Turning Words on the Page into "Real" People
2004; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 38; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2374-6629
Autores Tópico(s)Language, Metaphor, and Cognition
Resumo1. The Power of Illusion In the wake of an ever-increasing interest in the characters of plays since the end of the eighteenth century, John Wilson in 1829 the following statement: Shakespeare's characters have long ceased to be poetical creations, and are now as absolute flesh and blood as any other subject of his Majesty's dominions (963). The striking neglect of the fact that characters tend to emerge from the page when we read novels, plays, or poems--a neglect that was strengthened by the structuralist fixation on the text--has slowly been overcome in recent times by an increased interest in the process of reading. The phenomenon is, after all, widespread enough. Not only do such take on a life of their own in that they repeatedly become the protagonists of new works (for example in the Hamlet novels of Georg Britting and Alfred Doblin or in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead). More important is the fact that like Hamlet or Lady Macbeth, Tom Jones or Huck Finn, Stephen Dedalus or Mrs. Dalloway, Blanche Dubois or Willy Loman, Holden Caulfield or Lolita tend to exist autonomously in the memory of those readers or audiences who have made their acquaintance in the respective plays and novels. In order to come closer to an adequate analysis of this process of figuring-forth, it will in the first place be necessary to differentiate between on the one hand as the totality of the signs in the that provide clues for the readers' acts of construction and, on the other hand, the dramatised figures beyond the text (Cohan) that readers picture on the stage of their imagination during the process of reading. Since the publication of the original German version of this essay, critics like Steven Cohan, Uri Margolin, Laszlo Halasz, Richard J. Gerri, and David W. Allbritton as well as Thomas Koch and Ralf Schneider have helped to overcome the methodological reduction of literary characters to mere actants in structuralist narratology and have started to pay tribute to the creative activity of the reader. What we chiefly find in these more recent studies is an interpretation of literary characters as mental models in the sense of cognitive psychology? This may solve some analytical problems but creates a new one--it leaves unexplained why in our imagination we do not encounter mere mental models but often as much alive as those we meet in everyday life. The experience of this encounter with literary characters will be felt most strongly by the literary scholar who still has the ability to read or to watch a film or theater performance without immediately analyzing it. The strength of the illusion becomes apparent in the fact that one almost inevitably gets involved in the fate of the protagonists despite one's theoretical insight into the artificiality or constructedness of literary characters. Admittedly, for the purpose of analysis one must not remain caught up in this illusion; however, neither should one dismiss it. On the contrary, one has to take this effect properly into account and attempt to explain it as the primary phenomenon. 2. The Conditions of Figuring-Forth We gain knowledge of literary characters through literary works--this seems fairly clear. On the other hand, such characters really become figured-forth only in the imagination of the reader or viewer. Since the imagining takes place during the so-called reception of a work, the elements or factors necessary for the figuration of a literary character are the text, the imagination of the recipient, and the interaction of the two in the process of reading or listening. The object of investigation here is precisely that interaction, the process of transformation that turns some signs or features of a literary into characters. How is it possible that powerful emerge from pages filled with words and sentences as soon as we begin the process of reading? …
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