The big issue in fiction is subjectivity, argues Sue Harper, fiction writer and Emeritus Professor of Film History at the University of Portsmouth. And it is the most tricky. You can, of course, write about landscape or objects or scents or the play of light upon a wall.
But on the whole, for a work of fiction to engage its readers, you need an identity, a subjectivity, to work on. Or possibly a range of them. To be sure, it might be possible in film to focus on the experience of (say) a donkey (Au Hasard, Balthazar) or a primate (Washo). In literature, one can focus on the consciousness of a horse (Black Beauty) or a rabbit (Watership Down). But on the whole, in both literature and film, it is language or discourse which facilitates our identification. That’s what gives La Planete des Singes its meaning, as well as Klara and the Sun. The speaking subject intensifies our desire to be them, to know them.
It’s all a question of distance. How close should we be to our character, how far away? The management of distance is an important skill that the writer must acquire with all speed. If the writer is ambitious, and probably avant-garde, then they will practice a variable distance: that is to say, sometimes you are made to feel as though you are your protagonist, close up and personal, and sometimes you see them from miles away. This can be disorientating. On the whole, I think consistency is best. You need to be able to conceptualise yourself sitting opposite to them, looking, talking. Or perhaps, as the text progresses, you get closer: from arm’s length to hair’s breadth. ‘There you were: here you are.’ A new sort of fort/da game.
The Emotions
What is crucial for the writer is to know the emotional landscape of the protagonist. And that also means assessing your own, and safegquarding your protagonist from being like you. For example, I am myself of a rather operatic temperament, florid, impulsive and tempestuous: easy to anger, quick to forgive. And it is therefore very important that I don’t make my characters like me. For a start, it would be too easy: everyone needs a challenge. But more importantly, readers need to develop their empathetic muscles.
So, to ascertain the emotional landscape of an individual, the writer needs to ask herself (or himself) a number of leading questions:
*How much repression takes place at the conscious or unconscious level of your protagonist? Do they always mean what they say? And if not, why not?
*Do they ever act or speak in bad faith? That is to say, do they engage in self-sabotage, and why?
*How confident are they in their emotions? Do they want them to be reciprocated, or don’t they care?
*Do they have habits of emotional restraint or pudeur, and do they experience embarrassment? Do they need it in order to survive? Embarrassment is sometimes an important clue to the high roads of the soul in question: it is a sign that something important is going on.
The Body
So far so good. We have to be able to answer all these questions about the emotional hinterland of our protagonists: which are the dried-up rills, which are the fertile uplands (and how that cartography came into being, of course.) But more is at issue. We need to know about their body. Not just how they look – their scars, their small hands, the shape of their nose, the size of their breasts – but how they manage their appearance. Do they turn three-quarters-on to their interlocuters? Or head-on? Is their shoulder girdle in slight apposition to thei hip girdle? If it does, it gives an impression of sustained dynamism and tension. If it does not, then solidity and balance is being signalled. The great key to presenting a character is to take account of their postural porousness and adjustability. Do they subtly mimic the people they are with, so as to achieve a comforting consonance, or do they have a jagged, dislocated posture and movement? And does the musculature contain the viscera in comfort, to give the observers or the protagomist a sense that all is in place – or does it feel as though the innards, the body’s bounty, might be spilled out on the pavement at any time?
And into all this bodily debate must come an awareness of the pattern of the gaze. This is (or used to be) a favourite topic of Screen critics many years ago , and was shorthand for the patriarchal conspiracy. But I want to insist that analysis of the gaze pattern ought to be a crucial part of the composition of a fictional character. Is their gaze fleeting, unreliable – a sort of strabismus of the soul? Or is it full, steady, unwavering? And how does it make the other people feel? The full, quiet gaze of a lover, with enlarged pupils (that infallable sign of sexual arousal!) can have an astonishing effect if it appears in an unexpected context like a board-room.
Space
The body of a protagonist acts out its role in social and geographical space. If that space is not of their volition or choice, then it is not really important for their character. Well, the formation of it is: blank walls or a particular painting will have an effect on their consciousness, and the writer needs to allude to that. But those elements are a priori. Characters are not the passive recipients of their environment: if they are, then they are not interesting enough to hold the reader’s attention. What the writer needs to do, at all costs, is to create the spatial world which a protagonist has chosen. It has textures, it has colours, it has perfumes: the reader has to know what they are, and why they were desired. It is here that the skills of mise en scene analysis (culled from film studies) can be very helpful. Why does a character select a particular type of chintz? How much attention have they given to the cascading fall of ruched curtain-material? Why that chair? Why is it in that shade of blue? Why was the table set just so? What can be seen through the window? Or not? Bachelard is masterly in the way he teaches us to read the symbolic and emotional significance of “home” and its accoutrements, and we can learn a massive amount from his approach, if not from his method. Pace Bachelard’s work, authors must always be mindful of the politics of the choices a protagonist has made. Decor is never neutral.
What Bachelard does not do, and what we should, is to allude to the issue of dress. This can be a rich quarry for the writer, as every dart and seam of an ensemble can be an index of the desires of the protagonist. I have made something of a specialism of this myself, publishing a number of stories in which the clothes speak the unspeakable, and often rebel against the wearer’s control: The Frocks, Parachute Silk, The Blue Shoes, The Red Coat, The Fascinator. It’s a very handy way of making a character live and breathe, sweat and strain. And in our treatment of their physical envelope, let us not forget their hair. Its plaits, coils, waves and chignons – or indeed its shining absence, in a shaven pate – can bear a lot of narrative weight.
Armature
So far so good. We are now in a position to look at fictional characters in a rounded way: we can tell the readers how they look, stand, move, gaze. As writers and readers we should have an idea of their emotional geography. But we need to think now about the question of armature. This is a term I have taken from sculpture. The armature is the hidden structure beneath the surface of the work of art: the piece of wood or metal which we cannot see, but which permits the ensemble to stand and have strength. I want to propose that all fictional characters (and indeed all real ones too) have an armature: a set of politico-social attitudes which may be incoherent but which are irreducible.
For example, Heathcliff’s armature would be:
*killing people is not wrong
*love is stronger than death
*convention is stupid
*passion and money are not coterminous.
Ulysses’ armature would be:
*nothing is as it seems
*never tell all the truth
*some voyages are fruitless
*never trust anyone
Mr Woodhouse’s armature would be:
*everything is dangerous
*we may all die tomorrow
*caution is best
*wrap up warm
What is interesting, of course, is to speculate about what happens when groups of people share an armature – or don’t quite share one. Swift makes excellent capital out of this in Lilliput, with the war between the Big-Endians and the Little-Endians.
Discourse
I began by talking about language, and about its crucial role in determining the intensity of our identification with a character. It is up to the author to create speech for his creation, and to ensure that there is discursive consonance: that is to say, that the parts all hang together. Or if they do not, to present that clash as an interesting work- in-progress of the psyche. And so a lot of attention has to be paid to matters lik sytax and lexis, register and frame of reference. of course, the tricky thing is history. If the protagonist is located in the past, then a number of important decisions have to be made. The people from the past were not like us: there is no immanent human nature. Their language was not like ours either. But that is a problem for the next time: ‘the past is another country’.
Further Reading
A couple of books on the emotions are worth looking at, though they are not new: Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (NY, Routledge, 2004) and Guiliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (London, Verso, 2002).
For gaze, Jennifer Barker’s The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (University of California Press, 2009) is useful, though it is about film.
For mise-en-scene, see Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Orion Press, 1964
For Sue Harper’s costume stories, see Journal of Film, Fashion and Consumption (give full ref and date), and The Dark Nest, Egaeus Press, 2020)
A relevant article by Sue: ‘From research to Practice: the Talking Frocks’, Film, Fashion and Consumption, Vol 10, no 2. Read it here for free.
Image courtesy of Sue Harper.
