characters in fictional worlds

25
Characters in Fictional Worlds

Upload: ederson-vertuan

Post on 15-May-2017

227 views

Category:

Documents


0 download

TRANSCRIPT

Page 1: Characters in Fictional Worlds

Characters in Fictional Worlds

Page 2: Characters in Fictional Worlds

RevisionenGrundbegriffe der Literaturtheorie

Herausgegebenvon

Fotis Jannidis

Gerhard Lauer

Matı́as Martı́nez

Simone Winko

3

De Gruyter

Page 3: Characters in Fictional Worlds

Characters in Fictional WorldsUnderstanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film,

and Other Media

Editedby

Jens Eder

Fotis Jannidis

Ralf Schneider

De Gruyter

Page 4: Characters in Fictional Worlds

ISBN 978-3-11-023241-7

e-ISBN 978-3-11-023242-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Characters in fictional worlds : understanding imaginary beings in literature,film, and other media / edited by Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, Ralf Schneider.

p. cm. - (Revisionen. Grundbegriffe der Literaturtheorie ; 3)Includes bibliographical references.ISBN 978-3-11-023241-7 (acid-free paper)1. Characters and characteristics in mass media. 2. Fictitious characters.

3. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.) I. Eder, Jens. II. Jannidis, Fotis.III. Schneider, Ralf, 1966-

P96.C43C47 20108091.927-dc22

2010037621

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

” 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York

Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen� Printed on acid-free paper

Printed in Germany

www.degruyter.com

Page 5: Characters in Fictional Worlds

Preface

Most of the contributions to this volume are based on papers presented and discussed at the conference »Characters in Fictional Worlds: Inter-disciplinary Perspectives«, which was held at the Centre for Interdiscipli-nary Research (Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung, ZIF) of the University of Bielefeld, Germany, 28 February – 2 March 2007. We would like to thank the Centre for the funding and the organization of the conference. A number of contributions were added to the topics of the conference to complement the present collection. The volume has been a long time in the making – we are very grateful to all contributors for join-ing this project and for their patience. Our heartfelt thanks go to Marcus Willand for the editorial work on this project. Without his indefatigable support, care, and patience this volume would not have been printed. Sarah Böhmer, Mareike Brandt, Daniel Bund, Anne Diekjobst, Sebastian Eberle, Christian Maintz and Maike Reinerth joined forces with him, and we would like to express our grati-tude to them, too. Some of the chapters were translated into English, for which we thank the translators, Wolfram Karl Köck, Alison Rosemary Köck and Michael Pätzold. Thanks are also due to Wallace Bond Love for last-minute language support.

The editors

Page 6: Characters in Fictional Worlds
Page 7: Characters in Fictional Worlds

Content

Content

Introduction JENS EDER / FOTIS JANNIDIS / RALF SCHNEIDER Characters in Fictional Worlds. An Introduction .................................... 3

I General Topics HENRIETTE HEIDBRINK Fictional Characters in Literary and Media Studies. A Survey of the Research ............................................................................................ 67

MARIA E. REICHER The Ontology of Fictional Characters .................................................. 111

PATRICK COLM HOGAN Characters and Their Plots ..................................................................... 134

II Characters and Characterisation in Different Media ALAN PALMER Social Minds in Persuasion ........................................................................ 157

JONATHAN CULPEPER / DAN MCINTYRE Activity Types and Characterisation in Dramatic Discourse ............ 176

SIMONE WINKO On the Constitution of Characters in Poetry ...................................... 208

MURRAY SMITH Engaging Characters: Further Reflections ................................................ 232

JOHANNES RIIS Implications of Paradoxical Film Characters for Our Models and Conceptualizations ........................................................................... 259

JÖRG SCHWEINITZ Stereotypes and the Narratological Analysis of Film Characters ..... 276

Page 8: Characters in Fictional Worlds

Content viii

CHRISTIAN HUCK / JENS KIEFER / CARSTEN SCHINKO A ›Bizarre Love Triangle‹. Pop Clips, Figures of Address and the Listening Spectator ............................................................................ 290

FREDERIK LUIS ALDAMA Characters in Comic Books .................................................................... 318

HENRIETTE C. VAN VUGT / JOHAN F. HOORN / ELLY A. KONIJN Modeling Human-Character Interactions in Virtual Space ............... 329

III Characters and Their Audiences RICHARD J. GERRIG A Moment-by-Moment Perspective on Readers’ Experiences of Characters ............................................................................................. 357

CATHERINE EMMOTT / ANTHONY J. SANFORD / MARC ALEXANDER Scenarios, Characters’ Roles and Plot Status. Readers’ Assumptions and Writers’ Manipulations of Assumptions in Narrative Texts ..................................................................................... 377

URI MARGOLIN From Predicates to People like Us. Kinds of Readerly Engagement with Literary Characters ................................................... 400

KATJA MELLMANN Objects of ›Empathy‹. Characters (and Other Such Things) as Psycho-Poetic Effects ......................................................................... 416

DAVID C. GILES Parasocial Relationships .......................................................................... 442

IV Characters, Culture, Identity MARGRIT TRÖHLER Multiple Protagonist Films. A Transcultural Everyday Practice ....... 459

RUTH FLORACK Ethnic Stereotypes as Elements of Character Formation ................. 478

MARION GYMNICH The Gender(ing) of Fictional Characters ............................................. 506

Page 9: Characters in Fictional Worlds

Content ix

V Transtextual and Transmedial Characters BRIAN RICHARDSON Transtextual Characters ........................................................................... 527

WERNER WUNDERLICH Cenerentola Risen from the Ashes. From Fairy-Tale Heroine to Opera Figure ........................................................................................ 542

Bibliography JENS EDER / FOTIS JANNIDIS / RALF SCHNEIDER Characters in Fictional Worlds. A Basic Bibliography ....................... 571

Page 10: Characters in Fictional Worlds
Page 11: Characters in Fictional Worlds

Introduction

Page 12: Characters in Fictional Worlds
Page 13: Characters in Fictional Worlds

JENS EDER / FOTIS JANNIDIS / RALF SCHNEIDER

Characters in Fictional Worlds An Introduction

1 Questions of Character Analysis and Theories of Character

Most kinds of fiction centrally feature characters – from ad hoc bedtime stories to the most complex works of art. Some characters are known to millions of people, such as Anna Karenina or Lara Croft, Ulysses or James Bond, Mickey Mouse or R2-D2. The aim of this volume is to present a survey of the varieties of international and interdisciplinary research on characters in fictional worlds in different media. That such a survey does not exist to date is perhaps due to the gaps between the disciplines, but perhaps also to the apparent normality and ubiquity of characters: We encounter them every day, and they are so familiar a phenomenon that they do not seem to require closer inspection. Yet another reason could be that once they are subject to closer scrutiny, characters prove to be highly complex objects in a number of ways. They remind one of real persons, but at the same time they seem to consist of mediated signs only. They are ›there‹ but they do not appear to exist in reality – we do not meet them on the streets, after all. They do exert an influence on us, but we cannot interact with them directly. They are incredibly versatile, they change over time and appear in different forms in different media. The introduction to Ronald B. DeWaal’s Sherlock Holmes bibliography gives an impression of this:

This bibliography is a comprehensive record of the appearances in books, periodicals and newspapers of the Sacred Writings or Canonical tales (fifty-six short stories and four novels), the Apocrypha and the manuscripts written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle between 1886 and 1927, together with the translations of these tales into sixty-three languages, plus Braille and shorthand, the writings about the Writings or higher criticism, writings about Sherlockians and their societies, memorials and memorabilia, games, puzzles and quizzes, phonograph records, audio and video tapes, compact discs, laser discs, ballets, films, musicals, operettas, oratorios, plays, radio and television programs, parodies and pastiches, children’s books, cartoons, comics, and a multitude

Page 14: Characters in Fictional Worlds

Jens Eder / Fotis Jannidis / Ralf Schneider 4

of other items – from advertisements to wine – that have accumulated throughout the world on the two most famous characters in literature.1

Terminology already posits a problem for a general or comparative approach that wants to examine (maybe even equally ›famous‹) characters across those media: We have to subsume readers, hearers, viewers, users, and players under the heading of ›recipients‹, and books, paintings, radio plays, films, video games, etc. under the heading of ›texts‹.2 (Coming from literature and moving image studies, the authors of this introduction are aware of their limited disciplinary perspectives in trying to give a general survey of the field.)

Moreover, in any media, characters confront those who are concerned with them – creators, audiences, critics and commentators – with numerous questions. These questions can be clustered into three groups concerning the analysis and interpretation of characters. 1. In the production phase of a media product, authors, filmmakers and

other media producers are mainly confronted with the question of how characters can be crafted in a way that allows them to evoke certain thoughts, feelings and lasting effects in the target audience. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had to invent Holmes in the first place, screenwriters had to adapt him, casting agents had to cast an actor for the role, etc.

2. The interpretation of a work of fiction confronts critics and scholars with the question of how characters can be understood, interpreted and experienced, and by which stylistic devices they are shaped.

3. Studies in the fields of cultural theory and sociology consider characters as signs of empirical production and reception processes embedded in their socio-cultural contexts in different historical periods and (sub-)cultures. The master sleuth Holmes, for instance, has been read in connection with the socio-cultural developments of a modern, industrialised society.

Each of these three fields of inquiry – production, interpretation and cultural analysis – has prompted scholars to find answers and develop

_____________

1 De Waal: Holmes <http://special.lib.umn.edu/rare/ush/ush.html#Introduction> (Jul. 21st, 2008).

2 When we use the term ›text‹ in this introduction, we include literature, everyday language, film – and, indeed, all other utterances in which characters may occur. Following Mosbach: Bildermenschen – Menschenbilder, p. 73, we might define text to mean ›complex, coherent utterances based on signs, which are contained in a media format, and, in their totality, communicative and culturally coded‹ (German original: ›komplexe, aber formal begrenzte, kohärente und [als Ganze] kommunikative, kulturell kodierte Zeichenäußerungen‹; on film as text, see montage/av: Film als Text, and Hickethier: Film- und Fernsehanalyse, pp. 23–25.

Page 15: Characters in Fictional Worlds

Characters in Fictional Worlds: An Introduction 5

theories. For the first two thousand years of the debate, the first set of questions was tackled mainly by practitioners – dramatists and directors, artists and media producers – with a view to practical concerns. It was only in the 19th century that a more theoretical, descriptive and systematic analysis of characters was developed in various disciplines of scholarship, such as literary studies, theatre studies, and later in film and media studies, communication studies, the history of art, philosophy and psychology. Each of these disciplines has produced diverse rival theories on which we can only cast a passing glance in this introduction (for a more detailed survey of the research, see the contribution by Henriette Heidbrink in this volume).

Simplifying matters for the purposes of clarity, we can point to four dominant paradigms that reach across disciplines but have different tenets, emphases and methods. 1. Hermeneutic approaches view characters dominantly as representations

of human beings and emphasise the necessity of taking into considera-tion the specific historical and cultural background of the characters and their creators.

2. Psychoanalytic approaches concentrate on the psyche of both characters and recipients. They aim at explaining the inner life of characters, as well as the reactions of viewers, users, and readers with the help of psycho-dynamic models of personality (e.g., those developed by Freud and Lacan).

3. Structuralist and semiotic approaches in contrast highlight the very difference between characters and human beings, focussing on the construction of characters and the role of the (linguistic, visual, auditive or audio-visual) text. They frequently regard characters themselves as sets of signifiers and textual structures.

4. Cognitive theories, which have been established since the 1980s, centre on modelling in detail the cognitive and affective operations of information processing. In these approaches, characters are regarded as text-based constructs of the human mind, whose analysis requires both models of understanding text and models of the human psyche.

The rivalry between these approaches in various disciplines and regions has contributed to the fragmentation of character theory and the co-existence of viewpoints. The interdisciplinary and international survey we envisage with this volume may help to remedy the situation. Most contributors to this book have done extensive research in the field, and are thus able to present their own established approaches and theoretical results. We are hoping that this will facilitate a dialogue between different positions. The essays are roughly clustered into five groups: (1) general topics (the research on characters, their ontology, and their relation to

Page 16: Characters in Fictional Worlds

Jens Eder / Fotis Jannidis / Ralf Schneider 6

narrative plots); (2) characters and characterisation in different media (prose fiction, drama, poetry, feature films, pop clips, comics, the internet);3 (3) recipients’ cognitive and affective responses to characters (from understanding to empathy and aesthetic evaluation); (4) relations of characters to identity and culture (stereotyping, gender); and finally, (5) characters that cross the borders of single texts or media. Clearly, this clustering is far from being comprehensive. It is only giving a first orientation and is not supposed to draw rigid lines. Many essays deal with several topics and could have been located in a different group as well.

This introduction is intended to help to situate the contributions in a more general context. We hope that our footnotes and references serve as links for the readers, pointing to essays that deal in more detail with topics we can only briefly mention here. Keeping our considerations on a rather abstract level and leaving out extensive examples and historical case studies, we start with some fundamentals: the definition and ontology of characters, their relations to real people and to the media they are represented in. We then turn to action and character constellations as two important contexts of individual characters in fictional worlds. On that basis, we examine somewhat more specifically how characters are re-identified and characterised in different media. From a more global perspective, characters can then be associated with recurring types and media genres, as well as with certain functions they fulfill and meanings they convey. Finally, we conclude with some thoughts on how recipients respond to characters and what kinds of lasting effects characters may have.

2 Definition and Ontology of Character

How we define character is relevant not only with regard to theoretical questions, but also in quite practical terms, for the definition influences how we analyse characters: If we regard Sherlock Holmes as a person-like being, we are likely to focus on his personality traits; if we see him as a sign, we will concentrate on the textual structures of his presentation; if we think of him as a mental construct, the psychological processes of his recipients will move centre stage, and so on. Each of these approaches, and some others, have been explicated in detail, and we can only gesture

_____________

3 Unfortunately, we did not succeed in including further important art forms and media like painting or TV.

Page 17: Characters in Fictional Worlds

Characters in Fictional Worlds: An Introduction 7

towards them here.4 Little explanation can be found in the etymology of the term, and the languages differ to boot. The English term ›character‹ goes back to Greek charaktér, ›a stamping tool‹, meaning, in a figural sense, the stamp of personality, that which is unique to a human being.5 The French and Italian terms – personnage and personaggio, respectively – point to Latin persona, i.e. the mask through which the sound of the voice of an actor is heard. The German Figur in turn has its roots in the Latin figura, and suggests a form that contrasts with a background.

In spite of the differences, in all of these languages characters are most frequently defined as fictive persons6 or fictional analoga to human beings.7 Such definitions are in accordance with the intuition that we resort to knowledge about real people when we try to understand fictional characters. Definitions of this type, however, are not entirely unproblem-atic: they are too vague as far as the ontological status of fictive beings is concerned, they are restricted to anthropomorphous characters and exclude, e.g., animal characters, aliens, monsters and robots. This raises two questions. First, there is the basic question of the ontology of characters: What kind of object are they? Second, there is the question of their specificity: What is the difference between them and other objects of the same kind?

The ontology of characters has been discussed most widely in philoso-phy and in literary scholarship.8 One position, according to which characters are regarded as component parts of fictional worlds, has been particularly prominent in this context. Fictional worlds are in turn explained in the scholarly discourses of fictional worlds theories and the philosophical possible worlds theories.9 Within this framework, a fictional world is conceived of as a system of non-real but possible states, or as a constellation, created by the text, of objects, individuals, space, time,

_____________

4 For more detailed discussions of the definition and ontology of characters, see Eder: Fiktionstheorie; Jannidis: Figur, chap. 5 and 6; as well as the references in the subsequent footnotes.

5 See the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. 6 E.g. Wilpert: Figur, p. 298. 7 E.g. Smith: Characters, p. 17. 8 For introductions to the debate in the discourse of philosophy, see Proudfoot:

Fictional Entities; Howell: Fiction; Lamarque: Fictional Entities. The discussion in literary theory can be found in Rimmon-Kenan: Narrative Fiction, pp. 31–34, Margolin: Individuals and Margolin: Characters.

9 See Margolin: Individuals; Eco: Lector; Ryan: Worlds, Possible Worlds Theory; Doležel: Heterocosmica; Pavel: Fictional Worlds; Ronen: Possible Worlds; Buckland: Digital Dinosaurs. Cf. also the helpful surveys in Martinez / Scheffel: Erzähltheorie, pp. 123–134, and Surkamp: Narratologie.

Page 18: Characters in Fictional Worlds

Jens Eder / Fotis Jannidis / Ralf Schneider 8

events, regularities, etc.10 Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes apparent that the character problem is not fully solved by referring to fictional or possible worlds, for their very status has itself been disputed.11 Models of fictional or possible worlds do allow for an integration of characters into the larger structure of the world presented in, or created by, the text, but they do not manage to clarify the ontology of characters convincingly, because fictional or possible worlds are subject to ontological problems themselves. What is more, the scholarly discourse on characters is much older and more varied than that on fictional worlds. Therefore, it makes sense to start from the perspective of character proper.

There are four major positions on the ontological status of characters, and they are highly controversial: 1. Semiotic theories consider characters to be signs or structures of

fictional texts.12 2. Cognitive approaches assume that characters are representations of

imaginary beings in the minds of the audience.13 3. Some philosophers believe that characters are abstract objects beyond

material reality.14 4. Other philosophers contend that characters do not exist at all.15 As we mentioned above, each of these positions has its own far-reaching implications for the analysis of characters. Each definition thus entails a particular perspective and a particular method.

This is not the place to deal with the pros and cons of the various positions in detail, not least because the authors of this introduction are not unanimous in their theoretical stance: Ralf Schneider conceives of

_____________

10 See, e.g., Doležel: Heterocosmica,pp. 16–23; Ryan: Narrative, p. 91. 11 For a survey of philosophical positions on the ontology of possible worlds, see Melia:

Possible Worlds. 12 Branigan: Point of View, p. 12 (›surface feature of discourse‹); Wulff: Charakter, p. 1

[French ed.: 32]; see also Jannidis’ criticism of (post-) structuralist varieties of this position (Figur, chap. 5).

13 For psychological approaches in literary theory, see Grabes: Personen; Schneider: Grundriß; Culpeper: Characterization; Gerrig / Allbritton: Construction, and the cricitism in Jannidis: Figur, pp. 177–184. No comparably detailed version of this theory has been put forward in the area of film studies, but it is implied in many approaches, such as Bordwell: Cognition; Ohler: Filmpsychologie; Grodal: Film Genres, or Persson: Understanding Cinema.

14 See Thomasson: Fictional Characters, and Reicher: Metaphysik; see also Howell: Fiction, and Lamarque: Fictional Entities.

15 Künne: Abstrakte Gegenstände, pp. 291–322; Currie: Characters; see also Proudfoot: Fictional Entities; Howell: Fiction; Lamarque: Fictional Entities.

Page 19: Characters in Fictional Worlds

Characters in Fictional Worlds: An Introduction 9

characters as mental constructs, as in position 2 above, whereas Fotis Jannidis and Jens Eder stand for different versions of position 3, maintaining that characters are abstract objects; another variety of this thesis can be found in Maria Reicher’s contribution to this volume.16 Despite such differences, we share a number of convictions. The philosophic-semantic view that characters do not exist is jeopardised by the fact that it requires extremely complicated logical re-formulations of quite straightforward utterances about characters: every sentence about a character would have to be translated into a sentence about the text – we would not be talking about Sherlock Holmes at all, but about the books and films in which he appears. Some hold the view that characters are signs, mere words or a paradigm of traits described by words. A well-known example of this approach is Roland Barthes’s S/Z (1970) in which one of the codes, ›voices‹, substitutes for person, understood as the web of semes attached to a proper name. In this view, a character is not to be taken for anything like a person, yet on closer examination these semes correspond to traditional character traits. Moreover, the reduction of characters to words poses many practical problems in literary and media criticism. In addition to that, every aspect of meaning of the term ›sign‹ leads to counterintuitive consequences when applied to characters: characters simply cannot be reduced to signifiants or signifiés or relations between them, because each of these aspects would imply that one character is always restricted to the one text to which it belongs, as part of the overall set of signs. It is, however, a well-known fact that characters can appear in a number of texts, as the example of Holmes and Watson clearly shows.

Given this situation, the series of essays by Uri Margolin, by combining elements of structuralism, reception theory and the theory of fictional worlds, proved to be a breakthrough. For Margolin, characters are first and foremost elements of the constructed narrative world: ›character‹, he claims, ›is a general semiotic element, independent of any particular verbal expression and ontologically different from it‹.17 If, in a similar vein, we consider characters to be elements of fictional worlds, which exist either as subjective mental entities or as inter-subjective communicative constructs, the question is what differentiates them from the other elements of the text. To what extent is Sherlock Holmes different from his pipe, the Thames or a lifelike Sherlock Holmes wax figure? This

_____________

16 See Schneider: Grundriß and Literary Character; Jannidis: Figur, chap. 5; Eder: Fiktionstheorie; Reicher (in this volume).

17 Margolin: Characterisation, p. 7.

Page 20: Characters in Fictional Worlds

Jens Eder / Fotis Jannidis / Ralf Schneider 10

question has been addressed by referring to some closely connected criteria that a character fulfills, including being animate, having an intentional mind (in the phenomenological sense), being able to act, being humanlike and having person status.18 Some of these criteria, however, prove to be too broad or too narrow: the criterion of being animate would on the one hand include the earthworm in the possession of an angler that Holmes identifies as a clue as a character; on the other hand, it would exclude inanimate characters, such as robots. Anthropomorphism and person status would exclude many well-known characters such as Lassie or the extraterrestrial plant Audrey II (The Little Shop of Horrors). In contrast to these criteria, the ability to act and to have an inner life (of whatever quality) appear to be more plausible. In addition to that, an element of the text is more likely to be regarded as a character if it is a particular, recognisable entity, not an indistinct part of a mass (of beings).

At the prototypical core of the concept of character, then, is a recog-nisable fictional being, to which the ability to think and act is ascribed. Individual characters can deviate from this prototype in a variety of ways and to various degrees. Models in advertisements, for instance, can be hard to identify (criterion of recognisability); a character can be a reference to historical persons, such as Napoleon in historical novels and feature films (criterion of fictionality); some cannot use their bodies to act, such as the invalid Johnny in Johnny Got His Gun (criterion of being able to act); others are even dead from the beginning of the story, such as Harry in Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry (criterion of being animate). In addition to that, Uri Margolin has pointed out that not all characters exist within the main level of the fictional world at all. He reminds us that characters can have various modes of existence: they can be factual, counterfactual, hypothetical, conditional, or purely subjective.19 At the end of the mind game movie Fight Club, for instance, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) turns out to be the hallucinated alter ego of the nameless narrator-protagonist (Edward Norton), who suffers from a split personality syndrome. Cases like this highlight the relevance of some further questions: What is the relationship between characters and real persons?

_____________

18 Eder: Fiktionstheorie, pp. 55–59. 19 Margolin: Characters, p. 375.

Page 21: Characters in Fictional Worlds

Characters in Fictional Worlds: An Introduction 11

3 Characters and People

If we conceive of characters as beings in fictional worlds, to which the audience ascribes intentionality or action, we must ask what precisely the difference between characters and real persons is. The differences concern especially the textual construction and fictional representation of characters, their ontological incompleteness, and, in connection with that, the difference between the audience’s knowledge about characters on the one hand and about persons on the other.20 Obviously, the reception of characters is quite different from the direct encounter with real persons: Readers, listeners, or viewers focus on media texts, activate media knowledge and communication rules, they cannot interact with the represented persons but can think about their meaning, as well as about causes and effects, and they can shift their attention from the level of what is represented (Sherlock Holmes) to the level of presentation (the words of the book, the actor’s performance). The symbolism and the communicative mediation of characters mark fundamental differences to the observation of persons in reality. In addition to that, the texts that construct characters are fictional. Real persons can of course also be represented in (non-fictional) texts, such as biographies or the news, but they do not owe their existence to these texts.

This consideration is connected with the ontological incompleteness of characters. Objects in the real world have certain properties. If such objects are mentioned in a non-fictional text, all persons involved in the communication process will assume that even those properties of the object which the text does not name and specify explicitly are still accessible in principle. This is even true in circumstances where there is a lack of sources, so that the evidence cannot be provided. If, for instance, the colour of Napoleon’s hair had not been mentioned in any of the contemporary texts about him, we would still assume that his hair was of a certain colour, and that this colour could still be found out, through the discovery of hitherto unknown sources, an exhumation, etc.

The situation appears to be entirely different in the case of characters in fictional worlds. If the medium that constitutes them provides no information on a certain property, this property is simply lacking in the fictional world – there is a gap, as it were, in that world. The recipient has _____________

20 The term ›knowledge‹ is used in a wide sense here, including also erroneous beliefs, pre-conscious dispositions, procedural or implicit knowledge, kinds of embodied cognition, etc. The incompleteness of fictional characters has been discussed exten-sively in analytical philosophy; see Eaton: Character; Crittenden: Fictional Characters; Lamarque: How to Create.

Page 22: Characters in Fictional Worlds

Jens Eder / Fotis Jannidis / Ralf Schneider 12

no opportunity to fill this gap in a way that would allow him to consider it an item of reliable knowledge. We simply cannot know how many children Lady Macbeth had, or if Sherlock Holmes has a birthmark on his back – to mention two cases in point which have been discussed extensively. There is, of course, nothing that would stop the recipient from contributing such pieces of knowledge, and each individual reading, viewing, etc. is likely to differ from all other readings with regard to the unmentioned details the recipient imagines in the process, but on the level of the fictional universe the text creates, the information will remain unavailable.

Things get more complicated because the above formulation that ›the medium which constitutes a character provides information‹ is admittedly vague. In the most straightforward case, the colour of a character’s hair is simply mentioned explicitly (in the language-based media genres) or shown (in the visual media genres). The case is less clear if a text presents this piece of information implicitly rather than explicitly (see below for a further discussion of this distinction). A character may, for instance, be presented as a typical Frisian, or a typical Italian from the south of Italy – in both cases, information on the colour of the hair is implied. The question here is to what extent the perception of persons feeds into – or ought to feed into – the perception of characters. As has become clear, knowledge that comes from outside the text plays a crucial role in many cases when a character’s behaviour is to be understood adequately. Therefore, if we want to understand the text, film, etc. in its historical context, we need to find out about the psychological and anthropological knowledge that was available to the author and her or his contemporaries. This process, however, is quite different from the way we approach persons, for in a historically adequate interpretation it only makes sense to fill in information that would have been available in the context of the text’s original production and reception. If we read, for instance, a historical report about the symptoms of an unknown disease, we may of course say that according to today’s knowledge, it is likely that this or that particular disease is meant; in the case of a fictional text, this procedure would be anachronistic and meaningless: If the disease is unknown in the fictional world and its context, the lack of information cannot be remedied. Whether or not one wants to admit such potentially anachronis-tic readings depends to some degree on the theoretical background one chooses: On the one hand, it has been an established practice, e.g. in psychoanalytical interpretations, to find prove of the symptoms described by psychoanalysis in texts that precede the development of the discipline itself by a few hundred years (consider, for instance, Freud’s famous analysis of the Oedipus myth in Shakespeare’s Hamlet); on the other hand,

Page 23: Characters in Fictional Worlds

Characters in Fictional Worlds: An Introduction 13

in the context of Foucault’s discourse theory it makes sense to regard the moment in which a phenomenon – say, an illness – is first described as the one in which the discourse brings forth the phenomenon in social reality, so that an a posteriori interpretation of a phenomenon of a previous epoch raises a number of epistemological and ideological questions. What is more, we not only make use of our knowledge about persons in understanding characters, but also our knowledge about character types, genres and the protagonists they typically feature, and the rules of specific fictional worlds: The utterance ›I want to see the sun‹ can be understood adequately in rather different ways, depending on whether it comes from a human being or a vampire.

Does this mean that characters are indefinitely changeable concepts which can only be understood in the context of particular contemporary knowledge about persons and characters? The answer is that in principle they are, but in spite of all this flexibility there seems to be a core set of properties, a common denominator that all presentations of characters share. This prototypical core or ›base type‹ – or basic structure of mental character models – is constituted by only very few and rather general properties, which seem to be anthropological givens of the perception of human (and humanlike) beings: In contrast to objects, characters have mental states, such as perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and aims. Accordingly, characters have both an outer appearance and an inner state of the psyche that is not visible from the outside. This definition of the base type is supported by recent research on person perception in early childhood.21 Assumptions about stable features or traits appear to be essential for most characters, too, so that it makes sense to include this aspect in the definition of the basic type as well. Other approaches also include the sociality of characters as a fundamental component beside corporeality and inner states.22 The relationship between a character and its environment may presuppose body and mind, but further particular qualities emerge from social interaction, e.g., social roles. In all three areas of the general structure of characters – corporeality, psyche, and sociality – the features that characters are ascribed can be either stable (static) or changeable (dynamic).

Even if this base type may be the same across cultures, it can only provide a very general framework. How this frame is filled will depend to a major extent, and perhaps entirely, on the respective cultural context,

_____________

21 On the base type, see Jannidis: Figur, pp. 185–195, with further references to the relevant research; cf. also Tomasello et al.: Understanding.

22 Eder: Figur, pp. 173–185.

Page 24: Characters in Fictional Worlds

Jens Eder / Fotis Jannidis / Ralf Schneider 14

which is subject to historical change. The constitution of characters from textual information and cultural knowledge is based on character schemata. This concept refers to expectations of regular connections that exist between two or more pieces of information. Such expectations direct the inferences of the audience: If one piece of information is given in the text, the schema allows the reader or viewer to fill in the second bit. Such schemata include such everyday items of knowledge as the fact that the consumption of alcohol will lead to intoxication.

The sources of such processes of inferencing consist of, on the one hand, knowledge about the actual world, especially the social world.23 On the other hand, there is media knowledge and narrative knowledge about fictional worlds in general, and about the rules of the narrated world in particular.24 Social knowledge includes person schemata; images of human nature; social categories; prototypes and stereotypes; knowledge of patterns of social interaction; groups and roles; folk psychology and sociology; the dynamics of social cognition; attribution and the interpretation of behaviour (e.g., the so-called fundamental attribution error); the knowledge of prototypical persons and last, but not least, the self-image of the reader/viewer/user. Media knowledge, on the other hand, includes an awareness of a text’s communication processes and fictionality; an awareness that is guided by the rules and aims of communication as well as media-specific knowledge of genres, modes of narrative, character types, dramaturgical functions, aesthetic conventions, star images, contexts of production, intertextual references, and individual popular characters (e.g., Sherlock Holmes as a pattern of later detectives).

The entirety of the character schemata formulated by, or implied in, a text, constitutes its ›text-internal anthropology‹.25 Of central importance in this context are traditional configurations such as the book-keeper, the melancholic, the extrovert, the beau, the vamp, etc. Such character types can emerge from a variety of sources: the knowledge of the specific kind of narrated world, the knowledge about fictional worlds in general, and

_____________

23 On accounts of social perception or social cognition, see for instance Zebrowitz: Social Perception; Lavine / Borgida / Rudman: Social Cognition.

24 On the interaction between different kinds of social and media knowledge, see Ohler: Filmpsychologie; Eder: Figur, pp. 162–248.

25 Titzmann: Psychoanalytisches Wissen, p. 184. Titzmann correctly points out that terms like ›psychology‹ and ›anthropology‹ ought not to be taken literally, because neither should we project the concepts formulated by the specialist disciplines back onto the text and its context, nor should we overestimate the coherence of such bits of knowledge.

Page 25: Characters in Fictional Worlds

Characters in Fictional Worlds: An Introduction 15

the knowledge about the actual world, including the habitus of social groups. We will say more on such character types below.

In view of the abundance of knowledge about people and characters in every society, it seems unlikely that there should still be gaps left in the fictional world. Even information missing from the text could be filled in from these knowledge stores. We should not forget, however, that fictional worlds are not autonomous worlds; rather, they emerge from processes of communication with their own particular rhetorical structure. Some aspects of the presentation of characters may be part of aesthetic structures that reach beyond the characters. Most importantly, characters themselves can be signs in a number of ways: they can be instances of exemplary behaviour, they can be symbols or in other ways representative of feelings, attitudes, problems and the like. In addition to that, characters are an important part of the emotional structure of literary texts, films, etc. They influence the feelings, moods and emotions of the audience to a considerable degree (see the remarks on ›Functions and Effects of Characters‹ in this introduction). In accordance with the complexity of the rhetorical structures, the reader or viewer may of course consider the number of Lady Macbeth’s children. Many of the questions of this kind, however, will look irrelevant, for the aesthetic structure sketched here will determine the quality and quantity of the import of contemporary knowledge.

The differences between characters and real persons come to the fore if we systematically consider the ways we understand and talk about them. Theories of reception stress the fact that we understand characters on several levels:26 Viewers, readers, listeners or users do not only grasp a character’s corporeality, mind, and sociality in the (fictional) world. They are building on those processes to understand the character’s meanings as sign or symbol, and to reflect on the character’s connections to its creators, textual structures, ludic functions, etc. The latter processes diverge from the social perception of real persons, and it would be unusual (to say the least) to think about human beings in those ways. Moreover, and in accordance with the different levels of reception, the readers’ or viewers’ meta-fictional discourse about characters (e.g., talking about them after leaving the cinema) contains sentences of different logico-semantical structure:27 While the statement ›Holmes is a detective‹ stays safely in the boundaries of the fictional world and might also be

_____________

26 E.g., Persson: Understanding Cinema. 27 Künne: Abstrakte Gegenstände, pp. 295–296, and Currie: Characters, are proposing

different logical transcriptions of such sentences.