The character puzzle

 

While doing her fieldwork among the Makassar, a people living on the peninsula of  Sulawesi, Indonesia who are ‘renowned” for their seafaring and fishing skill, Birgit Roettger-Roessler noticed that her informants were uneasy when asked to tell about themselves, and when they did, they told her narratively thin stories about what they did – not why they did it, or what they felt. On the other hand, she found that the Makassar enjoyed gossiping about each other. Roettger-Roessler was disappointed by this state of affairs at first, as the standard notion in the eighties, when she did her fieldwork, was that first person accounts were  more reliable –more authentic. Gossip, however, is, she presumes, the stock that fills up many an ethnographer’s notebook.

However, as she reflected on this curious situation (reflections she goes over in her article, Autobiography in Question. On Self Presentation and Life Description in an Indonesian Society) she noticed that other anthropologists also reported that first-person autobiographical accounts were difficult to get from informants all over the South Pacific, and in Africa. And she concludes, as other anthropologists were also concluding at the time, that there is something very “Western” about first person life stories. This is a large  conclusion pinned to a small reference: St. Augustine’s Confessions.

“I began to comprehend that I had fallen victim to my own cultural bias. Proceeding from Western cultural peculiarities I had assumed autobiographical narrating as known in the West to be a universal phenomenon. In contrast, the genre of autobiographical narrative seems to be strongly tied to a specific form of self-consciousness which is defined not only in terms of space, but also in terms of time. By taking Augustine's "Confessions" as a landmark in the development of this literary genre, the literary historian Gusdorf (1980: 33) correlates the evolution of the conscious awareness of the singularity of each individual - as a necessary precondition for autobiographical narration - with the tradition of self-examination in Christian ascetism. He defines (1980: 29) the genre of autobiography as "... a late phenomenon in Western culture, coming at the moment when the Christian contribution was grafted onto classical traditions. Moreover, it would seem that autobiography is not to be found outside of our own cultural area . . .."5

“Nevertheless, it may be stated that life history until the present has been conceived of by anthro- pologists and other social scientists as constituting a universal narrative genre.”

This reference is, I think, itself very Western – the uneasy mixture of this reference to a book that is, indeed, highlighted within some specific institutions in those parts of Europe that once constituted “Christendom” and, as well, to a tradition of ascetism that may have spread across the vast peasant masses who actually constituted that Christendom. It was certainly the case that, for centuries, the Church presented a vehicle for social mobility that was like no other in the rigidly hierarchized societies of the West. And that social mobility depended, in part, on learning how to talk about oneself – and others. How to self-represent.

The oral historian, Alessandro Portelli, wrote a book about oral histories that begins with an orally passed down “error” concerning the death of an industrial worker in a clash with the police. That worker, Luigi Trastulli, died in 1949 as a matter of hard fact, protesting against Italy joining NATO: yet in the stories passed down about him in Terni, where he lived, his death is placed, instead, in 1952, during a long and violent strike. The fact has its reasons – but so does error. Portelli quotes Benjamin’s sentence about Proust: For an experienced event is finite- at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite, because it is key to everything that happened before and after it."

I wonder whether if what Birgit Roettger-Roessler found among the Makassar was really that different from the difficulties with self-accounting among those people in the “West” – the vast majority, outside of the cities and castles, in the villages and farms – that form the city person’s image of the peasant. The idiocy of rural life is that “idios” is everywhere and nowhere.  When Portelli went to Terni with his tape recorder and started talking to people there, he found a situation not unlike that of the anthropologist in Sulawesi. The idea that the Other is Other to some European I too quickly passes over how composite, how edited, how rarified that European I is in Europe itself - and how Europeans, like the colonized Other, were subject to massive surveillance and pedagogical efforts to turn them into these “sovereign subjects”.

As without, so within – my golden rule.

 Roettger-Roessler’s work with the Makassar eventually forced her to consider the notes she was putting in her fieldwork journal, where it turned out that there were plenty of life-histories at second hand. The Makassar gossiped. They also would tell about themselves in certain triangulated situations – in ordinary conversation, for instance. And especially in gossip.

Against the autobiographical I – the I that now is perpetually caffeinated and “excited” about job opportunities, or a new cosmetic, or yoga, or whatever, the Yankee I in its decay – there is the enduring social practice of the “character”.  It is interesting that character no longer carries any conceptual weight in an anthropological discourse that literally begins as a discourse about ethos, about character.

The standard reference in twentieth century writing on characters in literature is E.M. Forster’s division of characters into round and flat ones, elaborated in Aspects of the Novel (1927) with the same exemplary application of Cambridge method as that by which Ansell, in The Longest Journey, proves that there is a cow in the room. That is, distinctions are made, flare up in a burst of illumination, hold for an instant, are manipulated, and then retreat back to the dark. In the case of character, however, Forster is speaking in character as a novelist, and he wants to approach character as a technician: the point is that character enters narrative as a devise to be manipulated, worked on a grand scale and on a  miniature one, and is ultimately  in the hands of the reader, which is where the fun of the novel is. Readers, then, as well as novelists need a lesson in character, and this requires a lesson in distinguishing degrees, or types, of character.  Forster relates his flat characters explicitly related to the comedy of ‘humor’ in the 17th century, and he writes that they are “sometimes called types, sometimes called caricatures” – the calling here being done by the critics.  Round characters, on the other hand, have complexities that lie “under the surface”. Forster’s roundness is actually three dimensionality, and round characters have perspectival depth.

The distinction between flat and round is very much a pictorial reference, made explicit in the idea of “caricature”. In fact, in the early modern re-appearance of character, the Theophrastian ‘character’ and the Aristotelian “ethos”, which come down in two different lineages, could be and were figured under the metaphor of the sketch and the portrait. Both have different values. Both thematized character in different ways.

The neglect of character as a devise in both print culture and oral culture at the present moment, and the moralization or weaponization of “character” as a rightwing trope, is a puzzle that is all about our present moment.