The gods were unlike fictional characters in their heyday, in the days when people actually believed in them, the days when the Greek myths were the Greek religion and the Roman myths were the Roman religion and you could have terrible things done to you for speaking the way I’m speaking now, because what is now a pleasant literary discussion would then have been the sin of blasphemy. One could wish that one or two of the current crop of monotheisms would decay to the point at which what is now considered blasphemy might turn into a pleasant literary discussion, but no such luck, or not yet. Anyway, the old Greek and Roman gods were vengeful types; they didn’t need mere humans to do their dirty work, they did it themselves with considerable relish, imposing dreadful sanctions on us if we failed to worship them, or if we didn’t do it often enough or well enough, or if, God forbid, we defied them: They could punish us; they could turn us into spiders like Arachne or, like Prometheus, bind us to a pillar and set a great bird to eat our liver for all eternity, the liver magically regenerating as it was consumed; they could becalm our fleets and demand that our children be sacrificed and burn our cities. Still, all that’s over now, happily, and only the books remain.

  Proteus.

  He was a very practical god, a good god for writers to pay attention to, full of technical solutions to life’s problems, and one of the things writers know is that all literary problems are technical problems. Aristaeus the beekeeper, the same fellow who lustfully pursued Eurydice across a field in which she was bitten by a snake and died, forcing Orpheus to follow her into the underworld, Aristaeus for whom one consequently feels a certain lack of sympathy, went to Proteus and asked him for a way of getting hold of even more bees than he already had. Proteus told him to sacrifice cattle to the gods, and when Aristaeus did so, out of their rotting corpses poured, yes, great swarms of bees. Proteus’s advice, when he could be persuaded to give it, was invariably worth taking.

  Poseidon tended to be the sea god who got all the headlines; people never paid much attention to Proteus then. But I’m suggesting we should start doing so now, because the idea of the protean is the foundation of what I’m calling the other great tradition, the one that isn’t trapped in a mistake about the real, the mistake being to see the real as ordinary when in fact it’s extraordinary, to see it as moderate when in fact it’s extreme, to see it not as it is, which is to say full of wonderments, but as merely naturalistic instead. If one clings to the idea of the protean, one will avoid all these mistakes and understand further that realism in the novel is not a question of following certain rules, that it has nothing to do with naturalism or mimicry, a novel not being like a photograph but more like an oil painting, or possibly in the case of the best novels a great fresco covering the walls and ceiling of a mighty palace, and so realism in the novel isn’t a question of technique; it is, in my opinion, a question of intention. That is to say, if the intention of the artist, the writer, is to make as true and honest a response to the world as he can, if it be his intention to use the best powers of language and imagination to create a vision arising out of his sense of what it is to be alive in the world, and if he be faithful to that intention, then what he makes will be a work of realism, whether it be filled with dragons and broomsticks or with kitchen sinks and offices. Van Gogh’s painting of a starry night doesn’t look like a photograph of a starry night or, indeed, what a starry night looks like to the naked eye, but it is a great painting of a starry night all the same, and all who look upon it understand it to be true.

  And when one lives at a hinge moment in history, as we do, as Shakespeare did when he wrote his protean plays, a moment when everything is in flux, everything is changing at immense speed, when the future is up for grabs and dark storm clouds rush across the sun, and when there are plagues and dragons loose in the world, then it becomes essential to admit that the old forms will not do, the old ideas will not do, because all must be remade, all, with our best efforts, must be rethought, reimagined, and rewritten, and to do otherwise would be to fail, most lamentably to fail, in the pursuit of our art.

  HERACLITUS

  When the cartoonist Charles M. Schulz announced that he was going to stop drawing the Peanuts comic strip, he received a flood of reader requests, all asking for the same thing: “Please, just once before you stop, let Charlie Brown kick the football.” But Schulz set his face against his readers’ wishes and followed the logic of his characters instead. If Lucy van Pelt allowed Charlie Brown to kick the football, if she didn’t whip it away at the last moment from his eternally trusting, eternally betrayed feet, then she would cease to be Lucy. If Charlie Brown kicked the football, he would no longer be Charlie Brown.

  For Charlie Brown, and for Lucy, their ethos, as Heraclitus said two and a half thousand years ago, their way of being in the world, is their daimon, the guiding principle that shapes their lives. Charlie Brown must eternally fume with the disappointed knowledge of his own gullible innocence, and Lucy will always delight in proving that gullibility. They can do no other. Their characters have led their author. The author, having created them, is no longer omnipotent but bound by his creations. Pinocchio is no longer a marionette; he once had strings, but now he’s free. He’s a real, live boy.

  Have you ever read Heraclitus? Stupid question, really; it’s like asking, have you ever drunk wine out of a smashed bottle, or have you ever taken a good look at a famous old painting that has unfortunately been ripped to shreds? Reading Heraclitus is like that because there’s so little of him left. His great book survived the Persian, Greek, and Roman empires and was praised by Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius, then managed to get itself lost, and all that remains of him are quotations in the works of other writers, some in the original Greek, some paraphrased or translated into Latin, just a few broken potsherds numbered from 1 to 130 like fragments in a drawer in a museum. It’s as if the complete works of William Shakespeare got lost and all we had left were one hundred and thirty decontextualized lines, and we didn’t know if these were his greatest hits or just words that had avoided oblivion by chance.

  The fragments included in the most recent collection, appropriately called Fragments, obviously retain considerable power, influencing Montaigne, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Jung; and, if we accept the argument of his latest translator, the elegant and scholarly Haxton of Syracuse—that’s Brooks Haxton, poet, of Syracuse, New York—then we can agree that “an early and abiding influence on Christian thought is famously transparent in the Heraclitean language that opens the Gospel According to John: ‘in the beginning was the Word.’ ” Heraclitus was a great fan of the Word; “All things follow from the Word,” he said, and again, “For wisdom, listen / not to me but to the Word, and know that all is one.” Logos was the word he used, a word that originally meant more than the Word, Brooks Haxton reminds us; it meant “all means of making ideas known, as well as ideas themselves, the phenomena to which ideas respond, and the rules that govern both phenomena and ideas.” Or, as the evangelist John put it, writing in Greek: “The Word [logos] was with God, and the Word was God.”

  This is good news for novelists, because if the Word is with God, then what does that make us? My only difficulty is that Heraclitus comes across as something of a mixed bag, part wise man, part fortune cookie:

  “Men dig tons of earth

  to find an ounce of gold.” (#8)

  “Things keep their secrets.” (#9)

  “Wisdom is the oneness

  of mind that guides

  and permeates all things.” (#19)

  “Without the sun,

  what day? What night?” (#31)

  “What was scattered gathers.

  What was gathered blows apart.” (#40)

  “An ass prefers a bed of litter to a golden throne.” (#51)

  “The way up is the way back.” (#69)

  “The beginning is the end.” (#70)

  “Goat cheese melted

  in warm wine congeals

  if not well stirred.” (#84)

  (That’s a good one.)

  “People need not act and speak as if they were asleep.” (#94)

  “The ape apes find most beautiful looks apish

  to non-apes.” (#99)

  It’s hard to take some of this stuff seriously, although there are many people, wise people, who take it very seriously indeed, and to these wise people one is tempted to say:

  “Stupidity is better kept a secret

  than displayed.” (#109)

  And yet, and yet. Heraclitus was a remarkable fellow by all accounts, the contemporary though probably not the friend of Pythagoras, Lao Tzu, Confucius, and the Buddha, and he was a genuine seeker after truth. Like the Buddha, he was born a prince, in his case in and of Ephesus, and like the Buddha, he renounced power in order to seek what he would have called wisdom (sophos), which the Buddha called enlightenment. And some of the fragments have plenty to say to me. For example:

  “People dull their wits with gibberish and cannot use their ears and eyes,” (#4)

  or:

  “The eye, the ear,

  the mind in action, these I value,” (#13)

  although obviously I’m disappointed to hear him say:

  “Now that we can travel anywhere, we need no longer take the poets

  and mythmakers for sure witnesses

  about disputed facts.” (#14)

  And then there’s fragment #121, which has attained the status of one of the grand self-evident truths about life, fragment #121, which tells us, as it told Charlie Brown, that a man’s ethos is his daimon, or, in plainer language, that a man’s character is his fate. “Character is destiny.” The key to the art of the novel in seven syllables, or so people have long believed. Captain Ahab’s character, driven, obsessive, fixated on the whale to the point of selling his soul for the right to kill it—“From hell’s heart I stab at thee”—makes his death inevitable. There he is at last, lashed to his prey by harpoon ropes and drowned, the two of them bound together, man and whale, inseparable in life and death. The survivor of the wreck of the Pequod, the one who lives to tell the tale, is the disengaged figure of Ishmael, or at least we think that’s his name; “Call me Ishmael,” he tells us, not “I am Ishmael” or “Ishmael is my name.” Ishmael may be an alias, like the name “Alias” adopted by the character played by Bob Dylan in Sam Peckinpah’s great Western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. “Call me Alias,” Dylan says, playing Ishmael to Pat Garrett’s Ahab (Billy the Kid being, I suppose, the hunted whale), and when Garrett asks if that’s his name, he replies, with an opaque little Bob Dylan smile, “You can call me that.” So, call-me-Ishmael, the outsider, the one who doesn’t buy into the passion and fervor, the grand obsession, of the quest for Moby Dick, Ishmael survives, because survival is the game he’s in; it’s his character, so it’s his fate. Ahab, because it’s his fate, because it’s what he wants, goes knocking on heaven’s door.

  Then there’s character as refusal—the refusal, for example, of Bartleby, the Scrivener, who prefers not to, without ever giving a reason or even a hint of an explanation. But can Bartleby actually be called a character or is he simply that refusal, enigmatic, infuriating, important for its effect on others and not for itself? I think he can, because the refusals are not random; they cohere. Bartleby has needs. He is homeless and close to penniless and is living secretly in the scrivener’s office, and when he is surprised there en déshabillé, he prefers not to let his employer enter until he has tidied himself. He has too a strong sense of himself as a worker, laboring assiduously at his copying but preferring not to go over his work with anyone else. His professional pride may be misplaced, but it reveals that this is a man who sets boundaries in his life. He will do this, he will not do that, and he will politely adhere to his private rules, whatever the consequences for himself. Is he, then, some sort of passive-aggressive zealot? I don’t think so, because he has no ideas to impose on anyone else. In the face of poverty and even death he has chosen the path of dignity, preferring not to deviate from it, and accepts his fate. So if character is destiny, then the characteristic of acceptance is as potent as that of refusal. Bartleby both refuses and accepts. He prefers not to, but he also, silently, prefers.

  I’m thinking too about another refusal, the refusal of Michael Kohlhaas the horse trader, in the great story by Heinrich von Kleist that bears his name, to accept that justice will not be done. He insists only on what the law has decreed, that the two beautiful, glossy, well-nourished horses unjustly seized from him by Junker Wenzel von Tronka and allowed to decline into “a pair of scrawny, worn-out nags” should be returned to him in the same condition they were in when they were taken, along with his other lost possessions—a neckcloth, some imperial florins, and a bundle of washing; and when his small grievance is not addressed, he embarks on a course so violent that it half-destroys his world and himself as well. His character becomes his entire community’s destiny as well as his own. But when, at the story’s end, and after deeds of terrible violence have been done, he gains full restitution for his losses, he accepts that justice must also be done upon him for his own deeds. Having received satisfaction, Kohlhaas is prepared to make satisfaction to the state and submits without argument to the executioner’s ax. Once again, refusal goes hand in hand with acceptance.

  A century and a half after it was written, Michael Kohlhaas inspired the American novelist E. L. Doctorow, who based the character of Coalhouse Walker in Ragtime on Kohlhaas—Coalhouse Walker, the dandyish African American with the fancy car that gets wrecked by racists and who, like Michael Kohlhaas, insists on restitution, insists peacefully and civilly for as long as he can, beyond the limits of most men’s patience, and only turns to extreme measures when modest ones have failed. A sense of injustice will drive a man to extremes—many of the world’s present discontents can be attributed to such a sense—but what makes these men special, Kohlhaas, Coalhouse, Bartleby, is their belief in civility, their refusal to step toward incivility or violence until all other avenues have been exhausted, their preference for nonviolence, even though, in two of these three examples, there is violence aplenty lurking below the surface.

  The almost karmic willingness to accept what life sends is also at the heart of the nature of Mr. Leopold Bloom, Odysseus recast as modern picaro, as the wandering, Irish, Quixotic Jew; Mr. Leopold Bloom, who “ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls,” who loves his wife in spite of her infidelities with Blazes Boylan; Bloom, who, after the sojourn in nighttown, brings Stephen home in the “Ithaca” chapter of Ulysses, the lost son Bloom never had, who’s in search of a lost mother, and afterward, in bed with Molly, speaks to her of him, presents him to her for her pleasure, allowing her to intuit what he doesn’t know himself: hes an author and going to be a university professor of Italian, Molly ruminates about Stephen, and Im to take lessons what is he driving at now showing him my photo…meaning Bloom, what is Bloom driving at, I wonder he didnt make him a present of it altogether and me too…I suppose hes 20 or more Im not too old for him if hes 23 or 24.

  How poignant it is, at the end of Bloom’s long day’s journey into long night, near the end of the chapter’s long catechism, and just before Molly’s overwhelming voice is unleashed upon us, to discover that there’s a refusal in Bloom too, a refusal beneath his acceptance: He accepts her infidelity because he refuses to lose her; he enters the marital bed and finds there “the imprint of a human form, male, not his,” and lying beside his sleeping wife lists to himself the names of his wife’s lovers, that list of which he is not even the last term, and experiences, sequentially, “envy, jealousy, abnegation, equanimity,” and yet is aroused by her, loves her in spite of what he knows, and then, in that beautiful gesture in which the cuckold’s humility joins with the husband’s lust, kisses “the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.” And as for Molly Bloom, Molly the Yes, she’s nothing but character-as-destiny, is soliloquizing Molly, nothing but fate, lying on her bed, sleeping, waking, doing, and remembering; no character was ever destiny more than she, everyone’s destiny as well as her guiltless, sensual own.

  So: Game, set, and match to Heraclitus, you may think. Character, destiny, the one leads to the other, and there you have it, nothing more to be said. Ah, but there is, there’s plenty more, because Heraclitus’s dictum doesn’t take into account the liquid things about life, the gaseous things, the things about people and stories and language and perception and, yes, moral values that don’t stay put, that aren’t dependable. James Joyce, that creator of potently destined characters, agenbitten by inwit, knew the limitations of the flesh as he knew everything else, was a master of the shifting, the mutable, and near the beginning of Ulysses invoked the metamorphic Old Father Ocean, Proteus: “beware,” as the book warns us, “of imitations.”

  There is, for example, the matter of chance. In the Mahabharata, King Yudhisthira, an addictive gambler, loses his wealth, his kingdom, the freedom of his brothers, and even his wife in a series of throws of the dice. So in a sense his character creates his destiny, but the thought remains: What if the dice had fallen differently? Yudhisthira’s character didn’t account for their random fall, and the suggestion in the Mahabharata that his opponent, Shakuni, was a master of the game, while Yudhisthira was a novice, is unconvincing; there’s really no way to be a master of the dice. An explanation of human affairs that omits the influence of the unpredictable, the chaotic, the thing for which there is no reason, will never be a full explanation. For the want of a nail, a battle can be lost. A child falls from a third-floor window and gets up, miraculously unhurt; the same child falling from the same window on another occasion would be killed. We turn right through the crowd at a certain party on a certain night and meet the man or woman who becomes our spouse. If we had turned left, we might never have met them. A house is carried away by a whirlwind with a girl inside it and, when it lands, by chance squashes a witch whose magic ruby slippers will eventually take the girl home again. But what if the witch had not been squashed?