I. Introduction

What exactly is ‘character’? How is it possible at present to think of the ‘concept’ of ‘character’ – if it is a concept? Assuming that this concept has a history, how far are we along now in this history or in the examination of this history? What does ‘character’ name? These questions are, on the one hand, involved in a whole system of critical presuppositions and crop up from traditional discussions about literature, within a conception of literary creation that is today outmoded. But, on the other hand, these same questions, having cropped up out of a disintegrating system, allow, through displacement, for the emergence of new, prying questions opening out onto the unknown of a text rather than its recognisable development; onto life, the incessant agitation of literary practice rather than its theses and its stability; onto its indescribable, unidentifiable aspects rather than its rules and means of being classified. To be more precise, it is with the removal of the question of ‘character’ that the question of the nature of fiction comes to the fore, as well as the examination of subjectivity – through fiction, in fiction, and as fiction: where the term ‘fiction’ should not be taken simply (in the sense of borne in mind) as part of a pair of opposites, which would make it the contrary of ‘reality’.