Character and Event

Character and Event

Since Aristotle, "character" has tended to be thought in dialectical conjunction with its antipode, "plot." But these two moments – the one allegorizing the theological horizon of predestination and Totality, the other standing in for subjective particularity and the gesture of free will – are ceaselessly reabsorbed into one another in the phenomenology of reading, as what had at first appeared to be the imposition of a grand design is subsequently revealed to have been the random convergence of dissociated wills; before this latter is again unveiled as the cunning of authorial reason after all. This dialectic, out of time and itself a kind of allegory for historical experience, occludes certain determinations that have, in modernity, differentiated the concept of "character" both from itself and from its narrative situations: determinations of historicity, of form, and of media. These cannot be approached separately, but must be faced squarely in their knotted convolution. What their involvement with the given problematic suggests is that, alongside this dominant dialectic of plot and character, a minor dialectic, of critical reflexivity and the relentless auto-correction of partial syntheses internal to the concept of "character," must also be registered. It is this latter dialectic that will be the focus of what follows, whose first part sketches a provisional theory of modern "character" as something in determinate excess of the sheerly narratological schemata with which it has tended to be thought. For the motor engine of literary and theatrical reflexivity is one that builds new characterological systems out of the remnants of the immediate past, before these again are metamorphosed into their own caricatures during the next stage of revision and generic differentiation. "Character" is situated at the very crux of this dialectic: in a perennial process of reification, as the new modes of narrativization and literary discursivity stabilize into reliable forms; but also the privileged site for reflexive modification and renewal – in something like a perfect analogue for the development of modern subjectivity, which is itself drawn into a ceaseless dialectic of substantiation, self-estrangement and sublation throughout modernity. Part two then looks to a particular text, Carl Theodore Dreyer's 1955 film Ordet, as a practical demonstration and manifesto for a new theory of character, at an obtuse angle to the "plot" and defined by something else altogether: its capacity to bear a passionate fidelity to an event whose impossibility within the terms of the plot forces the character who bears it out beyond the margins of the text's symbolic order. An argument is outlined for a radical ethical construal of "character" as the incitement to subjective commitments in Alain Badiou's extraordinary sense, but only in relation to the specific formal and medial conjunctures of a given textual moment. It was Aristotle who said that ethics (or what he called "political science") had one end, the "best end": "making the citizens to be of a certain character, viz. good and capable of noble acts" (Nicomachean Ethics, section 9). Located at the meeting point of philosophy, politics, science and a kind of dramaturgy, the notion of "character" both serves as a point de caption for these various fields and holds them imperceptibly apart. It is my hope that the etymology and polysemy of the term, straddling moral, psychological, physiognomic and aesthetic milieux, still enables some effective mediation between them.

I. A Theory of Modern Character

"We need," argues Rachel Malik, "to accept the true force of character: why readers can treat characters as people (or even intimates) speculating about their pre-and-post narrative 'lives.'" At any rate, we need to grasp how and why characters "so often seem to exist beyond the repertoire of gestures, actions, thought and words in which they are inscribed" (139). The recent reappearance of the almost forgotten subject of "character," in the work of Alex Woloch to name but one,¹ serves ironically to remind us of the current unfashionability of the concept in literary studies, an unfashionability that surely matches that of the "subject...