Author traces particularly timely quality in ‘Character’

In the ungainly, interminable pageant of public apologies of late, one statement about misbehavior is proving strangely popular.

‘‘This is not who I am,’’ a student at American University pleaded after a video circulated of her using a racial slur.

‘‘That’s not the real me,’’ Youtuber Shane Dawson said, acknowledging his long history of wearing blackface in videos.

‘‘That’s not who I am,’’ New England

Patriots kicker Justin Rohrwasser swore after his tattoo of the logo of a right-wing militia sparked outrage.

It’s not me, not the real me, not the true me.

‘‘The implication, not always made explicit, has to do with character; the mistake was ‘out of character’ for me,’’ Marjorie Garber writes in her hectic and absorbing new book, ‘‘Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession.’’ ‘‘The phrase ‘That is not who I am’ becomes a feedback loop, in which the speaker becomes his own character witness.’’

What is the notion of character lurking behind these apologies? How are we conceiving of the self if we can insist: Never mind what you’ve seen on the video, never mind what I wrote or said, my true character exists independent of my choices and behavior — an intangible (and stainless) essence?

‘‘ ‘Character’ remains one of the least understood of all modern terms,’’ Garber writes. She prods at the cloud of confusion surrounding the word — its philosophical roots, literary history, political uses and inadvertent comedy.

‘‘Character’’ has fallen out of scientific usage, but it’s brandished at the pulpit and podium, often, in Garber’s telling, by those employing it for protective camouflage. See Charlie Rose, Donald Trump and, most eloquently, Richard Nixon. (‘‘You must not give power to a man unless, above everything else, he has character,’’ Nixon declared in a television advertisement for Barry Goldwater’s campaign. ‘‘Character is the most important qualification the president of the United States can have.’’)

Garber begins with Aristotle, whose conception of character contrasts with our modern idea of an inward, fixed essence. In his ‘‘Poetics,’’ he emphasized character as ‘‘deliberate moral choice’’

in language and behavior. This notion of character as a quality that can be cultivated — even instilled — can be traced through the rise of the self-help movement of the 19th century and the establishment of the Boy Scouts movement, described by its founder, Robert Baden-powell, as a ‘‘character factory.’’

Garber is at her most fluent and thorough in this section as she traces Baden-powell’s fusion of Spartan military training and Arthurian chivalric codes into a method of instruction, in which character became synonymous with an idealized form of ‘‘manliness’’ expressed in thought, attire, even movement.

From this careful, attentive treatment, the book picks up speed. References whiz by, like uprooted trees in a cyclone. There goes ancient philosopher Theophrastus with his taxonomy of social types; there goes caricaturist William Hogarth, who believed the face to be ‘‘the index of the mind.’’ Phrenology, exclusionary college admission policies, Freud, inevitably, with his idea of character as the ‘‘outward sign, so to speak, of an inward personality’’ — there’s plenty to paddle around in, but do we arrive anywhere?

I have a high tolerance for rapid, associative, hunch-based writing, but I began to crave an argument, or at least a more explicit examination of the roots and consequences of character’s evolution. Garber will occasionally sidle up to tracing some point of continuity before parachuting away on the gusts of digression.

It’s not merely that Garber valorizes description over analysis; it’s that this method strips ideas of their historical context and function. As a critic, she has written powerfully about how life follows art. But ideas aren’t merely ‘‘suggestive’’; they are put to particular uses in the service of particular ends. That the self-help movement in England, with its sense of personal responsibility and the perfectibility of character, overlapped with the Industrial Revolution seems salient, to put it mildly — not that this book bothers much with such details.