Characters in Literary Fictions

About the Editor

Jadwiga Węgrodzka is Associate Professor at the Institute of British and American Studies, University of Gdańsk, and the Faculty of Modern Languages, Koszalin Technical University, Poland. She publishes on popular genres, children’s literature, fantastic fiction and fairy tales.

About the Book

The book focuses on the category of character in fiction. It provides a general outline of different approaches to literary character followed by nineteen essays on individual authors from Conrad to Coetzee, on various genres from utopia, fantasy and gothic fiction to academic novel, and on characters’ extra-textual contexts from intertextuality to history and autobiography.

Characters in Literary Fictions is likely to perform the role of a lucid and inspiring guide to the complexities of character in fiction. The volume offers fresh insights into the work of diverse authors. Additionally, it constitutes a comprehensive overview of contemporary and historical forms of narrative fiction. The impressive scope of approaches offered – from structuralism to cognitivism – will make this volume indispensable to anyone interested in literary studies and character analysis.

Wojciech Nowicki
Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Sister Helen”: A functional approach to the literary character

ANDRZEJ ZGORZELSKI

Literary character appears to be one of the most complex and difficult textual relationships to analyse. Moreover, although numerous studies on the topic have been presented, it seems that their interpretative results have not yet been most illustrative or outstanding. If I were asked to undertake the challenge of such a demanding analysis, I would be bound – as in the case of all other aspects of the literary text – by some elementary methodological precepts that I have been taught by Russian Formalists, by the Prague School structuralists (not to be mistaken with French structuralism represented by Tzvetan Todorov, Claude Lévi-Strauss and others), and finally by semioticians from the Tartu school of semiotics. In my opinion these assumptions ensure the only consistent and logical paradigm of literary study in general and are also applicable to the particular aspect of the literary text that we recognise and refer to as a literary character.

To begin with: I have been taught to view a literary character as a textual phenomenon woven from an intricate network of sign relations, which exists only within a given utterance, within the text subjected to observation and interpretation. Such a perspective defines the basic directive of my scrutiny: to discover how this phenomenon reveals itself, how a given literary character “is made”. In the broader context of humanist endeavour my aim is to understand how “beauty” comes into being – the aesthetic value being the paramount feature of literary art. It is the “beauty” that draws us and enchants but the question still remains: how? How does a literary work of art draw us and enchant? It was the Formalist school that first introduced such an angle of interest into liter ← 27 | 28 → ary studies and asked the question about a literary text: “how is it made1?”

When I learned that a literary character is concealed within an intricate network of sign relations, that it is a phenomenon of a structural nature (where structure is defined as a functional whole of relationships, which cannot be reduced to a simple sum of its components), I understood that a literary character is not a human being who can meet you or can consult a psychologist. I also realised that every trait of a literary character has its function within the larger structure of the whole text. In my view it is precisely this function which should be the object of literary investigation, while psychological analysis, which treats the character as if it were a real living person, does not really belong to the area of literary studies.

In practice, however, it is easy to blunder for the simple reason that we all tend to read within a cultural framework of reference, and not a literary one: we treat a literary text as if it referred to the real world we live in. Even literary scholars may find it hard to shed the impression – shared by all readers – that characters encountered in the text are persons like living people. If this happens, then scholars often become interested in the characters’ inner-life and their interpersonal relationships. Then they are inclined to judge characters’ attitudes, ideologies or deeds, to reconstruct characters’ life stories (“how many children had Lady Macbeth?”), and on this basis to discuss historical or else contemporary reality. In fact, however, a literary character is simply a part of a certain model, to be more precise – a model of a different reality, not the world we live in.

Semiotics prompts here another sharply defined directive by declaring that the textual is recognised in opposition to the extra-textual. These are two different realities that are governed by different sets of rules. My own studies on fantastic literature made me realise that any attempts to compare those two (or even more numerous) realities in terms of their similarities or differences, possibility or probability of their existence, are ill-founded and fail to render any valuable interpretative conclusions. As it is, in contradistinction to our phenomenal reality, the literary model of the world is not random or chaotic but is a highly organised structure with a communicative purpose, the structure in which the function of ← 28 | 29 → each and every element is carried out only in relation to the whole structure and not to any external factors.

Moreover, semiotics – both in the variant developed by the Tartu School and by Umberto Eco – emphasises that a literary utterance is subjected not only to linguistic rules but is additionally complicated by its subordination to the rules of a supercode², called by Umberto Eco the “textual idiolect” and by Yuri Lotman the “secondary modelling system”³. Thus, a literary text – whether considered as discourse (narration) or as a world model – turns out to be entirely different from our reality not only by virtue of the semiotic nature of language itself, but also because of the semiotic nature of the supercode, which seems to raise this difference to the second power. For my scholarly purposes such recognition of the "ontology" of a literary text (and all its elements) becomes entirely satisfactory, so that Ockham’s razor effectively cuts all other (philosophical?) speculations about the status of literary characters or other textual phenomena.

The recognition of the different nature of the two realities, the textual and the phenomenal, allows me to distinguish the textual world model as the object of my observation and – on the other hand – to define the use which can be made of my knowledge and understanding gained from the textual observations. The recognition of the difference helps to draw a line between what exists actually in the text and what is evoked in my mind by reading and analysing the text. The experience of encountering many literary world models leads – I trust – to a better understanding of our own reality as well, though this aspect does not properly belong to the literary studies even if it defines their sense and purpose in most general terms.

If I were to analyse a literary character, I probably would also suspect – besides observing the above strict methodological directives – that the substructure we call a character reveals its secrets through the language of the literary text: both through the language that describes the characters and their actions as well as through the language in which the characters speak. It is probably the first textual level on which the ← 29 | 30 → structuring of a character takes place and where we can recognise primary signals of how a character is made. Practically everything is structured in language: motivations of actions, relationships between the character and various types of tellers, including the narrator (especially the first-person narrator-character or “focaliser” whose perspective determines the narration), interactions between characters and also relations with events and spatiotemporal settings. Polish readers may remember that the expression “a pine torn apart” is not just a part of the space setting, but brings important information about one of the characters in the novel Ludzie bezdomni by Stefan Żeromski. Obviously, analysing the language of a literary text I would also remember that we deal not only with linguistic rules but always with additional supercode rules, too.

In order to apprehend the role of the character in the context of compositional patterns or in the course of narration it would be necessary to go beyond simple observation of language and to delve deeper into the complex structures of the supercode: the interplay of various points of view, the patterning of lyrical, dramatic and narrative situations, or even into the intricate plot development, narrative structures, and the range of thematic topoi. The analysis of the supercode would probably reveal the relationship of the character with the textual organizing principles, with the text’s construction, with its dominant.

It has to be emphasised that a specific element of a literary work (such as a character) never exists in isolation from other elements, from relations with other aspects of the text and with the text as a whole (it is always good to remember that the textual structure is a functional whole made of relationships within the hierarchy of various structural levels: phonological/phonetic, morphological, lexical, syntactical and compositional). Any textual interpretation scrutinizing this variety of structures-within-a-structure of an individual work is a functional one.

At some point of the analysis it would be necessary to examine literary conventions used in the text, beginning with genre conventions and finishing with the axiological systems evoked in the text. This may open a broad literary-historical perspective allowing to place a given literary text among other works that precede or follow it. But such an analysis may not always bring verifiable results; the further we depart from the ← 30 | 31 → observation of concrete textual phenomena or the higher levels of abstraction we reach, the more dubious our conclusions may turn to be.

Let us return for a while to the beginning, to our most general methodological directives: what makes me adhere to them so stubbornly? What makes me limit myself to just one scholarly paradigm? In not so distant past the label of a formalist (applied to my own Father, Professor Czesław Zgorzelski) was not only offensive but also dangerous as a political denunciation. Today structuralism has a bad name: it is dishonoured and compromised. So what is the point of obeying principles which appear outmoded, rejected, forgotten and often evidently misunderstood?

As it is, I am really afraid of the uncritical acceptance of new theories and paradigms which, for instance, often seem to bring back the danger (among others) of returning to the crude division of the text into form and content. The division, to all appearances, has been successfully eliminated from literary studies but currently returns dressed up in various terminologies. I am also afraid of the new approaches to literature which frequently offer unverifiable and subjective critical statements and, what is more, again shift the scholar's attention from the text (which I take to be the proper object of literary studies) to, for example, the characters’ psychology, the author’s ideological convictions or the mental processes involved in reading. I am anxious for the distinctness, discreetness and "clarity" of literary studies, and I am particularly wary of the so-called interdisciplinary approaches which muster isolated examples culled from literary material to support newly coined theories. And I believe that, as a complex and challenging phenomenon, the literary character certainly deserves examination in the context of a long-established and well-tested, more traditional paradigm of literary studies.

*

Perhaps the general directives suggested above ought to be illustrated by more or less exemplary observations of characters in a particular text. But, instead of a monograph study, I can offer here only some sketchy remarks on Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ballad “Sister Helen” and the characters there⁴. At the outset let us see what characters we are to deal with ← 31 | 32 → in this text. They are revealed to us neither in description or narrative nor fully and instantly – at first, we can only hear their voices engaged in a dialogue. The order of responses remains the same throughout the whole text: the first three lines are uttered by Little Brother, with the iterative second line, the following two lines belong to his sister Helen, each stanza repeating her second line, while the next two lines – closing the stanza – contain a prayer-like apostrophe to Mary Mother, which constitutes a kind of commentary put in parenthesis and printed in italics5. The first stanza, with its introductory dialogic exchange, provides basic information about the situational context of the dialogue:

Thus the opening informs of Sister Helen’s actions: for three days she has been melting a wax figure of a man. Cultural competence allows us to recognise this activity as a magic ritual designed to bring about someone’s death. This suggestion is indirectly confirmed by the parenthetical part of the stanza: three days have elapsed in suspension between damnation and salvation, "between Hell and Heaven”. In contrast to the reader, however, Little Brother is unaware of his sister’s intent. He asks about the purpose of her time-consuming work because, as the second stanza reveals, he is waiting for the playtime she promised to him: “You’ll let me play, for you said I might”. What is more, Sister Helen’s subjective perception of the fast flow of time is suggested by the words: “Yet the time ran!”. Let us notice a crucial juxtaposition between the dialogic nature of the text, determining its dramatic⁶ character, and the lyr ← 32 | 33 → ical strategy of implication (as opposed to straightforward statement) which suggests both the innocence of Little Brother and Sister Helen’s subjective perception of the world. Evidently, the text communicates much information by implying rather than by stating explicitly.

Our understanding of the situation in which the characters find themselves at the beginning of the ballad, as well as of their characteristics, becomes often enhanced by a number of reticent passages in the dialogue. This strategy of hinting, implying and suggesting is based mainly on the device of equivalence, owing to which some words acquire multiple meanings, and refer not only to their immediate context but also to the past and future situations. This is what happens, for instance, in the fifth stanza of the ballad: