A Million Windows (12 page)

During the years when I used to read the reviews of works of fiction published in newspaper supplements or in so-called literary magazines, one of the words that I most often puzzled over was the word
character
. Writers of fiction, so I often read,
created characters
, some of whom were
believable
while others were not so. One or another reviewer might admit to
caring about
the characters said to be
in
a certain work of fiction while another reviewer might gainsay a certain work because he or she was
unable to care
for the characters said to be
in
the work. Sometimes a writer of fiction would be praised because he or she had adequately explained the motivation of his or her characters: the reasons for their having behaved as they had. Or, a writer might be blamed for failing to account for the behaviour of his or her characters. I would surely have read many a review in which characters and their motives were never mentioned, but I recall no reviewer or critic who insisted that fictional characters ought not to be discussed as though they are persons living in the world where books of fiction are written and read. In this connection, however, I can report that I once read with approval a statement by the writer of fiction Evelyn Waugh. He had never, Waugh wrote, entertained the least interest in
why
his characters behaved as they did. Waugh may have belonged among the
great number who seem to think of fictional characters rather as they think of actual persons, but at least he felt no obligation to try to read the minds of his creatures, so to call them.

While I was writing the previous paragraph, I remembered an illustration that I saw as a child on the cover of some or another history textbook. The illustration was of a book resting vertically with its spine rearward, its covers parted so as to form almost a right angle, and many of its pages standing slightly apart. In the foreground appeared the nearest of a throng of crowned kings and queens, knights in armour, and persons in robes or tunics or animal skins. Behind these, in the middle ground, more such figures were advancing from between the pages of the book while further off, in the background, were rudimentary figures or mere blurs only partly detached as yet from the lines of text that had given rise to them and to all those ahead of them. A child might have supposed, from the faces and the bearing of the foremost figures, that they were pleased and relieved to have fulfilled at last their true destiny: to have escaped from the confines of printed pages and to have arrived in the actual, visible world where they could shed their former mysteriousness and could deal as equals with those who were previously able only to read about them.

I have sometimes tried to explain what I consider a widespread confusion about the nature of what I call fictional personages. I have sometimes supposed that too many readers – and writers also – expect the reading of fiction to yield the sort of experience seemingly provided by the watching of films. I have sometimes
supposed that those same readers and writers have been too much influenced by certain theories devised during the twentieth century to explain the workings of the mind. But these are mere suppositions, and they seem doubtful indeed when I recall what little I can recall from my having read long ago some of the fiction by Charles Dickens or George Eliot or William Thackeray, who were writing long before the development of the cinema or the dissemination of the theories of Sigmund Freud. (Am I right to have omitted Emily Brontë from the few that I named just now and to take satisfaction from my never having watched any of the several films titled
Wuthering Heights
or from my never having understood why any of the characters, so to call them, in the book of the same name behaved as they are reported to have behaved?)

I was probably foolish to have tried just now to account for beliefs and expectations so different from my own. I am surely entitled to do no more than to report my informed speculations as to what happens sometimes in this corridor, in those rooms where a certain sort of fictional personage might be said to come into being.

The next section of this work of fiction will comprise a report of the dealings, during a period of no less than sixty years, between a certain occupant of this corridor and a certain fictional personage, so to call her. What follows here is a summary of many drunken debates in the common room of this wing and almost as many sober discussions on far-reaching pathways in the grounds around, or on shaded seats by sequences of trickling pools in secluded ferneries. The sort of writer most likely to find his way
to the corridors hereabouts and to consider our ways congenial – that sort of writer has seldom tried to fit into any system the jumble of beliefs and suppositions and presentiments and instinctive preferences acquired during a lifetime, but we are able to agree on some matters. Most of us agree, for example, that we were too timid as young writers and too respectful of custom, so that our earlier works of fiction include reports of deeds done or words said or daydreams entertained by entities likely to be taken for characters by most readers. The most eloquent of this majority, although we share many of his beliefs, nevertheless wearies even us with his constant railing, as I may be about to weary the reader with my report of it. He, the eloquent one, can never begin a discussion about what he calls the ghosts above the pages without first belittling those readers or commentators who speak or write about Tess Durbeyfield or Catherine Earnshaw or Maggie Verver or others of their kind as though they are beings hardly different from you, whatever sort of reader you may be, or from me, the writer of these words, or from our next-door neighbours or the persons who served us yesterday in our local shops: persons of flesh and blood who breathe, digest food, sweat, and break wind. He professes to despise those who read fiction for no better purpose than to learn what they might more easily learn by listening to their neighbours' quarrels or by getting drunk with their workmates. A so-called character from fiction, he says, struggling, so I always suppose, with terms that have no meaning for him – a so-called character belongs by definition in the invisible world, and no dweller in that world is perceptible
to more than one dweller in this, the visible world. The eloquent one, as I called him, has told us more than once that a certain now-famous writer of fiction, at his desk in an upstairs room on the far side of the globe, would once have had in mind a certain image-personage. Nearly a hundred years later, he, the eloquent one, had happened to read certain sentences the import of which seemed to be that a certain young woman, hardly more than a girl, and bearing the name Tess Durbeyfield, might be supposed to have lived, at some or another time now passed, at some or another site in some or another visible world...He has told this to us often but has always broken off at the same point in his argument, as if he demeaned himself by explaining what was surely obvious to the dullest reader of fiction.

He calls them, this occasionally drunken and voluble but mostly sober and taciturn man – he calls them sometimes, as I wrote earlier, ghosts above the pages or, sometimes, casters of fictional shadows. He has said more than once that these presences, which is another of his names for them, are to him what their deities and saints are to the followers of religions. He speaks often as though, from some ultimate vantage-point, his ghosts or presences might prove to be the actual and we who try to write or to read about them the shadowy. I recall my asking him one evening, when the common-room was suddenly in gloom after the last shafts of sunlight had passed from the nearby panes – I recall my asking him how he could dare to seem to limit or to diminish the beings he so venerated by writing fiction in which semblances of them could be said
to be recognisable. He evaded my question but gave me an answer that silenced me, even so. He asked me to recall some or another recent dream of mine in which some or another dream-character or dream-personage had behaved contrary to my wishes or my expectations. I was able at once to recall such a dream and such an instance as he had described. Then, while I was still in somewhat the same mood of confusion and disappointment that would have overcome me when I awoke from the dream itself, he declared that he or she who had angered me or had disappointed me or had consoled me bore the same relationship to the agent truly responsible for my mood as a so-called character in a work of fiction bears to the personage who seems to stand beside the writer while he or she writes or beside the reader while he or she reads.

During all the time while I was writing the previous six paragraphs, some or another image has appeared to me from among the sequences of images that would first have appeared to me twenty-five years ago, while I was reading for the first time a piece of short fiction sent as an unsolicited contribution to a periodical that employed me for several years to help select fiction for publication. Before I had finished even my first reading of the piece, I had decided to recommend it for publication, and it was later published. Of all the other pieces that I would have thus recommended I recall only a few titles, a few authors' names, and a few imprecise images that would have occurred to me while I read the pieces, which I usually read only once. In connection with the piece of fiction mentioned
just now, I cannot claim to recall what happened during my first reading for the reason that I have been drawn to read the piece a number of times during the twenty-five years since, so that the images brought to my mind and the feelings linked to the images have been often augmented or renewed and I am often able to recall whole sentences from the text itself. The title of the piece is ‘The Characters of Nineteenth-Century Fiction', and the author is Louise Davenport. The text, which comprises fewer than a thousand words, begins with the sentence ‘She wanted to squash the characters she read about in nineteenth-century fiction.' The remainder of the text reports that the chief character kept many of the characters of nineteenth-century fiction in matchboxes; that on a certain day she killed the characters one after another in her parents' bedroom – not by squashing them but by breaking their tiny bodies with a toy axe; that she then took the matchboxes full of the dead, broken bodies of the fictional persons out into the sunshine and carried them to a shallow irrigation channel on the boundary of her parents' property in the north-central district of the state where I sit writing these words; that she waded into the channel and emptied the matchboxes into the muddy water among clumps of bulrushes; and that she afterwards returned home and began to rake the grass-cuttings left by her brother, who was mowing their parents' lawn.

Her name is Torfrida, and he has never during the past fifty years thought of her as any sort of character from any sort of
fiction, he being the occupant of some or another room not far from this room. (If the doors after doors along the dim corridors hereabouts had nameplates or even numerals on them, I could be more precise, but when once I tried to suggest such a system I was told, somewhat pompously, it seemed to me, that bright lighting and unambiguous labelling would be not at all in keeping with the tasks undertaken in this part of the building, which tasks have always been agreed to possess a certain mysteriousness, or so I was told.) He claims that no word in the language denotes the class of being that she belongs to. Sometimes, for the sake of convenience, he calls her a ghost, but he ought rather, he tells us, to use the odd-sounding term
haunter
, given that the verb
to haunt
comes close to defining her dealings with him. While he admits that certain passages in a certain work of fiction were in some way connected with his becoming aware of her, if he were to set about making notes – here, in this very corridor and on this very afternoon – for a fictional account of her connection with him, he would surely begin by mentioning not only a certain book but certain places, a certain piece of music, and even a certain weather, as though to allow for the possibility that she might have appeared to him, so to speak, at a certain time and in a certain place no matter what fictional text happened to be in his hands.