CHARACTERS IN FICTION
189
Moscow-Petersburg express." We would wait to hear more about
this "Richard Cole" or "Count Karenin" before depositing our
sympathies with him. This throws an interesting light on the
question of character.
In the modern novel, characteristically, there is little sus–
pense. No one reads
Ulysses
or
Finnegans Wake
or
The Sound
and the Fury
or
Mrs. Dalloway
for the sake of the story, to find
out what is going to happen to the hero or the heroine. The chief
plot interest in these books is to try to find out what happened
before the book started: what was in that letter the chicken
scratched up? what had Earwicker done in Phoenix Park? why
does Benjy get so excited every time he is taken near the golf
course? what is biting Stephen ("agenbite of inwit") ? who, really,
has been Clarissa Dalloway? The absence of suspense means that
the cord of identification between the reader and the hero has
been deliberately cut. Or put it a different way: the reader, as
I have said, wakes up in a foreign consciousness, a bundle of
impressions, not knowing where he is. The first reaction is a mild
panic, an attack of claustrophobia; far from the reader's identify–
ing, say, with Stephen at the outset of
Ulysses,
his whole wish is
to fight his way out of Stephen into the open world, in order to
discover where Stephen is and what is going on. And even when
these fears have been quieted (Stephen
is
in a tower; he lives
with Buck Mulligan, a medical student; his mother has just
died), new fears surge up and always of a locative character, so
that the reader is put in the position of a perpetual outsider,
hearing what Stephen hears, seeing what Stephen sees but failing
to get the drift often, asking bewildered questions: "Where am
I?"
"Who is talking?" "What's up?" An anxiety about location
(the prime clinical symptom in the reader of the modern novel)
precludes interest in direction; in any case, the end is foreor–
dained: nothing can happen to .stephen but to become Joyce.
Stephen is neither subject nor object, neither hero nor comedian,
but the bombarded center of
.a
perceptual all-out attack; in this
sense,
Ulysses
is a scientific study in the logistics of personality.
