by L Rust Hills
It may be that what further acquaintance is to the recognition of individuality of persons in life, depth of characterization is to the creation of individuality and originality of character in fiction. Thus we must be told more about a character if he is to be differentiated from a type.
In 1936, you know, Gordon Allport and H. S. Odbert published a Psychological Monograph called "Trait-Names: a Psycholexical Study," and in it they listed 17,953 of what they called "Terms Characterizing Personal Behavior and Personality." If you like lists, this is a lovely one. How hard they must have tried to find just forty-seven more terms, to make it come out even at eighteen thousand! Here, for instance, are the first thirty-six words just sort of strung together:
She was ablaze, aflame, aflush, acquiescent yet active, entirely adulterous, and utterly absorbed by her accommodating, accurate, accomplished, admirable, adorable, adept, not merely acceptable but acclaimed and even Achillean lover, when her abstemious, academic husband made an abrupt, accidental, acentric return. Then, abashed, affrighted, and aflutter, she heard him accusing and affronted, characterize her personal behavior and personality as abysmal, so advanced as to be absurd, and so abrasive to his feelings as to seem acrid or even absinthine; although he admitted in his addle-brained, absent-minded, and abstract manner, that she was probably not acquisitive.
Think of it: seventeen thousand, nine hundred and fifty-three luscious, loaded terms that people use to describe other people! What more could a writer want? With a palette like that, surely you can do a little psycholexical differentiating.
Knowing a Character
Who knows how well a fiction writer should know his characters? How much need he know about them? In theory, of course, a character's characterization needs to be no deeper than necessary to fulfill his function perfectly in a perfectly wrought story. Sometimes a character gets uppity, forgets his role. We know, somewhat to our annoyance and regret, that Salinger and Faulkner knew more about their characters than they ever told us, that things have "happened" to these characters beyond whatever happened in the fiction the authors wrote. Does knowledge of unrecounted details of a character's "past" or "future"—events before or after the action of a story—help or hinder an author? It might be useful—perhaps just once, as an experiment, an exercise—for an author to run it all through, just in his mind, of course, everything that could possibly be known about one of his characters, which is, again of course, far more than would ever be needed in a story. If you did this, you could in theory answer any conceivable question about your creation.
It's only in regard to fiction, these days, that we speak of "character," for the word has come to have old-fashioned, moral overtones. In life, we speak of a person's "personality." Testing and rating of personality usually commences with the psychobiological factors of temperament—those elements of personality which a person is thought to be born with rather than acquire. There is, for instance, his symmetry, as against deformity, and God knows deformity can be important in a character whether it's acquired or not—ask Ahab, Quasimodo, or Jake Barnes. The extent of vitality is thought to be temperamental, too—that is, basic. So is intelligence, both the abstract and mechanical kinds. You know how smart your character is, right? Is he in good health usually? Does he have "Broad Emotions" or "Narrow Emotions"—that is, does he react to a broad range of objects and situations, or just to what most concerns him? And are the emotions "Strong" or "Weak"?—does he react violently or calmly?
Does your character have what the psychologists call "social adaptability"? How the hell would you know? Well, give him this test: Is he (1) cheerful or depressed, (2) talkative or silent, (3) adventurous or cautious, (4) adaptable or rigid, (5) placid or worrying? There's a higher correlation between the way an individual will rate on each of these scales than would occur by chance, so from this cluster of traits the psychologists assume a "general" trait, social adaptability. They now have laboriously-achieved, scientifically-tested proof that by and large a person who is cheerful, talkative, adventurous, adaptable, and placid will tend to be socially adaptable, whereas a person who is depressed, silent, cautious, rigid, and worried probably won't. You want your character to have this kind of consistency, don't you—or don't you?
How does your character rate in terms of his expressive and attitudinal traits? Is he, for instance, ascendant or submissive? Expansive or reclusive? Persistent or vacillating? Extroverted or introverted? Self-objective or self-deceiving? Self-confident or full of misgiving? Gregarious or solitary? Selfish or unselfish? Socially intelligent or entirely lacking in tact? Radical or conservative? Suggestible or negative? With or without ambition? Cooperative or competitive? Careful or careless? Fair-minded or not? Honest or not? Inhibited or uninhibited?
In mock-Freudian terms, what stage of maturational development had he reached when the wind blew when his eyes were crossed and he got stuck that way? Oral? Anal? Genital? What's his "character structure" or "personality syndrome"? Is he the "compulsive personality," for instance—that is, does he have those three supposedly related traits of stinginess, orderliness, and obstinacy? Or is he the "authoritarian personality"—destructive, cynical, and power-hungry? Does he have unresolved Oedipal feelings? Does he still experience sibling rivalry? Is he dominated by the "pleasure principle" or the "reality principle"? And, for goodness' sake, what about his toilet training?
And which is dominant: his ego, his superego, or his id? A lot of internal conflict will devolve from this, you know, or could.
What's this character look like anyway? At first glance? Later, when you get to know him? Is he actually like what he looks like—that is, does his nature actually conform to what we usually sense about people of his "type"? Can you describe him? His face—eyes, mouth, jaw, nose, hair—and habitual expression, if there is one? Any speech mannerisms, fingernail biting, loping or strutting walk, gestures, and so on? Height? Weight? Age? His zodiac sign is meaningless, no need to know that. But knowing which sex he is might help, and of course you know all about his love-life, don't you?
Where was he born? Father's occupation? Mother's disposition? As a child, did he have no friends, lots of friends, or just one good friend? How was he educated? You know the total effect of his rural or urban upbringing, don't you? Of his lonely or happy childhood? Okay—then how does he feel about money now, and why?
So, can you describe his life-style now? Rich or poor? He married and have a family? Relations with wife and kids if so, or feelings about being alone if not? Where's he live? In what sort of town, in what sort of dwelling? Neighbors? How's he spend his leisure? What's his taste—is it different from or the same as would be expected according to the socioeconomic class and local culture? What are his significant possessions? Any animals or pets? What TV shows does he watch?
Take the character through a typical day. Make sure nothing exceptional happens, for that evokes a story. How does he feel when he gets up? What kind of toothpaste does he use? You know how he feels when he looks in the mirror, I'm sure; but don't describe what he sees in detail, for that's a cliché technique now for sneaking in a description of a point-of-view character. Do you know what your character eats for breakfast? How he gets to work? Do you know whether he likes his work, or hates it? What do his superiors and subordinates think of him? Who's he have lunch with, and how long does it take? What time does he leave work to go home? Does he go right home? What's it like when he gets there? Dinner? After dinner? What time does he go to bed? How's he feel about it all? You never said if he had a sense of humor.
Actually, as I said, none of this need go into a story. I was just curious how well you knew your character.
Motivation
If you speak of a character's motives—if you ask, "What are his drives, his dreams and fears, what does he want?" —then you're getting awfully close to moving a character over into the action of a story. For motive seems to create a sort of potential for movement in a character, to seem almost that part of character which
potentially is plot. Motivation seems to have a key role in creating sequential, causal action, and formulas of fiction and drama speak of it as the "mainspring" of the action. Writers are always being urged to "establish motivation," to make each character's motivation as clear as possible, this seeming to be a good way of establishing both characterization and conflict.
But motives can be awfully complicated, can't they?
Psychologists distinguish between two kinds of motivation: social and physiological. Physiological motives are those that depend on physical need—hunger and thirst and like that—and they seem to present interesting problems in the studies of rats. As far as social motives in human beings are concerned, some psychologists maintain that they develop out of physical needs in what they call behavior systems—that is, a child's need for food soon becomes associated with a need for his mother which becomes associated with an "oral drive" which leads to all sorts of "food-related" behavior (such as going out hunting and smoking too much) and to a general dependence on others (homesickness, joining organizations). Other psychologists maintain that social needs establish a functional autonomy and that an activity once under way establishes its own motivation toward completion and becomes an end or goal in itself, even though the drive that originated it no longer exists. It seems a distinction without much difference. In either case the individual's motives are involved in a complicated interaction with cultural forces to produce his behavior.
It's true that the basic way we know the personality of others is by their behavior, but we are often aware of a discrepancy between our own horrid actions and our own nice selves, and we can sometimes extend this realization to make a similar distinction between the behavior and the self of another, particularly when we know him well. If it's true that depth-of-characterization in fiction is analogous to degree-of-acquaintance in life, then it would be similarly true that the deeper the characterization achieved, then the less clear we'd be about a character's motivation in a story.
Motives cause behavior in life, of course, just as motivation is said to create action in fiction. But it is seldom possible to demonstrate how a motive caused a certain act, in any one-to-one relationship. Any interesting act is usually the result of "mixed" motives. The same act, in different individuals and under different circumstances, may be the result of entirely different motives. And the same motive, in different individuals and under different circumstances, may result in entirely different acts.
Motives may indeed cause conflict, but to the extent that it is two characters' motives, each clear and distinct, that come into a head-to-head confrontation, this is just external conflict and is of interest, really, only in melodrama and slick fiction. Far more usual in literary fiction is the internal conflict that occurs when motivations are in conflict within the same character.
With some exceptions, all the intriguing characters in literature have very unclear motivation.
The Stress Situation
Once a character is introduced into the action of a story, we know that something will "happen" as a consequence of it, that the action of the story will have some effect on him. Events of consequence seldom occur without anxiety. Change is pain, we know. Movement of character in fiction may be a far more subtle and gentler matter than all this indicates, but it also may very well take place in some sort of stress situation.
Psychologists, too, have always been interested in human behavior under stress. Experimental psychology about normal human reactions developed mostly during World War Two in studies of the behavior of troops in combat and the reaction time of fighter pilots and the like. More important, psychology has traditionally been interested in the abnormal—the neurotic and the insane—just as medicine has always been interested in the ill. Anxiety is of course the chief cause of most mental illness, and psychologists have developed a virtual inventory of ways people act in an anxiety state, none of them unknown to the fiction writer.
The emotions of a character in stress can be described by an author to a reader in two ways: as expressed or as suppressed. Strong emotion—whether of fear or anger or whatever—causes bodily changes: quick breathing, butterflies in the stomach, moist palms, pounding heart, and so forth. These have been experienced by everyone, categorized and measured by psychologists, and described by authors of fiction. The emotions of a character may be openly expressed by facial expressions, tears, sobs, cries of rage, pounding the table in anger, and so on. But there are often circumstances, in fiction as in life, that thwart the open and direct expression of emotion, that keep the individual from confronting or reacting to the situation directly. Pounding the table in anger is to some extent an example of what happens then—it is an example of what is called "displaced aggression," for it is seldom that the table is the real cause of anger. But there are subtler indications of anxiety when emotions are for one reason or another repressed.
A character in stress and frustrated by a situation with which he can't cope directly may be shown, for instance, as attempting to deceive himself about it, constructing one or another of various defense mechanisms that either deny or disguise the situation. Amnesia is an example of denying a situation totally, and it has already been overused by fiction writers. One is more likely to see a character "rationalizing" his reaction—that is, explaining in a very logical way his reasons for not having done what was needed, or for having done just the opposite. Another way of disguising the situation to himself is through "projection"—that is, by assigning to others the motives or faults of which he himself is guilty, as an explanation of the necessity for his own behavior. Another is the so-called "reaction-formation"—in which a character may be so fearful of his actual tendencies that he takes an extreme position on the other side. Or, such a fear of self may lead a character into total repression of his feelings—a matter of exerting willpower, but unconsciously and unhealthily. The repressed feelings may, however, reveal themselves in various compulsive movements—twitching or blinking or handling steel-ball feces like Captain Queeg. Or it may lead to some kind of sublimation of his feelings—in which the energy he wants to expend in one direction gets expended in another. This can be a kind of compensation—in which a character substitutes success in one field for failure in another.
All sorts of unconscious motives may thus be shown as present, and in conflict, and there are all sorts of other ways too. The character's dreams have often been used in fiction to show wishes or fears of which he may not be consciously aware. He may be shown making significant slips of the tongue or having other significant accidents or symptomatic illnesses.
There is often, in stress, a sense of restlessness and a generalized irritability. Or, there may be the entirely opposite reaction, if the frustration is prolonged: a period of apathy. Perhaps apathy will be accompanied by fantasying or daydreaming—and daydreams, as authors very well know, will often be associated with real-life problems. Frustration also leads people into compulsively repetitious patterns of action—despair is often the cause of what is called "stereotypy" in behavior, an unwillingness to try a new attempt at solution. Or a character may regress and return to ways of behavior that were successful when he was a child, like being sick all the time, or to a kind of primitivism, like picking a fist fight in a bar. Both of these reactions, however, are so familiar in fiction as to be virtually clichés.
In life we feel we know a person better when we have shared a stressful situation with him; people "reveal" more of themselves under strain. While it is true that the real function of action in fiction is to alter character, it is clear now why it is so often maintained that "action reveals character." The revelation comes as a result of the stress that accompanies change.
The Importance and Unimportance of Plot
To a reader who doesn't understand the nature of the contemporary short story form, that aspect of fiction known as plot may seem equivalent to the whole of the story. It's inconceivable to have a story without plot; for, as we've seen, what we'd then have would
be a sketch. But it's equally impossible for a story to exist without characters, or without language or without setting or without theme or without (probably even) the paper it's written on. Plot is just one of a number of aspects of the short story; and if it is the only aspect a reader looks for, all that means is that plot is all he gets. The modern literary short story must seem very dull to him.
"Story" in the old sense of "Tell me a story" means plot. But that the whole should have a name thus interchangeable with the part is, so far as we're concerned, just an accident of terminology, for we speak of "the story of a novel" or "the story of a play" and mean nothing more than "the plot of a novel" or "the play's action." Edgar Allan Poe, as first definer of the form, tried in his review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales to change the name from "story" to "tale," but that didn't stick, and it wouldn't really have removed the confusion anyway. The term "short story" is some help, of course. But this continuing confusion of the words "story" and "plot" indicates the extent to which the short story has remained undifferentiated from the simple "tale" or "story" made up to entertain children or to enthrall the old primeval campfire gang.
This purported "origin" of the story in Man's simplest basic nature is supposed to point a lesson for the modern writer. No matter how sophisticated and "arty" he may be, the contemporary writer should never forget, so goes this argument, that the short story originated in some such storytelling caveman grunt as "Tiger jump me, me get away." I don't want to rig the argument too much, but it's hard not to make fun of it. That "Tiger jump me, me get away" really isn't a story at all in our sense. It is an expression or communication, not an art object. Even revised so as to tell of "something that happened to somebody" conveying the felt consequences of the action, as "Tiger jump Og, him get away; but him scared, no go forest anymore"; even then, even if it were elaborated at great length, replete with details of the adventure in the forest; even if it kept everyone spellbound by the fireside for centuries, were taken down on a tape recorder by some scholar and published in The Hudson Review —even then it wouldn't be a short story. I don't know what it would be—some kind of folk tale, I guess—but it isn't the kind of contemporary literary short story I'm talking about.
