I read advice once for revealing character in fiction, not personality, but character. Moral character. And moral development or deterioration.
The writer’s observation was that personality is far easier to convey. Forget about the challenge of “convey well.” It is simply easier to sketch someone’s exterior behavior than to show their moral life so that it can be understood, evaluated and observed to progress through changes based on a story’s events.
Writers can go completely “on the nose” - look no further than any character, ever, by James Cameron. Cameron characters are so generic and stereotypical that we learn nothing at all and the whole artifice of a made-up person comes crashing down. I’m thinking specifically now of the bad-guy marine in Avatar. Ai-yai-yi. Awful. GI Joe. Forget that, I’m thinking of every character in that God Awful Titanic.
Sorry. Distraction.
The writer’s advice on revealing character in fiction is so trenchant that it immediately opens a whole door to understanding our own internal moral lives.
The idea is this: character is revealed when an individual must make a choice between two opposing, but legitimate values. It is important that both are legitimate in isolation, that, sidebar, may not ever actually happen in the real world.
We have to leave the realm of “good vs. bad” which gets us a James Cameron character, and we have to go into the world where both of these values are important, and as a fictional character or a real person, I am forced to pick one.
That choice, right there in that moment, is what reveals character.
Some examples help:
“I don’t want to be beat up” and “if I don’t step in she’s going to get hurt.”
“I feel terrible for this homeless guy. No human should live like this” and “Giving him money will only go towards alcohol” and, we’ll add a third, “I’m late and I can’t go looking for a homeless shelter for every lost soul I pass on the street.”
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings by disagreeing with you” and “I feel out of integrity agreeing with you.”
These aren’t the best examples. I’m not writing a dissertation, and I’m not going to spend the whole morning on this. The best examples of what I’m talking about come from our own awareness of these tensions - because we believe that both values are legitimate. In our internal lives we don’t get to go all binary.
And the one we pick… is the one that reveals our character.
A fictional character and a real one can be placed in situations that operate in this tension and allow others to see “who they truly are” from a moral perspective, what they stand for, and a whole parade of downstream dominos. And that, sayeth the writer advice giver, is how you get to a real character in fiction.
That’s part one of this post, which I thought would be briefer.
Part two is that a lack of recognition of the real - and legitimate - tension between these opposing (wrong word, I really mean “contending”) values is disappearing from our political culture almost entirely and fast. Actually, let me capitalize the key word: LEGITIMATE. We are turning into political AVATAR characters where our characters are only determined in the straw man moral situation of “good” and “bad.”
For example: the tension of rethinking every historical character in terms only of “some known horrible behavior” with the desire to “not turn everything that has every happened into a fatal flaw.” And we may be horrified at the prospect of nothing being left to celebrate in a binary world.
There are paintings that should come off the wall for a variety of reasons - and, um, say certain flags - and there are paintings that shouldn’t be removed from the Capital Rotunda. Thomas, I have your back here. I’m not going to take MLK Jr. off of a stamp because he was an adulterer. And neither are you. But thirty years from now, when adultery is the gold standard for character, we might just do that, which would be a horror, and I would get involved to stop that. And I absolutely think adultery is bad.
If the public discourse denies the real tension between opposing values and is unable to sustain a world that is only healthy when it is uncomfortable, then we’re moving into James Cameron territory where the stakes are very high.
And, it seems to me, this is where we are arriving at exactly where our body politic is right now. Right and Left. Maybe we’ve already arrive there.
So this is what’s going on in my head right now. Melanie wants to go out for breakfast. I agree with her, but I’d also like to understand this better, get some input, even argue about it, because this is important to me. They’re both important to me. Marriage health. Character. Whoops! I’ve Done It Again.
Here’s a representative world of ambiguity, and you can weigh in on it:
If there was a recording artist who had been famous his entire life, but then did terrible things as an adult, may I continue to listen to that artist’s music that was recorded while he was still a child? I am incapable of operating in a state of moral ambiguity. Please tell me what to do. Sleepless in Gary.
Ha-ha. You see what I’ve done here with the whole yes/no thing in the poll?
Intellectually, I think we should separate creations from the creator. Emotionally, I struggle with this. Sometimes I hear a great song or watch an inspiring movie and I don't need to connect to the artists in order to find value. But when I do associate the art with the artist, suddenly the WHO made it matters. This is a tough one.
It is a tough one. There’s another weird flavor of it, too. There’s no crime committed by Nabokov, but Lolita makes my skin crawl because i believe he’s uncomfortably close to the subject matter. I read it in high school (!) and picked it up again a few years ago and started feeling I was part of something I didn’t like. I just didn’t want any part of it. I’m taking for granted that he’s not a child molester.
Is there an artist that comes to mind where you can no longer find value and have conscientiously ruled them out like you’re saying? And is there anyone who hasn’t been formally convicted of something where you want to distance yourself from the artist? Like Woody Allen. (who’s innocence I don’t find unreasonable.)
Yup. I get it. But.... here’s where we go back to the starting place of this whole thing. Value 1: don’t support antisemite’s Value 2: hold those with mental illness to different standards Value 3: separate the man from the art. I think your “character” reveal is through value 1. Mine is Value 2.
This is tricky sometimes... I think about someone like Richard Wagner, an unrepentant anti-semite, but he also wrote some of the most beautiful music ever written. But the dissonance is partially grounded in the time difference between his world and mine today. I know that is not an adequate justification, but he's long dead and his social/political impact is nil to none, yet the overture to "Tannhauser" still exists... "Tristan and Isolde" still reverberates in my soul. It's a little different if it is someone still trying to "influence" the world today (eg: Kanye Fucking West) with their hateful rhetoric (and frankly shitty music) that I feel it is ok to vote with my wallet and not support. That's not cancellation, it's just "you and your music suck". But of course, there are more contemporary examples... Kevin Spacey, brilliant actor... for example.
On the other topic, character in literature... I would find it nearly impossible to write one myself, but it is certainly one that I have examples of in my collection. Richard Powers creates amazing, complex moral characters that show development throughout the narrative. But some. less literal ones would be the sketched out inhabitants of the short stories of Magnus Mills (who I highly recommend), or the complex morality of Joy Williams' characters ("Breaking and Entering"... a must read).
I think it's dimensionality... that is, like real life, morality can be nuanced and contradictory... but many authors don't let their characters express that. Like every Stephen King or Tom Clancy character has one voice, one perspective, cover to cover. Joy Williams on the other hand, creates deeply wounded and realistically conflicted characters that evolve or sometimes just stay tragically conflicted. I honestly don't know how she does it, but she is marvelous.
I can’t answer the cancellation question for the same reason I can’t answer the question “When did you stop beating your wife?”. It requires me to accept a premise with which I don’t really agree, which is that cancellation - or at least what is commonly understood by it these days - is a moral act. I wonder if we have the same understanding of the term.
Btw, your reply here has introduced the interesting question of whether cancellation is even in the realm of a moral decision. I have not actually thought about that. And that little realization, by the way, is exactly what I intend to do with this “right brain” section here on Substack. i’m trying to notice new things. And throw them into the intellectual hopper. Thank you!
The inquiry into right brain thinking has been probably my central intellectual preoccupation since I began to really dive into Iain McGilchrist’s book “The Master And His Emissary” a few months ago. I think it’s the first book I’ve literally studied since I was in school, with note taking and, happily now since we live in the age of Google, regular side trips to the material the author references.
The “collapse” of the right brain style of knowing the world (rich, complex, inclusive, tolerant of ambiguity, inconsistency and contradiction) into a left brain style of knowing (analytic, coherent, rejectionist, impatient with category messiness, oriented toward theory, control and manipulation, severe) is nicely expressed in Sleepless in Gary’s agitated question. The left brain thinking style resolves into binary or absolute ethical insistence what the right brain style accepts as normal, natural, and real.
What does he/you see as the limitations of the right brain? And is the ideal some harmony between them in all moral complex issues- or is this contextual where one side or the other is the “go to” side of the brain for that class of problem?
That is an enormously complex question and IM has spent much of a lifetime exploring it. I'll take a stab with this short response: the ideal is most definitely something that IM would describe as harmony, but it is the harmony of a cooperatively organized division of labor rather than the harmony of co-equal capabilities taking their turn in accordance with evolving or dynamic externalities. In this division of labor IM (I would say) argues for the primacy of the manner in which the right brain perceives the world. He would say, for example, that moral intuition is important and meaningful. It works best when it is usefully informed by essentially subsidiary left brain processing.
There is a lopsided and antagonistic relationship between the two thinking personalities which McGilchrist repeatedly warns against. I can use the example which your cancellation question suggests to illustrate it, although I have to emphasize that this is a highly abbreviated, oversimplified and essentially truncated distortion of what I think is going on. Michael Jackson was an actual human being whom you once met in person. He is, in one sense, more real to you than he would be to a biographer who spent 10 years researching and studying the man's life but who never actually met him. (Video and audio recordings confuse the issue somewhat but to make the point slightly differently, imagine the difference between the way Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton's biographer, "knows" Alexander Hamilton and the way Benjamin Moore, the bishop who met and reluctantly accepted Hamilton's request for communion on his deathbed "knew" him. Chernow certainly knows much more about Hamilton than Moore ever did, but also can never know Hamilton the way Moore, who might have spent ten minutes with the man, knew him. The right brain apprehends wholes, the left components.)
The question of your ethical obligations with respect to cancelling Michael Jackson on the day you met him was a real question... on the day you met him. You could have refused to work with the man. You could have demanded an accounting of his actions, or insisted on his repentant apology to someone or other. You could have insisted on a short private audience with him as a condition of being in his video. You could have decided to anonymously send the proceeds from your work that day to a shelter for abused children. You could have decided to do the same thing publicly and have issued a press release about it later for maximum effect. You could have walked up to Martin Scorsese and demanded a duel. I don't know. But there was an actual situation, and all of these options require cooperative interaction between the left/logical and right/intuitive aspects of your brain, which is something like a mediation between the actual world you were in and the notional ethics you had developed at that point in your life to guide your actions.
Now, about that imbalance: the left brain, when it is expanding and clarifying the grasp the right brain has on the world, does things like show the right brain how the various options are likely to play out in time, or to discern the effect on parties and things the right brain doesn't really apprehend (because they are not present at the time). The left brain, in McGilchrists's construction, is the Emissary. It probes and expands the world according to the needs of the right brain. It is an advisor and a tool for thinking and seeing, both of which it does effectively to the degree that it is directed in a manner that is - in the end - informed by the actual exigencies of a human life.
It is not that ethics are only situational. Quite the opposite, in fact. Ethics have a lovely coherence. They float in a realm of marvelous perfection, troubled only by the difficult but surely correctable paradoxes about which some restless guy from Gary keeps asking. But life itself does not cohere like the systems the left brain lovingly develops to manipulate and control it. It is messy, full of ambiguity, full of true and deep contradiction.
The catastrophe occurs when something like "Ethics" forgets that it was developed to serve, not to rule. ("The law was made for man, not man for the law.") There is no systematized ethics adequate to the task of living an actual life. The left brain does not like this. It is a natural usurper and wants to be in charge. This wasn't as brief as I'd hoped, but I think your question is best answered like this: McGilchrist sees the best cooperation as looking something like a process that begins in the intuitive grasp of the world which is the provenance of the right brain, consults the analytic capacity of the left brain, which then informs the right brain's still holistic apprehensions. We need to at the same time respect our intuitions and emotional views of the world and also acquire the "necessary distance" from them to achieve a harmony that looks - to use the example of ethics - like both justice and mercy.
But you would agree that others believe it is a moral act. The important context here is not the observer, but the participant. It's very irritating you can't use italics in comments. Italicize "others" for me. But, yes, the question is a "have you stopped beating your wife" question. I almost made mention of that writing it.
A challenge of character in this post, and this will reveal something about me and make my point. I believe that a) you shouldn't assume people are guilty when you don't have enough information and they haven't been convicted and b) you have the perfect example and a record cover that says "BAD." A better person than I would not have used the example. Polanski would have been better. But, I, having a lesser character, went with the one where I would have been ashamed to meet the person directly. Sorry, Michael. I did meet you directly, and I would never have said any of this to your face.
Intellectually, I think we should separate creations from the creator. Emotionally, I struggle with this. Sometimes I hear a great song or watch an inspiring movie and I don't need to connect to the artists in order to find value. But when I do associate the art with the artist, suddenly the WHO made it matters. This is a tough one.
It is a tough one. There’s another weird flavor of it, too. There’s no crime committed by Nabokov, but Lolita makes my skin crawl because i believe he’s uncomfortably close to the subject matter. I read it in high school (!) and picked it up again a few years ago and started feeling I was part of something I didn’t like. I just didn’t want any part of it. I’m taking for granted that he’s not a child molester.
Is there an artist that comes to mind where you can no longer find value and have conscientiously ruled them out like you’re saying? And is there anyone who hasn’t been formally convicted of something where you want to distance yourself from the artist? Like Woody Allen. (who’s innocence I don’t find unreasonable.)
Kanye.
Yup. I get it. But.... here’s where we go back to the starting place of this whole thing. Value 1: don’t support antisemite’s Value 2: hold those with mental illness to different standards Value 3: separate the man from the art. I think your “character” reveal is through value 1. Mine is Value 2.
This is tricky sometimes... I think about someone like Richard Wagner, an unrepentant anti-semite, but he also wrote some of the most beautiful music ever written. But the dissonance is partially grounded in the time difference between his world and mine today. I know that is not an adequate justification, but he's long dead and his social/political impact is nil to none, yet the overture to "Tannhauser" still exists... "Tristan and Isolde" still reverberates in my soul. It's a little different if it is someone still trying to "influence" the world today (eg: Kanye Fucking West) with their hateful rhetoric (and frankly shitty music) that I feel it is ok to vote with my wallet and not support. That's not cancellation, it's just "you and your music suck". But of course, there are more contemporary examples... Kevin Spacey, brilliant actor... for example.
On the other topic, character in literature... I would find it nearly impossible to write one myself, but it is certainly one that I have examples of in my collection. Richard Powers creates amazing, complex moral characters that show development throughout the narrative. But some. less literal ones would be the sketched out inhabitants of the short stories of Magnus Mills (who I highly recommend), or the complex morality of Joy Williams' characters ("Breaking and Entering"... a must read).
Food for thought, Adam!
What is it that makes the characters morally complex? Is the situation they are in unique? Or is it something else?
I think it's dimensionality... that is, like real life, morality can be nuanced and contradictory... but many authors don't let their characters express that. Like every Stephen King or Tom Clancy character has one voice, one perspective, cover to cover. Joy Williams on the other hand, creates deeply wounded and realistically conflicted characters that evolve or sometimes just stay tragically conflicted. I honestly don't know how she does it, but she is marvelous.
Ordered Breaking and Entering. Cool set up.
Lots to unpack. Please hold…. :-) in the meantime just saw this in the nyt https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/08/us/hamline-university-islam-prophet-muhammad.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
A Lecturer Showed a Painting of the Prophet Muhammad. She Lost Her Job.
I can’t answer the cancellation question for the same reason I can’t answer the question “When did you stop beating your wife?”. It requires me to accept a premise with which I don’t really agree, which is that cancellation - or at least what is commonly understood by it these days - is a moral act. I wonder if we have the same understanding of the term.
Btw, your reply here has introduced the interesting question of whether cancellation is even in the realm of a moral decision. I have not actually thought about that. And that little realization, by the way, is exactly what I intend to do with this “right brain” section here on Substack. i’m trying to notice new things. And throw them into the intellectual hopper. Thank you!
The inquiry into right brain thinking has been probably my central intellectual preoccupation since I began to really dive into Iain McGilchrist’s book “The Master And His Emissary” a few months ago. I think it’s the first book I’ve literally studied since I was in school, with note taking and, happily now since we live in the age of Google, regular side trips to the material the author references.
The “collapse” of the right brain style of knowing the world (rich, complex, inclusive, tolerant of ambiguity, inconsistency and contradiction) into a left brain style of knowing (analytic, coherent, rejectionist, impatient with category messiness, oriented toward theory, control and manipulation, severe) is nicely expressed in Sleepless in Gary’s agitated question. The left brain thinking style resolves into binary or absolute ethical insistence what the right brain style accepts as normal, natural, and real.
What does he/you see as the limitations of the right brain? And is the ideal some harmony between them in all moral complex issues- or is this contextual where one side or the other is the “go to” side of the brain for that class of problem?
That is an enormously complex question and IM has spent much of a lifetime exploring it. I'll take a stab with this short response: the ideal is most definitely something that IM would describe as harmony, but it is the harmony of a cooperatively organized division of labor rather than the harmony of co-equal capabilities taking their turn in accordance with evolving or dynamic externalities. In this division of labor IM (I would say) argues for the primacy of the manner in which the right brain perceives the world. He would say, for example, that moral intuition is important and meaningful. It works best when it is usefully informed by essentially subsidiary left brain processing.
There is a lopsided and antagonistic relationship between the two thinking personalities which McGilchrist repeatedly warns against. I can use the example which your cancellation question suggests to illustrate it, although I have to emphasize that this is a highly abbreviated, oversimplified and essentially truncated distortion of what I think is going on. Michael Jackson was an actual human being whom you once met in person. He is, in one sense, more real to you than he would be to a biographer who spent 10 years researching and studying the man's life but who never actually met him. (Video and audio recordings confuse the issue somewhat but to make the point slightly differently, imagine the difference between the way Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton's biographer, "knows" Alexander Hamilton and the way Benjamin Moore, the bishop who met and reluctantly accepted Hamilton's request for communion on his deathbed "knew" him. Chernow certainly knows much more about Hamilton than Moore ever did, but also can never know Hamilton the way Moore, who might have spent ten minutes with the man, knew him. The right brain apprehends wholes, the left components.)
The question of your ethical obligations with respect to cancelling Michael Jackson on the day you met him was a real question... on the day you met him. You could have refused to work with the man. You could have demanded an accounting of his actions, or insisted on his repentant apology to someone or other. You could have insisted on a short private audience with him as a condition of being in his video. You could have decided to anonymously send the proceeds from your work that day to a shelter for abused children. You could have decided to do the same thing publicly and have issued a press release about it later for maximum effect. You could have walked up to Martin Scorsese and demanded a duel. I don't know. But there was an actual situation, and all of these options require cooperative interaction between the left/logical and right/intuitive aspects of your brain, which is something like a mediation between the actual world you were in and the notional ethics you had developed at that point in your life to guide your actions.
Now, about that imbalance: the left brain, when it is expanding and clarifying the grasp the right brain has on the world, does things like show the right brain how the various options are likely to play out in time, or to discern the effect on parties and things the right brain doesn't really apprehend (because they are not present at the time). The left brain, in McGilchrists's construction, is the Emissary. It probes and expands the world according to the needs of the right brain. It is an advisor and a tool for thinking and seeing, both of which it does effectively to the degree that it is directed in a manner that is - in the end - informed by the actual exigencies of a human life.
It is not that ethics are only situational. Quite the opposite, in fact. Ethics have a lovely coherence. They float in a realm of marvelous perfection, troubled only by the difficult but surely correctable paradoxes about which some restless guy from Gary keeps asking. But life itself does not cohere like the systems the left brain lovingly develops to manipulate and control it. It is messy, full of ambiguity, full of true and deep contradiction.
The catastrophe occurs when something like "Ethics" forgets that it was developed to serve, not to rule. ("The law was made for man, not man for the law.") There is no systematized ethics adequate to the task of living an actual life. The left brain does not like this. It is a natural usurper and wants to be in charge. This wasn't as brief as I'd hoped, but I think your question is best answered like this: McGilchrist sees the best cooperation as looking something like a process that begins in the intuitive grasp of the world which is the provenance of the right brain, consults the analytic capacity of the left brain, which then informs the right brain's still holistic apprehensions. We need to at the same time respect our intuitions and emotional views of the world and also acquire the "necessary distance" from them to achieve a harmony that looks - to use the example of ethics - like both justice and mercy.
But you would agree that others believe it is a moral act. The important context here is not the observer, but the participant. It's very irritating you can't use italics in comments. Italicize "others" for me. But, yes, the question is a "have you stopped beating your wife" question. I almost made mention of that writing it.
A challenge of character in this post, and this will reveal something about me and make my point. I believe that a) you shouldn't assume people are guilty when you don't have enough information and they haven't been convicted and b) you have the perfect example and a record cover that says "BAD." A better person than I would not have used the example. Polanski would have been better. But, I, having a lesser character, went with the one where I would have been ashamed to meet the person directly. Sorry, Michael. I did meet you directly, and I would never have said any of this to your face.