melodie-avant-mots - Lacheret

For a story to be real to us, Stevenson argues, the character must fade away, must be a
placeholder, so that we are able to insert ourselves in the story; and what we glean
from it is a form of self-understanding. The more the character is completely
subsumed to the plot, the more compelling we find the story. I might agree with
Stevenson if I thought that a character can have only one voice; but in fact I don’t
think so. In the next section, I explain why I have come to believe that there is always
more to a fictional or dramatic character that its role in a plot; and the result of the
analysis will also explain my view that the character and its voice in a play or novel is
in the end chordal and polyphonal.
II.
Is there more to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus or to Shakespeare’s Othello than
what that character specifically does in the play that bears his name? Can characters in
a play or novel can be referred to, apart from their role in the plot of the novel? I
would like to answer these questions in the affirmative; and there are several
directions in which to take the answer. First, as Doctor Faustus is the result of the
composition of two or more historical characters named Faustus who showed up in
German towns in the late Middle Ages and won renown and mistrust for themselves
on account of their special powers, so the figure of Othello may be based on historical
precedent. This is a question for the historian and the textual scholar, who can thus
supply ‘extra’ content for the figure of Othello. As Aristotle observes, when a
historian treats an historical figure, he tries to fill in as much detail as possible, to
recreate that figure in its concrete particularity, but a poet is more interested in its
universal features. Still, the dramatic treatment of a once-real person can range
between the detailed presentation of Shaw’s Saint Joan, in which the author makes use
of a trial transcript, and the mythic presentation of Homer’s Agamemnon.
Second, Othello is a type; in fact, he personifies two important types. On the
one hand, he is the cultural Other in a Venice of the imagination that is in certain
respects open (it is a seaport) and in certain respects closed (it is an aristocratic
oligarchy). In the role of Other, he shares our consideration with Shylock, and with
Portia as long as she is dressed like a lawyer. On the other hand, he is the Jealous
Husband, driven mad by his unfounded fears, and so shares our imagination with
Leontes, King of Sicilia in The Winter’s Tale. In thinking about both types, since they
are universals, we may also supply ourselves, for we all have first, second and third
person experience of otherness and of jealousy—topics that, by the way, invoke
privacy, secrecy, exclusiveness and excludedness, the bounds and displacements of
mutuality. We can supply ‘extra’ content to the figure of Othello from our own
experience, which is also the basis on which we understand the tragedy, the source of
its pity and fear.
Moreover, these types brought to life in a great work of art go on to live another life,
as Martine de Gaudemar shows so well in her development of the notion of
personages, not just in the imagination of an individual, but as a public feature of our
social world. Thus we all know what it means to call someone an Iago, or to compare
a public figure to Othello. Such personages, neither historical figures nor abstract
concepts, walk among us provided with a story and a character that is a pattern of
strengths and weaknesses; they are known objectively insofar as they constitute part of
a shared cultural heritage, they have real effects on our lives, and they attract other,
further stories.
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