CHARACTERS IN FICTION
In
constitute a kind of advertisement for the author, eliciting such
responses as "Think of the work that went into it!" or "Imagine
a twenty-five-year-old being able to take off an old man like
that!" One is reminded of certain young actors whose trade–
mark is doing character parts, or, vice versa, of certain old
actresses whose draw can be summed up in the sentence "You
would never guess she was sixty."
Yet you might say that it was a fine thing for a well-paid
writer in
his
twenties to know from the inside what it was like
to
be
an aged charity patient. Very democratic. True, and this
is
a real incentive for the novelist of the twentieth century. The
old authors identified with the hero or the heroine, a sympathetic
figure whose dreams and desires resembled the author's own.
«Madame Bovary, c' est moi,"
said Flaubert, and no doubt there
was quite a lot of Madame Bovary in
him
or of
him
in Madame
Bovary. Allowing for the differences of circumstance and in–
tellect, he could have been Emma Bovary; the stretch of imagi–
nation to encompass her circumstances and her intellect was a
great step, of course, in the democratization of the novel, and
the naturalists, English and French, pushed further in this
direction, with their studies of servant girls, factory operatives,
and of the submerged poor in general. Even James tried it
with his poor little anarchist, Hyacinthe Robinson. Yet here, as
in
Flaubert, there is still the idea of a hero or a heroine--mute
inglorious Cinderellas who never went to the ball; what separates
the author from the hero or the heroine is fate or social destiny.
Their souls are not alien. But for the writer today (the writer
who has any interest in character) it has become almost ob–
ligatory not merely to traverse social barriers but to invade the
privacy of a soul so foreign or so fetal as to seem beyond grasp.
Take
Ulysses.
Molly Bloom
is
not a soulmate of Joyce's or a
sister under the skin. She is as far removed from Joyce as you
could get and still remain human- the antipodes. Mr. Bloom
is
closer, but he is not Joyce as he might have been if he were
Jewish, an advertising canvasser, and married to Molly. He
is
