Theories of Characters

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be too naïve an assumption to put literary characters generically on a level with real persons.

Nevertheless, a human-like ‘basic type’ of literary character seems to exist, a structure basic enough to be shared by all human beings, which serves as an identifying feature in texts. The same is true for the persons acting in the early Buddhist suttas, although it is not intended here to deny their historical existence. However, it has become almost commonplace in the contempo-rary discussion to assume that historical texts contain a good portion of rearrangement and other

“manipulations” of the historical and/or narrative raw material they are based on.

A similar problem constitutes the category of personality ‘traits’: they are not “atomic”, unchangeable factors; they convey information about a character which is largely dependent on language, literary genre, and current, that is, culture- and time-specific personality models (like, e.g., the psycho-analytical model etc.).¹⁹⁴

On one level (the “category-analytic” discourse of Theravāda orthodoxy), for instance, the characters’ traits in the Pāli suttas (Ger. “Figurenmerkmale”) are very often expressed in bi-nary distinctions – as properties or characteristics of persons, either vested in the language of the Path (sekha; a-sekha) or in dependence of the early Buddhist system of ethical or moral values.

In most cases, furthermore, they refer to the generic states of mind of individuals, like the oppo-sition “negligence” (pamāda) and “vigilance” (appamāda), with the positive term having the greater value attached to it. These distinctions may be instantiations of the more abstract “man-in-the-world”/saṃsāra ― “world-renouncer”/mokṣa dichotomy.

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independent of their medium of origin.¹⁹⁵ Another, but related, phenomenon was expressed by Peter Lamarque:

“What is striking is how often fictional characters from the literary tradition – like the well-loved Eliz-abeth Benett, Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, Pip, Tess of the d’Ubervilles – enter reader’s lives at a highly personal level. They become, as Martha Nussbaum puts it, our ‘friends’, and for many readers the lives of these characters become closely entwined with their own.”¹⁹⁶

Also, Lamarque remarks¹⁹⁷, these lives from the canonical literary tradition seem, as time goes by, to serve as blueprints for the stories people tell about their own lives. It is reasonable to assume that the principle of narrating exemplary lives may also be applicable to Indian Buddhist literature, in which the identification or, at least, the process of comparing and/or identifying oneself with certain characters, may every now and then occur intentionally.¹⁹⁸

This phenomenon and its related problems are also well known in literary criticism, and attention has especially been drawn to it by those theories of literary characters whose objective

195 An especially amusing, and rather exceptional, example for this is the fact that up to the year 2002 every year approximately 700 letters arrived at London’s 221b Baker Street addressed to Mr Sherlock Holmes. The then company in charge even employed a secretary to answer these letters; see Jan Westerhoff. 2010. Twelve Examples of Illusion. Oxford: OUP, p. 97.

196 Cp. Lamarque 2007: 117.

197 Cp. ibid.: 117f.

198 The Jātakas, and especially their later Sanskrit versions (cp. Ohnuma 2007), by exhibiting certain Bodhi-sattva-virtues (mainly dāna, generosity) did serve in some respects as ideal ‘model-lives’ for the followers of Buddhism. The stories of the protagonists are often widely known. We learn, e.g., from the travel accounts of the Chinese pilgrims Faxian and Xuanzang of yearly offering ceremonies in front of special stūpas at Mathurā, which means that the practice was alive for at least from the early fifth to the seventh centuries; cp. Gifford 2003: 78: “Certainly, there is ample evidence to show that after Mahāmoggalāna’s death, cult practices arose that allowed both monks and laity to derive at least some of the benefits that would have accrued from a face-to-face meeting with the saint. According to Faxian, there were in the early fifth century various stūpas at Ma-thurā that memorialized several of the Buddha’s disciples, including Mahāmoggalāna. He reports that there was a yearly ceremony in which various groups of people each made offerings to the stupa of their special dis-ciple, presumably to obtain some facsimile of the powerful qualities that disciple had embodied.” Although it is by no means clear that that was in fact the purpose of the reported activities (Gifford writes, “presumably to obtain […]”), it is reasonable to assume that it was. Similarly, although there are reasons to assume that the individual texts of the collections of the Sutta Piṭaka were not really studied individually (cp. Collins 1990), but rather cursory in a handbook-like manner, as, e.g., the tradition of the Pirit Potha in Sri Lanka, it is also reasonable to assume that for the religious life of the laity, representations of the Buddha (statues, stūpas, etc.), not as mere representations in an intellectual manner, but even powerful, enlivened, and inspiring representa-tions, have always been an important part of the religion.

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it is to integrate the cognitive processes of the readers.¹⁹⁹ The phenomenon can be explained by reference to the two levels of representation (the story- and the discourse-level): The constitution of the story-world or the narrated world is dependent on the presentation in the narrative dis-course, but they are not identical. The narrative discourse triggers certain semiotic processes (Ger. “Zeichenprozesse”), which become detached from the informational content of the mes-sage in the brain/mind of the reader. Empirical findings suggest that this is actually quite often the case: The average reader frequently remembers the content, but easily tends to forget the (ex-act) wording of a text.²⁰⁰ The representation of a literary character seems therefore to be much more dependent on certain cognitive operations of readers (so-called ‘bottom-up’ processes²⁰¹) than is generally assumed.²⁰² The thus generated mental image can then further enriched be by additional information from (real-) world/encyclopedic knowledge (Ger. “Weltwissen”) of the reader (‘top-down’ inferences). Although this is an irrefutable fact, as the most recent cognitive approaches to narrative have shown, the structuralist theory of characters, on the other hand, has no place for what James Phelan calls the ‘mimetic aspect’ of literary characters. However, it is beyond doubt that structuralism has contributed invaluable insights, and as Jannidis has ex-plained in his historical overview of the development of theories of characters in literary fiction, every new theory has built its edifice on the foundation of the insights of their (structuralist) pre-decessors.

For these reasons, from now on I will use the term ‘character’ when talking about the per-sons that are depicted in the Pāli suttas, without, however, implying a final judgement about their ontological status. Therefore, I do not presuppose them a priori as either fictive “paper beings”²⁰³ (Mieke Bal) or representations of real persons, and for the purpose of this study, which is largely synchronic, it is in fact irrelevant. The term character seems ideal for that purpose. Uri Margolin has provided a definition of ‘character’:

“The core sense, shared by all usages of ‘character’ in literary contexts, is that of narrative agent (=NA), that is, an individual capable of fulfilling the argument position in the propositional form DO

199 See Jannidis 2004: 177, and especially note 60 on that page for references concerning the “cognitive turn” in literary criticism and narratology.

200 See Jannidis 2004: 176, especially note 59.

201 Cp. ibid.: 182f.

202 Cp. ibid.: 175.

203 Cited in Neumann & Nünning 2008: 52.

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(X), which is the sine qua non of all narrative and drama. It is an individual, human or human-like, of whom actions can be predicated.”²⁰⁴

According to Uri Margolin, for readers to turn their focus of attention onto characters is purely a matter of choice, a second-level “interpretative activity” which is itself subject to certain conditions like contemporary prevalent poetic concepts and (literary as well as sociological) con-ventions.²⁰⁵ This is true, given the numerous other interesting aspects contained in the suttas as, for instance, the wealth of Buddhist teachings themselves. What is more, although Margolin’s statement points to the problem of the impossibility for historical scholars to know whether the historical addressees of the suttas had the same interest in their characters as a modern audience has, the following analyses show how characters have essential parts in the structure and narra-tive progression of the texts, and one can therefore assume that characters were indeed, in some way or other, in the focus of the attention of the historical listener/reader too.

Having thus decided to turn one’s attention to the characters, in order to go about the task, one is confronted with a plethora of character typologies (Ger. “Figurentypologien”). Within the already very diverse field of the discipline of narratology, a number of theories of characters

204 Margolin 1983: 1f. Margolin is one of the most influential literary theorists of the 20^th century. He has suc-cessfully combined structuralist, cognitive (reception theory), and philosophical (Possible Worlds Theory,

“PWT”) approaches in his numerous ground-breaking studies of character analysis.

205 Margolin 1983: 6.

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ist. They range from models grown out of structuralist approaches that view characters as ‘act-ants’, roles, and narrative devices up to characters as individuals/persons.²⁰⁶ In an important es-say from 1983 about characterisation, Margolin summarises the different historically evolved po-sitions of narratology regarding characters in literary narratives concisely.²⁰⁷ Characters, he writes, can be described as ‘actants’, as “abstract spheres of actions, defined in terms of a narra-tive case grammar (object, instrument, etc.)”, as ‘roles’, embodying “standardized, stereotyped and codified social role[s] with the norms of action and appropriateness, expectations and values associated with it”, they can be described as ‘individuals’ and/or (possible) ‘persons’, i.e. as nar-rative agents viewed “in terms of inner states, mental properties, personality traits, and general or specific complexes of such properties, i.e. individual personality models or personality types”²⁰⁸, and, finally, characters as ‘narrative devices’, sub-dividing in ‘character as symbols’ or as

‘theme, idea, thesis, [or] literary archetype’, character as ‘narrative instance’, and character as part of the formal design of the action of a particular work (as agent, “foil”, “card”, “ficelles”, and so forth, as described by Henry James).

In a later essay, Margolin gives a more detailed account²⁰⁹ of the field, which is very di-verse and sometimes even contradictory, and in which he identifies two layers of meaning (“as

206Cp. Margolin 1983: 2f.; see also Margolin 1989: 1f, passes a rigorous, even harsh judgement on the two main factions within the ‘narratology of characters’: “The debate about the nature of character in narrative has been raging for a long time. The views expressed range from the traditional one regarding literary characters as lifelike persons, to the deconstructivist one, which sees in them nothing but a collection of words on the page.

The debate, however, has not yielded any measure of progress, and the different camps seem to keep talking past each other, each claiming to possess the exclusive truth about the subject. The root cause of this failure of scholarly communication resides in a dual confusion: theoretical and methodological. On the theoretical side, many scholars have succumbed (at least unwittingly) to the false dictum unum nomen, unum nominatum, cou-pled with an essentialist view on the nature of concepts. They accordingly assume that the term ‘literary char-acter’ can have only one correct sense, as it designates an independently existing single concept or type of ab-stract entity with inherent defining or essential properties, which are to be discovered and correctly labeled by the literary scholar. However, the existence of cultural concepts or entities with essential properties, inde-pendent of any linguistic formulation, is no longer a tenable view. What is more, the vague and polysemic nature of most ordinary language cultural terms, where a single term refers to a variety of concepts, is by now widely acknowledged.” [my emphasis]

207 The following citations and references are all to Margolin 1983: 2 until stated otherwise.

208 This is the definition of character Margolin presupposes in his 1983 essay if not otherwise qualified; cp.

Margolin 1983: 2. It seems that this is also a definition of character one encounters most often in works on lit-erary characters (cp. Bachorz in Wenzel 2004: 53). The criticism of a psychological view of characters of the Structuralists and New Critics makes actually the impression of a temporary backlash, though a very important one.

209 All references and citations in this paragraph are to Margolin 1989: 2f.

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an intuitive, pre-theoretical term and as a theoretical term within the confines of an explicitly for-mulated theory” – and he bemoans that they all too often had been blurred!) and six explications of the theoretical term ‘literary character’, which oscillate between the two poles of “textual-ity/signifier” and “representation/signified” together with their respective theoretical frame-works: a) “Character as the topic entity of a discourse” [= linguistic signifier; analysis is strictly intratextual or text-internal]; b) “Character as device, one of the pieces or components of the composition or design of the literary work”; c) “Character as textual speaker (speech position, voice, source of utterances) or communicative role in the enunciatory system represented by the text; in other words, a narrative instance or level”; d) “Character as thematic element, one of the figural projections of the narrative text’s underlying macrosemantic/thematic deep structure,

‘theme anthropomorphized’”; e) “Character as [1] actant and [2] role. For Greimas and his school, character as actant is a purely formal category, involving whoever carries out or under-goes an action, preceding any semantic investment. […]. As a second step, the actant may un-dergo some qualitative semantic concretization, turning it into a role (that is, a bundle of social functions). At this point, standardized, stereotyped, and codified attributes, together with the norms of action and appropriateness, expectations, and values associated with them, become the defining features of character”; “f) Character as non-actual individual, designated by means of a referring expression, who is included in or is a member of some nonfactual state of affairs or possible world [‘Possible Worlds Theory’].”

The category or the view of “character as narrative instance” is particularly productive from the perspective of narratological textual analysis (Ger. “Erzähltextanalyse”) because it fur-ther yields information about such important analytical categories as ‘point of view’, ‘focaliza-tion’, ‘narrator’, ‘character’, speaker, and so forth.²¹⁰ The last mentioned model, however, the

“character as a non-actual individual” in a “non-actual world” (= “textual actual world”), is inter-esting for its ability to connect (Ger. “Anschlussfähigkeit”) to extra-textual, historical personality theories. The treatment of literary characters as representational, as ‘possible persons’, on its part, offers the possibility to account for most audiences’ intuitive response to characters as per-son-like, and the interpretation of the possible motivations underlying their actions from

210 For a much more in-depth treatment and review of the different existing character models of the past six decades or so, which eventually leads into his own, eclectic model of character as mental model, see Jannidis 2004: Ch. 5 (pp. 152-195). For different typologies of character see ibid.: ch. 3 (pp. 85-108).

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psychology. This procedure, as Herbert Grabes (1978) has explained based on empirical findings in psychology is not different from what one does in real life when interpreting the behaviour of fellow human beings.²¹¹ Because of the role conscious and reflecting individuals play in the sut-tas, the view I shall in principle, but not exclusively, adopt is that of characters as possible per-sons. As is apparent, there exists a stark opposition between the structuralist and the “personal-ity” view, which lies at the centre of the New Critics’, the Structuralists’, and the post-Structural-ists’ criticisms of too naïve a treatment of literary figures as real persons (= a “mimetic treatment of literary characters”).²¹² However, these different theories and character-models are not relat-ing to each other in a kind of hierarchy of “increasrelat-ing specification” (from ‘actant’ to ‘individ-ual’).²¹³ If anything, their criteria and/or their “defining features” (Ger. “Differenzkriterien”) are different in each case and the insights and the knowledge about characters thus gained from nar-ratives is not lost with the emergence of each new character-model. Ideally, applied in a com-bined way where possible and/or necessary, and without dragging along their respective ideolog-ical superstructure (particularly with regard to structuralism), the different kinds of information about characters thus obtained could rather complement each other or ‘pile up’ instead of contra-dicting each other, and have the potential to show a complex phenomenon from different an-gles.²¹⁴ However, when things start getting too complicated, one is well advised to concentrate

211 See also Jannidis 2004: chapter 3 (pp. 86-109) for a more detailed discussion and an exhaustive overview over the different character-typologies in narratology (up to the year 2004) starting with E. M. Forster’s basic – and still valid – distinction between ‘flat’ and ‘round’ characters: E. M. Forster, pp. 86f.; Christian N. Wenger, pp. 87-89; William Harvey (harking back to Henry James), pp. 89f.; Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (influenced by Joseph Ewen and Gérard Genette), pp. 90-94; Baruch Hochman, pp. 94-97; David Fishelov, pp. 97f.

212 Cp. for a detailed discussion of the history of this criticism Jannidis 2004: 151-157; cp. also Grabes 1978:

405f.

213 Cp. Margolin 1989: 5: “The different conceptions are semantically heterogeneous, and no two of them can be translated into each other or reduced to a common denominator; nor can they be synthesized in any mean-ingful way. At most, some weak correlations might be established between particular pairs of concepts. None of the concepts seems arbitrary or spurious, each seems to command a certain degree of theoretical legitimacy, and each of them enables us to see and say things we could not have otherwise.”

214 Margolin 1983: 3; cp. also Stock 2010: 197; Jannidis 2004: 151, who states that even while certain ap-proaches/views on character were eventually replaced by new models, the knowledge about characters didn’t vanish simultaneously: “Vielmehr kann der knappe Abriß verdeutlichen, daß das Wissen über einzelne Aspekte dieses komplexen Phänomens mit jedem neuen Ansatz zunimmt. Selbst wenn die jeweilige Lösung eines späteren Ansatzes wieder verworfen wurde, so ist doch nicht damit auch das Wissen über den Aspekt der Figur wieder verschwunden.” Cp. also Grabes 1978: 7, who states that the kind of questions asked of a text are totally different in a structuralist approach and an approach that values/acknowledges the ‘illusionary charac-ter’ (“Illusionscharakter”) of literay works of fiction with its presupposed “willing suspension of disbelief”.

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on the basics. Although often criticised, narratologists have in principle never really departed from E. M. Forster’s pioneering and sagacious distinction of literary characters as either “flat” or

“round”:

“We may divide characters into flat and round. Flat characters were called ‘humours’ in the seven-teenth century, and are sometimes called types, and sometimes caricatures. In their purest form, they are constructed round a single idea or quality; when there is more than one factor in them, we get the beginning of the curve towards the round. The really flat character can be expressed in one sentence […].

It is only round people who are fit to perform tragically for any length of time and can move us to any feelings except humour and appropriateteness. […] The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is flat pretending to be round. It has the incalculability of life about it – life within the pages of a book.”²¹⁵

Now, how does one get, in a methodical way, from names to qualities, to traits, to charac-ters, and, finally, perhaps to a personality model?