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Source: Herman, David, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan, eds. (2005). Character. In: Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 52-57.

CHARACTER

(URI MARGOLIN)

As a narratological term, character (French personnage, German Figur), refers to a *storyworld participant, i.e., any individual or unified group occurring in a *drama or work of narrative *fiction. In a narrower sense, the term is restricted to participants in the narrated domain, to the exclusion of the *narrator and *narratee. Meanwhile, in everyday usage the term character is often used to refer to someone's personality, that is, an individual's enduring traits and dispositions. The homonymy of the technical and ordinary terms has sometimes led to the exclusive concentration on the *psychological aspects of literary figures. All theoretical models of character divide into mimetic or representational (first formulated by Aristotle), treating character as a human or human-like entity, and non-mimetic (e.g., Roland Barthes's model), reducing it to a text-grammatical, lexical, *thematic, or compositional unit. The major theoretical paradigms currently available for the *mimetic study of character are the semantic (*possible-worlds theory), *cognitive (readers' mental models), and communicative (the process of narrative mediation; see FUNCTION (JAKOBSON); NARRATIVE TRANSMISSION). While the three approaches are different in their points of departure, they reveal significant complementarity, and sometimes even convergence, providing jointly a fairly rich theory of character. Semantic theories In possible-worlds semantics character is modelled as an individual who is a member of some non-actual state of affairs. Such an individual is created by *semiotic means and designated by a referring expression of some kind (see REFERENCE). Inside the non-actual domain the individual is located in *space and *time and prototypically assigned human-like properties: physical or external, actantial (including communicative), social, and mental or internal (cognitive, emotive, volitional and perceptual) (see ACTANT). The individual may also be ascribed enduring personality traits and dispositions, knowledge and belief sets, intentions, wishes, attitudes, *desires and *emotions, and, of course, internal states and actions (see INTENTIONALITY). Minimally, it must possess an agential capacity (see AGENCY). Unlike actual individuals, all the information about characters is limited to the text that calls them into existence, so they are radically incomplete in some respects. Many predications about them hence get an indeterminate truth value (see GAPPING; INDETERMINACY). Conversely, they need not conform to any ontological regularity of actuality, and may even be inconsistent or possess incompatible properties. Characters are presented textually as a discontinuous series of states, and their continuity is world-dependent. By a constitutive narrative convention, it is possible in some fictional worlds to have unrestricted mental access to such individuals, and thus obtain certain knowledge about their interiority (see THOUGHT AND CONSCIOUSNESS REPRESENTATION (LITERATURE)). Since non-actual individuals are semiotically created, one can ask about the minimal constitutive conditions under which they can be introduced and sustained. Firstly, the referring expressions by which such an individual is designated should be used referentially, to pick out 1

an entity in a domain, not just played with as pure signifiers. Beyond bare existence, it should be possible to assign at least one property to the individual for every state in which it exists. Further conditions fulfilled by most narratives include uniqueness, that is, that an individual should be distinguishable in each state of affairs in which it exists from all other coexisting individuals, and coherence of features, which means that they definable pattern or intelligible structure. Still another condition would be temporal continuity or *identity in spite of all changes undergone. The problematisation or non-fulfilment of any one of these conditions is always thematically foregrounded, and when none of them is fulfilled one encounters the death of character or its reduction to pure verbal expressions. Individuals in storyworlds may have any kind of modal status. They may thus exist in the textualactual world, that is, in the fact domain of this world, but also in any of its sub-worlds such as the hypothetical or counterfactual (Ryan 1991; Werth 1999; see VIRTUALITY). Or they may exist merely in the belief, wish, intention, or imagination sphere of another character or characters, such as the gardener Putois in Anatole France's story of the same title. The modal status of a character may be undecided or disputed for much of a story: does N. N. exist or is s/he just a mental construct in the belief or imagination world of one or more other characters? By the same token, widely different versions of the same individual whose existence and properties in the factual domain of the story-world are confirmed by an authoritative narrating instance may be entertained by different coagents (see NARRATOR). In the absence of such an instance, however, the *truth value of any version may remain in dispute. While the dimensions for the characterisation of storyworld participants are universal (physical, mental, behavioural), the number and nature of the properties any individual possesses with respect to a particular dimension may vary enormously depending on the individual's role in the story, the type of storyworld portrayed and what is necessary, possible, or probable in it (see MODALITY), and the aesthetics of the *author or literary school. In stories with dual-world ontologies, such as human and divine, individuals belonging to different zones may be radically different as regards the most basic types of properties (bodily shape, mental ability). Individuals designated by the same proper name sometimes occur in storyworlds generated by different texts written by the same or different authors, such as the numerous Don Quixotes or Don Juans throughout the centuries. The question of the sameness of these individuals immediately arises, and also the legitimacy of transferring information about the same named individual from one storyworld to another, leading at the limit to their fusion (see TRANSFICTIONALITY). Is it the same individual, different versions of one and the same figure, or distinct and separate individuals? Opinions vary, but the most convincing view would regard the relation between the original individual and his or her namesake in another storyworld created later as one of counterparthood, not sameness, this relation being a matter of degree, with no clearly agreed upon minimal conditions (see NAMING IN NARRATIVE). A similar problem involves actuality variants in fictional worlds, such as individuals bearing the names of historical figures, for example Napoleon, interacting with fictional ones. How much of the historical information about such individuals may one thus introduce into the storyworld, and how much of the historical features need be preserved so we can claim that this is a version of the original individual? Is an ex-emperor named Napoleon, living in exile in New Orleans a version of the original one? And how about a sheep farmer called Sherlock Holmes? As for the relation between fictional individuals and actuality in general, one can distinguish three kinds. A fictional individual may be just semiotically motivated with respect to preexistent literary codes and stereotypes. It may in addition be considered verisimilar if its property structure is such that it could be instantiated in actuality according to one's version of actuality (see VERISIMILITUDE). A character is realistic if it is verisimilar according to the 2

prevailing world model of nineteenth-century western culture (see REALISM, THEORIES OF). Fictional individuals, no less than actual ones, are often endowed with a rich mental life. A recent development within fictional-world semantics is the utilisation of cognitive-science concepts and theories to produce a disciplined description of characters' mental functioning, from perception to metacognition. The basic model is that of information processing: its acquisition, mental representation, storage and retrieval, and production of new information. Cognitive theories Traditional, pre-theoretical discussions of character have introduced some distinctions which have become standard in critical practice. Depending on the number and variety of mental features attributed to a character it can be termed flat or round. It has been said that flat characters cannot surprise us while round ones can. In the course of the action, characters may remain psychologically unchanged, hence static, or they may undergo mental change such as development or decline, and hence be dynamic. Employing one or another kind of folk cum literary psychology, characters can be classified in numerous ways into character types. But how do readers construct any image of a character to begin with? A tentative answer to this fundamental question is provided by the cognitive approach as elaborated in the last few years by Culpeper, Jannidis, and Schneider. In this paradigm, character is seen as a mental model of a storyworld participant, constructed by the reader incrementally in the course of reading (text comprehension) on the basis of constant interplay between specific textual data and general knowledge structures stored in the reader's long-term *memory (see NARRATIVE COMPREHENSION; PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO NARRATIVE). The construction of the mental model is initiated by the identification of a referring expression in the text as designating a discourse entity and a recognition that occurrences of other tokens of the same expression in the discourse (or other expressions) pick out the same entity. The reader then establishes a distinct entity in his or her mental map to which features are ascribed on the basis of textual data and around which a minimal situational frame is constructed, consisting of this individual, time, place, and state or *event (see SITUATION MODEL). The conceptual unit that readers intuitively label character is thus mentally generated in response to textual clues. As one reads on, guided by the read for character contr ol system, one gathers textual cues which characterise the mental entity in focus. This is bottom-up or data-driven processing, involving both explicit property ascription and character-related information which could serve as basis for such ascription. Once a certain number of properties have been gathered, they often activate a knowledge structure stored in long-term memory under which these properties can be subsumed and integrated into a character model. Information gathering and the search for a category under which it may be subsumed may well be running concurrently. The knowledge structures in question include scripts, schemas, and stereotypes (see SCRIPTS AND SCHEMATA), and may encompass the psychological, social, communicative, and physical dimensions. They may originate in world knowledge, but also in knowledge of literary *genres and conventions and in specific literary texts, including generalisations about character made in the text currently being read. Actual world models and literary ones often diverge, and the question then arises as to which of them should predominate in a given case. While the model reader and professional literati will give the literary ones precedence, ordinary readers tend to give precedence to entrenched actual-world models. The same issue arises when the actual-world models of the text's original *audience are very different from those held by current readers. Once a fit between data and category is established, categorisation takes place, and readers may then proceed top down, integrate all the information 3

currently available, fill in or complete their mental model of the individual, formulate expectations about further textual information about it, and explain previous information. Inference drawing, based on character-related information beyond explicit property ascription, is crucial in mental model building, especially when the mental properties of characters are concerned, since these are often implied by non-mental data, e.g., about a character's actions. Such inference drawing is abductive (logically incomplete) and probabilistic with respect to both the antecedent/ conclusion relation and the norm or maxim guiding it. Such norms are based both on world knowledge, for example folk psychology, and on literary knowledge. Several basic assumptions specific to inferencing in literary contexts are that since all textual information is deliberately created and displayed by an author, all of it is potentially significant for character portrayal; that formal patterns of character grouping, parallels or oppositions may also be relevant here; and that information varies in *reliability depending on its origin (ranging from an omniscient narrating voice to the individual in question). A fairly complex computation is hence involved in such inferencing operations. Additional information about a categorised character may fall into the established pattern or it may require a modification of the mental image of this character which does not involve abandoning the initial category. In such a case one can speak of schema refreshment, subcategorisation, or individuation. But the incoming information may contrast directly with the defining features of the selected category, causing schema disruption, decategorisation of the character, the invalidation of previous inferences, and the focused search for a new, more adequate category. Schema disruption leads to deautomatisation of perception and may draw the reader's attention to the very nature of the cognitive operations involved (see DEFAMILIARISATION; FOREGROUNDING). Since characters exist in temporal frames, a category may sometimes apply to one phase of their existence, with a new one required for a later phase, and a second-order category required to integrate the two. Either because of failed re-categorisation or from the very beginning, a reader may not be able to find a suitable stereotype in his or her knowledge base for categorising a given character. Or the reader may be interested in character features other than category membership. In such cases the formation of mental models proceeds bottom-up and piecemeal, slowing processing and heightening awareness. It may also have to tolerate incongruent category features and defer integration and *closure, and could be named personalisation. Communicative theories In classical narratology a character is an occupant of one or more constitutive roles in the twolevelled process of narrative transmission, being either a narrative agent, a focalizer (see FOCALIZATION), a narrator, or a narratee. Because of the possibility of narrative *embedding, these four positions may likewise occur on any embedded level as well. The three key questions for any communicatively oriented model of character are: where does information about the individual occupying any of these positions come from? What are its nature and scope? What is its truth-functional status or reliability? The most obvious source of information about the properties physical, mental, or social of the occupant of any position are explicit characterisation statements, that is, statements that directly ascribe a trait or property to an individual. A narrative agent can be characterised by himself, his co-agents, and a narrator who stands on a higher communicative and sometimes also epistemic level (except in first-person present-tense *narration) (see NARRATIVE SITUATIONS; PERSON). Any act of characterisation involves its originator, topic entity, and addressee and, according to the identity or difference between them, eight configurations are possible in the case of narrative agents. Focalizers cannot self-characterise, but inferences about 4

their mental dimension can be drawn from the nature of the information they take in and the ways they process it. A global narrator qua narrator can only self-characterise, while a narratee can always be characterised by the narrator, or have his self-characterisation quoted by the narrator. The reliability of any characterisation statement made by a narrative agent is the subject of a complex computation involving both general factors (intelligence, knowledge, honesty) and specific contextual ones (who characterises whom, for whom, in what situation, and with what intention). Narrators can be reliable or not with respect to both the information they provide on any subject and their evaluation or judgement of it, and this holds for any self-characterisations or characterisations of others that they might make. The basic rule seems to be that any characterisation statement made by a narrative agent, narratee, or personalised narrator needs always to be assessed by the reader and placed on a gradient ranging from total acceptance to total rejection. But the maker of a characterisation statement always gets himself characterised implicitly on the basis of the matter and manner of her characterisation and the relation between the two. By narrative convention, characterisation statements made by an omniscient impersonal narrating voice are true and serve as a yardstick for assessing the validity of such statements made by all others (see AUTHENTICATION). The only exception seems to be narratorial *irony, which is a matter of interpretation. Explicit characterisation of a storyworld participant by a global narrator can be given all at once, usually when the character is first introduced, in which case it is termed block characterisation. Or it may given piecemeal throughout the text. Finally, like all other statements, characterisation statements too can be modalised as merely quoted, probable, hypothetical, counterfactual, wishful, and so on. As already mentioned, much of the textual information that serves to ascribe properties to storyworld participants is implicit or indirect. Often, therefore, a certain item of textual information is identified on the basis of a semantic trigger as a signifier for the properties of a given individual. In the case of narrative agents, this trigger is provided by a genre convention which defines what information is significant for the characterisation of an individual in this or that kind of storyworld (Jannidis 2001). The next step consists of employing an inference rule to extract the relevant properties, an activity already discussed in the previous section. While individual items are text-specific, there are three major sources of information for inferring a narrative agent's properties, especially mental ones. (1) Dynamic elements: a character's physical and verbal actions or behaviour, their content, manner, and context. (2) Static elements: a character's appearance, natural setting and man-made milieu, assuming that contiguity implies similarity between physical and mental, the physical serving as signifier for the mental. (3) Formal compositional patterns of character-grouping by way of similarity and contrast, assuming that forms of organisation reflect forms of content. In contrast, a narrator qua narrator can only be characterised on the basis of the verbal action of narration, and narrators and narratees in general may in some cases be amenable to only very minimal characterisation beyond their structural communicative capabilities. Non-mimetic theories All mimetic theories of character assume a nonverbal situation, extension, or domain of reference with individuals, time, place, states, and events evoked by the narrative text, the individuals in question being fictional human or human-like entities. Non-mimetic theories, in contrast, refuse to go beyond the textual, intensional, or semiotic profile of the narrative discourse. Character is thus viewed as a topic entity of a connected discourse, a name to which distinctive lexical features are attached, a role in a case grammar (agent, patient, etc.), a device for achieving an aesthetic effect (laughter, horror), an element in an architectonic pattern 5

(parallels and contrasts), or a functional piece in *plot conceived as a set of formal moves (agent, foil). On the thematic level, character has been viewed as an ideological position, point of intersection of *motifs or themes, and as an exemplification of an issue, problem, attitude, value, or idea (see IDEOLOGY AND NARRATIVE). But are the mimetic and non-mimetic views of character mutually exclusive? Starting from a functional view of narrative, which recognises the narratological usefulness of both approaches, James Phelan has suggested an integrative model of character, distinguishing in it three basic components: the mimetic (character as person), thematic (character as idea), and synthetic (character as artificial construct). He goes on to point out that all functions exist in every character occurrence, and it is the relation among them (which one is foregrounded and which de-emphasised) which varies from one narrative to another. SEE ALSO: reader-response theory

References and Further Reading

Bortolussi, Marisa, and Peter Dixon (2003) Psychonarratology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Culpeper, Jonathan (2001) Language and Characterisation, Harlow: Longman. Emmott, Catherine (1997) Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Garvey, James (1978) Characterization in Narrative, Poetics, 7, 6378. Glaudes, Pierre, and Yves Reuter (1998) Le Personnage, Paris: PUF. Grabes, Herbert (1978) Wie aus Stzen Personen werden, Poetica, 10, 40528. Jannidis, Fotis (2001) Figur und Person, unpublished Habilitationsschrift. Knapp, John (ed.) (1990) Literary Character, Style, 24.3 (special issue). Koch, Thomas (1991) Literarische Menschendarstellung, Tuebingen: Stauffenberg. Margolin, Uri (1987) Introducing and Sustaining Characters in Literary Narrative, Style, 21.1, 10724. (1989) Structuralist Approaches to Character in Narrative: The State of the Art, Semiotica, 75.12,124. (1996) Characters and their Versions, in Calin-Andrei Mihailescu and Walid Hamarneh (eds) Fiction Updated, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Palmer, Alan (2004) Fictional Minds, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Phelan, James (1989) Reading People, Reading Plots, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure (1991) Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Schneider, Ralf (2000) Grundriss zur kognitiven Theorie der Figurenrezeption, Tbingen: Stauffenberg. (2001) Towards a Cognitive Theory of Literary Character, Style, 35.4, 60740. Werth, Paul (1999) Text Worlds, London: Longman.