"Action is character," F. Scott
Fitzgerald wrote in a notebook, meaning that showing a person's actions, and
more importantly his choices, is the clearest way to delineate his personality.
But there is a distinction between character and characterization. It's one
thing to make a man seem brave, petty or violent. It's something else to make
him seem real. The best short description of characterization I've ever found
was a quote on the back of a novel whose title and author I can't even
remember. While they've gone out of my mind, the quote, by V. S. Pritchett,
remains. "[Author X]," he
wrote, "knows the fantasy lives of his characters."
When great writers look at the works of others,
they often end up discussing themselves; and Pritchett's statement could just
as easily have been a description of, and an explanation for, the vitality and
life in his own work. Throughout the whole of his long writing career, you feel
Pritchett had a direct line to the cinema playing behind his characters'
eyes. The cinema where they were the
heroes and happiness unfolded.
While we judge the people we meet in fiction
by their decisions, we believe in them largely because of what comes out of
their mouths. Which ties good characterization inextricably into the art of writing
good dialogue. "Good" doesn't necessarily mean clever or long.
"You killed Miles and you're going over for it," is good because it's
true to Sam Spade's hard-headed, uncomplicated view of his life. However, given
that the main purpose of the pages of a novel—any novel—is to make you keep
turning them, dialogue needs to be more than just true. It needs to be interesting.
The fuller section of The Maltese Falcon
that I've just quoted is,
"I
don't care who loves who. I'm not going to play the sap for you. I won't walk
in Thursby's and who knows who else's footsteps. You killed Miles and you're
going over for it."
This
has a great rhythm and power, without moving outside the vocabulary Spade would
use or the kind of ideas he’d express. Another writer of great hyper-real
dialogue is Saul Bellow. His characters use ordinary idioms and phrases, but
often at such a pitch of emotion their thoughts go tumbling into each other. From
The Victim, when Leventhal finally decides he's had enough of Allbee
leeching off him:
"You
dirty phoney!" Levanthal cried huskily. "You ugly bastard
counterfeit. I said it because you're such a liar, with your phoney tears and
your wife's name in your mouth, every second word. The poor woman, a fine life
she must have had with you, a freak like you, out of a carnival."
People reveal themselves in anger; they lose
hold of the image they want to present to the world. But it's impossible to
write a novel in which everyone is angry all the time. So the writer needs to find
the smaller signs where people give themselves away. Great examples of these
are scattered throughout Paul Theroux's collected short stories.
Theroux is a great describer of groups. Whether
it's a reception at a London Embassy, the muggy heat of a Malaysian polo match,
or four poets strolling through a frosty Amherst night, Theroux's group scenes
bristle with life. This isn't because his characters are constantly screaming
at each other—although their tempers do fray and irritations do flare—but
rather because he creates the impression of separate human minds running on
very different rails. Theroux's people talk to one side of each other, they
enter conversations pre-armed with a view of the world, their minds snag
monomaniacally on an idea and then refuse to let it go.
How much mental space an author needs to
achieve this is moot. Graham Greene often
said he knew his characters had become real when they became capable of
surprising him. In contrast, Nabokov
described his characters as "galley slaves." And yet to the reader Humbert Humbert remains
as disturbingly real as his desire for Dolores Haze.
The issue of authorially-granted freedom has
often led to novels being labeled as either plot-driven or character-driven;
but the fact is, any wholly alive story is set moving by the hungers and self-deceptions
of its people. The plot of The Maltese Falcon ticks along like a Swiss
watch. But it's the low cunning and mutual suspicion of Joel Cairo, Brigid
O'Shaughnessy and the Fat Man, and the almost amoral nature of the "blond
Satan" (Sam Spade) they turn to who set the book ticking.
Who would you recommend as a great example of
characterization, either to learn from or simply to enjoy? Which writer and which of their works?
Mithran
Somasundrum was born in Colombo, grew up in London and currently lives in
Bangkok. His short stories have appeared
in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine,
The Sun, Inkwell, The Minnesota Review,
Natural Bridge, and GUD, among
others.
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