The Nature of Literary Being

Are novel characters more than verbal representations of individuals or collective subjects? The commonsense answer would be 'no.' Many readers believe that the essential difference between a person and a novel character is ontological: the former is while the latter is not. Counterintuitively, perhaps, this Colloquy will look closely and variously into the foundations of our assumption that the antithesis of flesh and word—inherent in the composition, legibility, and decomposition of novel characters at a reading’s conclusion—denies them being in any but the most fantastic, even specious, sense.  

To approach the question of fictional ontology, we might begin with a phrase taken from Jacques Rancière—"the suspensive existence of literature"—in his essay, "The Body of the Letter: Bible, Epic, Novel" (La chair des mots: politiques de l'ecriture, 1998). How might we understand this suspensive existence in relation to character? In the process of reading, could it refer to a crossing over of the reader’s material actuality with the character’s immateriality; if so, how does that crossing-over occur, what are its temporal and spatial conditions, and what are its consequences within and outside the novel? How do we evaluate the special properties attributed by some authors to the flesh of characters, their peculiar powers of embodiment, as when we read how some survive their own death, however briefly, in novels including Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, Toni Morrison’s Sula, and the extended afterlife J.M. Coetzee gives Elizabeth Costello. We hope this Colloquy will explore the crossings-over of word to flesh and flesh to word as they occur among the three subjectivities in play in the particular event that the novel both is and engenders: character, reader, and writer. What is the nature of our investment either in safeguarding the integrity of the antithesis of flesh and word or in violating it?