Last week, in discussing flat characters, I ended with an argument that’s perhaps mildly controversial—that characters are not real people but just words on a page, artificial creations of an author. I think all of us know this intuitively, of course, but still, even intelligent readers often act as if the characters they encounter are real. How many book clubs, after all, have ended up in discussions over how much everyone liked the main character, as if they were a mutual friend? How many writer groups have devolved into interrogations over a character’s backstory (What are his parents like? Does she have siblings? What happened in their past to make them this way?), ignoring everything that actually happens in the story? We are, for whatever reason, obsessed with characters, and in particular obsessed with the idea that characters should feel real.
But what exactly makes a character feel “real?” It’s not simply an issue of relateability (which I’ve discussed on the blog before) since unrelateable characters (Humbet Humbert, for example) can obviously be as real as relatable ones. Character backstory isn’t necessary either, since oftentimes we don’t learn about a character’s past till well into a novel, after we’ve already established the character’s “realness.” No, instead this feeling that a character is real comes from a connection we as readers make with them—we see their inner life, their emotional richness, their complexity of thought and feeling. Even in a more objective narration, when we’re not privy to a character’s mind, we can still see evidence of this inner life in their actions, which is often enough to make them feel real to us.
James Wood in How Fiction Works puts this same idea another way:
…the vitality of a literary character has less to do with dramatic action, novelistic coherence, and even plain plausibility—let alone likeability—than with a larger philosophical or metaphysical sense, our awareness that a character’s actions are deeply important, that something profound is at stake, with the author brooding over the face of that character like God over the face of the waters.
And yet—what about any of this suggests a “real” or “vital” character? The sad truth is, in our real lives, we rarely know or connect with other people with the level of depth we expect from our fictional characters. We don’t often see other people’s inner lives, their emotional richness, their complexity of thought or feeling, and we certainly don’t get a philosophical or metaphysical sense of them, or an awareness of what makes their actions profound and important. The only people we really know with that kind of depth are ourselves. Other people, meanwhile, remain mysteries, and we interact with them using social codes that often hide the kind of direct emotional engagement we find in literature. Ironically, the “realness” we crave in fictional characters is not a “realness” we often get from real people.
E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel (which I also discussed last week) expressed this very well in his first chapter on character (or “People” as he chose to call it), so well in fact that the passage is worth quoting in full:
[Moll Flanders] cannot be here because she belongs to a world where the secret life is visible, to a world that is not and cannot be ours, to a world where the narrator and the creator are one. And now we can get a definition as to when a character in a book is real: it is real when a novelist knows everything about it. He may not chose to tell us all he knows—many of the facts, even of the kind we call obvious, may be hidden. But he will give us the feeling that though the character has not been explained, it is explicable, and we get from this a reality of a kind we can never get in daily life.
For human intercourse, as soon as we look at it for its own sake and not as a social adjunct, is seen to be haunted by a spectre. We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion. But in the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life. In this direction fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the evidence, and each of us knows from his own experience that there is something beyond the evidence, and even if the novelist has not got it correctly, well—he has tried. He can post his people in as babies, he can cause them to go on without sleep or food, he can make them be in love, love and nothing but love, provided he seems to know everything about them, provided they are his creations. That is why Moll Flanders cannot be here, that is one of the reasons why Amelia and Emma cannot be here. They are people whose secret lives are visible or might be visible: we are people whose secret lives are invisible.
Thus, it’s clear that even the most “real” characters are completely artificial, the result of their author’s creative powers, and that the emotional depth we desire in them is far beyond anything we actually encounter in the real world. Even Forster understood this, and he’s often held up as a writer whose characters are the most “real.” But maybe that means that when we read Howards End and feel deeply moved by Margaret and Helen, it’s not because they are “real” or “realistic” but because Forster the author has given them an emotional depth to convince us of their “realness.” Some people may find this idea disillusioning, that the emotional richness of the characters we connect to in fiction is just an artificial construct of the author. But I actually think it’s freeing, because it shows that as writers, we are the ones who hold the power to craft and construct “realness.” It’s a testament ultimately to the power of artificiality, and thus of imagination, which I believe are the core of all fiction.