The New Yorker asked some novelists – Margaret Atwood,
Jonathan Franzen, etc. – to comment on Claire Messud’s comments to an
interviewer who asked her about the likeability of her protagonist in her new
novel. Messud claimed the right to create unlikeable characters, citing the
royal precedents of those novelists who did it before her – or, rather, more
cleverly, simply referencing the characters. It was a nice spate of
indignation, and made for a nice interview. The novelists, asked their opinion,
all spoke up for characters who aren’t likeable. But I was a little
disappointed that they all spoke up, so to speak, within the novel and its
tradition itself. From the point of view of technique, the question is whether
the character works, not whether the character is likeable. Humbert Humbert was
cited by Messud, and is used as a sort of totem of unlikeability by these
novelists.
However, I think this misses the response outside of the
novel – the response that fully accounts for the novel’s strangeness, or function
within novel cultures. For it is a good question: why would anybody want to
read about the actions, thoughts and words of a person one dislikes? Why would
you do this for fun?
The line in lit crit, which was cemented in mid twentieth
century, was that the modernists invented the novel in which the anti-hero is
the dark eminence, and true prince of our sensibilities. This, however, really
isn’t the case. Greek myths, the Grimm’s fairytales, Daoist anecdotes are all
ceded with mildly or strikingly dislikeable personages. Aristotle, in a sense,
is asking a similar question in the Poetics about tragedy. We can admire
Antigone, we can even admire Achilles, but we don’t – we are intended to –
befriend them. For Aristotle, plausibility is a sort of meta-rule of narrative
production. Plausibility is not reality, but rather, reality as seen by a
certain credentialed set. It inscribes class into the very heart of aesthetics.
Plausibility is not just continuity and logistics, but it gives us our sense of
what typifies a character – what they would do in character. This is not a
neutral judgment about norms – it is an imposition of a certain class’s norms
upon narrative. And, always, the artist has squirmed under that imposition. The
slave’s impulse – irony –counters the demands of plausibility even in fairy
tales. When La Fontaine portrays the ant and the grasshopper, for instance, we
know, from the point of view of plausibility, that the ant is right Mention,
say, welfare at a dinner party in the suburbs and you will hear a chorus of
ants. But La Fontaine surely makes the reader uncomfortable with this judgment.
We see the cruelty of ants, and the beauty of the grasshoppers.
Plausibility and likeability get us to reflect on what these
narratives do in the culture. And I think that this is what really happened
with the novel in the 19th century in a Europe that was still
largely peasant and ancient regime: the novel was a tool for encountering the
Other. The Other outside the bourgeois norms, as orphan or ax murderer, as
adulteress or unhappy wife. This is
where the anti-hero collects within his unlikeability the collective
unconsciousness, and opens up the dreamlike possibility that the plausibility-ruled
reader is, perhaps, Other. The novel hymns what Foucault calls the
experience-limit – the limit in which you test to see whether you are a human
or a monster. How much of a monster can you be? And so far, in the sweep of the
imperialist eras, the genocide, the famines, the wars, we find that often,
dizzyingly, the likeable is the monstrous, liquidating the dislikeable in a
systematic monstrosity that runs because we don’t want to look at it or claim
our responsibility for it.
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