The Romantic Manifesto_ A Philosophy of Literature - Ayn Rand [39]
Characterization requires the portrayal of essential traits. Now what are the essentials of a man’s character?
What do we mean, in real life, when we say that we do not understand a person? We mean that we do not understand why he acts as he does. And when we say that we know a person well, we mean that we understand his actions and know what to expect of him. What is it that we know? His motivation.
Motivation is a key-concept in psychology and in fiction. It is a man’s basic premises and values that form his character and move him to action—and in order to understand a man’s character, it is the motivation behind his actions that we must understand. To know “what makes a man tick,” we must ask: “What is he after?”
To re-create the reality of his characters, to make both their nature and their actions intelligible, it is their motivation that a writer has to reveal. He may do it gradually, revealing it bit by bit, building up the evidence as the story progresses, but at the end of the novel the reader must know why the characters did the things they did.
The depth of a characterization depends on the psychological level of motivation which a writer regards as sufficient to illuminate human behavior. For instance, in an average detective story, the criminals are motivated by the superficial notion of “material greed”—but a novel such as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment reveals the soul of a criminal all the way down to his philosophical premises.
Consistency is a major requirement of characterization. This does not mean that a character has to hold nothing but consistent premises—some of the most interesting characters in fiction are men torn by inner conflicts. It means that the author has to be consistent in his view of a character’s psychology and permit him no inexplicable actions, no actions unprepared by or contradictory to the rest of his characterization. It means that a character’s contradictions should never be unintentional on the part of the author.
To maintain the inner logic of his characterizations, a writer must understand the logical chain that leads from the motives of his characters to their actions. To maintain their motivational consistency, he must know their basic premises and the key actions to which these premises will lead them in the course of the story. When he writes the actual scenes in which the characters appear, their premises act as the selectors of all the details and small touches he decides to include. Such details are innumerable, the opportunities for revealing a character’s nature are virtually inexhaustible, and it is the knowledge of what he has to reveal that guides the writer’s selections.
The best way to demonstrate what the process of characterization accomplishes, the means by which it is done, and the disastrous consequences of contradictions, is to illustrate it in action on a specific example.
I shall do it by means of two scenes reproduced below: one is a scene from The Fountainhead, as it stands in the novel—the other is the same scene, as I rewrote it for the purpose of this demonstration. Both versions present only the bare skeleton of the scene, only the dialogue, omitting the descriptive passages. It will be sufficient to illustrate the process.
It is the first scene in which Howard Roark and Peter Keating appear together. It takes place on the evening of the day when Roark was expelled from college and Keating graduated with high honors. The action of the scene consists of one young man asking the advice of another about a professional choice he has to make. But what kind of young men are they? What are their attitudes, premises and motives? Observe what one can learn from a single scene and how much your, the reader’s, mind registers automatically.
Here is the scene as originally written, as it stands in the novel:
“Congratulations, Peter,” said Roark.
“Oh . . .