Recent anthropological interest in character has focused on what would be the Spanish form of the word ‘carácter’, used to indicate a qualitative description of a person or thing, inclusive but not limited to such categorisations like temperament, personality, make-up or constitution. Reed and Bialecki (2017a and 2017b) in their introductions to two special editions noted that they are interested in ‘character’ both as ‘artefactual dimensions of concepts we typically treat as
expressions of moral personhood’ (Reed and Bialecki 2017a: 161) and with regards to ‘a much wider range of ethnographic objects that can be addressed, either “emicly” or “eticly” through character as a concept’ (Reed and Bialecki 2017b: 305). In this chapter, I am interested in ‘personaje’ or the Spanish word for fictional character or personage, but central to the way my interlocutors spoke about their personajes was with regards to their carácter or their characters’ characters.
In the above anecdote, Lena told me about two characters (personajes) that she was currently writing. Her description of the two differed greatly. From the conversation28 about the
first novel, I was aware of the name of the character, the area in the country she was from, dilemmas she faced and was made aware of an internal struggle between patriotism and freedom that would shape her life. The character from the second novel was not named and as far as I was aware from our conversation had no background except for his tendencies to kill. What was most important about this character was not the development of a personhood, but the creation of a presence, a negative carácter, for lack of a better term, that was identifiably human, but very much ‘other’. It was the affective quality he had on Lena and hopefully her reader that was important in the creation of this personaje.
Carroll (1987) writes about certain novelistic genres that are written and grouped together with the auspice of provoking ‘a certain affective response’ (52). Often those genres are ‘named by the very affect they are trying to provoke’ (ibid: 52), such as suspense, mystery, romance and horror. In the genre of horror,29 the affective response is driven through the relationship of the
other literary characters to the figure of horror. As Carroll writes: ‘The characters of works of horror exemplify for us [the reader] the way in which to react to the monsters in the fiction. Our emotions are supposed to mirror those of the positive human characters’ (ibid: 52). When I asked Lena whether or not she found her new heightened state of fear while writing this killer-character problematic, she said: ‘It doesn’t worry me. It is how it must be. If you want to scare people, you have to scare yourself first’. In this case, Lena constructs interesting relationships through the text. In the first case, she identifies a model reader, with whom she intends to share the experience of fear, or a person to whom she feels similar. In the second case, she identifies her character as an other; something dissimilar to both herself and her model reader.
In writing her killer, it seemed as if Lena had a new acute awareness of a type of malevolence belonging to this character (personaje and carácter) that now exists in her world because she had written it. She saw her community as if her killer was there: sensing the possibility
28 I have still never seen writing samples from either work in progress
29 Carroll (1987) notes horror is made up of ‘art-horror’ of which he specifically writes and ‘terror’. ‘Art-horror’ is driven by a specific type of ‘monster’ and he writes about books such as Bram Stocker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Lena’s story is an example of terror fiction, like the stories of Edgar Allen Poe or Hitchcock’s Psycho (52).
of danger when home alone and distrusting the innocent disappearance of an upset friend. Unlike background biographical data or the lifecycle of the serial killer, what preoccupied her was her character’s carácter, which came from her imagination, yet she treated as something independent to her. In fact, unlike her ability to relate to Mariana, the character of the first novel with whom she even shares certain biographical histories, it is the killer’s unrelatability that gives it the terror necessary to make it affective. Although I never spoke to her about the secondary characters of the plot, according to Carroll’s (1987) argument, for her to have effectively written an affect-inducing horror, Lena’s emotional response and her desired response from the reader should mimic the other ‘positive human characters’ in the novel, indicating the breadth of possibilities of both
carácter and personaje in fiction as being human-like and, paradoxically, inhumanely human-like. What sort of thing then is a literary character? They are hard to classify as objects because they lack materiality, outside the physicality of the texts through which they are reproduced. They are human-like, but not human. A character is considered fictitious and invented by the writer, as figment of the writer, yet can also be considered an ‘implied person’ (Woloch 2003: 13) and seems to exist outside their creators once they have been written. In his work with members of a literary society dedicated to the British author Henry Williamson, Reed (2018) provides an ethnographic study of readers’ engagement with literary character. Among the readers he worked with, he noted ‘an interest or identification with secondary characters’ (forthcoming: 2). Reed notes that interest in secondary characters by his interlocutors ‘is fuelled by what readers find on the pages of the novels but also what is missing from them’ (ibid: 7). According to Woloch (2003), who provides a literary theory of characterisation, the minor characters in the story allow for readers to encounter this ‘implied person’ within the complex, narrative ‘character-system’ (Woloch 2003: 13) in which they are revived and dismissed from the novel as the story dictates. Reed writes that Woloch’s theory ‘offers us a theory of reception precisely grounded in the reader’s own act of giving attention (and neglect) to literary characters’ (forthcoming, 4).
Writing on the idea of ownership of characters in the 18th and 19th century, Brewer (2005)
characters after the story ends. This is something he calls ‘imaginative expansion’ (Brewer 2005).30
Similarly, Reed provides examples where an interlocutor produced a ‘biographical exposition’ of a secondary character (forthcoming, 7) and another where an interlocutor ‘spoke about the
importance of imagining futures for those “very minor” characters’ (ibid: 9). Yet historically in literary criticism, the possible existence of characters outside a text has been dismissed as ‘a particular bourgeois notion of personhood’ (Woloch 2003: 16) and ‘a naïve and pernicious tendency on the part of non-academic readers and earlier critics to talk about characters as if they were actual people’ (Brewer 2005: 3). However, Brewer’s (2005) research on the historical analysis of readers and Reed’s work speak to situations where the supra-textural personhood of characters is very much felt by readers of fiction.
While these studies provide lenses through which to begin to understand reader
relationships to some literary characters, the classification or general ontology of characters as a whole seems elusive. The work I did with writers did not seem to clarify a single way to conceive of a literary character or of their ontology but did provide insight into the construction of characters and a clear idea that characters – regardless of the human-like qualities or relatable social
identities, like Mariana and the killer – seem to both be of the author and yet a thing unto themselves.