Characters and Creatures

Abstract

Humans not only err, they often err willingly and explicitly, for both pleasure and edification. We accordingly “find” faces everywhere . . . most frequently, in the “faces” in paintings. And if we look at stars, clouds, and shadows we can find anything we want to find, so great is the indeterminacy of such finding places and so willing are we, for certain purposes, to accept the most minimal likenesses as “like.”Adena Rosmarin, The Power of Genre (1985)Adena Rosmarin's comment is part of a wider discussion of E. H. Gombrich's idea of the role of “schema” in perceptions of art—a concept he uses to explain, among other things, how it is that observers can perceive a face in a collection of lines and dots, and, more generally, why it makes sense to say that all art begins not with nothing but with something. A snowman starts with the schema that is snow, for example, and we “work the snow and balance the shapes till we recognize a man.” And not only do we work the snow to achieve some approximation of human faces and bodies, but we find human characteristics in—or, more accurately, make characters out of—all sorts of things, living and not. Certainly, we project character onto living nonhumans, such as cats, dogs, birds, and plants, imagining that they share our feelings of love, loneliness, and desire, but we also assign character and characteristics to inanimate objects and assorted phenomena: ships, cars, and hurricanes all get names; we may talk to the toaster, or grumble at a shoelace that, we imagine, stubbornly refuses—refuses!—to untie. Thus it is hardly surprising that literary characters, intended expressly as vehicles for imaginative occupation, take on a similarly outsize quality in our psyches. Words on a page, constructions of language, they invite us to consider them as soulmates and doppelgängers; nightmare—or perhaps ideal—versions of parents, brothers, sisters, friends, and selves: the families we might have chosen if we could; the me (or not me) nobody knows.