Part 5 (1/2)
=Transition to the Next Chapter.=--A well-constructed plot, like any other sort of well-articulated pattern, is interesting in itself; and certain novels and short-stories, like Wilkie Collins' ”Moonstone” and Poe's ”Murders in the Rue Morgue,” maintain their interest almost through the element of plot alone. But since the purpose of fiction is to represent reality, a story will fail of the highest effect unless the people acting in its pattern of events produce upon the reader the illusion of living human beings. We must therefore turn our attention next to a study of the element of character.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. How may unity be best attained in narrative?
2. Distinguish between the a.n.a.lytic and synthetic methods of construction.
3. Distinguish between positive and negative events.
4. Explain the pattern of picaresque romance.
5. What are the essential phases of a plot?
6. Explain the meaning of _nouement_ and _denouement_.
7. Must a story always follow the order of chronology?
8. At what point in the exposition of a plot is the major knot most usually found? What is the logical reason for this usual position?
SUGGESTED READING
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: ”A Humble Remonstrance.”
BLISS PERRY: ”A Study of Prose Fiction”--Chapter VI, on ”The Plot.”
O. HENRY: ”Roads of Destiny.”--The plotting of this story ill.u.s.trates in practice most of the important points expounded in this chapter.
CHAPTER V
CHARACTERS
Characters Should Be Worth Knowing--The Personal Equation of the Audience--The Universal Appeal of Great Fict.i.tious Characters--Typical Traits--Individual Traits--The Defect of Allegory--The Defect of Caricature--Static and Kinetic Characters--Direct and Indirect Delineation--Subdivisions of Both Methods--I. Direct Delineation: 1.
By Exposition; 2. By Description; [Gradual Portrayal]; 3. By Psychological a.n.a.lysis; 4. By Reports from other Characters--II.
Indirect Delineation: 1. By Speech; 2. By Action; 3. By Effect on other Characters; 4. By Environment.
=Characters Should Be Worth Knowing.=--Before we proceed to study the technical methods of delineating characters, we must ask ourselves what const.i.tutes a character worth delineating. A novelist is, to speak figuratively, the social sponsor for his own fict.i.tious characters; and he is guilty of a social indiscretion, as it were, if he asks his readers to meet fict.i.tious people whom it is neither of value nor of interest to know. Since he aims to make his readers intimate with his characters, he must first of all be careful that his characters are worth knowing intimately. Most of us, in actual life, are accustomed to distinguish people who are worth our while from people who are not; and those of us who live advisedly are accustomed to s.h.i.+eld ourselves from people who cannot, by the mere fact of what they are, repay us for the expenditure of time and energy we should have to make to get to know them. And whenever a friend of ours asks us deliberately to meet another friend of his, we take it for granted that our friend has reasons for believing that the acquaintances.h.i.+p will be of benefit or of interest to both. Now the novelist stands in the position of a friend who asks us to meet certain people whom he knows; and he runs the risk of our losing faith in his judgment unless we find his people worth our while. By the mere fact that we bother to read a novel, thus expending time which might otherwise be pa.s.sed in company with actual people, we are going out of our way to meet the characters to whom the novelist wishes to introduce us. He therefore owes us an a.s.surance that they shall be even more worth our while than the average actual person. This is not to say that they should necessarily be better; they may, of course, be worse: but they should be more clearly significant of certain interesting elements of human nature, more thoroughly representative of certain phases of human life which it is well for us to learn and know.
=The Personal Equation of the Audience.=--In deciding on the sort of characters that will be worth his readers' while, the novelist must of course be influenced by the nature of the audience he is writing for. The characters of ”Little Women” may be worth the while of children; and it is not an adverse criticism of Louisa M. Alcott to say that they are not worth the while of mature men and women.
Similarly, it is not an adverse criticism of certain Continental novelists to say that their characters are decidedly unfit companions for adolescent girls. Our judgment of the characters in a novel should be conditioned always by our sense of the sort of readers to whom the novel is addressed. Henry James, in his later years, wrote usually for the super-civilized; and his characters should be judged by different standards than the pirates of ”Treasure Island,”--a story which was written for boys, both young and old. One reader may be bored by pirates, another by super-subtle cosmopolitans; and each reader has the privilege of avoiding the society of the characters that weary him.
=The Universal Appeal of Great Fict.i.tious Characters.=--But the very greatest characters of fiction are worth everybody's while; and surely the masters need have felt no hesitancy in asking any one to meet Sancho Panza, Robinson Crusoe, Henry Esmond, Jean Valjean, or Terence Mulvaney. In fact, the most amazing thing about a great fict.i.tious figure is the mult.i.tude of very different people that the character is capable of interesting. Many times we willingly absent ourselves from actual society to pa.s.s an evening in the company of a fict.i.tious personage of a cla.s.s with which we never a.s.sociate in actual life.
Perhaps in the actual world we would never bother to converse with illiterate provincial people; and yet we may not feel it a waste of time and energy to meet them in the pages of ”Middlemarch.” For my own part, I have always, in actual life, avoided meeting the sort of people that appear in Thackeray's ”Vanity Fair”; and yet I find it not only interesting but profitable to a.s.sociate with them through the entire extent of a rather lengthy novel. Why is it that a reader, who, although he has crossed the ocean many times, has never cared to enter the engine-room of a liner, is yet willing enough to meet on intimate terms Mr. Kipling's engineer, Mac Andrew? And why is it that ladies who, in actual society, are fastidious of their acquaintances.h.i.+p, should yet a.s.sociate throughout a novel with the Sapho of Daudet? What is the reason why these fict.i.tious characters should seem, for nearly every reader, more worth while than the very same sort of people in actual life?
=Typical Traits.=--The reason is that great fict.i.tious characters are typical of their cla.s.s, to an extent rarely to be noticed in any actual member of the cla.s.s they typify. They ”contain mult.i.tudes,” to borrow Whitman's phrase. All idealistic visionaries are typified in Don Quixote, all misers in Harpagon, all hypocrites in Tartufe, all egoists in Sir Willoughby Patterne, all clever, tricksy women in Becky Sharp, all sentimentalists in Barrie's Tommy. But the average actual man is not of sufficient magnitude to contain a mult.i.tude of others; he is comparatively lacking in typical traits; he is not, to such a great extent, ill.u.s.trative of life, because only in a small measure is he representative of his cla.s.s. There are, of course, in actual life, certain people of unusual magnitude who justify Emerson's t.i.tle of ”Representative Men.” Benjamin Franklin, for example, is such a man.
He is the only actual person entirely typical of eighteenth-century America; and that is the main reason why, as an exhibition of character, his autobiography is just as profitable a book as the master-works of fiction. But men so representative are rare in actual life; and the chief business of fiction is therefore to supply them.
=Individual Traits.=--It is mainly by supplying this need for representative men and women that the novelist can make his characters worth the while of every reader. But after he has made them quintessential of a cla.s.s, he must be careful also to individualize them. Unless he endows them with certain personal traits that distinguish them from all other representatives or members of their cla.s.s, whether actual or fict.i.tious, he will fail to invest them with the illusion of reality. Every great character of fiction must exhibit, therefore, an intimate combination of typical and individual traits. It is through being typical that the character is true; it is through being individual that the character is convincing.