In his article “ ‘Lay Aside My
Character’: The Personate Novel and Beyond,” Jonathan Lamb desperately
communicates the superiority of person over the categories of character and
author; while characters’ “part in the history of fiction is scant,” and
authors have an “enigmatic genealogy and an uncertain posterity” leading to “a
symmetry of pure enquiry that has little to do with knowledge,” persons are where it’s at: “Persons have
a much greater investment both in representation and conjecture, which is their
way of transfiguring what is imagined into what is real. Really they rule the world”
(284-5). Clearly, for Lamb, there
is an investment in the process of creating reality through imagining, rather
than relying upon empirical facts and histories that so neatly differentiate
characters and authors from persons.
Though he preludes this postulate with (an entire article’s worth of) an
impressive review of the critical work concerning persons and characters in the
eighteenth century novel, I am left baffled by his damning of these other
categories, as though persons that are not characters or authors always already
exist. Not that they have no
origin—he makes the “making of person” (by that same person) very clear; rather,
he seems to suggest these three categories of existence are mutually
exclusive—one may only be either a character, a person or an author.
If we use his definitions of these
different ontological manifestations to consider Lavinia (I will leave her
unlabeled, as yet), I wonder if such distinctions will hold, or, since
Shakespeare always trumps everyone, if we will find these
definitions a bit too limiting. If
characters are “settled and well known,” then Lavinia should fit the bill
marvelously. As a type of stock
character (the virgin “good girl”), one who is literally a character in other
narratives (The Metamorphoses, The Rape of Lucrece) and one who spends
the entire time complicit in a revenge plot which simply looks back on what has
happened, both to her and her literary predecessors, rather than casting ideas
forward, she would seem to fit the part. And yet, according to critic Mary Fawcett, Lavinia is exactly the type of author Kristeva
defines in Desire in Language: “he
[she] is neither nothingness nor anybody” (Fawcett 262). As Fawcett sees it, the act of carrying
her father’s detached hand in her mouth (since she has no hands of her own with
which to carry it) replaces her tongue; subsequently, that same orifice takes
in her uncle’s staff to carve the crimes of her rapists into the sand. She is transformed from “speaker to
witness, and from character to writer” (ibid). Granted, Fawcett has not Lamb’s specific definition of
character and writer/author in mind; yet, it seems possible, in light of Lamb’s
description of author—that which is “unattached…to the cycles of exchange that
define a character, or to the fictions of representation that define a person”
(Lamb 274), to argue for Lavinia’s existence as both an author AND a
person. Though she seems attached
to “the fictions of representation” (i.e. Ovid’s account of the history of
world from creation to Julius Caesar) she explicitly distinguishes herself from
this representation, by physically distancing herself from it—she points to the
book, itself. She is the person
who has created a person, by writing
about (i.e. authoring) a character of herself to create herself (as the
avenging Lavinia of Titus Andronicus).
Lamb’s methodology seems handy in
distinguishing this tripartite model of Lavinia, but to pin her down to one or
another seems to undermine the whole point
of personhood. Lavinia’s use of
the imagined (her literary predecessors), through authorship, to manifest her
revenge seems a quite lovely Shakespearean contradiction to Lamb’s reductive
model.
Fawcett, M. L. “Arms/Words/Tears: Language and the Body in
Titus Andronicus.” ELH (1983):
261–277. Print.
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