Topical Guide 907
Mark Dorset
Characters: Their Origins and Their Relationship to the Author
Leaving Small’s Hotel, Chapter 12:
Rockwell Kingman was nothing like me. I was beginning to spend more and more of my mental time with him, and I was beginning to like him. […] The astonishing fact of his suddenly appearing at that hotel window — full-grown, tough, competent, cynical, bitter, brutal — no longer astonished me at all, because I knew exactly where he had come from, from some dark corner of myself, where he had been waiting for years, confident that the day would come when I would let him out.
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (translated by Michael Hery Helm):
As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn’t it true that an author can write only about himself? . . . The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own “I” ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.
Edmund Wilson, “Marcel Proust‚” in Axel’s Castle:
The real elements, of course, of any work of fiction, are the elements of the author’s personality: his imagination embodies in the images of characters, situations, and scenes the fundamental conflicts of his nature or the cycle of phases through which it habitually passes. His personages are personifications of the author’s various impulses and emotions: and the relations between them in his stories are really the relations between these.
J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread:
My hypothesis, then: the novel as the perpetual tying and untying of the knot of selfhood for the purpose, in the psychic economy of the individual and of the community, of affirming the fiction of character by putting it fictionally in question and so short-circuiting a doubt which, left free to act in the real social world, might destroy both self and community. Belief in the self, in character, is thereby precariously maintained by the novel over the abyss of its dismantling. . . . The novel demonstrates, in a safe realm where nothing serious is at stake, the possibility of maintaining the fiction of selfhood in the teeth of a recognition that it is a fictive projection, an interpretation not a fact, and so always open to being dissolved by a contrary interpretation—for example, that of the multiplicity or the nonentity of the ego.
See also:
Characters and Characterization TG 538, TG 540, TG 544, TG 548; Character as Uncontrollable Creation TG 117
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