How Fiction Works by James Wood

Author:James Wood [Wood, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-374-17340-1
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2008-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

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In fact, the ubiquitous flat character of the English novel, from Mr. Collins to Charles Ryder’s father, tells us something deep about the dialectic of British reticence and sociability, and something, too, about British theatricality. It is hardly surprising that the self should be so often theatrical in English fiction, when its great progenitor is Shakespeare. But of course many of Shakespeare’s characters are not just theatrical; they are self-theatricalizing. They carry within them fantastic, often illusory, notions of their own prowess and reputation. This is true of Lear, of Antony, of Cleopatra, of Richard II, of Falstaff, of Othello (who, as he is dying, is still instructing his audience to make a record of his demise: “Set you down this, / And say besides that in Aleppo once, / … I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog / And smote him thus”). And it is true, too, of the minor characters like Launce and Bottom and Mistress Quickly, who so easily flame up into histrionic comic irrelevance.

From Shakespeare descends a selftheatricalizing, somewhat solipsistic, flamboyant, but also perhaps essentially shy type who can be found in Fielding, Austen, Dickens, Hardy, Thackeray, Meredith, Wells, Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh, V. S. Pritchett, Muriel Spark, Angus Wilson, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, and on into the superb pantomimic embarrassments of Monty Python and Ricky Gervais’s David Brent. He is typified by Mr. Omer, in David Copperfield, the tailor whom David visits to get his funeral suit. (David is en route to his mother’s funeral.) Mr. Omer is an English soliloquist, and prattles on without embarrassment as he blunders his way all over David’s grief: “showing me a roll of cloth which he said was extra super, and too good mourning for anything short of parents,” and saying, “‘But fashions are like human beings. They come in, nobody knows when, why, or how; and they go out, nobody knows when, why, or how. Everything is like life, in my opinion, if you look at it in that point of view.’”

Something true is revealed here about the self and its irrepressibility or irresponsibility—the little riot of freedom in otherwise orderly souls, the self’s chink of freedom, its gratuity or surplus, its tip to itself. Mr. Omer is determined to be himself, even if that means likening fashions in clothes to patterns of morbidity. Yet no one would call Mr. Omer a “round” character. He exists for a bare minute. But contra Forster, the flat character like Mr. Omer is indeed capable of “surprising us”—the point is, he only needs to surprise us once, and can then disappear off the stage.

Mrs. Micawber’s catchphrase, “I never will desert Mr. Micawber,” tells us something true about how she keeps up appearances, how she maintains a theatrical public fiction, and so it tells us something true about her; but the farmer who says, “I’ll plough up that bit of gorse” is not maintaining any similarly interesting fiction about himself—he is just being stoical or habitual—and so we know nothing about his true self behind the catchphrase.

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