CHARACTERS IN FICTION
In
Aur.t Dante's hairbrushes (why was she called Dante?) and the
quarrel about Parnell (who was Parnell?) at the Christmas
dinner table. Or the beginning of
Dr. Zhivago,
where the child
Yury, taken to his mother's funeral, looks out the window at
the cabbages, wrinkled and blue with cold, in the winter fields.
Yury, being a child, cannot comprehend the important event that
has happened to him (death), but his eye takes in the shivering
cabbages. Everyone experiences something like this in moments
of intense
grief
or public solemnity, such as funerals; feelings,
distracted from their real causes, attach themselves arbitrarily
to sights, smells and sounds. But a child passes a good part of
his life in this attentive state of detachment.
Now two characteristics of the child are that he cannot
act (to any purpose) and he cannot talk (expressively); hence
he is outside, dissociated. And it is just this state, of the dis–
sociated outsider, that is at the center of modem literature of
sensibility and sensation alike. Camus's
The Stranger
or
The
Outsider
begins with the hero's going to his mother's death bed
and being unable to summon up the appropriate emotions or
phrases.
It is modem but it is not new. The inability to say the
appropriate thing or to feel the appropriate thing, combined
with a horrible faculty of
noticing,
is an almost clinical trait
in the character of Julien Sorel and in most of the Stendhalian
heroes. Tolstoy was a master of the tragi-comedy of inap–
propriate feelings, gestures, and sensations. Take the first chapter
of
Anna Karenina,
where Stepan Oblonsky, who has been
unfaithful to his wife with the French governess, finds a foolish
smile spreading over his features when she taxes him with it–
a
smile
of all things. He cannot forgive himself that awful,
inadvertent smile (he ascribes it to a "reflex"), which causes
her to shut herself up in her room and declare that
all
is over.
Vronsky's toothache, near the end of
Anna Karenina,
as it were
dunce-caps the climax; it is the distracted intrusion of the
commonplace into a drama of tragic pCl$ion. Anna has killed
