The Surface and the Depths: Characters, Character and Stories
Along with plot, characters are essential elements of stories. Seems straightforward, right?
Characters are at the core of stories. The events in characters’ lives, and the reasons those events are connected, unfurl the patterned cloth of the plot. Without characters in whatever form they take, animal, vegetable or mineral, events happen without meaning. Characters have a point of view; characters are able to make meaning; characters have and express feelings; characters can and do suffer. Characters allow writers and readers to express their creative imagination in perceiving another’s life, to transgress the limitations of their own life and to realise the finite quality of their life.¹ Characters allow us to see life from someone else’s perspective, to live in another’s shoes.
Many assumptions and presumptions follow along, unbidden and mostly unvoiced, with readers’ and writers’ concepts of characters, character and characterisation. These presumptions channel the way writers write and the way readers read. These presumptions, I suggest, are about the tension between the two interacting dimensions of a story: what it says, and what it is talking about; the surface and the depths.
Problems arise, though, in confusing which way round these two things should go — from the depths up to the surface; or from the surface down to the depths. In examining these two, we must take great care in our steps lest we put ourselves into difficulties with our focus and our priorities.
The Surface
The surface of a story is what it says, the words on the page, the prose and dialogue, the cut and thrust.
At the surface of a text, characters are the embodiment of a persona, a point of view: they are living, breathing citizens, acting and suffering in the world of the story.
Characters are the specific personalities in the story.
They are Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester; Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler; Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion; Deckard and Batty; Captain Ahab and the white whale; Napoléon Bonaparte and Joséphine; Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy; Marlin, Nemo and Dory; Hazel and Bigwig; David Bowman and HAL 9000.
They are the specific personalities in the story, whether fictional or historical.
At the surface, in the narrative as told and as read, characters have personalities. They have things they want to do in life, motives for their behaviour, and reasons for acting or speaking in a particular way. They have vulnerabilities, flaws and failings that hamper the way they act and speak. They have a personal history that has shaped them and their views of the world and the way they react and respond to it.
Characters speak.
That is, when a character speaks in a story there is someone who is speaking. A whole person. Each character is not a mere manifestation or embodiment of the narrator, or a dimension of the author’s psyche. As far as the reader is concerned, someone is speaking. And, being a whole person, characters speak in contradictions and inconsistencies, where there is a surplus of meaning.
At the surface, we see a person.
The Depths
If the surface is what the story says, the depths of a story is what it is talking about, the themes and ideas, the questions and problems that it is wrestling with.
In the depths, though, things get indistinct. This is the realm of allusion and inference, where the surplus of meaning is overflowing. It is much harder to talk about characters and we tend more to characterisation.
Humans create patterns to bring order out of confusion
In the depths, where individuality and specificity are harder to distinguish we try to recognise things, we try to gain our bearings, to retain a sense of which way is up, which way is down. We humans suffer terribly from pareidolia: we create patterns and search for the recognisable (often finding things that are not necessarily there, a face in the pattern of a burnt piece of toast, say) to bring order out of confusion, to bring familiarity and regularity in a murky and indistinct world.
In the depths are traits, qualities, types and tropes that help the reader and the writer to understand more, to perceive similarities, repetitions and embodiments, to see limitations and boundaries that constrain and compel the ways characters behave.
Monsters from the Deep
However, the way the depths and the surface interact causes all manner of problems. Pareidolia, our subconscious urge to find the familiar, leads us to jump to conclusions that are maybe unjustified. When we spot a pattern it’s all too easy to leap, without justification, to asserting that the pattern is everywhere.
In storytelling, this results in talking about roles. Characters in stories are manifestations of an underlying set of roles, so the thinking goes, roles that are finite in number and clearly definable. There’s a hero and a villain; there’s helpers and opponents; there are false heroes, gatekeepers, gift-givers; and so on.
Moreover, those roles are universal, the argument goes. Every story has them, these underlying roles, and every story can be analysed to expose characters with these roles within them.
Roles, Models and Structuralism
The structuralist movement that began in the first half of the 20th Century systematised this thinking for narratives, forming several theories of structural narratology.² These theories attempted to create a universal model that defined the set of character roles and the structure of narratives of all types, at all times, in all places.
The most well-known is Vladimir Propp’s Morophology of the Folktale, based on his analysis of Russian folk stories. Others notable structuralist narratologies were developed by Tzvetan Todorov (who coined the term ‘narratology’), Claude Lévi-Strauss (derived from his structural anthropology), Roland Barthes (his ‘mythologies’), and Algirdas Greimas (his ‘actantial model’).
These theories caught like a virus at the time. This was an age when the significance and importance of science and scientific thinking was rising to preeminence in the academic world, the political world and ultimately in society at large. In order to assert their relevance, other disciplines needed to portray themselves as scientific, or science-like, so in the mid and late 20th Century a scientism fever took hold in academic disciplines. (When I was at school, we learned cooking but it was called ‘domestic science.’) Linguistic study of narratives was not immune and structural narratology was a firm part of the zeitgeist.
Structural narratology is not just a relic of the past, however. A contemporary descendant of 20th Century structural narratology is Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, often called the ‘monomyth’ (a very revealing subtitle), popularised in Hollywood in Christopher Vogler’s famous 7-page memo to cinema executives, A Practical Guide to The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
Structural approaches are very appealing. There is something beguiling about a simple analytical model: its apparent explanatory power and universal application is seductive. But, they create a rose-tinted view of stories: that there is something in their depths, in their substructure, that connects them all, something that can be grasped and defined. We, like archaeologists, can dig through the surface detritus and uncover the true structure hidden below. We, like particle physicists, can smash things together to get at the smaller elemental parts and define the laws that determine how they work.
We humans like rules and models. They make complicated things simple. They are important in the right context. They are enormously attractive in difficult situations, because they help us to bring order amongst disorder.
Take, for example, the number of methods for defining personality types, from Galen’s ‘Four Temperaments’ to Carl Jung’s Psychological Types to Myers-Briggs to socionics to enneagrams and many more besides. All of them claim some analytical, scientific basis and scientific methodology in application. Most of them have substantial criticisms that often point to flaws in their scientism.
For writers, this is an enormous problem. Writing a story is a difficult thing to do; writing a good story, a believable story with a plausible plot and compelling characters is extremely difficult. And because it is so difficult, writers fall back on models and methods and structures to make it a bit easier. Search the web and you can find a myriad of models and systems and books and courses that supposedly guarantee writing success. And because it is so expensive to make a film, Hollywood falls back too easily on formulas for a surefire success.
Systematising human behaviour, creating rules and models, especially when they try to rationalise the way humans behave and interact is deeply problematic, and there is a very simple reason.
We humans are irrational. We are full of contradictions and conflicting motivations. And we are adaptable, plastic, contextual, paradoxical, inconsistent beings. We react and behave and speak differently in different places and environments and situations, according to our mood, our stress, our tiredness, our preoccupation. Physical pain changes how we feel and behave. The weather and the season makes us behave differently. We behave differently in a crowd from when we’re with friends or loved ones from when we’re alone. We change as we age, as people and experiences shape us.
That is not to say that analysing human behaviour is futile. Not at all.
It is, however, to question the direction of travel.
But Every Story Has a Hero, Right?
One of the fundamental problems of having a model for human behaviour, a structural model for narrative in this case and, more specifically, a substructural character role to embody, is that model gets overlaid on a narrative. The model is placed on top of a story and the story is made to fit the model.
This is a cardinal sin for a reader or critic. A text — whether it’s a novel, a short story, a film, a newspaper article, or whatever — must be allowed to speak for itself. The story-as-told cannot be relegated to a subservient position, and yet structuralist narratology keeps the narrative structure preeminent. The story-as-summarised dominates.
This overlaid model is precisely what happened in Hollywood following Campbell’s book and Vogler’s famous memo. The creators of Star Wars used the hero’s journey model in developing the story, and Vogler’s memo led directly to The Lion King, both of which broke new ground in their time. But their success and popularity led to other film makers to ascribe their triumph to their use of the hero’s journey model and so followed a slew of films that also used the model, movies that felt too frequently predictable, formulaic and boring.
And which model is being overlaid? Is it Propp’s narrative structure, with 31 functions and 7 character roles? Or is it Cambell’s with his 17 stages? Or Vogler’s with his 12 stages and 8 character ‘archetypes’? Or Greimas’s, with his 6 actants?
To this day, writers, courses and critics continue to assess films and novels according to the hero’s journey model, asserting that they all fit.
Life At the Extremes: When Heroes Fail
These two criticisms — a dominating substructural model that forces a story to conform to the model and does not allow it to speak for itself; and the consequent formulaic predictability — are the key criticisms of structuralist narratives and substructural character roles.
There are further problems, though, that can be clearly demonstrated.
At the extremes of human experience, normality and order break down. Roles are no longer rigid and well-defined; they start to falter and ultimately collapse.
This is liminality — being at the thresholds and boundaries, the limits of life.
In The Matrix, Cypher betrays Morpheus and precipitates the final showdown, and Agent Smith pursues, ambushes and kills Neo in the Matrix. Both characters are Neo’s opponents, Agent Smith being the great villain. But both their actions ultimately help Neo. Cypher’s betrayal of Morpheus provokes Neo to try to rescue him and doing so gains greater confidence in his ability. Agent Smith’s pursuit and execution of Neo is the ultimate situation that allows Neo to become The One.
Liminality, the extremes of human experience where normality and order break down
In Macbeth, Macbeth starts as the classic hero, on his way home from winning the war, but the witches prophesy and it’s not long until he’s killed the king and numerous others. The witches don’t tell MacBeth to kill to fulfil the prophecy; he and Lady MacBeth do that all by themselves.
In Schindler’s List, Amon Göth orders the liquidation of the ghetto. Oskar Schindler witnesses the slaughter, is profoundly moved, and is spurred to use his previous exploitation of Jews as cheap labour as a façade for saving as many as possible from the concentration camps.
In Anna Karenina, Vronsky’s passionate love for Anna induces her to leave her husband, leaving her son behind and ultimately committing suicide.
In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Darcy is Elizabeth Bennet’s adversary at every turn. Standoffish, judgemental, insulting her at the dance and rude throughout the story, he even tries to break up Mr Bingley and Jane. We eventually discover that he is desperately in love with Elizabeth and he becomes dashingly heroic.
In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is a poor orphan, then a romantic hero consumed with his love for Cathy, then leaves so he can make enough money to one day win her over. She dies, and Heathcliff spends the rest of his life making everyone else’s lives miserable, abusing his family.
In (the film adaptation of) The English Patient, after Almásy has recounted his story to Hana she injects him with an overdose of morphine to euthanise him.
In Frankenstein, Frankenstein is the doctor, not the monster … except he is the monster, as well. He is a scientific genius wracked with grief at the death of his mother. He creates a living being out of dead body parts, essentially a baby … and then abandons it, fearing and hating his offspring.
In the Harry Potter saga, Professor Snape is consistently Harry’s nemesis, thwarting him in every year at Hogwarts, even killing Dumbledore, until Harry discovers that he was completely wrong about Snape all along.
Opponents are helpers, helpers are opponents, all at the same time in liminal experiences. Heroes are villains are heroes; villains become heroes become villains.
What is possibly more important, though, is a vital trait of this brief excursion: we have already returned to the surface, to the realm of specific characters and embodied, whole people in these iconic stories.
Omitted and Overlooked
One final question should be raised. Advocates of essential roles, basic character traits and substructure narrative models give examples of characters and stories that fit the model but do not talk about characters or stories that do not fit the model.
Moreover, as things are pointed out that do not fit then advocates of these essential roles and substructural models do very slippery things.
The Wikipedia summary of the hero’s journey/monomyth, for example, gives this get-out-of-jail card to the model: ‘Not all monomyths necessarily contain all 17 stages explicitly; some myths may focus on only one of the stages, while others may deal with the stages in a somewhat different order. So anything goes, any variation, any order, any number — it all fits the model. We’ll make it fit, dammit! Similar contortions happen in other models of story, character and personality.
Similarly, brilliant stories that do not have any sense of a heroic journey nor characters that fit a given personality mould are simply ignored. Take, for example, Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong or William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, episodic stories that follow the way characters change and develop over time as they encounter sublime and horrific experiences in the worlds they inhabit. These are not heroic journeys. They are simply lives.
Coming Up for Air
I am not arguing here that the depths do not exist. Rather, I would suggest that it is the surface of characters that we encounter first, the real embodied personalities, people who are acting and suffering in the world of their story. And as we encounter the actual characters in the surface of the story — what the story actually says about them — then we start to think about similarities with other characters, which prompts us to look a little deeper, to the traits, qualities and tropes they share.
When we encounter George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, for example, we encounter George Bailey the person, first and foremost. He is not the embodiment of a hero who is about to depart on a metaphorical journey, but a real person struggling to find himself amongst the limitations of his family and his provincial town. The irony of George Bailey’s life is precisely that it lacks any journey and adventure — he is desperate to travel, to escape Bedford Falls and see the world, and yet the expectations on him combined with his instinctual selflessness and his sense of what’s right prevent him from going on a hero’s journey. There are certainly plenty of attempts to analyse It’s a Wonderful Life according to the ‘monomyth’ or hero’s journey story structure thesis, but they all end up forcing George to be a hero when the story is presenting us with the opposite.
What we get, though, in encountering George Bailey, or Elizabeth Bennet, or Shere Khan, or Miss Havisham, or George Smiley, or Mary Poppins, or Luke Skywalker or whoever is a prompt to gaze into the depths. They urge us to look deeper, past their surface, to see within them patterns of behaviour, to see traits and types and qualities.
The way that a character embodies traits and types and qualities is not a repetition, but it does rhyme.
When characters help us look into the depths, they set us thinking about forthright daughters and feckless sons and drunk fathers and self-denying mothers and dominating bosses and naïve apprentices and abused women and gullible voters and power-crazed officials and voyeuristic recluses and timid prodigies and concealed charlatans and aloof billionaires and credulous disciples. We get to ruminate on the power of hope, the terror of loneliness, the corruption of money, the lust of ambition, the comfort of companionship, the joy of triumph, the grip of obsession, the wonder of discovery. They help us reflect on what love will drive us to do, how fear can immobilise, what we will do to pursue justice, the desolation when justice escapes us.
Each character is an embodiment of traits and types and qualities but none are an instance of a role. The way that a character embodies those traits and types and qualities is not a repetition, but it does rhyme. It is not a repetition because each character, whether human or otherwise, is an individual, a unique person with their own hopes and abilities, fears and failings, shaped by a distinct set of events peculiar to them and them alone. But it rhymes because we human beings are social, we are impressionable, we are affected by each other and inspired by each other and we emulate each other.
From the Surface to the Depths
In summary, then, models of character types and theories of personality are abundant, but they are deeply problematic. They presume an underlying order to the human psyche, a pre-existing systematic regularity without adequate evidence or reasoned justification. They can help us begin to understand but they are a pale imitation and a dull reflection of the complexity and fecundity of being human.
Rather, when we read we encounter characters on the page (or the silver screen, the newsprint, etc.). We see them in the surface of the story as they are presented in the text, as people, with the richness of real lives and real histories, real hopes and struggles. We must let them, and the textual world in which we find them, speak for themselves, from their own experiences, with their own personality.
As we encounter characters in the surface of the text we are drawn down below, into the depths, where we are confronted with the things that we share, the things that are common, the ways we are alike. And that kicks us back up to the surface where we can breathe again in the reality of the lives of the characters in our stories.
Footnotes
¹ Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man (rev. trans. Charles A. Kelby; New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), 18–46.
² Cf. David Herman, Basic Elements of Narrative (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 26–29.
