Character Troubles

I'm gearing up to teach a course called Introduction to Literary Interpretation this fall. It's a class for beginning literature majors, to introduce them to major concepts like "genre" and technical terms like "synedoche." One of the concepts we have to cover is "character"--round characters, flat characters, stock characters, unreliable narrators, archetypes, etc, and what qualities make characters relatable, likeable, or compelling.

There's always some shred of hope that what I'm teaching will bleed into my own writing. If I'm teaching about great characters, maybe it will make it easier to write a great character, right? Wrong. It is not easy to write a great character, and the more I try, the more fake and cobbled-together it feels.

I'm not generally a fan of fluffy, touchy-feely, "become one with the universe" "just let the muse flow" "listen to your book, and your book will tell you what to write" kind of advice. I'm more of the belief that writing is hard work and that you have to sit down and move your fingers around your keyboard day in and day out to be successful at it. But I'm starting to feel like a character has some sort of intangible reality outside (or inside?) of my own brain, because I am finding it so difficult to write Miranda.

Miranda is the main character of #JurassicUnicorn. And even though I have complete control over every aspect of her personality--each facet of her being is something that I have consciously put there--she feels real, and solid, and immovable to me. 

This wouldn't be a bad thing if she didn't also bore the hell out of me.

I have written 94 double-spaced pages of #JurassicUnicorn. Just over 26,000 words. Not that much, really, considering that people who complete NaNoWriMo write 50,000 words in a month. (Last November, when I did NaNoWriMo, I only wrote 15,000.)  But also nothing to sneeze at. And I'm not losing interest in the book. I feel confident in its potential.

But my main character is just dragging me down. 

A lot of it is that I have this idea of Miranda as an inflexible, literal-minded person who opens up over the course of the story. She’s a scientist by vocation and by nature; she sees the world as a puzzle to be solved and believes that every question has an answer. In this way, she is an optimist. But I haven’t written her very optimistically, which may be part of the problem. She’s fundamentally sad. Her outlook on life is kind of dreary. She is very introverted and perhaps a bit of a misanthrope. At the beginning of the book, she really only loves two people: her brother and the unicorn she has created.  I think that maybe this is why I find her boring; it’s hard for me to relate to someone joyless.

Part of the reason I've written her this way is that I want her to have a major emotional shift associated with her brush with the supernatural. She has a religious experience, the first in her life, and it changes her. But I also don’t want to paint her as a dour, sad atheist who needs God to be happy, because I don’t believe that message myself. (Nor do I believe that all scientists are introverts, or that all introverts are misanthropes, etc.)

And I can change that about her. She doesn’t have to be that way. It feels like she inhabits a corner of my mind, a dark, dour presence, but that presence is an illusion. She isn't real. 

Animal Characters

Bruce Boehrer's book Animal Characters deals with, you guessed it, how animals are characterized in the early modern period. By doing this, he also deals with the notion of human character, positing that animal characters in early modern literature were a way of creating and developing distinctions between humans and animals.

He begins by discussing what a "character" is. Are characters, as Elizabeth Fowler says, "social persons" with overlapping "legal, civic, corporate, economic, kinship, and literary" identities? Are characters basic types representative of certain virtues, vices, traits, etc., as Aristotle might class them--a catalogue of observations about a certain type of object or creature? Can animals only be characters inasmuch as they remind us of humans? Or are animals denied "characterhood" altogether because, as Descartes would say, they cannot think and have "no mental powers whatsoever"--no memory, no agency, no reason.

These questions might be applied to the distinction between human and animal, as well; what makes humans humans, and not merely an animal called homo sapiens. According to Boehrer, these questions of character, and the ensuing ways in which character is used and portrayed in literature, are answers to these questions. As he traces it, the history of character began to privilege interiority in the 18th century, an interiority which we know that we as individuals possess, which we have substantial evidence that other humans possess, and which we have very few clues as to whether animals possess it. Around the same time, animals lost subjectivity in literature and, instead of being admired, began to be degraded.

Boehrer uses a pre-Cartesian (pre-cogito, pre-interiority) model of literary character and proceeds to create character studies for several different animals. The hauler: the horse, which signals backward to feudal and chivalric associations, the knight, the warrior, the Hotspur, and forwards to the man of leisure, the "effete ninny" that has the disposable wealth to keep a horse for hunting and riding, the French dauphin who writes sonnets to his horse. Or, if we read Milton, the horses that pull the chariots of God, beings spiritual in nature and utterly un-animal.

The companion: the parrot, which reminds us of rich people trading in on the exotic nature of their pet only to receive its connotations of parroting and empty-headedness (especially associated with Catholic elite and clergy, and "the mindlessness of prayer in ancient languages and set forms" (20).) Or the cat, also associated with Catholicism in the practice of cat-torture, because cats were believed to be agents of the devil. This practice continued in Protestantism, not because cats were associated with demonic forces anymore but merely to underline the superstition and stupidity of Catholics.

The food: the turkey, a New World bird who takes the place of the large roasting fowl at the grand banquet, but whose ease of breeding and cheap cost eventually makes it available for lower-class people as well. And the sheep, who is associated with Christ, with saved Christians, with the pastoral mode, and with "emergent literatures of animal husbandry and georgic nationalism" (21), and, of course, discourses about Lent and abstinence (as we see in Middleton's Chaste Maid).

A review by Kent Steel is here.

I wonder where we are today, especially as the Internet culture adores animals, especially animals doing human things. What does this mean? Is this a step backwards, condescending towards animals and only granting them worth when they act like us, or forwards, towards allowing them rights, subjectivity, a place in society?