Search Conversational Reading:
Custom Search

« Upcoming | Main | RTW/Interview with Chad Post of the Dalkey Archive Press »

A Matter of Character

This weekend in the NYTBR, Lee Siegel tells us:

By the 1950's, here and in Western Europe, it was making less and less sense to fashion the idiosyncratic, original inner and outer lives of a character in a novel. His or her behavior was already accounted for by the universal realities of id, ego, superego, not to mention the forces of repression, displacement and neurosis.

Thus the postwar rise of the nouveau roman, with its absence of character, and of the postmodern and experimental novels, with their many strategies -- self-annulling irony, deliberate cartoonishness, montage-like ''cutting'' -- for releasing fiction from its dependence on character. For all the rich work published after the war, there's barely a fictional figure that has the memorableness of a Gatsby, a Nick Adams, a Baron Charlus, a Leopold Bloom, a Settembrini. And that's leaving aside the magnificent 19th century, when authors plumbed the depths of the human mind with something on the order of clairvoyance. Of course, before that, there was Shakespeare. And Cervantes. And Dante. And . . . It seems that the further back you go in time, away from Freud, the deeper the psychological portraits you encounter in literary art. Nowadays, often even the most accomplished novels offer characters that are little more than flat, ghostly reflections of characters. The author's voice, or self-consciousness about voice, substitutes mere eccentricity for an imaginative surrender to another life.

Huh. Really. So I guess that means that Lolita, Humbert, and Kinbote are all unmemorable characters, eh? Or Enid Lambert? Very flat indeed. Or Hal Incandenza and Don Gately--now there's a couple of poorly realized characters.

I think Siegel actually makes a pretty good point about Freud's ideas releasing fiction from character. Authors like Pynchon, Borges, and DeLillo did some interesting things that couldn't have been done if they had to stick to writing authentic characters.

With that said, Siegel is clearly overreaching when he says "Nowadays, often even the most accomplished novels offer characters that are little more than flat, ghostly reflections of characters." First off, not everyone working today is writing pomo fiction. There are plenty of authors out there aspiring back to the character portraits that flourished before WWII. Second, who says that postmodern works can't include compelling characters? Cartoonishness is certainly a feature of some pomo works, but it is hardly necessary. Nabokov may have been the first to prove that posmodern fiction could have characters every bit as good as those in fiction that came before it, and I think that authors since him have re-proven this time and time again.

 

Comments

I am by no means a literary gourmand, but it seems to me that Siegel's argument suffers from its own internal muddledness. On the hand, he explains the rise of po-mo literature as a move away/against traditional undestandings of character. But then he seems to judge them based upon these same traditional criteria. In effect he is holding them accountable to notions of character which they displace as a starting point.

The reason why he can get away with it is that this traditional understanding of character slides into an evaluation of "memorable" characters. This is an entirely different issue I think. The more ingenuous question would be are characters in po-mo literature interesting according to their own aims and constraints rather than against a list of all stars from some sort of canon?

I can't help but agree with that.

If he didn't overreach, he wouldn't be Lee Siegel. Why this man's writing is o'erspreading the landscape like kudzu (Slate, Nation, NYTBR, New Republic...) is beyond me.

http://mort.dyndns.dk/mortgage-calculator.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/mortgage-payment-calculator.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/reverse-mortgages.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/adjustable-rate-mortgage.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/mortgage-application-online.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/mortgage-bad-credit.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/mortgage-application.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/mortgage-insurance-quote.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/commercial-mortgage-loan.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/biweekly-mortgage.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/what-is-a-reverse-mortgage.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/easy-mortgage-loan.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/commercial-mortgage-loans.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/commercial-real-estate-mortgage.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/mortgage-home-loan.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/private-mortgage-insurance.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/clarksville-ft-campbell-mortgage.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/mortgage-calulator.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/milwaukee-county-mortgage.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/minnesota-mortgage-rates.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/online-mortgages.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/mortgage-companies-memphis.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/gmac-mortgage.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/mortgages-uk.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/mortgage.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/mortgage-insurance.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/mortgage-lender.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/mortgage-marketing.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/chase-mortgage.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/internet-mortgage-leads.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/mortgage-knoxville.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/texas-mortgage-refinance.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/mortgage-loan-application.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/bad-credit-mortgage-company.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/reverse-home-mortgage.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/home-mortgage-loan-california.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/mortgage-calculations.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/lead-mortgage-reverse.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/mortgage-mn.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/new-york-mortgage-brokers.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/knoxville-mortgage-companies.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/california-home-loan-mortgage-rates.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/refinance-mortgage-texas.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/ozaukee-county-mortgage.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/california-mortgage-rate.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/mortgage-ft-cambell.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/clarksville-va-mortgage.html
http://mort.dyndns.dk/mortgage-savings.html

Very interesting site I congratulate

Post a comment

If you have a TypeKey or TypePad account, please Sign In

Get Conversational Reading on the Kindle

Support Indie Literary Coverage


Get the Amazon Kindle

Search IndieBound



Subscribe via email:

Delivered by FeedBurner





Guests

Christopher Miller, author of The Cardboard Universe: Five of Christopher Miller's Favorite Books About Imaginary Authors
Joshua Henkin, author of Matrimony: Joshua Henkin's Ten Terrific Novels About Writers, Writing, and the Writing Life, Writing About Writing
Christina Thompson, editor of Harvard Review: How Many Times Must an Author Write the Same Book?
Neus Arqués, author of Un hombre de Pago: On Translations or the Pursuit of the Domino Effect
Jennifer Epstein, author of The Painter from Shanghai: Rewriting Motherhood: Why Career and Home Do Balance (at Least, for Me)


cover