Book Report: Vermeule's "Why Do We Care About Literary Characters?"

1. Thesis of Work

Why Do We Care about Fictional Characters is primarily concerned with the cognitive approach to understanding relationships readers enjoy with fictional characters. Vermeule outlines three specific goals for her book in the first chapter:

1. How do humans engage with fictional characters
2. Why do humans spend a great deal of time and energy explaining themselves to others
3. How does the relationship we have with fictional characters relate to our relationships with real people

2. Methodology

Blakey Vermeule is a professor of Literature at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1995. Vermuele incorporates several different traditions into her work including literary criticism, neuroaesthetics, philosophy, and cognitive science.

3. Contribution

The major contribution of this work is the establishment of literary characters as being important or reimagined as integral to understanding literature as a whole. In her preface and opening chapter, Vermuele focuses on literary traditions and criticism that have seemingly shifted away from the relationship of character. Characters fill moral, ethical, or social roles that allow readers to engage with deeper themes and interpret text in a variety of different ways. Vermuele seeks to understand character and relationship to deeper metaphysical questions; namely, why is it that readers feel connected, sympathetic, and other emotional attachments to fictional characters. Her work as a whole seems to bridge the gap between cognitive science and literary criticism. By bringing the two together, Vermeule creates an interesting project and a new realm to imagine the novel. 

4. Chapter Summaries

Chapter 1:The Fictional Among Us

In the first chapter of Vermeule’s book, the author makes quick note of several important ideas. The first thing of note is her focus on “Schadenfreude” stories and the “Gossip Marketplace”. Vermeule contends that “Schadenfreude” stories and the “Gossip Marketplace” go hand in hand, creating a space that gives a reader exactly what they want: fame, beauty, youth, and mone(5).“Schadenfreude” stories have been popular since the dawn of fiction and the novel, and they continue to be popular across almost all mediums today (both fictional and nonfictional). These stories saw rise during the creation of Credit and Market Economics during the early modern period in English history. “Gossip Literature”, which is defined as “anything insightful or exposing about other people in which insight doesn’t necessarily put the other person in the best light” (7) plays into the cognitive evolution of the human mind; “Gossip Literature” became crucial in allowing others to place themselves with the Credit and Market Economics system, and allowed for them to gain insight into other’s sense of morality. Chapter 1 outlines three major themes for the book. The first two themes go together: How and why do we (humans) spend a great deal of time and energy seeking to explain ourselves and other people? The third major theme relates to Literary Criticism. More specifically, Vermeule is interested in exploring why humans relate and spend emotional energy on fictional characters and how that investment in said characters relates to developing the particular tools and capacities that literary critics develop in order to analyze information and text.  Fiction itself, according to Vermeule, offers two cognitive costs / functions: 1. It demands readers to suspend disbelief. 2. It rewards readers by delivering desired information / gossip / criticism that otherwise is unattainable from one’s own ability to extract information from the world.

Chapter 2: The Cognitive Dimension

Vermeule begins to build her case for cognitive science included into literary analysis. Her primary interest in this chapter is understanding how the mind interacts with Social Information.  She begins by outline four “conceptual primitives” that inform person/thing distinction: Animation, Agency, Personification, and the body / soul distinction. Each of these four primitives make up the processes of the human brain and contribute to what it means to be human / person. Vermeule theorizes that humans act and base reason on emotion (23). Machiavellian Intelligence explains why we are driven to understand other people. Machiavellian Intelligence is an evolved trait that allows humans to meet the needs of social interactions and keep a step ahead of competition. Human beings are inherently social creatures, and because we are social creatures, we develop tools to try and understand social situations and other human beings. The primary tool we use to understand others is Mind Reading. Mind Reading simply means that we are able to represent to ourselves the thoughts, feelings, desires, attitudes of other people, and then are able to make predictions relating to possible outcomes (34). Mind Reading, in the simulation theory tradition, allows us to engage with fiction by taking our minds off-line (into a virtual world) where instead of acting on impulses and actions that may be triggered by trying to understand another mind, we imagine by creating a certain space of mind. Mind Reading can be tightly tied to the protagonist of a novel (or story), but it can also create separation of space between the character and the reader (through methods of narrative construction). The relationship of both of these ideas triggers G. Curries idea of “reader of fact” which simply suggests that a reader learns all about a story through information presented, and at times connects with the emotional conditions /situations of the characters (43).

Chapter 3: What Hails Us?

Literary characters are unusually portable between different mediums. Minor characters in some works can become major characters in follow up work (think Ulysses in Homer’s Iliad and then his role in The Odyssey or Frasier in Cheers and then the spin-off Frasier). The first notable trend of this happening in fiction is Richardson’s Pamela. Portability leads to fan fiction and sometimes co-authorship, as seen in Richardson’s Clarissa. The characters that matter most to us usually show a high level of Machiavellian Intelligence and some super human endowment (52-3). Literary characters circulate, levitate, and become famous because they allow the reader access to reason about social contract under imperfect conditions (55). This is because social contract thinking has been ingrained in human thought, and as a result, character’s reflect this sort of thinking. Character’s that stay with us reflect issues relating to conscience, authority, and other imperatives that contract thinking incorporates. Writer’s use the tools of Mind Reading to create, and in the case of several texts (notably in this chapter, Behn’s Oroonoko) Machiavellian Intelligence leads to societal critiques.

Chapter 4: The Literary Endowment

Focus of chapter is around a single important question: “Why are some literary narratives so fascinating? or, What are the mechanisms that trigger our interests?” (62). This chapter is focused on “five turns”. These turns are: glances and eye contact, Free-Indirect Discourse, Machiavellian Narratives, Attention, and Differential Access to Social Information. Each of these “turns” are themes and techniques “writers use to trigger mind reading in their texts” (106).

Chapter 5: The Fantasy Exposure and Narrative Development in Eighteenth-Century Britain

The primary focus of this chapter is the conflict between the public eye, narrative development, and exposure. The chapter traces the rise of the novel, the rise of the press, and other British inventions or discoveries (in the case of the novel). All of these forms / inventions developed out of notions that “center on the idea that knowledge is a form of exposure: knowing something means opening it up, laying it bare, flushing it out, uncovering it, and stripping it down” (109).18th century Literature (or the bulk of it), is concerned with social perception and the motivations of other persons / society. 18th century novels thus unpack and stripped down these motives, to get a clearer idea of their purpose (111-12). Exposure makes rich form for narratives. Many 18th century novels are devoted to it. Novels of paranoia build on psychological exposure. One the best literary / textual analysis in the entire book comes in this chapter when Vermeule examines Godwin’s Caleb Williams. In this analysis,  Vermeule examines the protagonist of the novel’s attempt at exposing his nemesis (Falkland) who has directly framed him / trumped up charges against him, thus making him a criminal. Godwin uses a “gender difference” to imagine power difference. The point of the novel, according to Vermeule, is to show that “psychological exposure is one of the few tools that the poor and weak have to unseat the strong” (118). This novel also may be one of the first to introduce the concept of Free Indirect Discourse (Vermeule claims that Godwin invented it in order to allow readers to gauge the psychological elements of the novel, such as class position or resentment of being beaten down by another man). The chapter essentially concludes with a long look at Richardson’s Pamela (though we do get a few pages regarding Pope and Gender), where Vermeule explores exposure, identity, and shifts to self interest in the part of the protagonist.

Chapter 6: God Novels

Introduces the concept of “high mind-reading tradition”, that she claims originates during the 18th century from authors such as Richardson and Fielding. This tradition continues today in the work of Ian McEwan (and I would imagine that of Jonathan Franzen as well). Essentially, this tradition represents a form of narrator which adopts the standpoint of agency with complete access to social information, and who then trickles that information out through characters, events, etc at different times and junctions. This can lead to blindness for a reader. This form of literature develops through the use of “God Novels” which simply mean novels with an overseeing narrator who behaves similar to the Christian notion of God (I’m not sure if this is a correct definition. This is an area in her book that I feel needs to be fleshed out a bit more. Or maybe I just missed the proper definition during my reading.). Human psychology is inherently moral. We try to moralize everything. Thus, it would appear to be impossible to create / write amoral literature (135). Vermeule establishes this thought through a close reading of McEwan’s Atonement which is rather wonderfully done. Following the close reading of McEwan, Vermeule dives deep into Tom Jones and looks at the various narrative techniques and themes that emerge throughout the novel. One of the more interesting conclusions drawn from her reading is that Fielding’s Christianity influences Fielding’s desire to try and make sense of the problem of evil (144).

Chapter 7: Gossip and Literary Narrative

In this chapter, Vermeule returns to the subject of Gossips Literature. She defines the paradox seen in high brow literature and its view relating to Gossip; namely, characters that matter in important social novels tend to look down on gossip and writers of social novels themselves do not want their work confused with gossip (150). Gossip is a “framing” device that authors use to frame a story (151). Because of this, literary novels depend on gossip (even if they want to condemn it morally). Gossip is concerned with power, and thus privies social information such as sex, scandal, etc. Gossip has a history of being associated with women, even though all people gossip; historically, gossip has been hated and attacked (154). Gossip helps us identify allies and groups, and thus it also allows us to create trust bonds with others. According to Dunbar, gossip is to humans what grooming rituals are to other primates (155). Vermeule introduces the concept of “Flayed Gossip”, though I’m certain exactly what she means by the term (much of this is due to his examples and lack of a concrete, everyday definition. She defines the term through literary examples of texts I am unfamiliar, so I feel a bit out of place in the discussion here. See pages 155-60 for the examples and her definition which doesn’t make sense to me) . Gossip is a useful tool in making generalizations, but like generalizations, gossip never seems to be able to truly and fully grasp personhood (160). The chapter then shifts into a discussion on  evolutionary literary criticism. Vermeule offers two hypotheses regarding the origin of fiction. The first hypothesis simply suggests that storytelling is natural to human nature and is essential to us as a species (161), though some have suggested it be a learned / adapted principle.  She asks the question, in relation to other evolutionary literary critics, whether or not it matters if fiction is a by-product or an accident relating to human involvement. Vermeule then briefly discusses Gallagher’s book Nobody’s Story, in which she, I think, mostly agrees with and builds upon with her Gossip Theory. The second hypothesis she mentions relates to the historicist perspective (166). Here, she discusses Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel. She does a wonderful job at restating his position on “formal realism” and then explaining the countless attacks that Watt has received over the years. Vermeule states: “what Ian Watt called ‘the triumph of formal realism’ marked the novel’s successful break with its own low past” (168). She shifts into the evolution of the historicist approach, in which ultimately the claim made is that new novels from Richardson and Fielding rejected older approaches by Haywood and Behn, thus stripping away and washing their hands of that tradition in the attempt to create a truly new and innovative form.  At the end of her explanation of this hypothesis, Vermeule rejects these claims, and inserts again her Gossip Theory that works hand in hand with the evolutionary literary approach (169). She then repeats her claim that the novel itself has a paradoxical relationship with gossip, and that it is something the novel been able to overcome. 

Chapter 8: What’s the Matter with Miss Bates?

This chapter begins by examining bias and error. Attributional errors are errors that “depend on the divergence between what one person believes about his or her contribution to a situation and what an objective observer would believe about that contribution” (172). Basically, people think much too highly of themselves and their perception of things. Most bias come from the human tendency to impose their perspective first. As this chapter progresses, the question doesn’t become “why do we have bias” but rather “what is it like to live with others who have biases”. These sorts of people are very common and popular throughout all literature. These characters have become targets for literary criticism, and yet their biases are vital to the development of the novel and plot. The chapter moves into readings of Austen’s Emma. Vermeule makes an interesting observation regarding Austen’s view of human psychology: “Where do values come from? The economic basis of society” (178). Most of the focus then shifts to Miss Bates and lastly Emma, where Vermeule thoroughly examines both characters. 

Chapter 9: Mind Blindness

We begin with an observation that 18th century satire is alive and well in the 21st century. Vermeule humorously examines the political satire sketches of George Bush in the aftermath of the 2000 election. She notes that the “Curious George”  sketch is indebted to the 18th century, mostly due to its connection between Humans and Animals (194). This leads into her idea of “situational mind blindness” (195). This is simply a dehumanizing trope which turns the subject into a mindless other. It also leads to group outness: the other no longer becomes human, and the in group then can justify deny rights and moral principle. “Situational mind blindness” is closely related to satire, and according to Vermeule, satire is found throughout all human literary traditions. Mind blindness is commonly associated with autistic people who do not possess the ability to Mindread (196). However, mind blindness can also be situationally enacted and adapted for people’s own purpose. Autistic people have fascinated writers for centuries, and continue to fascinate intellectuals today (Defoe published a pamphlet; a film in the mid 90s with Jodie Foster is incredibly similar to Defoe’s descriptions of Peter). Literary mind blindness incorporates irony (or rather, it is ironic) (202). The trope of the “unseeing eye” extends into the satirical relationship to the concept of situational mind blindness. Another trope that plays into this is “eye blinded by power”. In each of these tropes, mind blindness is shown as “a limiting case of social knowledge, one that comes into play when the system breaks down” (204). Vermeule’s case, with examples from Swift and other authors, is that “literary mind blindness is dehumanizing, uncomfortable, and shot through with feeling of domination” (210). However, as she further goes on to say, there are redemptive qualities to mind blindness. Her primary reasoning is that mind blindness is generally placed on flat characters, and thus it increases a reader’s own mind reading capability.  She concludes the chapter by examining a case where mind blindness is positive, from a series of prints from Hogarth. 

Chapter 10: Postmodernist Reflections

The final chapter of Vermeule’s book examines the work of J.M. Coetzee. The first section essentially sums up Coetzee’s work and interest. She describes him as being a philosophical writer whose work is very much in line with work produced in the 18th century. One of the major themes in his work is suffering. Vermeule does a close reading of Elizabeth Costello. She then focuses on four recurring characters in his work: the madman (related to Gulliver), an economic man (Robinson Crusoe), a fool, and a couple suffering from sexual frustration (220). Each of these recurring characters are thoroughly considered. She then begins to look for parallels in his work to those of the great 18th century novelists and tries to trace what his books say about famous works from Richardson, focusing on the book Disgrace and relating it to Clarissa.  She also examines his other works and compares them to the texts in which they are directly in dialog with. This chapter neatly wraps up the bulk of her work, and in doing so, not only does Vermeule demonstrate her high sophistication of various traditions (evolutionary psychology, literary criticism, philosophy, cognitive theory, etc) but she also manages to successfully weave centuries old literature in with contemporary literature production. 

5. Connections / Applications/ Extensions

• Leslie Brothers
• Catherine Gallagher
• Bertrand Russell
• Caroline Levine
• Barbara Stafford
• Cognitive Theory
• Literary Criticism
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Relationship between Fact and Fiction
• etc

Many of the ideas expressed in this book, I think, are incredibly helpful for me moving forward as both an academic and a writer. Quite simply, I expect that this work has influenced the way I will approach both creating characters and writing about characters when trying to analyze literary fiction. In relationship to material we have already read, I think Vermeule makes us think about the ways in which characters appear on the page and how we as readers approach a relationship to the text and our feelings regarding characters. For example, when reading Pamela, I couldn’t stand her as a character. Vermeule’s text asks me to think about why I had problems relating to her character and what that says about the how everything unfolds and relates. Likewise, I felt emotionally invested in Evelina, and so Vermeule’s text would likewise ask the same question and make us think about how and why these relationships matter.

6. Strengths and Weakness

One of the great advantages of this text, compared to other literary critics and philosophical theorists that I’ve read in the past (namely Spivak and Kripke), is Vermeule’s strength as a writer. The book is simply wonderfully constructed, and the sentence structure is fantastic. Because the book is very wide ranging, and it would appear that Vermeule is on the cutting edge of a new approach to literary criticism,  there could be difficulty in comprehending or engaging with the material. If I have a major criticism of the text, it’s simply that it’s far too long and in depth. In the second chapter, I greatly struggled getting through all of the cognitive theory, and I felt at times overwhelmed. Vermeule does a damn good job at trying to explain everything, but some of her explanations are so long and drawn out, that at times it feels like the text is running in circles, or I had to skim over it to get a sense of what the overall idea being presented was (see Machiavellian intelligence and the sequential section that discusses “Mind Reading” and the two different schools of thought relating to its development).  

One specific chapter of the book that I feel needs work is Chapter Six regarding “God Novels”. I don’t think it is fully developed, and at this point, I felt that the chapter was the most abstract of all the sections of the book. She is onto something interesting, but I’d like to see more.

7. Questions?

I haven’t yet really been able to formulate any significant questions to the text. I certainly would like some clarity regarding certain chapters and ideas (specifically the God Novels Concept). I was also a bit confused relating to what exactly “flaying gossip” constituted and how it differed from traditional forms of gossip she describes through several sections within the book. I'm also curious whether or not many of these ideas that she presents holds true for more genre based fiction (specifically the Gothic Novel). 

I think one of the more curious questions that should be asked is: How differently do we view our interactions with real individuals from the one’s with fictional characters? From my reading, the answer to this question remains unclear.