Every fiction writer who’s taken even an intro to creative writing class is likely aware of E.M. Forster’s famous distinction between flat and round characters, from his book of lectures Aspects of the Novel (1927). To summarize, flat characters are, according to Forster, “constructed round a single idea or quality” whereas round characters are implicitly the opposite. Only round characters, Forster argues, “are fit to perform tragically for any length of time” (whereas flat characters are generally best when they are comic) and only they are “capable of surprising in a convincing way.” As examples, Forster contrasts the novels of Charles Dickens, which are full of flat characters such as Mrs. Micawber (whose singular quality is that she will never desert her husband), with the novels of Jane Austen, who imbues even seemingly flat characters such as Mansfield Park’s Lady Bertram with surprising depth of emotion. “All her characters are round,” Forster says. “All the Jane Austen characters are ready for an extended life, for a life which the scheme of her books seldom requires them to lead, and that is why they lead their actual lives so satisfactorily.”
It’s an extraordinarily well-articulated defense of round characters, and no wonder it’s so frequently taught in creative writing classes—but unfortunately, many contemporary writers have misunderstood Forster’s lesson and many creative writing classes try to argue that ALL characters should be round. But Forster himself acknowledges the necessity of flat characters. In his discussion, he quotes Norman Douglas (a minor British novelist, important enough to have a Wikipedia page, but otherwise largely forgotten) who complains that too often the novelist fails to “realize the complexities of the ordinary human mind” and “selects for literary purposes two or three facets of a man or woman…and disregards all the others” and thereby “falsifies life.” (In this way, Norman Douglas sounds not unlike some of our own literary critics who argue that verisimilitude or “the real” should be primary the goal of literary fiction.) But as Forster responds, “a novel that is at all complex often requires flat people as well as round, and the outcome of their collisions parallels life more accurately than Mr. Douglas implies.” He then discusses Dickens, whose success and skill as a novelist he attributes to the deft combination of flat and round characters.
The truth is, a novel featuring only round characters would fail as a novel. Some characters have to be flat to put the central characters in relief. That’s why they’re called “supporting characters” after all—the story isn’t about them, and therefore making them round would dilute the complexity, the “roundness,” of the main character. Hamlet’s roundness of character only works in contrast to a flat Laertes and a flat Fortinbras and a flat Horatio and a flat Polonius, all of whom are meant to serve as character foils to Hamlet in different ways. I don’t doubt, after all, that Polonius may have a complex inner life behind his buffoonish pronouncements—but that’s not the narrative I’m reading. The play is called Hamlet, not Polonius, and there’s only room in it for a handful of round characters. A round Polonius wouldn’t be as effective a foil to Hamlet as a flat one.
In How Fiction Works, a craft book I’ve mentioned on this blog before, James Wood critiques postmodern writers like Thomas Pynchon for their “rapid, farecelike, overlit simplicities” and Pynchon in particular for “his habit of making his flat characters dance for a moment on stage and then whisking them way” and his “vaudevillian fondness for silly names, japes, mishaps, disguises, silly errors, and so on,” all of which, Wood argues, diminish the ultimate seriousness of his novels. But in his obsession with “the real,” Wood misses, as he often does, the way Pynchon uses flat characters with silly names to represent the very serious, cruel, inhuman world and to offset his novels’ “round” and often very human protagonists. Mike Fallopian the anti-government reactionary and Genghis Cohen the stamp collector and Teddy Bloat the bumbling soldier are obviously not meant to be “real” in the James Wood sense—but just as Shakespeare does with Hamlet, Pynchon uses such flat characters as a contrast to his protagonists: Oedpia Maas in The Crying of Lot 49, Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice, Maxine Tarnow in Bleeding Edge—these round characters all work because they, like the readers, are forced to wander through Pynchon’s strange worlds filled with Mike Fallopians and Genghis Cohens and Teddy Bloats. If, as James Wood seems to want, every character in a Pynchon novel was round, there would be no narrative, no mystery, no commentary on our world.
Ultimately, we have to remember that characters are not real people. They are fictional creations, the product of words on a page. A very extreme example of this philosophy is that of the late postmodernist William Gass, who argues in his essay “The Concept of Character in Fiction” (1971) that “a character, first and foremost, is the noise of his name” and rejects the notion that a character exists beyond the text itself. We may disagree and argue that well-written characters exist in our minds as well on the page and that our emotional responses to them depend on their being more than just words and sounds. But if we go too far in this direction, we start to judge all characters in a novel based on their “realness, ”or to put it in Forster’s terms, their “roundness,” and we forget that the roundness of a novel’s characters is often the result of carefully constructed and crafted elements such as plot and setting and of course supporting characters. There is, after all, a degree of artificiality to even the most “real” novels, something the advocates for human complexity like Wood often fail to recognize. A good novel requires flat character as well as round characters, and even E.M. Forster understood this. About Dickens, he said that “he ought to but bad” but acknowledged that “he is actually one of our big writers, and his immense success with type suggests that there may be more in flatness than the severer critics admit.”