Characters are strange things. They are not persons, not exactly. They belong to the page, the stage, the screen, and it is central to our experience of them that we know they are fictions. Yet we feel for them nonetheless: we sympathize with them, root and fear for them, and get annoyed by them, too. When Hamlet pondered the player—“What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?”—this was the paradox that left him mystified: how is it that an imagined person can generate real and potent feelings? In Astrophil and Stella, written some years before Hamlet, Philip Sidney explored the same riddle. The forty-fifth sonnet in the sequence begins with a familiar lover's lament: although Stella sees his suffering, Astrophil complains, she “cannot skill to pity” him. Stella is not utterly impassive, however: when she hears a tragic fable of “lovers never known,” Astrophil reports, pity moves her instantly to tears. For Hamlet, the surprise is that we can care about fictional people much as we care about real ones; for Astrophil, it is that sometimes we care about fictional people more readily and more deeply. So Astrophil decides to turn himself into a fiction: “Then think, my dear, that you in me do read / Of lover's ruin some sad tragedy: / I am not I, pity the tale of me” (Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 45). In the poem's final line, Astrophil becomes to Stella what he already is to us: a character.Sidney's poem traces two distinct ways of thinking about characters. The first we can call the formalist position: it insists on a distinction between persons and characters, reminding us that the latter are textual artifacts, assemblages of words fashioned, as John Frow (2014: 2) has recently put it, into “person-like entities.” The second we can call the realist position: it is concerned with the responses characters elicit, the feelings they provoke, the uses they invite; it reminds us that characters are like persons and that our relationships with them are like our relationships with people. For Sidney, there is no necessary conflict between the two views. His sonnet suggests that character is beguiling just because of its artifice and that the remove of fictionality is what makes sympathy possible. In contemporary criticism, however, the formalist and the realist approaches have come to seem like opposing camps, and character has emerged as a stage for a confrontation of competing ideas of what criticism should be—so we might suspect, at least, from the appearance of two polemical new books, each determined to put the study of character on new ground and each possessed of a very different idea about where it has been.The first, Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi's Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies, describes a discipline still in the thrall of formalism and its injunctions against treating characters as if they were persons. Those strictures, they warn, have left us “with nothing to say about characters as objects of identification, sources of emotional response, or agents of moral vision and behavior” (4). By contrast, Aaron Kunin's Character as Form insists that we have hardly any other way of talking about them. “Most readers,” Kunin declares early in his book, “think that the job of a character is to individuate,” which is why we tend to approach them in ethical and psychological terms—as objects, that is, of identification (7). Where Anderson, Felski, and Moi want to “develop a nonformalist understanding of form” (19), Kunin's aim is to teach us, as if for the first time, how to see character as a form. More precisely, he wants us to see it as a device of generalization rather than individuation: “I think that a character is a collection of every example of a kind” (5). Character urges us to forget form in order to focus on the claims—ethical and aesthetic—that characters make on us; Character as Form demands that we remember it so that we can see how characters typologize the world.Reading the two books alongside one another, one is struck by the difference not just between their critical prescriptions but between their assessments of the field: it is as if they have been reading altogether different bodies of scholarship. But a stranger conclusion quickly follows: that, despite their direct opposition, each assessment is substantially correct. It is true, as Anderson, Felski, and Moi claim, that it remains customary, perhaps obligatory, for critics to distinguish fictional from real persons. Yet it is equally true, as Kunin suggests, that the most influential recent theorists of character—from Catherine Gallagher to Alex Woloch to Blakey Vermeule—have focused on processes of individuation and modes of readerly investment. The fact that the criticism on the subject of character is susceptible to nearly opposite readings may be a measure of its syncretism, as critics draw on the resources of formalism and its alternatives at once. But the simultaneous arrival of Character and Character as Form suggests that syncretism is on the way out, and that the argument between formalism and realism—or for their compatibility—will have to be had in the open.*Like the other volumes in Chicago's Trios series, Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies features an essay by each of its three authors, preceded by a jointly written introduction. In Anderson, Felski, and Moi, Character brings together three of the most eminent literary critics working today, and their collaboration bears the stamp of each of its contributors: a grounding in ordinary language philosophy drawn from Moi's work on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell; the interest in modes of attachment that Felski brought to the center of the discipline in The Limits of Critique (2015); and the attention to ethos that has motivated much of Anderson's writing. Their different modes of argument complement each other as well: in moving from Moi's ground-clearing polemic to Felski's typologizing to Anderson's close reading, the book gradually turns from theory (or rather, as we shall see, antitheory) to practice—first calling for a criticism that takes seriously the “claims [characters] make on their readers” then showing us what such a criticism would look like (3).Moi's essay, the first and most essential, confronts the volume's primary bogey: “the taboo,” as she calls it, “on treating characters as if they are real” (29). In Moi's telling, this taboo has two central problems. The first is that it misrecognizes how people actually experience characters. Yes, we can love them or fear for them or be compelled by them, but we are never under the illusion that characters are actually people; even children quickly learn the difference between fact and fiction. The second problem is that because it imagines the confusion of characters and persons to be far more widespread than it is, the taboo needlessly restricts how we talk about characters. Ordinary readers may speculate about the inner lives of characters, and they may imagine their prehistories or further adventures, but critics will see only a category error, a failure to observe the difference between life and art. Moi traces this prejudice to its apparent origin: the archly titled pamphlet How Many Children Hath Lady Macbeth?, published in 1933 by L. C. Knights, then a doctoral student at Cambridge and an acolyte of F. R. Leavis. For Knights, character was an interpretive red herring, an “abstraction” that effaces the formal “pattern” of a text and the “total response” to it. Moi makes quick work of Knights's argument: how, she asks, can “total response” be any less an abstraction than character or plot? But Moi also historicizes it. Knights's polemic, she shows, was an act of professional self-assertion, undertaken against an older generation of belletristic amateurs and one of aesthetic position-taking, championing highbrow modernism against old-fashioned realism. The intervention came at a decisive moment in the history of literary study, when formalism became the methodological banner of a professionalizing discipline.Contemporary critics don't have the same excuse. For us, Moi suggests, polemical edge has softened into doxa, and a refusal to read characters as anything but forms has mired character criticism in a series of pseudoproblems. Thus, she argues, when John Frow describes characters as “ontologically hybrid beings” (1)—at once persons and textual constructs—he is finding paradox where none need be: readers have no problem talking about characters as though they are people, despite knowing full well that they aren't. The suggestion of logical incoherence or doubleness arises only out of a determination to give a formal account of what characters are. Moi has no interest in developing such a theory of character; instead, she urges critics to remember the range of ordinary responses that they have trained themselves to forget. What are characters? The answer, Moi writes, will come “not in speculation, but in an examination of use—that is, in how we talk about characters” (60).The second essay, Felski's, is a natural companion to Moi's, for it offers a taxonomy of the various modes of character use loosely gathered under the label of “identification.” Identification is a promising and a difficult category, at once formal, phenomenological, and ethical in its force, and the great value of Felski's approach is its careful delineation of these tendencies. She adduces five modes of identification: alignment, or the formal framing of perspective; allegiance, as ethical or aesthetic commitment; recognition, in the sense of coming to know; empathy, as feeling with or feeling for; and—the most provocative—ironic identification, in which estrangement serves as the paradoxical glue between character and reader. These are productive distinctions, and they suggest the power of a sustained focus on response and attachment. Yet this approach may not be as new as Felski, like Moi, thinks it is. Hans Robert Jauss offered a strikingly similar taxonomy of identification some decades earlier—his categories of associative, admiring, and sympathetic identification are, in fact, near matches for Felski's alignment, allegiance, and empathy—but Felski addresses Jauss only to distinguish his definition of ironic identification from her own (see Jauss 1982a: 152–88). Like his fellow reader response theorist Wolfgang Iser, Jauss is mostly overlooked in Character, as if the book's insistence on the unbroken dominance of formalism, and hence on its own novelty, requires that precedents be forgotten.The last essay in Character is Anderson's perceptive study of rumination—the slow, directionless circling of experience in the mind—in Eliot, Trollope, and Woolf. The essay's patient readings practice the sort of criticism that Moi and Felski call for, considering examples of ruminative thought in order to show the special capacity of novelistic character to depict the “phenomenology of the thinking life” and the gravity of moral experience (131). More precisely, the capacity of realist character: if Anderson's method bears out Moi's and Felski's prescriptions, her examples, drawn from Eliot, Trollope, and Woolf, realize the aesthetic commitments that guide Moi's critical prescriptions. In her earlier book, Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, Moi (2006: 19) took aim at what she called, following Fredric Jameson, the “ideology of modernism,” claiming that it had distorted literary history and criticism alike. Realism and formalism, she argues, both emerged as branches of modernism—they were linked as skeptical responses to idealism—but as formalism became modernism's default mode, it began to enforce a vocabulary rooted in autonomy, reflexivity, and irony. Critics in the grip of the ideology of modernism had no way of appreciating Ibsen's realism, just as today—as Moi argues in an essay adapted from Character for the magazine The Point—they lack a language for the neorealist “existential turn” in the autofiction of Knausgaard, Cusk, Heti, and Ferrante: the formalist preference for irony and detachment, she suggests, is helpless in the face of the moral seriousness that realism demands (Moi 2020: 54–59). Such seriousness is what Anderson's readings aim for, their subtle appraisals of depictions of thinking bringing out the realism at the heart of even the high modernist Woolf.Character's preference for realism is one reason why Frow—whose examples favor modernism and postmodernism—comes in for sharp criticism. His emphasis on the “ontological hybridity” of character, Moi argues, traps criticism in the arid air of theoretical classification; worse, it mystifies the ordinary ways that we use and respond to the characters we meet. But hybridity is hard to banish. Felski writes in her essay of “the two-foldedness of character—as both person and aesthetic device” (92); the modes of identification she traces remind us that characters “are portmanteau creatures,” “Janus-faced figures” (90, 119). It is not that she is backsliding into metaphysics but rather that use—when one really follows it—can't help but implicate the modes of irony and reflexivity that formalism prizes.*Frow is, in any case, an imperfect antagonist: too much a syncretist, too willing to balance form with attention to response and attachment. In Character as Form, Aaron Kunin provides a more suitable one. Kunin is an uncompromising formalist—so much so that he idly muses, in a characteristically eccentric aside, whether Frances Ferguson is “the only true formalist critic” (16). His idea of form is Ferguson's—it is what “makes it possible for there to be ‘more than one of something’ ”—and even critics who call themselves formalists, he suggests, tend to fall short of this degree of abstraction: we are caught up in describing aspects of experience, or of style (16). Style, Kunin writes, is what attaches to particular artworks or to individual persons, as a qualitative relation among parts; form, by contrast, transcends particular instances, as an iterative principle of composition. The articulation of this distinction occupies nearly the whole of the introduction to Character as Form, a puzzling choice until one sees that the point is to justify the austerity of the book's account of character. For Kunin, character has nothing to do with personhood; it is a form in the strong sense: a device of collection, iteration, and generalization.The roots of this conception of character lie not in the realist novel—the privileged genre of Character—but in the Theophrastan character books that flourished in England and France in the seventeenth century. A student of Aristotle, Theophrastus wrote his Characters as a survey of thirty moral types in fourth-century Athens. The Theophrastan mode—as found in the sketches of Joseph Hall, Thomas Overbury, John Earle, and Jean de La Bruyère, as well as the drama of Jonson and Molière—asked its readers to imagine characters as kinds. When Earle sketches the figure of the Gallant, for instance, he doesn't give us a particular gallant but a personified compendium of the sorts of things that gallants do; his Gallant is every gallant in one. Kunin's gambit is to turn this mode of character writing—a historically specific and in many respects idiosyncratic one—into a more general theory of character. It is a striking and arguably a perverse project, reading Renaissance character forward, but no more perverse than the more familiar one of reading novelistic character backward. “I take seriously the idealism of characteristic writing,” he writes, “in order to rewrite subsequent literary history and include everything we call a character in the same way that the realist concept of character rewrites earlier literary history so that what used to be called character has to be renamed caricature or stereotype” (45).The result is a highly original book and a strange one—often compelling, sometimes brilliant, occasionally frustrating. Kunin's prose is direct and conversational, capable of aphoristic pith, yet his arguments wander and circle, working in and out of readings of an eclectic range of texts and films. The first chapter, “Many Is Not More Than One,” is a case in point: it moves through The Merchant of Venice, Our Mutual Friend, Milton's companion poems “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” Bridget Jones's Diary, the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business, Doug Allen's comic strip Steven, and the Korean film Yeopgi Girl in order to unfold Kunin's idea of character as “a device that collects every example of a kind” (38). It is in this chapter, too, that Kunin weighs up the critical literature on character. Seeing character as a device of collection, he suggests, means letting go of theories (such as Alex Woloch's [2004: 13] account of “character-space”) that contain characters within texts: a central function of character is to generalize across them. But it doesn't mean embracing approaches that focus on the movement of characters between texts: collection is distinct from David Brewer's (2005: 78) concept of “character migration,” Kunin writes, because it depends on a logic not of influence but of abstraction. What links Woloch and Brewer, along with most other critics of character, Kunin suggests, is the mistake of conceiving of character by analogy to personhood. Characters and persons, he argues, instead should be seen as reflecting dialectically opposed logics, the former framed by a principle of “abundance” (they are types that can be exemplified by many different individuals) and the latter by a principle of “transformation” (each can enact many different characters). This is why Kunin tends toward examples like Dickens's eccentric Mr. Boffin, who accumulates books about misers, building an archive of miserliness even as he learns to play the miser himself.Yet even Boffin suggests the difficulty of sustaining these distinctions. He is a collector, an abundant gatherer of instances, but he is also himself an instance: he acts the part of miser, but only in order to set up his eventual transformation into another role entirely, that of the loving uncle. There are things that Boffin does, in short, that we will have a hard time describing without a framework of personal agency. But there is another reason to hesitate. It may strike us that an example like Boffin's obsessive book buying invites the sort of confusion that Kunin warns of in his introduction—the confusion, that is, of style for form, of a representation of collecting for the structural principle of collection.The latter chapters of Character as Form repeatedly court this confusion, converting the form of character into styles of subjectivity. The second chapter, “Banish the World,” finds the paradigmatic case of Kunin's definition of character in the figure of the misanthrope. “The paradox at the heart of misanthropy,” he writes, “is to be in the world and not in the world,” and character, too, wants to escape from the world it sorts and classifies (91). After all, the process of collection produces curiously antisocial communities: the misers that Boffin collects have nothing to do with each other except for their being alike. “A character forms a community,” Kunin writes, “by associating without relating examples,” and misanthropy turns this refusal of relation into a way of life (106). In the fourth chapter, the misanthropic banishment of the world takes a more extreme form: the wish to be an object. The precipitate of Kunin's stringent formalism is a fascination with withdrawal—into a solitude unburdened by human relations, an idealism that can weigh up the world from without—though in truth it is hard to say which comes first, method or mood. It is no wonder, in either case, that Kunin has little time for the relations of attachment, identification, and response to which Moi, Felski, and Anderson direct us: “I am not interested in what readers do with characters” (56). A criticism of use keeps us in the world, he suggests, but the point of art is to take us elsewhere.Kunin's formalism thus encodes an idealism that is calibrated to oppose just the sort of realism favored, as a matter of aesthetic commitment and critical practice, by the authors of Character. To be clear, Kunin seems as unaware of Character as Moi, Felski, and Anderson are of Character as Form. So it is a remarkable coincidence that, at the heart of his discussion of the relation between idealism and realism, Moi turns up as his opponent. The passage, which appears in the third chapter, “What Fiction Means,” mounts an argument against Moi's case for realism in Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism. Idealism for Moi was an ideological and aesthetic constraint, and the achievement of the realists, especially Ibsen, was to escape from it, to open art to ordinary life and a nonidealized world. Kunin objects not to this historical argument but to its normative implication: that art should favor the ordinary, the concrete, the particular. “Moi does a disservice to modern artists,” he writes, “insofar as she cuts them off not just from a conventional set of values but from a capacity to generalize that is a crucial source of aesthetic value” (145). We can't jettison idealism, that is, because art's relation to the world is necessarily an ideal one: art construes what it represents, presents it under a certain generalizable aspect, and so opens onto the possibility of evaluation. For Moi, aesthetic value comes from the escape of the real from the ideal; for Kunin, it arises in the ideal's apprehension of the real. This is why Kunin treats character as a complex mode of figuration—a synecdoche by which “one example of a kind includes the complete collection of examples” (166)—and why Moi insists, to the contrary, that it is “the most ordinary thing in the world” (58).*Moi borrows her provocation from Wittgenstein, whose influence, along with Cavell's, presides over her essay. “One person might say ‘A proposition is the most ordinary thing in the world,’ ” Wittgenstein (1989: §93) writes in the Philosophical Investigations, “and another: ‘A proposition—that's something very queer!’—And the latter is unable simply to look and see how propositions really work. The forms that we use in expressing ourselves about propositions and thought stand in the way.”1 For Wittgenstein, the problem is not that it is wrong to ask what propositions are but that doing so tends to leave us beguiled by the question of their form, when what really matters is what we do with them. Formalism, Moi suggests, fails character in the same way it fails the proposition: it traps us in the riddle of ontology and prevents us from getting on with the task of describing use.In her recent book Revolution of the Ordinary (2017), Moi positioned Wittgenstein against what she portrayed as a post-Saussurean consensus in literary studies, a consensus marked by an enduring investment in the division of the sign between signifier and signified. The formalist account of character, she suggests in her essay in Character, is a largely unrecognized expression of that investment, with the language of “ontological hybrids” precisely mirroring the division of the sign. And each is an invented paradox: to say that signs bind marks to meanings, or that characters make persons out of words, is to find a mystery where the ordinary speaker or reader has no trouble. Yet Kunin's book is a reminder that not all formalism is Saussurean. Character as Form tends not to construe character in the terms of a dyadic relation between word and person; indeed, Kunin insists that characters are not like persons at all. The formal principle of character from his point of view is synecdoche, the part that stands for the whole. And we may decide that synecdoche raises real rather than confected problems: the problem, for instance, of how we coordinate types and tokens, how we manage to see individuals as at once unique beings and instances of kinds. If it does, then granting in advance the ordinariness of characters will mean missing something about how they really work.Against Wittgensteinian deflation, then, we might set another view of the simple and the strange. “A commodity,” Marx (1980: 163) tells us, “appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis shows that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” The difference may be in part a matter of temperament, but it is surely also a function of the object in question. Commodities, unlike propositions, need to be defamiliarized, for what is decisively important about them is the set of relations encoded in their form—in the form, that is, of exchange value, which transforms the “social relation between men themselves” into “the fantastic form of a relation between things.” It is when they are thus made into social things that commodities spring to life, as if they were, like that other fabrication of the human mind, the gods: “autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, and entering into relations both with each another and with the human race” (165). An analysis of the commodity-form is necessary in order to demystify the fetishism of commodities but also in order to grasp the operations of capital, above all the grounding of the value-form in the abstraction of distinct kinds of work into undifferentiated labor-time.Much as Marx's attitude toward formalism differs from Wittgenstein's, his idea of form differs from Saussure's. The dyadic sign may be hermetically sealed—a relation between mark and meaning that can be conceptually separated from language-in-use—but the commodity-form is something different, an objectification of the dynamics of exchange. If the proper analogy for the hybrid form of character is the sign, then Moi's complaint will ring true: an account of what character is won't tell us what character does. But what if the better analogy is the commodity? Like value, the charisma of character arises in its implication in a system of mediation. As Jauss (1982b: 19) puts it, the “communicative character” of literature “presupposes a dialogical and . . . processlike relationship between work, audience, and new work,” and it is only through this relationship that characters produce their particular effects. When we open Our Mutual Friend, to return to one of Kunin's examples, we are outfitted in advance with certain ways of approaching fictional persons, habits so engrained that they barely register as habits: we know that Mr. Boffin isn't historically real but that we can judge him or sympathize with him regardless; we infer, through the set of references to him in the novel, a subject—a complete personality—that exceeds them; we recognize him as an individual agent, even as we work to classify him and discern the type of person he exemplifies. These operations reflect a specific “horizon of expectations,” Jauss's (1982b: 22) term for the conventions of reception, derived from the assimilation of earlier works, that any new work orients itself within and against. Boffin's writing anticipates his uptake: when his performance of the Dickensian miser turns out to be a ruse, the surprise—and the rush of restored affection—hinges on the expectations presupposed in his design. Only in exchange do commodities attain the “sublime objectivity” of value (Marx 1980: 144), and only within a system of reading and response can characters come to life.*In attempting to turn criticism from form to use, then, Character (and Moi's essay in particular) risks losing sight of their mutual articulation—of the production of new forms under the pressure of reader response and of the anticipatory embedding of response in form itself. What's more, by taking aim at a monolithic idea of form, the book risks embracing an equally monolithic conception of use, replacing a formalizing account of characters as signifying constructs with a focus on the seemingly natural tendency to talk about characters like real people. That this tendency is only seemingly natural—that it is as much a historical determination as any other habit of reading—is easy to forget as long as we remain in the company of realism and its inheritors. Felski, at least, perceives this problem—“Why,” she asks, “do critics so often equate character with the genre of realism?” (78)—and her taxonomic account of identification does more than the volume's other essays to slip its hold. But her chapter lacks the dialectical turn of Jauss's (1982a: 153) essay on the same topic: his taxonomy encodes literary history in sedimented form, with different “interaction patterns of identification” shown to have emerged in tandem with modifications in the idea of the hero. The range of responses that character elicits, Jauss suggests, is a function of the complex historical mediation of form by use.Because Character is so determined to isolate use, and Character as Form to isolate form, neither is quite able to grasp their mediation of each other. Yet read in combination, these sharply different books suggest what an approach attuned to it might look like. For to read Kunin's book is to realize that readers once did—and, in certain ways, still do—ask characters to do things other than individuate. A longer history of character would have to come to terms with the Theophrastan impulse to generalize and classify; it would also have to make room for the durable tradition of allegory. Writers and readers in these modes used character to gather worlds of individuals into recognizable types and to realize abstractions; for them, the burden of character was precisely the work of formalization. In the passage between allegory and realism, hybridity is a condition of reading—a condition of which character use can be purified only if realism's victory is taken to be total—and the lingering resonance of typology in figures like Mr. Boffin makes clear that character never lost its impulse to generalize. Then again, even allegory retains a grasp on the particular: when Spenser's Malbecco, distorted by jealousy, at last forgets “he was a man, and Jealousy is hight,” the point is precisely the violence needed to turn a person into an idea.The history of character is a history of the coordination of particularity and generality, individual and kind. If we look closely, indeed, we see that individuation itself relies on formal rubrics, for characters and persons alike: it happens through the types and roles we invoke in order to present ourselves to the world, or to locate others in it. Formalism dies hard because we are formalists with people, too.Think back to Sidney's sonnet. The Petrarchan mode to which it belongs fits cleanly into neither Character nor Character as Form, offering an introspective subjectivity that eludes Theophrastan generality but also an idealism at odds with novelistic realism. Yet what the poem reveals is the unexpected root of identification, and the intensely personal feeling of pity, in an intuition of typology. Sidney refuses to tell us anything specific about the characters in the “fable” that draws Stella's tears; they are, simply, “lovers never known.” And when Astrophil seeks to turn himself into a character, this generality is what he claims for himself: “Then think, my dear, that you in me do read / Of lover's ruin some sad tragedy.” Although the first impulse is to take this as a poem about fiction, Astrophil's wish is not simply to be rendered imaginary; it is also, perhaps more importantly, to be rendered generic. That loss of particularity—his dissolution into the aspect of the ruined lover—is what he hopes will turn Stella's disdain to pity. Whether or not this is its effect on her, it works on us. We identify with Astrophil when and because we can see him as a certain kind of person, playing a certain role: a person whom we might be, a role that we might play. Such surrogacy is crucial to the sonnet form, with its underdetermined personae and conventional situations: the relative emptiness of its characters is just what allows readers to insert themselves. In this genre, at least, but probably in many more, the formalizing bent of character—its capacity to collect and abstract—doesn't oppose our desire to treat characters as persons. It is what makes it possible.