On the Unknowability of Our Characters
Author and critic Sophie Madeline Dess discusses how the unknowability of characters in fiction is what makes them real for readers.
When reading fiction, I savor the experience of indecision, or doubt—both within the text and within myself. Being controlled, being pulled or directed with certitude in any way morally, politically, aesthetically, intellectually bores me (and most readers) immediately. I do not want instructions, or handholding. Instead it’s the gap—the distance between my outstretched hand and the novel’s—where things are most intriguing.
Distinct from moral control, one of the most beautiful aspects of books is their ability to achieve a kind of mind-control by transcending the boundaries of consciousness, by taking over through subsumption. A book can only achieve this if the writer has written with complete and unconscious faith in the reality of his characters: Only then can a character stand for himself, only then can he stay vivid and strong (even if the character himself is weak-hearted and spineless) as readers address him with their queries, or project onto him their visions and theories.
When writing fiction, the desire to too directly guide a reader has never occurred to me. Ava, the narrator of my debut novel What You Make of Me, invites projection; she invites a bit of theorizing, despite her defiance and desire for control. A reader might wonder at her aims, at her self-awareness, at the things she says and her reasons for saying them, at her art (she is a painter). But while writing, I felt I knew Ava and understood her. She was multidimensional to me. My goal (‘goal’ is not quite the right word… but my ‘charge’ sounds absurd) was to create a character who is equal parts definitive, present, evasive, inward, self-contradictory.
Confronting this challenge became my favorite part of writing the novel. I was constantly aware of Ava’s shifting levels of self-awareness. I wanted a few aspects of her psyche to bubble up, cross the threshold of consciousness, and make their way into clear, explicit writing. I needed other aspects of her psyche to hover just below that threshold of consciousness, to be underthoughts that haunt but do not penetrate the narrative.
At times Ava has an idea of what is hovering just below. At times she does not. Then—when she thinks she does know—at times she is right, at times she is mistaken; further, at times she knows she is mistaken about herself, and at times she does not know she is mistaken (but the reader, perhaps, knows she is mistaken). This is all to say: Ava is a human being, with oblique paths of access into herself, some more right and revelatory than others, some errant (but still, somehow, psychologically productive).
AND WHY SHOULDN'T THAT BE TRUE?? AFTER ALL…in a novel, it is a characters’ ultimate unknowability—their ability to evade our capture—that endows them with real human spirit, for the simple reason that in the real world, real human beings possess an inwardness that is and should be inaccessible to us. We don’t know if Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is frigid and remote despite or because of her romanticism (or neither). In Lolita we can’t quite gauge Humbert Humbert’s interpretation of his primordial wound (that first love), or its impact on his psyche. We don’t know for sure if Dostoyevsky’s monkish Alyosha is noble and circumspect, or if he is rather weak, naive—or if he is each of these things (he is!).
As Zadie smith writes in “Fascinated to presume: In Defense of Fiction”: "Fiction suspects that there is far more to people than what they choose to make manifest … Fiction is suspicious of any theory of the self that appears to be largely founded on what can be seen with the human eye (...) Fiction—at least the kind that is any good—is full of doubt, self-doubt above all. It has grave doubts about the nature of the self."
It is this doubt—the doubt we feel even when looking into the eyes of a loved one and feeling not just closeness but in fact, and paradoxically, an insuperable distance—that feels most human, that drives and feeds our will to know and understand. In novels, we might come to love characters or despise them; we might argue in defense of them, or protest their actions; we might put our book down and feel a narrator’s presence as a shadow self throughout the day, or we might put a book down as if it is the blade that will slice through us next we return.
A text, I believe, is at its deepest when the reader does about as much ushering in of her own as possible. It’s not that writers trust their readers to do this (or trust their readers to hold the ‘right’ impression of their characters), it’s that readers always and must do this—they must use their minds to co-engineer a character. It is an ineluctable part of the reading process (see Barthes, etc). The most a writer can (must) do is put human spirit onto the page in all its lucidity and difficulty. Thus my decision not to ‘explain’ on Ava’s behalf is not an intentional act of evasion, it’s an unconscious process of trying to generate reality.
Of course, because I respect her life and humor, and because I have faith in Ava, it would make me itch to see readers come to her with what I take to be misunderstanding. But that’s the way it goes. There’s nothing she or I can do. The reader must take over, accrue his own impressions of Ava, and project his own reasons, and supply his own logic.
This fact, I believe, wouldn’t bother her. I hope readers will see her as the kind of person who is both radically open—she would change her clothes with the door open in a dressing room or easily talk constipation—while at the same time rigorous in protecting a deeper privacy, a more profound and complete solitude, her inwardness, which no misunderstanding could touch.
Check out Sophie Madeline Dess' What You Make of Me here:
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