The Creation of Character

The one unassailable fact with fiction is that it will contain characters – characters that live and breathe on the page in their own unique ways.  The characters may not necessarily be human (Paul Auster’s Timbuktu [1999] is from the point of view of a dog) but there will be some quality within each character that endears them to the reader.  A qualification: this endearment may not necessarily mean that the character is likeable – think of one of the most beloved figures in British fiction, Heathcliff, and how his passion at times overwhelms into madness.  He is not, by any definition, a loveable character, and yet he is loved.  Or there is Becky Sharp, a character defined by her abrasive wit, and yet it is this that makes Thackeray’s Vanity Fair [1847–48] such a joy.  

Guy de Maupassant

 A sentence beloved of Ford Madox Ford and Henry James comes from the Guy de Maupassant story, Le Reine Hortense [1883] and it is this:

“He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway.” 

It is a sentence I love as well, for it is one that instantly brings forth the image of a man.  A man with a past and about whom you know the psychology.  That one sentence speaks multitudes.  From it we can discern that first he is a gentleman (so we know that he is well attired), that he has red whiskers (and red whiskers immediately brings to mind a certain kind of individual, usually of an irascible nature), and that he always goes through doorways first (telling us that though he is a gentleman he is not always a mannered gentleman).  These qualities, discerned quickly, will inform our understanding of the remainder of the story.  This gentleman is a character defined.  As Ford said of him, “that gentleman is so sufficiently got in that you need no more of him to understand how he will act. He has been “got in” and can get to work at once.”

For this is the important issue to the writer – the “getting in” of character.  What Ford means here is creating a character that lives on the page and is defined without much need for lengthy description or detailing.  It is what all novelists want – their characters to be alive.  Much bad fiction suffers because the writer is uncertain as to whom their character is.  You can see the writer struggling to make their characters breathe.  They struggle through this by creating detailed pictures of the characters on the page, framed as if in a photograph.  They read something like:

“Henry was a tall man, six four, with a crop of light blonde hair that waved over his forehead.  His neck was long and thin, and came down to broad shoulders.  His arms, gangly for his body, ended in hands of weathered skin, for Henry was a farmer.  His light blue eyes looked back out at you with such deep resonance.”

And so on for a page or so.  It may be an interesting portrait of a man, but it is a man who is only anatomically alive.  He remains a mere waxwork on the page.  We may have a perfect picture of him, but who is he and why should we care?  It is why Maupassant’s gentleman works – there is a picture of him and he is instantly alive.  He is, as Ford so rightly observed, “got in”.

The Power of Lolita

In 1955, Vladimir Nabokov published his most famous work, Lolita.  Lolita was included on Time's list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 and was fourth in the Modern Library's 1998 list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th century.  Its reputation is vast; its influence is bigger still.  What follows is an extract from my PhD where I discuss this novel and gives great insights into the creation of one of the greatest novels ever written.

Lolita did not come to Nabokov fully formed in the mid-1950s.  In 1939, he wrote a novella that remained unpublished until 1986, following his death in 1977.  That novel, entitled The Enchanter, Nabokov would go onto describe as “the first little throb of Lolita” in an essay that would subsequently be attached to that great novel.   Like Lolita, it is concerned with ephebophilia and the same technique of a predatory older man to gain access to his desire as Humbert Humbert – by marrying the mother.  But the truth is greyer even than Nabokov paints it.  He touched upon the theme earlier, in a short story written in 1926, entitled A Nursery Tale. The theme would appear also in Laughter in the Dark [1932], and again in one chapter of The Gift [1938].  This concept of ephebophilia fascinated Nabokov – and I dare say if Lolita had been his first novel he would have been accused of being an ephebophile himself.  Lolita was a secret heart beating within him, and though it is touched on in other works, he wrote two distinct novels on the subject – The Enchanter and Lolita itself.   

Yet he is still not done with it, or the subject.  A third, unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, was published in 2009, after thirty years of family debate about whether they should release it.  Nabokov had requested it be destroyed.  That unfinished novella features Hubert H. Hubert, an older man preying on a pubescent girl, but unlike in Lolita, he is rejected.  What made Nabokov return again and again to Lolita and the men that pursue her?  I’m not sure even Nabokov knew.  In a BBC interview[i] he said,

“Lolita is a special favorite of mine. It was my most difficult book—the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real.”

Was the desire alone to make the distant tangible to him?  Was he simply imposing structure on a section of the world he did not understand?  Whatever his reasoning, it is lost.  But we can look at how one novel evolved into something else.  In 1939 he stood by The Enchanter, but later disowned it.  He wrote it in Russian, and had this to say of it long after Lolita was finished:

“Now that my creative connection with Lolita is broken, I have re-read [The Enchanter] with considerably more pleasure than I experienced when recalling it as a dead scrap during my work on Lolita.  It is a beautiful piece of Russian prose, precise and lucid.”

And it is those things.  The literary world is glad it was not lost.  Not only because is a short masterpiece by Nabokov, haunting and disturbing in a manner similar to his other work, but also because we can compare how a writer matures, and alters his presentation of similar material.  Here is the famous opening of Lolita:

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”

God those lines sizzle with energy!  We know straight off how proud our narrator is of this woman, whoever she is.  Very quickly we learn not woman, but child.  Then we’re hit with the lines:

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

And we gulp.  We draw breath.  We know this isn’t going to end well.   But what’s more – here is a man, proud of his actions.  He draws pride in his sexual attraction to a child and in the act of murder.  He is a grotesque, and Nabokov shocks us again and again with him.  Through the novel we feel our understanding of him shift, even our position of empathy.  Everything in that novel comes from that first short chapter; the novel is an explaining of how a man can end up there.  How a man can become that.

The Enchanter, on the other hand, sets out its stall very, very differently.

““How can I come to terms with myself?” he thought, when he did anything at all.  “This cannot be lechery.  Coarse carnality is omnivorous; the subtle kind presupposes eventual satiation.  So what if I did have five or six normal affairs – how can one compare their insipid randomness with my unique flame?  What is the answer?”

The narrator is clearly locked into a similar mental turmoil to Humbert Humbert but shares not a shred of his violence.  This man, who remains unnamed throughout, as does the girl, is stalled by fear when his plan seems to work and gains access to the girl.  His fear causes his death.  The Enchanter is a considerate work, the work of a writer finding his way into material that is beyond his own understanding, but in comparison to Lolita it is a weaker work.  Lolita hits you, hard.  No wonder it was so instantly recognised for its brilliance. 

In April 1947, Nabokov wrote to his friend Edmund Wilson explaining the idea: "I am writing ... a short novel about a man who liked little girls—and it's going to be called The Kingdom by the Sea....”[ii]  It took him eight years to finish Lolita.  It had been eight years since The Enchanter.  

Writing a novel of genius takes time, and patience.  Nabokov got there brilliantly, in the end. 

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[i] Peter Duval-Smith  and  Christopher Burstall interviewed him in July 1962, for the Bookstand TV programme, in Zermatt.  It was broadcast November 4, 1962.  Printed as Vladimir Nabokov on his life and work in The Listener (London), 68 (1756), Nov 22, 1962, pp. 856-858. Reprinted as "What Vladimir Nabokov thinks of his work, his life" in Vogue, New York, March 1, 1963, pp. 152-155.

[ii] Letter dated April 7, 1947; in Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov Wilson Letters, 1940–1971, ed. Simon Karlinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001; ISBN 0-520-22080-3), p. 215

Olympic Torch Relay

The Olympic Torch came through my town this morning.  I was out on the streets at 8:30am, along with a good two hundred other people, watching as the torch was taken along the street towards Conwy Castle.  I had no idea who the torch bearer was, so here is the BBC’s Live Feed explanation:

“The town is jam packed and people are hanging out of windows to cheer Sarah Thomas, 31, as she passes with the flame. Sarah is an academic and teacher but also finds time to compete in contests such as the Ironman UK Triathlon and Ultraman Canada Championships.

Sarah Thomas, local hero

“She was the first ever person from Wales to represent the UK in its 25 year history. She ran 84km, cycled 418k and swam 10k in aid of Dolen Cymru - a charity dedicated to creating life changing links in terms of education, health, governance and civil society.”

Well done Sarah Thomas, I say.  I’m glad a real sportsperson and civic champion carried the torch through my home town, rather than one of the ‘celebrities’ that have carried it in other places.  Having, say, Will.I.Am as the torch bearer has given it some worldwide publicity, but this is about Britain, about celebrating our sporting achievement, and honouring our everyday heroes.

The whole ‘event’ lasted only a short while – first the promotional buses came through, and Coca Cola gave away free bottles of pop – and then riders from the Metropolitan Police Force and North Wales Police – and then finally the torch arrived and Sarah Thomas began her walk along the streets swelled with revellers, towards the imposing edifice of Conwy Castle.  The whole thing was so well orchestrated, and the crowds were behind it all with enthusiasm.  Well done to the Torch Relay team for doing it all in style.

What has been good to see in this 70 day relay, as the torch traverses our great nation, is how communities have come together to support it.   You can gripe all you want about the costs – and they are exorbitant, and yes we probably can’t afford it – but as a moral boost for a flagging country, it’s certainly wonderful pageantry.  Allied with the Golden Jubilee celebrations happening next week in honour of The Queen, and then the Olympic Games themselves, it does seem that Britain is a very happening and exciting place right now.  We will not see another year like it.

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Amour [Love] / Dir. Michael Haneke

On a completely unrelated note, I want to comment briefly on Michael Haneke winning his second Palme d’Or with his new film ‘Amour [Love]’.  I admire Haneke’s work immensely – he is one of the most interesting and distinctive voices working in contemporary cinema – and I look forward to seeing this film on its release in this country.   The film is described on Wikipedia as: “focuse[d] on an elderly couple, Anne and Georges, who are retired music teachers with a daughter who lives abroad. One day Anne suffers a stroke which paralyses her on one side of the body.”  Haneke has taken the stories of two people whose stories would never normally be shown on screen – it is certainly uncommercial – and celebrated with what sounds like a moving, elegiac piece of work.  He’s come a long way since ‘Funny Games’ has Mr. Haneke.