Prologue: Fictional Characters: Psychoanalytic and Literary Perspectives

Are fictional characters real people? Of course not. By definition. Even when they’re partially inspired by one or more actual people. But if they’re not real, why do we care about them enough to read fiction? Further, why has there been such a profound disconnect for the past several decades between general readers’ reactions to fictional characters, and those of many literary theorists, who tell us such characters are merely words on the page, and that it is absurd to speculate about their psychology, or their backstory? In college, I took a comparative literature seminar on novels that openly or – more often – subtly alluded in their plots to the life of Jesus. That is, the novels’ protagonists had the life of Jesus as a salient backdrop, adding depth to their characters. Our teacher later published a book based on the topic of our seminar (Ziolkowski, 1972). That course sensitized me to the possibility that a fictional character can have an important backstory – including one of literary allusion – that will enrich our experience with the book.

This issue was inspired by a book review. Evan Kindley of Pomona College, in the March 25, 2021 New York Review of Books, wrote an essay titled “The People We Know Best” (Kindley, 2021). Below the title appeared these provocative and generative statements: “Readers love fictional characters almost as if they were real people. Literary scholars are just starting to take them more seriously.” This tapped into longstanding concerns I have had about the direction that literary theory has taken, downplaying the roles of actual writers and readers of fiction. In the process, it has weakened its previously robust connection with a truly psychoanalytic view of the mind.

After citing a wide range of opinions about the nature of fictional characters, Kindley concludes, “A strange fact about academic literary criticism is that this … view [that of L.C. Knights, who wrote that fictional characters are ‘merely an abstraction … in the mind of the reader’] – that literary characters don’t even exist – has been the predominant one for almost a century, despite being the least intuitively satisfying and attractive one to most people. Indeed, literary critics have been strict about policing readers (and one another) when it comes to talking about character” (accessed online September 17, 2022).

Psychoanalysts are bound to a have special interest in studying in depth what fiction and fictional characters mean to readers, including readers who are our patients (for example, Novey, 1964). Ours is a developmental theory, so we would expect to find a developmental line of our experiences with stories, beginning with being read to by a parent; reading picture books, then chapter books as a child; then encountering adult fiction as an adolescent and beyond. Children spend much time in the world of their imagination (Selma Fraiberg, 1959, The Magic Years). Fraiberg contends that “language originates in magic” (p. 112), as the baby’s babbling “magical incantations” sometimes “bring about a desired event,” such as a radiant smile on his mother’s face when he first says “mama.” And childhood self states are magically revived when adults read fiction for pleasure. Wilhelm Schlegel observed that Shakespeare, in particular, connects us with the childhood sources of our imaginative capacities so we can better understand and enjoy his plays (“tales which are … attractive and intelligible to childhood … they transport even manhood back to the golden age of imagination,” Schlegel, 1815, p. 387).

For years, I have had many illuminating conversations with a friend who is an English professor, and who has also had much non-clinical training in psychoanalysis. We share a love of creative literature. But we sometimes disagree on how we approach it. Learning about its author regularly helps me see a given literary work in new ways. Once, in apparent exasperation, he told me that “the professionals” don’t consider it legitimate to make such connections. I continue to be puzzled about any literary theory that downplays the author. Further, despite the scholarly prestige of some literary theorists, I have been perplexed as to why psychoanalysts, who know about psychic determinism, could accept as valid an approach to literature that minimizes the role of the author and their imaginative characters.

What motivates this minimization of characters’ psychologies and backstories? Unconsciously, it may be one means by which literary scholars attempt to stake their exclusive, “professional” claim on interpreting the text. They may feel some rivalry with nonspecialist readers, who productively engage with the text through their own subjectivities. We might think of the analogy with the Protestant Reformation, when each believer was expected to read the Bible for themselves, rather than rely on the authority of the Church. Departments of English had only existed in universities for a few decades when New Criticism began the ongoing trend to claim literature as the domain of specialists, skilled in close reading and in applying a steady succession of faddish literary theories to the text. It is not so in departments of classics, since years of study are needed to read Latin and Greek, and classicists feel less threatened by οί πoλλοί (hoi polloi) infringing on their turf.

Group psychology is also relevant to these questions. “Amateur” readers are motivated by their love of fiction. The distinguished professor of Hebrew and of Comparative Literature Robert Alter (1989) chose to write a book about The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age because he was shocked that so many fellow professors of literature no longer enjoy reading fiction. Prevailing literary theories, however misguided, may remain entrenched partly because of the considerable power of groupthink. Literary scholars may unconsciously preserve their solidarity as a group by agreeing not to question certain core assumptions, and instead attack those who do question them. We psychoanalysts suffer from our own versions of groupthink, of course. It plays a role in our theory wars, and in our theoretical tribalism.

In my article in this issue, I will propose that an unwillingness to believe that Shakespeare’s bisexual Sonnets are autobiographical is a major if unacknowledged reason that literary theory has turned away from the author and from the psychic reality of literature. We also know that, in the years following the Holocaust and World War II, psychoanalysts retreated from the world’s horrific experiences of psychological trauma, which personally affected many analysts, including Holocaust survivors. The Holocaust itself was so extremely traumatizing that it may have produced a massive dissociative response. It was some years afterward before serious Holocaust studies became widespread. U.S. psychoanalysis turned inward instead, to the abstractions of ego psychology, and focused on intrapsychic oedipal conflicts, while turning away from trauma, including both the Holocaust and childhood sexual abuse.

Alter observes that a shift to the greater “theorization” of creative literature started in the late 1960s, when new approaches that originated in France started having a profound influence in the U.S. and elsewhere. It is possible, given the respect that many literary scholars have for psychoanalysis, that the retreat toward abstraction in psychoanalysis was another influence on the retreat in literary theory from books’ characters and authors to one after another faddish, abstract theory. And yet, a hilarious true story proves that psychoanalysts are fully capable of regressing into the world of make-believe. After Lorraine Bracco spoke to a 2001 meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association about playing her psychiatrist character Dr. Jennifer Melfi on the hit television series The Sopranos, so many audience members asked her about clinical dilemmas they faced that she had to remind them that she was merely an actor, whose lines were written by screenwriters.

Both Homer and Hesiod regarded poetry as divinely inspired, so the person who merely recited or recorded it was of little importance. Socrates agreed, and offered as evidence Tynnichus of Chalcis, a mediocre poet, who wrote only a single great poem. That, Socrates claimed, showed the gods chose him to provide proof that it was they who spoke through great poets. So Homer, Hesiod, and Socrates anticipated our modern literary critics in devaluing the role of the author.

Probably writing in the first century of the common era, the later critic known as “Longinus” (“his” fragmentary On the Sublime is actually anonymous) observed that “Homer seems to me to have done everything in his power to make gods of the men fighting at Troy” (in Dorsch, 1965, p. 111). And he regarded The Iliad as greatly superior to The Odyssey, complaining that, in the latter, “the fabulous predominates over the actual” (p. 113). He made the intriguing observation that rhetorical and literary art “is perfect only when it looks like nature” (p. 131). Eighteenth-century critics viewed Homer as a divinely inspired genius. In 1769, Robert Wood (1769) proposed that Homer was illiterate, and his works were handed down orally. Scholars now agree with Wood, since Homer probably lived during the era when ancient Greece had lost knowledge of writing. These assumptions in turn influenced the bardolatry that promoted similar views of the divine but uneducated genius Shakespeare, starting that very year with the 1769 Stratford “Jubilee,” promoted by the famed Shakespeare actor David Garrick. By the late 18th century, many intellectuals had lost their traditional faith in God, so the “divine” Shakespeare began serving as an unconscious surrogate deity.

What of the relationship between writers and critics? One admires fine critics who are also fine writers of fiction. The novelist Siri Hustvedt earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. She calls the work of art “an intersubjective object,” highlighting the crucial interaction between the imaginations of the writer and the reader (July 21, 2021 plenary presentation on “Umbilical Phantoms” to International Psychoanalytic Congress, by Zoom).

Otherwise, one suspects that a degree of unconscious envy may lead critics to presume they know more about fiction than do authors of fiction. Aristotle probably influenced this trend. He was an extremely influential theorist of literature. Through his authority, and through some misunderstandings of what he wrote, dogmatic ideas about the necessary “unities” in drama arose. Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos was Aristotle’s favorite play, and he made many generalizations from it.

When did literary critics begin trying to impose their own opinions on the general public? One prominent, especially transparent example was T.S. Eliot (1934), who contended in his 1923 essay “The Function of Criticism” that a primary purpose of literary criticism is the “correction of taste.” Eliot apparently disagreed with the ancient Romans that one cannot argue about taste (“de gustibus non est disputandum”). For his part, the influential critic F.R. Leavis introduced haranguing and bullying as acceptable tools of the literary critic. Once popular, Eliot and Leavis have both suffered a decline in their respective reputations. It did not help Eliot that he admitted that his own tastes were royalist (as well as anti-Semitic).

Christopher W. T. Miller, M.D., is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who has previously published perceptive essays on Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece and Winter’s Tale. Here, he explores the neglected topics of scapegoating, and of the role of the audience, in Twelfth Night.

Fred L. Griffin, M.D., also a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, has written extensively on creative literature. His essay in this issue includes a fascinating interview with a novelist, since he knows novelists have important insights about literary works.

Paula Marantz Cohen, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University and Co-Editor of The Journal of Modern Literature. She has written six books on literature, film, art and culture, as well as five novels. With her bona fides as a novelist, she writes here in an engagingly personal style about the evolution of literary theory.

Jehanne Gheith, Ph.D., MSW, LCSW, is Professor of Russian Literature at Duke University. She combines literary studies with her MSW, specializing in hospice work. Her remarkable essay eloquently shows how literature deeply interacts with her clinical work.

Elisabeth P. Waugaman’s Ph.D. is in medieval French literature; her dissertation was on characterization in the works of Chrétien de Troyes. She has been publishing articles on the French influence on Shakespeare’s works since 2019. Here, she gives examples of Shakespearean characters based on actual members of the French court.

Richard M. Waugaman, M.D., your issue editor, is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Half of his 200 publications are on Shakespeare. His essay connects problematic aspects of literary theory with foundational errors about who wrote Shakespeare’s works.

Richard M. Waugaman, M.D.

Issue Editor

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Richard M. Waugaman

Richard M. Waugaman, M.D., is a Training and Supervising Analyst, Emeritus, at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis, and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University. Half of his more than 200 publications are on Shakespeare and the Shakespeare authorship question.