Sep 3, 2026 · 36 min · 12 segments
Audio 37 Recorded live in front of an audience, the writer, translator, and artist Miriam Stoney reads from her new essay and talks with Berlin Review editor Hana Szabo about characters: in fiction…
Miriam StoneyGuest
Tobias HaberkornHost
It is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between a person and a character.
The mediation of personhood through social media, datafication and analytics, as well as the tendency to regard one's own life as a narrative, as in therapy or autobiographical writing, have all made a concept like main character energy seem like something worth cultivating.
Accordingly, to be a non-playable character sounds like a fate worse than death.
Literary genealogies of character are coextensive with the development of written forms that once took for granted the essential separation of life and art, even where they might be perceived to interact with and influence one another, from the novel to the feature film, obviously many other examples as well.
To consider character was to pay special attention to forms of personhood within a singular sketch or study.
A character could be judged believable, sympathetic or unsympathetic, even relatable.
But the incompleteness of their representation made any serious identification not only unlikely but potentially pathological.
Indeed, psychosocial understandings of character take it to be a quantity of attributes, a pattern of behaviors, but not something that equates to a whole person or presence.
Character is a moral category too, and we should be conscious of the fact that morality can only provide an essentially impoverished account of a life.
At my now defunct prep school in the north of England, pupils were still being slapped for misdemeanors as tragic as wetting themselves when I left in 2005.
I was instilled with an unshakable belief that such forms of suffering, misfortune, and toil as we experienced at that nasty little institution were character building.
And as brown kids, we were advised to endure it smiling if we wanted to get on in life.
To me, character is akin to a facade or a model, not fit to house a whole person or a life, but perhaps the idea of one.
Also predictable is my need for characters to persist in their worlds and solely in their worlds.
The slippage here between character, as in traits, and a character, as in a story, is conscious.
a fact that must always be taken into consideration when the figures in question are marked in ways that politicize their otherwise aesthetic judgment as figments of someone's imagination or fantasy, as when, say, a character is racialized in one way or another.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between a person and a character.
The mediation of personhood through social media, datafication and analytics, as well as the tendency to regard one's own life as a narrative, as in therapy or autobiographical writing, have all made a concept like main character energy seem like something worth cultivating.
Accordingly, to be a non-playable character sounds like a fate worse than death.
Literary genealogies of character are coextensive with the development of written forms that once took for granted the essential separation of life and art, even where they might be perceived to interact with and influence one another, from the novel to the feature film, obviously many other examples as well.
To consider character was to pay special attention to forms of personhood within a singular sketch or study.
A character could be judged believable, sympathetic or unsympathetic, even relatable.
But the incompleteness of their representation made any serious identification not only unlikely but potentially pathological.
Indeed, psychosocial understandings of character take it to be a quantity of attributes, a pattern of behaviors, but not something that equates to a whole person or presence.
Character is a moral category too, and we should be conscious of the fact that morality can only provide an essentially impoverished account of a life.
At my now defunct prep school in the north of England, pupils were still being slapped for misdemeanors as tragic as wetting themselves when I left in 2005.
I was instilled with an unshakable belief that such forms of suffering, misfortune, and toil as we experienced at that nasty little institution were character building.
And as brown kids, we were advised to endure it smiling if we wanted to get on in life.
To me, character is akin to a facade or a model, not fit to house a whole person or a life, but perhaps the idea of one.
Also predictable is my need for characters to persist in their worlds and solely in their worlds.
The slippage here between character, as in traits, and a character, as in a story, is conscious.
a fact that must always be taken into consideration when the figures in question are marked in ways that politicize their otherwise aesthetic judgment as figments of someone's imagination or fantasy, as when, say, a character is racialized in one way or another.
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