Rethinking Character beyond “Writing Back”

Sugathan, Leenu; Sugathan, Leenu

The bourgeois liberal understanding of character as a unified self has long been a celebrated figure in Western literary realism. Bildungsroman with its well-rounded, psychologically fraught protagonists and their progressive self-formation offers the quintessential manifestation of this tendency. While the reception of this paradigmatic figure by Western readers had initially been uneven (Moretti, The Atlas of European novel 1800-1900, 1997), the appeal of individualism, autonomy, socio-economic mobility embodied by this figure was confirmed by formal realism’s increasingly powerful hold on the Western reading public during the nineteenth century (Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, 1970). However, as Meenakshi Mukherji’s Realism and Reality (1985) and Priya Joshi’s In Another Country (2002) demonstrate, the same cannot be said with reference to such non-Western locales as India. The reading culture of colonial India instead affirms the failure of formal realism – and by extension, its glorified protagonist, the bourgeois individual – to gain traction among its non-Western readers at the colonial periphery who felt more drawn to the comparatively familiar anti-realist (e.g., fantastical, romantic, melodramatic) literary modes.

However, when we consider the question of reception by shifting our attention to the author’s craft, such claims about the fundamental difference between Western and non-Western reception of character cannot easily be sustained. The goal of this panel is to provide a forum to engage with non-Western texts where the craft of characterization is not shaped by the singular drive to “write back” to the Western paradigms. The prospective panelists – with their respective focus on Iranian memoir, Korean proletarian literature, and Indian graphic narrative – demonstrate this by showing how these texts deal with the unified self not through rejection, but through its aesthetic and political repurposing. Refusing to position non-Western traditions as diametrically opposed to Western protocols of characterization, the panelists also demonstrate how the Iranian, Korean, and Indian literary texts they engage with reaffirm and reconsider the formal hierarchy between round and flat characters, which has historically shaped the craft of characterization in Western realism.

Owlia will begin this discussion by scrutinizing characterization in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003) and Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran (2005). The characters in these memoirs, as Owlia will help us see, bear testament to how the persistence of flat/round character hierarchy continues to shape the depiction of both the full-fledged, autonomous, agentic self and its static, one-dimensional counterpart in the Iranian context. Analyzing this formative impact, Owlia will also draw our attention to its ideological function, highlighting how in the Iranian context the dominant protocols of characterization are repurposed to perpetuate certain racial stereotypes – for instance, the portrayal of indigenous Iranian men as brutal and aggressive, Iranian women as passive and submissive, and Westernized, cosmopolitan, and irreligious Iranians as agentic and self-possessed.

While Hannah Kwak and Anu Sugathan do not foreground the flat/round hierarchy, they will complement Owlia’s ideological criticism of the prevalent Western characterization norms by drawing our attention to the aesthetic remodeling of the unified self, thus expanding the scope of this panel. Kwak’s discussion will concentrate on the literary works of Ch’oe Sŏ-hae which, inspired by the changing Korean mediascape, replaces the widespread interest in inwardness and depth with a growing fascination for projected images. What results in the process, as Kwak will elaborate, is a rethinking of the unified self – its interiority supplanted by the representation of the mind as a cinema-like projection on a surface. Delving into the unique affordances of the graphic novel form, specifically Sarnath Banerjee’s Corridor, Sugathan will showcase how the interiorized, psychologically complex protagonist is repurposed by the disjointed urbanscape of a postcolonial city. Her discussion will revolve around a fragmented constellation of motley characters that come into being in the process, their quests unfolding not as arcs of self-realization but as disjointed, often absurd searches for belonging, desire, or meaning in a chaotic cityscape.

As respondents to the panelists’ rethinking of character in non-Western contexts, we will foreground in conclusion the panel’s distance from the postcolonial emphasis on non-Western exceptionalism. However, this distancing is not analogous to a triumphalist account of literary transnationalism. Rather, in a telling deviation from such contemporary projects of de-exceptionalizing American/European literary cultures (Di Leo 2017; Cuddy-Keane 2003), the panel helps us see the space of global literary realism from a non-Western vantage point, emphasizing how the commonalities it produces bear the traces of underlying unevenness.

623 Rethinking Character beyond “Writing Back”: Calls for Papers