Characters in Fictional Worlds

Revisionen
Grundbegriffe der Literaturtheorie
Herausgegeben
von
Fotis Jannidis
Gerhard Lauer
Mat as Mart nez
Simone Winko
3
De Gruyter
Characters in Fictional Worlds
Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film,
and Other Media
Edited
by
Jens Eder
Fotis Jannidis
Ralf Schneider
De Gruyter
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 2010
8091.927-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, Gttingen
Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Germany
www.degruyter.com

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 fr interdisziplinre 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 Bhmer, 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 Kck, Alison Rosemary Kck and Michael
Ptzold. Thanks are also due to Wallace Bond Love for last-minute
language support.

The editors











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
JRG SCHWEINITZ
Stereotypes and the Narratological Analysis of Film Characters ..... 276
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 TRHLER
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

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



Introduction

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. DeWaals 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, childrens books, cartoons, comics, and a multitude
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. 21
st
, 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, kohrente und [als Ganze] kommunikative, kulturell
kodierte Zeichenuerungen; on film as text, see montage/av: Film als Text, and
Hickethier: Film- und Fernsehanalyse, pp. 2325.
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 19
th
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
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.
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 charaktr, 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 persons
6
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. 3134,
Margolin: Individuals and Margolin: Characters.
9 See Margolin: Individuals; Eco: Lector; Ryan: Worlds, Possible Worlds Theory;
Doleel: Heterocosmica; Pavel: Fictional Worlds; Ronen: Possible Worlds; Buckland:
Digital Dinosaurs. Cf. also the helpful surveys in Martinez / Scheffel: Erzhltheorie,
pp. 123134, and Surkamp: Narratologie.
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., Doleel: Heterocosmica,pp. 1623; 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:
Grundri; Culpeper: Characterization; Gerrig / Allbritton: Construction, and the
cricitism in Jannidis: Figur, pp. 177184. 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 Knne: Abstrakte Gegenstnde, pp. 291322; Currie: Characters; see also Proudfoot:
Fictional Entities; Howell: Fiction; Lamarque: Fictional Entities.
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 Reichers 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 Barthess 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 signifis 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: Grundri and Literary Character; Jannidis: Figur, chap. 5; Eder:
Fiktionstheorie; Reicher (in this volume).
17 Margolin: Characterisation, p. 7.
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
Hitchcocks 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. 5559.
19 Margolin: Characters, p. 375.
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 audiences 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 actors 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 Napoleons 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.
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 characters 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 characters 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
texts 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 todays 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, Freuds famous
analysis of the Oedipus myth in Shakespeares Hamlet); on the other hand,
Characters in Fictional Worlds: An Introduction
13
in the context of Foucaults 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. 185195, with further references to the
relevant research; cf. also Tomasello et al.: Understanding.
22 Eder: Figur, pp. 173185.
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 texts 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. 162248.
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.
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 Macbeths 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
characters corporeality, mind, and sociality in the (fictional) world. They
are building on those processes to understand the characters meanings as
sign or symbol, and to reflect on the characters 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 Knne: Abstrakte Gegenstnde, pp. 295296, and Currie: Characters, are proposing
different logical transcriptions of such sentences.