{"id":146298,"date":"2020-07-22T15:10:51","date_gmt":"2020-07-22T19:10:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=146298"},"modified":"2020-07-22T15:10:51","modified_gmt":"2020-07-22T19:10:51","slug":"the-flatterer-and-the-chatterer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/07\/22\/the-flatterer-and-the-chatterer\/","title":{"rendered":"The Flatterer and the Chatterer"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Detail from lithograph by Matthias Rudolph Toma depicting Franz Xaver Messerschmidt\u2019s \u201ccharacter heads,\u201d 1839. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

The \u201cTheophrastan character\u201d is not often mentioned today, perhaps because it is so little known as a genre. Yet for centuries this was what \u201ccharacter\u201d meant in literature. A list of familiar social types compiled in the fourth century B.C.<\/small> that chronicled human traits and foibles\u2014from bore to boaster, cynic to coward\u2014influenced the development of later fiction and drama, and remains sharply pertinent in psychology, journalism, cartoon art, and popular culture.<\/p>\n

Theophrastan character sketches deliberately describe a recognizable model of behavior rather than a mocked or skewered individual. Dickens\u2019s ever-hopeful Mr. Micawber, clinging to the thought that \u201csomething will turn up,\u201d is a descendant of the Theophrastan character, as are Moli\u00e8re\u2019s miser and hypochondriac. Psychologists and psychoanalysts have created character types on what could be called the Theophrastan model, like the obsessive-compulsive, the hysteric, the impulsive man, and the paranoid (whom Theophrastus, lacking the resources of the DSM<\/em>, might have called \u201cThe Suspicious Man\u201d). The \u201cwhite working-class voter\u201d is a Theophrastan type, as is the equally hypothetical \u201csoccer mom,\u201d not to mention generational \u201ctypes\u201d like the baby boomer and the millennial. By the twenty-first century, the \u201ccharacter sketch\u201d (or \u201ccharacter portrait\u201d) had become the frequent province of editorial journalism, both print and electronic, as well as of social media and stand-up comedy. \u201cAny kid with a passionate interest in science was a wonk, a square, a dweeb, a doofus, or a geek,\u201d wrote the scientist Stephen Jay Gould, a self-confessed geek. (Within a year or two, however, this \u201cdepreciative\u201d term\u2014\u201can overly diligent, unsociable student,\u201d according to the Oxford English Dictionary<\/em>\u2014would morph into the glamorous style called \u201cgeek chic.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Why has this ancient mode survived so long? \u201cThe Characters <\/em>suggested an adaptable form and a set of basic techniques, according to which human types of any century or country could be depicted,\u201d observes J.\u2009W. Smeed. \u201cThe book seemed to offer an invitation to later writers to borrow the method and use it to describe their own contemporaries.\u201d He adds, \u201cI cannot think of a smaller book with a greater influence.\u201d <\/p>\n

A consideration of that influence, beyond the \u201ccharacter collections\u201d of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which were enormously popular in their own time but much less so today, will speak directly to the fascination with character that still dominates intellectual and public life.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Theophrastus (ca. 370\u2013285 B.C.<\/small>), born Tyrtamus, was a student and colleague of Aristotle, chosen by him as his successor to direct the Peripatetic school in Athens. His name, which translates to \u201cthe divine speaker,\u201d is an honorific said to have been given him by Aristotle in acknowledgment of his eloquence.<\/p>\n

Called by some \u201cthe father of botany,\u201d a topic on which he wrote two large and important early treatises, Theophrastus produced a wide range of scholarly work, very little of which has survived, in areas as diverse as physics, biology, law, ethics, rhetoric, mathematics, music, and poetics. He is best known today for the thirty fictional sketches that are known collectively as the Characters<\/em>, each of which illustrates a dominant attribute, or fault, or \u201cvice.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Jeffrey Rusten points out in his edition and translation of the Characters<\/em>, \u201cIf it were not firmly established, Theophrastus\u2019 title might better be rendered \u2018traits,\u2019\u2009\u201d since it is part of his conception that \u201cindividual good or bad traits of character may be isolated and studied separately\u201d\u2014a point also made by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics<\/em>. Aristotle himself had produced in that work a striking description of magnificence, or \u201cthe magnificent man,\u201d situated at the mean between stinginess and vulgarity, but the virtuous mean is not the substance with which Theophrastus will work in the Characters<\/em>. His thirty memorable \u201ccharacters\u201d are all extremes, whether deficient or excessive.<\/p>\n

Whether his goal in writing them was ethical, rhetorical, satiric, comic, or to enliven his classroom lectures\u2014scholars have suggested all of these, sometimes in combination\u2014the result was remarkable: his imitators and stylistic heirs included some of the most notable writers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, as well as a surprising number and variety of modern practitioners. The psychologist Gordon Allport quoted the whole of \u201cThe Penurious Man\u201d in his Pattern and Growth in Personality<\/em>, observing, \u201cThough written over two thousand years ago it is applicable to some of our acquaintances today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Theophrastus\u2019s most immediate literary influence, however, was on the comic playwright Menander, who may have been one of his students. \u201cYou will find,\u201d the British scholar G.\u2009S. Gordon told an Oxford audience,<\/p>\n

that whenever Characters are written there is this same conjunction, of Character-Writing and Comedy; to every Theophrastus, his Menander. To Hall, Overbury, and Earle, the accepted imitators of Theophrastus in England, corresponds Ben Jonson with his Comedy of Humours, an earlier, harsher, and profounder version of the later Comedy of Manners. To La Bruy\u00e8re, his professed disciple in France, corresponds the comedy of Moli\u00e8re, the French Menander. To the Tatler<\/em> and the Spectator<\/em>, the New Testament, as I may call them, of Character-writing in England, corresponds the comedy of Congreve, our English Moli\u00e8re.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gordon added that such a conjunction always implies or reflects some philosophy of conduct. \u201cVirtue once admitted to be the mean,\u201d as Aristotle had established, \u201cit became necessary to define all the extremes, the too little and too much of the social appearances of man.\u201d This \u201ctoo little and too much\u201d would furnish the basic materials of comic types, from the miser to the libertine, the fashionable peacock, and the glutton.<\/p>\n

Comedy, as is often observed, is an essentially conservative genre, as is satire. Both point toward the foibles and follies\u2014and sometimes the delusions and sheer wickedness\u2014of human beings. Here ethical \u201ccharacter\u201d and two different but related modes of literary \u201ccharacter,\u201d the Theophrastan prose sketch and the theatrical role, come together.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Since they would exercise so great an influence upon his imitators and (witting or unwitting) literary heirs, it may be useful here to list the thirty \u201ccharacters\u201d as we have them from Theophrastus. Richard Aldington\u2019s titles for them, derived from scholarly work of the early twentieth century and generally adopted by commentators, describe the person (\u201cThe Flatterer,\u201d \u201cThe Arrogant Man,\u201d etc.), whereas Benjamin Boyce, and Jeffrey Rusten in his recent Loeb translation, names the characteristic, or foible (\u201cFlattery,\u201d \u201cArrogance\u201d). In Aldington\u2019s version, the original Theophrastan characters are:<\/p>\n

The Dissimulator
\nThe Flatterer
\nThe Chatterer (or \u201cThe Bore\u201d)
\nThe Rustic
\nThe Complaisant Man
\nThe Reckless Cynic
\nThe Loquacious Man
\nThe Newsmonger
\nThe Unscrupulous Man
\nThe Penurious Man
\nThe Gross Man
\nThe Unseasonable Man
\nThe Officious Man
\nThe Stupid Man
\nThe Surly Man
\nThe Superstitious Man
\nThe Grumbler
\nThe Distrustful Man
\nThe Offensive Man
\nThe Unpleasant Man
\nThe Vain Man
\nThe Mean Man
\nThe Boaster
\nThe Arrogant Man
\nThe Coward
\nThe Oligarch
\nThe Late-Learner
\nThe Slanderer
\nThe Friend of the Rabble
\nThe Avaricious Man<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From this list, even without looking at the individual descriptions, it is easy to understand Allport\u2019s sense that these two-thousand-year-old types are readily recognizable in the modern world.<\/p>\n

\u201cTheophrastus\u2019 characters remain fixed,\u201d notes the philosopher Am\u00e9lie Rorty. \u201cThey are not transformed by the unfolding of events. On the contrary, their dispositional characteristics allow them to be used to develop a narrative or to stabilize the structure of a society.\u201d In other words, as events unfold, the \u201ccharacter\u201d becomes even more like himself or herself\u2014sometimes to the point of comedy or parody. \u201cAt a time when bad behavior flourishes, even among our leaders,\u201d says the novelist and critic Francine Prose, Theophrastus\u2019s \u201cportraits of boors, braggarts, and blowhards have never felt more current.\u201d The classicist Mary Beard agrees: \u201cThese Characters<\/em> are people we know\u2014they\u2019re our quirky neighbors, our creepy bosses, our blind dates from hell.\u201d<\/p>\n

The format of the Characters<\/em> is fairly uniform. Each begins with a definition of a quality (\u201cChattering is the mania of talking hugely without thinking\u201d; \u201cGrumbling is complaining too much of one\u2019s lot\u201d; \u201cPenuriousness is economy carried beyond all measure\u201d), although not all scholars agree that Theophrastus himself wrote these opening sentences. Then the chosen trait is illustrated by a series of descriptions of actions or words. The Chatterer (in some translations, \u201cThe Bore\u201d) \u201csits down beside someone he never saw before and begins by praising his wife; then describes a dream he had the night before; then passes to his dinner and relates it in detail.\u201d When the Grumbler is told of the birth of a son, he retorts, \u201cYou should add \u2026 that my property is now halved, and you would be telling the truth.\u201d Of the Penurious Man (or \u201cThe Pennypincher\u201d) we are told, \u201cAt a dinner where expenses are shared, he counts the number of cups each person drinks,\u201d and \u201cWhen his servant breaks a pot or a plate, he deducts the value from his food. If his wife drops a copper, he moves furniture, beds, chests and hunts in the curtains.\u201d \u201cThe inner man emerges from this description of externals,\u201d observes Smeed. \u201cThere is no abstract analysis.\u201d The form is perfect in and of itself.<\/p>\n

Here is one of Theophrastus\u2019s \u201ccharacters\u201d quoted in full, to give you a sense of how the shape of the whole small form coheres. \u201cThe Gross Man\u201d (or \u201cThe Obnoxious Man,\u201d or \u201cObnoxiousness\u201d) is one of the briefer \u201ccharacters,\u201d but every sentence is telling.<\/p>\n

Grossness is not hard to define; it is obtrusive and objectionable jesting. The Gross Man is the sort of person who, meeting free-born women, pulls up his clothes and exposes his genitals. At the theatre he goes on clapping when others cease, and hisses the actors whom the public like. In the midst of a general silence he leans back and belches to make everybody turn round. When the market-place is crowded he goes up to the stalls where they sell nuts or myrtle-berries and pilfers from the pile as he talks to the stall-keeper. Somebody he does not know comes by in a hurry\u2014he tells him to stop. Another comes out of court where he has lost an important case\u2014he accosts him and offers congratulations. He goes personally to do his marketing and hire flute-players; he shows his provisions to everybody and invites them to the feast. He stops in front of the barber\u2019s or perfumer\u2019s and tells the customers he is going to get drunk.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The \u201csort of person who\u201d structure allows for a list of distinguishing actions and behaviors that describe not a specific individual (what later practitioners and scholars would call a \u201cportrait\u201d) but, rather, a recognizable \u201ctype.\u201d The obnoxious man does things like the ones here mentioned. The reader can be relied upon to think up some additional examples to fit the pattern. The generality of the form, and the present tense (\u201che goes on clapping\u201d; \u201che stops in front of the barber\u2019s or perfumer\u2019s\u201d), underscores both the typicality of the behavior and the way it might translate into another place or time. (Think \u201cfrat party\u201d or \u201c#MeToo.\u201d)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Marjorie Garber is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of several books on Shakespeare, including <\/em>Shakespeare\u2019s Ghost Writers and <\/em>Shakespeare After All, and of books on cultural topics ranging from dogs and real estate to cross-dressing, bisexuality, the use and abuse of literature, and the place of the arts in academic life. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she is a member of the American Philosophical Society.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession<\/a>,<\/em> by Marjorie Garber. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright \u00a9 2020 by Marjorie Garber. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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