Alan Ackmann

He's Not Flat, He's Just a Character

On Thursday afternoon, James Wood—noted essayist/critic and senior editor of The New Republic—gave a discussion he claimed might well be titled, “In Defense of Flat Characters.” It is difficult to summarize because it was essentially an upcoming book chapter, and admittedly free-associative and structureless. Wood opened with an observation that beginning novelists seem drawn to the static, rather than the mobile, so that their characters are fundamentally inert, their desires unactualized and unpersued. Wood expanded this to a discussion of how character is defined (whether through desire or other means) and presented his belief that many predominantly “flat” or under realized characters are perhaps more vivid and engaging than other so-called “round” characters. When properly rendered, characters can seem as clear through a singularly precise detail (“He had thick red whiskers and was always the first one to walk through a door”) as through pages of exploration.

He went on to say that many fascinating characters—from Ahab to Iago—are fascinating because we know so little about them, not so much. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Miss Brodie is mostly a collection of aphorisms and unfounded assertions—a teacherly persona rather than a fully “rounded” individual, and one of many Muriel Spark characters that are “mere crescents of existence we as readers press out into discs.” Similarly, King Henry in Henry V may at first seem interesting, but his presentation is that of a crafted image, and the monologues through which he laments are full of regal clichés, betraying nothing about Henry specifically other than that he has grown a bit self-pitying. Elsewhere, Wood described a dichotomy between writers who care too much about character, and assert that their creations are alive, with their own desires and energies that whip them fiercely across the page, and writers who care too little, seeing their characters either as figurative suggestions that do not and cannot be thought to exist at all (as William Gass describes in “Fiction and the Figures of Life”) or as pawns with useful functions but no autonomy (Vladimir Nabokov, Wood explains, was famously iron-fisted with his characters, proclaiming, “I am their master, and if I desire for them to cross the road, they cross the road.”).

Wood then explained that each of these views, like those on writing in general, are descriptions of artifice, and that subtlety is perhaps more important than simple roundness. Furthermore, he claimed, sometimes characters can be more compelling if central truths about them are withheld, so that they invite speculation. He claims many of Shakespeare’s plays function because Shakespeare took source tales in which all action was explained (i.e. “Iago hates Othello because Iago loves Desdemona”) and rendered them as psychologically real but not directly explained. For the record, I found this lecture thought provoking, though I did not agree with all of it . . . but that’s an entry for another day.

Posted by Alan Ackmann - Jul 26, 02:15 PM.
Related Articles:
The Deportees
The Braindead Megaphone
This Side of Brightness