Safety and Disaster through Indefinition

Abstract

MANY YEARS AGO I began noticing in American fiction a recurrent configuration of characters, wherein one or a few individuals in a plot were represented as multi-talented and variously oriented, and the remainder were represented as fixed in limited identities?a mother of a particular and determinative background; a father or other older male of a particular and clear disposition; friends, enemies and lovers whose behavior did not vary so much as to confuse a sense of their nature; and so forth. I was aware that the attribution of complexity to a central character and simplicity to minor ones was a means of achieving perspective and emphasis, and that such strategic attribution could be found throughout literary history. But in the configurations I was concerned about, the mixed characters, as I shall call them temporarily, were at times not central to their plots?indeed were often on the fringe?and their mixtures as against the other characters' simplicities were issues in the plots. For instance, there are several conversa tions in W. D. Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) in which the staid and well-defined characters attempt to come to terms with the versatility of the artist Angus Beaton. I knew that what I was noticing in these configurations was substance, not mere instrumentation, and from their recurrence over several generations of our writers I believed I was on the track of something that had a strong cultural pull. And so I set out to explore. My preliminary formulations were based largely upon recollections of earlier reading, and consequently they had an imbalance of the monumental and spectacular, which my memory is prone to retain. I thought of Natty Bumppo, James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking, that hero who evinced the fullest manhood through embodying the cultures of the wilderness and of civilization?and that same character surrounded by a comic pedant, a fierce Redman, a Noble Savage, a greedy pioneer, a sterling gentleman, and the rest of Cooper's crowd, all of them crudely simple and many of them commonplace, but against whose trite simplicity Leatherstocking's new and transcendent richness of character was all the more striking. I thought of historical persons who, like Leatherstocking, had been characterized as combining cultures ordinarily polar. I recalled the famous St. Aubin engraving of Benjamin Franklin wearing both wire-rimmed spectacles and