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The challenges raised by Arieti and Shainess are illuminating. They reveal a fundamental disparity in our conceptions of the nature of a literary work. Before responding to the individual challenges I will try to clarify the disparity. To do so, I must raise an additional challenge of my own.
In the original article I argued that characters exist through our imaginative interactions with language and with dramatic devices. We experience the illusory characters of novels or plays as if they were living people. But now we must take a harder look at these fictive characters. It is not enough to say that they are illusory. What is their mode of existence? Where are they now as we think about them?
Just now it is late afternoon, and where are the characters I watched in last night's performance of The Shadow Box? Are they in their dressing rooms? In the type-script? In my memory? I don't seem to know exactly where they are. Yet they exist in the same way that Hamlet exists. What way is that? Does psychoanalysis raise this question?
“… psychoanalytic criticism,” Frederick Crews says (Crews 1975, p. 168) “is always bound to falsify both the ontology and the multivalence of literature. What we want from criticism … is recognition of the inexhaustible and irreducible vitality that somehow inheres in the works themselves.”
What is this vitality that inheres in the work? What is meant by its singularity? How can we think about the ontology of a literary work? And do we need to think about it at all?
If literary works simply reflected a recognizable reality, such questions would not arise. They arise because of our prior tacit sense that a Hamlet and an Emma Bovary do not exist in the same way that you and I exist. Perhaps if we look into their mode of existence, then all of the questions raised by Shainess and Arieti can be seen in a clearer light.
The question of “ontological situs” is tackled and dismembered by Wellek and Warren in their Theory of Literature (Welleck and Warren 19