by L Rust Hills
The regulars in the classic TV series never change. They are the fixed characters. The doctors, sheriffs, private detectives, and police chiefs, who are the central figures of these programs, always remain the same. If they are shown falling in love, you know the girl's got to be done away with; no matter how tight the spot they're in, you know they'll get out. Even a child knows this: the regulars can't marry, can't die, can't really have anything happen to them.
But the guest stars always change. They are unconvincingly presented as moving characters. You can analyze the guest star's characterization as it is first presented and be absolutely certain that when the program is over he will be diametrically opposite to the way he comes on. If he comes on polite, he'll be shown as selfish before the hour's up; if he comes on angry, you know that at the end he'll be shown as really loving.
Another trouble is with the source of the action. In a series drama, for the most part, the regulars are expected, especially the principal, to do something to resolve the situation. It's the regular who must resolve the action that leads to the alteration of the visitor. It is up to the regular to bring the guest star to his senses, to reconcile father and daughter, to make happen whatever it is that has to happen. This is all backwards, for the essence of meaningful plotting is that a character will be affected by action he himself takes or doesn't take—otherwise the significance of what happens to him as a result of the action is very much minimized.
The interesting thing is that the same backwards conceptions were the basis of the old magazine-series fiction, the "slick" fiction, that was just as popular a generation ago as the TV series dramas are now. In The Saturday Evening Post or in Collier's, in the old days, there was a series regular—Tugboat Annie or Scattergood Baines or Mr. Glencannon or whoever—who remained exactly the same from story to story but whose actions effected a change (always, of course, for the better) in the life of a guest character who appeared in the story and then disappeared. Philip Wylie's characters, Crunch and Des, for instance, ran a sport fishing boat in Florida. A rich man (the guest star) would charter the boat, but he'd be having trouble with his daughter who wanted to marry a poor law student (someone basically okay like that). Crunch and Des would straighten it all out. The formula was exactly the same.
Now obviously we can't expect the regulars to change: there are all sorts of commercial reasons for this pattern of action in TV dramas. If there's to be movement at all, the movement has got to come from the guest stars. But this is all backwards, because even though we only see the same aspects of the regular characters week after week, we've come to have at least some idea of what their character is—we know them in at least somewhat more depth than we know the guest stars. And it is depth of characterization that is at the heart of creating characters capable of movement.
Types of Character
Fiction writers are always being warned to be on guard against "typing" their characters, for it is individualization that is thought to be at the heart of successful characterization. And so it is. But economy is necessary in creating characterization in a short story, and individualization from a type may be a substantial time-and-space saver over creation of a characterization from the ground up.
The search for the definitive types of human personality seems to have begun in prehistory and seems destined never to end. For it is a basic desire in human beings to categorize, to sort things out into their separate kinds so as to know them better. Such categorizing is basic to the study (scientific or otherwise) of everything—kinds of elements, kinds of birds and arrowheads—so, most naturally, kinds of men and women.
The oldest characterological theory of which there is any record is the Doctrine of the Humours—and from the writer's point of view it may be the most satisfactory theory of human psychology ever devised, for it associates the temperaments of Man with the four cosmic elements: air, earth, fire, and water. Air, for instance, which is warm and moist, was associated with the bodily fluid blood and a person with a prevalence of that was considered a "sanguine" type—that is, with a ruddy complexion, cheerful, of hopeful spirits. Water, cold and moist, was associated with phlegm and a prevalence of that made for a "phlegmatic" type—sluggish, apathetic, calm, composed. This is the origin of the term "humour characters"—not comic types, but characters dominated by a single trait.
Virtually all of the subsequent type theories have made use of the humour theory's underlying concept that body chemistry somehow affects personality, and of the commonly recognized connection between temperament and bodily type. There have been all sorts of theories having to do with physiognomy, musculature, bony structure, glandular imbalance, phrenology, and so. A famous typology is Sheldon's "endomorph, mesomorph, and ectomorph"—roughly (very roughly!) jolly fatties, jocks, and thin, nervous grinds—which referred to skin cell layers right there in the embryo where personality is being formed.
But while we recognize the types referred to, they don't seem to include all the people in the world. Nor does all mankind seem to be composed of "asthenic" (long and frail) types and "pyknic" (short and round) types, as someone named Kretschmer once maintained; nor of "The Mental Type," "The Volitional Type," and "The Vital Type," as a person named Bain maintained; nor of 801 types with different predominate "ruling passions," as a man called Fourier maintained; nor does the world seem even to be divided between those lonely, shy types who withdraw into themselves, the "introverts," and those "extroverts" who are so sociable and outgoing, as Carl Jung maintained.
The history of characterology has been a seesaw: human ingenuity has sorted human personality into countless intricate and plausible systems of types, only to have human skepticism demonstrate that the typing really doesn't check out. Studies show that if you establish a rating system from "most introverted" to "most extroverted" and scale a whole group—like, say, a collegeful of students—you would get a regular bell-shaped curve with most of the students grouped somewhere in the middle— not the bimodal curve (that is: two groups) that you'd have to get if the theory that there are two types of people in this world were correct.
Common sense seems to be on both sides of this argument. We all know or sense that there are "kinds" of people—people who are more one way than another. Yet we all know or sense, too, that no individual seems wholly "a type," and that there could never be a final listing of types that would include everybody. What we have to realize is that the only reason these various depictions of types seem so plausible, when first presented, is that they represent extremes of a kind of behavior that is familiar to us.
Types as Exceptions
Insofar, then, as a person in life or a character in a story resembles a pure type—a thoroughgoing, all-out extrovert type, for instance—he is not "typical" or usual or common at all; he is far out on the scale, far from the average or mode; he is the extreme; he is, in fact, the exception. Types, then, are really more exceptional than they are typical. And this profound-sounding paradox applies not just to a grading system like the extroversion-introversion scale, it applies to any manner or behavior that is usually thought "typical." The nice old movies, for instance, used to be fond of showing us a typical "boy from Brooklyn." But this kid wasn't really like the vast majority of Brooklyn boys, he was more so. He was all- Brooklyn: wisecracking, gum-chewing, nostalgic for Flatbush Avenue; he didn't just mispronounce some words the way some people do in Brooklyn some times, he always spoke all the words in a comical exaggeration of my mother's Brooklyn accent. Like all his fellow members in the so-called "representative platoon"—that familiar group in World War Two movies, comprising a typical Italian, a typical Negro, a typical sensitive intellectual (the author), a typical farm boy, a typical rich man's son, and so on—like all of them he wasn't typical at all. He was an exaggeration, a phony composite, an extension or an extreme, and ultimately an exception.
Let's distinguish what is actually average from what is supposedly typical. The average farm boy is far more like the average boy from Brook
lyn than the "typical" farm boy is like the "typical" boy from Brooklyn. The difference in their attitudes and accents will be far less great. Your average person on the extroversion-introversion scale will be very like your average farmer, your average Negro, your average intellectual. Average people are rather much alike. "Typical" people are all very different from one another.
Types, then—and this is especially true in writing—are used to distinguish or separate persons or characters, to emphasize differences, and not, as is commonly thought, used to lump them together with a lot of others. That types are familiar is certainly true—but that is because we have become used to writers and others exaggerating the same manners or attitudes or accents, not because there are so many people in the world who are actually like these extreme cases.
Type Characters, as against Stock Characters
It seems useful here to make a further distinction, this time between two kinds of characters in fiction. One I'll call the type character, and the other I'll call the stock character. For the most part, I believe, the terms are used interchangeably; but there is a distinction to be made, and the availability of the two words, stock and type, provides handy labels to make it with.
Let us say that a stock character is one that we have grown too familiar with, through having seen him over and over in films and in novels and stories and on TV, always performing the same role or function in the plot. His characterization is based on a cliché of plot. An example is "the other guy," the Ralph Bellamy role in a Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn movie, the medium-good guy who loses the heroine in the end and goes off with the second female lead, an equally stock character, the acidtongued friend of the heroine's. Another stock character is the old sheriff who's lost his nerve in a Western. Everyone can compile his own list of favorite stock characterizations, characters who have become familiar because of the way their personalities must be to fit their function in the plot.
A type character, on the other hand, is a character cliché rather than a plot cliché. He is what we have been speaking of: an extension or exaggeration of a commonlyheld quality or manner or accent. He is the extreme, the artificially thrown-together paste-up of qualities, attitudes, accents, and so forth that are thought to be "typical" of racial groups, national groups, regional groups, occupational groups, psychological groups, class groups, and so on. That is, the typical Jew, the typical Irishman, the typical hick, the typical cabdriver (wow!), the typical jock, the typical society snob, and so on. They are familiar characters, yes—and far from original. But they do represent something—the way some people in some groups do seem to act sometimes—that is known to us through our own observation, through our own experience in actual life, rather than through our continuous exposure to the cliché situations of film or fiction.
It would seem from this that while type characters might be useful in fiction, the creation of stock characters ought always to be avoided—because they lead the author into using stock situations and stock plots. Yet there's nothing that a fiction writer can't do, and, actually, stock characterizations seem to reflect a peculiar line of contemporary thinking.
What I refer to is indicated by a basic change of approach in modern psychology. It was always thought through the ages that personality determined behavior, that, in the words of the Greeks, "Character is fate." What you did and what happened to you came as a result of what you were. All the characterologies of previous psychologies reflected this, whether they hypothesized the determining effect of bodily chemistry or structures or parental love and toilet training or whatever. But the latest psychological approaches—both in theory and in therapy—tend to emphasize roles rather than types. The part we play in life becomes the destiny that defines us. Transactional psychology, for instance, with its emphasis on life's "games," suggests that people will repeatedly play "the victim" part, or "be" a Don Juan or a schlemiel.
In other words, now, instead of saying "Character is fate," we seem to feel that "Fate is character."
The Dichotomous Stereotype
Differentiating from a type doesn't mean just playing up some plausible-sounding, apparently contradictory aspect. Take, for instance, a couple of cliché-type figures like the courtly Southern gentleman and the tough Italian gangster. You put in an apparently surprising detail, such as the Southern gentleman carries a pistol, while the Italian gangster has a picture of his mother in his wallet. All that does is lead you into what I call the dichotomous stereotype.
The dichotomous stereotype is the natural result of what's involved in creating types in the first place. The trouble with typing people is double: first, it recognizes supposed qualities in a group and then assigns these qualities to an individual; second, it recognizes qualities in individuals and then assigns these qualities to the group. Down South people seem pretty polite to us, so we say, "That man is from the South, hence he is a courtly, courteous Southern gentleman." Or we meet a few of those courtly courteous Southern gentlemen, so we say, "Southern men are courteous gentlemen." Now we know that isn't true. The brutal, dirty-minded, red-necked sheriff of a small Southern town is a Southerner and he's not a courteous gentleman. So first we double the stereotype: "Southern men are either courtly gentlemen or brutal red-necks." This seems at first to have some validity in terms of a kind of socioeconomic schism in Southern life, but then it doesn't really account for all Southern men. Some at least seem to be in-between. This leads to the dichotomous stereotype. We assign both qualities, both extremes of group behavior, to the same individual. "Southern men are courtly gentlemen by day, but they ride with brutal KKK lynch mobs by night."
The Southern man—whether courtly gentleman, brutal red-neck, or both combined—is a regional stereotype. But the dichotomous stereotype can come out of any kind of typing. The second-generation Italian-American gangster has always been a nationality-group stereotype, the opposite of which is the warm-hearted boy who works hard, plays the violin, and loves his mother's spaghetti. Extremes— opposites —like this can be found within any grouping. Just put the mother's picture in the gangster's pocket and you think you've achieved some depth of characterization, but all you've got is flip-flop typing.
Does it make any sense? Are all gruff doctors really kindly underneath? Swedes, we know, are all stolid squareheads; we also know they're all free-loving nudists. Negroes are jolly, affectionate folk; but Blacks are sullen and mug you in the park. For every stereotype conception we have about a group, there is a directly opposite aspect that is almost equally familiar to us.
Do hard-boiled whores have hearts of gold? It does seem to stand to reason, somewhat at least, that it would be a kind of warm-hearted, soft-minded girl—someone who's generous and giving and finds everybody easy to love—that would get into that line of work. And that the tough, hard-boiled front she puts on is just a sort of shell that is necessary to protect her from being taken advantage of. Is there any truth to this worn old cliché of characterization? Or any of the others? There is always something both suspicious-sounding and yet somehow convincing about these dichotomous stereotypes.
It is easy to see why the dichotomous stereotype is so often found in melodrama, farce, and slick fiction. Containing its opposite within itself, so to speak, a dichotomous stereotype characterization comes all set up and ready for a character shift. The young Italian gangster can turn okay and save the day at the last minute because we know that he loves his mother and sister; the courtly Southern gentleman turns out to have a brutal side when he has one mint julep too many halfway through the story. With the reverse clichés about the type implicit in the original characterization, the character submits plausibly and easily—indeed, almost invites—a complete changeabout in role. Flip-flop. They are fixed characters with two sides and can be flipped like a coin to Side Good or Side Bad whenever necessary for purposes of the plotting.
Differentiating from Types
In a great deal of fiction, the main character is an "average" person while the secondary characters are
"typical" people—that is, "extravagants," people dominated by a single trait or motive to an extent that in life would seem unusual and excessive. It may be that types are a more useful conception for literature than psychology, for in fiction there are no picky bimodal nodes to contest their validity.
Types in literature anyway may really represent extensions of the authorial self—in that all the characterizations may be projections of "potentials" of the writer's own nature. Sitting there at your desk, you may have them all "in" you somehow: the typical Don Juan, the typical family man, the four types of the Russian character represented by the Karamazov boys, even Mr. Micawber with his flip-flop optimism and despair. Well, maybe you don't. But you do believe that each writer's own characters may be possibilities of his own self?
It doesn't matter how we think about "types" in life — whether as qualities thought to inhere in all men, or just one man, or in different sorts of groups, or as personifications of psychological or sociological insights, or whatever, no matter "what" they are or where they "came from"—types have always been demonstrably useful in literature. In differentiating a main character from a type, the problem is whittling the extravagant back toward the average, a process of individualization.
The validity of types seems to depend on the distance from which the character is seen. From sufficient distance almost everyone will seem to fall into a type — whether regional or occupational or whatever—perhaps into several types. Everyone knows his own differences, from the cradle on. But it takes a while to learn of the individuality of others. From a distance a trainful of commuters will all seem like "typical suburbanites"; but inside they know what a mixed bag they are. Even an advertising man senses his own uniqueness, however dimly, and sees differences among the others. From a distance, differences fade and similarities appear; from a close view, the similarities fade and the differences appear. The longer and better one knows another person, the more his uniqueness will be evident, the more individual his personality will seem.