Uri Margolin

CHARACTERIZATION IN NARRATIVE :
SOME THEORETICAL PROLEGOMENA
1 .0 In recent years, poetics has been paying ever increasing attention to

the act of reading and the operations involved in it . This interest has been
focussed primarily not on purely verbal comprehension ("reading"), but on
the reader's interpretative activities ("reading out" Chatman 1980, 41-2),
on those operations whereby the reader constructs from textual data a
semantic deep structure, a macrosemantic representation or an alternative
possible world . The constructs as such have of course had a long history in
poetics and have traditionally been referred to as the mimetic or represen-
tational elements of the work of literature, or, in the phenomenological
tradition, as the intentional objects projected by/ from the text . The current
focus, however, is more on the process than on the product : on the operati-
ons of construction themselves, their constitutive conditions, initial data,
and the codes, norms, procedures and rules (especially implicational ones)
actually employed in them, that is, on their underlying regularities .
In this essay, I shall seek to elucidate and model explicitly some of the
types of data and some of the operations involved in the construction by the
reader of one macro-semantic unit, that of character, concentrating prima-
rily on literary narrative texts . I shall also seek to provide some of the
reasons for the divergent characterizations the same figure receives in
different interpretations . Part of what I am going to say may apply equally
well to drama as text, since all possibilities of character-construction implicit
in drama as text are contained in narrative as well, while narrative has
additional specific types of data for this purpose . An endeavour of this kind
is free of any charges of "psychologism" . It does not claim that poetics, as a
theoretical discipline, should employ the category of character in its own
theoretical vocabulary or that it should analyse literary figures as if they
were real human beings . It starts rather from the obvious observation that
readers as readers (not as poeticians) do create characters from texts, and
from the conviction that poetics should study all aspects of literature as a
cultural institution, hence also the reader's projections and their underlying
operations .
1 .1 What does one mean by "character" ("person", "figure") in the
context of literary texts? Like most critical terms, this one too is polysemic
and ambiguous, lending itself to a number of only partially overlapping
explications (see Hamon, Ferrara and Wilson) . Fortunately, all senses of
"character" are meaningful even without recourse to philosophical theories
about the mode of existence of fictional entities or the nature of self, person
and consciousness . The core sense, shared by all usages of "character" in
literary contexts, is that of narrative agent (= NA), that is, an individual
capable of fulfilling the argument position in the propositional form DO
(X), which is the sine qua non of all narrative and drama . It is an individual,
Neophilologus 67 (1983) I-14

2 Uri Margolin - Characterization in Narrative
human or human-like, of whom actions can be predicated . Action and agent

- as well as narrative as an account of a series of doings and happenings -
are translinguistic and of a general semiotic nature, language being simply
one of the media for their expression or manifestation (Chatman 1980) .
Beyond the initial sense, NAs can be viewed by the reader in a variety of
ways, the most prominent of which are the following :
Character as actant : The NA is equated with a certain highly abstract
sphere of actions, defined in terms of a narrative case grammar (object,
instrument, etc .) or of a functional range in the action sequence (hero,
helper, donor) .
Character as role : The NA is seen in terms of a "station and its duties"
(F . H . Bradley) that is, a standardized, stereotyped and codified social role,
with the norms of action and appropriateness, expectations and values
associated with it, irrespective of the individual fulfilling it . A model of a
particular society with its role system is essential here . The vocabulary and
Sehweise associated with this conception of character are institutionalised in
ethics, sociology and social psychology . Deontic and axiological systems,
e .g., moral values, are prominent in this conception of character. Classical
examples are the courtier, king, judge, warrior, etc .
Character as individual or person : The NA is seen in terms of inner states,
mental properties, personality traits, and general or specific complexes of
such properties, i .e . individual personality models or personality types .
Psychology, and especially personality theory, is the institutionalised place
for this concept of character . In the rest of this essay, whenever the term
"character" occurs without qualification, it will be used in this sense .
Character as narrative device : The NA is not regarded as an analogon,
simulacrum or whatever of a "reall life" phenomenon, and all attention is
focussed on its formal, artifical, contrived and purely artistic nature . It is, in
other words, a device . Several subcategories may be distinguished here :
(a) Character as symbol : The NA is an expressive device or signifier for a
signified on a higher level . Alternatively, it embodies or concretises this
"higher" unit : a theme, idea, thesis, literary archetype ("faustian figure") or
any abstraction whatsoever : "Vitality", "Faith", etc . Allegorical interpre-
tations of NAs are the paradigm case here .
(b) Character as narrative instance/level : One starts from a model of
narrative as hierarchy of embedded/hierarchical macrospeech acts/utteran-
ces, and assigns each level in the hierarchy a speaker (or type of speaker) on
the basis of textual features such as tense, person and deixis . We thus obtain
the categories of point of view, voice, focalization, narrator, and character as
speaker. Narratology is the foal point of this concept of character .
(c) Character as a piece in the architecture, or formal design, of the
action : by this cumbersome term I refer to classifications of NAs into main
characters and auxiliary ones, agents and "foils", "cards" and "ficelles"
(Henry James), protagonists and antagonists and several more .
The logical relations among the different conceptions of NA are more

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CHARACTERIZATION IN NARRATIVE :

SOME THEORETICAL PROLEGOMENA

1 .0 In recent years, poetics has been paying ever increasing attention to

Neophilologus 67 (1983) I-14

2 Uri Margolin - Characterization in Narrative

human or human-like, of whom actions can be predicated . Action and agent

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