Does it matter if you don't like the characters?

I cannot reconcile my heart to this unlikeable approach to literature

In the Financial Times, the novelist Jem Calder (whose new book I am yet to read), has written about the question of whether it matters if we like the characters in novels.

I have to ask: what’s so important about likeability? What’s the problem with reading about fictional people who have done fictional bad things, or had problematic fictional thoughts?

He thinks that doing unlikable things is what gives a novel drama. What would Middlemarch be, he asks, if everyone were as pious as Dorothea? (Yes, he notes her own problematic thoughts.) He does avoid blaming social media and Goodreads for what he takes to be the trend of judging books based on whether you like the characters. (His 62-year-old mother thinks this way.) But he sees a professional/non-professional divide.

On the issue of likeability, non-professional online reviewers depart sharply from their professional counterparts published in mainstream literary publications. Even though professional reviews usually discuss characters’ actions while summarising a book’s plot, the judgments of likeable or not almost never feature.

Calder assumes this is because students are taught to approach literature as a “text” but falls into the familiar trap of wishing away critical complexity, saying:

the idea that fiction might just simply and entertainingly try to explore how other people live their lives and comport themselves under interesting ethical circumstances goes out the window in favour of an interrogative mode of reading that instead treats the novel primarily as an object of analysis.

No-one denies that we read for pleasure. But the idea that Austen, Eliot, Dickens, and James were “just simply and entertainingly try to explore how other people live their lives” is silly in its own right. However, that is beside the point Calder is making. (He cannot have it both ways!)

The distinction between liking the characters and judging the book critically does not need to be so sharp. If, as Calder claims, professional critics relegate their feelings about characters’ likeability to judgements of craft (oh that dreaded word), style, and its place in the canon, they are a modern exception to the general rule. It seems to me that if this is a critical predilection, while it surely does have something to do with the idea of books as texts and all that desiccated approach, it is also grounded more sensibly in the distinction between feeling and judgement. Critics who exclude their feelings about the characters are doing so out of a sense of the importance of proper judgement, but they are missing a trick nonetheless.

Critics used to write about liking and not liking characters all the time. Read the early reviews of the Brontes! It was common for readers in the nineteenth century to talk about knowing the characters and for that to be part of the pleasure of reading. And George Henry Lewes, who Carlyle called “the prince of journalists”, wasn’t above writing about his own deep feelings for Austen’s characters.

Miss Austen is like Shakespeare: she makes her very noodles inexhaustibly amusing, yet accurately real. We never tire of her characters. They become equal to actual experiences. They live with us, and form perpetual topics of comment. We have so personal a dislike to Mrs Elton and Mrs Norris, that it would gratify our savage feeling to hear of some calamity befalling them. We think of Mr Collins and John Thorpe with such a mixture of ludicrous enjoyment and angry contempt, that we alternately long and dread to make their personal acquaintance. The heroines—at least Elizabeth, Emma, and Catherine Morland—are truly lovable, flesh-and-blood young women…

Truly lovable! Ludicrous enjoyment! Lewes of course was a true man of letters, unworried by the possibility of being thought middlebrow. The closest thing we have to such a person today is A.N. Wilson, another great critic who is unafraid to weep and laugh on the page. Lewes was not imposing his feelings onto Austen. She wrote intentionally to provoke this sort of reaction. He was reading her as she ought to have been read. Likeability was part-and-parcel of judgement, for both critic and novelist.

Calder’s mother and all those readers on Goodreads are reacting in exactly the way they ought to—in exactly the way novelists like Austen and Eliot knew they would, as the scholar Debra Gettelman showed. Ana Kinsella wrote today about the way she wrote her recent novel (which I am also waiting to read). Rather than writing “with any idea that the novel might be read, nor that those readers might bring their own opinions about gender and art to the text”, she wrote about what interested her: a complicated man. This is quite different to the way the nineteenth century novelists thought about the problem.

Kinsella and Calder are writing against the idea of what one scholar called “wish-fulfillment” literature—books with lots of likeability and less moral complexity. That’s the sort of thing Austen and Eliot were writing directly against. Those novelists knew that they had to join readers in their reactions of likeability, if only to go beyond them.

I am so in sympathy with Lewes’s approach that I am affronted that he does not love Fanny Price, who is Austen’s greatest and most admirable heroine. Indeed, a good deal of critical commentary, starting in Austen’s own time, and including Kingsley Amis and recently Lauren Groff, has struggled to love Mansfield Park because readers have struggled to love, or even to accept, poor old Fanny. They might take a leaf out of George Saintsbury’s book, who wrote in his 1894 Preface to Pride and Prejudice that there were five heroines of the novels of the last hundred years with who “no man of taste and spirit” could resist falling in love.

Their names are, in chronological order, Elizabeth Bennet, Diana Vernon, Argemone Lavington, Beatrix Esmond, and Barbara Grant. I should have been most in love with Beatrix and Argemone; I should, I think, for mere occasional companionship, have preferred Diana and Barbara. But to live with and to marry, I do not know that any one of the four can come into competition with Elizabeth.

Many professional critics would now recoil from this sort of thing, not just on feminist grounds, but because they find it excruciating and cringe-worthy. That’s why they find the character-based criticism of the great A.C. Bradley to be so mockable. More fool them. Samuel Johnson was happy to judge Shakespeare’s characters on this basis, writing of Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well, “I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram, a man noble without generosity, and young without truth.”

Isn’t that a splendid phrase for so serious a critic to use? I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram. This was, and presumably still is for most people, a perfectly normal reaction to Shakespeare. In 1632, Charles I inscribed the names “Benedicte and Betteris” next to the title of Much Ado About Nothing in his copy of Shakespeare. I thought of this the other day when my colleague Ben Brophy told me he was reading Much Ado. Ben was full of delight about the “merry war” between Benedict and Beatrice. Falstaff was so popular that in a 1930s book which recorded all references made to Shakespeare in other literature, the index listed Falstaff at the top, saying “for the purpose of this index Falstaff shall be referred to as a work.” There were more entries for Falstaff than for the rest of Shakespeare’s works put together. One reason Harold Bloom was so popular was that he would share in this enthusiasm for character.

Johnson’s comment put me in mind of what Calder said about modern attitudes to likeability:

I searched the words “likeable” and “unlikeable” in the online reviews of some of my favourite novels. On the lower end, I discovered that any of the following offences were enough to make a character unlikeable to some readers: being privileged; having an affair, or imagining having an affair; initiating a divorce; lying; being a social outcast; being indecisive; being an alcoholic.

Well, yes indeed. Having an affair might well make someone unlikable. Just imagine extending this argument to the screen. Can we watch The Godfather without thinking about the question of likeability? What about The Sopranos or Succession? Isn’t likeability one of the main ways a writer has to engage a reader or watcher? The whole point of recent movies like The Drama and The Invite was to do with the likeability of the characters and how morally complex that can become.

So when Calder says that he doesn’t find the question of likeability to be important, I wonder what he can possibly mean. To say that “it feels beside the point to pass judgment” on a character is surely wrong. How could we read Emma or The Great Gatsby like that? What could we possibly make of Jonathan Franzen or Sally Rooney if we were so aloof? (Those are two novelists, by the way, where professional critics often make their feelings about the characters quite clear, intentionally or otherwise.) Calder claims that:

I have an allergic reaction when people start opining on the “point” of literature — especially if that “point” has anything to do with learning or self-development — but it’s clear that some form of moral engagement is part of the basic expectation that many readers bring to works of fiction.

It is also clear that this is one of the basic expectations of the books themselves. It simply isn’t possible to read most of the great novels otherwise. Without “moral engagement” there would be no V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, or Helen deWitt. Likeability is not the be-all-and-end-all, but it is the inevitable starting place.

The novel as a genre was intended to play upon the readers’ feelings about the characters, to confront them, and hope to modulate or change them. In Johnson’s comment that he could not reconcile his heart to Bertram, he acknowledges this role of literature. We should not confuse our instinctive feelings about a character with a critical judgement. For a long time, I could not finish Emma because I hated Emma. That’s fine as a personal reaction, but inadequate as a critical one. But that doesn’t oblige the modern critic (or God forbid, the modern novelist) to forgo the idea of likeability. Literature so often works by instinct and intuition. That should be a starting point for judgement, not something we keep hidden or presume to dislike.

For a long time, it was possible to be both a highbrow and a lowbrow when appreciating literature. It was normal for the groundlings to stop cracking their nuts so they could hear Falstaff’s lewd jokes. The middlebrow pleasure Lewes got from Austen’s characters didn’t prevent him writing the sort of criticism Johnson would have approved of, in which “opinion is improved into knowledge.” I would have thought Calder was one of these. He writes,

Many of us are interested in seeing dilemmas of moral complexity played out in novels, and some want to see not only that, but also characters resolving those dilemmas while behaving in aspirational ways.

Yes indeed. But if we wish for novels that play out and resolve moral dilemmas without feelings of likeability being involved, one wonders why we would want to read novels at all…

The lovable Diana Vernon