Character: Under Erasure?

The paper you are reading now is very different from the one I set out to write. In that paper I had hoped to find a way of going beyond the Glance beyond Doubt (1996) which Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan casts in that book. There, Rimmon-Kenan affirms the possibility—albeit a highly limited possibility—of talking about subjectivity in literature, as well as about representation, and of doing so from within the highly skeptical terms of structuralist and post-structuralist discourse. I had hoped to affirm more than that, and to reinstate character as a central—nay, as an indispensable—feature of the literary text.

In doing so, I was meaning to ride an old hobby horse: the conviction that responsiveness to characters is the royal road into the vast majority of the works we study and teach, and that to divert our attention from them is, in effect, to block access to the vital life of those works. The challenge, I thought, was to find a way to affirm them in terms appropriate to the discourse within which Rimmon-Kenan worked so productively.

Rather quickly I found this task both pointless and beyond my powers. The more I pondered the issues the more I came to feel that the grounds for the neutralization of character within the terms of the relevant discourse were too complex and closely reasoned for me to engage here. Beyond that, I felt that my own position could best be argued by engaging a work in which the centrality of character cannot be elided.

Sophocles' Oedipus Tyranus came to mind as ideal for this purpose.¹ It struck me, for the umpteenth time, that without entering into the experience of Oedipus and resonating with the full horror of his situation, there is no way of adequately accessing the play's meaning—that is, of grappling with the mind-boggling issues on which the play pivots.²

Yet the more I worked on demonstrating that there is no way to apprehend the play without engaging the implicit subjectivity of Oedipus, the more I felt that it needs no strenuous demonstration: that empathy with and experience of characters in literature tend to be, indeed, the means through which we access the pith of the works we choose to read—and a major source of the pleasure we take from them.

In saying this, I did not mean to suggest that the problematization of character in the work of Barthes (1974), Greimas (1966), Bremond (1973), and others, as well as in the tradition of deconstruction, has no relevance to our treatment of character in literature. Even the glance beyond doubt that Rimmon-Kenan affirms in her latest book does not invalidate the grounds for doubt in the tradition in which she has worked. I do not doubt that "character" is a feature of texts and that it is constructed by verbal and formal means within texts and hence should be addressed with due respect for its factitious nature. It is also, as theorists from the feminist studies, gay studies, or deconstructive, Lacanian, and other schools have shown, also unstable, multifarious, effaceable, and often self-effacing.

Yet, as I worked on Oedipus I was again stunned by what seemed to me the undeniable counter-truth: that it is difficult not to retrieve images—powerful images—of the agents who figure in the great majority of the texts that most of us study and teach, and no less difficult to avoid attributing to them something akin to the subjectivity that we attribute to people in life. Pondering Oedipus, I reconfirmed a longstanding conviction that failure to do just this makes for a considerable impoverishment of our experience of literature and of such insight as it can give us, about our lives and the world we live in.

As I tested this conviction on a splatter of works with which I have achieved some intimacy, the self-evidence, to me at least, of my position led me to abandon the effort to reason it on the basis of Oedipus or any other text, and certainly to give up doing so...