Cooper and His Critics on Character
- Cooper and His Critics on Character
Peter C. Lapp is a doctoral student in English at Queen’s University and a researcher at the Strathy Language Unit. He is working on the role of character in narrative and on the relation betwen American psychology and the American novel in the nineteenth century.
Notes
1. James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer (Albany: SUNY, 1987).
2. Wallace Martin in Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca, 1986) discusses the attempts of various theorists to find a suitable compromise between character as pure text and character as mere impression. See particularly 116–122. Schlomith Rimmon-Kenan in Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (New York, 1983) notes that “the elaboration of a systematic, non-reductive but also non-impressionistic theory of character remains one of the challenges poetics has not yet met” (29).
3. The features of the theories of play developed by Huizinga in Homo Ludens (Boston, 1955) and by Caillois in Man, Play and Games (New York, 1979) that seem most relevant to our experience of character are the notion that play occurs within a “space” removed from the everyday and the further notion that within this area certain principles hold as a logic unto themselves. Our understanding of what psychological principles should guide our hypothesizing about character constitutes an awareness of the rules of the game, while our tolerance for a different order of probability in human action is evidence of the separatıon of game and life.
4. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse (Ithaca, 1980), 118, 138.
5. James D. Wallace, Early Cooper and His Audience (New York, 1986); Nina Baym, Novels Readers and Reviewers (Ithaca, 1984). Wallace clearly establishes that Cooper was conscious of the interest his audience had in character, particularly in the regional types (106–109), and Baym shows through the analysis of reviews that character came to rival plot as a formal aesthetic criterion and was more likely to remain “in the memories of men,” thus ensuring they “parted” (85) with regret from both novel and character.
6. A summary of the theories of interpersonal perception which make use of Gestalt theory can be found in most overviews of social psychology. Edwin Hollander’s discussion in his Principles and Methods of Social Psychology (New York, 1971) is notable for its explicitness concerning the connection between this area of social psychology and Gestalt concepts. See Chapters 4 and 7.
7. Two examples of the work being carried out with the aim of understanding the cognıtive representation of character impressions are the study by John D. Mayer and Gordon II. Bower, “Learning and Memory for Personality Prototypes,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51 (1986), 473–492, and that by Robert S. Wyer and Leonard L. Martin, “Person Memory: The Role of Traits, Group Stereotypes, and Specific Behaviours in the Cognitive Representation of Persons,” The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50 (1986), 661–675. Mayer and Bower found that once a schema for a character had been established, it showed high resistance to change in the face of incongruous information about the fictional person. Frequent and extreme deviations from expected behaviour must occur before the character impression is altered to accommodate the anomalıes. Preconceptions about character type, too, influenced subjects to organize descriptions of behaviour on the basis of the character schema they anticipated would be relevant. Mayer and Bower also found that what they term “evaluative consistency”–the emotional coherence among traits as opposed to simply their logical consistency–was significant in developing and maintaining an impression. Wyer and Martin use four levels of character information–concept, type, traits and behaviour–ranging from most abstract to most concrete, and demonstrate that though the levels effectively interact, the resultıng representation or schema will be self-preserving in the face of information that ıs inconsistent with it. They find some evidence to support the hypothesis that when enough information fails to fit the character impression one may construct a completely independent impression rather than modify the first version. Whether incongruous character information leads to more processing and greater liklihood of recall is also a concern of their study but is not resolved...
