'Lay Aside My Character': The Personate Novel and Beyond

Fiction became the preferred form of narrative in the politics and popular culture of England from the 17th century onwards because it depended heavily on the idea and function of the person, as opposed to the character. In the political philosophies of Hobbes and Locke the person was situated in a network of representations that Hobbes calls fictions, and out of these fictions political reality was understood to emerge. But owing to the provisional constitution of the person, partly imagined and partly real, room was made available for a figure who was neither a character nor a person, nor yet what Catherine Gallagher has called a nobody. This is the author, isolated from the restrictions and advantages of civil society whom Hobbes also called the natural, as opposed to the artificial, person. The author has an uneven relation to fiction, and to the systems of conjecture and representation that make fiction probable and ultimately constitutive of the real. The author prefers romance, and traces her genealogy from Don Quixote.