melodie-avant-mots - Lacheret

the usual expressions of pain can be feigned or misinterpreted. However, if I encounter
another person writhing in pain, and instead of offering assistance or calling an
ambulance or a doctor, I stand there interrogating the certainty of my knowledge of his
pain, I am morally at fault.
Another awareness can never be plumbed. As Cavell puts it, the best case
scenario that seems so tempting in the case of a coffee cup is incoherent in the case of
another person. The third person, God’s eye view of another human being requires
reducing him to a physical entity and opening it up; that is, it requires murder. And of
course, once another person is murdered, his awareness—the very thing the
perpetrator wanted to get at—has fled. Another person is a whole world to which we
have no access; but we have an interest in him, an empathic projection, and a moral
obligation towards him. Moreover, the exploration of our own interest and obligation
towards him will reveals the limits we may have consciously or unconsciously set to
interest and obligation, or by contrast the depths of our commitment, and such
knowledge is self-knowledge.
What then are we doing, when we apprehend a dramatic character, the
representation of a human being in a play or novel? Otherwise put, to whom are we
listening? When we encounter a real human being, there is always a ‘more’ that we
will never exhaust; can we say the same thing about a dramatis persona? If not, how
can we take an interest in her? The Russian formalists sever the Gordian knot by
claiming that a character is just a placeholder, a nodal point, in the formal structure of
the plot. The job of the literary critic is accordingly just to trace the genealogy of plots,
as they are transformed from one culture to another; and this is literary criticism that a
logical positivist might approve.
In his essay “A Gossip on Romance,” Robert Louis Stevenson (a fine essayist
and travel writer as well as novelist and poet) answers my question: how can we be
interested in a story whose protagonist is a mere placeholder? 1
“No art produces illusion; in the theatre we never forget that we are
in the theatre; and while we read a story, we sit wavering between
two minds, now merely clapping our hands at the merit of the
performance, now condescending to take an active part in fancy with
the characters. This last is the triumph of romantic story-telling:
when the reader consciously plays at being the hero, the scene is a
good scene. Now, in character-studies the pleasure that we take is
critical; we watch, we approve, we smile at incongruities, we are
moved to sudden heats of sympathy with courage, suffering, or
virtue. But the characters are still themselves, they are not us; the
more clearly they are depicted, the more widely do they stand away
from us, the more imperiously do they thrust us back into our place
as a spectator. I cannot identify myself with Rawdon Crawley or
with Eugene de Rastignac, for I have scarce a hope or fear in
common with them. It is not character but incident that woos us out
of our reserve. Something happens as we desire to have it happen to
ourselves; some situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is
realized in the story with enticing and appropriate details. Then we
forget the characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge
into the tale in our own person and bathe in fresh experience; and
then, and then only, do we say we have been reading a romance.
1 R. L. STEVENSON, Essays, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918, p. 220-234.
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