What is Character? 有關小說人物的討論(衛報文章)
本週六的Book版
一篇討論 小說中的人物
到底是純粹虛構還是 反映你我他
除了討論小說家刻畫人物的技巧
到底小說家 輕描淡寫 或是 苦心經營的 主人翁
讀者怎麼看待 怎麼反應
同時還進一步討論 EM Foster對於小說人物的看法
(文章太長 僅節錄幾段)
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2246855,00.html
A life of their own
Saturday January 26, 2008
The Guardian
.....................................
a great deal of nonsense is written about characters in fiction - from those
who believe too much in character and from those who believe too little.
Those who believe too much have an iron set of prejudices about what
characters are: we should get to "know" them; they should not be
"stereotypes", they should "grow" and "develop"; and they should be nice. So
they should be pretty much like us. A glance at the thousands of foolish
"reader reviews" on Amazon, with their complaints about "dislikeable
characters", confirms a contagion of moralising niceness. Again and again, in
book clubs up and down the country, novels are denounced because some feeble
reader "couldn't find any characters to identify with", or "didn't think that
any of the characters 'grow'".
On the other side, among those with too little belief in character, we hear
that characters do not exist at all. ........
But of course characters are assemblages of words, because literature is such
an assemblage of words: this tells us absolutely nothing, and is like
elaborately informing us that a novel cannot really create an imagined
"world", because it is just a bound codex of paper pages.
............................................
The truth is that the novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it
always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it. And the novelistic
character is the very Houdini of that exceptionalism. There is no such thing
as "a novelistic character". There are just thousands of different kinds of
people, some round, some flat, some deep, some caricatures, some
realistically evoked, some brushed in with the lightest of strokes.
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Perhaps because I am not sure what a character is, I find especially moving
those postmodern novels,... in which we are confronted with characters at once real and
unreal. In these novels, the authors ask us to reflect on the fictionality of
the heroes and heroines who give the books their titles. And in a fine
paradox, it is precisely such reflection that stirs in the reader a desire to
make these fictional characters "real", to say, in effect, to the authors: "I
know that they are only fictional - you keep on telling me this. But I can
only know them by treating them as real." ... An unreliable narrator insists that Professor Pnin is "a character"
in two senses of the word: a type (clownish, eccentric émigré), and a
fictional character, the narrator's fantasy. ....
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01/27 14:39, , 1F
01/27 14:39, 1F