The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl (25 page)

‘You have’, God continued, smiling round the assembly at the table, ‘brought it to my notice that, as a fictitious character, I am free to do anything. So I shall accomplish my rehabilitation quite simply. I shall make the fact that I
am
fictitious generally acceptable.’

His four interlocutors replied instantly and all at the same time.

‘A somewhat incautious estimate of your capacities,’ Gibbon was saying while the psychoanalyst murmured:

‘Your plan seems dictated more by wish fulfilment than by the reality of principle.’

Simultaneously, Shaw exclaimed:

‘You are putting the applecart before the horse.’

At the same moment Voltaire said reprovingly:

‘Fiction is not so simple an affair as amateurs assume.’

‘O,’ God said in a tone of dejection.

For a moment he imposed a gloomy silence. Then, glancing tentatively round the table, he said:

‘I suppose you mean I have no control over other people’s responses? You mean I was forgetting that people will all respond in character?’

‘Character?’ queried Voltaire in a scandalised tone. ‘
Character
is mere sleight of hand. It is never more than a useful device for stringing the episodes of a narrative into a semblance of unity, and many of the very best fictions virtually do without it. Why, I would almost say that, apart from what is implied in his name, whose meaning has, by bad luck, slightly changed with the passage of time, Candide
has
no character. To have given him one would have impeded the flow, and obscured the inter-relationships, of the ideas.’

‘Indeed,’ Gibbon added, ‘I venture to suggest that when (which, happily, was well after my time) Victorian novels took to a profusion of what I may call heavily impastoed characters, they did so in order to conceal their want of ideas.’

‘Gibbon and I’, Voltaire took up, ‘have the advantage that we were born into a century not yet so resistant to the
impending
arrival of psychology that writers had to take refuge in the old-clothes-cupboard of characters. Of course, we amused
ourselves
, in our classicising way, by anatomising characters à la Theophrastus. But we were never in a moment’s serious doubt that what forms a human personality and holds it in self-
consistent
being is not some bundle of inborn traits but the series of dynamic relationships by virtue of which it exists. The 20th century, which practises torture on a scale that would have shocked even
my
century, has established the point
experimentally
. (Torture is, of course, a form of experiment: a
scientifically
valid one, but immoral.) If you deprive a person of
external
relationships, by placing him in solitary confinement, he disintegrates. That is, he ceases to
be
a personality and ceases to
have
a character. In my time, we knew perfectly well that it was not a native love of lies, inherent in the heart or the spleen, that caused rulers and priests to impose myths on the populace: it was the dynamic relationships of the economic process that impelled rulers to devise myths to serve them as pretexts for continuing to rule. Likewise, the gullibility of the populace was not an inborn defect of character. It was the result of the rulers’ witholding from the populace the process of education, whereby a person enters relationships with the civilisations of distant countries on whose soil he will never set personal foot, and with artists and thinkers now dead, to whom he can never personally speak but by whom his personality may be formed if he chooses to enter a relationship with them. It was with sadness that I saw the world, after my death, doing its utmost to lose sight of this precious knowledge, which is both political and literary knowledge, and returning to the static concept of character as a mere agglomeration of traits labelled
tactfulness
or outspokenness or hypocrisy. (Let me add, by the by, that the man who appears to be one type of person when he is alone with his wife and a different type when he is with the managing director is
not
displaying the character-trait of hypocrisy. The fact is that he genuinely consists of two
different
personalities, both created by the separate relationships in which different parts of his being consist.) And it was with an ironic sadness, in which my own self-interest was of course
concerned, that I witnessed literature being ruined, for
generations
of children, by a method of education which, instead of creating a relationship between the pupil and the work of art, obliged the pupil to dissect some of the items in the work of art according to the static concept of “character”. For a whole era, the supposedly educated people of the West have been rendered deaf to poetic drama and blind to the design of novels by being obliged to learn by heart the exam answers to such commands as “Illustrate the character of Elizabeth Bennet from her conversation” or “Trace the development of the character of Lady Macbeth in the course of the play”.’

‘In other words’, Shaw said to Voltaire, ‘it is apparent to you, as it is to my own Irish eighteenth-centuryism,
53
that
Shakespeare
’s dramatic personages are not collections of assorted traits, each of which gets its turn to display itself during the action, but that his personages say and do whatever will be most effective at the particular moment they have reached in the drama. If we want our children to enjoy and understand art, we must teach them to impersonate not a character (or, for the matter of that, a tree or a house) in the work of art, but the artist. Shakespear chooses certain words to put into Macbeth’s mouth not in order to display Macbeth’s character but in order to make a certain effect on the audience, while incidentally fulfilling the metrical requirements of blank verse. Lady Macbeth
sleepwalks
not because she is the sort of woman who
would
sleepwalk but because
Macbeth
is the sort of play that benefits from the eerie and pathetic effect of a sleepwalking scene – which
incidentally
also provides an opportunity to shew up the medical profession in a manner undertaken more comprehensively and systematically by my own play
The
Doctor’s
Dilemma
.’

‘In the theatre’, Voltaire said ‘(and I speak as one who has written both novels and plays), there is need for only the
thinnest
minimum of self-consistent character on which to string a dramatis persona together. Audiences can be easily gulled into supposing there is more of such consistency than there truly is, because their eyes assist their own deception: they cannot help seeing that a given dramatic personage is played by the same actor all the way through.’

‘Indeed,’ said Shaw, ‘such consistency of character as a
dramatic
personage needs is needed principally to assist the actors. Their profession consists of the childish activities of
making-believe
, dressing up and shewing off. Unlike children, however, they have to take part in those activities punctually, regularly and in circumstances both frightening and fatiguing. If you allow them to suppose that they are undertaking a subtle and complex character-study, you encourage them to believe in the seriousness of their activity and you thereby promote in them the courage and perseverance to do it. In a novel, on the other hand, where the reader moves at his own pace and can go back to re-examine any passage that gives him doubt, and where there are no visible actors for his imagination to rely on, it may be necessary to endow the personages with a more plausible and naturalistic semblance of coherent characterisation. It was probably because I was too busy with ideas to have time to polish the characters that I failed as a novelist – or to be precise, that I wrote novels exactly as though they were plays, consisting of nothing but dialogue and stage directions.’

‘You failed’, Gibbon said to Shaw, ‘only because, through the accidents of history, the novels you were attempting to write were Victorian novels. You would have taken to the genre with ease had your ambition been to emulate, for example,
Les
Liaisons
Dangereuses,
which consists entirely of letters – that is to say, of dialogue. Or again, although you admired and
appreciated
them, you could not, in your historical situation, wholly model your own novels on those of Jane Austen, who was born into the same century as Voltaire, Laclos and myself and knew, by the light of the Enlightenment, that “character” is only a veneer, though she made it a highly polished and attractive veneer. It is quite apparent that in her books X marries Y not because that is in the least “in character” for either of them but because they are compelled by the ruthless and inexorable demands of the symmetry of the fiction’s design.’

‘She was more merciless to her creatures even than I was to mine‚’ Voltaire agreed, with a sigh of respect. ‘She was concerned wholly with relationships: the relationship, that is, of one section of her design to another, and the relationship of one motif in her material to another, which she exposes in the light of a most admirably unwavering irony. I am not in her class for toughness. I never managed, as she did, to isolate the Oedipus
situation as the crucial relationship in human affairs. Letting my fancy stray into the exotic, I was incapable of her relentless concentration on the domestic but cardinal problem of whom the children are to marry and whether the parents will permit them to. Even so’ (Voltaire’s voice became brisker) ‘I think I may claim that my fancy was not distracted either by local colour or by bizarre characterisation. I did single out and stick to the essence; and no doubt it was because I had understood that the essence consists of relationships that I was able, as soon as I became aware of it, to appreciate Freud’s concept of
psychology
. You see’ (and here Voltaire turned towards God), ‘we were all shocked to hear you speak seriously of people’s responses being “in character”, terminology I myself would use only in a joke, because it implied that you had retreated from Freud and had reverted to a static psychology – if not positively a medieval one. You will be explaining next that a person’s
response
is governed by the proportions of fire and earth in his constitution.’

‘Explanations of just that kind’, the psychoanalyst said, ‘pass daily for 20th-century psychology. Whole institutes spend time and money on drawing up charts shewing the proportions of introversion and extraversion in a person’s character. It is not necessary – indeed it is scarcely possible – to demonstrate before starting that any such dichotomy actually exists, because it is admitted straight away that everyone contains a mixture of the two. However, since it can be expressed in diagrams, this activity, like alchemy and astrology before it, readily passes for “scientific” and mathematically measurable. It therefore
appears
to be a respectable means of achieving what it has come into existence to achieve, which is of course to distract the 20th century from the dynamic psychological concepts of Freud.’

‘Psychology apart,’ Gibbon said, ‘the only area of 20th-
century
thought that is retarded enough to retain the static concepts of character is politics. You will find politicians still busy
weighing
one another’s characters, with all the solemnity that I and my contemporaries brought to such a figment of a task but with none of our wit or our steady hand with a finely balanced antithesis. As recently as January 1973 one British politician publicly diagnosed in another the traits “stubborn” and “rash”, and yet went on, as soberly as a judge or an analytical chemist,
to pronounce that those “faults” shrivelled away when they were “put in the scales and weighed against his qualities”. It is quite possible that politicians still believe that “faults” and “qualities” of character are entities which have a palpable existence – together, no doubt, with those “scales” in which politicians can determine their relative weights with such
conviction
of infallibility.’

‘Indeed,’ Shaw said, ‘since character doesnt exist, people believe whatever they like about it. As I remarked of myself,
54
  I began my career as a dramatist by lifting characters bodily out of pages of Charles Dickens, and discovered that I thereby produced an effect of daring innovation and originality.’

‘Not only did you produce that effect,’ Voltaire said; ‘you actually
were
a daring innovator and original. Character is
so
insubstantial and so little to an artist’s purpose that you and Dickens could use the same characters and yet make utterly different original effects.’

‘Character is indeed
so
insubstantial’, the psychoanalyst added, ‘that the very characters who, in the pages of Dickens, were universally recognised as human, warm and fleshly-
and-bloody
, were accused, when they reappeared in the pages or on the stages of Shaw, of being dehumanised, intellectualised and mere mouthpieces for ideas.’

‘It is an inexplicable paradox’, Shaw said, ‘that people regularly regard ideas as dehumanised, but passions, emotions and violent actions as human. Yet the truth is that ideas are the
most
human of those things. All the others we humans share with other animals. But ideas are things which only humans have.’

There was a moment’s pause, of general agreement, round the table and, during it, Shaw bent down and patted the sheep as though to console him for his want of ideas.

‘Well,’ God said, placing his forearms on the table rather in the manner of a sphinx. ‘Well. You have all made it
splendidly
clear that the reason I can’t simply
make
people believe
what I say has nothing to do with character. However, you have
not
made clear what the real reason is. And neither have you, which is more immediately important to me, given me the smallest indication of what action I ought to take.’