Garber's Character: A Belated Book Review

One of the few aphorisms about character not to appear in Marjorie Garber’s compendious book about the subject is due to Albert Camus: “when one has no character, one must apply a method.” Garber has both. Her method is literary and cultural critique: she concentrates on language to the point that hers is more a history of the word “character” and its cognates than of character itself. Her character comes out in vibrant detours that are highlights of the book.

Among the authors Garber quotes is John Start Mill. “One whose desires and impulses are not his own has no character,” he wrote, “no more than a steam-engine has a character.” Ironically, Mill’s writing was dismissed by Thomas Carlyle in similar terms: “You have lost nothing by missing the autobiography of Mill,” he wrote to a friend. “I have never read a more uninteresting book … [the] Autobiography of a steam-engine.” Garber’s own discussion of Mill ends with a riff on Thomas the Tank Engine and Virginia Lee Burton’s picture book classic, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.

Other chapters speak to the role of character in education, the murky distinction between character and personality, the idea of a character type, and the relationship between character and gender. A surprisingly large chunk of the book is occupied with phrenology, which is said to have been as influential in the first half of the 19th century as Darwin was in the second. Sometime subjects include Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Walt Whitman, who had his phrenological chart bound into the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Garber gently mocks resemblances between the pseudo-science of phrenology and recent attempts to locate mental activities in the brain by functional MRI.

It’s not clear why certain topics get extended treatment while others are missing. Why a chapter on character education in schools but nothing on parenting? Garber tracks philosophical reflection on character back to Aristotle but no further. What about Socrates and Plato, not to mention philosophy in India and China? She suggests, misleadingly, that character “goes conspicuously unmentioned by neuroscientists and psychologists today.” This ignores, among other things, the “situationist” critique in social psychology, according to which human behaviour depends much more on contingencies of circumstance than on robust character traits, and the “fundamental attribution error,” in which we flail in the opposite direction.

No doubt a philosopher or psychologist would have written a different book. The character of this one reflects the preoccupations of its author. Case in point: Donald Trump’s deficiencies of character are pilloried in every single chapter. Having argued that “‘character,’ despite its apparent abstraction, is not only a philosophical but also a historical—and sometimes a political—term,” Garber ends by asking whether we should simply ditch the word. She thinks not. “It may not be perfect, or perfectible,” she concludes, “but it is, at present, the best we’ve got.” Best for what purpose, she does not say—but one can hazard a guess.

BONUS CONTENT: Almost twenty years ago, I wrote about Garber on “academic instincts,” human nature, and knowledge.