Literature, Character, and the Human

Abstract

Nowhere does the human seem more the cornerstone of literature than in the novel. If the novel is an escape, it is an escape into: meaning, sense, the human. Madame Bovary. Isabel Archer. Gatsby. Ahab. Hester Prynne. It is the great characters of the novel that we remember, and the emotions that spring from the human’s encounter with all that is outside of it. Greed, obsession, sin, regret, and pride assign a value to the humanity of fictional characters. Their triumphs are the human triumphs of understanding, reconciliation, creation; their defeats are equally human: despair, loneliness, loss.

In literature the human reveals itself through language.

Or rather, in literature, language creates the human.

Literature is the intersection of language and the human.

The human, which has its possibility in language, extracts from the possibilities of language to create literature.

Literature extracts the human from language to give the human its own voice.

The subtraction ofliterature from language, leaves us with all that is nonhuman.

Language, literature and the human fight pitched battles ofmutual capture, shifting alliances and attrition, punctuated by periods of peace or uneasy truce.