Characters in fiction

From James Woods' How Fiction Works:

William Gass, commenting on a character in a Henry James novel:

"What is Mr. Cashmore? Here is the answer I shall give: Mr. Cashmore is 1) a noise, 2) a proper name, 3) a complex system of ideas, 4) a controlling perception, 5) an instrument of verbal organization, 6) a pretended mode of referring, and 7) a source of verbal energy. He is not an object of perception, and nothing whatever that is appropriate to persons can be correctly said of him."

responds Woods:

"I find this deeply, incorrigibly wrong. Of course characters are assemblages of words, because literature is such an assembage of words; this tells us absolutely nothing, and is like elaborately informing us that a novel cannot really create an imagined 'world,' because it is just a bound codex of paper pages."

To bring this to cyberpunk, which came up, briefly, last time: yes, cyberpunk is about evoking a mood, and an attempt to make sense of changes the world is going through as a result of emerging technologies. But it evokes this mood, makes sense of this world, through a story populated with characters. Neuromancer might be my favorite book (it's up there in any case)-- Case is one of my favorite characters in literature. He feels "real" to me, even if he's just words-- all of the characters do, even the improbable Peter whatsisname, the embodiment of sheer perversity. Even Wintermute, the AI. These assemblages of words have emotional resonances, their stories play out in my imagination as i read-- I can recall the imaginal dream created in me when I first read Neuromancer (or any book that has moved me); I can quote the climax back to myself and experience that thrill of Case's transcendence. I know characters in fiction aren't real. But they feel real, if they are done well. And yes, we are characters that we invent.

But I don't say to myself (mostly) "I'm not real, I don't really exist, I'm just a symbolic organizing principle." I say, we say, "I feel real. I feel that I exist." That my existence is mediated through symbolic processes of understanding is incredible. That using words, I can be convinced of the emotional reality of an invented character is even more so. Neither phenomenon warrants the smug dismissal of a Gassian postmodernism. Postmodernists didn't figure out that fiction isn't "real." We've always known that. What the emphasis should be (and to be fair, is for more lucid "postmodern" thinkers) is what a fictional character's unreality says about our own, in light of our own construction of ourselves and our world. Maybe that's why Pynchon, for all his brilliance, and the "oh-wow-aha" moments in The Crying of Lot 49 (the only one I've read), leaves me feeling cold and vaguely like some asshole is laughing at me.