a

Samuel Liu
for Prof. James Wood

People Who Are in Books

1.

I begin now to think about character. I do not agree that the glory of the novel is the representation of character (I think I just do not like novels) but the question is interesting so let us talk about it.

2.

I wonder if it is correct to judge the ‘quality,’ the efficacy, the success of a particular representation of character by whether or not the character is memorable. When people talk about this topic, they often say, oh yes, wasn’t so-and-so such a memorable character, etc.; this is how I have heard some measure the success of a character. But what actually happens when people test a character for memorable-ness?
	If I think to myself who comes ‘off the top of of my head,’ though it disagrees with my literary impulse (which always takes pleasure in finding connections to high art), I see the face of Don Draper, no doubt because I have been watching Mad Men of late, a show which I do not like but will serve just as well as anything for the avoidance of studying.
	Out of a series of semi-transparent Don Drapers, of so many see-through masks which overlap in darkness, and which, when I tap the surface of my mind by saying ‘Don Draper,’ appear not one-by-one, but, of that series of overlapping transparencies, coalesce in the center of my sight, as a single face, stronger, more opaque, more fleshy than the rest. Though it can be picked out from the lineup of false faces, that ‘visible’ face is still composed of similiar transparencies which fade off to the left and right. And if I ‘scroll’ in my mind, swiping the faces left, there are spun out the faces of Don Draper in his various moods, as many and distinct as the photographs hidden within a ‘view-master.’ Though the stern, brow-knitted one is predominant (the one whose catch-phrase is, “What do you want to hear”), soon I can make out the lover Don Draper, the drunk Draper who, flushed red, angry, shows under the taut skin of his hard forehead so many small worms, so many moving veins, as if, anger building, his brain secreted in its gray squishy folds the thin mobile brown broth of wormwood, which, out of a squirming within itself, grew the many worms of rage that loosened themselves from the brain’s loam with a stretching, wave-like motion; one or two long ones are found under the forehead’s skin, trapped but not dead, mating with each other, still hoping to break through the skin; and there is (whoops) the feverish Draper, the ‘Oh god, you know I’m Dick Whitman’ Draper, etc.
	‘Off the top of my head,’ —those who immediately come to mind.
	As those ghosts in the asphodel who step first out of the dark, the most eager, craving blood and daylight, so also Don Draper for me; I hear his name, I descend the steps into the darkness of my self, cut out the blood of hours from my wrist and Don Draper, very serious and sexual ad man, comes to lick at the blood like a little dog, on his knees…
	Here the poet says something serious.
	Don Draper is memorable and comes to the mind because he’s presented to us visually. No one in their right mind would consider Don Draper a ‘great’ representation of character; nevertheless, he is extremely memorable, and this simply because we are familiarized with the sight of his face, which seems to hold in us great significance, such that I can remember the faces of a million stupid characters in film, more quickly than characters in great fiction. —Okay, so I’ll begin my essay here.

The essay begins here

I can’t see Bartleby Scrivener esq.—indeed, in Bartleby’s case, the essence of the character’s treatment is just that Bartleby, placed behind a screen, beyond the narrator’s vision, becomes a disembodied voice, a ghost perpetually summoned; he is, as it were, the purest of literary character—empty, abstract, pure, bodiless intelligence—described in barely any terms, if terms, then negative terms like ‘nondescript,’ as if not there. ‘Ghostly,’ ‘pale,’ ‘slender,’ as if wisping away. (Not eating). We have no immediate memory of Bartleby; we never see his face; though doubting like Thomas, we never touch his hands. And yet, listen inward and behold!as if contained in the seed of a single, short phrase, ‘I’d prefer not to,’ he sits behind a screen in our mind, in the corner or in the shadows, indolent, apart, as gray as the wall, arousing our epistemological anxiety and meeting it with an over-determinedness as of whiteness. Ghostly Bartleby has none of the immediacy of a visual character, of the shade who rushes forward out of the asphodel horde at our first call, eager to become flesh; Bartleby is as a ghost in the background of the asphodel horde; he stands there aloof, standing back, not coming forward as the rest of them, not greedy, not too hungry for life; does he call our name? —If he did, his voice would sound to us so singular, so unlike a voice even, so reminiscent of something, perhaps of our own voice, or what we think how an absolute loneliness would speak; and there, over the tops of transparent heads, like a stone shrine hidden in the woods, to him our gaze is drawn, it’s him we would like to speak our name with some sense of recognition.
	Likewise, I can’t picture Elizabeth Bennet. Her voice, rather than belonging to an exterior person whom I could go out and meet (as I could Don Draper), seems merely to be my own, a self hidden inside me. —Not that I am as smart as Elizabeth Bennet, but that during the moments when I seem to myself most intelligent, when for example I’ve had three cups of tea!, and am in a mode made seemingly intelligent by pure excitement, then, in that quickness of tongue, do I think to hear Elizabeth Bennet.
	Or, in more seriousness, I can recognize her irony in the voice of a particular extremely intelligent friend: not the fetishized irony of a millennial, not that drawl, that flick of the hair, that too-easy roll of the eye, locutions picked up in books and said coolly as to disguise their learnedness (‘Mary made extracts’)—but the cool, limber, mobile, informationless irony that protects a sentiment of moral weight, constantly withdrawing in a flurry as smooth as an octopus that avoids and yet toys with a predator (someone looking to insult her), but even so, always on balance, after its withdrawing coming to rest, on its toes, and there in its repose, immediately ready to move in, this time carrying a word so sharp it seems prepared as if honed nightly by fire, but which actually comes together ‘on the move’ and hones itself midair; —and strike hard with moral seriousness, attacking, undoing the other person not meanly but by bitter, acerbic, sensitive comedy. Just as, therefore, a certain form of martial arts, favored by smaller combatants, seeks to unbalance the other person, to strike at weak points or sensitive joints, so Elizabeth’s wit functions simply by out-speeding the other person, never by facts, nor indeed with the intention to trip, but it feels out the opposition and, where it finds the soft spot, quickly withdraws and, as the opposition stumbles, catches them and softens the blow. There is an always-a-step-ahead, brutally clear-eyed, yet gentleness to the athleticism of her mind.
	I can’t see her, however, in my mind; her face is vague, as if without distinction, without features. Unlike Don Draper. But while Don Draper is so visual a character that I could give you an impression of his body, of his stature, less could I do so for his speech (gruff? strong?), and far less of his mind, of the movement of his thought. Nor is there anything distinct about the mental mode he represents, even as he is, in a superficial way, more ‘memorable’ than Elizabeth Bennet.
	For with the best of fictional characters, we read them as we read thought itself, as the unprepared expression of the way thought moves, whose least inadequate medium remains writing, in such a way that writing foments thought unlike any other medium, not even music; and there is the uncanny fact that the ‘people’ who exist only in language, are less like people of the flesh, normal people, than they are spirits, ghosts, voices in the head; they seem less exterior.
	We cannot see them. Seeing always implies at a distance, at some place exterior to me—even the images in my memory are at a distance, if in interior spacing alone. But voices, intangible, without flesh, nowhere but in our own heads, are so close they are inside our own ear; they are so close it is as if something were already lying close to us in bed (that is why visual hallucinations are in my opinion quite preferable to auditory ones). Literary characters, as voices, do not seem exterior creatures but simply a part of our own selves. They seem less to be people, like our family whom we know and see around us, and whom we can touch if we wanted to, and who remain foreign to us in that merely exterior way; rather they seem to us versions of our selves which we cannot touch, which are ours yet remain strange, at a depth which though I plunge my hand into my chest, seeking it, I find only a bloodied flesh, not the sounding thing I sought.
	And so when we voice Bartleby, chanting his lines to ourselves, performing his role, yet simultaneously looking at him from afar through the narrator’s eyes, he seems to us, again, as some deeper, fantastical, horrid, stale, of a sadness so deep as to have effaced itself, mask of our selves, a mask dramatic though numb; as if our soul but sheathed some limpid, watery thing that spoke like a Bartleby, but which, without that Bartleby, that Bartleby a ventriloquist’s puppet, would not be able to speak, and is helped along as by a translator for the deaf and mute; that thing in us is given language, or, the Bartleby tweaks something in our ear, as to adjust us to its signal, so that we can hear it and recoil.
	That is why the novel, in its best moments—which I still don’t like; I wasn’t being ironic earlier; I don’t like character—is not, as some argue, a mode of empathy. Proust argues somewhere that, by way of art, we get to know how other people are inside—the empathy of being able to see from another’s perspective—for there is no way to ‘see as other people do’ except if they, as artists, represent their inner vision outside. Interesting, then, that for Proust, art allows us not empathy with everyone, but merely with geniuses; only geniuses, in this sense, can speak or express themselves—everyone else is mute. Therefore it is as if there is some great room into which a select number of people are allowed admittance; you can sit there and listen to their discourse, small in your beautiful cushioned seat, but as the cross-talk grows, as the conversation carried over ages foments, you are crowded out by the more powerful shades in humanity’s asphodel, and lose the ability to speak, indeed have no reason to—when there to the side someone else speaks what you want to say more eloquently. In Proust’s conception, art then allows us insight only into the minds of geniuses, to their unique modes of representation, to their inner world; such an ‘empathy’ is only possible in art. (Let us not even consider common people since they are mutes.)
	But Proust has not spoken his own thought correctly; he has fallen short, become cowardly at the very last moment, like a runner who sees that his trail, if finished, leads over a cliff, and there at the edge decides he has run the course, completed the race, where clearly the trail marker at the breaking-off turns and head vertically down the cliff-face, as in a cartoon. Proust is not elitist enough! For Art, or the novel, does not offer us empathy with other people, even with geniuses; again and again, as I say, and probably don’t believe, in books we only find ourselves, we can only hear voices that we already recognized in us. We read the vast world not with a desire to know other people but to trawl, as with a huge net cast through a sea of whales, for the little fish of certain turns of phrase, certain grammatical movements, images of seeming permanence, cute minnows which, when we put it in our basket, covered and protected there, and take home to feed the muse our wife—lover of fish—might make her say something about her life which we didn’t know before; selfishly, we are looking for prizes to bribe the stranger we keep in our own house. We do not wish to know other people; we only wish to have her speak, the others be damned; for the outer world is the world of appearances (is it?) and there has never been a very strong reason to believe in the existence of others, and in any case, other people are boring. So do I say that we are looking for things that cause our inner world—a world of falsity and appearance that pretends to be nothing but that—to open up to us, to come alive to us, to say something every now and then; the exterior world be damned, for it is a world which, without our interior exaggerations, is damned to the lukewarm, immortal, lethargic hellfire of boredom.

I feel like Jesus

	I feel like Kafka when in closed-up buildings, small like K.; or in a mall, am angry, like Dostoevsky; or when walking through places of squalor, sensing sadness in all of humanity, like Jesus; it is like we contain within ourselves indeterminately so many unnamed selves, and at certain hours, or having received the news of such-and-such, we are shifted into the transparency of that self, a ready-made role, stored in the archives of our psychology amongst so many unfilled shapes and forms.
	Thanks to literature, when we wake into such selves, we have the ability to name them, to say, ‘Ah, here I am in this again, hello Dostoevsky!’—if we have literature, we can name the selves we already have—which does not really mean much at all, other than that, where before literature I only had the vague word ‘anger,’ now I have the more sophisticated, resonant, accurate, poetic word, ‘Dostoevskian,’ as if he himself denoted his own, universal emotional state. This is a sort of meager, wan wealth, but a wealth nevertheless. Just as English, holding the armory of Shakespeare’s words, by plentitude of vocabulary, has greater power than a language with less words, sending out its armies of names and possessing the blank, mute things of the world, planting its flags in unmapped land, so a humanity without Dostoevsky would lack a name for one of its own interior states, for a particular mode of its inhumanity, reduced to calling it something like ‘resentment.’ In this way, by Dostoevsky, a new interior state is mapped out, as if the goal of psychological writers were cartographical, each staking out a certain territory in us, planting their flag there, setting another trail-marker that leads inward into stronger, more interesting darkness; and the greatest explorers, the Cortezes and Magellans, we commemorate with statues, we reprint their memoirs, we call them the Original; Harold Bloom chants their names to fall asleep. We study them in class! Yippee.
	Perhaps we are not quite like actors who play different roles, or selves. Actors do so more-or-less consciously, aware of the farce; when we encounter a particular mental mode, oftentimes we know not that we do so. Rather, when someone steps in front of us in the street, knocking into us, as if our mother were knocking at the door of our bedroom, we wake into a certain self we have stored in us, play its role without knowing we are being played; supposedly, we occupy these states, or possess them, but in reality we are possessed by them. Why did I act that way on the street, as if some beast were aroused in me that I never knew? what is this sadness that comes from looking at the sky, as if the sky’s influence had been impressed onto my soul?
	Literature both lets us name, have a better hold on, the malevolent spirit that possesses us in these modes, as it is the spirit itself, the harm-bringer and foul influence; literature can be like the serpent, whispering sweet words that induce a new knowing in the inner ear. For the best literature infects us with mental modes. After reading, we keep hearing its voices, a way of speaking, a particular logical movement we did not know how to do before but which is ‘infectious’ in us like a disease, unexpellable, having already rearranged the chambers of our minds. It is a mental disease which we wear ourselves into, which we cannot get rid of and so we call it ‘life’; we cannot fight it; a stronger self in us, it wears us out—we had to fight Dostoevsky and he easily beat us—and so we simply submit and say ‘this is how life is and had to be.’ A Stockholm Syndrome surrounds the best literature, the strongest and most potent, annoying literature, which induces in us its own disease, and because this disease is so strong, we convince ourselves that there is no other way; and in the final offense, we insist to ourselves that we like it this way, and couldn’t we have another virus, and maybe we could give it to others? O, do proselytize some more, you fantastic viruses of the mind!
	Can we be saturated with too many voices? The ghosts in the asphodel compete with each other; how many can come to the fore at once? What we know to be originality is the great explorer of the interior; it is some madman who had an imbalance in a particular mental category and as a result knew it better than anyone else, had more sensations in that mode and thus more content; he is not necessarily gifted in style, but his particular affliction, his daemon, is just in that way: he has more material, more experience than the rest of us, he has gone farther beyond the horizon. But it can also be said, and let’s say it why not, that the world unexplored can be saturated by explorers; you cannot plant a flag where already one is; and no one can go farther than Dostoevsky, especially if they are awakened by Dostoevsky. The interior world of human psychology is supposedly limitless. But at times, in the absence of new genius, it feels as if too many regions have already been marked off, delineated, sterile for new adventures, already about to sprout with the artificial flowers of suburbs and commercials, just as if the new world has already ‘cooled off,’ the monsters of the deep expurgated into light, no longer terrifying to us, in fact placed under our own protection, as Melville’s whale is now the charitable cause of skinny desperadoes; the more heroes, the less need for heroes. (No doubt something from Bloom’s Influence-thing will be relevant here, though I’ve never read Bloom). One time in my suburban backyard we saw a coyote. My sister cried in fear. But it seemed to me so lonely a thing, so sickly; it walked along our stony, arid creek in search of human refuse, with a slow, tired, trembling step, its paw often pausing midair and too afraid to come down, keeping its snout pointed down as if in shame, looking up at us warily. Here was the last monster…! But where was I…ah yes, the interior world, no longer unexplored, has been demarcated, suburbanized, totally known?
	But perhaps the grounds on which such writers play is less so unexplored land, as it is a coal mine: Dostoevsky makes eighty years of progress down here; Kafka steps in and takes up the pick, testing for where the earth is soft, hoping to dig tunnels that are especially daring and precarious; and that rather than fight against each other for territorial dominance, in some wild west of newfound earth, whose newfoundness is a resource soon scarce—not jealous, daring, individual explorers—but literature as some deadman’s relay race, the dead passing on the torch to the living, wherein each is a John the Baptist making straight the way-tunnel for the Greater who comes after, always expecting that last man who steps down from the sky and figures everything out for us; that miner, of veritable greatness and hardiness, shall reach the iron core of existence and cause the mantle, the crust of boring days, the rind of confused existence, to fall itself from the earth. His name shall be highly famous…!