Edith Wharton says the novelist’s characters are “as solidly real as the world of experience…but in a way…different.” As in multiple personality.

“To the artist his world is as solidly real as the world of experience, or even more so, but in a way entirely different; it is a world to and from which he passes without any sense of effort, but always with an uninterrupted awareness of the passing. In this world are begotten and born the creatures of his imagination, more living to him than his own flesh-and-blood, but whom he never thinks of as living, in the reader’s simplifying sense. Unless he keeps his hold on this dual character of their being, visionary to him, and to the reader real, he will be the slave of his characters and not their master. When I say their master, I do not mean that they are his marionettes and dangle from his strings. Once projected by his fancy they are living beings who live their own lives; but their world is the one consciously imposed on them by their creator. Only by means of this objectivity of the artist can his characters live in art” (1, pp. 85-86).

Thus, Wharton agrees with Toni Morrison, whom I quoted in a past post as saying that the novelist experiences her characters as “more real than real,” making it necessary for the novelist to control her characters by reminding them whose novel it is.

The paradox described by both Wharton and Morrison is that novelists have two contradictory views of their characters: as both real—even more real than real—and not real.

That is similar to multiple personality, in which the person experiences the alternate identities as separate, real people, but in which there is always at least one identity who sees what is going on.

1. Edith Wharton. The Writing of Fiction. New York, Touchstone, 1924/1997.