Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? PDF
Preview Why Do We Care about Literary Characters?
Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? This page intentionally left blank Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? 8 BLAKEY VERMEULE The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore ©2010The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved.Published 2010 Printed in the United States ofAmerica on acid-free paper 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715North Charles Street Baltimore,Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vermeule,Blakey. Why do we care about literary characters? / Blakey Vermeule. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13:978-0-8018-9360-5(hardcover :alk.paper) ISBN-10:0-8018-9360-7(hardcover :alk.paper) 1. Fiction—Psychological aspects. 2. Characters and characteristics in literature. 3. Psychology and literature. 4. Reader-response criticism. 5. English fiction— 18th century—History and criticism. I. Title. PN3352.P7V472009 809.3!927—dc22 2009002903 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Special discounts are available for bulk purchases ofthis book.For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936or [email protected]. The Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed ofat least 30percent post-consumer waste,whenever possible.All ofour book papers are acid-free,and our jackets and covers are printed on paper with recycled content. For Khedi and Terry, with deepest love This page intentionally left blank contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xv 1 The Fictional among Us 1 2 The Cognitive Dimension 21 3 What Hails Us? 49 4 The Literary Endowment:Five Mind-Reading Turns 62 Four Openings 62 Free Indirect Discourse 71 Machiavellian Narratives 81 Attention 95 The Drama ofDifferential Access to Social Information 103 5 The Fantasy ofExposure and Narrative Development in Eighteenth-Century Britain 107 6 God Novels 128 7 Gossip and Literary Narratives 150 8 What’s the Matter with Miss Bates? 171 9 Mind Blindness 193 10 Postmodernism Reflects:J.M.Coetzee and the Eighteenth-Century Novel 215 Epilogue 244 Notes 251 Bibliography 255 Index 265 This page intentionally left blank preface He’s my favorite fictional character —Homer Simpson,on God The idea for this book came to me during a graduate class I taught at Northwest- ern University in December of2001.We were talking about J.M.Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, which had won the Booker Prize in 1999. This was a course in eighteenth-century fiction,and Disgracewas the last book on the syllabus.On the day we came to discuss it I felt mute.Disgraceis a staggering work,spare and raw. How do you begin to talk about it? It is probably best to start by simply admiring it.Thus the opening salvo came as a surprise.A student wanted to know why Disgrace was on the syllabus—indeed, why Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Jane Austen’s Emma were on a syllabus whose only genuine eighteenth-century fic- tions were Henry Fielding’s TomJonesand Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa.I had already said that I thought Disgracewas an obsessive rewriting ofClarissa,an ex- tended meditation on rape,on the will,on the problem ofcruelty,on “fighting,” as one ofCoetzee’s character puts it,“with death.”I was strongly attached to this insight;my students were not.I took it as the basis ofthe day’s seminar;they took it as a mildly interesting aperçu.They shrugged. Flummoxed,I let the conversation take its own course.It settled angrily on the main character,David Lurie,a divorced middle-aged professor in South Africa who has an affair with a student and is forced to resign from his university by a cartoonish band ofpolitically correct feminists.David Lurie provoked outrage in my students.What was his attitude towards women? Had he learned anything at all by the end of the book? Had he really improved or had he merely turned to art—composing an opera on the love life ofLord Byron—as a way ofducking his responsibility? Nobody got angry with the vapid student Melanie,who let herself be pressed—with what degree ofwillingness nobody can say—into his bed.No- body cast a harsh word on the group of men who doused David Lurie with ethanol and set him on fire while raping his daughter,Lucy.Nor did they ques- tion the motives ofLucy’s neighbor,Petrus,who possibly masterminded the at-
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