The Mysteries of Identity: A Theme in Modern Literature

OF THE MOST FASHIONABLE LITERARY TERMS these days is persona which is the Latin word for the mask that actors used to wear in the Greek and Roman theater. The currency of the term suggests that the identity of the author and his characters, and the distinction between them, has become a problem. When critics call characters in poems and plays and novels personae, they may mean one of two different things. They may mean that the characters are masks through which the author speaks, or they may mean that the characters have nothing to do with the author but are the masks or types necessary in order that the action may be played out. With both meanings of the word persona, the critics are saying that literature is or ought to be impersonal. Like most technical terminology the word persona is a weapon in a campaign in this case a campaign against the autobiographical or confessional style of much nineteenth-century literature. It is in nineteenth-century literature that the issue first arises between a personal and an impersonal literature, that it becomes a problem to distinguish between the author and his characters. To understand the twentieth-century reaction, we have therefore to understand why nineteenth-century literature became so personal. A good working explanation is provided, I think, by the Chicago philosopher George Herbert Mead, in his Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. According to Mead, the ro© Regularly at the University of Virginia, ROBERT LANGBAUM is visiting professor of English this year at Columbia University. His latest book is The Gayety of Vision: A Study of Isak Dinesen's Art. The present article derives from a paper he read at the Conference in the Study of Twentieth-Century Literature at Michigan State University in May, 1964.