Characterization in the Second Transcribed Passage from Swann's Way and in Snow White
The characters in Snow White are flat characters; shadow puppets that convey the action and the ideas of the novel without having any substance of their own. We approach them from a distance, and after a certain point, we cease to get any closer. In the larger scheme of things, they elicit reactions from us rather than empathy. As a result, we have feelings about the book (not with it), and those feelings are not connected to nor influenced by any form of identification with the characters. It’s almost as if the reader is intended to regard the characters as variables within a formula, and then, after identifying those variables, is intended to decipher the formula and thereby extract the ideas or sentiments it has been constructed by the author to convey. Only after this final step, after the contrivances of the characters and plot have been distilled into an idea, only then should the reader react to, empathize with, or dismiss what is in front of him.
In Proust’s novel, and in most books I’ve read that predate postmodernism, the function of fictional characters is very different. Characters in modern and classical literature are intended to engage the reader and secure his or her participation in the novel at a very fundamental level: “Next to this central belief… came the emotions aroused in me by the action in which I would be taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with more dramatic and sensational events than occur, often in a whole lifetimes. These were events which took place in the book I was reading… The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections [found in real life characters], impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself. After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures [fictional characters] appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening.” A character, in as much as we believe that he or she is real, is marginally the character that the author has given us and massively the character that we’ve constructed ourselves. Swann, for instance, is introduced to us as “almost the only person who ever came to the house at Combray, sometimes to a neighborly dinner (but less frequently since his unfortunate marriage, as my [the author’s] family did not care to receive his wife) and sometimes after dinner, uninvited.” Only a little bit more is said about him before his character is left untouched for thirty or forty pages, the effect of which, is to force us as readers to supply our own details, tentative and generic at first, since we’re barely acquainted with him, but more specific and elaborate, as new dimensions of his character are introduced by the author. Two hundred pages into the novel, the shame and sadness we feel as a result of his unhappy love affair is half his and half our own: the outline provided by the author having been filled out and bolstered by the millions of excuses, grievances, and elaborations that we’ve supplied ourselves. The effect is that his character is one that we are so intimately acquainted with that we have no choice but to feel his suffering (and elation) as our own.
The characters in Snow White, on the other hand, do not demand such participation on the part of the reader. They are much more mathematical in their precision. In many respects, they act as caricatured forms of classical characters. It’s not important for the reader to actually believe that they are real; it’s only important that the reader is able to identify what type of real character they were intended to represent. Take the following passage from Snow White:
“Hello Hogo.” “Hello chaps.” “The floor is yours Hogo.” “Well chaps first I’d like to say a few vile things more or less at random, not only because it is expected of me but also because I enjoy it. One of them is that this cunt you’ve got here [Snow White], although I’ve never seen her with my own eyes, is probably not worth worrying about.”
At no point are we expected to supply supplementary details to fill out Hogo’s character (What happened to him to make him so villainous? Is his chauvinism a form of compensating for some other deficiency? etc.), because we don’t need to believe in his reality; his only function in the larger novel is to be easily identifiable as a villainous character. It’s enough that we think to ourselves; “He’s the type of character that, in a Marcel Proust novel, would elicit feelings of hate and enmity.”
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Anyway, the library is closing and I’m leaving London day after tomorrow, so I’ll have to finish this up when I get back to Bangkok. For now, I’ll end with this:
My gut reaction to the type of writing you find in Snow White is not a positive one. The flatness of the characters is something I’ve noticed for a long time in postmodern writing (I think I touched on it in my third post on David Foster Wallace’s “Interviews with Hideous Men”), but I’ve struggled to articulate to myself why I dislike it. Part of what I really liked about the second Proust passage, and something I’ll try to talk about later, is the case it makes for more traditionally engaging fiction.
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