Lecture
Character/Personage (Fr. personnage, from Lat. persona — person, individual, mask) — a type of artistic image, the subject of action, experience, or utterance in a work. In the same sense, contemporary literary scholarship uses the phrases literary hero, dramatis persona (chiefly in drama, where the list of dramatis personae traditionally follows the title of the play). Among this series of synonyms the word personage/character is the most neutral; its etymology (persona — the mask worn by an actor in ancient theater) is barely felt any longer. In some contexts it is awkward to call someone a «hero» (from Gr. heros — demigod, deified man) if they are devoid of heroic traits («A hero must not be petty or worthless,»1 Boileau wrote of tragedy), and it is likewise awkward to call an inactive person a «dramatis persona» (as with Podkolyosin or Oblomov).
The concept of the character (hero, dramatis persona) is of the utmost importance in analyzing epic and dramatic works, where it is precisely the characters, forming a particular system, together with the plot (a system of events), that constitute the basis of the represented world.
Most often a literary character is a human being. The degree of concreteness with which he is portrayed can vary and depends on many factors: on his place within the system of characters, on the genre and kind of the work, and so on. But above all, the principles of depiction, the very direction of the detailing, are determined by the design of the work and the writer's creative method: about a secondary character in a realistic tale (for instance, Gagin in Turgenev's «Asya») more may be reported in biographical and social terms than about the protagonist of a modernist novel. Alongside human beings, a work may feature animals, plants, objects, natural forces, fantastic creatures, robots, and so on, that act and speak (Maeterlinck's «The Blue Bird,» Kipling's «Mowgli,» A. Belyaev's «The Amphibian Man»). There are genres and kinds of literature in which such characters are obligatory or highly likely: the fairy tale, the fable, the ballad, animal literature, science fiction, and others.
The realm of characters in literature is composed not only of separate individuals but also of collective heroes (their prototype being the chorus in ancient drama). Interest in questions of national character and social psychology stimulated the development of this angle of depiction in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature (the crowd in Hugo's «Notre-Dame de Paris,» the market in Zola's «The Belly of Paris,» the workers' district in Gorky's novel «Mother,» the «old women,» «neighbors,» «guests,» and «drunkards» in Leonid Andreyev's play «The Life of Man,» and others).
The variety of kinds of character brings us directly to the question of the object of artistic cognition: non-human characters serve as bearers of moral, that is, human, qualities; the existence of collective heroes reveals writers' interest in what is common across different persons. However broadly one interprets the object of cognition in imaginative literature, at its center lie «human essences, that is, first and foremost social ones»2. As applied to epic and drama, these are characters (from Gr. charakter — a mark, distinguishing feature), that is, socially significant traits manifesting themselves with sufficient clarity in people's behavior and mindset; the highest degree of characterfulness is the type (from Gr. typos — imprint, impression). (The words character and type are often used as synonyms.)
In creating a literary hero, a writer usually endows him with one character or another: one-sided or many-sided, whole or contradictory, static or developing, evoking respect or contempt, and so on. The writer conveys to the reader his own understanding and evaluation of real-life characters, imaginatively reworking prototypes and creating fictional individualities. ««Character» and «personage» are not identical concepts, as was noted even by Aristotle: «A dramatis persona will have character if <...> in speech or action it reveals some inclination of the will, whatever it may be...» In literature oriented toward the embodiment of characters (and this is precisely what the classics are), it is characters that constitute the main content — the subject of reflection, and often of dispute among readers and critics. In one and the same character critics see different characters.
Thus the personage appears, on the one hand, as a character, and on the other, as an artistic image embodying that character with one or another degree of aesthetic perfection.
In Chekhov's stories «The Death of a Government Clerk» and «Fat and Thin,» Chervyakov and «Thin» are unmistakable as images: we meet the first in a theater, «at the height of bliss,» and the second at a train station, «laden» with his baggage; the first is given a surname and an office, the second a first name and a rank, and so on. The plots of the stories differ, as do their denouements. But the stories are interchangeable when discussing Chekhov's theme of rank-worship, so similar are the characters of the heroes: both act according to the same stereotype, failing to notice the comedy of their voluntary servility, which brings them nothing but harm. Their characters are reduced to a comic discrepancy between the personages' behavior and an ethical norm unknown to them; as a result, Chervyakov's death provokes laughter — it is «the death of a government clerk,» a comic hero.
If it is usually not difficult to count the personages in a work, then discerning the characters embodied in them, and grouping the persons accordingly, is an act of interpretation, of analysis. In «Fat and Thin» there are four personages, but evidently only two characters: «Thin,» his wife Louise, «née Wanzenbach... a Lutheran,» and their son Nathanael (the superfluity of this information is an additional touch to the portrait of a ridiculous man) form a single, tight-knit family group. «Thin shook three fingers, bowed with his whole body, and giggled like a Chinaman: «Hee-hee-hee.» His wife smiled. Nathanael scraped his foot and dropped his cap. All three were pleasantly stunned.» The number of characters and personages in a work (as in a writer's oeuvre as a whole) usually does not coincide: there are considerably more personages. There are figures with no character of their own, serving only a plot function. There are doubles, variants of a single type (the six Tugoukhovsky princesses in Griboyedov's «Woe from Wit»). The existence of same-type personages gives critics grounds for classification, for drawing an entire series of personages of one type into analysis (the «tyrants» and the «downtrodden» in N.A. Dobrolyubov's article «The Realm of Darkness,» devoted to Ostrovsky's work; Turgenev's «superfluous man» in P.V. Annenkov's article «The Literary Type of the Weak Man» and Dobrolyubov's «When Will the Real Day Come?»). Writers return to the type, the character, they have discovered, finding ever new facets in it and striving for the aesthetic perfection of the image.
In accordance with their status within the structure of a work, personage and character are judged by different criteria. Unlike characters, which evoke an ethically colored attitude toward themselves, personages are evaluated first and foremost from an aesthetic point of view — that is, according to how vividly, fully, and concentratedly they embody characters.
The means for disclosing character in a work include various components and details of the represented world: the plot, speech characteristics, portrait, costume, interior, and so on. At the same time, the perception of a personage as a character does not necessarily require an elaborate structure of the image. Offstage heroes are marked by a particular economy of means of depiction (for example, in the story «The Chameleon» — the general and his brother, fanciers of different dog breeds). The distinctiveness of the category of personage lies in its culminating, integrative function with respect to all the means of depiction.
There is yet another way of studying the personage — exclusively as a participant in the plot, as a dramatis persona (rather than as a character). As applied to archaic folklore genres (in particular, to the Russian magic tale, as examined by V.Ya. Propp in his book «Morphology of the Folktale,» 1928) and to early stages in the development of literature, such an approach is to one degree or another justified by the material: characters as such do not yet exist, or are less important than action. Aristotle considered action (the plot) to be the main thing in tragedy: «Thus the plot is the foundation and, as it were, the soul of tragedy, and only after it come the characters, for tragedy is an imitation of action, and therefore especially of agents»1.
With the formation of personality, it is precisely characters that become the principal object of artistic cognition. In the programs of literary movements (beginning with classicism), the concept of personality is of fundamental importance, closely linked to its understanding in philosophy and the social sciences. Aesthetics also affirms the view of plot as the most important means of disclosing character, of testing it and stimulating its development. «A man's character can reveal itself in even the most trifling acts; from the point of view of poetic evaluation, the greatest deeds are those that shed the most light on the character of the individual»2 — many writers, critics, and aestheticians could subscribe to these words of Lessing.
The plot functions of personages — in abstraction from their characters — became the subject of special analysis in certain schools of twentieth-century literary scholarship. In structuralist theories of plot this is connected with the task of constructing general models (structures) discoverable amid the diversity of narrative texts.
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