Epilogue: Fictional Characters: Psychoanalytic and Literary Perspectives

Abstract

The story goes that some learned medieval monks were debating the question of how many teeth horses had, a seemingly crucial issue, on which Aristotle was silent. Overhearing the debate, an illiterate lay brother suggested that he could go outside where a horse was tied up, and count its teeth. The monks naturally rebuked him for his effrontery. Similarly, English literature scholars have many debates about novels and whether it’s legitimate to connect them with their authors. Fred Griffin is clearly not illiterate, and I’m not aware he’s ever been attacked for his efforts to provide answers to some of these literary debates, but, like the lay brother, he decided to investigate some of these questions empirically, “letting the authors speak for themselves,” rather than to treat theory reductionistically as a “Procrustean bed.” Griffin notes the “therapeutic potentials” of writing fiction, citing Virginia Woolf’s comment that writing To the Lighthouse helped her grieve her mother’s death. Griffin learned from personal experience that transforming painful experiences into fiction allows enough emotional distance to deepen one’s understanding of trauma. After writing of similar themes in the works of William Maxwell, Arnost Lustig, Elizabeth YoungBruehl, and Colin Toibin, Griffin presents his fascinating interview with the novelist and short story writer Sheila Kohler. In some ways, Christopher Miller’s entire essay persuasively glosses Malvolio’s final words in Twelfth Night, which bring the mirthful audience up short: “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.” Miller probes deeply into the play’s complexity, since Shakespeare never fully separates comic from darker, tragic themes in his dramas. Miller skillfully shows how we, the audience, implicitly collude in scapegoating Malvolio, as other characters in the play – whom Miller compares with “pack animals” – projectively identify some of their “despised elements” such as self-love onto him, and limit our empathy for Malvolio. Mistreating Malvolio, through the dynamics of groupthink (“the group’s mindset”), gives the other characters – as well as the audience – a sense of cohesive group identity. Miller reads Shakespeare’s words closely, just as we try to listen closely to our patient’s words. He refers to Malvolio’s temporary “descent into hell,” as he’s locked in a small room and gaslighted. We might remember that ancient heroic figures such as Odysseus, Orpheus, and Jesus also visited the underworld and, like Malvolio, returned from it. Toby may be alluding to purgatory in claiming that Malvolio is in the dark room for his “penance.” Paula Marantz Cohen’s highly compressed article opens with a sad tale of an irrational putdown of her sophomore essay from her theory-obsessed college English professor, accusing Cohen of “confusing fictional characters with real people.” She quickly learned to write what her teachers wanted, rather than allowing her own heart to inspire her. She takes us on a tour of the changing fashions of literary criticism as she attended graduate school, then became an English professor herself. Cohen never allowed herself to be brainwashed by the theories du jour. She found readerresponse theory to be the most congenial one. She cogently concludes that “It’s not so much that we can now see literary characters as real as that we can see ourselves as being like literary characters.” She links her family’s intergenerational anti-Semitic traumas with commentaries on Abraham and Isaac. Cohen sketches a sort of literary developmental line from Shakespeare’s soliloquies to the prominent internal lives of the characters in 19th-century English novels – influentially “insidious babysitters,” in Cohen’s memorable phrase. At the end of her compelling