CHARACTERS IN FICTION
191
technical virtuosity. The best efforts, far from mastering the
conundrum, merely result in the creation of characters-Benjy,
Jason, Molly, Mr. Bloom, and so on-who are more or less "suc–
cessful" in exactly the old sense, more or less "realized," con–
crete, objectively existent. Choirs of such characters make up the
modern novel. What has been lost, however, in the continuing
experiment is the power of the author to speak
in
his
own voice
or through the undisguised voice of an alter ego, the hero, at
once a known and an unknown, a bearer of human freedom. It
would seem, moreover, that there was a kind of symbiosis
be–
tween the hero and the "characters," that you could not have
the one without the others or the others without the one. The loss
of the hero upset a balance 6f nature
in
the novel, and the lan–
guishing of the "characters" followed. Certainly the common
world that lies between the contemporary reader and the con–
temporary author remains unexplored, almost undescribed, just
as queer and empty a place as Dickens' world would
be
if
he had
spent eight years recording the impressions of Fagin or the sen–
sory data received by Uriah Heep ·in the slithery course of a
morning's walk.
