Characters

How to distinguish a person from a character? The mediation of personhood through social media, “profiles” and analytics encourages us to treat our lives as narratives, to cultivate something like “main character energy.” Accordingly, to be a “non-playable character” sounds like a fate worse than death. But the NPC is just the unknowable other, while the obsession with perceiving people as characters simplifies lived experience to the point of a conceit: namely, that we like people because we know them. When in fact, the inverse is true: we like people because we don’t know them, and yet we still want to have them around.

In European culture, the concept of character evolved in a setting where the separation of life and art was taken for granted. For over two hundred years, from the realist novel to the feature film, much of the pleasure and education derived from narrative art rested on the special attention paid to a form of personhood that the writer had abstracted into a singular study or sketch. Characters in novels or films could be judged believable, sympathetic or unsympathetic, even relatable, but the incompleteness of their representation made any serious identification with them not only unlikely but potentially dangerous, as various anxieties around contagion from fiction to life made clear (the Werther suicide panic; the fear that novel-reading women might become “capricious”; the rush of Bonapartism first in French novels, then in French and European public life).

Modern psychology inherited from this setup the idea that an individual can be usefully broken down to a quantity of attributes and behavioral patterns, regardless of whether such a sketch equates to a whole person or presence. Character is a moral category too, and we should be conscious of the fact that morality can provide only an impoverished account of a life. I grew up in the twilight years of authoritarian parenting and education—at my (now defunct) prep school in the north of England, pupils were still being slapped for misdemeanours as tragic as wetting themselves when I left in 2005. I was instilled with an unshakeable belief that such forms of suffering, misfortune and toil as we experienced at that nasty little institution were “character building.” And as brown kids, we were advised to endure it smiling if we wanted to get on in life.

Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that I refuse to make do with character. To me, character is akin to a facade or a model: not fit to house a whole person but perhaps the idea of one. Also predictable is my need for characters to persist in their worlds, and solely in their worlds. This is necessary for a character to be able to scope out the range of possible and permissible activities within the fiction they inhabit. The slippage here between character, as in traits, and a character, as in a story, is conscious. Both character and characters are essentially partial—a fact that must always be taken into consideration when the figures in question are marked in ways that politicise their otherwise aesthetic existence as figments of someone’s imagination or fantasy. As when, say, a character is racialised in one way or another.

“Wuthering Heights?”

When criticised for the whitewashing of Heathcliff in her adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, director Emerald Fennell justified her decision to cast Jacob Elordi for the role on the basis of a solipsistic erotics: “It’s very personal material for everyone. It’s very illicit. The way we relate to the characters is very private.” Doesn’t this sound like a millennial’s justification of blasé racial exclusions on her dating app profile? No X, no Y, no Z.