Why Do We Care about Literary Characters?

291 Pages·2011·4.011 MB·English

by  Blakey Vermeule

Why Do We Care
about Literary Characters?
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Why Do We Care
about Literary Characters?
8
BLAKEY VERMEULE
The Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
©2010The Johns Hopkins University Press
All rights reserved.Published 2010
Printed in the United States ofAmerica on acid-free paper
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The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vermeule,Blakey.
Why do we care about literary characters? / Blakey Vermeule.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13:978-0-8018-9360-5(hardcover :alk.paper)
ISBN-10:0-8018-9360-7(hardcover :alk.paper)
1. Fiction—Psychological aspects. 2. Characters and characteristics in literature.
3. Psychology and literature. 4. Reader-response criticism. 5. English fiction—
18th century—History and criticism. I. Title.
PN3352.P7V472009
809.3!927—dc22 2009002903
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
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please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936or [email protected].
The Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials,
including recycled text paper that is composed ofat least 30percent post-consumer
waste,whenever possible.All ofour book papers are acid-free,and our jackets
and covers are printed on paper with recycled content.
For Khedi and Terry,
with deepest love
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contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
1 The Fictional among Us 1
2 The Cognitive Dimension 21
3 What Hails Us? 49
4 The Literary Endowment:Five Mind-Reading Turns 62
Four Openings 62
Free Indirect Discourse 71
Machiavellian Narratives 81
Attention 95
The Drama ofDifferential Access to Social Information 103
5 The Fantasy ofExposure and Narrative Development
in Eighteenth-Century Britain 107
6 God Novels 128
7 Gossip and Literary Narratives 150
8 What’s the Matter with Miss Bates? 171
9 Mind Blindness 193
10 Postmodernism Reflects:J.M.Coetzee and the
Eighteenth-Century Novel 215
Epilogue 244
Notes 251
Bibliography 255
Index 265
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preface
He’s my favorite fictional character
—Homer Simpson,on God
The idea for this book came to me during a graduate class I taught at Northwest-
ern University in December of2001.We were talking about J.M.Coetzee’s novel
Disgrace, which had won the Booker Prize in 1999. This was a course in
eighteenth-century fiction,and Disgracewas the last book on the syllabus.On the
day we came to discuss it I felt mute.Disgraceis a staggering work,spare and raw.
How do you begin to talk about it? It is probably best to start by simply admiring
it.Thus the opening salvo came as a surprise.A student wanted to know why
Disgrace was on the syllabus—indeed, why Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Jane
Austen’s Emma were on a syllabus whose only genuine eighteenth-century fic-
tions were Henry Fielding’s TomJonesand Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa.I had
already said that I thought Disgracewas an obsessive rewriting ofClarissa,an ex-
tended meditation on rape,on the will,on the problem ofcruelty,on “fighting,”
as one ofCoetzee’s character puts it,“with death.”I was strongly attached to this
insight;my students were not.I took it as the basis ofthe day’s seminar;they took
it as a mildly interesting aperçu.They shrugged.
Flummoxed,I let the conversation take its own course.It settled angrily on the
main character,David Lurie,a divorced middle-aged professor in South Africa
who has an affair with a student and is forced to resign from his university by a
cartoonish band ofpolitically correct feminists.David Lurie provoked outrage in
my students.What was his attitude towards women? Had he learned anything at
all by the end of the book? Had he really improved or had he merely turned to
art—composing an opera on the love life ofLord Byron—as a way ofducking his
responsibility? Nobody got angry with the vapid student Melanie,who let herself
be pressed—with what degree ofwillingness nobody can say—into his bed.No-
body cast a harsh word on the group of men who doused David Lurie with
ethanol and set him on fire while raping his daughter,Lucy.Nor did they ques-
tion the motives ofLucy’s neighbor,Petrus,who possibly masterminded the at-