Abstract

Price commits the Fallacy of Novelistic Presumption. This is clearly evident to his earlier essay ["The Other Self"], but it is certainly implicit in "People of the Book." He assumes that the novel possesses a history that is independent of other modes of fiction and that it may be discussed independently of the history of literature. In this perspective, a specific element of the novel will seem validly detachable from literary history in general. I think that this is an error and that if a theory of character should emerge, it will necessarily account for—go to the heart of—all instances of character, symbolic, allegorical, naturalistic, whether in the novel, in epic, in romance, in drama, or in lyric. "By any inclusive definition of the term, Gerontion can be a character; yet he is at once less and more."1 Such a statement can be correct only if it masks "less and more than a character in a novel." · 1. Martin Price, "The Other Self: Thoughts about Character in the Novel," in Imagined Worlds: Essays on Some English Novels and Novelists in Honour of John Butt, ed. Maynard Mack and Ian Gregor : p. 291. Rawdon Wilson, associate professor of English at the University of Alberta, has contributed articles and short works of fiction to literary journals in the United States, Canada, and Australia. He contributed "The Bright Chimera: Character as a Literary Term" to Critical Inquiry in the Summer 1979 issue. Rawdon Wilson responds in the present essay to Martin Price's "People of the Book: Character in Forster's A Passage to India" . Martin Price's rejoinder, "The Logic of Intensity: More on Character" appears in the Winter 1975 issue of Critical Inquiry