Rawdon Wilson's "On Character" raised a great many questions, and I should like to deal with lesser matters before going on to those of more consequence. He has found in my work the Fallacy of Novelistic Presumption. To commit this unnatural act is to assume "that the novel possesses a history that is independent of other modes of fiction and that it may be discussed independently of the history of literature." Let me say at the outset that I am not (...) trying to frame a restrictive definition of the novel. Novels are whatever most critics agree to call novels, and if I speak of "the novel" I can only hope that the phrase will be taken as convenient shorthand rather than an attempt to define an essence. And of course the novel has a history of its own, just as the state of Connecticut has a history even as it remains one of the fifty states, just as literature has a history although it is only one of the arts or institutions of our culture. Mr. Wilson wants a theory of characters that "will necessarily account for - go to the heart of - all instances of character, symbolic, allegorical, naturalistic, whether in the novel, in epic, in romance, in drama, or in lyric." To that I can only reply with E.M. Forster's sentence: "We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing." In this essay Martin Price, Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of English at Yale University, responds to Rawdon Wilson's "On Character" which raised objections to Price's "People of the Book: Character in Forster's A Passage to India". (shrink)

The subtlety of the novel lies in its unrelieved tension of flesh and spirit, exclusion and invitation, the social self and the deeper impersonal self. At one extreme are the caricatures caught in the social grid - the Turtons and Burtons. At the other are the characters who slip out of the meshes of social responsibility through despair or obliviousness. We move from the elaborate rituals of Anglo-Indian to Mau, where the only aspects of life we are shown are ecstasy (...) and neglect. Where does the mind rest? The difficulty with looking at reality directly is that reality will tend to dissolve: "not now, not here, not to be apprehended except when it is unattainable." Transcendence dehumanizes, the deeper self is a source rather than a habitation, we cannot see the unseen. We only glimpse it through paradox, violence, or farce; and each of these contributes something to Forster's conception of character. Martin Price, Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of English at Yale University, is author of To the Palace of Wisdom and the recently reprinted Swift's Rhetorical Art, editor and coeditor of the Oxford Anthology of English Literature, and coeditor of Poetry Past and Present. He is currently working on a book on character in the novel. (shrink)