Paradoxically, the ‘persons’ who emerge with most presence in the history of theatre and novel traced in this book are wholly fictional. Those who make works of art and those who consume them are real embodied persons in time. Yet they prove tantalisingly elusive, inclined to disappear as ‘beings’ when we attempt to retrieve them from behind (or anticipate them beyond) the texts or performances that appear to ‘represent’ them. In contrast, invented characters – ‘persons’ who are most distant from real embodied people in the making of a work of fiction – are those with most apparent ‘presence’ to us. In this sense too, characters ‘occupy space’: they are more tangible, extend further into our apprehension, than authors or readers. In particular, the dramatis personae discussed in the preceding section of this book extend beyond the ‘role’: they become ‘themselves’ rather than stand for, or in the place of, a position in an aesthetic system. Nonetheless, character – like the other forms of person in art (artist and consumer) – also achieves an effect of presence through the process of unconcealment and withdrawal.

The characters discussed here occupy both stage and page to the extent that they become more absorbing to us than the stories in which they feature. They impede rather than advance both ‘plot’ and ‘meaning-effects’ through their pausing, digressing, departing or preventing the actions of others. Of course, such impediments also generate plot. And characters also thicken the environment so as to make plot more plausible, or to turn our attention away from the implausibility of plot by creating a sense that they, as characters, are real. Blakey Vermeule notes the ‘portability’ of literary characters, they are:

Character portability enables readers to reason offline, to address the problem of other minds in environments where they can ‘reason about the social contract under conditions of imperfect access to relevant information’.