Paranoia: What is a character?

[Paul Nightingale]

A couple of key points from Paul Mackin (who hopefully will correct me if
I'm wrong here). Firstly, criticism is concerned with the text, not
individual characters considered in isolation. One of the problems with
thinking of characters as real people, according them individual
psychologies, is that we can never enjoy a human relationship with them, we
can never interact with them. Nonetheless, characters can stand in for
absent humans, which is where empathy comes into it. So it doesn't matter if
they are robots or monsters or anything else. Frankenstein's monster is an
outlaw; we relate to that, to the way he/it implicitly functions as a
critique of society. Ditto Roy/Rutger Hauer in Bladerunner: I defy anyone
not to be moved by his "time to die" speech. Moreover, the fact that
Deckard/Harrison Ford might 'himself' be a replicant doesn't/shouldn't
matter: he is part of a tradition of outsiders who yearn, on our behalf, for
something better.

Secondly, Paul characterises the text itself as paranoid. Yes, if this means
the text couldn't have been written without paranoia. P-listers have argued
over (sorry, discussed) GR and whether it refers to the Vietnam war. The
novel could only have been written at a time when the Watergate scandal was
made possible by the refusal to accept, unquestioningly, the actions and
constructions of political leaders. I'm also thinking of Angus Calder's The
People's War, first published in the late-60s: this history of British
society during WWII set out to explode some of the cosy myths that survived
from the 1940s, constructions that had glossed over the question of class
conflict for example. M&D could only have been published when the writing of
history had been problematised by Foucault and others.