Character as Linguistic Sign

Author(s): Harold Fisch

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 21, No. 3, New Historicisms, New Histories, and Others
(Spring, 1990), pp. 593-606
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/469129 .
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 Character as Linguistic Sign*
Harold Fisch

HARACTERin Greek signifies a mark or token made by a

writing or marking instrument. Only secondarily does it come
to signify the human personality, its psychological essence or
moral tendency. In this it is like type-formed from another Greek
word meaning to write or incise. Characters, we may say, are types.
The original nature of the term remains when we speak of "char-
acters" in the sense of alphabetical signs or hieroglyphs, as in John
Wilkins's Essay Towards a Real Character (1668).' In such usage we
return to the notion of "character" as something belonging essentially
to 6criture, to a linguistic ordering of reality. As a matter of fact,
character as verbal sign remains with us in spite of the term having
been applied to psychology or moral behavior, as in discussions of
Shakespeare's characters by Hazlitt or A. C. Bradley.
To take but one example of this, we could consider the use of
the term in Measure for Measure. This play is centrally concerned
with determining what sort of a man Angelo is. It is Angelo's own
question: "What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo?"2 The test
arranged by the Duke at the beginning of the play when he appoints
Angelo as his deputy seems to be aimed at answering Angelo's
question. The term "character" becomes important. In his first words
to Angelo, the Duke pointedly speaks of "a kind of character in
thy life / That to th' observer doth thy history / Fully unfold" (1.1.27-
29): here he is talking about reading the inwardness of Angelo
through outward signs. But this proves no easy task either, for the
Duke or for Angelo himself: the "character" of Angelo in this sense
remains a puzzle to the end. Elsewhere the term is used without
the psychological referent. We hear in the next scene of character
as a mere outward sign or mark when Claudio admits that his
relations with Juliet have resulted in her pregnancy: "The stealth
of our most mutual entertainment / With character too gross is writ

*Based on a paper presented at a Conference on "Person and Persona" held by the

Lechter Institute for Literary Research at Bar-Ilan University in December 1986 to
mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Luigi Pirandello.
594 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

on Juliet" (1.2.143-44). The getting with child as the inscription or

stamping of a sign is a notion echoed a little later on in the second
interview between Angelo and Isabella when Angelo, speaking of
love outside of marriage and the consequent begetting of illegitimate
offspring, condemns "Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven's
image / In stamps that are forbid" (2.4.45-46). Coining is probably
the best example of the marking of a sign by means of a metal
instrument in the original Greek sense of "character," and this is
already the force of the first occurrence of the coining image in
the play. Angelo, responding to the Duke's initial appointment of
him as deputy, had asked

Let there be some more test made of my metal,

Before so noble and so great a figure
Be stamp'd upon it.
(1.1.48-50)

Here Angelo is asking that before a sign is stamped on him, the

inner quality of his "metal" should be determined.
The punning of "metal / mettle" in this passage, as several times
in Julius Caesar, precisely articulates the dialectic of human softness
and the hardness of a metal object.3 From this point of view it
serves as a comment on Angelo, "a man whose blood / Is very snow-
broth" (1.4.57-58) and yet he is eventually forced to declare: "Blood,
thou art blood" (2.4.15). But the pun is more than a comment on
Angelo's character; it also illuminates the dilemma of the artist in
his attempted symbolization of character; one track points to "type,"
the other to something more like temperament or inward condition.
The problem is to find a correlation between the externality of
mere inscription and a reading of the "inner man." And this is a
most doubtful enterprise, as the whole play makes clear, for we
never really discover the "inner man" in Angelo. Is he angel or
devil? His name suggests the former but he is never sure whether
that sign is to be taken as the sign of itself or its opposite. "Let's
write good angel on the devil's horn," he sadly concludes at one
point (2.4.16). And here we are back again with the inscribing of
signs, with engraving or "typing" on hard objects. That, it seems,
is what character is. We write a sign -it could be the name "Angelo"-
but we may well find ourselves writing it on the devil's horn! There
is no assured relation between sign and inward condition, between
signifier and signified.
CHARACTER AS LINGUISTIC SIGN 595

Those who tend to think of characters in literature as having

reference to a human, three-dimensional reality will usually find
their examples in the novel. There, it may be thought, we have a
genuine mimesis-living people, so to speak, embodied in words.
Baruch Hochman has recently argued that until our own time and
the "dismantling" of character by postmodernist writers such as
Nabokov and Beckett, characters in fiction were often thought of
as having "the coherence of identity and intention that we expect
in real life."4 Readers and critics who felt this way, he argues, could
not be entirely wrong. Now it is true that nineteenth-century critics
found rounded, "real-life" characters in novels and in Shakespeare's
plays also. But we could push the question back to an earlier stage:
Did readers and critics feel this way also before the onset of nine-
teenth-century postromantic individualism? It is worth glancing, for
instance, at the Theophrastan character sketch as imitated by Hall,
Earle, Overbury, and others in the early seventeenth century. This
is one of the recognized sources of characterization as the early
English novelists were to practice it. And yet such character sketches
are extraordinarily schematic, an anticipation almost of the Saus-
surian concept of the linguistic sign as the product of a system of
differences.
Joseph Hall's Characterismsof Virtues and Vices (1608)--the first
formal Characters in English-are built on the principle of antithesis.
"Of an Honest man" begins with the words: "He looks not what
he might doe, but what he should" and ends with a witty aphorism:
"And if there were no heaven, yet he would be vertuous." "Of the
Faithfull man" begins with a series of sharp negations: "His eyes
have no other objects but absent and invisible; which they see so
clearly, as that to them sense is blind: that which is present they
see not; if I may not rather say, that what is past or future, is
present to them."5 The faithful man is thus defined by a dialectic
of presence and absence: the absence of the present, the presence
of the absent. Such contrarieties are to be found not only as forming
the interior lines of these individual character studies; they also
constitute the mode of interaction between characters. Hall sets up
his sketches in parallel groups where the positive characters are in
a deep sense defined by their opposites. Thus his Virtues are balanced
by his Vices, his sketch of the honest man by that of the hypocrite,
and vice versa. Hall explains in his Proem prefixed to the Vices
how this procedure illuminates the two divided sets of signs. "By
how much more they [that is, the Virtues] please, so much more
odious and like themselves shall these deformities appeare. This
light contraries give to each other in the midst of their enmity"
596 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

(167). It is a telling definition. We are guided in sketching characters

by a light which contraries give to each other in the midst of their
enmity. From this point of view, the prototypical character is that
of the Hypocrite: he is antithesis writ large. "An Angell abroad, a
Devill at home; and worse when an Angell, than when a Devill"-
says Hall in his "Character of the Hypocrite" (170). We are back
with Angelo's self-definition. To characterize the hypocrite, we write
good angel on the devil's horn. The writer is here not so much
recording the human scene as he is seeking to give order and
distinctiveness to that scene through language and thus make it
available to our understanding. From this point of view it could
perhaps be argued that there is no essential difference between the
way we perceive people in life and the way we perceive them in
books. Language is involved in both cases: we not only "know"
people in the directness and immediacy of interhuman relations,
we also tend to classify them according to a system of signs.6 Hall
and his followers provided their generation (both writers and ob-
servers) with what we may term semiological handbooks--guides to
the grammar of characterization. If they portray people as "types"
or even stereotypes, using simple antithetical strokes, it is because
at one level that is the way we need to perceive and order reality.
Character studies formalized in this way give us a kind of langue,
with the concreteness, the adventitiousness of parole almost totally
absent.
All this explains why the hypocrite is such a favorite with these
early writers. He is essentially not what he seems-thus he is si-
multaneously black and white. John Earle has a portrait of "A Shee
Precise Hypocrite": "She is so taken up with Faith, shee has no
room for Charity, and understands no good Workes, but what are
wrought on the Sampler."'7Puritan hypocrites were often referred
to under this term "precise" or "precisian"; Angelo too we are told
"is precise" (1.3.50). It would seem to be a term denoting not only
that which is defined but the mode of definition itself, consisting
as it does of precise distinctions between inner and outer, public
and private, being and seeming. Angelo's self-knowledge is appro-
priately enough shaped by such disjunctive logic: "Alack, when once
our grace we have forgot, / Nothing goes right; we would, and we
would not" (4.4.31-32).8 The novelists later on show themselves
equally attracted by this character and for the same reasons. There
are a great variety of hypocrites in Fielding; in Dickens we have
Pecksniff and Mr. Chadband; in George Eliot's Middlemarchwe have
the memorable figure of Mr. Bulstrode. And there is a whole gallery
of hypocrites in the theater of Ibsen. It may be argued that in such
portraiture we have a system of linguistic signs rather than the more
CHARACTER AS LINGUISTIC SIGN 597

complex, untidy world of living men and women where clear and
precise hypocrites are not so easily to be found. But literature cannot
get along without such distinctions any more than it can get along
without words. We are naturally left with the feeling that there is
always some human essence, some supplement, not covered by these
clear-cut distinctions. Measure for Measure, it could be argued, is a
play much concerned with the dialectic of the supplement; it reflects
both the need for clarity of outline and the uneasy questioning to
which this clarity gives rise.
Another example of a binary ordering of the human scene is
provided by the archetypal rendering of the Jew in a hundred
novels and plays from The Merchant of Veniceto Ivanhoe and Marjorie
Morningstar. The dark Jewish Father has to be matched by the fair
Jewish Daughter.9 By a similar compulsion Dickens found it necessary
to balance the incredibly bad Fagin with the portrait of the incredibly
good Mr. Riah in Our Mutual Friend. In that case the reader had
to wait almost thirty years for the other shoe to drop. Both portraits
are of course stereotypes, but one would want to argue that all
literary characterization partakes of the nature of stereotype-a
situation which, whilst it is deeply satisfying in some ways, also
naturally gives rise to some uneasiness in readers and writers who
might feel that it does not do justice to the ontological wonder and
depth of our conscious existence, what Heidegger calls Dasein. With
regard to the portrait of Jews, such uneasiness can be shifted onto
the Jew himself, who, being what he is, is somehow made responsible
for this shortcoming.
Thus antithesis remains in literature if not in life. The artist
cannot readily cede the binary principle. Pope's epistle "Of the
Characters of Women" opens with a rousing antifeminist motto
which utilizes the by-now hackneyed image of the marking or
engraving instrument:

Nothing so true as what you once let fall,

'Most Women have no Charactersat all.'
Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear,
And best distinguish'd by black, brown, or fair.10

But as the poem proceeds it becomes clear that Pope's real point
is not the absence of character in women but the binary opposition
between the male and female characters which enables him to put
them neatly into opposite boxes. This is a strategy practically dictated
by the form of the heroic couplet with its built-in parison and
antithesis:
598 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

But grant, in Public Men sometimes are shown,

A Woman'sseen in Private life alone:
Our bolder Talents in full light display'd;
Your Virtues open fairest in the shade.
(11.119-22)

Pope certainly knew men of retiring habits and women who loved
the limelight, but to have introduced such confusion into his poem
would have spoiled the admirable balance of his witty distichs. Art
doesn't have to be that faithful to nature.
But to turn again to the genre of the novel, one might have
expected that this freer mode, unburdened (or unsupported) by
distichs, would prove more capable of rendering the waywardness
of the human scene. Nevertheless, characters in Joseph Andrews, the
book which Fielding thought of as inaugurating the new genre of
the novel, are often, as Wolfgang Iser has remarked, conceived in
terms of "conflicting schemata."" Trulliber and Adams are neatly
opposed and could be placed in boxes labeled Nature and Culture
or Faith and Works. In Tom Jones the same binary principle is at
work in the happy black-and-white contrast of Tom Jones and Master
Blifil. It is only through the contrastive light that they shine on one
another (as Hall would have said) that we "get to know" them both.
If Blifil is another hypocrite, fair on the outside and corrupt within,
then Tom is his antitype, a picaro on the outside and a pearl within.
The novel is constructed throughout in such a checkerboard pattern.
Thwackum and Square make up another balancing pair and so do
Squire Allworthy and his sister. It would seem that all these figures
have their existence only within a grammatical design. Similarly,
what Jane Austen first seized on in portraying Marianne and Elinor
Dashwood was evidently not their human essence--whatever that
may mean-but the contrast of Sense and Sensibility-two signs
differentiated by a neat phonemic divergence. Only later, it would
seem, did she flesh out these signs into what we may term "human"
figures. The strength of her narrative art is very much bound up
with the precision and neatness of such typing.12 Naturally, there
is subtlety in the subsequent exchange of roles between Marianne
and Elinor as each learns the quality personified by her sister, but
this very interchange owes its charm and interest to the firmness
of the structural distinction that we are discussing.
As may be imagined, the awareness of this distance between sign
and fact, in spite of the felt need to bring them together, did not
escape the writers themselves. Sterne's theory of "hobbyhorses" in
TristramShandyis the reduction to absurdity of the notion of character
CHARACTER AS LINGUISTIC SIGN 599

as a mode of description capable of truly defining and representing

human persons. Thus Uncle Toby's "being"is absurdlyconcentrated
in his single obsession with the details of the siege of Namur. Poking
gentle fun at the reader who naturally expects a more rounded
portrait,Tristram announces, "I will draw my uncle Toby's character
from his Hobby-Horse."'"The reader, he says, "must be out of all
patience for my uncle Toby's character"but he adds that "there is
no instrument so fit to draw such a thing with" as the hobby-horse
(66). We are back here with the image of a marking or writing
instrument. The hobbyhorse is identified as a literary or linguistic
tool, a mode of identifying by means of a sign. It has, in short, a
semiotic rather than a psychological function. Walter Shandy's par-
ticular hobbyhorse belongs even more obviously to the realm of
semiotics. He comically reduces the foundation of character to the
name itself. This obsession has been properly related to Lockean
associationismwhich Sterne is here satirizing, but it is just as clearly
directed at readers and authors who had assumed that figures in
novels had a kind of human substance and autonomy and that
names were an adventitiousappendage to such substantialhumanity.
Sterne comically reverses this way of thinking. What comes first is
names; it is they that determine character. More than that, names
are permanent, ineffaceable; character, on the other hand, in the
sense of the inward contents of the personality, is secondary and
changeable. Father Shandy held that "When once a vile name was
wrongfully or injudiciously given, 'twas not like the case of a man's
character, which, when wronged, might hereafter be cleared .
be, somehow or other, set to rights with the world" (50). The injury
done by a name could not be undone, he held. It stamped one (to
use Angelo's word) for life.
A direct line links Sterne to Dickens. As Sterne's characters are
defined by their hobbyhorses, so Dickens's figures are defined by
a phrase or gesture. "Mr.and Mrs. Veneering were bran-new people
in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London."'4This is
the art of caricature:it does not signify what is already in the world;
rather it imposes a mark on the world, and that mark is henceforward
going to be indelible. When the caricature artist has picked the sign
of the figure he is drawing-a furled umbrella, a beaked nose, a
twitch of the mouth-we henceforward see that person as we had
not seen him before. The world does not yield these signs, it is
rather the signs which come to designate and define the world.
Humphry House correctly notes that the memory of people he had
met was not essential to Dickens's characterization. "Instead of
speaking about real people as if they were fictions, he spoke about
600 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

his fictions as if they were real people."'5 Having read Dickens, we

move about the world discovering characters from Dickens wherever
we turn. We find a Mrs. Jellyby, a Mr. Podsnap, a Wemmick. Those
who have not read Dickens do not find such figures. As a conse-
quence, they lack one particular language-and a rich one at that-
for signifying and marking the human scene.

Sterne's novel is a tour de force. He reduces the notion of character

in the round to the absurd particularity of the hobbyhorse; he thus
draws Uncle Toby with one stroke. But he does not express a basic
skepticism about the possibility of a more "normal" characterization
whereby fiction would give us figures having the solidity of human
beings in their habit as they live. Whilst making fun of such intentions
on the part of authors and such expectations on the part of readers,
he leaves the realistic mode intact for those who wish to pursue it.
And in fact it will flourish abundantly in the following century in
Tolstoy, Thackeray, Dostoevsky, and so many others. However, as
we approach the modern age, we encounter a more radical and
less playful skepticism. There is now less confidence in the possibility
of a secure relation between fictional characters and living persons,
and less confidence also in our capacity to "read" the signs correctly
in either realm.
In his important essay on "Hawthorne's Modernity" Frank Ker-
mode some years ago pointed to Hawthorne as a liminal figure
moving from a mode of invention based on invariant "types" towards
a view of "type" as essentially shifting and unstable.16 Holgrave in
The House of the Seven Gables is, as his name implies, a kind of
engraver. In fact he is a daguerrotype artist-he works in fixed
impressions, inheriting the old stereotypes of the Puritan period
which were felt to be authorized images by which human beings
could be understood and judged. But the narrator tells us that he
also unsettles everything "by a lack of reverence for what was fixed."'7
In this, according to Kermode, he symbolizes a new law involving
"palpable changes in society, history, in art [which have] made all
typologies problematical" (436). The Scarlet Letter (another engraved
or at least embroidered "character") starts out by being a clear and
unambiguous sign for Hester's sinfulness; the Letter, embroidered
on Hester's outer garment and later imprinted on Dimmesdale's
flesh, ends up by being a type "variously engraved and susceptible
to multiple interpretations" (437). The reader is left to interpret it
for himself in light of the unfolding history of his own times. For
the signs formerly imposed on the human scene no longer possess
the neatness and permanence they once had. There is as a result
CHARACTER AS LINGUISTIC SIGN 601

less confidence in the stable identity of those human forms of

personality which seemingly inhabit the world. They too have become
little more than wandering signifiers. Foucault sees our century as
one in which "man has 'come to an end.' " And this has happened
because we now realize that all we have is language, the sign. "Things
attain to existence," he says, "in so far as they are able to form the
elements of a signifying system."'8 There is, according to this view,
no way to get behind, beyond, or above language. There are no
identities, only signs suspended in a void. And if that is so, Angelo's
question, "What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo?" will remain
unanswered.

Pirandello was probably the first writer to articulate such a radical

skepticism. In his play of 1917, Costi , (se vi pare) (It Is So, [If You
Think So]), we seem at first to be involved with a case of mistaken
identity, as in some traditional plot. But it soon becomes apparent
that the real question is whether we can speak of identities at all.
Significantly, Pirandello knew and admired TristramShandyand refers
to Sterne approvingly several times in his early essay on humor.19
The central situation of Cost e, (se vi pare) concerns the arrival in
a small provincial town of one Signor Ponza with his wife and his
mother-in-law, Signora Frola. They have come from a nearby village
which has suffered an earthquake and widespread loss of life, so
no inquiries are possible about the new arrivals and their background.
The central issue is the identity of Ponza's wife. Who is she?
According to Signora Frola, she is her daughter, Lena; according
to Ponza himself, Lena is dead and the lady is his second wife,
Julia. He is keeping up the pretense that she is Lena to humor
Signora Frola who is insane. In Signora Frola's version she herself
is maintaining the pretense that the younger woman is Julia so as
to humor Signor Ponza. It is he who is insane. Ponza's wife is thus
a "character" acting in a play, though we cannot tell whether it is
Ponza's play or that of Signora Frola, just as we cannot tell which
of the two is insane. From this point of view we are more than
halfway to Six Charactersin Search of an Author (1921).
At the climax of the play, the townspeople in their desperate
desire to get behind the pretense and uncertainty to the human
foundations themselves, arrange for Signora Ponza herself to appear
before them and declare her identity. She appears veiled and dressed
in black: Signora Frola greets her passionately as Lena whilst Ponza
greets her equally passionately as Julia. She is both and neither,
nor will the lady herself agree to determine the question either way.
The "truth" can never be established: "The truth is simply this. I
602 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

am the daughter of Signora Frola, and I am the second wife of

Signor Ponza. Yes, and-for myself, I am nobody, I am nobody.""2
We are left with the radical impossibility of linking "character" to
"identity," personnage to personne, of establishing the reality behind
the appearances created by words. This is the position taken by
Laudisi, the amused onlooker who evidently functions as a persona
for the artist in this play. Speaking of Frola and Signor Ponza he
says "She has created for him, or he for her, a world of fancy which
has all the earmarks of reality itself. And in this fictitious reality
they get along perfectly well" (267). "What can we really know about
other people," comments Laudisi in another key passage, "who they
are-what they are-what they are doing, and why they are doing
it?" (252). The implied answer is that we can never know. The same
applies to ourselves. Looking at himself in the glass, Laudisi wonders
what he is for other people: "What are you in their eyes? An image,
my dear sir, just an image in the glass!"
Similar conclusions are sometimes reached by philosophers and
psychologists. Erving Goffman sees social interaction in daily life
from a "dramaturgical perspective" not essentially different from
the theater of Pirandello.21 Groups in society divide themselves into
performers and audiences, the latter responding to the acting codes
adopted by the former, whether they be doctors, salesmen, or
university professors. There is collusion between players "who ac-
knowledge to one another that the show of candour they maintain
is . . . merely a show" (156). On this universal stage, everyone is
masked; on the rare occasions when the mask falls "the individual
who performs the character will be seen for what he largely is, a
solitary player involved in a harried concern for his production.
Behind many masks and many characters, each performer tends to
wear a single look, a naked unsocialized look" (207). We are reminded
of the terror of the citizens in Pirandello's play when they cannot
find an identity for Signora Ponza and discover that things are not
what they seem to be.
This situation of the Ponzas and Signora Frola could thus be
regarded as a paradigm for the human situation. The "characters"
of other people that we draw in our minds or that they adopt for
our benefit are mere phantoms. As for themselves they are nothing.
"For myself, I am nobody" says Signora Ponza. This might almost
be a quotation from Sartre's L'Etreet le neant. We construct characters
for other people, we categorize them, attribute properties to them
such as anger, greed, amiability, placing them as objects in the
world.22 We also reflect upon our own selves, turning ourselves into
objects. But such reflection carries with it the shadow of negation,
CHARACTER AS LINGUISTIC SIGN 603

of nothingness; it has no relation to Being-in-itself, to the plenitude

of a subjective existence which cannot be known or described and
certainly cannot be rendered on the stage.
Skepticism it would seem can go no further. We might suppose
that there is nothing left but to confess the radical impossibility of
finding a true connection between persons and their representations.
They are like parallel lines which never meet. The theater of
Pirandello--both the play we have discussed and Six Charactersin
Search of an Author-would lend support to such a view. But if we
return to our primary model, namely, Measurefor Measure, it seems
that there may be grounds for a less unambiguous conclusion. The
play is full of masks and of unmasking. The Duke puts on a mask
to play his various roles; when he is unmasked in the final scene
we have a moment of shock and terror as the other characters are
revealed in the nakedness of their unsocialized existence. So far, it
would do as a well-nigh perfect illustration of Goffman's thesis.
Likewise, Angelo, the most obviously masked character on the stage,
is a hypocrite in the original Greek sense of that word, that is,
"actor." His unmasking by the Duke is the most dramatic, indeed
melodramatic moment in the play. It leaves him without a part to
play: he is, so to speak, annihilated. And what he discovers is
"shame"-in the precise Sartrean sense of "la honte," which is defined
as "finally being what I am for the Other"23--and what he desires
appropriately enough is death:

No longer session hold upon my shame,

But let my trial be mine own confession.
Immediate sentence, then, and sequent death
Is all the grace I beg.
(5.1.369-72)

But there is one unmasking in the play which seems to reverse

this movement. It is that of Mariana. Mariana appears in the fifth
act heavily veiled. The moment is closely analogous to Signora
Ponza's appearance in Pirandello's play but it is also in a deep sense
its opposite. Mariana has earlier on "supplied" Angelo in the garden-
house in the imagined person of Isabella. Like everyone else in the
play she has been playing a part--the bedtrick being what we might
term "the primal disguise"-and she is still disguised in Act 5. But
the point is now that no one can find a part to fit her. Far from
the mask indicating a persona, it has become a sign of anonymity.
The veil here has come to signify the end of role playing. The
dialogue, omitting the joking commentary of Lucio, points us for
604 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

the first time in the play towards a true knowledge of persons,

intimating the possibility of an identity freed from role playing. It
merits careful attention:

Mariana. Pardon, my lord; I will not show my face

Until my husband bid me.
Duke. What, are you married?
Mariana. No, my lord.
Duke. Are you a maid?
Mariana. No, my lord.
Duke. A widow, then?
Mariana. Neither, my lord.
Duke. Why, you are nothing, then: neither maid, widow, nor wife!..
Mariana. My lord, I do confess I ne'er was married;
And I confess besides, I am no maid:
I have known my husband; yet my husband
Knows not that ever he knew me.
(5.1.171-88)

In her disguise she is nothing (Signora Ponza's word also); she is

neither wife, maid, nor widow. But we have a knowledge of her
which pierces that disguise, and she has a knowledge of Angelo
which will dispel all the confusions of a mistaken identity. When
the moment comes, she can replace these confusions for him with
a true knowledge of her, of himself, and of his place in the world.
Authenticity will come with the removal of the mask and not before:

Duke. ... You say your husband.

Mariana. Why just, my lord, and that is Angelo,
Who thinks he knows that he ne'er knew my body
But knows, he thinks, that he knows Isabel's.
Angelo. This is a strange abuse. Let's see thy face.
Mariana. [unveiling] My husband bids me; now I will unmask.
(5.1.200-5)

Mariana identifies Angelo by naming him. In so doing she provides

the nearest answer the play has to offer to Angelo's question: "What
dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo?" It is notable that she offers
no comments about his "character." Neither here nor elsewhere
does she help to solve that puzzle. The knowledge of her husband
of which she here speaks (carnal knowledge, according to Lucio) is
the direct and immediate knowledge of Angelo as person. It cannot
be summed up by qualities or rendered as a pen portrait. In fact
CHARACTER AS LINGUISTIC SIGN 605

art and literature can only point to such knowledge wordlessly, or

indirectly through the act of naming-as when Mariana here names
Angelo, or Juliet first names Romeo.
Here, it may be argued, we are in the region of dialogue in the
sense in which that term is understood in the philosophy of Martin
Buber. According to Buber, the encounter between the I and the
Thou is the fundamental event which constitutes our own existence
and that of the other. But there is no judgment of the other in
such an encounter.24 For us to sum up, judge, define, describe, it
is necessary to situate ourselves in the I / It relation. But of course
that does not give us the immediate knowledge of the other, the
directness of relation. There is no encounter, no unveiling of the
self in the presence of the other, as when Mariana unveils herself
to Angelo. Characterization as an activity of critics or as a system
of signs in fiction or drama, belongs inevitably to the region of I /
It and one might conclude that as such it is doomed to inauthenticity.
But the greatest art, whilst it cannot afford us the direct, transforming
knowledge of the Thou, can point eloquently to the very absence
of such knowledge, thus signifying even that which resists signifi-
cation. The reader, thus confronted, is like Angelo himself "who
thinks he knows that he ne'er knew my body." But of course he
knows it all the time.

BAR-ILAN UNIVERSITY

NOTES

1 See John Wilkins, Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language
(1668; rpt. Menston, Yorks., 1968).
2 William Shakespeare, Measurefor Measure, ed. J. W. Lever, The Arden Shakespeare
(London, 1965), 2.2.173; hereafter cited in text.
3 See Harold Fisch, "Julius Caesar and the Bleeding Statue," Appendix to his Hamlet
and the Word (New York, 1971), pp. 224-30.
4 Baruch Hochman, Characterin Literature (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), p. 29.
5 Joseph Hall, The Worksof Joseph Hall (London, 1634), p. 156; hereafter cited in
text.
6 Hochman too acknowledges "the potentially schematic nature of character, in life
as well as in literature"--thus somewhat weakening the case for naturalistic char-
acterization (Characterin Literature, pp. 46-47, 90-93).
7 John Earle, Micro-cosmographie,ed. Alfred S. West (1628; rpt. Cambridge, 1920),
p. 49.
8 See Harold Fisch, "Shakespeare and the Puritan Dynamic," ShakespeareSurvey,
27 (1974), 84-86.
9 See Edgar Rosenberg, From Shylockto Svengali (London, 1961), ch. 4 passim.
10 Alexander Pope, "Of the Characters of Women," in The Worksof Alexander Pope
Esq. (London, 1770), III, 249; 11. 1-4; hereafter cited in text by line.
606 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

11 Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore, 1974), p. 41.

12 See Martin Price, Forms of Life (New Haven, 1983), p. 65.
13 Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1760-1767; rpt. New York, 1962), pp. 66;
hereafter cited in text.
14 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth, 1971),
p. 48.
15 Humphry House, The Dickens World (London, 1942), p. 12.
16 Frank Kermode, "Hawthorne's Modernity," Partisan Review, 41 (1974), 428-41;
hereafter cited in text.
17 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (New York, 1981), p. 157.
18 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York, 1973), pp. 383, 382.
19 See Luigi Pirandello, L'umorismo:Saggio (Lanciano, 1908), pp. 37, 43, 135, 155-
57.
20 Luigi Pirandello, It Is So (If You Think So), tr. Arthur Livingston, in Introduction
to Literature:Plays, ed. Lynn Altenbernd and L. L. Lewis (New York, 1963), p. 287;
hereafter cited in text.
21 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in EverydayLife (London, 1969), p. ix;
hereafter cited in text.
22 Jean-Paul Sartre, L'tre et le neant (Paris, 1943), p. 352.
23 Sartre, p. 326: "la honte-sentiment d'etre enfin ce que je suis, mais ailleurs,
l'-bas pour autrui"; cf. p. 349: "la honte . . . d'etre un objet, c'est a dire de me
reconnaitre dans cet &tre d6grad6, dependant et fig6 que je suis pour autrui."
24 See Martin Buber, I And Thou, tr. Ronald Gregor Smith (Edinburgh, 1959):
"This human being is not He or She, bounded from every other He or She, a specific
point in space and time within the net of the world; nor is he a nature able to be
experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. But with no neighbour
and whole in himself, he is Thou and fills the heavens" (p. 8); "In face of the
directness of the relation everything indirect becomes irrelevant" (p. 12).