CHARACTERS IN FICTION
179
The only fonn of action open to a child is to break something
or strike someone, its mother or another child; it cannot cause
things
to happen
in
the world.
This
is
precisely the situation of
the hero of the novel of sensation; violence becomes a substitute
for action. In the novel of sensibility, nothing happens; as people
complain, there is no plot.
Once these discoveries had been made, however,
in
the
recording of the perceptual field (i.e., of pure subjectivity), the
novel could not ignore them; there was no turning back to the
objectivity of Tolstoy or the rational demonstrations of Proust.
The "objective" novel of Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, and Butor is
simply a factual treatment of the data of consciousness, ·which
are presented like clues in a detective story to the events that
the reader guesses are taking place. The very notion of character
is
ruled out. One way, however, remains open to the novelist
who is interested
in
character (which means in human society)–
a curious back door. That is the entry found by Joyce in
Ulysses,
where by a humorous stratagem character is shown, as it were,
inside out, from behind the screen of consciousness. The interior
monologue every human being conducts with himself, sotto
voce, is used to create a dramatic portrait. There is no question
but ·that Mr. Bloom and Molly are characters, quite as much
as the characters of Dickens or · any of the old novelists-not
mere ·bundles of vagrant sensory impressions but articulated
wholes. Their soliloquies are really half of .a dialogue-a con–
tinuous argument with society, whose answers or objections can
be inferred. .Mr. Bloom and Molly are pathetically social, gre–
garious, worldly, and lonely: misunderstood. This seIllle of being
the victim of a misunderstanding dominates
Finnegans Wake,
where the hero is Everybody-the race itself. Nothing ' could
be
more vocal than these books of Joyce: talk, talk, talk.
Fin–
negans Wake
is
a real babel of voices, from the past, from
literature, from the house next door and the street; even the
river Liffey chatters. We would know Mr; Bloom anywhere by
his voice, the inmost Mr. Bloom; the same with Molly. Joyce was
