HERE’S ONE THING I learned teaching introductory creative writing: would-be fictionists don’t understand character. When I would give the first characterization assignment, I always got back the same thing—height, weight, hair color and length or lack, size of nose, shape of mouth, number of freckles. The full package. You could take the details and paint a life-size portrait. You could, I couldn’t, but that’s a function of artistic ability, not lack of student description. What I could do, however, was hand the character sketches back with this question: what does Huck Finn look like? Or Jake Barnes? Or even Emma Bovary?
The answer is, we don’t know. Sometimes, as with Huck, we haven’t been told; he lacks sufficient self-awareness to bother describing himself. We know about Jake’s signature war wound, since it matters so much to the story, but not much else about his appearance. And Flaubert, for all his exact rendering of detail, can’t even settle on Emma’s eye color, which leads to the riff on Enid Starkey in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot. Sometimes Emma’s eyes are black, or sort of blue in certain light, or maybe brown if looked at just so. Starkey, a real Flaubert scholar, took him to task on the shifting iris coloration, and Barnes’s protagonist, Geoffrey Braithwaite, in turn takes her to task for her shortcomings. But looks ultimately don’t matter all that much. In order to understand Braithwaite—or Huck, Jake, or Emma—we don’t need to know what they look like.
We need to know what they want.
Take Emma’s eyes. Maybe a bit vague or inconsistent. Still, we have a pretty good idea about her eyes, really, but it’s not the eyes that matter. We’re not her lovers; we’re her readers. We’re looking to understand her, not fall in love. What matters for Jim is not how he drives forward but what drives him forward. Again, I say, we need to know what they want. Really, really want.
And usually, we know what they want by what they obsess on. If I were to ask ten people to name one object from The Great Gatsby, nine of them would come up with the same item—even if they hadn’t read the title of this chapter. There it is, that green light on the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock, commanding Jay Gatsby’s rapt attention and presiding over Nick Carraway’s final paragraph. This thing, the object that drives him forward to calamity, stands for everything that’s wrong with him, and also what’s right—his capacity for self-delusion, his ability to hope, his belief that some things, some people, no matter how flawed, are worthy figures of the Dream. It’s quite literally the last thing we see in the novel, before those phantom boats driving against the current. Fitzgerald was taking no chances that we might miss his point.
That point is central for writers, and hence for readers, the Law of Character Clarity: To understand characters, you have to know their deepest desires. More often than not, that desire finds an emblem—an object or action—to give it tangible expression.
Since we’re out on the water’s edge, consider another longing gaze, this one directed out to sea from the Cobb, a long, snaking pier at Lyme Regis, toward a man the gazer knows is never coming back. The Cobb is actual and historical, the woman fictitious, the man perhaps a figment of her imagination. She is Sarah Woodruff, the elusive if titular female in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). Why would a woman spend her off hours scanning the waters for a French officer who, if he ever existed, is certain not to return? Why would a woman in 1867, the year in which the novel is set, subject herself to the community disapproval resulting from this unseemly (and therefore obviously sexual) display of romantic grief? Ah, there’s the question that drives the novel and to which Fowles never provides a clear answer. Is it deliberate debasement, a desire to incur social opprobrium, a suicidal impulse, inconsolable romantic mourning, pure existential misery, self-dramatized posturing, out-and-out madness? Whichever view one ultimately takes—and there are adherents to each of those possibilities within the narrative—will decide how one feels about Sarah and about the novel. The options are nearly endless, but the gesture itself is abundantly clear. What your experience of the novel is like will depend greatly on what you believe Sarah is looking at, or looking for, or looking out for, out on the Cobb. Of course, she’s not the only or even the main character, even if she does own the title. Charles Smithson holds that distinction, and he has wants of his own. One of those desires turns out to be Sarah Woodruff. Charles doesn’t even know this, or if he does, he spends great energy on denying it, for much of the novel. We have to figure this out for ourselves as we watch him clamber over the cliff faces in search of his fossils, his “tests,” referring, in this case, to fossilized shells of sea creatures. Do you think that’s all that Fowles means? Charles is a hunter, of fossils first of all and of the mysterious Sarah later, but most of all of meaning. His life fills him with ennui and a vague but inescapable sense of pointlessness. Although as a Victorian man he lacks the vocabulary to express it, he is living out the existentialist crisis, confronting absurdity and nothingness in cravat and dundrearies.
Okay, I promise this principle holds true on dry land as well, but just one more example from the waterfront. In theory, the purpose of a vacation is to get away from our troubles and concerns, but it rarely works out that way, as Virginia Woolf shows us in To the Lighthouse. While appearing to tranquilly summer in the Hebrides, nearly every character is driven forward by desires, usually by the desire to achieve, although that can take many forms. The most famous example of wanting in the novel is, of course, the lighthouse itself. James, the youngest of the Ramsay children, is consumed by a wish to see the lighthouse across the bay. He has been promised a trip the following day by his parents, and Mrs. Ramsay clings to that promise even as Mr. Ramsay correctly if thoughtlessly insists that the weather will force postponement. James accordingly hates his father but loves his mother all the more. My students generally read this conflict as being about some dichotomy—men and women, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, nurturers and takers—and there’s some truth in that. But it’s also a good deal more complex. This little scene of the six-year-old James wanting his trip to fantasyland, his mother supporting him despite concerns about the morrow’s weather, his father almost absentmind-edly stomping on his dream, reveals an entire family dynamic.
What we really find here is a conflict of desires. They complement at times but enter into battle at others. And yet they seem so simple. What are they, these deepest heart’s wishes? Mrs. Ramsay is driven by a dinner entrée, Mr. Ramsay by a letter of the alphabet. Yes, you heard me right. Throughout the course of this day that comprises the first long section of the novel, Mrs. Ramsay obsesses over her boeuf en daube—will it be a success, will the family and guests like it, will it have enough of this or that, will it, in short, be a credit to her? The beauty of this obsession is that she does not cook it; Mildred, her maid, spends three days preparing the dish, which is declared a “triumph,” so much so that Mrs. Ramsay cannot help taking credit, saying that it is “a French recipe of her grandmother’s.” Silly, you say? Perhaps, but show me the person who has never worried over the outcome of a party or dinner and I’ll show you someone who has never hosted one. Her concerns, moreover, are entirely domestic and allow her to concentrate her attention on her children, and especially on her youngest. Besides fretting over the meal, she also knits a brown stocking—probably the most famous sock in literature—for the lighthouse keeper’s son, who has a tubercular hip. Neither of those activities distracts her greatly from her maternal duties. Nor, it should be added, are they presented as inconsequential or trivial. Both show her as committed to the comfort and well-being of others, and that is not negligible. And her husband? Mr. Ramsay spends his day barging around the grounds, largely lost in thought and reciting Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” and obsessing on “getting to Z.” I’m sure you’ve often wanted to go there yourself. Like his wife, his thinking, although presented humorously at times, is not trivial. He is fuming over his intellectual limitations, which are few and, by our standards, tiny: he’s not the greatest thinker of his generation. One man (and it would be a man in his mind) in a generation, maybe one, can get all the way from A to Z; he reckons he’s made it to perhaps Q and can squeeze through to R or S, but that’s about it. Hard to sympathize, isn’t it? Most of us weren’t the greatest thinker in our dorm room. Thought of differently, though, it’s not so petty. He wants to be more than he is. Now that we can relate to. And I’ve been a little unfair to him. His concern is less about competition than it is about achievement; he wants to reach as far as he can, which he realizes is not as far as he had hoped. Call it a midlife crisis, if you will; it certainly has elements of that. For our purposes, however, the drive itself is the point of interest. He’s so caught up in his own desire that he can’t recognize the needs of others, even those of his own children. Mrs. Ramsay, on the other hand, is very sensitive to and even protective of everyone who comes into her sphere of interest—smoothing ruffled feathers, playing matchmaker, offering advice, and generally being solicitous. When someone like Augustus Carmichael, an old family friend, seems not to need her aid, she receives this attitude as personal hostility.
And Lily Briscoe? Lily has her painting. In the first part, she is stymied in her attempt to capture the scene in front of her, to grasp the domesticity punctuated by error and aggression that is the Ramsay household. Part of what she wants is approval or acceptance; that is why the comments of Charles Tansley, Mr. Ramsay’s latest protégé, that “Women can’t write; women can’t paint” frustrate her efforts almost completely. She seeks that approval from Mrs. Ramsay, from Mr. Ramsay, and even, unwittingly and very much against her will, from the “odious” Tansley. Only in the third section, “The Lighthouse,” does she understand that it must come from the inside, from herself. It is then that she can make the bold line down the center of the canvas and finish her painting. She gets the last words of the novel, and they are about neither Mrs. Ramsay nor anyone’s approval: “I have had my vision.” That’s what it has all been about for her, the ability to have a vision, the space to pursue it, the maturity to express it in her own way, free of outside influence. Is that desire? I believe it is.
It’s always about desire, which may or may not involve sex but is just as powerful nonetheless. Characters are driven, and the thing that drives them is desire.
Is this why saints so rarely feature prominently in novels? Perhaps. Mostly, though, they’re just not really very interesting, narratively. Consider the Confessions of St. Augustine—is this the focus on his many years as priest and bishop? Not at all. He wrote them around age forty and had only converted to Catholicism at age thirty-three; moreover, the narrative of his life more or less stops at his conversion, with the last several chapters taken up by meditations on such religious matters as Genesis and the Trinity. Or Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. He may reach something like enlightenment, but the bulk of the novel is taken up with the searching, error, and struggle prior to attaining insight. Why? Because saints lack desire. They don’t want anything and as such aren’t going anywhere we’ll be interested in watching. Admire? Sure. Emulate? We’d do well to. Read about with fascination? Not happening.
Faulkner knew this. He doesn’t have much truck with saintly types, and when he does give us a Dilsey, in The Sound and the Fury (1929), he keeps her firmly in the background. Out front, the Compsons are frantically clawing and scratching at their desires, whether Benjy’s to return to a happier childhood when his beloved sister Caddy was still around, Quentin’s to assuage guilt and shame at his own conduct and that of his family, or Jason’s to acquire material gain. Faulknerian characters are the neediest, most obsessive creatures ever invented. His novels teem with brooding, scheming monomaniacs pursuing their idiocentric mythologies. Even his saints, or the would-be versions, display wild fixations. Isaac McCaslin, who in Go Down, Moses (1942) truly wants to atone to his heretofore unacknowledged black kinsmen for the treatment of their forebears by his white ancestors, particularly his grandfather Carothers McCaslin, gives away the estate in ways that destroy his marriage and make him suspect in the eyes of his neighbors. His refusal to own the plantation drops it into the hands of his cousin McCaslin Edmonds, who is a less understanding and moral person than Isaac himself. He does make sure that money entailed for the descendants of McCaslin slaves gets into the right hands, even traveling to Arkansas to hunt down one heir. Isaac is ethical but also excessively scrupulous. From the Snopes family avarice to Sartoris honor, Faulkner’s characters create mayhem and calamity for themselves through their obsessions, and those obsessions come to readers through emblems. Pick up one of his books and you’ll soon find driven people and their signs. Any book will do.
And then there’s As I Lay Dying. We have many reasons to teach this gem of a novel, but one of the most compelling is that character motivation is so darned available. Everyone in the dysfunctional Bundren family (a tautology when reading Faulkner, but these people are special even for him) has a secret, a burning desire, an obsession—and a thing to represent it, what T. S. Eliot calls an “objective correlative.” Jewel, the angry son, has his spotted horse. Forty years later and it would have been a muscle car, a Mustang or GTO that he had worked and scrimped to be able to almost afford and that he would lose, as he does the horse, through the agency of his improvident, self-involved father. The joke, of course, is that Anse is not his father, that Jewel is illegitimate, and that his obsession is escaping the leaden, earthbound condition of his family. Jewel couldn’t tell you what his desire is, and if he tried, he would probably say it’s the horse, but it’s not the horse. It’s so much bigger than that. Anse himself wants a new set of teeth, or seems to. His “determination” to get Addie to Jefferson for burial masks his wish for new chompers. Yet they’re not the real desire. That has to do with going on with life, maybe even with finding, as he announces in the novel’s last line that he has, a new wife. Now, you can’t very well say, before your wife is even in her coffin, that you’re aimin’ to go to town and get yourself a new one. Even someone as low as Anse Bundren probably can’t admit that to himself. But you can say you need new dentures and, as long as you’re headed that way anyhow, well . . . why not? Vardaman, who is still a child, needs to understand things beyond him, matters of life and death and what dying really means. He’s so concerned that his mother is in that box and still alive that he drills holes into the coffin lid—and into her—to provide air for her. His objective correlative is easy, since he tells you all about it: “My mother is a fish,” he says in the shortest and most memorable chapter in all of literature. Vardaman catches an enormous fish, nearly as big as he is, and when Anse makes him clean it himself, he confuses the fish and the mother and living and dying and about every other thing in his world, so that, when he comes out with his famous pronouncement, it shocks not because it’s outrageous but because it’s so perfectly understandable. What else would he say? Even Cash, who seems to be concerned only with making the coffin for his mother, is driven by desire. His is to feel nothing, to push feeling, with which he is profoundly uncomfortable, as far away as he can. He does this by obsessing on the box’s construction, one of his narrative chapters consisting entirely of a list of his thirteen reasons for cutting the corners on the bevel. Focus is good. Attention to detail is good. But when a person focuses that intently on a fairly straightforward bit of logic, he is seriously trying to avoid something else. Dewey Dell, the teenaged sister in this tragicomedy troupe, wants as badly as her father to get to Jefferson, where she’s heard the druggist might have a cure for her complaint. She’s pregnant. Only Darl, the eldest son, seems immune from his family’s penchant for obsessive thinking. What a relief, we think—one semi-normal person in the bunch. He winds up in the insane asylum. The Bundrens are, by turns, appalling, hilarious, touching, frustrating, and shocking. But mostly, they are—and this makes them a teacher’s dream—readily accessible.
It is ever thus. Novelists want us to understand their creations, or at least their creatures. So they post road signs along the way, suggesting what we should look for. Sarah Woodruff has her French lieutenant, the unlucky Mr. Micawber his faith that something will turn up, and Jay Gatsby, of course, the green light on Daisy’s dock. What is it, we ask, that Joe Christmas really wants? How does what Pip wants differ from what he needs? Can he figure out the difference? What does Jake Barnes not see when he looks at the mirror, and how does it matter to the novel? Every character has his telos—Aristotle’s term for the necessary endpoint in a goal-oriented, even compulsive, process—not the place he actually winds up but the thing toward which he’s driven, his ultimate goal. Our job is to find it. Are they always so obvious? Sadly, no. Will it explain everything about him? Again, no. But it will explain a lot, and we need to find out what drives the character if we want to know what drives the novel.