage to Le Bon would put her in relation to
the entire French society that she characterizes through him.
Company
This account of character as a collection of examples is a paraphrase of
seventeenth-century characteristic writings. Leo Spitzer says:
For Saint-Simon, character is the structure which arches over all the
facts of history; it is the totality which embraces historical personalities
in their full extent and substance. Character is like some Trojan Horse
concealing historical acts, events and customs, which can climb out of
its belly and yet leave a clearly visible skeleton. . . . Character here is the
unmoved mover, the essence or Being from which the Becoming of his-
tory springs: individual historical events uow from individual aspects of
Being as honey, so to speak, may uow from the separate cells of a single
honeycomb.
13
Because Spitzer is committed to the primacy of style and the integrity
of the work of art, he allows this dehnition of character to work only
for one historical epoch, and only for Saint-Simon, and really only for
the Caractre de Louis XIV. My account follows this dehnition into
the indehnite future, just as the antiformalist conception of character
rewrites earlier literary history so that what used to be called character
has to be renamed caricature or stereotype. But Bofhn is no stereo-
type. Collected as an example well before Wegg reads to him from the
character sketches, he is part of the community of misers. In Dickenss
13
Leo Spitzer, Saint-Simons Portrait of Louis XIV, in Essays on Seventeenth-
Century French Literature, ed. and trans. David Bellos (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, +gS), ++.
300 MLQ September 2009
precise phrase, Bofhn is in their company. Moreover, the acts of col-
lection and reading mark off distinct strata of sociability: when Bofhn
collects the misers, he is in bad company, and when Wegg reads to
him, he is in worse company (Our Mutual Friend, qgS o). Associ-
ated but not related.
Many Is Not More than One
The social organization I am describing does not look like the econ-
omy of scarcity that Deidre Shauna Lynch hnds in the early English
novel, nor does it look like the limited character-space that Woloch
hnds in the realist novel. Graziano does not have to recite as many lines
as Mercutio to dehne a character type based on Mercutio. He can do
it simply by using the dehnite article. Even in Dickenss realist novel,
the asymmetry between the one and the many is not greater than or
less than. For Bofhn, again, size, price, quality, were of no account.
He represents the entire society of misers without the tedious labor
of reading through the books of characters page by page and without
Dickenss having to transcribe them even more tediously. This commu-
nity does not consist of characters competing for attention from history
within the limited space of the aesthetic. In fact, no community of char-
acters looks like that; no community of anything looks like that. The
social universe is not organized as a diminishing series of enclosures,
in which, say, the public is bigger than and includes the private, or his-
tory is bigger than and includes the aesthetic, or society is bigger than
and includes the family, which is bigger than and includes the individ-
ual.
14
Instead, at any point, any hgure can collect others. Naturally, two
people are more people than one person, but they are not necessarily
more of a collective, insofar as one person can be a character such as
the miser, the coquette, the pedant, or the old maid. Molire expresses
14
Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors
Macro-structure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So, in Advances in
Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-sociologies, ed.
Karin Knorr-Cetina and Aaron Victor Cicourel (Boston: Routledge, +gS+), : o.
See also Latours discussion of the short hlm Powers of Ten (+g), directed by Charles
Eames and Ray Eames, in Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, :oo), +S S6.
Kunin Characters Lounge 301
this property of character with extraordinary clarity in a line from Dom
Juan about hypocrites: By making faces [ force de grimaces], one binds
together a close society of people of the same party (.:).
15
Dom Juan
does not mean that hypocrites schedule meetings to conspire with one
another or that their facial expressions are a secret code, like a wink, by
which they communicate with one another. The faces are signs only of
the imposition of form. By making the face of a hypocrite, one instantly
collects every example of hypocrisy.
An example of a character may obviously fail to conform to the
type in a sense, that is what it means to be a hypocrite and Molires
most sensitive readers have recognized the repeated staging of this fail-
ure as one of his favorite comic effects.
16
Erich Auerbach observes that
Molires comic characters represent types without being particularly
good at performing as the type: Everywhere the ass looks out from
under the lions skin.
17
In Le misanthrope Climne is a coquette not
because she loves or wants to be loved by many persons but because she
operates on a principle of discretion. She prefers Alceste but does not
want to reject her other suitors, because she believes that it would be
impolite to speak disobliging words directly and that her heart knows
softer signs [de plus doux tmoins] to indicate its preference (.:). In
other words, she is a coquette by dint of her expertise in maintaining
a web of relations invisible to Alceste, who cannot interpret a code that
15
All references to Molire follow Oeuvres compltes, ed. Maurice Rat (Paris: Gal-
limard, +g6).
16
To put it another way, a character collects all examples, even the bad ones.
La Bruyre makes a joke of this in the grouping titled De la mode, in which the
virtuoso Dmocde has a mania that requires him to possess every print of Callots,
including one print that is not, to be truthful, his best work (Oeuvres compltes,
qoS). In a similar vein, John Earle writes that the counterfeit of the Blunt Man is
most dangerous; that is, the character even includes inauthentic approximations
(Micro-cosmographie; or, A Peece of the World Discovered in Essayes and Characters [Lon-
don, +6:S], 6).
17
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans.
Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, +g), +. Ramon Fer-
nandez traces this tendency to the early Ballet des incompatibles. In the later theatri-
cal masterpieces, the incompatibles are fused in single characters: A character in
Molire is comic for no reason but that he undertakes to merge attributes that are
mutually contradictory (Molire: The Man Seen through the Plays, trans. Wilson Follett
[New York: Hill and Wang, +gS], q).
302 MLQ September 2009
he does not even see.
18
At the same time, Alceste shares Climnes dis-
cretion as the organizing principle of a social world in which he would
like to live. His wish to be distinguished (+.+) has been read as evi-
dence of bad faith.
19
But the way that Alceste wishes to be distinguished
is consistent with his withdrawal from society. Instead of shaping how
others talk about him, his distinction would render such talk superuu-
ous; he wants others to take him for granted, just as he takes himself
for granted. This distinction is really a variety of discretion that would
not require him to participate in social relations: for example, he could
win a lawsuit without having to appear in court or arrange to have wit-
nesses establish his character (+.+), or he could be in the right without
winning the lawsuit (.+).
The Misanthrope
The real space of character comes into view in the paradoxical hgure of
the misanthrope. Hans Robert Jauss misleadingly identihes the paradox
as an implication of the hatred of humanity (To be or to feel oneself
an enemy of mankind would go against nature and the social condition
of human existence), when in fact self-hatred is no more paradoxical
than any other reuexive emotion.
20
The misanthrope is characterized
not by a feeling such as hatred but by objective actions: in the inter-
pretations of Lucian and Shakespeare, long speeches of invective; in
that of Molire, the gesture of withdrawal from the world. This is a real
paradox. The misanthrope establishes a collective by denying member-
ship in any collective: provided that you are willing to join me [que votre
coeur veuille donner les mains] in my effort to uee from all humans, and
follow me without delay into the solitude [dans mon dsert] in which I
have vowed to live (.q). In this passage the speaker, Alceste, collects
two kinds of persons. On the one hand, all human society is constituted
18
On Climne, the coquette mdisante, as a hgure for Molire see Larry F.
Norman, The Public Mirror: Molire and the Social Commerce of Depiction (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, +ggg), +6g So.
19
Lionel Gossman, Men and Masks: A Study of Molire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, +g6), 66 gg.
20
Hans Robert Jauss, The Paradox of the Misanthrope, trans. Sharon Larisch,
Comparative Literature (+gS): o.
Kunin Characters Lounge 303
21
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettre M. dAlembert sur les spectacles, in Oeuvres
compltes, vol. + (Paris: Hachette, +gog), :o.
22
Plutarch, Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin, vol. g (London: Heinemann; Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, +g:o), :gg.
23
Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Indi-
viduation (New York: Routledge, +gg:), +o:.
through the exclusion of one individual who uees it. On the other, that
individual represents a society of misanthropes who also uee human
society, a point that Alceste underlines when he invites Climne to
join him in solitude. Her presence will not disturb his solitude, because
if she were to turn her back on human society, she would be no longer
a coquette but a misanthrope and hence no more disturbing than any
other member of the community of misanthropes. The misanthropes
do not disturb one another in their solitude, because they are collected
without relating to, acting on, or knowing one another, or wanting to.
In this gesture of withdrawal from the world, Jean-Jacques Rous-
seau saw the possibility of a new, just society imperfectly understood
by Molire, and unavoidably distorted by the spectacular medium of
the drama, but still tantalizingly evident.
21
This is the same form of
association without relation that the classical misanthrope Timon pro-
poses to Apemantus when they participate in the Festival of the Pitch-
ers, an unusual memorial holiday in which the celebrants are expected
to drink silently rather than perform songs and toasts. Plutarch tells
the story in the Life of Antony: And once, at the Festival of the Pitchers,
the two were feasting by themselves, and Apemantus said: Timon, what
a hne symposium ours is! It would be, said Timon, if thou wert not
here.
22
What a Character Is
Frances Ferguson writes eloquently of a solitude at the heart of char-
acter itself, the extension of individual action through narrative until
it has become romance, the impossibility of action.
23
This solitude,
in which persons are associated without being related to one another,
belongs not to misanthropes only but to all characters. This may be
a way of saying that there is always something misanthropic about
the assignment of character. When he asks to play the fool, Graziano
304 MLQ September 2009
reveals that he is not yet the fool, that his character is not given and
must be chosen. In effect, he uses the hgure of the fool to establish a
part of himself offstage, outside the relational community of characters
in the diegesis of the play and outside the collective of fools. When Por-
tia lists her suitors, she assigns a character to everyone but herself. Not
only is her one trait, weariness, not determined by personal qualities,
but it appears somehow to contradict them. In John Miltons anoma-
lous exercise in characteristic writing, LAllegro and Il Penseroso,
the pensive one prefers solitude to company, but curiously he is never
alone; like the happy one, he is accompanied by a crew of personihed
abstractions Peace, Quiet, Fast, Leisure, Contemplation, Silence, and
Melancholy (ll. q ).
24
The anomaly in this exercise is the person-
alization: the assignment of character, like Grazianos, is done in the
hrst person; moreover, the experience of Melancholy is imagined not
merely as membership in a collective but as a relation to another per-
son who turns out to be related genealogically to a number of others.
Milton presents a life with Melancholy as a temptation scene or, as he
less intensely puts it, a choice between two companions: These plea-
sures Melancholy give / And I with thee will choose to live (ll. + 6).
The speaker in LAllegro ends by offering to formalize the relation to
Mirth in a similar contract: These delights, if thou canst give, / Mirth,
with thee I mean to live (ll. ++ :). The important part is if, which
implies that Mirths gifts have yet to arrive, and the speaker has not yet
entered into the relation. If is the hrst principle, the real space, of
characteristic writing.
What are characters for? When the speaker in Overburys collec-
tion hnally explains what a character is, he literalizes and classicizes
it: If I must speake the Schoole-masters language I will confesse that
Character comes of this inhnitive moode [kharassein] which signiheth
to ingrave, or make a deepe Impression. And for that cause, a letter
(as A. B.) is called a Character (g:). Many readers have been struck
by this move to collapse character with writing, which externalizes the
24
Quotations from Miltons poems follow John Milton: Complete Poems and Major
Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, +g). Samuel Butler approaches
this paradox from a different angle in the character of A Melancholy Man, who
keeps the worst Company in the World, that is, his own (Characters and Passages from
Note-Books, ed. A. R. Waller [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, +goS], g).
Kunin Characters Lounge 305
most basic facts about the person. The depth of a character, writes
Jonathan Goldberg, is the result of an inscription, what others read
on the surface.
25
It has not previously been remarked that these lines
are also spoken in character: If I must speake the Schoole-masters
language . . . Unlike the other entries in the book, the character of
character is written in the hrst person, and it begins not with is but with
if. He speaks the language, but he is not the schoolmaster. Even as he
assigns himself a character, the schoolmaster, he reserves a neutral part
of himself that does not conform to the script.
Proper Names Belong to Everyone
Mirth, says Rosemond Tuve in her essay on Miltons pair of poems, is a
way of talking about the absolutely not the contingently real.
26
Or, Fer-
guson might say, mirth is a way of making more than one of something.
Tuves description does not help, because she does not allow it to read
forward; on the contrary, she carefully opposes Miltons allegorical per-
sonihcation to modern conceptions of character. With deep regret, she
says, such images as Mirth no longer surround us

(:). Theorists
such as Dorothy Van Ghent and Ian Watt agree that novelistic character
is by nature radically particular, and the novel is the genre of contin-
gent reality. According to Van Ghent, For hction the particular body
that a thing has is of the very greatest importance. . . . Does it squeak,
is it brown, is it round, is it chilly, does it think, does it smash?
27
Even
The Pilgrims Progress succeeds as a novel only because Bunyan founds
his allegory of human qualities in the objective reality of human man-
ners in other words, because characters such as Christian are not
abstract personihcations (Van Ghent, :g). The apparent consensus
among these literary historians would partition the nature of reality
generically and temporally, so that the absolute pertains to premodern
25
Jonathan Goldberg, Shakespeares Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, :oo), :. See also J. Hillis Miller, Ariadnes Thread: Story Lines (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, +gg:), + :.
26
Rosemond Tuve, Images and Themes in Five Poems by Milton (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, +g), +.
27
Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Harper
and Row, +g6), q.
306 MLQ September 2009
poetry, and the contingent to the modern novel. The difference is that
Tuve is nostalgic for premodern unity, whereas Van Ghent and Watt
celebrate modern multiplicity. That these two conceptions of reality,
the philosophical and the literary, are both called realism is, in Watts
words, a paradox that will surprise only the neophyte.
28
Is it true that abstract personihcations do not surround us in mod-
ern civilizations? Do characters in novels not act as hgures of abso-
lute reality? One alternative to this seeming consensus is suggested by
Naomi Schors and Sharon Marcuss important work on the idealist tra-
dition in the novel. To Schor, critical accounts that identify situations
in novels with a recognizable historical reality are inadequate to pro-
tocols of interpretation in nineteenth-century French novels, in which
anything that occurs on the level of representation must posit an ideal,
understood as both the heightening of the essential and the promo-
tion of the higher good. Schor quotes the realist Balzac as reported
by the idealist Sand: You are looking for man as he should be; I take
him as he is. . . . But the ordinary human beings interest me more than
they do you. I make them larger than life; I idealize them in the oppo-
site sense, in their ugliness or in their stupidity.
29
Most critics of real-
ism, following Van Ghent and Watt, see a crucial difference between
Balzacs man as he is and George Sands man as he should be. But
if idealism is the paradigm, then there is no way to separate the two
modalities. Make no mistake: Balzac wants his characters to express
an ideal. That is why Le pre Goriot includes the magnihcent images of
integrity [probit ] Jeanie Deans (from Walter Scott) and Alceste (from
Molire) and why Balzac considers the women in his novels superior
to Jeanie Deans: his characters have the Virgin Mary as an exemplar,
whereas the Protestant woman has no ideal.
30
Tracing the reception of French literature in England, Marcus hnds
that Victorian critics share their French contemporaries assumptions
28
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (London:
Chatto and Windus, +g), ++.
29
Naomi Schor, George Sand and Idealism (New York: Columbia University Press,
+gg), qo q+.
30
Honor de Balzac, Le pre Goriot, ed. Philippe Berthier (Paris: Flammarion,
+gg), +6; Balzac, La comdie humaine, ed. Pierre-Georges Castex, vol. + (Paris: Gal-
limard, +g6), +.
Kunin Characters Lounge 307
about idealized representation and also use realism mainly in a pejo-
rative sense: What realists would call an objective and encyclopedic
grasp of the world, idealists called granting a bill of indemnity to all
that is perverse and ungovernable in our nature.
31
For the nineteenth-
century critic Leslie Stephen, the canon of realism is conhned mainly
to French sapphism and includes just a few books by Balzac and Emile
Zola, not their entire output, and a number of poems by Charles Baude-
laire and Algernon Swinburne (Marcus, :6 ). (Baudelaire, whose
art criticism champions imagination against historical reality, is a real-
ist in this literary formation!) I want to push this argument a little far-
ther: where Marcus elegantly remarks that contemporary critics have
idealized realism (::), I would argue that they are right to do so,
because realism idealizes itself.
The neophyte is right to think that realism means realism, and
Watt is wrong to exclude philosophical from literary realism. One of
Watts hrst examples, the name protocols in the novels of Henry Field-
ing, almost comically fails to support his claim. According to Watt, the
early English novel uses proper names that were characteristic, such
as Mr. Badman and Euphues, whereas in later novels, like Fieldings, a
characters name signals a particular person and not a type (+g :o).
Watt immediately has to make exceptions for Heartfree, Allworthy,
and Square. He does not even think to make an exception for Joseph
Andrews, whose name is purely literary, an extension of the family tree
from Samuel Richardsons Pamela. Even the name Tom Jones is a place-
holder whose function is to suggest an idealized ordinariness; in any
case, it is not the characters family name. Finally, Watt suggests that
Fielding reformed his name protocols in Amelia. The shift from signih-
cant names to ordinary names, which was originally supposed to take
place over the early history of the novel, is now recapitulated within
Fieldings career. Even in Amelia, however, Watt has to make exceptions
for Thrasher and Bondum. The evidence of Fieldings new attitude
toward naming is that the names of other characters (Booth, Matthews,
Harrison, etc.) are apparently copied from the list of subscribers to
31
Sharon Marcus, Comparative Sapphism, in The Literary Channel: The Inter-
national Invention of the Novel, ed. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, :oo:), :+.
308 MLQ September 2009
the +:q folio edition of Gilbert Burnets History of His Own Time, a
practice that suggests, if anything, that the characters are designed to
collect both historical and hctional examples, just like generic types.
32
If the English novel does not give up on signihcant names in Field-
ing, then when does it happen in Anthony Trollope, who gives char-
acters names such as Quiverful and titles such as the Duke of Omnium?
In James Joyce, who calls his projected self-idealization or self-parody
Stephen Dedalus? Maybe it happens in Helen Fielding, who writes
about a character named Bridget Jones. Again, the uses that characters
make of one another are more illuminating than the uses to which
historical readers put them. Bridget Joness Diary, for instance, is obvi-
ously an adaptation of Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice, but the relation
is unexpectedly oblique, in that Fielding adapts not the novel but the
BBC television serialization. She acknowledges this genealogy by hav-
ing Bridget watch the series during the time of its original broadcast
and by having her remark on the social phenomenon of England sit-
ting down as a nation to watch the same program: Love the nation
being so addicted. The basis of my own addiction, I know, is my simple
human need for Darcy to get off with Elizabeth. . . . They are my cho-
sen representatives in the held of shagging, or, rather, courtship.
33
But
despite electing Darcy and Elizabeth as her representatives, Bridget
has nothing to say about the resemblance of her own story to theirs.
Unlike Bofhn, Bridget is hardly illiterate she keeps a diary and works
at a publishing house but she seems not to recognize that she is reliv-
ing an old novel.
34
Even the fact that one of her lovers is named Darcy
goes unremarked. (In the hlm adaptation of Bridget Joness Diary [dir.
Mike Newell, :oo+], this blindness is compounded by casting Colin
Firth, the actor from the BBC series, as Darcy.) The example of Bridget
shows that a character collects every example without effort or con-
32
On the use of characters in historical writing see David Nichol Smith, Char-
acters from the Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon,
+g6).
33
Helen Fielding, Bridget Joness Diary (New York: Penguin, +gg6), :+.
34
Fielding does gently hint that Bridget may be, if not illiterate, then a poor
reader. Her colleague Perpetua another signihcant name complains that a
whole generation of people only get to know the great works of literature Austen,
Eliot, Dickens, Shakespeare, and so on through the television. . . . And you do real-
ize Middlemarch was originally a book, Bridget, dont you, not a soap? (S6 S).
Kunin Characters Lounge 309
35
Doug Allen, Steven, q vols. (Princeton, WI: Kitchen Sink, +gSg g+). The four
volumes are unpaginated; subsequent citations use hand-counted page numbers for
ease of reference.
sciousness. Bridget can play the part of Elizabeth without trying to,
without realizing that she is doing it. Her status as a hgure of Elizabeth
does not depend on her identihcation with Elizabeth or recognition of
Darcy neither of which occurs.
Although history may not follow a straight line from Tom Jones to
Bridget Jones, the novels are linked not only through name protocols
that announce the characters as hgures of absolute reality, and not
only through the shared surnames of their protagonists (Jones), but
also through those of their authors (Fielding). That is because proper
names belong to everyone just as much as common names do.
Characters Lounge
If a character by itself already forms a community, what happens when
characters get together? Doug Allens weekly comic strip Steven offers
a bleak answer to this question. Steven, like The Merchant of Venice, is a
work of theory in that nothing happens. Such events as there are tend
to be overwhelmingly mundane: Steven, a little boy wearing a lumpy
hat, orders drinks in a bar, or sits in a chair watching television, and
says no, or something obscene, in response to every question. The
lack of other events, and even of comedy, is one of the main themes.
Cmon, cant I come with you on this comic adventure? Im just going
to the Goodwill to get a new table (+:+:).
35
Now I have enough for a
bottle of Vat +:. Oh boy, this is going to be a good comic (::6). In
Steven, as in The Merchant of Venice, the characters dehne themselves not
by performing but by anticipating and evaluating their performances.
On this theoretical level the characters are known to one another as
characters, and the background they inhabit is known to them as a
comic strip, as in: Im tired of all the characters in this stupid comic
strip (+:++).
What is the theory? Woodrow, the rodentlike character who enthu-
siastically anticipates a trip to the Goodwill or the liquor store as a
comic adventure, seems designed to articulate the theoretical argu-
310 MLQ September 2009
ment and connect it to the mundane actions and squalid background.
For Woodrow, who does not drink, it makes sense to contribute money
for Steven to buy a bottle of Vat +:, because doing so allows him to
appear as an image in one or several panels. The loss of the money is
not signihcant, because Woodrow cares more about his status in the
society of cartoon characters. It makes no sense for him to care about
anything else; his refrain is Can I be in this one? a magical phrase that
immediately inserts him into this one, contradicting Stevens habitual
answer, No. The only thing better than appearing in the Steven comic
strip would be having his own Woodrow Comic, which he gets, brieuy,
in exchange for bailing Steven out of a holding cell (+::S :g).
This social theory looks quite different from that of The Merchant of
Venice, in which each character makes a collective. In Steven each char-
acter is pitted against the rest of the social universe in a winner-take-
all competition to be the protagonist, the title character, the center
of attention. Steven complains: Everybodys always trying to take over
my comic strip. . . . Now its some stupid cactus plant (q:+). In some
episodes the cactus plant does effectively take over, appearing in most
or all of the panels, so that Steven occupies only the title (in which
he desperately asserts, This is my comic strip, Im the star, Im Steven
[q::]) and perhaps a small hnal panel in the lower right-hand corner,
where he might have the last word (The plants not funny [q::])
or, in a different mood, surrender (Go back to the plant. Nothings
happening here [q:o]). The cactus plant is not the only minor char-
acter threatening to take over. Fihdoodle, a dog drawn to resemble a
deformed Snoopy, talks candidly about his ambition: I want it to be
my comic strip (+::o). He also tries to convince the other characters to
join him: We must plot to overthrow the evil Steven (+::o). Fihdoodle
is right: Steven is evil, both passively, in that he only says no and drinks,
and actively, in that he kills any minor character whom he views as a
threat to his status as protagonist. (This social theory can have vio-
lent consequences, such as Steven hring a shotgun at Fihdoodle or Mr.
Owl Ph.D. hring a cannon at Woodrow.) But it is hard to argue that
Fihdoodle is any better, since he also tries to kill Steven and, later, the
cactus plant; in one episode he and two other dog characters kidnap
Stevens friend Brock and threaten to keep him locked away until they
are featured more prominently. Steven is not intimidated (You have
Kunin Characters Lounge 311
Brock hostage, so what. Kill him [::S]), because his friendship with
Brock has been strained ever since Brock [took] over my comic and
ruined it (:::q). Even the kind of collective action represented by the
dogs attempted mutiny would normally be impossible, because all the
characters are working on plans to take over and are therefore compet-
ing with one another as well as with Steven. Mr. Owl Ph.D., the aca-
demic in the group, explains that this competition is based on desires
shared by everyone: A lot of people would give anything to have their
own comic strip (:+6). Because there are not enough comic strips to
go around, the characters compete brutally for the one thing they all
want: to occupy more space in the panel. One of the things I like to
think we do in the comic business is to hll space. . . . And around here
at Stevens, we do it pretty well (::q+).
What are the theoretical implications of Steven for character criti-
cism? Lynch generalizes the controversial statements about the comic
strip business to include the character business of the literary novel
(). The same characterological theory is reproduced in Wolochs
account of the formation of hierarchical, centralized communities
of characters in The One vs. the Many. As the title suggests, the char-
acters gathered in Wolochs study compete with one another. Each
one wants to be the protagonist, the center of the character-system,
the one whose character-space is disproportionately expansive rela-
tive to the spaces allotted to the many minor characters. Behind the
plot of the nineteenth-century realist novel, a metaplot pits charac-
ters against one another in a contest for maximum attention within a
limited space. The metaplots shape is determined by the patterns of
attention of a given novels readers, which are determined by the nov-
elists artistry. Behind the metaplot is the actual social basis for the
character-system, the larger social processes in which readers and
novelists themselves are embedded (Woloch, +, :). However, the
metaplot does not simply reproduce the inequalities of social organiza-
tions. The protagonist does not even have to be the center of attention
for other characters to capture the readers interest. In these respects
the character-systems Woloch describes are truly dynamic: the con-
test is always open to all characters.
What Woloch identihes as the metaplot of the realist novel is simply
the plot of Steven. In the comic strip, because the theory is laid bare, it
312 MLQ September 2009
becomes possible to calculate precisely how space is distributed among
the characters. At any moment the character who acts as protagonist is
easily identihed, because that characters name appears as a banner in
the title. The Famous Steven of Providence (+:+o). Steven: The Boy,
The Legend (+:qo). The title changes in every installment, sometimes
radically, to reuect changes in the hierarchy. Brock (:::q). Woodrow
Comic (+::S). Steven and Brock, Comedians (+:+S). Steven and His
Plant (:qo). The population of characters the many against which
the one protagonist shines has a precise number: Steven gives up
counting morons on +qth Street in New York City. Three million twelve,
oh, I give up (:+). The amount of space allotted to a character can
also be measured, even quantihed: one can count the panels in which
a character appears and calculate the proportion of space in a panel
that the character takes up. Moreover, because this cartoon calls itself
a cartoon, and Steven is never shown in prohle, there is no discrepancy
between the actual space of the panel and the illusion of space it cre-
ates.
36
Allen gives the character-system itself a precise spatial location
and dimensions. All characters who are not part of Stevens current
weekly comic adventure are gathered in a small room called the Charac-
ters Lounge. Every time a mutiny fails, the rebel character is returned to
the lounge. The same thing happens to characters who die: I dont kill
them, I just retire them to the Characters Lounge (::). The lounge is a
stark image of the spatial consequences of the system Woloch describes,
in which a protagonists centrality is achieved against a background of
foreshortened minor characters. Fihdoodle complains, This place isnt
a lounge, its a prison (+::o).
The Characters Lounge shows that the character-system, despite
a seeming dynamism that potentially allows for a moment-by-moment
reordering of the hierarchy, is severely closed. For Woloch, the deter-
mining fact in a characters existence is not the possession of intrinsic
qualities in other words, characteristics but the relationship to a
character-system elaborated sentence by sentence: Narrative progress
always entails a series of choices: each moment magnihes some charac-
ters while turning away from and thus diminishing or even stinting
36
Even in a community of uat characters, however, there are spatial anomalies:
Brocks refrigerator box is larger inside than outside and is more elegantly appointed
than Stevens apartment. Its because of the way I decorate it (+:S).
Kunin Characters Lounge 313
others (+:). A novels character-system is a zero-sum economy in which
attention given to one character has to be taken from another. Does
this mean that I can take over your comic? No. . . . But Ive decided to
add you to my cast of extras (+:+g).
The Spider Community
In the model I am proposing, the totalization performed by charac-
ter is not limited by the boundaries of a work of art such as a novel
or a comic strip. In other words, there is no character-system, no cast
of characters. One of Wolochs examples illustrates the indifference
of character to the frames that separate aesthetic objects from one
another. When Woloch describes the character-system of Balzacs Pre
Goriot, he argues that the system must include characters who recur
throughout the Comdie humaine; in this way he begins to follow the
network that a character automatically establishes, if it works at all.
However, Wolochs concept of the character-system is limited histori-
cally to Balzacs lifetime and generically to the novel, and it does not
acknowledge, because it cannot sustain, the inclusion in Le pre Goriot of
characters from other novels, plays, and books of characteristic writings
by other authors, such as Jeanie Deans from Scotts Heart of Midlothian,
Alceste from Molires Misanthrope, Jaffer from Thomas Otways Venice
Preserved, and Mnalque, the distracted man from La Bruyres Car-
actres (Le pre Goriot, +6, +6, +g6, +go). The names of some of these
characters also appear in the Avant-propos to the Comdie humaine,
where they are integrated into a society that includes Balzac and his
readers, as well as the state of nature, through Balzacs comparison of
his project to that of naturalists such as Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buf-
fon: If Buffon wrote a magnihcent work by attempting to represent
zoology completely, couldnt a work of the same kind be written on
society? (Comdie humaine, S).
37
37
Peter Demetz incorrectly describes Buffon as a strong nominalist for whom
the individual horse or lion was the real thing and all genres, ordres, et classes
merely a necessary evil (Balzac and the Zoologists: A Concept of the Type, in The
Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation, and History, ed. Peter
Demetz, Thomas Greene, and Lowry Nelson Jr. [New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, +g6S], gg). Although Buffon opposes the systematic taxonomies of Linnaeus
314 MLQ September 2009
The reference to Buffon suggests that character is not limited to
human actors even in a series of novels with the general title Comdie
humaine. Character does not respect divisions between biological spe-
cies, or between organic and inorganic nature, for that matter. Things,
places, machines, nature, and concepts obviously these can function
as characters, as in Steven, where a cactus plant becomes the most inter-
esting actor; or in novels such as The Adventures of a Bank-Note and hlms
such as Istoria mias kalpikis liras (The Counterfeit Coin, dir. Yorgos Javellas,
+g), where the protagonist is a piece of money;
38
or in John Earles
Micro-cosmographie, which gives the characters of generic places such as
A Prison and particular places such as Pauls Walk, and in which
persons are characterized as places, as when A Gallant is described
as a walking mercers shop (+S, 6+, o). The same thing happens in
Wolochs other examples, for instance, Dickenss Great Expectations:
An pergne or centerpiece of some kind was in the middle of this
cloth . . . and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remem-
ber its seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckled-legged spi-
ders with blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from
it, as if some circumstance of the greatest public importance had just
transpired in the spider community.
I heard the mice too, rattling behind the panels, as if the same
occurrence were important to their interests. But the blackbeetles took
no notice of the agitation, and groped about the hearth in a ponderous
elderly way, as if they were short-sighted and hard of hearing, and not
on terms with one another.
39
These crawling things, Pip continues, had fascinated my attention,
and for a few paragraphs he describes the social lives of spiders, mice,
and his followers and makes fun of the notion of kingdoms and families of creatures,
he is strongly committed to the reality of the species, which he dehnes pragmatically
as a group of creatures that can reproduce internally. This remains an uncontroversial
dehnition of species in modern biology. See Jacques Roger, Buffon: A Life in Natural
History, ed. L. Pearce Williams, trans. Sarah Lucille Bonnefoi (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, +gg), og .
38
On The Adventures of a Bank-Note see Lynch, g g; and Christina Lupton,
The Knowing Book: Authors, It-Narratives, and Objectihcation in the Eighteenth
Century, Novel g (:oo6): qo: :o.
39
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, +go), gS.
Kunin Characters Lounge 315
and blackbeetles. This scene is organized like the character-systems
that Woloch describes, except that the human actors, Pip and Miss
Havisham, are not at the center. Instead, they look on from the outer-
most periphery, along with blackbeetles, which are less observant. Most
characters care about the great cake, which in this passage is help-
fully described as the centerpiece and therefore might also be called
the protagonist. Pip attributes public importance to mice and spi-
ders, whose interests converge in the centralized cake on and around
which they live. Therefore an accurate account of communities of char-
acters in the novel should include not only those who walk on two legs
but also those who crawl on several legs the spider community, in
which spiders are linked to one another, and to the community of mice
through shared interests, and to the human community through Pips
fascination as well as through the cake, a talismanic object for Hav-
isham and the spiders.
Membership in this society is not limited to actors who are rep-
resented directly in the novels diegesis. Spider community means
just what it says: all spiders, everything that spiders are interested in,
everyone who is interested in spiders, and, peripherally, all those whose
interests coincide with those of spiders. Even the characters in Steven,
most of whom are stuck in the cramped Characters Lounge, easily form
associations with other hgures outside the frame. The example of Ste-
ven may seem to show that Wolochs model of the character-system is
actually the right one, at least in one instance. But in a late episode, in
which Steven performs increasingly extreme variations on the misan-
thropic gesture of withdrawing from the world hrst hring his charac-
ters (I dont regret hring all my characters one bit! . . . I can have big
empty panels like this where nothing happens [q:g]), then jumping
out of the cartoon panel altogether and into the real world (Good-
bye cartoon world. Im jumping [q:+6]) the characters repeatedly
discover openings in the panel. The hred characters continue to be
represented in the strip: Didnt you notice youve been in it more since
you were hred? (q::o). Conversations cross the border separating the
panel and the margin. Mr. Owl Ph.D. hnally explains, Theres no dif-
ference between the comic world and the real one (q:+g).
Communities of characters bridge individual hctions and genres,
as well as orders of reality such as history and hction, given and made,
316 MLQ September 2009
and life and death. The best example of these crossings is not a comic
book or novel or group of novels but a work of criticism such as The
One vs. the Many. In one passage Woloch performs a thought experi-
ment: Imagine a Hall of Fame for minor characters ranging from
Pylades to Lucky and Pozzo, with a handful of Mercutios and Fridays in
between where hctional creations were suddenly plucked from their
relative obscurity within the dramas and narratives that they enchant
(:+q). His book is that Hall of Fame: it collects characters from vari-
ous novels, plays, poems, and works of criticism and gives them a new
signihcance. The problem is that Woloch has no way to account for
the act of collecting. His concept of the character-system only describes
communities within novels; it does not describe the community formed
by his own study, in which the entire cast of characters in King Lear is
attached to Le pre Goriot and linked to the names of professional criti-
cal readers of Balzac and Shakespeare.
40
If Woloch is right about how
the character-system works, then criticism should be impossible.
Wolochs study is a clear, compelling statement of an account of
character that many readers assume, and a frightening exposition of the
consequences of this account for communities of characters. Woloch
pursues the consequences to a point that would be destructive not to
the practice of criticism but only to the coarticulation of history and
form. Whether one prefers Wolochs account, in which a characters job
is to particularize, to mine in which a character collects examples
may depend on whether one wants a tragic history or a comic one.
It may also depend on what one means by form, because Marjorie
Levinson observes that critics associated with formalism not only do
not share a dehnition of form but in fact have no such dehnition.
41
My
formalist account of character follows Fergusons idealist dehnition of
form, according to which form makes it possible for there to be more
than one of something (viii, :o :+, +). Although separate from the
sensuous particulars of aesthetic experience, form is involved in acts
of making, because the imposition of form is precisely how things are
made. Why is form a concern for criticism? Because we need more than
40
I refer to the subsection titled Interiority and Centrality in Le pre Goriot and
King Lear (Woloch, :S: SS).
41
Marjorie Levinson, What Is New Formalism? PMLA +:: (:oo): 6+.
Kunin Characters Lounge 317
accounts of things that do not translate. We also need accounts of what
parts of things translate, what devices translate them, and where it hap-
pens. Character is such a device.
Aaron Kunin is assistant professor of English at Pomona College. He is working on
two book manuscripts: Research on Human Subjects: Character as Form, about
making a person, and Preservation Fantasy, about preserving human values in the
form of an artifact. He is also author of a collection of small poems about shame,
Folding Ruler Star (2005), and a novel, The Mandarin (2008).