Imagined Human Beings - Bernard Jay Paris

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I have continued to look at literature from a Horneyan perspective, one discovery has led to another, about both the nature of literature and the possible applications of the approach. I began by using the theory to make sense of thematic contradictions but soon came to appreciate its power to illuminate character. Recognizing the psychological complexity of many of the protagonists of nineteenth-century fiction led me to change my ideas about characterization; and as I read and taught works from a variety of periods and national literatures, I found that mimetic characterization is more widespread than generally thought and that Horney’s theory works well with writers from many cultures. My selection of texts in part 2 of this book is designed to show, among other things, that a Horneyan approach is applicable to works from Antigone to The End of the Road.

      Employing a Horneyan approach to character has led me to perceive that the great mimetic creations almost always subvert their aesthetic and thematic functions. As we have seen, E. M. Forster describes “round” characters as “creations inside a creation.” They “arrive when evoked,” he says, “but full of the spirit of mutiny. For they have these numerous parallels with people like ourselves, they try to live their own lives and are consequently engaged in treason against the main scheme of the book” (1927, 64). That seems exactly right to me. As wholes in themselves, imagined human beings can be understood in terms of their inner motivational systems, and when they are so understood, they appear to be inharmonious toward the larger whole of which they are a part. They are in conflict with their roles in the plot and with the author’s rhetorical treatment of their experience.

      When I first became aware of the incongruities between form and theme on the one hand and mimesis on the other, I felt that they were failures of art, but I have found them to be almost inescapable in realistic literature and have come to regard them as a concomitant of great characterization. Round characters create a dilemma for their creators. If they “are given complete freedom,” says Forster, “they kick the book to pieces, and if they are kept too sternly in check, they revenge themselves by dying, and destroy it by intestinal decay” (1927, 64). The artists’ character-creating impulses work against their efforts to shape and interpret experience, and they must choose between allowing their characters to come alive and kick the book to pieces or killing their characters by subordinating them to the main scheme of the work. The great realists choose fidelity to their psychological intuitions over the demands of theme and form, usually without knowing that they are doing so.

      There are a number of reasons why realistic characterization is almost bound to subvert a work’s formal and thematic structures. As Northrop Frye observes, there are “two poles of literature,” the mimetic, with its “tendency to verisimilitude and accuracy of description,” and the mythic, with its “tendency to tell a story . . . about characters who can do anything” (1957, 51). Western literature has moved steadily from the mythic to the mimetic pole, but the movement toward mimesis has affected only content; literary form is derived from mythic patterns. Thus even in the most realistic works, “we see the same structural principles” that we find in their pure form in myth (136). There is a built-in conflict between myth and mimesis: “the realistic writer soon finds that the requirements of literary form and plausible content always fight against each other” (Frye 1963, 36).

      Literary form and realistic characterization involve incompatible canons of decorum and universes of discourse. Realistic characterization aims at verisimilitude; it follows the logic of motivation, of probability, of cause and effect. But, as Frye observes, when judged by the canons of probability, “every inherited convention of plot in literature is more or less mad” (1963, 36). Form and mimesis arouse different sets of expectations within the reader. Mimetic characters create an appetite for a consistently realistic world. We want their behavior to make sense and their fates to be commensurate with the laws of probability. Realism does not round out a shape, however, and mimetic characters are often set into manipulated plots that arrive at rather arbitrary conclusions. One of our cravings, either for realism or closure, tends to be frustrated at the end.

      In many realistic works, the formal pattern is closed, despite the improbabilities this creates, and the characters remain true to life, subverting that closure. In Jane Austen’s novels, for example, the happy endings demanded by the comic structure seem much less satisfactory when we become aware of her protagonists’ unresolved psychological problems and the deficiencies in their relationships (see Paris 1978b). One of the most common formal patterns in fiction is the education plot, based on the archetype of the fortunate fall, in which the protagonists err because of their flaws, suffer because of their errors, and achieve wisdom and maturity because of their suffering. When we analyze the characters in Horneyan terms, we usually find that their growth is an illusion and that if they have undergone a great change it is from one destructive solution to another. The education plot and mimetic characterization are usually at odds with each other. This often gives rise to critical controversies, the sources of which can be understood through a Horneyan approach.

      It is important to distinguish between the psychological portrait of a character and the rhetoric by which the character is surrounded. By rhetoric I mean what we normally think of as theme and a good deal more besides. The rhetoric consists of all the devices an author employs to influence readers’ moral and intellectual responses to a character, their sympathy and antipathy, their emotional closeness or distance (see Booth 1961). When we understand mimetic characters in motivational terms, we usually find ourselves responding in ways that are different from those that the rhetoric seeks to induce and taking issue with the author’s interpretations and judgments.

      The great psychological realists have the capacity to see far more than they can conceptualize. Their grasp of inner dynamics and of interpersonal relations is so subtle and profound that concrete representation is the only mode of discourse that can do it justice. When they comment on what they have represented or assign their characters illustrative roles, they are limited by the inadequacy of abstractions generally and of the conceptual systems available to them. Their interpretations of their characters are often wrong and almost always oversimple, in contrast to their intuitive grasp of the characters’ psychology. The more we recover their intuitions and do justice to their mimetic achievement, the more disparities we perceive between their representation of human behavior and their interpretation of it.

      Psychological analysis leads us to judgments that are in conflict with those of the author because it enables us to see the destructiveness of the solutions that have been glorified by the rhetoric. Writers tend to validate characters whose defensive strategies are similar to their own and to satirize those who have different solutions. The rhetoric of the work and sometimes even the action are designed to gain sympathy for the life-styles and values of the favored characters. Changes from a condemned defensive strategy to an approved one are celebrated as education and growth, although the new solution is often as unhealthy as the one that has been discarded. Insofar as the characters are mimetically portrayed, we are given an opportunity to understand them in our own terms and to arrive at our own judgments. When we arrive at different interpretations and judgments, the author’s spell is broken, the characters are seen to rebel, and we experience a disparity between rhetoric and mimesis.

      To be more precise, we experience a disparity between the author’s interpretations and judgments and our own. The mimetic component of literature can never be definitively interpreted, by the author or anyone else. By virtue of its richness, it escapes all conceptual schemes, and conceptual schemes are constantly changing. I employ a Horneyan approach because it satisfies my appetite for clarity here and now. I am aware of the epistemological problems, but I choose to make as much sense of things as I can, according to my best lights, rather than to dwell on the uncertainty of knowledge. Although I shall not be constantly calling attention to the fact, let it be understood that I know that I am presenting my version of reality, which I hope will be of use to some others in the construction of theirs.

      Once psychological analysis of mimetic characters led me to resist authorial rhetoric, I began to interpret the rhetoric itself from a psychological perspective and to see it (along with much else) as a reflection of the psyche of the implied author. When the rhetoric consistently glorifies characters who embrace a particular solution while criticizing

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