The Lives of Literary Characters [digital humanities #DH]

Come contribute one of the final annotations to our Citizen Science project on "The Lives of Literary Characters." Over 80,000 annotations to date on character relationships and identities. https://t.co/YDrPPeFHSW pic.twitter.com/DlCLNQPFcI

— Andrew Piper (@_akpiper) June 17, 2024

From the project site:

The goal of this project is to generate knowledge about the behaviour of literary characters at large scale and make this data openly available to the public. Characters are the scaffolding of great storytelling. This Zooniverse project will allow us to crowdsource data to train AI models to better understand who characters are and what they do within diverse narrative worlds to help answer one very big question: why do human beings tell stories?

In the nineteenth-century heyday of the novel, there were over 1.5 million literary characters invented just in English alone. Today, with the continued growth of literary markets around the world and the explosion of creative writing on the internet through fan communities, that number is orders of magnitude higher.

How on earth can we possibly understand all of this creativity?

This is where you, the reader, come in. We need your help to build better, more transparent AI models to understand human storytelling. To be clear: our goal is not to build AI to generate stories or create smarter chatbots. Our aim is fundamentally academic: we want to develop models to help us understand stories and thus learn more about this essential human activity. Most AI development is happening inside of black boxes behind closed doors. Our models will be open to the public as will all of the annotations made by readers like you. You are a key participant in how we will understand the future of stories.

There's much more HERE.

Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous [Media Notes 128]

Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous is the prequel series to Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, which I’ve already blogged about. It consists of 49 episodes over five seasons (22-24 minutes each), which ran from 2020 to 2022. Thus it centers on the same six characters and has the same showrunners, Scott Kreamer and Aaron Hammersley, thus insuring continuity among the characters.

At the beginning of the series I found all of the characters annoying at times, some more than others. But those annoyances had mostly disappeared by, say, the fourth season. Is that simply because I’d gotten used to them, or because they had in fact changed. For the purposes of argument, let’s say it’s the latter. That’s why I’m writing this note.

Come to think of it, this show is a variation on the “gang of misfits” premise we find in such movies as Seven Samurai, the American re-make, The Magnificent Seven, and The Dirty Dozen. During the early scenes of those movies, misfit fighters are recruited on an impossible mission. They succeed, of course, and during the process become a well-functioning team. The six teens in Camp Cretaceous are not fighters, and they aren’t exactly recruited, but really, they’ve been chosen because they make for good PR. The dinosaurs somehow escape from their cages, things fall apart, the adults flee the island, and the kids are left to fend for themselves.

Which they do, and quite ingeniously. They also have to figure out what’s going on. Some bad people are doing bad things and they have to get to the bottom of it. Actually, there’s more than one bad actor at work. During the course of all this, two young women discover they are gay and attracted to one another, or, perhaps more likely, Sammy knew she was gay all along, but Yasmina had to discover it about herself. And Kenji and Brooklyn fell for one another.

Kenji’s story is the one that most interests me. His father is rich, and has a penthouse apartment on Isla Nubar. He’s entitled and domineering, but manages to get over it by the fourth season or so. Then, at the very end of the fourth season Kenji learns that his father, Daniel Kon, now owns the island. During the fifth season we learn that Daniel Kon is not a good guy. But Kenji, who desperately wants his father’s approval, cannot see that, not initially, while the others see it right off. That disparity puts Kinji at odds with the others, though it all works out in the end, sorta’.

So, did these characters really change over the course of the five seasons? That question is entirely an aesthetic one, for these, after all, are purely imagined characters. Did we see character change, or simply different behavior from the same characters? I think it’s the former, but the question requires more investigation.

Analyze This: A Curious Pattern Across Characters in Three Shakespeare Plays

From the old days: When I first started posting at The Valve I posted a series on the problem of literary character: Since they ARE fictions, why is it so difficult for us to talk about them AS fictions? Why are we always using that language and concepts of real people to talk about these fictions? This is one of those posts, originally going on the web on July 25, 2006.

Some years ago I published an essay on Much Ado About Nothing, a comedy, Othello, a tragedy, and The Winter's Tale, a romance.* All involve a protagonist who mistakenly believes the woman he loves to be unfaithful – the Claudio-Hero plot in Much Ado. Though I argue the point in my essay, for the purposes of this post I will simply assume that that common plot feature betrays the same psycho-social problematic in each play. Thus in this group of three plays we have a "natural" experiment in which a single problematic is dramatically realized in three different kinds of play.

In the comedy the male protagonist makes the mistake during courtship; in the tragedy the mistake happens shortly after marriage; and in the romance, the mistake occurs well into the marriage. If we examine the relationships between the characters, we find that it gets closer as we move from one play to the next. And that's not all. There seem to be systematic differences among the configuration of characters in these plays. And that has led me to wonder whether or not those differences are related to the fact that we are dealing with three different genres, comedy, tragedy, and romance. Are these configurations merely incidental features of the plays or are they intrinsic to the different genres -- as realized by Shakespeare, if not in general? This line of thinking was suggested to me by a remark Frye had made in his Anatomy of Criticism, to the effect that a tragedy is a comedy where the last act, the reconciliation, has gone missing.

With this in mind, consider the following table, in which the first column names the function a given character takes in the play:

	Much Ado	Othello	Winter's Tale
Protagonist	Claudio	Othello	Leontes
Mentor	Don Pedro
Deceiver	Don John	Iago
Paramour	Borachio	Cassio	Polixenes
Beloved	Hero	Desdemona	Hermione

Does this table depict something for which an explanation is necessary or does it depict a mere contingent set of relationships between these plays? If an explanation is necessary, what kind?

If I thought this table depicted mere contingency, I wouldn't bother posting it here (nor would I have bothered publishing an article based on it). Unfortunately, the type of explanation required is not clear to me, though I've pondered the question enough. I suspect it has something to do with the "deep structure" of those three genres. Whatever that explanation is, I don't see how it can be couched in terms of naturalistic accounts of the motivations and actions of the characters in the table. Perhaps such naturalistic accounts – whether expressed in Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian, cognitive, or evolutionary terms, whatever – have some explanatory value when applied to individual characters, but the phenomenon depicted in that table is of a different order.

It is about artistry, about how characters are constructed to meet the demands of a certain kind of dramatic trajectory, and about how a certain kind of trajectory follows from certain characters in certain relations. But it is also about how all the characters in a play are the product of a single mind. From one point of view, that mind is Shakespeare's; from a different point of view, we're dealing with the minds of readers. Just how is it that a single mind can yield all of the characters in a single play?

What that table suggests to me is that we have three different ways of "mapping" a single mind onto the multiple characters of a play. Claudio, Othello, and Leontes each has different capabilities; that is, they draw on different capabilities within the reader. And so it is with other characters as well. I can't explain what's going on. But I will finish this post by describing it in a little more detail.

Neither Othello nor Leontes has a mentor comparable to Claudio's Don Pedro. Don Pedro talked with Hero's father, Leonato, and arranged the marriage. We see that happen in the play. We must infer that Othello arranged his marriage to Desdemona, whose father didn't even know about the marriage. We know nothing about how Leontes managed his marriage to Hermione, but he doesn't have anyone associated with him who could be called his mentor.

Further, there is no deceiver in The Winter's Tale comparable to Don John or Iago. Leontes deceives himself. Iago, Othello's deceiver, is closer to Othello than Don John is to Claudio. Among the presumed paramours, Cassio is closer to Othello than Borachio is to Claudio. Polixenes and Leontes have known one another since boyhood; they are so closely identified that we can consider them doubles. Thus relationships between key characters and the protagonist become more intimate as we move from the comedy to the tragedy to the romance – and some characters, the mentor and the deceiver, seem to disappear.

Finally, note that the protagonist becomes more powerful as we move through the sequence of plays. Claudio is a youth just beginning to make his way in the world. Othello is a mature man, a seasoned general at the height of his career; but there are men who have authority over him. Leontes is king (and father); there is no mundane authority higher than his. Perhaps this increase in power is correlated with the apparent "absorption" of functions into the protagonist. The absorption of functions increases the behavioral range of the protagonist. And this increased range is symbolized by higher social status.

What makes this problem so intractible is (1) that it involves a rich configuration of relationships – both synchronic and diachronic – among characters and plot trajectories, but (2) that we don't have an adequate metalanguage for describing these relationships. Levi-Strauss faced this problem in his four-volume Mythologiques, where he examined the relationships among myths.** He seemed to be getting at the notion that there is an invariant relationship between social structure – broadly considered – myth structure, and that that relationship follows from the structure and operations of the human mind.

To describe these relationships Levi-Strauss used a pseudo algebraic notation and the notion that "transformational" relationships exist between one myth and another. At the same time he made gnomic statements to the effect this his theory of myth is just another transformation of the myths about which he theorized. That is to say, the obvious commonsense distinction between myth and discourse about myth failed on some deeper and more abstract level.

For all the work that's been done in the cognitive and neurosciences since then, it's not at all clear to me that we are yet in a position to do much better. I don't expect the cognitive scientists to tackle this problem, nor neuroscientists, much less evolutionary psychologists. I don't expect it to be solved by anyone for whom stories are simply examples of higher cognitive processing. I'm afraid it's up to us.

---

*Benzon, William L. At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeare's Greatest Creation? Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 21 (3), 259-279, 1998. URL: http://www.academia.edu/235334/At_the_Edge_of_the_Modern_or_Why_is_Prospero_Shakespeares_Greatest_Creation

**I've taken up this problem in a working paper, Beyond Lévi-Strauss on Myth: Objectification, Computation, and Cognition, URL: https://www.academia.edu/10541585/Beyond_Lévi-Strauss_on_Myth_Objectification_Computation_and_Cognition

Much Ado about Simulation (Characters as Props)

When I first started posting at The Valve I posted a series on the problem of literary character: Since they ARE fictions, why is it so difficult for us to talk about them AS fictions? Why are we always using that language and concepts of real people to talk about these fictions? This is one of those posts, originally going on the web on August 5, 2006.

Let's look at the individual reader as he or she apprehends a text and thus (re)creates the lives of the fictional characters in the text. It is common to say that we come to identify with literary characters. But, as Norman Holland pointed out in The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968, pp. 262 ff.), it is by no means clear just what we mean by identification in this context. Still, in order to get this discourse on the road, we need some word for the relationship a reader establishes with a character. If not “identification,” then what?

Keith Oatley has been writing about fiction as simulation of the world:

Shakespeare’s great innovation was of theatre as a model of the world. The audience member constructs the simulated model in the course of the play, and thereby takes part in the design activity. So fiction is to understanding social interaction as computer simulation is to understanding, perception and reasoning. Shakespeare designed plays as simulations of human actions in relation to predicaments, so that the deep structure of selfhood and of the interaction of people who have distinct personalities becomes clearer.*

Oatley has the notion of simulation from computing, where computers are used to simulate a wide variety of phenomena – traffic patterns, explosions, fluid flow, and so forth. He proposes that simulation is just the notion we need in order properly to interpret the Greek mimesis. Stories are “the kind of simulation that runs on minds rather than on computers."

I find Oatley’s proposal to be plausible, but I’ve got reservations. Thus much of what I say will be a critique of that notion. I am not particularly happy about this mode of proceeding, as I would prefer simply to set forth a problem-free account. Alas, I am not aware of such an account and so must be content with a crude demonstration by via negativa.

A Scene from Shakespeare

I would like to discuss Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, focusing on the first scene of Act IV. I have two reasons for choosing this scene: 1) Eight major characters are on stage and most of them have substantial speaking parts in the scene. 2) The scene is emotionally rich, with the characters having distinctly different interests in the action. Whatever it means for a reader to simulate an imaginary world, the complexity of this scene taxes that capacity.

Here’s what’s going on: The characters have gathered for the wedding of Claudio and Hero, the arrangement of which has been accomplished in one of three plot lines intertwined in the first three acts. The relationship between Beatrice and Benedick is another of those plot lines. While the third is Don John’s scheme to destroy the wedding. Don John’s notion has been to deceieve Claudio into believing that Hero is a woman of loose morals who has deceived him even after having accepted his proposal. Thus, while the other characters, save Don John, believe they are about to witness a wedding, Claudio intends to denounce Hero before the assembled group.

And that’s what he proceeds to do, within thirty lines of the scene’s opening. Hero doesn’t say much, but she does deny the charges. She then faints and is taken for dead. At that point Don John, Claudio, and Don Pedro leave. Hero then revives and those who remain plan a course of action that will, they hope, clear her name.

My first issue is this: Is it physiologically possible for one person, one nervous system, to simulate the actions and emotions of all the characters in this scene? Different emotions are mediated by different neural and physiological systems. In particular the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems are important in motivation and emotion and they are antagonists, pulling physiological processes in opposite directions. Claudio’s aggressive anger – perhaps with overtones of hatred – would be sympathetically driven while Hero’s protective faint would be parasympathetically driven. Can a single nervous system simulate both of those states, either simultaneously or in close succession? That seems highly unlikely. And those are only two characters in the scene. What of Hero’s father, Claudio’s patron, of Beatrice and Benedick, the Friar? And what of Don John? Is he feeling pleasure, perhaps even triumph – albeit concealing these feelings from the others – at seeing his plotting bear fruit?

It seems rather unlikely that a reader would be able to simulate these various feelings and attitudes within the relatively brief compass of a few minutes. Beyond the difficulty of simultaneously activating mutually exclusive neuro-physiological systems, we have the fact that these hormonally rich systems change state more slowly than perceptual and cognitive systems. Even if we simplify the reader’s problem by asserting that the reader only need simulate the character who is speaking, we have the problem of switching from one character to the next, which could be daunting where three or four characters switch back and forth within the compass of only a dozen or two lines.

So, perhaps the reader does not simulate these feelings and attitudes in any very deep way; in particular, perhaps the slower acting hormonal systems are not recruited into action at all. Or perhaps the reader is not simulating the emotions of any of the characters in the scene. Rather, the reader is simply reacting to the actions and words of people whom the reader “knows” and toward which the reader has various attitudes, both positive and negative. That is, if the reader is simulating anyone, it is a person watching such a scene. I am imagining that the reader is simulating someone in attendance at such a wedding, but not participating in them in any way.

And this is not so far from imagining the reader to be in the audience of a performance of Much Ado About Nothing. In this situation each actor has responsibility for simulating the words and actions of a character, and only one character. The playgoer need only react to the play.

At this point, however, the notion that a reader, or a playgoer, is simulating the action seems rather far away from what Oatley has been asserting, who talks as though the reader is simulating the characters from the inside. Though he doesn’t use phrases like “from the inside,” that seems to be what he is asserting. If, for the reasons I have asserted, that is difficult or impossible, then it is not at all obvious to me what simulation might mean. What could it mean to simulate a character from the outside?** (Note that this problem doesn’t arise in computer simulation of physical phenomena.)

One way to deal with this problem would be to say something like: “Well, we don’t simulate all the characters. Just one or a small group of them.” Given that Oatley is arguing that such simulations help us understand ourselves and others, and thus help us negotiate our social lives, it is not at all clear that such a narrowing of scope is legitimate. But even if we accept it, difficulties remain.

The Foolish Protagonist

Let us return to Much Ado. Unlike Hamlet or Othello, the play doesn’t really have a single protagonist. But Claudio takes the active role in one plot and is obviously is a central figure in this drama.

Let us say that Claudio is motivated by anger in this scene. But the accusation motivating that anger is wrong, and the reader knows it. That knowledge effectively bars the reader from “identifying” with Claudio and so simulating his anger toward Hero. If the reader feels any anger at all in this scene – as this reader did – it is more likely to be directed at Claudio himself, perhaps against Don John as well, or simply at the whole bollixed situation. One sort of reader may also feel a bit of pity for Claudio, who, after all, was deceived; while another sort of reader may feel that Claudio was wrong not to have first broached the matter in private. But no reader is simply going to follow along with Claudio’s feelings and actions.

At this point, it seems to me that, if the notion of simulation is to be of much use, that we need to know considerably more about just how the brain does these things. Rather than speculate about what such knowledge might yield, I want to move in a different direction.

Fictionality as an intelligible and stable category of discourse

Andrew Piper, in Journal of cultural Analytics:

This article makes a very different claim, one that is based on observing a great deal of instances in which individuals have engaged in fictional or non-fictional writing over the past two centuries. Seen from this perspective, fictionality emerges as a highly legible category at the level of linguistic content ("lexis" in Aristotelian terminology). Such legibility is what allows us to build predictive models that can identify works of fiction with greater than 95% accuracy, and it should be added, that allow human readers to do the same (as in my initial experiment above). Contrary to the beliefs of the philosophers of language or different schools of literary critics from poststructuralists to postclassical narratologists, truth claims in language (or their opposite fictionality) are a highly recognizable linguistic aspect of texts. What appeared to be the case at the level of the sentence or "utterance" (what Searle rather vaguely called a "stretch of discourse"), no longer holds when we observe writing at a different level of scale. Placing all of the emphasis on the reader's activity, whether as cognitive predisposition or interpretive freedom, overlooks the powerful and extensive ways that texts mark themselves for their readers according to their fictional nature.

Not only does the research here suggest that fictionality is a highly legible category, but it also appears to have been surprisingly stable for at least two hundred years. While there have undoubtedly been significant changes to the way we tell stories, when we use learning algorithms trained on nineteenth-century texts we can still recognize contemporary novels with an impressive degree of accuracy (about 91%), even if that performance does decrease (history still matters). Indeed, the very features that seem to indicate the uniqueness of novels in the nineteenth-century, for example, appear either to be increasing over time or largely holding steady, even among a diverse range of genres into the twentieth and twenty-first century. While it remains an open question as to the extent to which different genres exhibit these features of fictionality to a similar degree, my initial research suggests that there is a surprising degree of commonality across very diverse types of fictional writing. Such continuity has important and still largely unaddressed implications for how we think about both genre and literary periodization.

YES!

Note, I've not yet read the article. I'm just skimming it. And I spotted this:

Indeed, imagining people as people may be fiction's most important role. If we remove dialogue from the sets above, including the pronominal expressions that accompany them (she said, he cried, etc),27 we see how third-person pronouns emerge as one of the strongest indicators of fictionality along with references to family members and bodies (Table 5). There is over a three-fold increase in the average number of she/he pronouns in fiction versus non-fiction outside of dialogue, with just these two words alone accounting for more than five-percent of all words in the text (or roughly 5,000 instances for a medium-length novel).

This speaks to my hobby horse about how we as critics have to learn to think and talk about characters as characters, not as people (who just happen not to be real).

Notes on the Unreality of Fictional Characters

Another working paper is online. Title above, downloads, abstract, contents, and introduction below.

Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/28941555/Notes_on_the_Unreality_of_Fictional_CharactersSSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2848422

* * * * * 

Abstract: We know that characters in fictions are not real but even as critics, we tend to talk about fictional characters in the same terms we use for real characters. This obscures the mechanisms by which fiction works. By looking at several Shakespeare plays and comparing them it becomes obvious that both characters and plot are subordinate to some as yet obscure higher level of organization. We need to develop a language and concepts for dealing with that higher level.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction: They’re Not Real! 1

A. C. Bradley: Character in Shakespeare (Othello) 3

Norman Holland: Cues for the Reader 5

Analyze This: Three Shakespeare Plays 9

Much Ado about Simulation 12

Godshalk: Shakespeare and the Problem of Literary Character 17

Recapitulation 18

Theory of Mind, Not! 20

Introduction: They’re Not Real!

This is one of the topics I took up in my first year of blogging at The Valve, back in 2006, the unreality of fictional characters [1]. By that I mean that we tend to talk about them in pretty much the same way we talk about real people. We’re interested in and comment on their feelings, desires, and motives, we probe the depths of their minds, sometimes using psychoanalytic theory. These days we even worry about their Theory of Mind, as it’s called, and how they probe one another’s minds.

Yes, of course, we know they’re not real. But that’s an observation we make by stepping outside our theories and analytic methods. As Graham Harman has observed here and there, what matters is what our theories can account for, not what we as individuals may also know [2]. To a first approximation we talk about characters in fiction in pretty much the same way as we talk about people in histories and biographies, or newspapers and magazines, or neighborhood gossip. And perhaps that’s the point, gossip, we’re a gossipy species and it turns out we like to gossip about imaginary humans.

That’s find and good for readers, but not so good for critics, who are supposed to be figuring out how fictions work. As William Flesch remarked in Comuppance, in a footnote about literary Darwinists:

…they treat literary characters as motivated by the same things that motivate real humans, rather than as representations to whom real humans react. It’s our reactions that psychology can analyze, not the actions of literary characters. [3]

Right. But that’s tough to do. While there’s a school of reader response criticism–actually, schools–they’ve done relatively little empirical work (except, perhaps for some of the psychoanalysts, such as Norman Holland and others) on how real readers respond. For the most part, reader response criticism has been about idealized readers and their communities.

While I would love to analyze the reactions of readers to fictional characters, particularly in real time, it’s not clear to me that doing so would fully satisfy my misgivings in this matter. In “Much Ado About Simulation” I point out how our reactions to certain actions in Much Ado About Nothing depend on what we know prior to those actions. The characters are what they are do what they do independently of what we know and when we know it, but our knowledge affects how we react to their actions.

That patterning is important. The issue is not simply about characters as individuals, but their interaction. Is it not their interactions that tell us about them? That same issue is at the center of the previous piece, “Analyze This,” where I compare configurations of characters in Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale. What emerges in that comparison is a distinction between characters and the functions they play in the plot. For example, in Much Ado, the function of Deceiver is enacted by Don John; that function is taken by Iago in Othello. The Deceiver fools the Protagonist into thinking that his Beloved has been unfaithful. There is no independent Deceiver in Winter’s. In that play, the Protagonist deceives himself.

Those characters are what they are. We can analyze them to our heart’s content. But the only way to see what Shakespeare is doing with them, how he deploys them, is to analyze them in context. Not only that, but to look at the three plays together. That’s when you notice that two plays have Deceivers, one does not. At this point we’re certainly talking about these characters as creatures of the dramas they enact, puppets at Shakespeare’s bidding, if you will, but we’re still not where I want to be, conceptually.

Those two sections flesh this out in more detail, but the problem remains. It’s about something that happens between fictional characters, as a function of overall patterning. Whatever it is that we ‘discover’ when we analyze these characters in the same terms as we use for real people, THAT is subordinate to this overall patterning. That patterning is related to the plot, obviously, but cannot be reduced to it. In fact, whatever THAT is, both plot and character are subordinate to it. How do we talk about THAT?

That’s the direction of this set of remarks. In the first section I look at A. C. Bradley’s discussion of Othello’s character, which is pretty much in terms we would use in describing real people, though he doesn’t go so far as to imagine what Othello might have been doing in his life prior to the actions represented in the play – a practice L. C. Knights lampooned in his well-known essay, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?”[4] This, of course, is something fans do all the time; not only that, but fans will create their own stories using their favorite characters, thus giving them life outside the originating fictions. After that I take a look at Norman Holland’s 1968 account of how it is that readers are justified in projecting (real) life into literary characters and, by implication, how it is that psychoanalytic critics are justified in plumbing the unconscious depths of imaginary minds.

That brings us to the two sections I’ve already discussed, “Analyze This” and “Much Ado About Simulation”. The next section is simply a pointer to an online article in which William Godshalk looks at discussions of Shakespeare’s characters from variety of thinkers ranging from Bertrand Russell to contemporary critics. I then recap the previous discussion and conclude with an appendix in which I rant against Theory of Mind.

References

[1] And here’s my first post on the subject, which generated a fair bit of comment: http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/fictional_characters_1_a_c_bradley/

[2] For example: “Yet it is not a question of whether philosophers are personally 'aware' of this, but of whether their philosophies sufficiently account for it.” Graham Harman, Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016), 28.

[3] William Flesch, Comuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and other Biological Components of Fiction (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2007) 231.

[4] FWIW, you can find the complete essay, which I have not read, online at the Internet Archive as part of a collection, Explorations (1949), URL: https://archive.org/details/explorations030001mbp

Character change in the Hollywood film

Rory Kelly has an interesting guest post at David Bordwell's Observations on film art. It's called "Rethinking the character arc." The opening paragraphs:

Since the 1960s, the character arc has become all but obligatory in Hollywood movies. Genres like sci-fi and horror, once largely unconcerned with character change, now often include it. Compare, for example, the 1953 version of War of the Worlds with Steven Spielberg’s 2005 remake. In the latter the alien invaders are not only defeated, but in the process Tom Cruise’s character, Ray Ferrier, becomes a better father.

Why has character change become so prominent? In The Way Hollywood Tells It (2006), David offered some suggestions. The psychological probing in plays by Arthur Miller, Paddy Chayefsky, and Tennessee Williams became popular models of serious drama. Teachers and writers were persuaded by Lajos Egri’s book, The Art of Dramatic Writing (1946), in which the author advises that characters should grow over the course of a play. There was also the impact of self-actualization movements of the 1960s and 1970s that held out the promise of personal growth and transformation.

It’s also likely that star power has had considerable influence. When trying to raise financing for a low-budget indie script a few years back, my collaborator and I were advised by three different seasoned producers to give our protagonist a more pronounced arc or we would never be able to attract a name actress to the role. Whether they were right or not, I do not know, but their shared assumption about attracting talent is telling.

Given how common the character arc has become, we need to better understand how it is typically handled. I think we can identify and analyze six narrative strategies that create a particular character type: the protagonist who is flawed but is capable of positive psychological change. My primary example will be The Apartment (1960).

I’ll also consider aspects of character change in Casablanca (1942), Jaws (1975), and About a Boy (2002). This list will allow me to consider the character arc over six decades, from the studio era to contemporary Hollywood, and across several genres.

Bayesian reasoning and fictional characters

Last year Stanford's Arcade, Probability and Literary Being, by Hannah Walser and J.D. Porter. Starting from a remark Toni Morrison has made about how characters in her novels seem to take on a life of her own:

Hannah Walser: Cognitive literary studies has an explanation for this phenomenon ready to hand. Blakey Vermeule, for instance, claims that “the illusion of [characters’] independent agency” experienced by novelists has been speculatively linked both to “imaginary play in childhood … and to mind-reading capacities in general” (46-7). The idea is that our brains are evolutionarily primed to attribute mental states and intentions not only to humans themselves, but to humanlike entities—anthropomorphic cartoons, expressive robots, and yes, literary characters. When authors feel their characters directing them or resisting them or talking back, they’re experiencing a side effect of this overattribution of minds, just as readers are when they feel as though characters are real humans with lives outside the boundaries of the story.

JDP: The cognitive piece is crucial here, but I think this actually extends to an ontological question as well. We think of characters and fictional worlds as wholly manipulable just because they were invented; they are mere arrangements of technical features that the author could adjust in any way at all. But the suggestion that Morrison and others have made is that, once some of those technical features are in place, the author loses a little control. The characters attain some sort of actual ontological status related to the epistemological issues you raise. I think the explanation here has to do with probability, specifically Bayesian reasoning and its deployment of priors.

HW: Agreed—our judgment of others’ agency is as much a matter of probabilistic reasoning as it is of imaginative projection. When it comes to contemporary research on how we learn to understand other minds, Hume, not Kant, is the patron saint—sometimes even explicitly credited as such, by the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik for instance (Gopnik 76). “Causal learning,” Gopnik notes, “is a notorious example of the gap between experience and truth” (75), most of all in the case of mental causes—desires, intentions, beliefs, and so on—which are by definition invisible and perhaps little more than hypothetical. But Gopnik’s idea, borne out by research into the learning processes of infants and small children, is that human reasoning about causality can be modeled according to Bayes’s concept of probability, which takes into account both the conditional probability of an event—for instance, the probability that it’s raining outside, given that I’m taking my umbrella to work—and the prior probability of the two events: that it’s raining, and that I would take my umbrella to work on any given day regardless of weather. (Wikipedia has a good breakdown of Bayesian basics.)

I’m going to explain this in detail, because Gopnik’s adaptation of Bayesian probability to social cognition strikes me as a persuasive theory of how we come to see other humans as intending agents with personalities: we notice that variations in behavior are often predictable on the basis of hypothesized individual preferences and beliefs rather than inherent features of the world.

Vicarious Experience, or How to Think Biologically about Literature

A couple of years ago I reviewed William Flesch, Comeuppance, for Twentieth Century Literature. I've now put that review online at Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/15076187/Altruism_Gossip_and_the_Vicarious_Apprehension_of_Human_Living

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Benzon, William. Altruism, Gossip, and the Vicarious Apprehension of Human Living. Twentieth Century Literature. Vol. 55, No. 4, Darwin and Literary Studies (winter 2009), pp. 629-633.

Abstract: William Flesch devotes the first half of Comuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and other Biological Components of Fiction to reviewing the relevant biological and evolutionary literature on cooperation, signalling, and altruistic punishment. His central point is that, when we experience fiction, we monitor the lives of fictional characters using the same bio-behavioral “equipment” we use in monitoring our fellows as we keep “score” of their “credits” and “debits” in the “group account.” The need to monitor our fellows gives us a vicarious interest in their actions, and that vicarious interest is emotionally charged. Flesch develops this notion of vicarious experience through reference to David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals in particular, and Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The anger we feel upon witnessing transgression comes not through some identification with the victim or victims of the transgression, but belongs to the affective component of our social monitoring system. This anger is, in effect, a sentiment on behalf of the group. The pleasure we feel in just punishment or just reward, Flesh argues, is similarly vicarious and on behalf of the group, not some particular individual or individuals. Literature provides us with an invented form of such vicarious experience.