7 - Comic characters

Summary

The dialogue's specific advantages over the treatise, its ability to entertain and engage the reader, depend to a great degree on its depiction of character. An attitude or argumentative stance can find expression in the character of the interlocutor, and the abstract be made concrete, familiar, and accessible to the reader. The reader reluctant to venture into abstruse speculation is thus insensibly drawn into thought, led on, if by nothing else, by a natural curiosity about human nature and behaviour. With its depiction of a mind in action, dialogue provides those ‘parallel circumstances, and kindred images’ which, in Johnson's opinion, give biography its ‘irresistible interest’. Our interest is encouraged to the degree that complex and specific characters emerge from the dialogue, and it has been argued that Berkeley's dialogues fail to attain any such appealing portraiture. Blair judged that ‘Bishop Berkeley's Dialogues concerning the existence of matter, do not attempt any display of Characters; but furnish an instance of a very abstract subject, rendered clear and intelligible by means of Conversation properly managed.’ In this century Elizabeth Merrill has argued that the intensity of Berkeley's ‘thought … leaves little room for any consideration of the individual personality’, and Michael Morrisroe agrees that ‘Berkeley's characters seem to exist less for themselves than for the response that Berkeley needed in order to get across his points.’ The assumption implicit in these criticisms is that characterization and argument are two poles between which the dialogue as a form is torn – that the intellectual intensity of the debate precludes drama.