Philip Pullman in Three or Fewer Dimensions

Princeton’s Cotsen Children’s Library has a podcast called “Bibliofiles,” and this comes from its new conversation with author Philip Pullman:

I’ve written four fairy tales. I call them fairy tales—I Was a Rat!, Clockwork, The Firework-Maker’s Daughter and The Scarecrow and His Servant. They’re different from my novels because the characters are flat rather than round. That’s the way I think of it.

When I’m doing a novel such as the Sally books or “His Dark Materials,” the purpose, what you’re trying to do, is make the characters as real as you can make them, which involves a certain amount of three-dimensionalism. Now you know they’ve got depths, depths sometimes which they’re not aware of themselves. So you want to make those characters as real as possible.

But in a fairy tale, such as the four books I’ve mentioned and of course, “Puss in Boots,” I've done that, and the Grimm tales, the Tales from the Brothers Grimm, character isn’t such an important thing. All the characters in a fairy tale are pretty flat, really. They don’t have much depth. And the interest of the story is not in the psychological complexity of the character so much is in the incident and what happens and what succeeds and will follow it. So they’re different kinds of writing.

Pullman is of course pulling from E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, as well as the Victorian distinction between “novels of incident” and “novels of character.”

The Dreaded Sequel

Word on the street in Boston is that William Monahan, the screenwriter of The Depahted, is working on a story for Mark Wahlberg’s character. Both men have been nominated for Oscars, the movie was a hit, and, frankly, it didn’t leave a whole lot of other sequel potential.

On the down side, Wahlberg portrayed a flat character, according to the dichotomy E. M. Forster proposed in his most enlightening Aspects of the Novel:

A “flat” character, according to Forster, can be summed up in a single sentence and acts as a function of only a few fixed character traits. “Round” characters are capable of surprise, contradiction, and change; they are representations of human beings in all of their complexity. Forster’s aim, however, is not to elevate the round at the expense of the flat, although he admits that the round is on the whole always a more interesting creation. Instead, he argues that there are compelling artistic reasons for a novelist to employ flat characters.

Can a flat character carry a movie? (Well, a good movie?) Or will Wahlberg’s role have to be filled out with (gasp!) a personal life?

This Hollywood news made me think of US Marshals, the 1998 vehicle created for Tommy Lee Jones and his supporting cast after The Fugitive brought in so much money and an Oscar for Jones. Marshal Sam Gerard, Jones’s character, was also flat in Forster’s sense, obsessed with chasing down his quarry, but Jones delighted us with unexpected details.

Once those details had become expected, however, the delight faded. The sequel smelled stale right out of the box, even though it was years ahead of its time in depicting Wesley Snipes on the run from federal agents.

Still, US Marshals has one line that is useful in many situations.

Robert Downey Jr character reacting to something Tommy Lee Jones character has done: Is this guy crazy?

Joe Pantoliano character: No, but he’s a carrier.