Thanks for this, really enjoyed it. I find The Great Gatsby to be a good book for discussing likability of characters. Most people don’t like any of the characters but still find them compelling, which I think is generally a good thing. It leads to the point I think you’re making, which is that likability is a good starting point for getting into a book (and often a strategy of authors for readership) but is not required and certainly not enough for critically reading.
There are plenty of fictional characters who are dislikeable but so enjoyable to read, the great novels of the 19th and 20th century are packed with them. I think underlying this though is the dread word ‘relatable’, which perhaps has been conflated with likeability. I first came across the concept of ‘relatable’ characters about 15 years ago when the students I taught were beginning to struggle with longer, older books. Part of the problem seemed to be the distance between the reader and the text in terms of time, culture, mores, expectations. Relatability seems to me like the opposite of true empathy - it is wanting to find in stories people and situations that the reader can align with their own experiences and emotions, when actually, the whole point of great stories, of great literature, is for us as readers to explore different worlds and understand different experiences and emotions that take us out of our immediate comfort zone. I’ve ended up teaching a good deal of context, particularly the historical, social, political environment prior to reading, but I still have students struggling to read a story where the characters are so remote from their experience.
Totally agree with you on "relatability": you express really well the discomfort I have always had with it.
But I'm wondering what you mean by fictional characters who are "dislikeable but so enjoyable to read". My feeling is that the kind of character who is enjoyable to read is almost by definition "likable", no matter how much one disapproves of them. People like Count Fosco in The Woman in White, or Lydia Gwilt in Armadale, seem to me quintessentially likable villains - totally delightful and engaging on the page, no matter how awful the things they do are. Or did you have something else in mind?
For me, characters who are awful, terrible humans in literature include Agamemnon in the Iliad, the Pardoner in Chaucer, and then Iago or Regan and Goneril, but also, Sir Toby Belch, and in 19th century fiction, the Crawfords in Mansfield Park, St.John Rivers in Jane Eyre, Heathcliff, in Dickens, characters as varied as Murdstone and Mrs Jellyby, Angel Clare in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the Buchanans in Gatsby, Grandcourt and Casaubon in Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch respectively, Gilbert Osmond. More recently, last year I read Olga Tokarczuk’s Books of Jacob, and the main character, Jacob Frank is horrendous. I think of books that create characters who take us to places of manipulation, cruelty and fear. Perhaps enjoyable isn’t the right word - enriching, enlightening, expansive, perhaps are better ways to think of these types of work.
Hmmm. That's interesting. I think I would regard some of those as positively enjoyable to read, in fact ... Iago, Sir Toby, Heathcliff, Mrs. Jellyby, for different reasons (Iago and Sir Toby for their wittiness, Heathcliff for the intensity of his passions, Mrs. Jellyby - well, because Dickens makes those scenes so funny that you just want more of them).
But the others, I totally agree with you: I don't find Angel Clare or Gilbert Osmond or Mr. Casaubon or St. John Rivers enjoyable to read, and they are SO dislikable, but we learn a lot about ourselves and the world through reading them!
Wonderful last lines which underscore the entire point. Being critical and having feelings about characters isn't an either or. It's possible and important to do both.
This question comes up for me particularly when I, in my high school English classroom, teach Catcher in the Rye. I open by saying that it's ok to not like Holden (in fact, maybe you're not supposed to like him), and that it is a reasonable reaction to reading the book. But what one can't do is let that stop them from engaging with the novel. Now, of course, some of that is just "you need to do the work associated with the text," but it's also a good thing to keep in mind for other texts one will engage with throughout their lives. Likability can factor in and be part of our reactions to a text, but it's not the end-all, be-all.
I basically agree with this - many writers create characters precisely with the intention that the readers will engage with them, will like them, indeed, and critics who miss that dimension are missing a lot of the point of the books. But I think there are a couple of nuances that need to be teased out.
First, I think you need to make a distinction between "liking" and "sympathizing with": both of those involve the kind of moral engagement you are talking about, but they are different things. I don't "like" Soames Forsyte - and I find it impossible to believe that Galsworthy intended his readers to "like" Soames Forsyte: he repeatedly emphasizes from the moment he is introduced just how dislikable and detestable he is in both his character and his behavior. But I SYMPATHIZE intensely with Soames: his desperate inability to understand why it is that Irene doesn't love him and can't love him, and his constant, tragic awareness that he is missing something terribly important in his own life through his reduction of everything to property relations and money. And our ethical engagement with Galsworthy depends fundamentally on that sympathy.
That's where Soames differs from (say) Falstaff, whom it is hard not to like no matter how much of a scoundrel he is - or even Iago, where we have to find him to some degree likable to understand how he can deceive and entrap the people around him. We can engage ethically there as well, but it's a different kind of ethical engagement from what we have with someone like Soames. It's also a difference from characters whom we initially like, but draw away from as the evil in them becomes more apparent: the Michael Corleones or Walter Whites.
Second, I think one needs to acknowledge that there is a class of writers who deliberately eschew "likability": they keep such a coolly severe distance from their characters that likability is really beside the point. Voltaire's Candide is an obvious one, but Flaubert's Salammbo might be a less obvious one. In both cases - the pervasive irony in Voltaire, or the deliberately alienating antiquarian horror in Flaubert - even to ask about "likability" would suggest that you've missed the point of the book.
But with the (many, perhaps majority of) books where the writer does clearly want you to like their characters, at least in part, you're absolutely right. And I think we judge a book's success or failure at least in part on how successful the author is at making us like the characters. Which is why Mansfield Park is my least favorite Austen (sorry! I just can't agree with you about Fanny, and I think Austen simply misjudged.)
The screen paragraph is where this bites hardest at the moment. Nolan's Odyssey does the thing you're describing, only backwards. Instead of trusting the audience to have a reaction to a morally complicated man and then taking them somewhere past it, it engineers the likeability in advance. In the poem Odysseus lies to nearly everyone he meets, his hosts, his son, his wife, almost to the last minute. That is what he is for. Sand it off to produce an honourable family man and there is nothing left in him to be judged, which turns out to be the same as nothing left to be interested in.
Which is your Austen point arriving from a long way further back. Homer knew precisely what reaction he wanted and built the poem to complicate it. The instinct came first and the judgement came after, and a version that removes the first one never gets to the second.
I think the focus on likeability is a bit narrow for what you're actually arguing. What you're essentially advocating, from what I can tell, is to be affectively invested in writing, and I totally agree! But I pity and/or grimace at everyone in Alice Munro's short stories, and that affective experience is not pleasant but it leads somewhere aesthetically. I love Cormac McCarthy, and almost zero of his characters are remotely likeable; that's not the point. I love liking a a good character and I also love hating a good character. Affect is very broad, it's not just about the pleasantness of empathizing with a worthy person.
I think what this is missing is an extended discussion of the deeper critique of likeability--which is that very specific, narrow mores dictate what is or isn't likeable. The unlikeability problem is real. One of my favorite never-published novels, a friend's, had absolutely incredible prose but was tanked because (in large part) people could not get over the "unlikeability" of the protagonist. (And that "unlikeability" was definitely related to the gender of said protagonist.)
Characters certainly don't have to be likeable, but they do need to be interesting. An interesting character is far more entertaining than a likeable one. As I think about it, actually, most of the books I love have decidedly unlikeable characters, at least for a degree of time in their development. The Great Gatsby. Middlemarch. Even Emma. It's rare to find characters that are interesting and likeable from the start. Elizabeth Bennet is a rare bird indeed!
As a semi-professional reader of literature, I don't find likeability essential to having a good time analyzing a novel. But the reason I focus on the Victorians is their predilection for creating likeable characters. I need an affective as well as an intellectual relationship to what I read.
I agree with you that I usually want to like the characters in books. The dictionary definition of likable is "having qualities that bring about a favorable regard."
I like Tom Ripley, a sociopathic murderer. He's intelligent, honest, and has good taste. Hannibal Lecter is a somewhat similar character. They have qualities that earn my favorable regard. I would not like to meet them in real life, but in the context of the fictional worlds they inhabit, which I observe from a place of safety, I like them. Frankly, I think their fictional worlds are designed to make them likable.
I've noticed, from attending book clubs, that some readers look at things differently. They might find it simply impossible to like a character who is a sociopathic murderer. The positive qualities just don't register once they clock the sociopathy.
I tend to think this debate about "likability" is really a debate about moral standards. I think the way we apply moral standards to fictional characters is related, at least partially, to how we apply moral standards in real life. And I guess I see a lot of moral perfectionism these days, applied to real people and fictional characters alike. I think moral perfectionism makes people unhappy (it's a symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder) and also makes them unable to appreciate characters like Tom Ripley and Hannibal Lecter.
So I agree with you, I usually want to like the characters I read. But I think when people write these screeds against "likability" they may be covertly railing against moral perfectionism.
I love The Talented Mr. Ripley and enjoyed the other Ripley novels. I don’t like Ripley . I don’t need to. I don’t like Patricia Highsmith. I enjoy her novels.
I simply could not enjoy a novel that spends so much time in the head of a character I did not like at some level. I think I have very different moral standards for fictional characters than real people, and that may make me unusual. To me, the best fiction approaches a kind of amorality, and Highsmith is certainly an expert at that.
Thanks for this, really enjoyed it. I find The Great Gatsby to be a good book for discussing likability of characters. Most people don’t like any of the characters but still find them compelling, which I think is generally a good thing. It leads to the point I think you’re making, which is that likability is a good starting point for getting into a book (and often a strategy of authors for readership) but is not required and certainly not enough for critically reading.
There are plenty of fictional characters who are dislikeable but so enjoyable to read, the great novels of the 19th and 20th century are packed with them. I think underlying this though is the dread word ‘relatable’, which perhaps has been conflated with likeability. I first came across the concept of ‘relatable’ characters about 15 years ago when the students I taught were beginning to struggle with longer, older books. Part of the problem seemed to be the distance between the reader and the text in terms of time, culture, mores, expectations. Relatability seems to me like the opposite of true empathy - it is wanting to find in stories people and situations that the reader can align with their own experiences and emotions, when actually, the whole point of great stories, of great literature, is for us as readers to explore different worlds and understand different experiences and emotions that take us out of our immediate comfort zone. I’ve ended up teaching a good deal of context, particularly the historical, social, political environment prior to reading, but I still have students struggling to read a story where the characters are so remote from their experience.
Totally agree with you on "relatability": you express really well the discomfort I have always had with it.
But I'm wondering what you mean by fictional characters who are "dislikeable but so enjoyable to read". My feeling is that the kind of character who is enjoyable to read is almost by definition "likable", no matter how much one disapproves of them. People like Count Fosco in The Woman in White, or Lydia Gwilt in Armadale, seem to me quintessentially likable villains - totally delightful and engaging on the page, no matter how awful the things they do are. Or did you have something else in mind?
For me, characters who are awful, terrible humans in literature include Agamemnon in the Iliad, the Pardoner in Chaucer, and then Iago or Regan and Goneril, but also, Sir Toby Belch, and in 19th century fiction, the Crawfords in Mansfield Park, St.John Rivers in Jane Eyre, Heathcliff, in Dickens, characters as varied as Murdstone and Mrs Jellyby, Angel Clare in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the Buchanans in Gatsby, Grandcourt and Casaubon in Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch respectively, Gilbert Osmond. More recently, last year I read Olga Tokarczuk’s Books of Jacob, and the main character, Jacob Frank is horrendous. I think of books that create characters who take us to places of manipulation, cruelty and fear. Perhaps enjoyable isn’t the right word - enriching, enlightening, expansive, perhaps are better ways to think of these types of work.
Hmmm. That's interesting. I think I would regard some of those as positively enjoyable to read, in fact ... Iago, Sir Toby, Heathcliff, Mrs. Jellyby, for different reasons (Iago and Sir Toby for their wittiness, Heathcliff for the intensity of his passions, Mrs. Jellyby - well, because Dickens makes those scenes so funny that you just want more of them).
But the others, I totally agree with you: I don't find Angel Clare or Gilbert Osmond or Mr. Casaubon or St. John Rivers enjoyable to read, and they are SO dislikable, but we learn a lot about ourselves and the world through reading them!
Wonderful last lines which underscore the entire point. Being critical and having feelings about characters isn't an either or. It's possible and important to do both.
This question comes up for me particularly when I, in my high school English classroom, teach Catcher in the Rye. I open by saying that it's ok to not like Holden (in fact, maybe you're not supposed to like him), and that it is a reasonable reaction to reading the book. But what one can't do is let that stop them from engaging with the novel. Now, of course, some of that is just "you need to do the work associated with the text," but it's also a good thing to keep in mind for other texts one will engage with throughout their lives. Likability can factor in and be part of our reactions to a text, but it's not the end-all, be-all.
I basically agree with this - many writers create characters precisely with the intention that the readers will engage with them, will like them, indeed, and critics who miss that dimension are missing a lot of the point of the books. But I think there are a couple of nuances that need to be teased out.
First, I think you need to make a distinction between "liking" and "sympathizing with": both of those involve the kind of moral engagement you are talking about, but they are different things. I don't "like" Soames Forsyte - and I find it impossible to believe that Galsworthy intended his readers to "like" Soames Forsyte: he repeatedly emphasizes from the moment he is introduced just how dislikable and detestable he is in both his character and his behavior. But I SYMPATHIZE intensely with Soames: his desperate inability to understand why it is that Irene doesn't love him and can't love him, and his constant, tragic awareness that he is missing something terribly important in his own life through his reduction of everything to property relations and money. And our ethical engagement with Galsworthy depends fundamentally on that sympathy.
That's where Soames differs from (say) Falstaff, whom it is hard not to like no matter how much of a scoundrel he is - or even Iago, where we have to find him to some degree likable to understand how he can deceive and entrap the people around him. We can engage ethically there as well, but it's a different kind of ethical engagement from what we have with someone like Soames. It's also a difference from characters whom we initially like, but draw away from as the evil in them becomes more apparent: the Michael Corleones or Walter Whites.
Second, I think one needs to acknowledge that there is a class of writers who deliberately eschew "likability": they keep such a coolly severe distance from their characters that likability is really beside the point. Voltaire's Candide is an obvious one, but Flaubert's Salammbo might be a less obvious one. In both cases - the pervasive irony in Voltaire, or the deliberately alienating antiquarian horror in Flaubert - even to ask about "likability" would suggest that you've missed the point of the book.
But with the (many, perhaps majority of) books where the writer does clearly want you to like their characters, at least in part, you're absolutely right. And I think we judge a book's success or failure at least in part on how successful the author is at making us like the characters. Which is why Mansfield Park is my least favorite Austen (sorry! I just can't agree with you about Fanny, and I think Austen simply misjudged.)
The screen paragraph is where this bites hardest at the moment. Nolan's Odyssey does the thing you're describing, only backwards. Instead of trusting the audience to have a reaction to a morally complicated man and then taking them somewhere past it, it engineers the likeability in advance. In the poem Odysseus lies to nearly everyone he meets, his hosts, his son, his wife, almost to the last minute. That is what he is for. Sand it off to produce an honourable family man and there is nothing left in him to be judged, which turns out to be the same as nothing left to be interested in.
Which is your Austen point arriving from a long way further back. Homer knew precisely what reaction he wanted and built the poem to complicate it. The instinct came first and the judgement came after, and a version that removes the first one never gets to the second.
I think the focus on likeability is a bit narrow for what you're actually arguing. What you're essentially advocating, from what I can tell, is to be affectively invested in writing, and I totally agree! But I pity and/or grimace at everyone in Alice Munro's short stories, and that affective experience is not pleasant but it leads somewhere aesthetically. I love Cormac McCarthy, and almost zero of his characters are remotely likeable; that's not the point. I love liking a a good character and I also love hating a good character. Affect is very broad, it's not just about the pleasantness of empathizing with a worthy person.
I think what this is missing is an extended discussion of the deeper critique of likeability--which is that very specific, narrow mores dictate what is or isn't likeable. The unlikeability problem is real. One of my favorite never-published novels, a friend's, had absolutely incredible prose but was tanked because (in large part) people could not get over the "unlikeability" of the protagonist. (And that "unlikeability" was definitely related to the gender of said protagonist.)
No
Characters certainly don't have to be likeable, but they do need to be interesting. An interesting character is far more entertaining than a likeable one. As I think about it, actually, most of the books I love have decidedly unlikeable characters, at least for a degree of time in their development. The Great Gatsby. Middlemarch. Even Emma. It's rare to find characters that are interesting and likeable from the start. Elizabeth Bennet is a rare bird indeed!
As a semi-professional reader of literature, I don't find likeability essential to having a good time analyzing a novel. But the reason I focus on the Victorians is their predilection for creating likeable characters. I need an affective as well as an intellectual relationship to what I read.
I agree with you that I usually want to like the characters in books. The dictionary definition of likable is "having qualities that bring about a favorable regard."
I like Tom Ripley, a sociopathic murderer. He's intelligent, honest, and has good taste. Hannibal Lecter is a somewhat similar character. They have qualities that earn my favorable regard. I would not like to meet them in real life, but in the context of the fictional worlds they inhabit, which I observe from a place of safety, I like them. Frankly, I think their fictional worlds are designed to make them likable.
I've noticed, from attending book clubs, that some readers look at things differently. They might find it simply impossible to like a character who is a sociopathic murderer. The positive qualities just don't register once they clock the sociopathy.
I tend to think this debate about "likability" is really a debate about moral standards. I think the way we apply moral standards to fictional characters is related, at least partially, to how we apply moral standards in real life. And I guess I see a lot of moral perfectionism these days, applied to real people and fictional characters alike. I think moral perfectionism makes people unhappy (it's a symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder) and also makes them unable to appreciate characters like Tom Ripley and Hannibal Lecter.
So I agree with you, I usually want to like the characters I read. But I think when people write these screeds against "likability" they may be covertly railing against moral perfectionism.
I love The Talented Mr. Ripley and enjoyed the other Ripley novels. I don’t like Ripley . I don’t need to. I don’t like Patricia Highsmith. I enjoy her novels.
I simply could not enjoy a novel that spends so much time in the head of a character I did not like at some level. I think I have very different moral standards for fictional characters than real people, and that may make me unusual. To me, the best fiction approaches a kind of amorality, and Highsmith is certainly an expert at that.
Whether I like a character has relatively little to do with whether I find that character of interest.