character is dead, long live character

rachel cusk, starlings, the el*c*ion

a common starling. like a piece of sky!

I’ve been writing fiction. I have learned that it is easy to write bad fiction and very difficult to write good fiction, and it is worth slogging through the difficulty to write good fiction, because when it is good, it can feel like a gentle, careful, and nearly invisible friend who joins you on some long and unknown walk. But getting to that point is hard, and maybe even impossible for some.

I’ve found myself struggling to write character. The craft tricks I’ve encountered have made it feel like character is something inelastic, a caricature or a stereotype—what, for example, would a young girl from Queens find in her trash bin or in her dreams that wouldn’t be horribly reductive? I’ve found the whole business depressing, that a character is just a word cloud of data points which, if curated correctly, can describe a certain type of person, and that the fiction that I had found so deeply affecting could be gamed to bat around a couple of well-chosen stereotypes.

Then I read this 2018 interview with the novelist Rachel Cusk. In it, she says: “…character no longer exists.”

The interviewer presses: “What about the subtleties of character or the subtleties of self-expression, or different personal experience?”

And Cusk replies, “I’m seeing them as more oceanic and as things that you can enter and leave in certain phases of your life that aren’t completely determined by the fact that you’re Jane and this is your life. I’m trying to see experience in a more lateral sense rather than as in this form of character.” 

These few sentences dislodged the whole business of character for me. Character could be something that was revealed through interactions with distinct, parallel systems—other characters, nature, technology, the self. I found the statement so profound that I started applying the frame to everything.

Later that week, I was writing when I heard a crowd of birds in my yard whistling, popping, squeaking, and generally chattering so much that their whole conversation flooded my living room. I had to leave my work to go look out the window that faces into my yard.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of birds were perched in an old elm tree that sweeps across four other yards, their feathery, dark bodies and beaks struck against the pale afternoon sky. Here is the audio I recorded from the small crack of window I dared open:

My Merlin Bird ID app told me that they were European starlings, common and invasive birds, pests that were nonetheless beautiful if you caught them up close, their bodies striped and spotted like some hidden piece of sky. Starlings are intelligent and interesting, a companion of Mozart’s, muses of Shakespeare’s, able to mimic and memorize sounds like human voices and car alarms and construction drills, sounds that they later bring back to lovers, family, friends, enemies.

I kind of wanted to see a murmuration—the strange, black clouds that form when the birds fly together for protection or signal, their numbers at times in the tens of millions, creating elliptic curves and religious figures in the sky. There are theories why starlings create such organized and unusual shapes—one is that they orient their velocity and direction to the six closest members of their flock. This orientation evolves as they come in contact with new birds, and the eventual pattern is the murmuration.

The starlings remained in the tree for about 30 minutes, and in the echoes of their chatter, I found myself thinking about Cusk’s notion of character again. This idea that a person does not have a fixed identity, and that—like starlings—we are formed in relation to close others and the systems we interact with.

a starling murmuration, via Wikimedia Commons

Let me join the murmuration of voices—for a second, as a somewhat naive observer. The American election and its resolution. I was disappointed but unsurprised. Worried about and saddened for some friends. Many have analyzed why the Democrats lost. One point that is largely agreed upon: Old messages were used to bring people together, messages that are no longer as effective as they used to be. The internet has not only changed distribution—it has also changed how and why people believe, identify, and react to shape-shifting, changing information and its messengers.

Perhaps it is the internet’s fragmenting nature that has reminded us that character does not need to be as fixed as it used to be. Character is formed in relation to a handful of others and can be reformed as those influences change. Friends, strangers, offline, online, in-between when you’re half-paying attention to both worlds, the din of the crowd, stories from the media, and even conversations with LLMs, who, interestingly, are also unbounded by the rigid character descriptions of yore.

Earlier this year, Merve Emre interviewed Cusk. She asked about Cusk’s old statement—that character no longer exists.

“The character in the novel is the result of the writer having read a lot of other novels, and the reader believes the character because they’ve read a lot of novels, too,” Cusk responds. “And so you’re actually in some sort of barter system whose links to reality are pretty remote. I think seeing the world like that is much more related to society than to art. The novel takes itself off into a different category by relying on those stratagems.” 

I love Rachel Cusk, I will hear nothing against her. This is what I understood of her response, lifted from her life into mine: We assume people are stereotypes, not because we are seeing them as they are, but simply because we have read and engaged with endless reports of how they should be. We believe others are fixed. When, in reality, most people are partial, half-in, half-out, half-attentive, half-asleep, half-awake, moving in and out of different states at will and against their wishes, inhabiting character as experiences rather than as fixed things. The internet only makes this more possible and more stark. And maybe a proper way of understanding others is to accept that they will evolve, and are allowed to, and to meet them in those states.

I never did see a murmuration. The starlings eventually flew away, a few at a time, and my living room sounded, again, like rushing trees and police sirens and the bypass valves of the bus. And I got back to my fiction, hoping again to catch that glimmer of character, wherever it may rest.