Getting into character

Kindly publishers sometimes seek to soften the blow of rejection by offering reasons for saying ‘no thanks’.

Kindly publishers sometimes seek to soften the blow of rejection by offering reasons for saying ‘no thanks’. One, for example, turned down a novel of mine because she ‘felt the lack of any character with whom the reader could identify’. This was irritating rather than soothing. It’s natural for a child to identify with a fictional character. At the age of seven or eight I desperately wanted to be the American boy Kit in my favourite Enid Blyton novel, The Boy Next Door. He dressed up as a Red Indian and hid from the villains in a houseboat moored up a backwater: enchanting. Later I graduated to D’Artagnan and Alan Breck. But one is supposed to grow up and to be able, as an adult, to enjoy novels without feeling the need for such identification. How, otherwise, could one read Dostoevsky?

Severe critics, of the sort who style themselves post-modernist, or at least attract that label, go much further in their puritan disdain. They deny the existence of characters in fiction. The author may give his personages names and descriptions, but the critic will have none of it. Speaking of one who figures in a Henry James novel, William Gass says, ‘He is not an object of perception, and nothing whatever that is appropriate to persons can be said of him.’ This is vigorous, but manifest nonsense.

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly 21 years in the world, with very little to distress or vex her.

‘Handsome, clever, and rich’ are all words that may appropriately be applied to persons, and, when Jane Austen chooses to  apply them to her heroine, she immediately fixes an idea of Emma in the reader’s mind.