Prologue: Fictional Characters: Psychoanalytic and Literary Perspectives

Abstract

Are fictional characters real people? Of course not. By definition. Even when they’re partially inspired by one or more actual people. But if they’re not real, why do we care about them enough to read fiction? Further, why has there been such a profound disconnect for the past several decades between general readers’ reactions to fictional characters, and those of many literary theorists, who tell us such characters are merely words on the page, and that it is absurd to speculate about their psychology, or their backstory? In college, I took a comparative literature seminar on novels that openly or – more often – subtly alluded in their plots to the life of Jesus. That is, the novels’ protagonists had the life of Jesus as a salient backdrop, adding depth to their characters. Our teacher later published a book based on the topic of our seminar (Ziolkowski, 1972). That course sensitized me to the possibility that a fictional character can have an important backstory – including one of literary allusion – that will enrich our experience with the book. This issue was inspired by a book review. Evan Kindley of Pomona College, in the March 25, 2021 New York Review of Books, wrote an essay titled “The People We Know Best” (Kindley, 2021). Below the title appeared these provocative and generative statements: “Readers love fictional characters almost as if they were real people. Literary scholars are just starting to take them more seriously.” This tapped into longstanding concerns I have had about the direction that literary theory has taken, downplaying the roles of actual writers and readers of fiction. In the process, it has weakened its previously robust connection with a truly psychoanalytic view of the mind. After citing a wide range of opinions about the nature of fictional characters, Kindley concludes, “A strange fact about academic literary criticism is that this . . . view [that of L.C. Knights, who wrote that fictional characters are ‘merely an abstraction . . . in the mind of the reader’] – that literary characters don’t even exist – has been the predominant one for almost a century, despite being the least intuitively satisfying and attractive one to most people. Indeed, literary critics have been strict about policing readers (and one another) when it comes to talking about character” (accessed online September 17, 2022). Psychoanalysts are bound to a have special interest in studying in depth what fiction and fictional characters mean to readers, including readers who are our patients (for example, Novey, 1964). Ours is a developmental theory, so we would expect to find a developmental line of our experiences with stories, beginning with being read to by a parent; reading picture books, then chapter books as a child; then encountering adult fiction as an adolescent and beyond. Children spend much time in the world of their imagination (Selma Fraiberg, 1959, The Magic Years). Fraiberg contends that “language originates in magic” (p. 112), as the baby’s babbling “magical incantations” sometimes “bring about a desired event,” such as a radiant smile on his mother’s face when he first says “mama.” And childhood self states are magically revived when adults read fiction for pleasure. Wilhelm Schlegel observed that Shakespeare, in particular, connects us with the childhood sources of our imaginative capacities so we can better understand and enjoy his plays (“tales which are . . . attractive and intelligible to childhood . . . they transport even manhood back to the golden age of imagination,” Schlegel, 1815, p. 387). For years, I have had many illuminating conversations with a friend who is an English professor, and who has also had much non-clinical training in psychoanalysis. We share a love of creative