Colm Tóibín: "It is not our job to like or dislike characters in fiction...

... or make judgments about their worth, or learn from them how to live." So what is our job in reading and writing characters?

Back when I was thinking about aunts and gunpersons as disruptors, I found Colm Tóibín’s brilliant essay on the important of aunts. It also contains this quote, which I stashed for another day - and today is that day.

The novel, after all, is not a moral fable or parable; it is not our job to like or dislike characters in fiction, or make judgments about their worth, or learn from them how to live. We can do that with real people and, if we like, figures from history. They are for moralists to feast on. A novel is a pattern and it is our job to notice how the textures were woven and the tones put in place. This is not to insist that a character in fiction is merely a verbal construct and bears no relation to the known world. It is rather to suggest that the role of a character in a novel is never simple. A novel isn’t a piece of ethics or sociology.

I get the feeling that Gwen Raverat’s Aunt Etty wouldn’t agree. She was the best reader-aloud that Gwen ever knew, and, as described in Period Piece, when she was reading fiction to her nephews and nieces the ethics and sociology of her day were much in play :

After her death I found a book [Aunt Etty] had once read to us: Don John¹ by Jean Ingelow. The story is about two changelings, a bad boy and a good one… In the end it is proved that the good boy is the son of the bad parents, and vice versa … This was more than Aunt Etty’s eugenic² conscience could bear… she changed the entire sense of the book so that the good boy should be descended from the good parents and the bad from the bad; and none of us ever discovered the fraud.

Photo by Stas Ostrikov on Unsplash