Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace 9780231542401

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Active Readers and Flexible Forms: The Emergence of Minor-Character Elaboration, 1966–1971
2. The Real and Imaginary Politics of Minor-Character Elaboration, 1983–2014
3. “An Insatiable Market” for Minor Characters: Genre in the Contemporary Literary Marketplace
4. The Logic of Characters’ Virtual Lives
Coda: Genre as Telescopic Method
Appendix: Minor-Character Elaborations Since 1966
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

MINOR CHARACTERS HAVE THEIR DAY

Literature Now

L I T E RATU RE N OW Matthew Hart, David James, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Series Editors Literature Now offers a distinct vision of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century literary culture. Addressing contemporary literature and the ways we understand its meaning, the series includes books that are comparative and transnational in scope as well as those that focus on national and regional literary cultures. Caren Irr, Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect Mrinalini Chakravorty, In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature Carol Jacobs, Sebald’s Vision Sarah Phillips Casteel, Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination

Minor Characters Have Their Day G E N R E A N D T H E CO N T E M P O R A RY L I T E R A RY M A R K E T P L A C E

Jeremy Rosen

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rosen, Jeremy. Title: Minor characters have their day : genre and the contemporary literary marketplace / Jeremy Rosen. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2016. | Series: Literature now | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016002788 (print) | LCCN 2016025468 (e-book) | ISBN 9780231177443 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231542401 (e-book) | ISBN 9780231542401 Subjects: LCSH: Characters and characteristics in literature. Classification: LCC PN3411 .R67 2016 (print) | LCC PN3411 (e-book) | DDC 809/.927—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016002788

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c10987654321

Cover Design: © Derek Thornton/Faceout Studio Cover Images: Photo by Bryan Longoria/Faceout Studio. Additional images © Shutterstock.

CONTENTS

P R E FAC E

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AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

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Introduction Three Axes of Genre Study 1 Chapter One Active Readers and Flexible Forms: The Emergence of Minor-Character Elaboration, 1966–1971 44 Chapter Two The Real and Imaginary Politics of Minor-Character Elaboration, 1983–2014 83 Chapter Three “An Insatiable Market” for Minor Characters: Genre in the Contemporary Literary Marketplace 117 Chapter Four The Logic of Characters’ Virtual Lives 154 Coda Genre as Telescopic Method 181 A P P E N D I X : M I N O R- C HA R AC T E R E L A B O R AT IO N S SI N C E 19 6 6 NOTES

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B I B L IO G R A P H Y INDEX

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PREFACE

Minor Characters Have Their Day is a book about genre and a case study of a booming contemporary genre. It attempts to explain how genres work, what defines them—form? content? a particular publishing niche?—how they emerge and develop, what they reveal about the cultural moment at which they flourish and about the literary, cultural, and commercial institutions and networks through which they circulate. The book draws its insights about genre through the focused analysis of a particular genre that has flourished since the late 1960s and become particularly visible since the late 1990s. These insights may not apply universally, to all genres. Like the varied array of texts that deploy a given genre, genres share some characteristics while diverging from one another in other ways. But since this book argues that genres are by their nature variable, adaptable technologies rather than rule-bound categories, the fact that genres differ from one another is fully compatible with the general theory offered here. Minor Characters Have Their Day understands genre as a dynamic kind of textual and rhetorical practice with a real historical existence that must be analyzed along several intersecting axes. The most familiar of these axes of inquiry, for today’s literary scholars, considers the cultural work of genre. The idea here is that a genre’s conventional form and thematic preoccupations make legible the social and political concerns of the historical moment at which that genre flourishes. The cultural politics of genre cannot be

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neatly separated, however, from the formal and institutional pressures that give genres their shapes. A genre becomes visible as such when a succession of producers plays out a set of formal possibilities. This process of formal iteration is never simply reiteration. The riffing on a form that constitutes a genre is also what generates its internal variation and thus the permeable boundaries of generic categories. How much modification of an inherited form can occur before we detect the presence of a new genre? The recent vogue of quantitative literary scholarship abjures such questions, ignoring the internal heterogeneity and porous borders of actual genres, the fact that they are defined by a combination of similarity and difference, stability and dynamism. Furthermore, formal experimentation does not occur in a vacuum. Perhaps the most important argument of Minor Characters Have Their Day emerges out of my insistence that we cannot apprehend the full social and cultural implications of genre, the function of form, without taking into account the commercial and symbolic economies through which genres circulate. Writers adopt genres because they provide existing forms that can be adapted to particular purposes but also because those genres serve strategic functions in a competitive literary field. Publishers seize on a genre and spur its production according to their perception of the readership for such texts and also because those publishers are subject to economic pressures from parent companies and responsive to broader cultural and marketplace transformations. Genre subsists, then, at the nexus of form, cultural history, and material conditions of production and consumption. The introduction to this book undertakes two considerable tasks—and is, as a result, a considerable length for an introduction. It argues that genre needs to be studied along the three intersecting axes traced above, and it introduces readers to some principal characteristics and representative texts of a genre, about which they might have only an intuitive awareness. Attempting to draw a general theory of genre study and acquaint readers with a genre that they will immediately start noticing everywhere in the popular literary landscape, the introduction lays down a methodological framework that the subsequent chapters apply to the genre I have dubbed “minor-character elaboration.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many minor characters lurking in the background of this text, but only one narrator-protagonist. The fact that they are not visible in the body of this book should not be mistaken for insignificance. On the contrary, I could not have completed it without their help. I won’t elaborate each character into an entire novel, but I hope each of you knows how grateful I am for your help. My first thanks are owed to Mollie Godfrey for providing the conversation that sparked this project and for her challenging and thoughtful responses to my work for a long time afterward. The most major minor characters of this project, those whose efforts appear most prominently in this text yet remain largely hidden, are my graduate advisors Deborah Nelson, Kenneth Warren, and Sandra Macpherson, who spent countless hours reading drafts, discussing the project on the phone and in person, and constantly pushing me to refine my thinking. Thank you, Debbie, for challenging me to take genre fiction seriously and for refusing to apologize for the fact that it is genre fiction. Ken, thanks for helping me put pressure on the political claims of minor-character elaborations and for making me figure out social formalism in Colloquium. And thank you, Sandra, for helping me see the centrality of minor characters to the history of the novel, for provoking me to a more nuanced understanding of the politics of form, and, most of all, for the constant generosity and confidence you have extended to me. The project’s origins also owe much to a number of

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other mentors at the University of Chicago with whom I began discussing a set of issues surrounding point of view, sympathy, rewritings of canonical texts, and the workings of the culture industry and around which this project coalesced: Jim Chandler, Bill Veeder, and Miriam Hansen. Conversations with other colleagues at Chicago were indispensable. Thanks to Robin Valenza, Mark Hansen, Leela Gandhi, Jackie Goldsby, Elizabeth Chandler, Benjamin Blattberg, Bobby Baird, Amy Gentry, Nathan Wolff, Moacir de Sa Pereira, Josh Kotin, Lubna Najar, Tom Perrin, and the members of the American Cultures Workshop. Thanks also to the Caribbean English Teachers Association, the CUNY Graduate Center, and James Madison University for allowing me to present parts of this work in progress. I have had the great good fortune of finding a set of colleagues of the University of Utah who have shared with me their rare combination of incisive critical thought and incredibly warm generosity. Many of them have read parts of this work with great care, and all have helped support me in the writing of it and in the adjustment to a new job and home. They have motivated and inspired me with the example of their work and the desire to remain in their company. Immense thanks go to Scott Black, Kate Coles, Al Duncan, Howard Horwitz, Lauren Jarvis, Andrew Franta, Anne Jamison, Stacey Margolis, Michael Mejia, Matt Potolsky, Angela Smith, Kathryn Stockton, Barry Weller, and Michelle Wolfe. I also send my gratitude to Rita Felski and the editors at New Literary History, as well as the readers and editors at Contemporary Literature, who gave great suggestions that helped sharpen portions of this book. Thanks to the Literature Now editors, Matthew Hart, David James, and Rebecca Walkowitz, and to Philip Leventhal and the editors and readers at Columbia University Press. To my family I owe debts, material and intangible, that cannot be conveyed here. Thank you, Linda Rosen, Jon Rosen, Ben Rosen, and Christine Maiello for bearing with my moods, keeping me going, and continuing to support me and love me over the long haul.

MINOR CHARACTERS HAVE THEIR DAY

Introduction

THREE AXES OF GENRE STUDY

Minor characters: overshadowed by definition, all of a sudden they are taking over the popular literary landscape. These characters have help, of course. Over the last several decades, an eclectic and ever-growing assortment of contemporary writers has been seizing minor figures from the original texts in which they appeared and recasting them in leading roles. Take, for example, Christopher Moore, whose Fool (2009) retells Shakespeare’s King Lear from the perspective of Lear’s jester. Fool offers readers a particular pleasure, the kind conjured by the very title of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which appeared in the same year: the frisson of witnessing the symbolic desecration of a hallowed literary monument. In an “Author’s Note,” Moore unrepentantly describes his desire to “put [his] greasy hands all over [and] befoul” Shakespeare’s “perfectly elegant tragedy.”1 Moore has made a career of putting ribald spins on popular genres,2 and in travestying a classic story while narrating from the point of view of its protagonist’s sidekick he reprised a formula he had already exploited in Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (2002). The reliability of this recipe has not escaped the notice of the author or his publisher HarperCollins; Moore has recently dipped into the well again, publishing a sequel to Fool entitled The Serpent of Venice (2014), a mash-up of Shakespearean characters and settings, rolled together with allusions to other canonical literary works. In fact, Moore is far from alone in recognizing

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the vast potential for iterations of this formula. With these novels, he joined the steadily growing international throng of authors who, since Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), have adopted the genre I call “minor-character elaboration,” a genre constituted by the conversion of minor characters from canonical literary texts into the protagonists of new ones. It might seem perverse to cite Rhys and Moore in the same sentence— perhaps even in the same book. Aggressively rewriting Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to focus on the now famous “madwoman in the attic,” Wide Sargasso Sea has become canonical in its own right, a paradigmatic text for feminist and postcolonial scholarship. Whereas Fool proudly advertises itself, in a pull-quote blazoned on the back cover of the Harper paperback edition and in a prefatory “WARNING,” as a “bawdy tale” containing “gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity.” But the ostensible perversity of linking these texts actually demonstrates the wide range of uses to which the techniques made famous by Rhys’s novel have been adapted in the decades since its publication as well as the popularization and conventionalization of gestures that seemed radical when Wide Sargasso Sea appeared. To date, the flourishing popular genre Rhys’s novel helped inaugurate has remained largely invisible to literary scholars precisely because when they have written about contemporary rewritings of canonical literature they have tended to focus their attention on texts such as Wide Sargasso Sea that mount a critique of the traditional Western canon and ignored many others such as Fool that fail to adopt a stance of political opposition. To be sure, a series of contemporary writers have closely followed Rhys’s precedent by constructing narratives around the perspectives of socially marginal figures from canonical texts, often seeking to critique the ideologies underlying the manner in which those texts represent minor characters—or their failure to represent socially marginal figures at all. This subset includes Christa Wolf ’s Cassandra (1983), which revisits the Trojan War and the story of Agamemnon’s homecoming from the perspective of the eponymous Trojan prophetess; Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (2001), which imagines a slave half-sister for Gone with the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara; and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), which converts Penelope and a chorus of the twelve maids hanged by Odysseus into dueling narrators. But, as the playfully profane case of Fool indicates, contemporary authors have put

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minor-character elaboration to varied use. Perhaps the most visible marker of the genre’s success as a vehicle for contemporary cultural production— conspicuous signs of it hailed me from the roofs of taxicabs and towering billboards in New York and Chicago as I began this project—remains Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995) and the hugely popular Broadway musical adapted from that novel.3 Many other works since John Gardner’s Grendel (1971) have imagined the perspectives of famous villains, including John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius (2000); John Clinch’s Finn (2007), the story of Huck’s abusive, alcoholic Pap; and John Scieszka’s delightful The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, by A. Wolf (1989).4 Like Scieszka, a number of writers have playfully reimagined nonhuman characters as their protagonists. Madison Smartt Bell’s “Small Blue Thing” (2000) makes Poe’s raven even more talkative, and when one gets acquainted with the woodworm aboard Noah’s Ark who narrates “Stowaway,” the opening chapter of Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1990), it becomes tempting to say that in the house of contemporary fiction minor characters have been coming out of the woodwork. In novels such as Robin Lippincott’s Mr. Dalloway (1999); Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia (2008), which makes a heroine of Aeneas’s wife; and David Malouf ’s Ransom (2009), which centers on Priam’s journey to redeem the corpse of Hector from an enraged Achilles, contemporary writers pay homage by imaginatively expanding the worlds of their illustrious forebears. Still other works, such as Geraldine Brooks’s Pulitzer Prize–winning March (2004), which makes a protagonist of the absent father from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, seem little interested in dialogue, polemical or otherwise, with their predecessors, and use them as pretexts for the creation of historical fictions. These subgroupings inevitably overlap; many minor-character elaborations blend homage, critique, historical fiction, and humor. This book began as an effort to explain how the proliferation of minorcharacter elaboration happened. When did this genre begin to flourish, and why have so many authors adopted its techniques over the past several decades? What satisfactions do such texts provide (or purport to provide) for their readers? What (real or imaginary) social needs does the genre fulfill? Why have publishers embraced these books, and how have they marketed them? And what can analyzing this genre reveal about the forms, politics, and institutions of the contemporary literary marketplace and

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postwar culture more broadly? At minimum, the fact that practiced genrefiction hands such as Moore have gravitated to minor-character elaboration suggests that we need to revise our sense of revision—that is, our understanding of contemporary intertextual production,5 the fortunes of canonical literary works, and the politics of popular literary culture at the turn of the millennium. Literary scholars’ near-exclusive attention to intertextual works that endeavor to subvert their predecessors and can be championed as instances of feminist “re-vision” or “writing back” from the margins,6 ironically, seems analogous to the kind of exclusive focus for which minorcharacter elaborations fault their canonical predecessors. The “protagonists” of existing critical accounts of contemporary intertextuality, one might say, are works that mount an ideological critique of the canon for excluding or “silencing” socially marginal characters. While those purportedly subversive texts and the hopes scholars have attached to them are an important part of the story I tell here, when one widens the focus to observe the array of uses for which the generic technology of minor-character elaboration has been deployed, a different picture appears. One is forced to confront the (seemingly obvious) fact that a great many intertextual works do not launch a critique of the canon and that even those that do may not be performing the political work we think they are. I will argue that they instead serve to prop up liberal individualism and are deeply embedded in the massproduction cycles of multinational capitalism. Because if Wide Sargasso Sea offered a “revisionary paradigm” for feminist and subaltern responses to the canon,7 it also served as a template for a popular genre. The endlessly iterable form of minor-character elaboration, its aura of literariness, inclusive politics, and its message that we are all equally compelling individuals—equally deserving of protagonist status—have combined to make the genre an appealing vehicle for the culture industry to target baby boomers schooled in the liberal arts during the postwar expansion of higher education and sympathetic to ostensibly subversive or oppositional politics. The trajectory of the genre—from its emergence amid the insurgent political movements and postmodernist experimentation of the 1960s; through the mid-1980s, when it is increasingly deployed and its principal conventions become visible; to the 1990s and 2000s, when the culture industry embraces and aggressively markets minor-character elaboration as a form of genre fiction—illuminates successive stages of the cultural history of the last five decades, demonstrating both the ambitions and the overly

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sanguine hopes of left cultural politics over this period. Minor-character elaboration initially seemed to brim with the potential to facilitate a radical critique of the literary tradition for neglecting subaltern perspectives and to help “recover” submerged narratives of violence and oppression, and literary scholars have embraced and helped propagate the genre accordingly. I show, however, the limitations of a textual politics that counts the liberation of the “voices” of fictional characters as success and that often relies on essentialist claims about who can access minor characters’ authentic voices. Rather than a subversive challenge, the genre’s ascendance signals a broad spirit of liberal pluralist inclusiveness and the prevalence of some postmodern banalities (there is no truth, only perspectives; everyone deserves a voice). The truism that any story can be retold from countless perspectives ends up helping well-read contemporary authors gain an elevated foothold in a competitive market for books and facilitating scores of genre-fiction iterations for a consolidated global publishing industry, which preserves the traditional canon’s cultural centrality by trading on its prestige. The canon thus returns triumphant, in and through a genre that seemed determined to point up its outdatedness, and it does so in the prevailing form triumph takes in contemporary life: triumph in the marketplace. Because the production of minor-character elaborations has absolutely taken off in the past several decades, a narrow focus on politically oppositional texts also, and I think as importantly, represents a missed opportunity for studying genre: the adaptation of a literary form to diverse purposes, the way conventional forms disclose shared assumptions and social commitments, and the way such forms circulate through institutions and material channels of production and consumption. Literary and cultural scholars have not only focused the bulk of their energies on subversive texts. They have also defined intertextual genres according to such texts’ shared political affinities.8 It should be fairly easy to see the problem of selection bias that results when one categorizes texts based on their common political commitment. Analysis of such texts will inevitably generate a partial picture of contemporary intertextuality, both incomplete and biased, in which subversiveness reigns supreme. If one understands genre, instead, as the shared adoption of a textual practice, as writers’ repeated adherence to and variation upon a given literary form, one is forced to confront the wide array of political and aesthetic purposes for which such a practice gets adopted. But one also finds that reading across the range

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of production using minor-character elaboration, of which I have so far merely sketched the surface, reveals deep continuities between a seemingly disparate assortment of writers. My analysis of minor-character elaboration thus offers to demonstrate what can be gleaned from the sustained and in-depth study of a genre, especially when a history of the evolution of literary forms is combined with cultural history and a literary sociology of the material conditions under which such forms circulate. And so, while I initially set out to write a book that explained how a particular kind of novel had become ubiquitous in the contemporary literary marketplace, somewhere along the way it became clear that Minor Characters Have Their Day was also a book about genre as such—what a genre is; how and why a given form comes to prominence, evolves, and gets re- and deformed over time; how genres function in cultural hierarchies and markets; and about the virtues and pitfalls of genre as an analytic method. Minor-character elaboration offers a particularly instructive and topical case study for an investigation into the workings of genre—so topical, in fact, that writing this book has been an exercise in trying to keep up with each new instance reviewed in the New York Times Book Review or that I learn about from a friend or colleague. Because such a variety of writers spanning national boundaries, the political spectrum, and the ostensible divide of “literary” and “genre fiction” have adopted this genre in recent decades, it represents an object of inquiry with the potential to convey a wide-ranging picture of contemporary literary production that nonetheless remains focused on a particular kind of textual practice. Moreover, minor-character elaboration usefully demonstrates the overlapping of cultural spheres that are often thought to be in tension if not antithetical. The genre has become a popular form of genre fiction but also a vehicle that has launched prestigious prizewinning works of literary quality. Engagé writers have gravitated to the genre in order to articulate subaltern perspectives or critique the politics of representation in canonical texts, but others have used it to launch explicit programs of cultural conservation and homage. As the genre emerged to prominence in the late 1960s and has flourished over the decades since, its history runs alongside the “culture wars” and offers to disclose the outcome of those battles, the fate in contemporary culture of both the traditional canon and revisionist strategies pitted against it. The increasing adoption of the genre also coincides with the era of the publishing industry’s consolidation, suggesting that the

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success of minor-character elaboration in the marketplace can shed light on the effects of that consolidation, the kinds of texts that appeal to largescale corporate publishers and their smaller “independent” competitors, and the ways such publishers market their wares to contemporary readers. And, as the writers who have seized on canonical minor characters hail from several continents, the genre demonstrates how form is portable, how influence hurdles borders, and how genre—and the global media corporations who dominate today’s publishing industry—establish transnational literary communities.

The remainder of this introductory chapter lays out, in three sections, the three methodological axes along which this book pursues its study of minor-character elaboration, methods it argues are fundamental to any inquiry into genre. The introduction derives a general theory of genre, using minor-character elaboration as an exemplary case and seeking to familiarize readers with the common features of this genre and some of its representative texts. The first section sketches the history of minor-character elaboration, which exemplifies the fact that genres are historically shifting practices that are both reiterable and variable, and situates this book among recent calls for renewed attention to genre. The writers who adopt minor-character elaboration test the endless possibilities, formal, thematic, and political, offered by the basic framework of the generic practice, altering the material that hangs on that framework or the form itself, in pursuit of their representational goals. Though instances of a genre’s deployment thus differ from one another in practice, I show in the second part of this introduction that the common features that constitute a genre’s central conventions convey a shared social logic. In the case of minor-character elaboration, the genre’s conventional form of imaginatively constructing a formerly minor character’s perspective, depicting the character’s psychology or narrative voice, indicates the extension of a liberal individualist project for the realist novel. The genre’s conventional form articulates the notion that everyone has an equally compelling subjectivity, a unique perspective, and thus is qualified for, even deserving of, protagonist status. The third section argues that genres must be studied in the context of the markets and cultural institutions in which they circulate. The fact that we use the same word to designate kinds of literary practice and the

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popular forms often disparagingly called “genre fiction” is not coincidence or linguistic slippage. I stress that producers necessarily deploy the formal reiteration and variability of a given genre in order to meet the demands of material conditions of production and consumption and to secure positions in symbolic cultural hierarchies. The social consensus that a genre’s conventional structures register likewise proves instrumental in such contexts, helping producers appeal to and access audiences who hold those consensus values. To exemplify the study of genre in its institutional context, I trace a sociology of minor-character elaboration’s function in the marketplace, demonstrating how the genre’s social logic is deeply compatible with its market logic as the inclusion of the perspectives or “voices” of socially marginal figures make it a reliable vehicle for appealing to identity-group readerships. The publishers who have embraced the genre value both its apparent subversiveness and its ability to trade on the prestige of the traditional canon, and they market such books by positioning the contemporary authors alongside their renowned predecessors. After its principal tasks of introducing minor-character elaboration and outlining these three major axes of genre study, the introduction, like the book as a whole, delves deeper to address fundamental theoretical questions surrounding the extratextual “lives” of literary characters that are provoked by this genre and then opens outward to suggest how the study of one genre can offer insights into a succession of related genres and, thus, convey a broader picture of contemporary cultural production. WRESTLING PROTEUS: GENRE AS SHAPE-SHIFTING PRACTICE

Like Christopher Moore, Margaret Atwood has found in minor-character elaboration a formal resource that she has returned to throughout her career. In her very short story “Gertrude Talks Back” (1992), Atwood converts Hamlet’s mother into a narrator and protagonist, anticipating Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius by several years, and she returned to Hamlet in “Horatio’s Version” (2006).9 (Moore, Atwood, Updike: such are the strange bedfellows, surprising affiliations, for which genre study forces us to account.) In The Penelopiad, Atwood turns to the Odyssey, using her versions of Penelope and the hanged maids as alternating narrators who recount the events at Ithaca during the wanderings of Odysseus. Here the author’s purpose will likely strike literary scholars as a familiar one. Atwood has Penelope protest

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“the official version” of her story, Homer’s Odyssey, for using her character as “an edifying legend. A stick used to beat other women with. Why couldn’t they be as considerate, as trustworthy, as all-suffering as I had been?”10 Atwood’s Penelope protests the ideological function of her character in the Odyssey, the way the character presents an idealized portrait of female fidelity. The author’s conversion of Penelope into a narrator and use of the maids as a choral counterpoint take part in a well-established feminist tradition of “recovering” previously silent voices from the margins of canonical narratives.11 In their final song, “Envoi,” the maids lament: “we had no voice / we had no name / . . . / it was not fair / but now we’re here / . . . / now, we call / to you to you” (Atwood, Penelopiad, 195). Atwood’s maids entreat contemporary readers to attend to their song and condemn the “honour killing” (193) that follows the climactic scene of the Odyssey and that the epic presents as part of the hero’s necessary purification of his home.12 Like the Penelopiad, Le Guin’s Lavinia makes a narrator and protagonist out of the wife of an epic hero, but the novels differ markedly in structure and in their stance toward their predecessors. Le Guin’s Lavinia narrates the entire book, and when the author strayed from her home provinces of fantasy and science fiction to publish a novel set in antiquity, she set out to offer a song of praise. In the Aeneid, Lavinia is the Latin princess whose suitors Aeneas battles in order to win her hand and establish his dynasty on the territories that will later become Rome. While Virgil thus installs Lavinia in a crucial structural position in the epic, he has her appear fleetingly in it and does not give her a speaking part. But rather than attempt to critique the “official version,” Le Guin poses her novel, in an afterword, as “a meditative interpretation suggested by a minor character” in the Aeneid.13 Le Guin’s précis captures quite succinctly the artistic venture that authors of minor-character elaborations undertake. Even literary works of epic magnitude (perhaps especially these) point to excesses that they cannot or choose not to contain—backstories, possible sequels or continued adventures, characters that readers barely glimpse. Contemporary writers take these “hints,” suggestions of stories untold or available to be told differently, “meditate” on them, and offer their own “interpretation” in the form of a new literary work. Le Guin seems aware of the broader recent trend in which Lavinia takes part, but in the novel, afterword, and interviews, she takes pains to reject the assumption one might leap to: that she intends Lavinia as a feminist response to or subversion of the Aeneid. Lavinia’s

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narration anticipates the desire for readers to enlist the novel to a feminist project and preempts dismissals from the likes of Harold Bloom: “I am not the feminine voice you may have expected. Resentment is not what drives me to write my story” (Le Guin, Lavinia, 68).14 In the afterword, Le Guin makes plain, for any reader who might have missed the reverential posture of the novel proper, that she sees the book as homage, “an act of gratitude to the poet, a love offering.” Far from intending an assault on the Western canon, its values, or its hold on the imaginations of successive generations, Le Guin sees her project as a literal act of cultural conservation. She poses the novel as a bulwark for tradition, a defense against the eventuality that Virgil’s “voice will be silenced” with the “true death of his language” (273).15 In interviews, Le Guin has been even more explicit in rejecting the mode of feminist re-vision or subversion. She maintains that she knows “how well Virgil understood women and the respect he had for them” and thus that Lavinia “was not written like Margaret Atwood’s Penelope book to right a wrong, or set Homer straight. You don’t need to set Virgil straight on women.”16 However one might be inclined to disagree with Le Guin on the politics of Virgil’s representations of female characters or distrust her comments in light of the independent heroine and single mother portrayed in her novel, what I want to stress here is how, by invoking Atwood’s Penelopiad, Le Guin registers her understanding that she is working alongside contemporary writers employing similar forms and methods without necessarily using those forms and methods for the same literary or political purpose—in other words, that she is working within and using a genre. The example of Le Guin and Atwood offers a compelling way of thinking about genre: not as an ideal category with static rules or criteria but as a malleable, historically dynamic kind of literary and rhetorical practice that may be manipulated according to the needs and purposes of those who adopt it. Thomas Pavel describes genre in similar terms, suggesting that genres are “norms” constituted by a “unique mixture of stability and flexibility” and lucidly defining genre as “a set of good recipes, or good habits of the trade, oriented towards the achievement of definite artistic goals.”17 With the exception of strict formal genres such as the sonnet, Pavel indicates that genres are flexible technologies, methods that may rely on a typical thematic content, formal device, or a combination of both.18 After a period in which genre had experienced a “decline as a vital issue in contemporary literary theory,” recent years have seen a growing

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consensus about both the errors of earlier modes of genre study and the benefits of a renewed, more supple application of generic analysis as a critical methodology.19 The current consensus represents a middle ground between two extreme philosophies of genre that have dominated its history: on the one hand, dogmatic transhistorical classification systems (from Aristotle’s Poetics to Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism) that formulate criteria that define a genre, often based on prototypical texts, and then determine whether subsequent texts qualify for “membership” or not—the countryclub model of genre—and, on the other hand, romantic and deconstructive theorists (notably Croce and Derrida), who view generic classification as a misguided and repressive effort to impose pseudoscientific laws and categories onto singular, sui generis artistic entities.20 Recent genre theorists, discovering and adapting the work of the Russian formalists on the evolution of genres, have distanced themselves from these poles by considering genres empirically and historically, as dynamic practices that grow out of other genres and transform over time as new instances retain some features while adapting or discarding others.21 Literary genres, in this view, are not static categories or corpuses, established groups of texts that abide by fixed sets of rules, though they are nonetheless made up of typified, codifiable practices that constitute norms.22 The particular utility of genre analysis derives from tracing the emergence and development of such norms, as their evolution provides a guide to literary and historical change. Jonathan Culler has recently called for more rigorous accounts of individual genres, as part of a return to poetics that would chart the formation of literary conventions, against which one might measure individual texts: We are rich in theories about language, discourse, hybridity, identity, sexuality, but not in theories of the rules and conventions of particular genres, though such theories are necessary for understanding the ways individual works subvert these conventions—which, after all, is a major point of interest for interpretation. One problem of postcolonial studies, for instance, which otherwise is thriving, is the absence of good accounts of the literary norms against which postcolonial authors are said to be writing.23

In a similar vein, Tvetzan Todorov writes, “Genres are the meeting place between general poetics and event-based literary history; as such, they

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constitute a privileged object that may well deserve to be the principal figure in literary studies.”24 Minor-character elaboration exemplifies the way genres are constituted both by a set of relatively stable norms and a heterogeneous, historically variant set of practical instantiations. The genre’s history is discernible and has a conventional form, though writers modify that form as they deploy it in the service of various ends. I trace the recent history of the genre to the late 1960s, when contemporary writers begin to adopt the practice with regularity. Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was first performed that same year. Works such as Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (1969) and Gardner’s Grendel (1971) followed close behind, but a lag of a decade and a half—perhaps the time it took for these early examples to become sufficiently prominent—would intervene before producers began to employ the technology with frequency by the mid-1980s.25 But the late 1960s is less a moment of origin than a return; the expansion and revision of familiar stories and characters date at least to Gilgamesh.26 Paula Richman has written extensively on the history of manifold retellings of stories from the Ramayana from different geographic, caste, religious, and gendered perspectives throughout India, and she recently edited a collection of modern versions of these stories.27 The Homeric epics are only standardized versions of a far older, heterogeneous tradition,28 and one need only think of Aeschylus dramatizing Agamemnon’s return from Troy, a brief account in the Odyssey, Ovid’s Heroides, Chaucer’s poetic treatment of Troilus and Criseyde, or Shakespeare’s recasting of the same couple to recognize the long history of expanding minor episodes and characters from Homer.29 Le Guin could cite Virgil himself as her model in this regard. And poets, from Dante’s and Tennyson’s Ulysses, Browning’s Caliban, and Pound’s modern Odysseus as “no man,” to H.D.’s extracting Claribel from the margins of The Tempest, have long been adopting classic characters as speakers.30 But before Eudora Welty’s short story “Circe” (1955), which converts the demigoddess into the narrator of a revised account of Odysseus’s travels to her island,31 one is hard pressed to find twentieth-century examples of minor-character elaboration, and there are no novelistic ones before Wide Sargasso Sea.32 The highly allusive high modernists were less interested in appropriating minor characters or settings than in taking archetypal plot structures and mythic character types

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(for example, Joyce’s Ulysses and Mann’s Doctor Faustus) and transposing them into the modern world. Rather than the birth of a genre or a point of origin, the late 1960s mark a revival and proliferation of the practice, the awakening of novelists to its potential, and a particular concern for the socially marginal. What becomes evident immediately is that the form of minor-character elaboration is malleable, adaptable. The basic practice of appropriating a plot, setting, and cast of characters from a canonical text while shifting the emphasis to a previously minor figure can be executed in a variety of ways in pursuit of different representational goals. It is not only that this form can be filled with different content—with the raw material of Jane Eyre or King Lear—but that the form can be stretched and pulled in any number of directions. As I detail in chapter 2, the conversion of a formerly minor figure into a narrator-protagonist who “tells her own story” has become the principal convention of the genre. In such texts as Le Guin’s Lavinia, Gardner’s Grendel, and Brooks’s March, the authors make their title characters into narrators who proceed to offer their sides of the familiar story. From the beginning, however, individual instances depart in myriad ways and degrees from what will, in retrospect, become recognizable as the genre’s conventional form. Critics and reviewers often shorthand Wide Sargasso Sea as the story of the “madwoman in the attic” or of “the first Mrs. Rochester,” but Rhys’s novel employs a tripartite narrative structure, alternating between the narration of the “madwoman” (whom Rhys renames “Antoinette”) and that of an unnamed “Rochester” figure. Further, as I stress in chapter 1, Rhys creates narrators who are not fully coherent, reliable, or sympathetic tellers of their tales. She thus invites readers to approach skeptically these formerly minor figures rather than be seduced into straightforward sympathetic identification with or sentimental attachment to them.33 Rhys’s alternating, fractured narratives refuse to replace a previous version of a story with one that claims to be a true report or authentic account of the narrator’s self and instead force readers to adjudicate among several conflicting points of view. Multiple formerly minor figures serve as rival narrators in later works such as Atwood’s Penelopiad, Christa Wolf ’s Medea: A Novel (trans. 1998), and Brooks’s March, which embeds several letters to and from the wife of the eponymous protagonist—this partial epistolary structure representing another variation of the form. In these works, the conflicting viewpoints raise doubts about the objective truth of any narration, undermining any

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one character’s claim to offer an authoritative version. Wolf ’s Cassandra has its title character narrate the entirety of the novel, but four rangy essays— on Wolf ’s travels to ruins in Crete, challenges facing women writers, and a history of Western violence up to the Cold War—originally delivered as lectures at the University of Frankfurt, accompany the novel proper, giving the book Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays a unique multivoiced structure that blends the genres of minor-character elaboration and memoir.34 Wolf ’s hybrid book—or Moore’s combining minor-character elaboration with a travesty of King Lear—demonstrates how texts frequently use multiple genres. Similarly, genres often overlap substantially with related ones. While keeping such fusions and boundary cases in sight, minorcharacter elaboration can be differentiated from related intertextual genres in order to historicize the proliferation of the practice, to establish how its conventional gestures emerge and become subject to innovation, and to determine the sociocultural significance of those conventions. When critics have considered texts that convert a previously minor character into a protagonist, they have often conflated them with other intertextual genres, particularly the common practice of “transposing” classic storylines onto modern settings (as in Ulysses, West Side Story [1957], Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres [1991], or Amy Heckerling’s Clueless [1995])35 and the contemporary boom in novels that take famous authors as their protagonists (as in J. M. Coetzee’s Master of Petersburg [1994] and Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George [2005]).36 Minor-character elaboration is an intertextual genre distinct from others but also one that is subject to internal variation. Texts such as Cassandra that combine multiple genres demonstrate the difficulties that face any scholar who would endeavor to quantify the production of texts using a given genre, the way the heterogeneity of actual literary texts frustrates any effort to categorize them neatly. Unlike the recent vogue of quantitative literary scholarship, which works at a high level of abstraction, genre study offers the flexibility to analyze the broader trends of the mainstream while remaining sensitive to the distinctive features of individual works, attributes that challenge readers and reveal ways of getting off the beaten path—ways that later writers may subject to heavy traffic. Theorists have often pointed to the gap between individual works and generic norms as a way of accounting for the singularity of masterworks, as in the well-known “horizon of expectations” posited by Hans Robert Jauss, but this gap is one that quantitative scholarship cannot see, let alone

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account for. Jauss calls the history of genres “a temporal process of the continual founding and altering of horizons,” and he replaces metaphors of generic evolution or development with “the nonteleological concept of the playing out of a limited number of possibilities. In this concept a masterwork is definable in terms of an alteration of the horizon of the genre that is as unexpected as it is enriching; the genre’s prehistory is definable in terms of a trying and testing of possibilities; and its arrival at a historical end is definable in terms of formal ossification . . . epigones.”37 While I will dispute the notion that generic practices ever “arrive at an end,” at which point they can no longer be adapted, Jauss’s notion of a “testing of possibilities” provides a conceptual framework for understanding the varied iterations that have resulted when contemporary authors have adopted minor-character elaboration. Further, Jauss’s theory points to the way a revitalized mode of sustained genre analysis offers an adjustable optic that can attend to both a mass of conventional texts and individual divergences, and thus it is one answer to the problems of scale that face today’s literary scholars and scholars of the contemporary period in particular.38 Franco Moretti has undoubtedly been the most influential and provocative recent scholar of literary genre. His (more teleologically inclined) work on the “life-cycles” of genres incorporates a view similar to Todorov’s in understanding them as “Janus-like creatures, with one face turned toward history and the other to form” and suggesting that they “are thus the true protagonists of th[e] middle layer of literary history,” between the individual text and the long run.39 Moretti has prominently advocated a program of “distant reading” that abstracts and aggregates texts into quantitative data sets. Some distance is also demanded by the study of a genre such as minor-character elaboration. Texts do not serve as evidence on their own but rather in relation to others; clusters of texts will constitute the object of study rather than the individual exemplar. Moretti’s quantitative method, however, is too distant because it elides any distinctions among texts in the degree to which or manner in which they employ the resources of a genre, reducing all “members” of a genre to equal numerical “participation” in it. He acknowledges that “a quantitative history of literature is also a profoundly formalist one—especially at the beginning and end of the research process . . . at the beginning, because a formal concept is usually what makes quantification possible in the first place: since a series must be composed of homogeneous objects, a morphological category

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is needed—‘novel’, ‘anti-Jacobin novel’, ‘comedy’, etc.—to establish such homogeneity.”40 Moretti’s approach (quantifying and graphing data from extant bibliographies), however, obscures this opening stage of analysis, giving the appearance that the process of categorization is a simple matter of sorting each text into the appropriate bin. But what about the text that is an anti-Jacobin comic novel? Does it fit into each bin? None of them?41 It is precisely the imperative to impose homogeneity on a heterogeneous array of objects that this study will avoid. Wai Chee Dimock delivers the crucial argument against such tidy systems of categorization: “Unfinishability might also be said to be a systemic failing in all genres—a productive failing—in the sense that none is a closed book, none an exhaustive blueprint able to predict and contain all future developments. Far from being a neat catalog of what exists and what is to come, genres are a vexed attempt to deal with material that might or might not fit into that catalog.” Instead of “distant” or “close” reading, Dimock argues for “breaking down the supposed opposition between the large and small.  .  .  . If the macro scale depends on extended kinship, that kinship is demonstrated only if the micro evidence is sufficiently detailed and precise.”42 Similarly, Pavel recommends “detailed attention to the interplay between abstract categories and the originality of their instantiation.”43 Oscillation between large and small scale, the abstract formal category and the empirical instantiation, is the method I adopt here, and it is one that makes an analytic opportunity, rather than an inassimilable piece of data, out of the text that doesn’t fit neatly into a given category. Dimock wonders, “what would literary studies look like if it were organized by genres in this unfinished sense, with spillovers at front and center?”44 A messy proposition, perhaps, but in studying an empirical genre, particularly a contemporary, unstudied one that is constantly changing as new instances come into view, one discovers such spillovers everywhere. An account that does not try to reduce the complexity of a historical phenomenon demands acknowledgment of its unstable borders and overlap with other genres. Alastair Fowler captures the fact that genres are flexible technologies rather than stable categories with characteristic elegance: “In reality genre is much less of a pigeonhole than a pigeon, and genre theory has a different use altogether [from categorization], being concerned with communication and interpretation.”45 In this view, a genre is a moving target—not a Janus figure but a Protean one, slippery, constantly changing shape.

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This changeability (and the practical difficulty of discovering all relevant examples of a previously unnoticed genre—where does one begin to look?) is why I have resisted the temptation to try to quantify the production of minor-character elaborations or offer the pretense of an exhaustive list. As with any genre, the “horizons” or edges of what can be considered a minor-character elaboration are permeable and shifting. In the appendix, I catalogue more than fifty texts that have elaborated minor characters since 1966, but the attempt to locate and count all instances of minor-character elaboration is futile precisely because of the categorical instability I have been discussing. Counting first requires determining what counts, and such determinations are a matter of interpretation. But even finding a wide corpus of such texts has proven challenging. There are no existing bibliographies, and titles are not a reliable guide.46 Admitting its instability, I nonetheless insist that the genre has a real existence and a distinct set of properties, which this book isolates and analyzes in their specificity. At the genre’s relatively stable center stands the double gesture of overt appropriation of a canonical literary text’s plot, setting, and characters and the conversion of a minor character from the predecessor into the protagonist of the new text. While the major story elements are retained, with the shift in emphasis or perspective to a minor character there is often a corresponding shift in details or the meaning of those events to the new protagonist. Looking closer at texts that employ these basic techniques, we immediately detect further variation.47 “Minor” is a relative term, and some texts adopt figures that are fairly central in the predecessor text (but not the protagonist, which would qualify the work as using a historically far more common genre: the sequel), such as in Atwood’s Penelopiad or Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius. Others, such as Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife (1999), make protagonists out of characters that are merely mentioned but do not appear in the precursor. Still others, such as Randall’s The Wind Done Gone, Barnes’s “Stowaway,” and Moore’s Lamb, center on characters that the authors invent from scratch and insert into a familiar story. The degree to which the precursor’s plot is retained also diverges. Novels such as Wide Sargasso Sea and Wicked largely offer the minor characters’ back stories and eventually connect with the events of their predecessors. Others, such as Nancy Rawles’s My Jim (2005), which converts the wife of Jim from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into a narrator-protagonist, depict events that are contemporaneous with those of the predecessor but

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that occur in a different locale—back, in the case of Jim’s wife Sadie, on the farm where she is left in slavery while he has escaped downriver. The degree and kind of canonicity of the predecessor texts also vary. Contemporary authors have frequently excavated minor characters from classical epics, the Bible, Shakespeare, and other “high-canonical” authors. But Randall’s response to Gone with the Wind, Maguire’s Wicked, and George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels, which feature the bully from Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), demonstrate that contemporary writers have borrowed from what Moretti has termed the “social canon” along with the academic one.48 The kind of canonicity is significant; contemporary authors that elaborate characters from popular, as opposed to “high-literary” texts, are less invested in the prestige of their predecessors than in wide audience familiarity with them. Writers who want to lend their works an air of literariness or, like Moore, to violate cheekily a literary paragon are better served by appropriating a work that has achieved the elevated status of the classic. But it makes little sense to borrow a character from a work no one would recognize, and doing so might constitute a different, because covert, form of intertextuality. Another aspect of the genre that varies considerably across its instantiations concerns the degree to which a previously minor character is altered or developed with respect to the earlier depiction. I settled on the admittedly unwieldy appellation “minor-character elaboration” because I believe the genre is fundamentally distinguished by the fact that when a minor character is converted to a protagonist, the character is meaningfully transformed, built into something new. The contemporary writer “elaborates” the minor character in the word’s earliest sense: “to fashion (a product of art or industry) from the raw material.”49 This author adds labor, modifies the raw material of character from its initial instantiation. Such modification differentiates the genre from close relatives like spinoffs, sequels (both authorized and apocryphal), and today’s booming fan-fiction communities, all of which typically offer new plots for certain, usually major characters without fundamentally transforming them.50 When Kingsley Amis wrote the James Bond novel Colonel Sun (1968), he adopted Ian Fleming’s character and invented continued adventures for him. The novel should be considered an authorized sequel, both legally and in terms of characterization, because Amis’s Bond is recognizable as the same character as Fleming’s. But clearly the distinction between a sequel that offers more of the

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same character and an elaboration in which that character is significantly altered is a matter of degree and, in fact, interpretation. Readers might disagree about the extent to which, for example, the Darcy in Janet Aylmer’s Darcy’s Story (2006) is transformed or simply extended from that of Pride and Prejudice. That determining whether Darcy’s Story ought to be considered a minor-character elaboration or a sequel relies on close analysis bears out Dimock’s assertion that claims for generic kinship demand “micro evidence” that is “sufficiently detailed and precise.” Rather than ruling out texts that don’t “qualify,” however, my method will be to consider kindred texts as relevant to the degree their similarity and difference proves analytically useful. Darcy’s Story looks, on close inspection, more like a sequel—readers get more of the Darcy they know and love rather than a revised version of the character—but the novel certainly takes part in a trend of retelling classics from alternative perspectives as well as in the booming contemporary market for Austen rewritings. The varying applications of minor-character elaboration also provoke the question whether genres can extend across different media. I have already referred to dramatic texts like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and A Tempest, both of which foreground minor characters from Shakespeare. As dramas, neither “adopts the perspective of ” or “is told from the point of view of ” a character—yet they redistribute stage time, spoken lines, and plot toward previously minor figures.51 As plays may give enhanced speaking roles to and poems make speakers of minor figures, they adopt similar techniques as narrative fictions that convert minor characters to narrators. The woodworm who narrates only the first chapter, “Stowaway,” in Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, provokes another boundary question: What if the device of minor-character elaboration is folded into a larger multigenre structure? This is also the case of texts such as Marina Warner’s Indigo (1992) and Michel Tournier’s Friday (1967). Tournier’s title suggests a retelling of Robinson Crusoe that converts Friday into its protagonist. But like Defoe’s, Tournier’s novel is primarily about Robinson and adopts his perspective, with the exception of a five-page section focalized through the consciousness of the title character, Friday. Does Friday count as a minor-character elaboration if only this brief episode offers a new, inside view of the formerly minor character? Does only this section count? I want to suggest that these are the wrong questions. Rather than determining whether Friday or a play such as Rosencrantz or a children’s book

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such as Scieszka’s True Story of the Three Little Pigs qualifies categorically or counts in quantitative terms, the pertinent analytic question for such boundary cases ought to be: What does this example tell us about the way the techniques of the genre may be modified for varied purposes? In general, an inclusive historicizing of the genre that takes into account but does not merely obey national boundaries and traditional divisions of labor into studies of drama, fiction, poetry, or high and low forms makes more sense than an exclusive one, and the adaptability of the genre to film, children’s literature, and the fairy tale, for example, indicates a broad sphere of cultural influence and a widely shared epistemology that an exclusive consideration of novels or “literary fiction” would obscure. If one is interested in a genre as a historically existing cultural phenomenon, then it is desirable to consider related forms of production in different media. Because genres are heterogeneous to begin with, constituted by a combination of shared features and divergences, genre analysis is inherently comparative and heterodox, even contemptuous of national borders, established periodization, “brow” height, and medium of delivery. This is the case not only because, as with Wicked, the musical, films, and plays may be adapted from fiction or vice versa but also because artists working in one medium may imitate and adopt genres that have been successful in another.52 The fact that minor-character elaboration may be closely related to other practices, folded into larger designs, or deployed in multiple media suggests that focused analysis of the genre can illuminate the significance of nearby and related phenomena—as well as the cultural networks and institutions through which they circulate. Moreover, to acknowledge the blurriness at a genre’s borders is not to question the relative stability of its center. And it is in the shared conventions that constitute this relatively stable center that the genre’s social meaning can be discerned. SETTING MINOR CHARACTERS FREE: THE SOCIAL LOGIC OF GENERIC CONVENTIONS

While individual minor-character elaborations appear as discrete iterations that test the number of possible variables offered by a basic recipe, genre study need not place exclusive emphasis on tracing formal innovation at the expense of extraliterary historical factors. Analyzing conventions, the shared characteristics that constitute a genre’s stable center, discloses

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the collective assumptions and priorities that explain the commitment of seemingly dissimilar writers to a common form while underscoring and making meaningful their differences. Genre study can thus reveal the ways cultural and historical change shape literary forms that a narrower focus on singular, exemplary texts and authors tends to obscure.53 Genres make visible the social functions of literature, the role of literary forms in articulating broader social and ideological formations. As Bruce Robbins writes, genres can serve as “building blocks of potential histories that link the literary to the nonliterary, thus making a larger claim on our attention than individual masterpieces or, for that matter, individual periods” because “there are social tasks that cause a genre to be seized on . . . and invested with special energy and representativeness.”54 Moretti submits that literary historians ought to pay particular attention to convention, which “is a crucial concept because it indicates when a form has taken definitive social root, entering into daily life, innervating it and organizing it in ways increasingly undetected and regular—and hence more effective.” There is a trade-off here; emphasizing the conventional “enforces a harsh disillusionment because it strips historical existence of its openness to change, and aesthetic form of its pristine purity. . . . To talk about literary genres . . . means re-routing the tasks of literary historiography and the image of literature itself, enclosing them both in the idea of consent, stability, repetition, bad taste even. It means . . . turning . . . the paradise of ‘beauty’—into a social institution like the others.”55 I have already begun to suggest, however, that conventions do not limit or preclude “openness to change” but rather appear retrospectively. Writers can slavishly adhere to formal and thematic precedents but also depart from them in unexpected ways, and the task of genre analysis is to oscillate between norms and the departures of individual instances—or to demonstrate how the extraordinary masterpiece that gains a wide sphere of influence inaugurates its own set of norms.56 Robbins’s compelling formulation, meanwhile, obscures the agency in the process of a genre emerging to fulfill social tasks. When genres are “seized on” at a given moment, who does the seizing and why? As I will elaborate in the next section, producers adopt minor-character elaboration because it helps serve their artistic and communicative needs, including the desire to meditate on suggestive hints in canonical texts but also because the genre helps them gain strategic advantages in a competitive literary marketplace. Thus there is a third avenue at Todorov’s crossroads: genre is “the

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meeting place” where form, history, and material and institutional relations converge. Can one read in the conventional form of the genre the social needs that cause producers to “seize on” minor-character elaboration in the late 1960s and do so with increasing frequency between the 1980s and the present? What social tasks does the genre fulfill? The ancient lineage I sketched above in barest outline suggests that one might explain the proliferation of minor-character elaboration as a rediscovery of vast reserves of material from earlier stories that might be converted into new ones. Minor characters, on this view, persist as untapped sources of narrative energy, roads not taken, and literary history a garden of forking paths through which authors might backtrack, trying new directions. Writers of minor-character elaborations have often described their works as motivated by a particular kind of readerly desire: the desire to know more about a minor character, to fill in the gaps or silences that surround a “hint” or suggestion—a desire that seeks satisfaction by imagining a narrative where a mere trace was found before. We see this desire expressed for example when Jean Rhys writes that Brontë’s Bertha “seemed such a poor ghost. I thought I’d like to write her a life,” and when Tom Stoppard explains that his “chief interest and objective was to exploit a situation which seemed to me to have enormous dramatic and comic potential—of these two guys who in Shakespeare’s context don’t really know what they’re doing,” and when Nancy Rawles wonders about Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “Who was he to his family and community? Who was he to his wife?”57 Explaining the recent surge in minor-character elaboration as simply the discovery of untapped stores of subject matter on the part of contemporary writers, however, fails to account for the particular historical moment at which this kind of literary practice reemerges or for the frequent conversion of female and other socially marginal characters into protagonists. The generic technology of minor-character elaboration does exploit the fundamental condition of limited narrative space, the fact that, as Alex Woloch has argued in his The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, “narrative progress always entails a series of choices: each moment magnifies some characters while turning away from—and thus diminishing or even stinting—others.”58 But writers who have seized on socially marginal characters also frequently view these narrative choices as motivated and ideological rather than arbitrary.

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In understanding minor figures as possessing a disproportionate significance, such writers align with Woloch, who asserts that the stories of minor characters are not simply “excluded” but that the texts in which they appear “powerfully inscrib[e] the very absence of voice that the distributional system produces” (Woloch, The One vs. the Many, 42). This way of conceiving of minor characters as disproportionately significant dovetails with the “luminous detail” of New Historicism59 and the prevalent critical mode of reading the margins canonically defined by Edward Said as “contrapuntal reading”: “We must therefore read the great canonical texts  .  .  . with an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented . . . in such works.”60 In a similar vein, Molly Hite suggests that attention to the hidden or silenced stories of women is the foundational gesture of feminist literary practice: “The notion that stories inevitably both obscure and encode other stories has been axiomatic to our understanding of narrative since at least the eighteenth century; when construed as repressed or suppressed stories of the Other, these stories become the enabling condition for the writing and reading of feminist narrative.” For Hite, experimental feminist texts such as Wide Sargasso Sea critique the ideology and reorient the “value structure” of canonical predecessors by “emphasizing conventionally marginal characters and themes.”61 Minor-character elaborations that foster an appreciation of subaltern perspectives are clearly aligned with a broader turn toward a multicultural politics of recognition and attention to otherness.62 Contemporary writers have imagined the experiences of peripheral female, non-Western, proletarian, and queer characters that populate canonical texts, which center on the dramas of white, male, upper-class protagonists. Or such writers have contested the way a canonical text depicts a socially marginal figure, finding the representation to be not only thin but also flawed, inauthentic, incompatible with their sense of reality, even stereotypical or demeaning. It would be tempting, at this point, to suggest that the genre begins to flourish near the zenith of multiculturalism and that the recognition of diverse perspectives absent within canonical texts parallels the push to expand the canon itself—and this has been the customary way literary scholars have approached such texts when they have engaged with them. However, when one takes notice of the profusion of minor-character elaborations in recent decades, it becomes clear that the multicultural turn is a necessary but

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insufficient explanation for the wide application of the genre’s technology. This technology has proven equally generative as a storytelling vehicle for elaborating characters that do not easily fit into any category of social marginalization—who are minor but not minority characters—Priam as well as Cassandra, the Big Bad Wolf in addition to Bertha Mason Rochester—suggesting more is at work than the “recuperation of the margins.” In chapter 1, I argue that feminist and anticolonial writers share with their contemporaries the ludic high postmodernists a spirit of unabashed cultural and intertextual appropriation, a turn to reader activism rather than deference toward the literary tradition. This appropriation may be used for the political project of critiquing the ideology that underlies the way a canonical text represents socially marginal characters but also, as in Stoppard’s case, for exploiting “dramatic and comic potential.” To understand the social logic of minor-character elaboration, one must begin by recognizing that the genre’s intertextual appropriation has generally taken a particular, conventional form in the decades since Rhys and Stoppard pioneered its use. Though surface differences abound, authors adopting the genre have consistently structured their narratives around the points of view of the formerly minor characters, at times using an extradiegetic narration focalized through the characters’ perspectives but most frequently converting them into coherent narrator-protagonists who tell their own stories.63 Retelling a familiar narrative from a new point of view, authors who adopt minor-character elaboration reveal their commitment to a pervasive epistemology of perspectivism, the Nietzschean notion that any truth or meaning is contingent on a given perspective or subject position, be it spatial or ideological.64 Texts that use the genre endorse perspectivism with their very form; they make intertextual dialogue between multiple points of view a central structural principle. Because the genre affirms the value of such dialogue between individuals, each of whom possesses a different subjective point of view, I argue in chapter 2 that the genre articulates a liberal-pluralist political epistemology. Such texts often echo their formal perspectivism in self-referential moments, such as Rhys’s protagonist’s contention: “There is always the other side, always” (a line that Hite culled for the title of her book).65 In their commitment to imagining perspectives that were absent from canonical predecessors, minor-character elaborations undertake an intertextual project that extends preoccupations with perspective and point of

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view that have dominated the history of the modern novel. In an oft-cited moment of Middlemarch, George Eliot’s narrator interrupts her own telling: “—but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage?”66—a moment when the novel famously becomes self-conscious about its ability to select among multiple points of view. In calling attention to the selective focus of her novel, Eliot points to a tension so firmly embedded in narrative that it has become proverbial. But there are potentially far more than two sides to every story.67 Henry James’s famous metaphor of the house of fiction’s million windows similarly registers the possibility for any narrative to be told from countless perspectives, even if James himself would rigorously select among these in choosing his “centers of consciousness.”68 The formal experiments of literary modernism went even further to wrestle with the absence of an objective, Archimedean perspective or God’s-eye view, and they play out the possibilities of viewing the world through the perspectives of multiple characters, each of whom has a unique subjective experience of it.69 The conventional form of minor-character elaboration that emerges in the mid-1980s is thus one bound up with modern novelistic practice and so is at one level not particularly surprising. If adopting the perspective of a minor character by converting that character to a narrator-protagonist or primary focalizer is not a remarkable or radical technique, this is part of the point. Minor-character elaborations in their ascendant phase generally abstain from experimental postmodernist forms that represent subjectivity as fragmented or constituted by discourse.70 Instead, they typically conform to realist or, better, sentimental conventions, in which point of view as form (either focalization or narration) is aligned with point of view as interest. That is, they manipulate narrative point of view in the service of the production of sympathy, concern, and identification with a previously minor character who was not, by virtue of her minorness, the principal object of concern in the precursor text. The typical method for achieving such a reorientation of narrative priorities is the representation of the character’s rich interiority—a subjectivity that was not represented in the precursor text. Seymour Chatman has lucidly summarized the workings of this conventional alignment: “Access to a character’s consciousness is the standard entrée to his point of view, the usual and quickest means by which we come to identify with him. Learning his thoughts insures an intimate connection.”71 Critical responses to minor-character elaborations

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such as Wolf ’s Cassandra reflect the conventional alignment between point of view and sympathy as well as widely held modern assumptions about what constitutes plausible characterization, on which texts using the genre typically rely. In Wolf ’s hands, Cassandra becomes “a fully rounded figure . . . an individual who changes and grows and finds new alternatives for living,” and the novel “interprets [the ancient Greek legend] in terms of psychological realism.”72 Another commentator writes: “Wolf recreates history from the point of view of this mythical woman and gives her a voice with which to speak of her own experience.”73 Perhaps more important than their commitment to perspectivism, then, is the subjectivism of minor-character elaborations: the authors and critics who have embraced the genre conceive of its aesthetic and political work as occurring through the formal registering of the narrative “voice” and “fully rounded” psychology of formerly minor characters. If the primary convention of minor-character elaboration suggests that its social function is to reassert the unique subjectivity and perspective of every individual by representing the interior states and “roundness” of characters that had been “flat,” depicted externally or cursorily in canonical texts, the genre can be seen as one that epitomizes the liberal individualist project that has been central to the history of the realist novel. Though literary historians have continually sought to chart the uneven development,74 establish countertraditions,75 and reverse the causality76 of Ian Watt’s influential account of the rise of the realist novel as “the form of literature which most fully reflects [the] individualist and innovating reorientation” of Western society since the seventeenth century, they have nuanced but not displaced the notion that the representation of subjectivity has been the dominant formal project of the realist novel and that its primary, hegemonic ideological function has been to shore up belief in the sovereign liberal individual.77 If minor-character elaboration may thus appear as the most novelistic of novel genres, dedicated to doing what novels already do and thus showing the persistence of the realist project of depicting subjectivity beyond a postmodern moment that sought to decenter it, what makes the genre unique, fascinating, as well as problematic is the way its intertextual project attacks canonical texts for not being novels or canonical novels for not being fair to—not representing fully—all of their characters. The genre, that is, does not just offer, as with many realist novels, “round” characters and limn their complex interior states. Minor-character

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elaborations lay down an imperative to roundness. They allege that earlier representations are aesthetic, ethical, and political failures to do justice to minor characters. Minor-character elaborations thus articulate in literary form the liberal ideology of the novel that Dorothy J. Hale has called “social formalism.” For Hale, social formalism manifests itself as a tendency in Anglo-American theories of the novel to posit that the novel “does not simply represent identity through its content but actually instantiates it through its form” (Hale, Social Formalism, 13). In the tradition Hale traces, the registering of a character’s internal state becomes more than just the best, or conventional, literary technique by which to represent fully a character; point of view comes to generate the “set of authentic interests that constitute a particular human identity” (22). By making the depiction of interiority “instantiate” and “constitute” identity, these theorists understand novelistic form as an enactment of democratic principles. When authors adopt a character’s perspective, “real characterological freedom [can] be achieved” because the character is allowed “to express himself in his own terms” (93); characters no longer will appear as “created beings” but as “wholly autonomous subjects” (120).78 Minor-character elaborations frequently make the illogical logic of autonomous fictional entities explicit, claiming that by offering the perspective of a minor character, the contemporary author liberates the character by allowing her to speak for herself. Thus Atwood writes in her introduction to The Penelopiad that she “chose to give the telling of the story to Penelope and the twelve hanged maids” (xv; my emphasis). Similarly, Le Guin’s Lavinia declares her independence from millennia under Virgil’s control: “If I must go on existing century after century, then once at least I must break out and speak” (4). In chapter 2, I demonstrate that critics who have championed instances of minor-character elaboration echo these terms because “giving voice to the silenced” becomes the consistent way they interpret such texts. Literary form, the representation of a character’s interiority or “voice,” is thus understood as a technology for enacting a kind of redistributive justice; to make a previously minor figure into a narrator is to grant her autonomy and self-determination that she had been denied in a canonical text. The creation of fictional characters becomes an act of liberation. The genre thus reveals the imbrication, indeed the conflation, of form and politics, exposing a common fallacy through which contemporary scholars overrate the political work of literary texts.

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If this liberal ideology of the novel seems to rest on a glaring conflation of literary representation with democratic self-representation, it nonetheless constitutes a pervasive way of thinking about the novel that stretches from E. M. Forster to Woloch’s ambitious theory of characterization. Forster of course codified the distinction between “flat” and “round” that has become part of our everyday lexicon for discussing characters. The former are “constructed round a single idea or quality” and have “no existence outside” that quality. But Forster’s next phrase is even more revealing of how his theory fuses aesthetic categories with ethicopolitical ones; flat characters have “none of the private lusts and aches that must complicate the most consistent of servitors.”79 Flat characters, in Forster’s account, lack the internal conflict that must persist in every individual, even within servants! (Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly [1990], whose narrator is a maidservant in Dr. Jekyll’s household and is briefly glimpsed in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella, and Jo Baker’s Longbourn [2013], which retells Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the Bennets’ domestics, look to be dedicated to demonstrating the truth of Forster’s assertion that servants are people too.) Forster thus understands all persons as having complex interior states and flat characters, necessary as they may be to an author’s design, as failing to capture those states and thus misrepresenting what “must” subsist in such persons. Similarly, Woloch argues that novels continually generate a tension among the many characters they introduce, between the protagonist, whose interiority is represented in the text, and minor characters, whose perspectives are obliquely suggested in their absence. While Woloch is no doubt correct that readers might seize on these suggestions and speculate about the imaginary beings that are so briefly sketched in a novel, he goes beyond Forster in declaring that narrative discourse is unjust to (“diminishes” or “stints”) minor characters and even presses them into servitude, in that they are forced to perform narrative functions.80 Functional minor characters are “the proletariat of the novel” (27), and their “functionalization  .  .  . effaces ‘the definite manifestations of definite qualities of individuals’ ” (27). Woloch insists that “each of these narrative workers also has a ‘case,’ an orientating consciousness that, like the protagonist’s own consciousness, could potentially organize an entire fictional universe” (22). This statement encapsulates the aesthetic ideology of minor-character elaboration and the social-formalist tradition in which the genre takes part; every character can be a protagonist because each one is an individual with

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“definite qualities,” a unique “case,” and subjectivity, even if that case is not depicted in the novel that constitutes the character. By imagining minor characters as endowed with a prior and autonomous existence, Woloch can claim that the failure to represent their particular qualities—presumably their “private lusts and aches”—“effaces” their individuality and constitutes an instrumentalization analogous to dehumanizing labor under capitalism. If Woloch’s theory seems extreme, I will insist, pace Hale, that it takes part in a broader tendency to view novels’ creation of round characters and consequent extension of sympathy to them as an enactment of democratic principles.81 The creation of fully fleshed-out characters, in this tradition, is understood as a broadening of the sympathetic imagination that goes hand in hand with an expansion of the franchise and the wider march of democracy’s progress. Agency, autonomy, individuality conveyed through rich interiority, the right to be heard—these are the often explicit claims made on behalf of minor characters. In chapter 2, I argue that understanding minor characters as autonomous entities who have suffered narrative injustice at the hands of canonical authors facilitates an overvaluing of the political remediation of minor-character elaborations, which are read as repairing the “disjunctions” Woloch describes and thus setting minor characters free from their oppressive silencing.82 But who is actually liberated, who is actually speaking, when a minor character “is given a voice with which to tell her own story”? MINOR CHARACTERS IN THE MARKETPLACE

If a genre’s conventions register its underlying social logic and so the way literary forms articulate and reinforce the social formations and ideological commitments of the period in which those forms flourish, genres also serve crucial functions in the more narrow sphere of literary culture and the market for books. Attention to the politics of representation in minorcharacter elaborations, to the fully fleshed-out characters that serve as rebuttals to flat or stereotypical depictions in canonical texts, offers only part of the story of the genre’s rise; it fails to take into account the social and political effects of how the genre functions and circulates in contemporary institutions. Those who would celebrate the “giving of voice” to minor characters lose sight of the fact that the authors of such texts are really the ones “speaking” and that these authors are manifestly in possession of

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significant quantities of cultural capital, both the basic means of literary production and the traditional knowledge capital produced in the school: a more-than-passing familiarity with the “great books,” even if this familiarity manifests itself in a critical stance toward those books. These authors leverage that capital to gain strategic advantages in a highly competitive literary marketplace. Minor-character elaboration proves useful for more than simply helping contemporary authors get published;83 the genre helps them associate themselves with the great names, mark their literariness, and thus make a bid for consecration in the market for symbolic capital, or prestige, that Pierre Bourdieu described as a constitutive feature of the field of cultural production.84 In turn, the prestige these authors acquire generates both symbolic and economic capital for the large-scale publishers of the consolidated global publishing industry. Genres, that is, don’t get “seized on” and come to reflect social formations by accident, magic, or the extraordinary ken of great authors. A succession of interested agents—writers, editors, reviewers, scholars—actively search for and promote forms that will serve their interests and resonate with readers. Considering genre in this institutional context demands attention to the relations between authors, publishers (and their parent companies), booksellers, and consumers and thus a shift in methodology outside of the texts themselves. This strand of genre study requires analysis of the ways texts are marketed, the art and blurbs on their covers, the book-club and reading-group guides packaged within them or offered online, and their reception by both professionals and amateur reviewers on websites such as Amazon and Goodreads.com. It demands scholars read literary texts as interesting and socially significant not insofar as they eschew convention and transcend commodity status but insofar as they are conventional, are commodities. That minor-character elaborations are popular fictions that trade on the timeless literary value of classics is less a paradox than evidence that the symbolic capital of the canon is both healthy and fungible, convertible to economic capital. That the multinational media corporations that dominate the increasingly consolidated global publishing industry are the ones accumulating this capital is a plain fact—but not one that literary scholars tend to talk about. By analyzing the marketing of minor-character elaboration to contemporary audiences and the genre’s reception, I show how its institutional and market logic is connected with its social and cultural logic. In chapter 3,

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I argue that structural transformations in the publishing industry over the last thirty years have contributed to the proliferation of minor-character elaborations. Three giant publishers, all owned by multinational media conglomerates, have come to control half of the U.S. trade market.85 This consolidation has been noted often and bemoaned almost as frequently. But literary and cultural scholars have barely begun to consider how these marketplace transformations have affected literary production. Today’s large-scale corporate publishers are highly risk averse, seeking to maximize profit in the short term. In this milieu, publishers have turned increasingly to genre fiction because works that follow a proven formula and appeal to a preexisting fan base help combat the uniqueness, and hence unpredictable sales, of any new book. Genre becomes a mechanism for generating production, identifying audiences, and minimizing risk rather than a formal or aesthetic imperative. Understanding genre in these terms helps explain the broader regime of genre fiction we have witnessed over the past several decades—the succession of vampire, zombie, fantasy, science fiction, and romance franchises that dominate the market for books as well as for film and television. Undoubtedly each of these genres and each successful work or series carry their particular attractions for audiences—and scholars might endeavor to read the social logic of such genres in their conventional structures. But the production-side appeal of genre fiction as such has less to do with the qualities that make these works unique; it is precisely their similarity to others that makes them safe bets, reliable sellers. One striking feature of the catalogue of examples I’ve offered thus far is the combination of upstart authors who have made their names with minor-character elaborations (Brooks, Maguire, Randall), established literary figures (Atwood, Malouf, Updike), and luminaries of the genre-fiction universe (Le Guin, Moore, Atwood again). Studying the works of these writers alongside one another reveals not only how permeable is the border between “literary” and “genre fiction” but also the extent to which this body of self-consciously literary texts—highly allusive, intertextual works that invoke the transcendent value of the traditional canon—has become a booming popular genre in its own right.86 Minor-character elaboration demonstrates the way the great names of Shakespeare, Homer, and the rest function as prestigious symbolic signifiers that are as resonant in the marketplace as Apple or BMW, brand names ripe for appending to the mass production of genre fiction. Likewise, the genre points to the way “literary fiction” gains that status by obscuring its derivative features behind others that grant prestige.

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Indeed, the history of minor-character elaboration reveals how the designations of “literary” and “genre fiction” are contested matters of reception rather than clear-cut distinctions of kind. Since genre is both a malleable technology and a form of literary practice that helps producers generate symbolic and economic capital, any “literary fiction” or “art novel” that utilizes an extant genre to any degree demonstrates the double impossibility of artistic autonomy. All such texts draw on earlier texts and forms and circulate in cultural fields and institutions in which successfully deploying a genre, or transforming it, facilitates the accumulation of both forms of capital, no matter how relatively autonomous these fields may be.87 Moreover, minor-character elaboration reveals how formally experimental and “high-literary” deployments of genre are historically continuous with the institutional propagation of those forms that leads to the production of formulaic genre fiction. The historical arc of my book demonstrates that the early stage of a genre’s emergence reveals multiple formal possibilities and agendas that writers might adopt (chapter 1). These possibilities do not evaporate or become prohibited, but they become less visible as writers follow precedent (though always with some variation) and gravitate toward a particular form to undertake a shared cultural and political project (chapter 2) and as publishers embrace and spur the production of similar texts in response to a perceived market (chapter 3). This book thus offers a history of how flexible generic practices and the testing of possibilities lead to the dissemination of formulaic popular forms—how they develop into genre fiction. Conventionalization is not an agentless or teleological process but the result of producers’ processes of imitation and selection that generate a conventional form.88 While these processes eventually flood the market with similar texts, they neither legislate that writers slavishly adhere to a formula nor establish a “contract” with readers who refuse to accept anything unconventional. New genres, including new popular genres, emerge precisely because producers can depart from existing conventions. Internal variations and fusion with other genres persist and are always potentials latent in a given kind of literary practice. (If the formulaic, mass-market production of genre fiction foreclosed further literary experiment with the same genre, one wonders how such writers as Samuel Delany or Octavia Butler could have enlivened the welltilled ground of science fiction, to cite two of many possible examples of generic transformation.)

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Much of the production-side appeal of genre stems from the way a given practice is available for both repetition and variation. Minor-character elaboration, for example, offers an endlessly iterable formula: retell X classic from Y minor character’s point of view. This genre has proven particularly attractive to producers because it adds to this basic formula a unique ability to solicit the attention of niche audiences: bibliophiles who recognize the prestige of canonical works and female and minority readerships that are reconceived as target publics. If minor-character elaborations share with other forms of genre fiction a recipe that facilitates limitless production, they have in common with other explicitly intertextual genres the ability to annex and trade on the prestige of the traditional Western canon. Minorcharacter elaboration represents a subset of the booming wider field of contemporary intertextuality that includes everything from performances and intermedial adaptations of canonical works, such as Shakespearean films, the latest in a long line of Jane Eyre movies, and the BBC’s Sherlock television series, to children’s versions of classics, such as the “Save the Story” series penned by famous contemporary writers that Pushkin Press launched in 2013 and 2014,89 to the craze of travesties or “mashups” that surged in the wake of Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies— a book that both thematizes and enacts the current mania for cannibalizing the classics—to the industry of Austen spinoffs, sequels, and paeans that Grahame-Smith set out to parody, to the boundless accumulation of fan fiction online.90 This cursory treatment cannot even begin to convey the extent of the field of contemporary intertextuality, and here I’ve only mentioned forms that explicitly mark their relation to a predecessor because a covert or unacknowledged allusion or rewriting is unlikely to capitalize on the recognizability and prestige of the canonical predecessor.91 To point to this extensive market suggests again the narrow focus of much existing scholarship on intertextuality, which has tended to focus on “re-vision” or “writing back” as an insurgent political strategy;92 produce wide-ranging overviews of various intertextual modes and approaches under the umbrellas of postmodern parody, pastiche, rewriting, and other “parasitic” practices;93 and analyze works that respond to a shared predecessor94 rather than analyzing particular genres of intertextual engagement or treating the prevalence of homage, conservation, and appropriation.95 Minor-character elaborations share with this broader field a strategic appeal to the prestige of their predecessors and therefore an investment

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in maintaining the latter’s cultural centrality. In rewriting canonical works from new points of view, such texts frequently invoke the names of their illustrious forebears, billing themselves as fresh takes on old tales and as transhistorical dialogues between great writers. Moore’s Fool, for example, trumpets and reactivates the prestige of King Lear, in this case to deface it more effectively. In an “Author’s Note,” Moore acknowledges his audacity in “thrashing around in the deep end of genius with the greatest artist of the English language who ever lived” and heaps praise on Shakespeare’s “perfectly elegant tragedy” even as he explains his desire to “befoul it” (305). (Even texts that travesty a canonical predecessor endeavor to maintain its status because you can’t desecrate something that isn’t sacred.) Dialogue or call-and-response also serves as the model for the online publicity that Knopf, the celebrated house that is now an imprint of the colossal Penguin–Random House partnership, released alongside Baker’s Longbourn. Knopf marketed the novel as “an irresistibly imagined belowstairs answer to Pride and Prejudice” and cited Baker’s rendering of the inner lives of servants, her “portrait of the disappointments, dreams, struggles, and secrets of the lower classes that stands entirely on its own.”96 Reviewers tend to understand these works in similar terms—even when they determine these dialogues to be failed or one-sided contests. A reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement deemed Le Guin’s Lavinia “a moving testament to the conversations that great writers sustain through the centuries.”97 Similarly, a New York Times appraisal of Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2012), which makes a protagonist of the great hero’s companion Patroclus, regarded Miller’s adoption of an increasingly common generic practice as “an (appropriately) heroic task: to fashion a modern work of literature out of very ancient stories.”98 Both the promotion of minor-character elaborations that insists they can “stand on their own” and the reception that positions them in a dialogue with (and deems whether they are worthy of) their canonical predecessors date to the earliest forays into the genre. Francis Wyndham’s introduction to Wide Sargasso Sea, which has always accompanied the text of Rhys’s novel, maintains that “it is in no sense a pastiche of Charlotte Brontë and exists in its own right, quite independent of Jane Eyre.”99 Responses to Gardner’s Grendel generally concurred that the novel “illustrates the perfect rapport possible between two workings of a single myth. That it can stand beside the epic Beowulf is no small judgment on the achievement of the novel.”100

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The marketing and reception of minor-character elaborations thus aims at a readership that valorizes the classics and contemporary works of literary quality, one that like the authors of such works possesses considerable quantities of cultural capital. But to see how the dialogues these modern works initiate are subordinate to the strategic function of co-opting the prestige of the great books, one only has to notice how frequently minorcharacter elaborations take pains to reassure readers who lack familiarity with their canonical precursors. A prominently placed blurb on the Harper paperback of Fool cites a USA Today reviewer: “Whether you need to read the original King Lear before you read Moore’s Fool is debatable. Seems a fool’s errand to us. Just enjoy.”101 In a similar fashion, an O Magazine review insists on the low barrier of access for appreciating Miller’s novel: “You don’t need to be familiar with Homer’s The Iliad (or Brad Pitt’s Troy, for that matter) to find . . . The Song of Achilles spellbinding. While classics scholar Miller meticulously follows Greek mythology, her explorations of ego, grief, and love’s many permutations are both familiar and new.”102 In linking Miller with Homer but assuring readers they needn’t read the Iliad (or sit through Troy), this reviewer invokes Miller’s cultural capital and fidelity to the classics while insisting on her accessible and original take on ancient material. Annexing the prestige of the canon without demanding knowledge of it, faithful to the timeless classics yet fresh and imaginative, minor-character elaborations help contemporary authors gain distinction and enable their publishers to access an educated, well-capitalized audience. If the genre shares with other intertextual practices a dependence and ability to capitalize on the prestige of canonical predecessors (demonstrating that genres’ social functions are not necessarily immanent to their forms), minor-character elaborations add to these qualities an air of inclusive, multicultural, or even subversive politics and thus help producers appeal to readers sympathetic to such progressive orientations and to identity-group audiences. As minor-character elaborations frequently adopt the perspectives of female and socially marginal characters, authors and publishers aim these books toward demographic groups that they anticipate will sympathize with such perspectives—strategies that become evident within the texts, in their publicity materials, and in their positioning within the marketplace. For example, Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent (1997), which makes a protagonist of the biblical Dinah, offers itself as an empowering instrument of feminine education: “The more a daughter knows the

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details of her mother’s life—without flinching or whining—the stronger the daughter.”103 My local bookstore shelved Randall’s The Wind Done Gone and Rawles’s My Jim side by side in its “African-American Interest” section, and the book jacket of Randall’s novel proclaims it to be the “emotionally complex story of a strong, resourceful black woman breaking away from the damaging world of the Old South to emerge . . . as a daughter, lover, and mother.” In addition, the dust jacket proffers the book’s revisionist politics as one of its major selling points; the novel “gives a voice to those history has silenced” and is “an elegant literary achievement of significant political force.”104 This synopsis vividly demonstrates how the sociocultural logic of minor-character elaboration intersects with its institutional and market logic. The genre’s assertion that every individual regardless of race, gender, or class is equally compelling and therefore qualified to be a protagonist (deserving of a “voice”) is deeply compatible with the values of a liberal readership, and such texts are marketed to groups that share the identity categories of their protagonists. It is precisely not the case that minor-character elaboration emerges with an oppositional textual politics, only to see it diluted in the process of the genre’s popularization. Instead, that politics continues to represent a crucial component of the genre’s popular appeal. The vast majority of minor-character elaborations that have appeared over the past several decades have appropriated characters from works in the public domain. But the lawsuits prompted by Randall’s novel and by the Italian author Pia Pera’s Lo’s Diary, which poses itself as the journal of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, make evident copyright holders’ desire to protect both the economic and symbolic values of canonical works to which minorcharacter elaborations are perceived as threats. The volume of production using the genre stands as the most glaring evidence that publishers anticipate its profitability, and these lawsuits show that the estates of canonical predecessors share that sense. The terms of the settlement reached between Pera and Nabokov’s son Dmitri—according to which Pera was allowed to publish Lo’s Diary but only with a portion of royalties going to Dmitri (who in turn donated the proceeds to the PEN Foundation) and the stipulation that he append a preface granting his permission to her novel—reveal the eagerness of the younger Nabokov to limit Pera’s ability to profit economically and symbolically off of his father’s work.105 A suit brought by SunTrust Bank, the guardian of Margaret Mitchell’s estate, against Houghton Mifflin attempted to block the publication of The Wind Done Gone, and the

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estate seemed particularly bothered by Randall’s suggestion that Mitchell’s whitewashed image of the antebellum South concealed widespread sexual violence, miscegenation, and homosexuality.106 The intellectual-property issues surrounding fair use provoked by these court cases are fascinating, if they largely exceed the scope of this book on genre.107 But the basic facts of these lawsuits demonstrate that the copyright holders of canonical works perceive minor-character elaborations as economic threats—even though one suspects that the publication of new, derivative works actually funnels readers back to the originals—and as challenges to the symbolic values, artistic or political, expressed in or embodied by those classics. While Randall’s book launches a direct attack on the mythology of the antebellum South fostered by Gone with the Wind, I show in chapter 3 that The Wind Done Gone is simultaneously deeply invested in promoting the value of the traditional literary canon as one of the principal resources drawn on by its protagonist Cynara, an avid reader of Shakespeare, Dickens, Scott, and Austen. Minor-character elaborations not only serve the strategic function of helping contemporary producers sell books, by allowing them to annex the prestige of canonical works and identify niche audiences. The genre also helps reinforce the cultural centrality of the canon and promote literary culture more broadly—the persistence of which serves the interests of corporate publishers, of course, but also anyone eager to safeguard immaterial literary and cultural values.108 Rawles’s My Jim, for example, served as the book selection for a 2009 “Seattle Reads” campaign, which was accompanied by various artistic and cultural events across the city, including the commissioning of a sculpture and quilt inspired by the novel and a speech by the human-rights activist Mende Nazer.109 The extent to which minor-character elaboration serves to promote the conservation of literary culture can also be glimpsed in Le Guin’s determination to preserve Virgil’s Latin and in the case of Jon Clinch’s efforts to save Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut. Clinch’s Finn, published by Random House in 2007, tells the story of Huck Finn’s virulently racist Pap. When Clinch discovered that Twain’s house, which nearly bankrupted the latter in his lifetime, was near to closing after a bubble-fueled twentymillion-dollar restoration and museum construction in 2003, he initiated a fundraising campaign led by contemporary authors to save the home. Clinch organized a benefit in September 2008 and a second, glitzier one, featuring the likes of John Grisham, David Baldacci, and Jodi Picoult, held

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in 2010 at the MGM Grand Casino in Connecticut.110 It seems fitting that Twain’s home, a symbol of both his own ostentation and the financial strife that dogged him throughout his career, should now be maintained with help of today’s publishing superstars and that Clinch, whose novel successfully leverages Twain’s symbolic capital, should make good on his debts. Minor-character elaboration thus functions in contemporary literary and cultural institutions as both a highly marketable publishing vehicle and a consummate promoter of compromise—reinforcing traditional values as embodied by canonical texts while accommodating demands from the margins and appealing to popular audiences while maintaining reverence for the literary.111 GENRE AS A “SWITCH MECHANISM”

Genre, I have been arguing, functions as a meeting place where the history of literary forms intersects with broader historical movements and with material and institutional relations and routes of circulation. Genre study is compelling because it provokes a number of interlocking questions and sets before us the task of explaining phenomena at several different levels. One can situate individual texts against widely shared generic conventions, analyzing the ways they diverge and interpreting the significance of such departures. Or one can focus on the conventional, investigating the broader social formations that become legible in those shared structures. Or one may choose to highlight the function of a generic form in its institutional contexts, illuminating the actions of various institutional agents and the contested values that shape the fields in which they act. Dimock has made a case for “the function of genre as a point of transit—a kind of switch mechanism—in the reversible hierarchy between the local and the global.”112 Dimock is principally concerned here with a widening purview for the study of American literature, with making connections across time and space and attending to the ways literary networks map unexpected connections between figures working with a genre over centuries and in far-flung locales. But her notion of genre as a “switch mechanism” also captures the way genre study facilitates a shuttling between levels and kinds of literary analysis. Though the overarching project of Minor Characters Have Their Day is to analyze the way the form, cultural politics, and material channels of

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production and consumption intersect in genre, the book organizes its subject chronologically. Chapter 1, “Active Readers and Flexible Forms,” fuses formalist analysis with cultural history to trace the emergence of minorcharacter elaboration to the decolonizing and second-wave feminist movements and the unabashed appropriation of high postmodernism. Though poets and playwrights have long expanded on characters and events from familiar stories, the late 1960s saw a resurgence of the practice, with novelists gravitating to it and paying frequent attention to socially marginal figures. I link the ambivalent reading methods of precursors like C. L. R. James and George Lamming—who both identify with and dissociate themselves from iconic minor characters—with textually acquisitive postmodernists like John Barth and Jorge Luis Borges, to show how the genre surfaces amid a sea change in reading practices. In this period, modes of active, appropriative reading, theorized by Roland Barthes as “writerly” and by feminists such as Adrienne Rich and Judith Fetterley as “re-vision” and “resistant reading,” unapologetically violate New Critical textual boundaries. Reading Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Gardner’s Grendel alongside popular fictions such as Fraser’s Flashman (1969), I show how minor-character elaboration emerges as a variable practice that can be tailored to disparate agendas: critiquing the politics of a canonical predecessor, paying homage to the classic’s humanist values, or generating a series of bawdy, swashbuckling adventures. The more experimental novels of Rhys and Gardner employ ironic, unreliable narrators and fracture conventional forms to approximate fragmented mental states, demonstrating myriad narrative permutations that successors might adapt. Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead poses a potential variation that few heirs will attempt; his play adheres to the New Critical ban on extratextual speculation with parodic extremity, refusing to grant his appropriated characters any traits or experiences beyond those licensed by Hamlet. Chapter 2, “The Real and Imaginary Politics of Minor-Character Elaboration,” analyzes the accelerated production of texts using the genre from the mid-1980s to the present, ascertaining the social logic of the conventions that become visible in this period and critiquing the way scholars have typically received such texts. While minor-character elaborations in this period frequently depict the experiences of marginalized subjects, they generally eschew the ironic and fragmented forms of Rhys and Gardner. Instead, authors repeatedly convert formerly minor figures into sympathetic

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and coherent narrator-protagonists. Many texts considered in this chapter, from Rawles’s My Jim to Le Guin’s Lavinia, utilize female or socially marginal figures as narrators. Works like Atwood’s Penelopiad explicitly and polemically seek to “recover” feminine and subaltern “voices” and to foster identification with them. But critics have overrated the imaginative restitution that “giving voice” entails and, by focusing on political opposition, have obscured the homage, continuity, and elaboration in these works. Further, I show that the perspectives of characters that are minor but not socially marginal, like those in Brooks’s Pulitzer Prize–winning March or Malouf ’s Ransom, become passengers in a larger caravan of inclusiveness. The genre can be used to express subversive agendas, but its conventional form reflects a set of consensus values of liberal pluralism: the rights of every individual to speak freely and of every group to contend on behalf of its interests. The third chapter, “ ‘An Insatiable Market’ for Minor Characters,” situates the genre in the material conditions of the consolidated global publishing trade. It asks why minor-character elaboration has become such a successful vehicle for the culture industry, how such texts are marketed and to whom, and what satisfactions they offer readers. These questions demand innovative methods. I chart the paratextual life of the genre by reading blurbs, book-club guides, electronic and print promotional material, and reception. This material shows how the genre helps large-scale corporations target niche audiences and effectively trade on the symbolic capital of the canon. In the paratextual apparatus surrounding Randall’s The Wind Done Gone, we see how identity groups make convenient target publics. Moreover, texts such as Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife seek to augment their own prestige by riding the coattails of their predecessors. On the one hand, such books supply inside jokes and allusions for educated consumers, who can exercise their skills at literary detection and utilize cultural capital that can no longer be converted to economic capital. On the other hand, paratexts provide those who have not read Moby-Dick with all the information necessary to understand Ahab’s Wife, preserving the association with high culture while obviating readers’ command of that culture. Given the genre’s frequent adoption in the service of insurgent critique, it is striking how often these strategies function to conserve the canon’s symbolic capital. Minor characters may “gain a voice,” but they do so only within texts produced and cleverly marketed by multinational media corporations and by joining, not overturning, the literary pantheon.

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I want to sketch briefly two other modes of analysis genre study can prompt and that I undertake in the remainder of this book. First, genres provoke theoretical questions. While this introduction attempts to establish a revitalized theory of genre as such, of what genre is and why it matters, any given genre will initiate its own set of theoretical questions. It will do so because genres represent a common type of rhetorical practice that communicants use in recurrent situations, which invites us to formulate the logic and unstated assumptions that underlie the widely shared adherence to that practice. Minor-character elaboration generates a set of provocative questions, particularly around the vexed theoretical subject of literary character. When contemporary authors reject the portraits of minor characters in canonical texts on the grounds of their ideological nature, they seem to view these characters as textually constructed. When Atwood has her Penelope complain about the way the Odyssey deploys her character as “an edifying legend” and a “stick used to beat other women with,” the author stresses the patriarchal agenda that underlies the epic’s depiction of Penelope as an ideally faithful wife. Atwood, it would seem, recognizes the Homeric character as a constructed representation and not as a reflection of reality or an autonomous entity with an independent existence. But despite understanding Homer’s character as a representation, when Atwood claims to “let Penelope” tell her own story, she seems to pose her own character as real, authentic, autonomous. When Nancy Rawles wonders “who [Jim] was . . . to his family and community? Who was he to his wife?” she likewise treats Twain’s Jim as if he had a life that extended beyond the borders of the text that constitutes him, as if there were an answer to the questions of what Jim was like at home, even though The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn offers no such answer. These authors, that is, treat their characters as if they had lives outside the text—a practice for which literature professors often chide their students and a kind of speculation that was famously banned by the New Critics as the illicit game of “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” The practice of minor-character elaboration thus foregrounds the conflict between structural and referential approaches that has dominated theoretical accounts of literary character.113 In understanding minor characters as ideological stereotypes or unrealistically flat, contemporary authors adopt a structural view of characters, thinking of them as effects created by a set of textual marks oriented toward a particular purpose. But in speculating about what the character was “really” like or wanting

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to know more about that character’s life, these authors adopt a referential or mimetic view that treats characters as implied persons with an existence that exceeds the marks of character on the page. Rather than simply claim, however, that Atwood and company make an ironic mistake or a category error, in chapter 4, “The Logic of Characters’ Virtual Lives,” I argue that minor-character elaborations throw into relief a process of negotiation in which readers are constantly and unconsciously engaged. Readers recognize that characters are constructed when they complain about how an author portrays them, positing that the fictional representation does not correspond to their sense of reality. But when they wish for an explanation of why a character acts the way she does, readers imagine that the character has motivations or qualities outside those mentioned in the text. They imagine, that is, that the character has a fuller, autonomous existence. Readers do this not because they are delusional or forget that characters are fictional, nonexistent, but because literary depictions are necessarily incomplete. The conventional practices of realist reading rely on readers to supplement information provided in the text with their knowledge about the real world—knowledge that is of course determined by a host of contemporary ideologies and subjective factors. No one, for example, needs to be told that the law of gravity typically abides in the fictions we read. Unless told otherwise, we assume it. With characters, readers perform a similar supplementation, constantly balancing our adherence to information conveyed by a text with an imaginative filling of gaps left by it, a balancing act that generates characters’ virtual lives. A second direction genre points is outward, toward other genres, kindred practices. Because genres overlap and share qualities, an in-depth examination of one genre helps elucidate a host of related phenomena. In a coda, “Genre as Telescopic Method,” I contend that minor-character elaboration illuminates the state of contemporary literary production more broadly and thus demonstrates another of the virtues of genre study. While my analysis of the way genre functions in the marketplace reveals how structural changes in publishing have influenced other forms of literary production, my emphasis on the politics of form helps make sense of several interconnected trends in contemporary literary fiction. A series of neighboring genres, “cousins” of minor-character elaboration, have also flourished in the 1990s and 2000s: other modes of explicitly intertextual fiction, novels that take famous authors as their protagonists, works that

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retell historical events (rather than previous fictions) from the perspectives of peripheral figures, and a wealth of “multiple-protagonist” fictions such as Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009) and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)—books that are dedicated to the project of proliferating points of view and purging minorness. Just as within the critical study of one genre, reading an individual text generates insights into similar texts, so analysis of one genre opens vistas onto a wider landscape of genres. Minor Characters Have Their Day thus advocates genre study as a compelling answer to problems of scale facing contemporary literary scholars. Genre study serves as a method uniquely capable of shuttling among close reading, literary movements, the institutional and economic setting of cultural production, and broader historical contexts.

Chapter One

ACTIVE READERS AND FLEXIBLE FORMS The Emergence of Minor-Character Elaboration, 1966–1971 There is always the other side, always. —JEAN RHYS, WIDE SARGASSO SEA (1966)

We keep to our usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else. —TOM STOPPARD, ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD (1967)

You will have read, in Tom Brown, how I was expelled from Rugby School for drunkenness, which is true enough, but when Hughes alleges that this was the result of my deliberately pouring beer on top of gin-punch, he is in error. —GEORGE MACDONALD FRASER, FLASHMAN: FROM THE FLASHMAN PAPERS, 1839–1842 (1969)

(They have their own versions, but this is the truth.) —JOHN GARDNER, GRENDEL (1971)

In 1966, a remarkable convergence, the kind that begs explaining: Jean Rhys published her Wide Sargasso Sea, imagining the story of Rochester’s first marriage to the mad Creole Bertha from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead premiered in Edinburgh, with the eponymous bumbling courtiers from Hamlet now in leading roles. These would be career-making events for each author. Born in Dominica, Rhys had been living in Cornwall, in obscurity, and was widely presumed dead until the BBC produced a radio adaptation of her Good Morning, Midnight (1939) in 1958. Wide Sargasso Sea won Rhys several literary prizes, prompted the reissue of her earlier novels, and led the New York Times to bestow upon her the title of “best living English novelist.”1 The last half-century has seen Wide Sargasso Sea become a classic in its own right and a touchstone text that has served as the occasion for countless works of feminist and postcolonial scholarship; the 1999 publication of the Norton Critical Edition of Wide Sargasso Sea serves as a convenient shorthand, a

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badge of and spur to the novel’s ongoing canonicity. And Rosencrantz and Guildenstern launched the Czech-born Stoppard to celebrity; after productions at the National Theatre and on Broadway, it won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1968, and reviewers immediately nominated Stoppard to be “considered among the finest English-speaking writers of our stage.”2 The play has become a classic of contemporary drama and Stoppard one of the foremost playwrights, screenwriters, and directors in English. The enthusiastic acclaim showered upon Rhys and Stoppard for these works suggests that the explicit appropriation and revision of a canonical literary text need not brand a contemporary writer as derivative. Rather, when critics judge such appropriation to be bold and well executed, intertextual borrowing can help the contemporary author achieve literary distinction, the right to be discussed in the same breath as a Brontë or a Shakespeare. In chapter 3, I contend that the runaway proliferation of minor-character elaborations in the 1990s and 2000s occurs for just this reason; the genre helps contemporary writers annex the prestige of the Great Books. Doubtless, the increasing deployment of the genre owes much to the prominent examples of Rhys’s and Stoppard’s best-known works. While hopes of similar success have prompted later figures to follow their precedents, this chapter emphasizes the way Rhys’s and Stoppard’s early experiments with the genre, along with those of John Gardner and George MacDonald Fraser, provided a malleable set of formal models that successive writers might adopt and adapt to disparate ends—the “trying and testing of possibilities” that constitute a genre’s “prehistory” for Jauss and that only becomes visible as such a period of testing retrospectively.3 That literary scholars have failed to note this coincidence or mention Rhys and Stoppard in the same breath surely testifies to the different uses to which they, from the beginning, motivate the generic technology of minorcharacter elaboration—and, in all likelihood, to distinct interpretive communities, with separate canons, within the academy. Wide Sargasso Sea has been embraced as a feminist and anticolonial rejoinder to Jane Eyre, whereas Stoppard has typically been seen as an ambivalent figure, inhabiting humanism and postmodernism, as he both playfully demythologizes and pays tribute to the Western tradition.4 But reading such authors alongside one another proves analytically useful; it is precisely the fact that such seemingly disparate writers with varying agendas seized upon minor-character elaboration at roughly the same moment that this chapter seeks to explain.

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Locating the meaning and significance of this convergence reveals the utility and flexibility of the genre and illuminates the tenor of the cultural and historical moment at which it emerges. It is only with the benefit of some hindsight, of course, that one can recognize this convergence as the early stage in the history of a widely adopted generic practice. When the American medievalist and novelist John Gardner published Grendel in 1971, reviewers lauded the apparent innovation of the book, but they did not note the significant recent precedents for its central conceit. The two appraisals appearing in the pages of the New York Times in September of that year both cited the strange humor of Gardner’s premise and differed only in the degree of adulation accorded the author for carrying it off. “Its subject sounds preposterous at first,” wrote the earlier commentator. But after reading the novel, he began to take it seriously: “ ‘Grendel’ is an extraordinary achievement—very funny, original, and deft.”5 The second reviewer echoed the progression of misgivings swelling to hosanna: “The Beowulf legend retold from Grendel’s point of view. That one sentence treatment of ‘Grendel’ suggests some unsustainable satire, valid for perhaps three pages of a college-humor magazine. But John Gardner’s ‘Grendel’ is myth itself: permeated with revelation.” The piece goes on to hail the book’s mix of fantasy and formal experiment as “another fierce blow struck against the realistic novel, the dead novel,” and, continuing in its reverent timbre, concludes the novel “is wholly a blessing.”6 Notwithstanding its devotional awe, this Times review zeroes in on one significant explanation for the emergence of minor-character elaboration at this particular historical moment: the paradoxical fact that many high postmodernists sought to reanimate “the dead novel” through a ludic appropriation and resurrection of the canonical works of the past. That the initial reviewers of Grendel saw its innovation but did not connect it with recent high-profile examples of elaborating a canonical predecessor to focus on a minor character indicates that the genre had not yet achieved a certain critical mass of cultural visibility, that its procedures had not yet become routinized. Genres are constituted by a similar kind or type of communication but depend on repeated social use for readers or viewers to recognize their rhetorical moves and understand them in context. Genres appear and become habitual under our noses without our realizing it; it is only later that we can name and identify a genre, analyze its typical features, and note divergences among its instantiations.7 The other reason

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a genre can be difficult to notice, at first, is that a genre looks particularly amorphous in its early stages, before writers begin to pattern their works (consciously or not) after earlier ones and conventions begin to take shape. In this chapter, I investigate this fluid, emergent stage in the history of minor-character elaboration. In the first part of the chapter, I show how authors such as Rhys, Stoppard, and Gardner convert minor characters to protagonists in the service of divergent aesthetic and political purposes and how their experimental uses of the genre take widely variable forms. This early stage demonstrates the genre’s versatility, a malleable form adaptable to diverse purposes that will reveal its usefulness for later practitioners. The novels of Rhys and Gardner, along with Stoppard’s drama, also demonstrate methods that will not be adopted later. Wide Sargasso Sea and Grendel create ironic narrator-protagonists out of the minor characters they appropriate and employ fractured forms and discontinuous narratives to convey fragmented mental states. These early examples do not cultivate a simple or straightforward sympathetic identification with their narrators, nor do they pose coherent identities and “voices” in place of the characters’ “silences” in the canonical predecessors—strategies that, as I will show in chapter 2, become conventional hallmarks of the genre in later decades. Further, both texts are metafictions that self-reflexively acknowledge their narratives (and by extension all narratives) to be fictive constructions rather than pose them as versions claiming to be true. Stoppard’s method will also look idiosyncratic, in hindsight, as he refuses to develop, flesh out, or make “round” the “flat” nobodies he shoves to center stage. Yet it is not simply the case that minor-character elaboration emerges in artistic experiment only to devolve into formal rigidity and the ignominy of genre fiction as time goes on. Such a teleological account of the life cycle of genres has frequently been posited by genre theorists, in broad outline and without sustained analysis of individual genres. Typically, theorists have proposed a cyclical model, in which an amorphous initial phase of fluidity and openness is followed by a period of ossification during which a genre’s conventions become crystallized and “it starts behaving like a genre in the strong sense—reproducing itself with abundance, regularity, and without too many variations.”8 The biological and anthropomorphic language frequently adopted by genre theorists conveys the false impression that genres have agency and “behave” in certain predictable ways. According to this model, initially proffered by the Russian formalists, “each art form travels

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down [an] inevitable road from birth to death,”9 with a continual narrowing of the possibilities open to the artist working with a given genre. Franco Moretti, arguably the most prominent and versatile contemporary genre theorist, has built on the Russian formalist schema of the “automatization” of genres by considering the interplay of a form and its sociohistorical context. Instead of a principally aesthetic dialectic of stagnation and opposition, Moretti elaborates a Darwinian theory of literary forms, which thrive or become extinct based on their social resonance. But even with greater attention to external, historical forces, Moretti adheres to the formalist narrative of a cyclical, inevitable process of conventionalization followed by a genre’s displacement by one more fit to survive. A genre flourishes when it is well suited to extraliterary forces, “when its inner form” is “capable of representing the most significant aspects of contemporary reality.” At this point the genre becomes conventionalized, or “automatized”—but when the genre is no longer suited to the historical moment, Moretti follows the formalists in positing that it surrenders to an upstart genre rather than change: “a genre exhausts its potentialities—and the time comes to give a competitor a chance. . . . At which point, either the genre loses its form under the impact of reality, thereby disintegrating, or it turns its back to reality in the name of form, becoming a ‘dull epigone’ indeed.”10 Moretti borrows this last phrase from Viktor Shklovsky, who uses it to describe an art form’s “death”: the moment “when form becomes a dull epigone which our senses register mechanically, a piece of merchandise not visible even to the buyer.”11 Shklovsky’s metaphor of a commodity, combined with the sense of belated imitation in “epigone,” intimates that one outcome of a genre’s conventionalization will be its zombielike afterlife as “genre fiction.” This predictable course is precisely the account offered by Fredric Jameson, who argues that “older generic categories do not, for all that, die out, but persist in the half-life of the subliterary genres of mass culture, transformed into the drugstore and airport paperback lines of gothics, mysteries, romances, bestsellers, and popular biographies.”12 I will show in chapters 2 and 3 that the practice of minor-character elaboration shows no signs of “exhausting its potentialities” (even if critics might become exhausted with the practice) and that the formulaic production of genre fiction is not necessarily “subliterary.” Minor-character elaboration stands as a form of genre fiction that appeals to its target audiences precisely on the ground of its claim to literariness. Moreover, I want to guard against

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reifying the genre in the manner of the theorists cited above, treating it as a quasi-animate entity that lives and dies and generally behaves in certain ways. Viewing genre as a technology or rhetorical practice, I point up the inadequacy of the metanarrative of generic life cycles. Instead, in the first half of this chapter, I argue that from the moment producers start adopting the technology of minor-character elaboration, some deploy it in ways that are unconventional and formally experimental, as in the cases of Rhys, Gardner, and Stoppard, and others, such as George MacDonald Fraser, in his Flashman series, will adopt it in the service of the formulaic, light entertainment that characterizes genre fiction. If a genre is a species, then it may struggle or even become extinct when its population gets too numerous and begins consuming all available resources. But if a genre is a rhetorical practice, then writers may inevitably choose to reproduce that practice in repetitive ways, generating a conventional form, but they may also discover—even at a late date—ways of transforming that practice. While I will complicate, then, any pat account of generic evolution that would cover all potential instantiations of the genre, Moretti’s rejection of a purely aesthetic/formalist account and emphasis on the historical fit between a genre and its extraliterary context prompts a crucial task for the second part of this chapter. There, I seek to explain why such a varied array of producers discovered, independently it would seem, the technology of minor-character elaboration around the moment of the late 1960s. The confluence of a historical turn toward a set of active reading practices with the insurgent political movements and spirit of postmodernist experimentation of the period prepares a set of historical conditions under which the genre becomes an appealing resource and is in turn adopted by such a diverse group of writers. THE FLEXIBLE TECHNOLOGY OF MINOR-CHARACTER ELABORATION

The writers who seized on minor-character elaboration between 1966 and 1971 frequently converted socially marginal, even monstrous, figures into the protagonists of their works. Often, as in later cases, the principal method for achieving such a conversion was to make the appropriated character into a narrator-protagonist, constructing a narrative using the character’s voice and dramatizing an individuality and rich interiority that was absent in the canonical predecessor. David Cowart’s description

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of Wide Sargasso Sea is representative: Rhys “depicts her characters with extraordinary subtlety, breathing a new complexity into most of the figures she appropriates.” As these formerly minor figures “hav[e] their inner lives . . . recorded” through the novel’s “device of alternating narrators or interior monologues,” the resultant protagonist becomes a “humanized version of  .  .  . [Brontë’s] monstrous Bertha.”13 Gardner’s Grendel also works to “humanize” a monstrous figure, to an extent, by utilizing the Beowulf monster as a narrator and constructing the novel as his internal monologue. But in both of these novels the story is more complex than this brief, typical account of realist character complexity suggests. Rather than simply making formerly marginal figures into narrators in order to demonstrate that they too are human, “round” individuals with complex psychological states, and therefore deserving of just treatment in their fictional worlds and of readers’ sympathy, Rhys and Gardner encourage readers to view their narrators—and by extension, all characters, narrators, and persons— skeptically. Wide Sargasso Sea and Grendel remind us that character narration or first-person narrative is self-justifying, distorting in the interest of self-exculpation, and thus not simply to sympathize or identify with the formerly minor figures. In addition, the postmodernist self-reflexivity of these novels prompts readers to recognize their characters as textual constructs, as the effects rather than origins of their narratives. Further still, in offering fragmented, discontinuous narratives rather than coherent accounts of the self, Rhys and Gardner offer initial deployments of the genre that pose a challenge to the assumptions of the minor-character elaborations that will come later. No version of a character, no narrative, can be true, these novels suggest; all narratives are efforts to construct the truth they claim to represent. The “round” or “humanized” depiction of deep psychology central to realist characterization is not actually a realer or more authentic picture, just another narrative convention. And though these novels share the basic technique of borrowing the main elements of plot, setting, and cast of characters from a canonical predecessor while converting previously minor characters into narrator-protagonists, these similarities immediately yield to a number of significant differences. The degree and kind of minorness of the appropriated character varies, as does the extent to which that character will become a more sympathetic one once transformed into a protagonist. Another divergence materializes in the differing medium of the texts I have mentioned thus far. Clearly, dramatic texts will adopt distinct methods of

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characterization than those of novels—provoking the question whether texts in different media ought to be considered part of the same genre. And, perhaps most notably, these texts deploy minor-character elaboration in the service of diverse agendas, situated along spectra from radical critique of the predecessor to homage to its values, from serious political and philosophical modes of engagement to playful and humorous ones. The use of minor-character elaboration that has garnered the most scholarly notice is, as I recounted in the introduction, the “recuperation” of a socially marginal “voice” from a canonical predecessor—and most of this notice has fixed on Wide Sargasso Sea as an exemplary case.14 Although this account of a polemically motivated form of intertextuality is a familiar one (though, in the case of Wide Sargasso Sea, one I intend to complicate), the project of elaborating a canonical text to focus on a socially marginal character as a political intervention propels much of the genre looking forward and so demands substantial consideration here. In imaginatively reconstructing the story of Rochester’s first marriage, Rhys’s novel draws attention to Bertha’s subordination in the story and discourse of Jane Eyre. Just as Rochester conceals his Caribbean-born wife Bertha in the attic, the rebellion against Victorian norms of female propriety and the structures of imperialist domination that Bertha represents are relegated to the margins of Brontë’s narrative. Rhys seeks to call attention to, and with her novel redress, this subordination by focusing on the madwoman in the attic. In redistributing narrative attention toward the prehistory of the marriage of Bertha and Rochester, which haunts the background of Jane Eyre, Rhys underscores the values, politics, novelistic conventions, and narrative priorities that underlie Brontë’s decision to align the reader with Jane, the bold (but ultimately yielding) English heroine, while largely excluding from our interest the intransigent, disobedient—indeed barely human—Creole Bertha. Wide Sargasso Sea, then, participates in a now familiar project of exposing the characteristic exclusions, gaps, and ciphers in canonical literary texts, in particular their tendency to efface or repress the violence of slavery, imperialism, and the hierarchical power structures of racial, sexual, and economic oppression. Rhys’s novel also employs what I have begun to suggest will become the conventional form of minor-character elaboration to critique implicitly and seek to repair these exclusions: “giving voice” to a previously marginalized figure by employing her as the narrator of her own story—though, again, Rhys weaves this basic device into a complex

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structure that will be simplified in later instantiations of the genre.15 Rhys makes Antoinette (in Wide Sargasso Sea, “Bertha” becomes the derisive, Anglicized nickname pinned on her by her husband) into the narrator of the first and third parts of the novel, creating a vivid representation of Antoinette’s consciousness and experience and portraying her as the victim of her husband and the stepfather who negotiated her marriage. In making a narrator-protagonist out of Brontë’s mad, monstrous Bertha, Rhys calls attention to the extremely inhuman depiction of the character in Jane Eyre. A glaring example is Jane’s description of Bertha scampering on “all fours  .  .  . like some strange wild animal.”16 In her letters, Rhys hypothesized (perhaps understating the case) that the gothic monstrosity of Bertha’s character stemmed from Brontë’s bias against Creoles, a belief that white Caribbean islanders were outside the pale of British civilization. Rhys reasoned that “Charlotte had a ‘thing’ about the West Indies being rather sinister places.”17 Though Rhys here attributes Brontë’s depiction of Bertha to personal animus, Wide Sargasso Sea prompts us to discern Brontë’s implication in broader colonialist ideologies, for example, when Rochester explains to Jane that he discovered his first wife had a “nature wholly alien  .  .  . her tastes obnoxious to [him]; her cast of mind common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable of being led to anything higher” (Brontë, Jane Eyre, 344). The utter incompatibility of Rochester and Bertha is attributable to the latter’s “alien” nature, the innately inferior characteristics of her West Indian foreignness. Brontë’s language swings from one extremity to the other, as Rochester maligns Bertha for her “pigmy intellect,” both tiny and exotic, and also for her “giant propensities” to drink, promiscuity, and madness. Her personal qualities are obliquely connected to the immoderate climate in which she was born and raised; as a result, she was “a wife at once intemperate and unchaste” and had “a nature the most gross, impure, depraved [he] ever saw” (345; my emphases). Abandoning Bertha at Thornfield, Rochester then searches Europe for, and finally finds in Jane, a woman who is “the antipodes of the Creole” (349)—someone who represents the opposite of, and lives on other side of the world from, the West Indian.18 The voluminous scholarship on Wide Sargasso Sea has compellingly argued that Rhys’s monumental achievement lies in her aggressive response to Jane Eyre and in her nuanced rendering of Bertha/Antoinette’s triply marginalized character—female, Creole, and insane—in particular the fact that she has “become” the narrator of her own story. Mary Lou Emery’s

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comments are emblematic: “the madwoman silenced in Jane Eyre speaks, and her voice exposes and turns upside down the values, patriarchal and colonialist, upon which the plot and characters of Brontë’s novel depend.”19 Emery clearly wants to argue that Wide Sargasso Sea lays bare and critiques the ideology of Jane Eyre, but she also suggests that the “silenced” character unproblematically speaks herself. This kind of reception oversimplifies what is delineated with far greater complexity in the novel. Wide Sargasso Sea self-reflexively depicts Antoinette becoming progressively aware that she is a character in some author’s book, and Rhys takes pains to construct a pair of narrators constituted by an unruly assemblage of dialects and to portray fractured mental states rather than coherent narrating subjects.20 Criticism that focuses on Antoinette’s “voice” is further weakened by its incompleteness; it fails to take into account Wide Sargasso Sea’s ambivalent relation to its predecessor, the former’s overarching structure—the fact that Rhys’s nameless version of “Rochester” narrates part 2, the longest stretch of the novel—and the fact that both of Rhys’s narrators speak from ideological perspectives that are ironic, unreliable, and significantly distanced from that of the implied author.21 Wide Sargasso Sea thus initiates a wide range of possibilities open to future inheritors of minor-character elaboration: multiple narrators, varying levels of sympathy, a range of stances with regard to a predecessor. Rhys goes to lengths to make her “Rochester” into an unlikable character. His narration begins with him conceiving of his courtship of Antoinette as a conquest—“So it was all over, the advance and retreat”—and ends with his expressions of hatred toward his wife and everything around him.22 But Wide Sargasso Sea utilizes his narrative voice to present nearly two-thirds of the novel. Rhys does this for at least two reasons. First, she wants to enhance our understanding of, and sympathy with, Brontë’s Rochester— to a degree. Rhys emphasizes the fact that he is already something of a victim in Jane Eyre. In the earlier novel, Rochester describes his father as “an avaricious, grasping man” who “could not bear the idea of dividing his estate” and so leaves everything to Rochester’s elder brother Rowland (343). Having disinherited Rochester, his father and brother arrange for him to marry a West Indian heiress for a dowry of thirty thousand pounds, which amounts to a “plot against” him since they knowingly contract him to a girl from a dissipated family of colonizers, with an “infamous mother” and a “dumb idiot” for a brother (344–345). Rochester is thus the victim of both a

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cruel, unloving family and a system of primogeniture that consigns second sons to second-class status. Though Rochester’s social position does not fit neatly into the triumvirate of (race, class, gender) marginalization that tends to preoccupy us today, Rhys reveals how European value systems and social practices, as well as personal animus, conspire to injure and ostracize Rochester in Jane Eyre. In Wide Sargasso Sea, “Rochester’s” situation is thus akin to Antoinette’s, in that oppressive political and economic structures, as well as the machinations of family members, have damaged him psychologically and constrained his ability to act as a free agent. Thus, in the first pages of “Rochester’s” narration, Rhys has his grammar express a lack of agency. His honeymoon is the result of someone else’s plans (“It had been arranged”), and his only role is to consent reluctantly: “I agreed. As I had agreed to everything else” (Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 39).23 Later, Rhys emphasizes his feelings of rejection. “Rochester” mentally apostrophizes his father, thinking, “I will never be a disgrace to you or to my dear brother the son you love. No begging letters, no mean requests. None of the furtive shabby manoeuvres of a younger son. I have sold my soul or you have sold it, and after all is it such a bad bargain?” (41). Not only is he unloved, but in the Faustian bargain of being contracted to marry a diabolical West Indian, Rhys’s “Rochester” wasn’t even allowed to sell his own soul. All this helps explain, if it does not ultimately justify, how Rochester could have ended up locking away his wife. The other reason Rhys employs “Rochester’s” narration for such a long stretch of the novel is that his victimization and his unsympathetic qualities actually bolster Rhys’s critique of imperialism and patriarchy and her fostering of sympathy with Antoinette’s plight. If “Rochester’s” father conspires to send him to the West Indies to marry a Creole, this banishment only underscores the inferiority of the colonies and the undesirability of its women. Jamaica is not a place one goes to wed willingly; it is where one might be sent if one lacks money and title. But Rochester is already “earnestly piti[ed]” by Jane and, by extension, the reader, in Jane Eyre (345). In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys makes her “Rochester” far less sympathetic, reflexively underscored as he asks: “Pity. Is there none for me? Tied to a lunatic for life—a drunken lying lunatic—gone her mother’s way” (99). But since Rhys’s reader recognizes that “Rochester” is not bound to Antoinette, but she to him, and that he would be kindest to leave her and the West Indies for good, his narration functions most dramatically by being distasteful

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to the reader—showing through as a perspective that is distanced from the implied author’s. Rhys uses his adherence to masculinist, romantic stereotypes about the Caribbean as a wild virgin place to be penetrated (“It was a beautiful place—wild, untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness” [51–52]) to expose and critique his imperialist and patriarchal ideologies from within. His narration concludes with him overcome by hostility toward Antoinette and the West Indies—even the scenic landscape: “I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain . . . the sunsets of whatever colours. . . . Above all I hated her” (103). Having his narrative end on this note, determined to inflict his hatred, Rhys creates in her “Rochester” an unsympathetic, unreliable narrator and in undermining him bolsters her critique of patriarchal and imperialist ideology and practices. Significantly, although Rhys makes Antoinette more sympathetic than “Rochester” and certainly portrays her as a victim (of “Rochester,” her family’s neglect, and Brontë’s animus towards Creoles), her narration is also distanced from that of the implied author—and this is not a result of her youthful naïveté in part 1, or her madness in part 3, but of her ideological positioning as the daughter of white colonizers. This is an aspect of Wide Sargasso Sea that has frequently been neglected because of a pair of conventional tendencies: to read a narrator-protagonist as sympathetic figure, with whom the reader is supposed to identify; and to read novels (particularly those by women and socially marginal figures) as autobiographical, assuming that because Rhys and Antoinette share the social identity of Creole women, Rhys’s perspective is aligned with that of her character. Thus Gayatri Spivak famously argues that in Wide Sargasso Sea the black native Christophine “cannot be contained  .  .  . within the European novelistic tradition in the interest of the white Creole rather than the native.”24 Spivak assumes that the Creole Rhys simply writes on behalf of her Creole protagonist. But Rhys exposes her protagonist’s racism and self-destructive impetuosity throughout the novel. Despite Antoinette’s thwarted efforts to create a friendship with Tia across the racial barriers that separate them and despite the fact that her black nurse Christophine is the closest thing she has to a mother, in her dealings with both characters Antoinette repeatedly resorts to racist language and explanations. For example, she dismisses Christophine’s sound advice, “A man don’t treat you good, pick up your skirt and walk out,” by wondering, “how can she know the best thing for

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me to do, this ignorant, obstinate old negro  .  .  . ?” (66, 67). Antoinette also either selectively forgets or purposely obscures the violence of colonial history with what Joyce Carol Oates pithily calls “a kind of sporadic amnesia  .  .  . typical of her people.”25 When “Rochester” asks Antoinette how a village came to be called “Massacre”—it was named after the killing of some seventy Carib natives by English colonizers—she answers, “nobody remembers now” (38).26 Rhys, however, certainly remembers. Recognizing this distinction, Carine Melkom Mardorossian takes issue with much of the criticism of the novel, writing that Rhys “forecloses a facile celebration of an insulated voice’s recovery” by showing how Antoinette “is implicated in the colonialist/imperialist ventures as a descendant of white or racially mixed European settlers and slaveowners.” Rhys’s irony tacitly critiques Antoinette’s perspective, and so “the racial and social divisions foregrounded in the novel ironically do to Rhys’s Antoinette what the latter did to Brontë’s Jane, i.e. show her as constituted within and by the processes of colonization and imperialism.”27 Rhys thus undermines both of her narrators, scrutinizing their ideological positions even as she uses them to expose the biases of Jane Eyre. My point here is not simply to add a more nuanced reading to the mountain of scholarship on Wide Sargasso Sea but to show how Rhys’s well-known precedent manifests a number of potential uses and forms that future practitioners of minor-character elaboration might take up and modify. First, we see in Rhys’s example a political agenda that many subsequent minor-character elaborations will inherit. By redistributing the narrative’s attention to focus on Antoinette and “Rochester,” Rhys calls attention to the colonialist and patriarchal demonizing of “intemperate” women that underlies Jane Eyre’s focus on Jane and that novel’s extreme and monstrous representation of Bertha. Second, Rhys employs character narration as the principal technology for shifting the focus from her precursor text. This is significant because, as I argue in the next chapter, the use of narratorprotagonists will emerge as the primary convention for the strategic development of formerly minor characters—an aesthetic “humanizing” that will often be understood as a political act of liberation. Third, in shifting the focus to multiple characters, and in ironically distancing each of these from the implied author, Rhys demonstrates a range of potential variations— kinds and degrees of minorness in the adopted characters, varying levels of sympathy with the narrator—and thus a fluid and malleable form that her

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successors might modify and fit to their own purposes. Finally, in her use of ironic narrators, Rhys eschews the straightforward cultivation of sympathy for the protagonist that will be the hallmark of many sentimental versions of minor-character elaboration that appear in the decades that follow.

Gardner’s Grendel is likewise an intricately structured novel, and it exercises a similar ironic undermining of the perspective of its minor character turned narrator-protagonist. In Seamus Heaney’s translation of the Beowulf epic, we see that Grendel is a marginalized outsider. But the poem evinces little sympathy for his plight. Grendel is “a fiend out of hell / [who] had dwelt for a time / in misery among the banished monsters, / Cain’s clan, whom the creator had outlawed / and condemned as outcasts. For the killing of Abel / the Eternal Lord had exacted a price.”28 Though the epic alerts listeners to Grendel’s miserable state, it makes clear that we are to see that misery as divinely sanctioned punishment. Grendel thus represents an unredeemed evil to be exorcised by the hero and savior Beowulf. In Grendel, Gardner emphasizes the monster’s marginality with alliterative epithets that echo the cadences of the epic: “earth-rim-roamer, walker of the world’s weird wall.”29 Gardner poses the entire novel as Grendel’s narration, mostly a long interior monologue in which the monster reveals “the deep-sea depths of [his] being” and the psychological “torment” that his ostracism provokes (Gardner, Grendel, 10, 127). Both animals and men shun him; Grendel laments that other beings “can make, concerning [his] race, no delicate distinctions” (8). In contrast with these ostensibly dumb animals, Grendel is an intellectual protagonist, a witty wordsmith, and a self-conscious narrator, always “talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between [himself] and all [he] see[s]” (8). When Grendel asks the sky, “Why can’t I have someone to talk to?” not surprisingly, the “stars sa[y] nothing” (53). Grendel’s isolation and ostracism provoke a futile search for meaning and thus an existential crisis and embrace of nihilism; the monster discovers “that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears” (21–22). Like Rhys’s “Rochester,” Grendel responds to his victimization with rage and violence, and seeing no meaning in the world, he sees nothing to dissuade him from killing with glee and embracing destruction as his raison

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d’être. Gardner’s monster “stink[s] of dead men, murdered children,” and he concludes that the “the world is divided . . . into two parts: things to be murdered, and things that would hinder the murder of things” (6, 158). Gardner’s emphasis on “murder” as opposed to simply “killing” and his subtle depiction of the monster’s hypocrisy—his bisecting of the world hardly amounts to the kind of “delicate distinction” he faults others for being unable to make—intimate that his marauding narrator is also meant to be an ironic, unreliable, and unsympathetic one. Robert Merrill lucidly explains that Gardner’s “rhetorical strategy is first to seduce us into identification with Grendel, then to reveal the terrible consequences of believing what Grendel believes.” This strategy carries risks, however: “The greater our initial identification with Grendel, the greater our shock and selfrecognition at the end.” Further, for those who fail to detect Gardner’s irony and remain seduced by Grendel, “there is unthinking acceptance of a philosophy more or less the opposite of the author’s.”30 Teaching Grendel has brought home to me the risks of Gardner’s strategy, as the majority of my students have sympathized wholeheartedly with the monster—reflexively following the conventional alignment between first-person narrator and the production of sympathy—and had to be alerted to the ways that Gardner ironically undermines his narrator. (Julian Barnes writes: “Irony  .  .  . may be defined as what people miss.”)31 Though Gardner runs the risk of being misconstrued, of readers feeling bad for his existentially anguished murderer of children, it is precisely the challenge Grendel presents its readers to resist the conventional alignment between a compelling first-person narration that represents a character’s deep psychology and the production of sympathy that constitutes the novel’s great achievement and makes it an instructive contrast, even rebuke, to the direction the genre of minor-character elaboration will take. Gardner forces us to decide if we should accept Grendel’s self-exculpatory justifications for his violence. Like Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), Grendel provides readers with a kind of testing ground, an exercise not only in detecting irony but in weighing whether an elaborate account of a character’s motives, a detailed interior view of his plight, should compel us to pardon him.32 Gardner asks us to know Grendel’s case, to understand and even feel what it is like to be in his shoes, yet to resist sympathetic identification with the monster. As such, Grendel stands as a critique of the sentimental structure—the tendency to understand a formal registering of a character’s

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point of view as an effort to compel sympathy with that character33—that underlies so much realist characterization, including the “rounding” of formerly minor characters. While readers may misconstrue Gardner’s purpose, critics have tended to accede to his statements that he loathes existentialism, that he intended Grendel to represent Jean-Paul Sartre, and that the novel is meant to critique Sartre’s philosophy and pay homage to the heroic values of Beowulf.34 As counterweights to the nihilistic, destructive narrator, Gardner introduces an itinerant poet called the Shaper and Beowulf himself. The constructive, humanistic ethos of the bard’s song, which “by changing men’s minds” helps make “the projected possible” (49), tempts Grendel momentarily. But witnessing someone who has found meaning and endeavors to communicate it ends up only tormenting the monster further. He becomes a “ridiculous hairy creature torn apart by poetry” (44) and decides to reject art and all values. Later, when Beowulf arrives to kill Grendel, Gardner has the hero articulate the author’s messages of seasonal rebirth, art as an emblem of the human potential for creation, and the human need for heroic action and beauty: “Though you murder the world, turn plains to stone, transmogrify life into I and it, strong searching roots will crack your cave and rain will cleanse it: The world will burn green, sperm build again. My promise. Time is the mind, the hand that makes (fingers on harpstrings, hero-swords, the acts, the eyes of queens). By that I kill you” (170). Through the ironized philosophical arguments of his narrator, characters like the Shaper and Beowulf, and an elaborate structure in which each of the novel’s twelve chapters represents a value that Grendel rejects,35 Gardner’s novel valorizes the heroic ideals of the epic. Thus, while Rhys employs minor-character elaboration to critique her predecessor, Gardner offers an essentially conservative affirmation of the values trumpeted in his.36 Gardner and Rhys both appropriate extremely marginalized, antagonistic characters from a predecessor and cultivate a decidedly measured sympathy with those characters. But in both cases, the implied authors maintain critical distance from the former villains, and in Grendel this distance is even wider; the monster is ultimately still to be viewed as a monster. These two early adoptions of minor-character elaboration are intricately structured art novels that engage complex political and philosophical questions and employ experimental formal approaches typical of modernist and postmodernist fiction. Rhys, who drafted her Voyage in the Dark in

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1914 and published Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966, has often been claimed as both a modernist and an early postmodernist writer.37 While I have little interest in arguing for one designation or the other (and think Rhys herself to be a good illustration of the continuity, rather than rupture, between the two movements), Wide Sargasso Sea’s conflicting narrators produce a moral and epistemological uncertainty characteristic of modernist fiction, and the novel challenges Western master narratives and offers glimpses of postmodernist metafictional play—as when Antoinette hints at an awareness that she has become a character in someone else’s book: “This cardboard house where I walk at night is not England” (107). Rhys interweaves a self-reflexive moment, one of even greater significance to the present study, when Antoinette recalls her time in the convent school. There, she listens to “stories from the lives of the Saints.” But Antoinette is not interested in this book and wants to know about “our own saint, the skeleton of a girl of fourteen under the altar of the convent chapel . . . St Inocenzia is her name. We do not know her story, she is not in the book. The saints we hear about were all very beautiful and wealthy. All were loved by rich and handsome young men” (32). Buried under the altar rather than locked in the attic, her story absent from the canonical book of saints and conventional maidens, “St Inocenzia” functions as an analogue of Bertha and Antoinette’s longing to know her untold story as a reflection of Rhys’s project. Gardner riddles Grendel with an even greater amount of postmodernist self-reflexivity and formal experiment. Seemingly conscious of his origins in lines of epic poetry, Grendel describes himself, in a section of the novel rendered in verse, as a textual Tarzan swinging through a stanzaic jungle: “red eyes hidden in the dark of verbs, / brachiating with a hoot from rhyme to rhyme” (112). And Gardner employs allusions to his predecessor, which only a scholar would likely notice, anachronistic references to contemporary literature, philosophy, and physics, and mixes an array of forms; prose narrative, iambic verse, dramatic scenes, and film cuts all appear.38 In both novels, metafictional devices disrupt any realist illusion, reminding readers of the constructedness of their characters and thus further forestalling a naïvely sympathetic response to them. Rhys and Gardner remind readers that their characters are constructed, textual, not people (or monsters). They also, in a manner consistent with postmodernist fiction in general, create fragmented characters that suggest that even “real” people are not unified, autonomous agents able to give

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coherent narrative accounts of themselves. Rather, both novels suggest that subjectivity is fractured and that the self is constituted by discourse. In Wide Sargasso Sea, the “Rochester” figure’s narrative continually undermines itself, revealing the fallibility of his point of view—both his actual vision (“And when did I begin to notice all this about my wife . . . ? Or did I notice it before and refuse to admit what I saw?” [39]) and his ability to set down an accurate record of his fractured psyche: “As for my confused impressions they will never be written. There are blanks in my mind that cannot be filled up” (45). Similarly, Antoinette possesses no stable identity (“So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong . . . ” [61]) and discovers that reality is not identical with narratives about it (“I wish I could tell him that out here is not at all like English people think it is” [20]) nor even with the experience of it: “It isn’t like it seems to be . . . It never is” (107).39 Grendel similarly disrupts any sense that its narration gives a seamless record of a comprehensible self or a transparent picture of a stable reality. Grendel is not only “torn apart by poetry” but is divided against himself throughout the text. Caring what humans think about him but drawn to misanthropy, the monster is “torn between tears and a bellow of scorn” (104). Later, Gardner depicts him as “a creature of two minds” (110), unable to decide whether to kill Wealtheow or to worship her beauty. Under the pressure of this self-division, Grendel’s narration comes unglued, as when Gardner flaunts the artifice of simultaneous narration (the fictional convention that allows a narrator to recount events while she takes part in them): “(whispering, whispering, chewing the universe down with words) . . . I jump back without thinking (whispering wildly: jump back without thinking)” (168). In both novels, these patterns of self-undermining narration accomplish more than postmodernist metafictional winking (“It’s fiction!”); they mount a critique of the idea that any narrative can offer a full or true account of character. Ironically, then, these early minor-character elaborations undercut the logic that underwrites what will become the conventional form of the genre: the belief that telling a story from the point of view of a character offers the truth of that character. It may not be surprising that experimental novelists like Rhys and Gardner were among the first to employ minor-character elaboration, audaciously appropriating canonical predecessors and pulling the form of their rewritings in a number of antirealist, self-consciously literary directions.

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This fact should not, however, be taken as evidence that genres necessarily begin in formal experiment and later descend into the debased realm of genre fiction—especially since these “high-literary” examples are not the only minor-character elaborations to appear in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1969, midway between the appearance of Wide Sargasso Sea and Grendel, George MacDonald Fraser published his Flashman: From the Flashman Papers, 1839–1842, the first installment in his tremendously popular Flashman series. Fraser’s novel demonstrates that the genre was, from the beginning, compatible with various purposes—for comic-historical romances featuring a boorish rogue as well as for high literary experiment. If one fails to recognize the “Flashman” in the title, it may not be apparent that this series of swashbuckling adventure tales that span the British Empire in the nineteenth century are minor-character elaborations or are in any way related to the other texts I am considering here. (In fact, I might not have become aware of the series had Fraser not died in early 2008; one begins to see the research difficulties involved in identifying “members” of a previously unspecified genre.) But Flashman is the bully in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), a popular, moralizing public-school novel set at the fictional Rugby School. Though Hughes’s book remains widely read, in particular by English schoolboys, it does not possess the same degree or kind of canonicity as, say, a Hamlet or a Jane Eyre. Thus Fraser’s Flashman takes additional steps to alert readers to his novel’s relation to its predecessor. Fraser offers a title page on which he follows the tradition of novelists since Cervantes in claiming the text to be a found document, “Edited and Arranged by George MacDonald Fraser.” An “Explanatory Note” follows the title page, asserting that the volume is a recently discovered “manuscript known as the Flashman Papers.”40 The “Note” goes on to identify the author of these fictional “memoirs” as a character from an earlier novel (though it also treats that novel as if it were a historical document): “A point of major literary interest about the papers is that they clearly identify Flashman, the school bully of Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays, with the celebrated Victorian soldier of the same name” (Fraser, Flashman, 9).41 Fraser references Flashman’s prior literary existence and foreshadows the more illustrious history he will give the character. Since Hughes’s novel was virtually forgotten in the United States, however, many of Fraser’s American reviewers took at face value the imitation of autobiography and believed “the Flashman papers” to be an actual historical document.42 These gaffes

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occurred despite the fact that Fraser’s “Explanatory Note” is followed by a long epigraph from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, which the “Note” claims was found “pasted to the top page” of the memoirs, and recalls for Fraser’s readers the relevant scene from Hughes’s novel: young “Flashy” being carried back to school, “beastly drunk” on gin punch and beer (10). The opening of Fraser’s novel provides another striking instance of a minor-character elaboration employing self-reflexive signals that indicate the revisionist, oppositional impetus of its narrative. Flashman also converts its adopted minor character into a narrator-protagonist, and Flashman begins his narration with the flat declaration: “Hughes got it wrong, in one important detail” (11)—making it even stranger that reviewers took Flashman to be an actual autobiography. Flashman goes on to dispute Hughes’s contention that it was his idea to follow gin with beer. The humorous intent behind contradicting the precursor is apparent. But beneath the surface of Flashman’s claim that he knows better than to mix his spirits, Fraser’s opening line offers the reader instructions about how to process this text—something like: “Hughes did not give you the whole story. This novel will offer a fuller picture of my character and set the record straight.” Fraser’s narrator is particularly explicit in the ideological motivation behind contesting Hughes, who “was more concerned to preach a sermon than to give facts.” Flashman rejects such moralizing, promises to offer only unvarnished facts, and claims: “since many of them are discreditable to me, you can rest assured they are true” (11). Flashman’s insistence on the truth of his account stands as a stark contrast to the debunking of first-person narration that occurs in Wide Sargasso Sea and Grendel and suggests that Fraser will offer a worldview to compete with that of Hughes, advocating his view of reality as more accurate rather than pose any such view as a construction of reality. (In chapter 2 I elaborate this distinction as the difference between a perspectivist and a constructivist epistemology.) The dispute over whose idea it was to drink beer may seem a minor revision and thus suggest that Flashman is more of a sequel or spinoff, but the critique of Hughes’s “preaching” agenda indicates the manner in which Fraser’s novel shifts its entire attitude toward Flashman. Whereas in the initial novel he is a justly punished bully and thus helps extend a moral admonition to readers, in Fraser’s hands Flashman triumphs time and again in spite of his boorish behavior—insinuating that in the history of the British Empire, no wealthy, racist, womanizing scoundrel went unrewarded.

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Despite its appearance as a “light” novel of irreverent humor, the politics of Flashman actually provides a complex counterpoint to those of Grendel and Wide Sargasso Sea because Fraser’s novel is at the same time an unabashedly commercial piece of popular entertainment, a historical novel satirizing British imperialism, and an articulation of its creator’s conservative views. Born in Carlisle, Cumberland, Fraser, whose other claims to fame include a screenwriting credit for the James Bond film Octopussy (1983), was unapologetic about his mercenary motivations, creating the Flashman series to “write [his] way out” of financial difficulties and a unpromising job with the Glasgow Herald. While Rhys wrote and rewrote Wide Sargasso Sea over decades, Fraser proudly boasted that the first installment of Flashman “took 90 hours, no advance plotting, no revisions, just tea and toast and cigarettes at the kitchen table.”43 Readers loved the result, and Fraser published eleven more installments in the series, the final one in 2005. Before his death, he embraced the profitability of his protagonist’s political incorrectness: “Flashman is my bread and butter, and if he wasn’t an elitist, racist, sexist swine, I’d be selling bootlaces at street corners instead of being a successful popular writer.”44 While Flashman and its sequels play the repulsiveness of their central figure for laughs, Fraser saw his project as a historical debunking, revealing the rust beneath Britain’s imperial gilding. “Through the Seventies and Eighties I led [Flashman] on his disgraceful way, toadying, lying, cheating, running away, treating women as chattels, abusing inferiors of all colours, with only one redeeming virtue—the unsparing honesty with which he admitted his faults, and even gloried in them.” Fraser lambasted the political correctness “of people who would deny their history because it doesn’t present the picture they would like.”45 While Fraser does not undertake a familiar project of recovering the perspective of a socially marginal figure—far from it: Flashy’s father made his fortune in “America out of slaves and rum, and piracy too” (16)—the novels continually highlight the sexism and racism of their protagonist, as well as the profiteering that actually motivated the imperial venture, the gratuitous bloodletting of war, and the corruption of the military and government. Flashman demonstrates, then, another set of possibilities that minorcharacter elaboration makes available: the production of a humorous, commercial entertainment with a complicated politics and a revisionist historical agenda. In chapter 2, I explore in greater detail the range of

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political agendas and stances toward canonical predecessors occupied by later writers to adopt the genre, and in chapter 3 I argue that the publishing industry has come to recognize its potential to facilitate all manner of popular production. But these varied possibilities are already evident at the moment of the genre’s emergence. Fraser’s prefatory materials also reveal the importance of paratextual devices for communicating (or failing to make clear) to readers the fact that a protagonist had a previous incarnation as a minor character in a canonical text.46 All the examples I have mentioned in this chapter explicitly signal their intertextual relationship—though they differ in how they do so and in the degree of explicitness. Like Flashman, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, A Tempest, and Grendel allude early and prominently with their titles, and their characters retain their proper names from Shakespeare and the Beowulf poet. Wide Sargasso Sea is subtler in both respects: the title offers no indication of the novel’s intertextuality; Rhys’s “Rochester” figure remains unnamed, and though he maliciously nicknames Antoinette “Bertha,” it is only in part 3 that “Grace Poole,” a full proper name from Jane Eyre, appears.47 An introduction by Francis Wyndham, however, has always been appended to Rhys’s novel.48 This preface performs a number of vital functions. It establishes for the reader the fact that Rhys makes a protagonist out of Brontë’s Bertha and discusses the reason Rhys did so, explaining that “for many years,” she “had been haunted by the figure of the first Mrs Rochester—the mad wife of Jane Eyre” and that “the present novel” is “her story.”49 Wyndham’s statement thus directs interpretations to follow by emphasizing that the novel is Bertha’s story—even though “Rochester” narrates over half of it. More significantly, in addition to offering background about Rhys’s biography and corpus and thus accrediting her authorship, Wyndham authorizes her aggressive intertextual appropriation, insisting, its derivative premise notwithstanding, that Wide Sargasso Sea be received as an autonomous work of art: “it is in no sense a pastiche of Charlotte Brontë and exists in its own right, quite independent of Jane Eyre.”50 Wyndham endorses Rhys, offering his authority and the fact that Ford Madox Ford mentored her to sanction her work. To point out the function of this paratext is in no way to contradict the merits of the novel itself but to stress that such paratexts offer a form of reception within the covers of the book itself—an instance of critical judgment that has considerable capacity to sway the book’s future reception.

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John Frow lucidly points out the importance of paratexts for establishing a text’s genre; they help “orient the reader towards an expectation of the kind of thing this is.”51 Such orientation is especially vital with a minor-character elaboration, where the entire level of intertextual meaning depends on the reader’s recognition of a character’s origins in an earlier text. A paratext like Wyndham’s introduction or a dust-jacket synopsis52 sends a crucial cue to the reader about the novel’s genre and its revisionary investments. We can easily imagine the reader who has not read Brontë’s novel in a long time, if at all, who picks up Wide Sargasso Sea, skips the preface (and is not reading a critical edition or in an institutional setting), and therefore does not recognize the parallels with Jane Eyre and misses the intertextual relationship entirely. This reader might enjoy Wide Sargasso Sea, might understand its depiction of English imperial attitudes toward colonial subjects, and be moved by its portrait of a girl abandoned by her family and forced into an economically exploitative and psychically abusive marriage, but this reader could not detect in the novel a critical response to Jane Eyre or a wider indictment of the exclusive focus of the English canon. Paratexts prepare readers for what to expect from a minor-character elaboration and how to understand and interpret the text. Further, a preface like Wyndham’s demonstrates the way paratexts indicate to readers the quality as well as the kind of “thing” they are approaching. Paratexts—think also of the “medals” blazoned on the covers of contemporary prize-winning novels (“Winner of the Man Booker Prize”)—that is, serve a crucial function in positioning a text in symbolic hierarchies. The strategy deployed by a given minor-character elaboration to announce its relation to a predecessor will depend on the degree and kind of canonicity, or, simply, the recognizability of the precursor. Selecting a well-known canonical text from which to borrow a character makes sense on both sides of the rhetorical exchange. Authors that want to reveal the ideological underpinnings of literary history, explore a mysterious character, or pay homage to a classic53 benefit from selecting a character from a recognizable text. And readers will only “get” the intertextual meaning if they have some familiarity with the precursor. This goes some way toward explaining why writers adopting minor-character elaboration have continually borrowed from the most “hyper-canonical” of texts,54 but in the next part of this chapter I explore the other reason at length: these works have had the widest sphere of cultural influence and therefore have a hold,

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for better or worse, over the imaginations of generations of readers in far-flung locales. I have referred several times to the well-known and allusively titled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and A Tempest, both of which also first appeared in the late 1960s, but I have parried until now the question of their generic “spillover,” to return to Dimock’s term—the difference of their dramatic medium and the thorny theoretical question whether a generic classification ought to span different media. Genre theorists have differed with regard to this question; some answer “no,” that adjectival “modes” that function in a particular register and encompass thematic content, such as “horror,” can span different media (we speak of horror novels and horror films) but that genres include a formal dimension that is medium specific.55 On the other hand, more empirically minded theorists tend to see historical genres as yoking together objects that don’t obey neat categorical divisions along lines of form, content, or medium. Culler redirects the question from whether certain works should “count” as part of the genre and toward a consideration of whether texts might be drawn into useful and meaningful relations with one another based on shared features as well as their divergences. A claim about a generic model is not an assertion about some property that all works that might be attached to this genre possess. It is a claim about fundamental structures that may be at work even when not manifest, a claim that directs attention to certain aspects of a work that mark a tradition and an evolution, that is to say, dimensions of transformation. The test of generic categories is how far they help relate a work to others and activate aspects of works that make them rich, dynamic, and revealing, though it is crucial to stress that interpretation of individual works is not the goal of poetics, which seeks to understand how systems of literary discourse work.56

When studying genres historically, dynamism is the rule. This study contends that genres are constituted by historical, formal, and institutional components, and it follows Culler in seeking to apprehend the significance of systems by adopting a scale of analysis wider than the individual text. So while dramas like Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead or Césaire’s A Tempest (first published in 1969) necessarily utilize different means for redistributing attention toward minor characters from that of

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novels like Wide Sargasso Sea and Grendel,57 they nonetheless relate in a number of significant ways to the genre at hand. These plays are, first of all, major markers of a shift in attention to the minor characters of Shakespeare’s plays. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern remains, in part thanks to its screen adaptation in 1990, one of the most popular contemporary works to feature minor characters from a classic, and its influence on subsequent production is hardly limited by the fact that it is a dramatic work.58 Of similar literary historical significance is the overt and aggressive intertextual nature of both plays, as minor-character elaboration forms a subset of a broader contemporary boom in explicit intertextuality. Césaire’s A Tempest, in turn, stands as a bold appropriation and an influential example of anticolonial “writing back” to a foundational Western text and thus shares a political project with works like Rhys’s and others that use the genre. If we search for relevant signs of the emergence of minor-character elaboration, we find these traversing the other major formal genres as well. In the same half-decade from which I have been drawing my principal examples, Anne Sexton published her Transformations, a series of long poems that rework fairy-tale material, often using “a middle aged witch” as a speaker.59 In short fiction, John Barth published his “Menelaiad” in 1968, an infuriating succession of nested quotations, which, in typical high-postmodernist, artifice-baring style, opens by admitting: “this isn’t the voice of Menelaus; this voice is Menelaus, all there is of him.”60 This debunking of the mimetic illusion that some person is actually speaking and insistence that Menelaus only exists in and through Barth’s text loom as another rebuke to the many minor-character elaborations and critics that applaud a minor character’s getting the chance to speak for herself. A little further back, Eudora Welty published her short story “Circe” in 1955, converting the demigoddess into the narrator of a revised account of Odysseus’s visits to her island.61 The other reason Stoppard’s play, in particular, needs to be taken into account here is because it too, in the unusual manner in which Stoppard depicts his unlikely protagonists, provides an instructive contrast to what will become the typical strategies of those adopting the genre and so helps clarify these negatively. Stoppard refuses to develop the characters he has appropriated from Shakespeare and uses to great comic effect the fact that they remain as indistinguishable from each other in his play as they are in Hamlet. They cannot remember their pasts or even their own names,

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and Stoppard refuses to depict them performing any significant actions not licensed by the text of Hamlet. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern appear onstage for Stoppard’s entire play—until the final scene when they are dead, that is—but despite this conversion from bit players to leading men, they are still completely “flat” characters, lacking individualizing traits, agency, and psychological depth.62 Stoppard has Rosencrantz reflexively summarize the lack of any individualizing elaboration of his character and his inadequacy for center stage: “I can’t think of anything original. I’m only good in support.”63 By not developing the courtiers and by having them resemble their prior incarnations as “the indifferent children of the earth,”64 echoing Eliot’s Prufrock, Beckett’s antiheroes, and Pirandello’s characters in search of an author, Stoppard draws an elaborate analogy between what it is like to be a minor character and what it is like to live in the modern world: to be unimportant, belated, unable to control events, a functionary serving the purposes of some unseen force. If fostering this analogy is the serious motive behind the comic vapidity of Stoppard’s characters, an additional playful purpose sheds light on what will become the conventional strategies of later minor-character elaborations. In refusing to provide development or backstory for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Stoppard adheres with parodic extremity to the New Critical injunction against extratextual speculation—a ban famously articulated in L. C. Knights’s attack on A. C. Bradley, in “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?”65 Yet it is precisely this kind of mimetic speculation—imagining a character has a life outside what we are told in the original text—that novelists such as Rhys, Gardner, and Fraser undertake in order to expand upon and develop the characters they appropriate. In chapter 4, I explore the logic of such expansion and its consequences for our understanding how readers respond to the textual marks of character on the page. Stoppard’s humor, by contrast, derives from the fact that, though his courtiers now have leading roles, he has not endeavored to speculate or expand; they remain completely “flat,” free of individuation, utterly typological—a quintessence of minorness. “Why us?—anybody would have done,” Guildenstern (or is it Rosencrantz?) acknowledges (Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 92). Stoppard’s play, in hindsight, represents another variation on the techniques of minorcharacter elaboration being tested at this early moment—one that few writers will endeavor to imitate.66

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THE EMERGENCE OF ACTIVE READERS

But why does the genre emerge when it does? Why, that is, do producers as seemingly disparate as Rhys, Stoppard, Césaire, Fraser, and Gardner arrive at the technology of minor-character elaboration at approximately the same moment in the late 1960s? Just as a genre is subject to historical development, ever evolving as successive writers adapt it to their needs, the forces that give rise to any such complex phenomenon are manifold. The Russian formalist hypothesis that genres begin in parodic overturning of a dominant genre’s conventions may look plausible for narrow formal genres like the folk/prose epic,67 but for a more complex one like minor-character elaboration it is difficult to point to a parodic reaction against a particular form to explain the genre’s appearance. It is tempting to explain the phenomenon by simply invoking “the Sixties,” with its oppositional political movements and iconoclastic forms. Gardner, in fact, associated his own experiments in Grendel with the spirit of the times, claiming that one influence on him “was the Beatles,” who “contributed to a fantastic thawing and breaking up of the rules. I was writing, you know, in the age of O’Hara and John Updike, all those realists, and I was putting out fantasy. At least, nonrealistic fiction. These days it’s called magical realism.”68 Gardner points to the fabulist reaction against realism that marked the “high” postmodernist moment, couching it in similar terms to those Robert Scholes would apply in his influential study of the period.69 But Gardner also saw himself as taking part in the broader radicalism of the era—interestingly complicating efforts to see his attack on Sartre and attempt to revive traditional humanist values as simply conservative or reactionary. At the same time as metafiction and fabulation surfaced to trouble realism, a generational shift of the gaze toward marginalized social groups and their untold histories certainly constitutes another major impetus behind the genre. The shift in attention from classic heroes and heroines to minor characters parallels, for example, the rise of the New Social History, with its shift in the object of historic investigation from elites to masses of the oppressed.70 These broader generational tendencies were accompanied by a number of more narrowly specifiable political, historical, and cultural forces, which made the genre’s techniques appeal to producers and helped propel it forward. Three overlapping forces seem most relevant: first, a cluster of active reading practices that respond to the Eurocentric, patriarchal, and upper-class

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focus of canonical Western literature, which can be seen as the literary, cultural component of the radical, insurgent movements—student uprisings and strikes, anticolonial revolutions in Africa and the Caribbean, and the second-wave feminist, civil rights, Black Power, and Gay Liberation efforts—of the period. These movements, of course, have distinctive features at different moments and locales, but a striking fact of the practice of minor-character elaboration over the past five decades has been its adoption by an assortment of writers from around the globe. Without attempting to flatten local differences, a signal goal of this project is to demonstrate how the shared use of a genre forms a horizon for coherent transnational study. The fact that a wide range of writers responded to different local circumstances with similar textual strategies is precisely what makes genre a compelling analytic framework. Second, the poststructuralist “Death of the Author” and an opening—perhaps reopening—of texts that arose in opposition to the New Critical textual orthodoxy exemplified by Knights’s essay. And third, an anxious set of proclamations about the “death of the novel” and, opposing these, the rise to prominence of a set of literary movements, often categorized under the wind-battered umbrella of “postmodernism,” including fabulation/magical realism, the nonfiction novel, and metafiction, which have in common a heightened and explicit use of intertextuality. Taken together these forces generate a more aggressive, radical appropriation of canonical literary texts, a political orientation that is resistant to or critical of those texts and their wide sphere of cultural influence, and a contemporary writing practice that unapologetically borrows from and remakes those texts into new ones. Before considering the trajectory of these forces, I want to reiterate that at one level the expansion and revision of familiar stories and characters is as old as literature. What is new or renewed, then, in the emergence of minorcharacter elaboration is not the sense that writers might be free to expand imaginatively upon familiar characters but the kind of characters appropriated (often socially marginal, rather than merely minor), the aggressive revision of such characters (rather than merely giving us “more” of Falstaff), and the frequent employment of the novel form for such a practice. The late 1960s does not represent a moment of origin, and the genre’s roots are not embedded in a single progenitor text. Rather, the genre’s utility becomes apparent at a time when modes of active, revisionist reading came to prominence in the decolonizing period that preceded the publication of Rhys’s novel.

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When the Barbadian poet and novelist George Lamming wrote his essayistic The Pleasures of Exile (1960), he was not the first writer to recognize Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a resonant allegory of colonial relations.71 Nor was he alone in proffering an interpretation of a classic text, or even The Tempest, rooted in the personal and collective experience of marginalization. Elaine Showalter has documented how Margaret Fuller, in her Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1843), likened her own life as a motherless intellectual, cut off from other women and enamored with the language of her father, to the situation of Shakespeare’s Miranda, and how Florence Nightingale, anticipating Christa Wolf by a century and a half, saw in the Cassandra myth a metaphor for the alienation she experienced in her search for feminine independence.72 But Lamming was consciously patterning his reading of Caliban and Prospero after C. L. R. James, whose “ingenious critical narrative” Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways (1953) anachronistically interpreted Melville’s Ahab as a representation of the authoritarianism of the U.S. surveillance state during the Cold War and imagined the Pequod’s crew as a collective movement and potentially the real heroes of Moby-Dick.73 In Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, James cited his experience being “detained” on Ellis Island as “the most realistic commentary [he] could give on the validity of Melville’s ideas today.”74 In turn, Lamming’s strategic decision to “make use of ” a simultaneously subjective and collective interpretation of The Tempest “as a way of presenting a certain state of feeling which is the heritage of the exiled and colonial writer from the British Caribbean” (Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile, 9) served as the springboard for a succession of prominent intellectuals in Caribbean and African nationalist independence movements who would follow him in appropriating and revising the figure of Shakespeare’s Caliban. Lamming’s book looms as significant precedent for minor-character elaboration. First, by fixing on a minor character who makes a rousing appeal that resonates with dispossessed peoples across the world and then making Caliban into the central figure of his essays, Lamming established a paradigm for the polemical, politically oppositional appropriation of a marginalized character from a canonical text that could also structure poetry, drama, or fiction. Though space constraints make it impossible for me to do justice here to the complexity of either Caliban’s portrayal in The Tempest or its reception, and though this story may be a familiar one to postcolonial scholars, the fact that so many contemporary writers have

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seized on Caliban in particular and on minor characters from hypercanonical texts in general demands some explanation. While Caliban is dispossessed, enslaved, and suppressed under threat of torture in the story of The Tempest, Shakespeare’s discourse does not suppress or marginalize Caliban in any straightforward manner. In fact, in oft-cited lines, the play depicts him emphatically protesting that Prospero has robbed him of the island that is his birthright and enslaved him: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou takest from me . . . I am all the subjects that you have, / Which first was mine own king: and here you sty me / In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me / The rest o’ the island” (1.2.482–495). Much of the appeal of the character to subsequent generations comes from the fact that, though Caliban is treated with manifest cruelty and injustice throughout the play, Shakespeare draws attention to this injustice and “gives voice” to Caliban’s complaint—a complaint that Prospero ignores but that the play’s audience may not. Similarly, critics have read Caliban’s anguished lament that he is dependent on Prospero’s language in order to oppose him (“You taught me language and my profit on’t / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!” [1.2.517–519]) as encapsulating the fundamental dilemma of the colonial writer.75 Yet the fact that Shakespeare’s play dramatizes Caliban’s plight while remaining principally concerned with the restitution of Prospero’s dukedom and the fact that Caliban’s complaint was not heard in the centuries that followed combine to make him a particularly resonant minor character. Furthermore, Shakespeare’s privileged position as the standard bearer of Western cultural authority and prestige has made his work, in particular among that of other canonical authors, a frequent target for intertextual revisions and appropriations from a diverse cadre of culturally marginalized writers. Lamming cites James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (1955) as capturing the ambivalence shared by artists who have been made to feel their “inferiority, both personal and racial . . . in the presence of ” the monuments of Western achievement, like “Shakespeare and Bach, the cathedral at Chartres, even the Empire State Building” yet simultaneously seek to create art by “drawing on the spiritual legacy of Western European civilization” (31, 30). The compulsion to respond to such monuments, even if doing so amounts to complicity with Western yardsticks of achievement, explains why a few foundational, hypercanonical texts—Hamlet, The Tempest, the Iliad and Odyssey, Robinson Crusoe—have continually inspired

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minor-character elaborations and many other forms of intertextual appropriation. Writers from Kamau Brathwaite and Césaire to John Edgar Wideman have subsequently reimagined Caliban. In his Philadelphia Fire (1990), Wideman’s protagonist Cudjoe recalls his idea to stage a production of The Tempest with his inner-city students—cannily, on Wideman’s part, in 1968. Wideman interrupts Cudjoe’s narrative of his doomed production with several pages of a free-style rapping, dozens-playing monologue uttered by a reimagined Caliban.76 (Here is another example of how minor-character elaboration can be folded into a larger structure—how counting texts cannot capture all the instances in which writers utilize a genre.) Similarly inspired, Marina Warner creates a narrative for Caliban’s mother Sycorax in her novel Indigo, and Derek Walcott has famously utilized appropriations of Robinson Crusoe and the Odyssey to structure his anticolonial poetry. The Pleasures of Exile thus stands an exemplary expression of ambivalence toward European cultural hegemony that has been the subject of much postcolonial literary production, theory, and criticism77 and that will become a felt tension in elaborations that rely heavily on canonical texts even as they seek to revise and critique them. Lamming binds his ambivalent reading of The Tempest to a vision of the novel as a particularly effective site of political work. He cites the West Indian novel’s historical vision, its ability to “chart the West Indian memory” (38), and its capacity for representing everyday proletarian and communal experience. The West Indian novelist “looked in and down at what had traditionally been ignored. For the first time the West Indian peasant became other than a cheap source of labour. He became, through the novelist’s eye, a living existence . . . involved in riot and carnival” (38–39). Lamming links this Bakhtinian account of the West Indian novel to claims about the novelist’s privileged ability to channel and reproduce authentically the dialects and voices that have “traditionally been ignored” (“the peasant tongue has its own rhythms which are Selvon’s and Reid’s rhythms” [45]), which will be echoed in many approving scholarly responses that claim minor-character elaborations “recover,” “recuperate,” or “liberate” voices that were “silenced” in the canon. It’s worth noting that several tensions emerge here in Lamming’s claims. The West Indian novelist is not a peasant, but he is singularly able, through his “novelist’s eye” and ear, to bring to life peasant experience and dialects. The novelist serves as the elite representative—educated and capable of transforming what he sees and hears into literature—that

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speaks on behalf of the proletariat, ostensibly with an authentic language and account of experience and a perfect alignment of interest. And reading Lamming’s claims about the ability of the novelist to ventriloquize tongues and rhythms alongside his frequent allusion to canonical European texts calls to mind a familiar paradox about the novel, especially in Bakhtinian theory, and one that minor-character elaborations evince in an especially dramatic way: the claim that the novel is at the same time a privileged medium for conveying an authentic representation of everyday life (in particular, of “low” experience) and of an array of social “voices” and a highly intertextual form that is derived from conventional representational codes rather than from “reality.” But the most significant aspect of The Pleasures of Exile, exemplifying one historical force that sets the stage for the emergence of the genre, is the manner in which Lamming reads. His strategies of producing personal and political reinterpretations of Shakespeare’s play anticipate the confluence of reader-centered theories, which have emerged over the past several decades and which are made manifest in fiction as the genre of minorcharacter elaboration. Lamming both identifies with Caliban (“For I am a direct descendant of slaves, too near to the actual enterprise to believe that its echoes are over with the reign of emancipation” [15]) and rejects the social role to which the character has been consigned; he “is not the Caliban whom Prospero had in mind” (11). In drawing the parallel with Shakespeare’s Caliban and limning his own contrary version of the experience of the colonized native, Lamming claims the authority of direct observation: “the whole world of my accumulated emotional experience” (12). But while The Pleasures of Exile is thus subjective, “a report on one man’s way of seeing,” Lamming stresses that the parallels he draws are validated by similar experiences “lived and deeply felt by millions of men like me” (13).78 By both identifying with and objecting to Shakespeare’s Caliban and by asserting an authority to do so rooted in his subjective experience and the collective one of colonial subjects, Lamming utilizes textual strategies that would be famously theorized in feminist scholarship as “re-vision” and “resistant reading” but that have proven appealing to other marginalized groups as well. For Adrienne Rich, “re-vision” describes the awakening collective consciousness spurred by second-wave feminism and the related textual practice of “entering an old text from a new critical direction.”79 Such acts of

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reappraisal demand that female readers read literary texts as representations of social reality, “as a clue to how we live,” but also as ideological constructions, distorting mirrors that have promoted self-alienation: “how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us” (Rich, “When We Dead Awaken,” 18). Re-vision demands knowledge of the literary tradition but requires that tradition to be read anew: “We need to know the writing of the past and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us” (19). Judith Fetterley extends Rich’s project, arguing that “the first act of the feminist critic must be to become a resisting rather than an assenting reader.”80 While the value of these projects to the development of feminist literary theory and practice cannot be overstated, I want to emphasize their vision of an approach to reading more broadly. Fetterley and Rich envision an active reader whose stance toward the text and the totality of the literary tradition has shifted from passive deference to an active confrontation—a spirit of questioning, wondering, disagreeing, and talking back to the tradition. It is this shift in “literary criticism from a closed conversation to an active dialogue” that makes the work of minor-character elaboration, an imaginative piece of criticism, a critical work of fiction, possible.81 The feminist model of the active, resistant reader has its (perhaps unlikely) counterpart in Roland Barthes’s complementary theories of the “Death of the Author” and “writerly” engagement with texts.82 For Barthes, viewing the text as a web of intertextual threads instead of the product of a unitary author liberates readers from the traditional authority of the author figure, allowing them actively to produce meaning through their reading, which “writes” the text into being. The “writerly” becomes Barthes’s standard for textual evaluation “because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text.”83 This description resonates emphatically with minor-character elaborations, which weave new texts beginning with the loose threads of old ones. Barthes’s notion of the reader as producer, like the resisting reader, reflects a generational, ideological turn toward an active, participatory mode of reading, which might be said to culminate with reader-response theory. Gerry Brenner’s Performative Criticism: Experiments in Reader Response (2004) demonstrates the close affiliation, perhaps even the indistinguishable line, between minor-character elaboration as an artistic and a critical practice.84 Brenner’s book is a work of reader-response criticism

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in which each chapter performs an interpretation in the form of a creative narrative, dialogue, or interview involving characters from a literary text— letters from Jim to Huck Finn and from Jordan Baker to Nick Carraway, “a feminist interview” with María from Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Viewing this turn toward active reading as an overturning of the Leavisite anathema against extratextual speculation helps us recognize the New Criticism’s notion of the self-sufficient, bounded text as the exception in literary history rather than the rule. Recalling the long pedigree of expanding upon familiar stories that I sketched in the introduction, we can historicize the New Critical mode of self-contained close reading as contingent on a search for objectivity in literary criticism and, I think, a commitment to the literary text as a bounded material object (and generally reliant, the “Intentional Fallacy” notwithstanding, on the notion of a genius author who created it), in place of an older notion of “story” that is far less bound by material form and the notion of a single authoritative text. It is this shift in stance toward literary history, back to the sense that texts and stories are open proliferators of meanings and other stories, rather than closed books, authoritative containers of meaning—as well as toward a new awareness that the canon might serve as a productive site for politically resistant reading and re-vision—that provides one set of the historical conditions under which the technology of minor-character elaboration will become increasingly attractive to producers. Over the last several decades, scholarship on Wide Sargasso Sea has demonstrated how Rhys’s own resistant reading provoked her to write the novel, and it has tended to view her achievement as a signpost of the radical opening up of canonical texts. The publication of her correspondence over the two-decade gestation of the novel has lain bare the fact that her resistant reading of Jane Eyre prompted her to appropriate and create a new narrative for Bertha. Reading Brontë, Rhys felt “vexed at her portrait of the ‘paper tiger’ lunatic, the all wrong creole scenes, and above all by the real cruelty of Mr Rochester.”85 Rhys resists Jane Eyre’s portrayal of the Creole, arguing, the fact that Brontë invents Bertha notwithstanding, that this portrayal is “all wrong,” inauthentic and implausible. In the same letter in which Rhys attributed Brontë’s implausible Creole to her “ ‘thing’ about the West Indies,” Rhys contested that portrait: “West Indians can be a bit trying  .  .  . but not so awful surely. They have a side and a point of view.” She recalls being “rather annoyed” upon rereading Jane Eyre and

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thought, “That’s only one side—the English side.”86 Rhys saw Wide Sargasso Sea as an opportunity to draw a more plausible Creole figure, a “side” that would counter “the English side” as told by Brontë. This account resonates in one of the epigraphs to the current chapter, a line Antoinette speaks in Wide Sargasso Sea, which forms a self-reflexive cue in that novel and which many critics have fastened onto as a metafictional distillation of the author’s purpose: “There is always the other side, always” (128).87 This line, indeed, could serve as a motto or emblem for the entire genre of minorcharacter elaboration. It is surely Rhys’s objection to Brontë’s “English side,” in which the experience of the Creole woman is the suppressed story, that provokes Caroline Rody to see Rhys as a model of Fetterley’s resistant reader and Wide Sargasso Sea as a text that demonstrates the subversive potential for a countertradition of feminist re-visions of canonical texts. According to Rody, Wide Sargasso Sea’s triumph is not only that it provokes a re-vision of Jane Eyre but that Rhys’s gesture will ramify, engendering and empowering other readers who might imitate what she has done: “it is all due to another reader like ourselves—one Jean Rhys, who felt an injustice in English literary history and took it upon herself to rewrite it. The implicit will to action of a self-authorizing reader underlies this revisionary text.”88 Rody views Wide Sargasso Sea as establishing a “revisionary paradigm” and anticipates the limitless potential for feminist re-visions of canonical texts. Rhys “declares open house on English literature” (Rody, “Burning Down the House,” 318), making “all literary history, by extension, seem to contain potential transformation, awaiting the right rereader” (312). One way of conceiving of the current proliferation of minor-character elaboration would be as just this “open house.” Rody’s claims fix on Rhys’s development of a minor character as the technology for a feminist “transformation” of literary history. Contrary to Spivak—whose influential reading of Wide Sargasso Sea considers the novel to be a “reinscription” rather than a revision of Jane Eyre because of the former’s focus on the white Creole—Rody interprets the plethora of minor female characters in Wide Sargasso Sea as a rich openness of the text.89 These characters become, in Rody’s own active reading, Rhys’s intimation of a multitude of other stories to be told rather than a limitation produced by her exclusive focus. Rhys’s precedent provokes Rody to read Grace Poole’s brief appearance in part 3 of Wide Sargasso Sea as a

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provocative trace rather than an act of discursive suppression or an indication of Rhys’s inability to comprehend the English servant class: “she too has a story . . . Grace here seems a candidate for heroine of her own novel” (316). Rody continues by arguing that Wide Sargasso Sea opens the possibilities for feminist “recuperation” by allowing us to read minor characters as invitations, not exclusions. Infinite potential recuperation of women’s stories is suggested here and all made possible, the reader realizes, by the emergence into activism of a woman reader. It is thus a dramatically energized, radically participatory literary universe that Rhys’s work seems to open for us. . . . One closes the book with the sense that all sorts of possibilities exist, which might now tremble into being, that if Bertha Mason Rochester’s story can be told with such poignant searing strength, there is no limit to the number of other characters whose lives might reveal themselves . . . to our reading eyes; Christophine and her knowledge of “other things” seems a foremost possibility. (316–317)

In chapter 2 I apply pressure to the notion that minor-character elaborations might “recuperate” women’s stories rather than construct them or that characters’ lives “reveal themselves.” But for now I want to stress the “infinite” possibilities that Rody points to, possibilities that her own account cannot begin to exhaust; we could easily add Tia to this list, or Antoinette’s mother—the madwoman of Rhys’s novel—or, actively reading Rody, a host of male characters like Daniel Cosway, one of the villains of Wide Sargasso Sea.90 As Flashman demonstrates, the possibilities open to authors who might elaborate minor characters do not only include female or socially marginal figures; the kind of minor characters adopted may vary. In this “radically participatory literary universe,” the agenda need not be radical; a poststructuralist opening of the text need not be yoked to an oppositional politics. One could also tell the story of Rochester’s patrician father, who gets a bad name in both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea through his son’s narration. While sociopolitical reparation, the “recuperation” or, more accurately, the literary representation of “parallel histor[ies] of victimization,”91 is one possibility suggested by Wide Sargasso Sea’s paradigm, it also offered a model for elaboration more broadly and less oppositionally conceived.

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The ever-expanding store of minor characters provides an endless cache of potential stories, and the novel’s flexible point of view and expansive size offer a wide range of techniques for selecting among this supply, for “recovering the margins,” or simply as a provocation or pretext for spinning further narratives. Both “resistant reading” and a poststructuralist opening of the text emerge in this period as approaches that rely on an active reader turned writer who gathers up the threads of earlier texts and weaves them into a new form. If prior stories have always been a major generative force for new ones, this phenomenon accelerated markedly in the high-postmodernist period of the late 1960s and early 1970s—and this intertextual turn looms as a third major force behind the emergence of the genre. One of several points of agreement among theorists of postmodernism is the recognition that its practitioners rely, to an even greater degree and with greater explicitness, on intertextual borrowing and remaking of texts and forms of the past.92 During the span that producers like Rhys, Stoppard, Césaire, and Gardner arrived at the practice of minor-character elaboration, writers were vigorously experimenting with other modes of unabashed intertextual appropriation, as in Barbara Garson’s MacBird! (1966), Michel Tournier’s Friday (1967), Donald Barthelme’s Snow White (1967), John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Charles Marowitz’s The Marowitz Hamlet (1969), and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972). This wave of intertextuality surges, depending on the account, as either evidence of or as an answer to the appearance of a number of critical pronouncements on “The Death of the Novel” between the 1940s and the 1960s. (Recall the Grendel review: “another fierce blow struck against the realistic novel, the dead novel.”) These postmortems attributed the cause of death to a series of perceived crises: in literary form (the question of where avant-gardism would go after the experiments of high modernism); a loss of faith in the Enlightenment’s progress narrative provoked by the traumas of the Second World War (and the question of how to respond in fiction to such horrors); as an extension of the epistemological dilemmas of modernism (how to represent experience after the dissolution of a commonly agreed-upon, objective reality); and the fear (only accelerating today) that the rise of competing media, such as television and film, might render fiction obsolete.93 One of the many ways fiction writers responded to this crisis (whether they actually believed it to be one) was to engage aggressively with, appropriate, and revise canonical

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precursors—and it is in this acquisitive and iconoclastic stance toward the cultural monuments of the past that the ludic postmodernist aesthetic, the poststructuralist embrace of writerly reading, and the politics of feminist re-vision and anticolonial “writing back” intersect.94 In this vein, it does not seem coincidental that John Barth, in his oftenanthologized (and as often misread) essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967), marks out Jorge Luis Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” as the embodiment of a new direction for fiction. The story takes as its theme, in Barth’s words, “the difficulty, perhaps the unnecessity, of writing original works of literature.” In his fiction Borges “paradoxically turn[s] the felt ultimacies of our time into material and means for his work.”95 In a follow-up essay, “The Literature of Replenishment” (1979), Barth attempts to clarify the misleading title of the earlier piece, arguing that “literature can never be exhausted, if only because no single literary text can ever be exhausted—its ‘meaning’ residing as it does in its transactions with individual readers over time, space, and language.”96 Borges’s Menard becomes a hyperbolic figure of the active reader, of the “writerly” mode of engagement. Minor-character elaborations emerge as one means of converting the apparent problem of writing original literature into a solution, by unabashedly appropriating and transforming a predecessor, turning it into material for new work, and demonstrating how the Menardian reader—in particular a resisting one—can alter the meaning of a prior text by shifting the focus to, and elaborating on, a minor character. Significantly, Barth sees such a fictional practice as one potential answer to the problem of the novelist’s audience, a way to escape the choice of writing either esoteric avant-garde or popular commercial fiction. In the “Replenishment” essay, Barth issues a wishful plea for the arrival of an “ideal postmodernist author” who will transcend the “antitheses” of a naïve “premodern” realism and a skeptical, self-conscious modernist fiction, with its often purposefully high barrier of access. This ideal postmodernist must avoid “moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naïveté,” yet she “aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-modernist marvels (by [Barth’s] definition) as Beckett’s Texts for Nothing or Nabokov’s Pale Fire.”97 In the next chapter I show how Barth’s wish for a fiction that is “democratic in its appeal” to readers will be paralleled by an impulse to extend democratic rights to minor characters. And in chapter 3, I show that publishers have gravitated toward minor-character

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elaboration precisely for its ability to occupy a middle ground in cultural hierarchies, its ability to solicit a wide audience yet carry the prestige of literary fiction—though not because the genre transcends or gets beyond “premodern” realism. In this chapter I have argued that beginning in the late 1960s, modes of active reading, a revisionist and politically oppositional stance toward the traditional canon, and a spirit of literary appropriation and experimentation conspire to make the genre of minor-character elaboration an attractive technology for diverse producers. These producers try out and make visible a number of formal possibilities and aesthetic projects—the multiple ironic narrators of Rhys; the fragmented, philosophical irony of Gardner; the vacant absurdism of Stoppard; the coarse satire and historical antiromance of Fraser—and inhabit varied points along the political spectrum. As I will show in the next two chapters, Barth’s imagined synthesis will not occur—or at least it will not predominate—in this genre. In fact, the realist representation of “round” characters with rich interior lives will remain central to the genre’s conventional structures. The ironic narrators and fragmented forms will largely give way to formerly minor characters that contemporary authors transform into sentimental narrator-protagonists, who call to readers with their newfound “voices,” clamoring to be heard and appealing to our sympathy. And the genre will facilitate a swell of production of highly conventional popular fiction for a multinational publishing industry rather than evade “Madison Avenue venality.” These developments do not occur teleologically, however, as the ultimate debasement that awaits any genre. Generic change and variation continue, even in the most popular fictions, and reactions to and parodies of the genre’s conventions will emerge alongside more formulaic production. Tracking these changes, tracing the development of these conventions and the reactions against them, and apprehending their social and historical significance are the tasks of the next chapter.

Chapter Two

THE REAL AND IMAGINARY POLITICS OF MINORCHARACTER ELABORATION, 1983–2014 Why did I want the gift of prophecy, come what may? To speak with my voice: the ultimate. —CHRISTA WOLF, CASSANDRA (1983)

Maybe you guessed that there was more to me than the voiceless cipher in the text. —ANITA DIAMANT, THE RED TENT (1997)

we had no voice we had no name . . . we took the blame it was not fair but now we’re here . . . now, we call to you to you too wit too woo —MARGARET ATWOOD, THE PENELOPIAD (2005)

Of course, fair’s fair, men will have to set about reclaiming the Heathcliffs and Rochesters from romantic stereotyping too, to say nothing of poor old dusty Casaubon. It will be a grand spectacle. —J. M. COETZEE, ELIZABETH COSTELLO (2003)

Though much has been written about J. M. Coetzee’s enigmatic novel Elizabeth Costello, few commentators have lingered on a curious detail—that the title character is a novelist renowned for rewriting another novel from the perspective of a minor character—and none have appreciated its full significance. Coetzee’s matter-of-fact narrator tells us on the first page that his protagonist Costello “made her name with her fourth novel, The House on Eccles Street (1969), whose main character is Marion Bloom, wife of Leopold Bloom, principal character of another novel, Ulysses (1922), by James Joyce.”1 With his canny choice of a publication date, Coetzee imaginatively interpolates Costello into the vanguard of the history of minor-character elaboration, as a pioneering experimenter with its techniques. In doing

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so, Coetzee provides perhaps the most discerning (if a decidedly oblique) assessment of the genre to date. When critics have remarked on the type of novel Costello has written, they have generally wielded this detail to help untangle the Gordian knot that is the question of how much Coetzee is speaking through his fictional author. James Wood, for example, understands Elizabeth Costello as “deeply confessional” and proffers the fact that Costello is “famous like Coetzee for her rewriting of a classic novel” as evidence of the real and fictional novelists’ shared concerns.2 Samuel Durrant, by contrast, stresses that Coetzee’s Foe (1985), which rewrites Robinson Crusoe (and more subtly Defoe’s other novels), differs profoundly from what we learn about The House on Eccles Street: “While Costello has apparently rewritten Ulysses from the perspective of Molly Bloom, Coetzee has written a book about the impossibility of recovering the point of view of Friday from Robinson Crusoe.”3 Durrant pinpoints the crucial distinction between Costello’s and her creator’s confidence in their sympathetic imaginations, their ability to adopt and inhabit another’s perspective: Costello’s seems boundless; Coetzee’s meets frustration at, or rather refuses the presumption to understand, the experience of the radically other. Coetzee’s choice to make his protagonist famous for writing a novel from Molly Bloom’s perspective does largely function, in Elizabeth Costello, to occasion debates about writers’ sympathetic imaginations; the novel touts Costello’s capacity to “think her way into other people, into other existences,” even “into the existence of a being who has never existed,” like Molly (Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 22, 80). But Coetzee’s acute awareness of the political demands placed on contemporary novelists also yields a perspicacious diagnosis of the rift between how texts like Eccles Street—that is, actually existing minor-character elaborations—have been received by critics and how they are understood by their producers. When Coetzee stages an interview between Costello and a scholar who “teaches in California and edits a journal” (7), the scholar offers a reception history that serves as an effective précis of the extant criticism on minor-character elaborations: “Critics have concentrated on the way you have claimed or reclaimed Molly  .  .  . challenging Joyce, one of the father-figures of modern literature, on his own territory” (12). Costello, however, does not view her project as subversion, as feminist appropriation or Electral conflict with her modernist forefathers, but as an elaboration of Joyce, in the word’s initial sense: “to fashion

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(a product of art or industry) from the raw material.”4 She responds that the breadth of Ulysses allowed, even seemed to beg, for imaginative expansion; her novel is animated by the fact that Joyce created in Molly “an engaging person.” “No, I don’t see myself as challenging Joyce,” Costello continues. “But certain books are so prodigally inventive that there is plenty of material left over at the end, material that almost invites you to take it over and use it to build something of your own” (12–13). In crafting this exchange, Coetzee intuits a pervasive disconnect between the scholarly propensity to emphasize elements of political critique and subversion when they have read texts that elaborate minor characters and their authors, who are less apt to embrace such a stance and often prefer, like Costello, to view themselves as participating in the construction of a literary tradition than in the overturning of an oppressive one. The fact that critics have not made the connection between Costello’s The House on Eccles Street and the real and vibrant genre to which it alludes reflects a wider failure to notice the phenomenon that minor-character elaboration has become and the particular characteristics of this intertextual practice. In the previous chapter, I argued that writers began to deploy the genre’s techniques in the late 1960s. But the most vigorous production using the genre begins in the mid-1980s, around the time Foe is published, and it only accelerates into the 1990s and 2000s; by the time Elizabeth Costello appears, the practice of elaborating minor characters has become so popular that even fictional novelists are doing it. In this period the genre has become a global and, at least for one who is looking, near-ubiquitous phenomenon that shows no sign of slowing. As I wrote the initial version of this chapter, I discovered in the New York Times Sunday Book Review that David Malouf, perhaps Australia’s most prominent real novelist, had published a new novel, Ransom (2009), which makes a protagonist out of Priam and enlarges the episode in book 24 of the Iliad in which he journeys to redeem Hector’s desecrated body from Achilles. Literary scholars have engaged with isolated texts that elaborate minor characters but have tended to receive them primarily in terms of their political opposition to or subversion of their predecessors—a model tough to reconcile with an example like Ransom. The Times reviewer recognized as much, writing, “It will inevitably be said that Malouf ’s novel ‘subverts’ or ‘undermines’ the ‘Iliad’ ” and countered that its faithful “redeployment” of the epic’s themes “belie[s] such a rote notion.”5 Many writers taking up the practice in this period have indeed endeavored to reimagine

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socially marginal characters. But literary scholars who have commented on individual examples of minor-character elaboration have tended to parrot the “rote notion” that these works are therefore politically subversive. More specifically, commentators have consistently understood such texts to be “giving voice” to previously “silenced” characters and applauded them for doing so. Eileen Williams-Wanquet’s comments regarding Marina Warner’s Indigo—a double-plotted novel, in which sections alternate between a story set in 1980s London and the Caribbean and another set on Shakespeare’s sixteenth-century island and focusing on Sycorax—are emblematic: Warner “gives back a voice to the silenced female presence in The Tempest who never appears onstage.”6 Marta Bryk similarly contends that Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly (1990) offers an “act of historical reparation” for the injustice done to the “maidservant who has been denied the right to speak” in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.7 Linda Schelbitzki Pickle writes that Christa Wolf attempts to “scratch away the entire male tradition” by “letting Cassandra speak for herself.”8 The authors of minor-character elaborations often formulate their projects in similarly phonocentric terms. On the second page of Cassandra, Wolf has her title character ask: “Why did I want the gift of prophecy, come what may? To speak with my voice: the ultimate.”9 In The Penelopiad, Atwood intersperses chapters of Penelope’s narration with verse sections “sung” by a chorus of the twelve maids hanged by Odysseus. In the last of their droll ditties the maids make their plea: “we had no voice / we had no name . . . we took the blame / it was not fair / but now we’re here . . . / now, we call / to you to you” (195). In her best-selling The Red Tent (1997), Anita Diamant makes a narrator-protagonist out of the biblical Dinah and sets her character’s narration against “the voiceless cipher in” Genesis (Diamant, The Red Tent, 1). These authors and critics follow a longstanding feminist tradition dedicated to “recovering” voices from the silences of history and canonical literary texts. In reiterating the language of “giving voice to the silenced,” however, scholars who have written on these texts understand them in mimetic and phonocentric terms that misstate and overrate the kind of political work they might accomplish. Thus when Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes, as part of an amicus brief defending Alice Randall’s right to publish The Wind Done Gone against a suit brought by Margaret Mitchell’s estate, “At last the slaves of Tara have found their voices, and I say, ‘Amen!’ ” his metaphor inflates

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a sense of (liberal) political triumph.10 When Randall’s publishers subsequently used Gates’s praise for a paperback blurb, this metaphor encourages Randall’s readers to understand minor-character elaboration in the same terms. Someone, this language suggests, has been granted agency, autonomy, the freedom to speak—“a voice with which to speak of her own experience,” as Heidi Gilpin writes of Wolf ’s Cassandra.11 Gained in this slippage is a pyrrhic victory that enables critics to laud such texts as subversive or liberatory—“scratching away” an oppressive tradition, winning justice or “reparations” for fictional characters—rather than performing the more modest political work of countering a previous literary representation with one that is presumably more salutary and possibly more historically accurate. Lost is attention to representation in both senses: to the fact that a literary depiction of a “voice” has been constructed by a contemporary author, who is writing on behalf of the formerly minor character.12 Ironically, then, the critics and authors who frame minor-character elaborations in phonocentric terms retain the perspectivism but abandon the self-reflexive alertness to discursive constructedness, and the inevitably ideological nature of such constructions, that texts such as Wide Sargasso Sea, which appeared at the genre’s vanguard, were determined to foster. Such accounts also gloss over the fraught transaction of elites speaking on behalf of a subordinated group that has preoccupied postcolonial studies since Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”13 Treating subaltern characters as if they were actually speaking, critics repress the obvious fact that their authors are the ones doing so—authors who are manifestly in possession of the cultural capital of the traditional canon and who deploy that capital in the service of marking their own literariness. In describing the form of character narration, that is, the representation of a character’s voice, as the liberation of that character, writers adopting minor-character elaboration and their critics demonstrate a commitment to the broader tendency in twentieth-century theories of the novel that Dorothy J. Hale has identified as “social formalism.” According to Hale, social formalists understand a novel’s formal registering of the speech or thoughts of a character as both the means to represent that character and to engender that character’s unique identity; thus the rendering of a character’s “internal discourse, the language of consciousness” becomes “not just the truth of what he believes, but  .  .  . the truth of who he is” (166). This understanding of narrative form fosters the notion that adopting the

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point of view of a character not only represents that character truly and authentically but amounts to “characterological emancipation” (89), a liberation from the oppression of authorial control that allows the (patently imaginary) person to speak as she will. Conflating literary representation with democratic self-representation, with autonomous free speech, authors and critics who describe minor-character elaborations as “giving voice to the silenced” understand the redistribution of narrative attention as a kind of justice. The registering of a panoply of character voices becomes, in such accounts, not merely a broadening of the purview of the novel to imagine the experiences of the socially marginal but an expansion of the franchise, a triumph of democracy. The reception of texts in the genre thus participates in the critical practice endemic to the canon debates of the 1980s and 1990s that John Guillory has called an “imaginary politics”—not one that is insignificant or a figment but one that “conceives the literary canon as a hypothetical image of social diversity, a kind of mirror in which social groups either see themselves or do not see themselves, reflected.”14 In Guillory’s view, this “politics has real work to do . . . but it is also inherently limited by its reduction of the political to the instance of representation, and of representation to the image” (Guillory, Cultural Capital, 7–8). Canon revision has been concerned with producing a corpus of texts and authors that more accurately reflects social diversity, and minor-character elaborations seek to generate a range of protagonists that is similarly “representative.” A kind of reflectionism—the belief that literary images reflect a preexisting reality—underlies this imaginary politics. It is easy to see how reflectionism founders in practice. That female characters speak with authority or demonstrate radical agency in Shakespeare’s plays does not mean that women of his period were emancipated. Likewise, when the maidservant in Mary Reilly is “given a voice,” working-class women have not suddenly gained democratic access. Literary images might well change how readers think about the social groups represented and spur such readers to activism on their behalf, but only through this indirect route do images democratize or alter the material relations of society. Just as Guillory concludes that “there must be some relation between the representation of minorities in power and the representation of minorities in the canon” (7), so must there be between oppressed social groups and the social types that are typically rendered as minor characters in literary works. But this relationship is not one of identity. It follows that to reverse the relationship, to make minor

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characters into protagonists, does not remedy structural inequalities or obtain representation for those who lack it. This chapter argues that although scholars who have written on individual instances of minor-character elaboration have stressed their participation in a purportedly subversive feminist and multicultural project, to consider this flourishing genre as a whole makes legible its actual significance: the genre articulates a broad contemporary commitment to a subjectivist perspectivism compatible with the reigning tenets of liberal pluralism. In the genre’s primary convention—the adoption of the perspective of a formerly minor character—one discovers an assertion of the unique subjectivity of every individual and a consequent insistence on a plurality of perspectives rather than any single truth. While a number of authors have indeed adopted the techniques of minor-character elaboration to critique their predecessors, the paradigmatic reception of such texts mischaracterizes the nature of their political work and allows critics to read subversive agendas into texts that claim liberal democratic rights on behalf of fictional characters. These texts and the critics who have championed them actually exemplify a thoroughgoing traditionalism; dedicated to the proposition that all characters are created equal, they reduce the project of novelistic representation to the rendering of interiority and voice and shrink the political sphere to the right of the individual to speak freely. Minor-character elaboration, like any genre, is constituted by a heterogeneous constellation of textual practices that nonetheless share a set of similarities or conventions, in which the genre’s underlying social meaning can be discerned. This chapter analyzes a cross-section of the genre, reading its significance in the conventional structures that appear in the aggregate. As I showed in chapter 1, the minor-character elaborations that appeared at the moment of high postmodernism did not cultivate a straightforward sympathetic identification with the characters they appropriated, nor did they pose coherent “voices” in place of “silences” in canonical texts—strategies that become the hallmarks of the genre in later decades. In the first part of this chapter, I document the genre’s phonocentric emphasis on voice and expand the critique initiated above, showing through analysis of critics’ responses to minor-character elaborations, authorial pronouncements, and the conventional features of the texts themselves how the political claims advanced by and on behalf of such texts rest on a dubious conflation of the representation of characters’ voices with the “recovery” of actual historical voices.

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Even more egregious has been the propensity to applaud such representations not as welcome responses to previous ones but as the liberation of minor characters—an accomplishment I insist takes place only in the imagination. The critical response to minor-character elaborations, however, is hardly anomalous. Rather, I show that it is symptomatic of a broader ideology of the novel that construes novels as first and foremost dedicated to representing the unique consciousnesses of their characters and that valorizes the extension of democratic freedoms even to fictional beings. Minor-character elaborations emerge and flourish, I argue, to reinforce what I refer to as “liberal subjectivism” and “perspectival pluralism”; proclaiming the unique individuality of any character, the genre reasserts the autonomous subject in the face of its poststructuralist critique and insists on a pluralist, perspectival notion of truth in place of a postmodern understanding of narrative and the self as constituted by discourse. I conclude by posing Coetzee’s Foe (1986) as a rejection of the conventions of minor-character elaboration, a fictional treatise on the problems with and limitations of “giving voice to the silenced.” But I also suggest that literary scholars too often focus on exceptional texts like Foe at the expense of the conventional and thus overlook the broader contemporary episteme that becomes visible across a genre. This chapter functions, then, at a number of intersecting levels. It explains why minor-character elaboration flourishes between the 1980s and the present, as it assimilates feminist and multicultural demands to liberal-pluralist tenets. In doing so, the chapter shows how genre study can be usefully deployed to answer problems of scale facing contemporary literary study, approaching far-reaching cultural phenomena through analysis of conventional generic forms while remaining attentive to the disjunctive or experimental features of individual works. The chapter extends a critique of the pervasive politics of literary form that minorcharacter elaborations epitomize, one that understands the representation of a character’s narrative voice and interiority not only as the conventional route toward “majorness” or protagonist status but as an enactment of democratic principles. In the slippage between viewing images of socially marginal characters as desirable and hailing their discovery of a voice, one discovers a principal route by which critics overvalue the political efficacy of literary texts. Finally, I show that while scholars have frequently attended to radical or postmodern texts that “write back” to canonical

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predecessors, are preoccupied with histories of violence and exploitation, and reflect on the problems of representing history in narrative form, the lion’s share of contemporary intertextual production remains dedicated to its unproblematic recovery.15 A CONVENTION OF VOICES: THE GENRE’S LIBERAL SUBJECTIVISM

To explain why so many authors have adopted minor-character elaboration between the mid-1980s and the present, one must begin by analyzing the conventional forms and practices that become visible across the range of texts using the genre over this period. In these conventions lies the social logic of the genre, the ways in which it actually or imaginatively fulfills social needs. As Joseph Slaughter writes: “genres emerge and become conventional (both publicly common and formally regular) to the extent that they make collectively legible—if sometimes distorted—both actual and possible (desirable and undesirable) social formations and relations.”16 The conventional form of minor-character elaboration discloses its broader social function: the reassertion of the distinctive subjectivity of each individual. With remarkable consistency, authors elaborating minor characters have structured their narratives around the points of view of those characters, at times focalizing through their perspectives but most often converting them to the reliable narrator-protagonists of their own stories. Despite frequently depicting the experiences of marginalized subjects, minor-character elaborations from the 1980s through the present generally forgo postmodernist forms that reflect on their own narrative procedures or represent subjectivity as fragmented or decentered.17 Instead, these texts diverge from Wide Sargasso Sea and others that appeared at the genre’s vanguard both in their lack of self-reflexivity regarding their own constructedness and in their depiction of coherent, autonomous narrating subjects. Thus a genre that emerged in texts that pointed up the gaps, limits, and exclusions of any given narrative has come to contest canonical predecessors with depictions of narrating “voices” equally limited and open to contestation. After a decade-and-a-half lag—perhaps the time it took Wide Sargasso Sea and its contemporaries to garner a critical mass of notice—minorcharacter elaborations begin to appear with frequency in the early 1980s. In 1982 Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon made protagonists

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of the female characters of Arthurian legend. In that same year, Wolf gave her Cassandra lectures. In 1983, Christine Brückner, on the other side of the Berlin Wall, issued a collection of monologues translated as Desdemona—If You Had Only Spoken! and subtitled Eleven Uncensored Speeches of Eleven Incensed Women (trans. 1992).18 A similar phonocentric emphasis emerged everywhere in the mid-1980s, a high-water mark for the “recuperative paradigm” in Anglo-American feminist studies and also the moment when Mikhail Bakhtin’s mode of discourse analysis arrived in English translations.19 In this period, the liberal subjectivism of the genre, its commitment to representing the unique subjectivity of the individual, becomes legible in its primary convention: the conversion of a minor character to a narrator-protagonist. Whereas Wide Sargasso Sea and Grendel flaunted the fictiveness of their characters and depicted fractured subjects constituted by conflicting discourses, the minor-character elaborations published from the mid-1980s through the present tend to project coherent speakers who purport to offer faithful accounts of their true selves. Contesting a previous depiction of character on the grounds of its necessarily ideological character, such texts ironically claim their versions to be authentic and realistic. In imagining the conversion of a minor character into a narrator-protagonist as the route to authentic self-representation, these texts epitomize the liberal theorization of the novel that Hale labels “social formalism.” Hale traces a lineage of theorists of the novel who posit that “characterological freedom [can] be achieved” when a character gets the chance “to express himself in his own terms” (93). Appearing to speak for themselves, characters cease to be “created beings” and are understood as “wholly autonomous subjects” (120).20 Authors who have elaborated minor characters and the critics who have embraced them adhere to this tradition, construing the formal registering of a character’s thoughts or voice as “giving” the character a chance to speak for herself and thus granting agency and autonomy to one who had been the victim of an oppressive silencing. Minor-character elaborations enact their social formalism in their conventional form, and they frequently make explicit the social meaning of this form by thematizing the character’s desire to speak freely. “Voice” serves as the ambiguous mediating term in these works, a shorthand that encapsulates their project of (imaginatively) transforming a minor character from an object to a speaking subject. As Brückner’s titles alone demonstrate, Desdemona articulates and attempts to satisfy the desire to “hear”

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from characters that are understood as having been silenced, or “censored,” in the past, and it endeavors to remedy these silences in vociferously oppositional terms. One finds a similarly sharp rebuke and an equally revealing title in Atwood’s short story “Gertrude Talks Back,” in which Hamlet’s mother discloses that it was she, not Claudius, who killed her husband.21 As a set of monologues for performance by the female voice, Brückner’s book exhibits an even greater investment in vocal presence than many of her nondramatic counterparts. The content of the speeches almost compulsively consists of demands to be heard. Clytemnestra shouts, “You never listened to me—listen to me now, listen well, dead Agamemnon!”22 Desdemona similarly refuses: “No, Othello, no! I will not hold my peace” (Brückner, Desdemona, 115). And Brückner’s Virgin Mary protests to the Lord, “I am almost suffocated with this silence that You have laid upon me!” (128). In these monologues, Brückner undertakes a fictional liberation of the voices of these female figures,23 fulfilling the desires of any reader or audience who has “resisted” earlier representations of these women, failed to find them convincing, wondered what they were thinking, or wanted to know more about a mere sketch of a figure. One does not have to look far to discover the forces motivating authors like Brückner and Wolf to “give voice” to female characters at this historical moment. Both make explicit the feminist aspirations of their work, and the 1970s and 1980s were distinguished by a widespread feminist project of calling attention to the historical and cultural silencing of women and seeking to repair those silences by “recovering” their hidden experiences and voices. The “recuperative paradigm” in feminist scholarship has most visibly engaged in its canon building: an “archeological” project of “excavating” a largely forgotten history of female authorship from the archive, as part of the “reconstructive act of establishing a parallel tradition.”24 The construction of fictional voices for female characters previously appearing at the margins of canonical texts or stereotypically represented therein represents an analogous project undertaken at the same historical moment and with a similar impulse—although it has often been conflated with, rather than likened to, the literary historical rediscovery of female authors.25 Feminist minor-character elaborations correspond more directly with a longstanding tradition of feminist criticism that seeks to highlight the politics of representation in canonical texts—the ways in which images in those texts both reflect and reinforce patriarchal ideologies.26

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Perhaps the most striking link between the theory and practice of liberal feminist scholars and the fictional practice of minor-character elaboration is the phonocentric emphasis of both, their reliance on “voice” as “a crucial signifier for female authority and autonomy.”27 Bakhtin’s work has often served as the linchpin between formal, narratological analyses of discourse and political or sociological deployments of “voice” that motivate it as a signifier for resisting oppressive power structures. Susan Snaider Lanser writes, “when these two approaches to ‘voice’ converge in what Mikhail Bakhtin has called a ‘sociological poetics,’ it becomes possible to see narrative technique not simply as a product of ideology but as ideology itself: narrative voice . . . embodies the social, economic, and literary conditions under which it has been produced.”28 This gesture of making narrative voice “embody” social conditions, however, converts a representation of discourse into the concrete actualization of social relations and has thus often enabled scholars to mischaracterize the political work of minor-character elaborations: they take an author’s construction of a narrative voice to be that character’s voice, erasing the scene of representation and applauding the liberation of imaginary people. As with her counterpart in the West, Wolf is overwhelmingly concerned with constructing a voice for her Cassandra. Although Kristevan and poststructuralist feminists have advocated a more radical linguistic subversion of syntax and narrative conventions, the adoption of female points of view and development of complex female characters are realist methods that have resonated with many liberal Anglo-American feminists. They have called for and welcomed women’s “revisionary” strategies to combat “the voicelessness—as well as the lack of human subjectivity—of women characters in much of the traditional body of literature” and endeavored to show how frequently female characters have functioned only in relation to male protagonists. Such liberal feminist strategies have typically attempted to “fill the old stereotypical female ‘vessels’ with character portraits that are complex, individual and unique” and “retell the world from the women’s perspective.”29 Wolf ’s entire Cassandra project, the novel and essays taken together, purposefully puts forth an unruly, sui generis, and undecidable textual “fabric.”30 But the approach she takes to create her portrait of Cassandra in the novel proper is to make her into a narrator-protagonist. In the essays, Wolf articulates the political logic behind her imaginative extension of narrative agency to the enslaved Trojan: “do we suspect, how

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difficult and in fact dangerous it can be when life is restored to an ‘object’? When the idol begins to feel again? When ‘it’ finds speech again? When it has to say ‘I’ as a woman?” (Wolf, Cassandra, 298). Wolf refers not only to Cassandra’s objectification here but to that of women throughout history; elsewhere she maintains that she intends her Cassandra to reflect the experience of the woman writer. Wolf has Cassandra speak in the first person, then, as a way of having her reclaim subject status.31 Moreover, Wolf has maintained that constructing the novel through Cassandra’s narration was motivated by her desire to solicit the reader’s identification: “I wrote sixty pages in the third person before I noticed that did not achieve what I was after. I then wrote the whole thing as a monologue, and this allowed a greater intensity and stronger identification with the figure, which may transfer itself to the reader.”32 Cassandra appears to be a particularly apt choice of a minor character to recreate as a narrating subject since in earlier depictions her object status was so conspicuous. In Aeschylus, she remains the captive of Agamemnon, and she recounts how Apollo gave her the gift of foresight, only to add the curse that she would never be believed when she reneged on her promise to sleep with him. Cassandra’s voice becomes ineffectual, her prophetic power a source of personal anguish rather than public authority, precisely at the point when she attempts to exercise autonomy over her body. Wolf leaves Apollo out of the story; the royal Trojan family ignores Cassandra’s warnings simply because she is a woman and not to be consulted in matters of state policy. But Wolf poses Cassandra’s training as a priestess as motivated by the desire for agency and authority. Wolf also depicts Cassandra as a woman for whom speech constitutes public political action as well as the exercise of individual liberty; she dares to protest against the saber rattling of her father and brothers and is punished for her transgression. In the novel’s climactic scene, the Trojans plot to ambush Achilles, heedless of Cassandra’s objections. (Significantly, they want to use Polyxena as bait, so this particular objection is to the instrumentalization of Cassandra’s sister.) In response to the demands of Priam, who embodies the patriarchal order, to “keep silent,” Cassandra refuses with a single syllable and is imprisoned for treason and accused of madness (127). Sadistically jailed in the palace’s “grave of the heroes,” Cassandra compulsively replays the scene of her refusal but refuses to relent: “A hundred times I said no again. My life, my voice, my body would produce no other answer. ‘You don’t agree?’ No.

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‘But you will keep silent?’ No. No. No. No” (131).33 Cassandra’s Lear-like repetition compounds and extends the novel’s own relentless reiteration of the word “voice,” its thematization of the political necessity and danger of speaking out, and Wolf ’s representation of a female narrating voice. Within the novel, Cassandra’s narrative is a private, extended interior monologue in the moments before her death, but Cassandra is also typical in the genre for self-reflexively offering itself as part of the construction of a feminine storytelling tradition. Wolf has Cassandra express the desire to have her story told to a future audience, preferring that it be passed on orally. “Send me a scribe,” she apostrophizes Clytemnestra, “or better yet a young slave woman with a keen memory and a powerful voice. Ordain that she may repeat to her daughter what she hears from me. That the daughter in turn may pass it on to her daughter, and so on. So that alongside the river of heroic songs this tiny rivulet too, may reach those faraway, perhaps happier people who will live in times to come” (81). Although Cassandra knows Clytemnestra will not grant her such a wish, and Wolf, analogizing the Trojan War with the nuclear threat of the Cold War, is not suggesting this rosy view of the future without irony, the wish for a matriarchal inheritance of stories to counter a bellicose Western tradition of “heroic songs” surely animates her project. A similar desire, likewise conveyed through the use of character narration that emphasizes voice, reverberates through later minor-character elaborations, such as Nancy Rawles’s My Jim (2005) and Anita Diamant’s immensely popular The Red Tent.34 Diamant’s novel explicitly states its desire to establish a matriarchal rejoinder to the biblical narrative by making Dinah into its narrator-protagonist. The Red Tent opens with Dinah addressing the contemporary reader, lamenting the loss of feminine histories and the fact that her story has been pushed to the Bible’s margins—or, rather, been buried in a footnote. We have been lost to each other for so long. My name means nothing to you. My memory is dust. This is not your fault, or mine. The chain connecting mother to daughter was broken and the word passed to the keeping of men, who had no way of knowing. That is why I became a footnote, my story a brief detour between the well-known history of my father, Jacob, and the celebrated chronicle of Joseph, my brother. On those rare occasions when I was remembered,

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it was as a victim. Near the beginning of your holy book there is a passage that seems to say I was raped and continues with the bloody tale of how my honor was avenged . . . Maybe you guessed that there was more to me than the voiceless cipher in the text . . . (Diamant, The Red Tent, 1)

Diamant stresses the masculine possession of “the word” and that Dinah’s only role in Genesis is that of object. She is a “victim,” and the biblical narrative does not tarry to make clear of what; it “seems to say” she was raped. Dinah, then, also seems to be the victim of the biblical author, who makes only a “brief detour” before swerving back to the male family members who avenge her honor, which is, of course, in their keeping. Diamant’s overt critique underscores the fact that, though they often occur in tandem, there is a fundamental difference between a character that has been victimized in the story—that is, by other characters—and one perceived to have been subjected to injustice by the discourse. In the former instance, the text may well condemn the character’s victimization while in the latter the implied author is perceived as willfully or unconsciously ignoring the character or representing her in a demeaning or stereotypical manner. (This would be the difference, to take a relevant example, between Jane Eyre’s account of the young Jane’s imprisonment in the Red Room, which the novel clearly marks as deplorable, and the novel’s monstrous depiction of Bertha.) Diamant critiques the implied biblical author for ignoring Dinah and contrasts Dinah’s active narrating voice with the “voiceless cipher” hinted at before—her full subjectivity with the empty “vessel” she had been. The Red Tent also explicitly imagines itself as an empowering act of feminist education (“The more a daughter knows the details of her mother’s life—without flinching or whining—the stronger the daughter” [2]), and Diamant embeds an image of a matriarchal narrative tradition in the red tent itself. The tent is the place where biblical women stay through their menstruation, but rather than a banishment or quarantine, Diamant depicts it as the site where mothers bequeath stories to their daughters. Even in a minor-character elaboration that features an omniscient, heterodiegetic narrator, in order to focalize the narrative through the perspectives of multiple protagonists, such as in Bradley’s massive saga The Mists of Avalon, “voice” looms prominently as both narrative device and central

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plot element. While Bradley focalizes the bulk of her novel through the women of Arthurian legend, the book begins with an italicized prologue, headed in capitals with the subtitle “MORGAINE SPEAKS.”35 Morgaine, better known as Morgan le Fay in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, narrates this section, and Bradley intersperses italicized “MORGAINE SPEAKS” sections throughout the novel. Mists dramatizes the overturning of a pagan, goddess-worshipping matriarchy with the rise of Christianity, and ends (after nearly nine hundred pages) with Morgaine trying to reconcile old and new faiths in a Christian chapel. In this sanctuary, she kneels to pray but beseeches the ancient spirit of the Goddess rather than the Christian God or Christ. As if in answer, her mother “Igraine’s voice” suddenly “rushe[s] over her like a great light” (Bradley, The Mists of Avalon, 876), intimating that a matriarchal spirit lives on, covertly, in Britain’s Christian era. Presenting formerly minor characters as autonomous speaking subjects, contemporary authors ironically obscure their own agency in creating new versions of these characters. Atwood writes in her introduction to The Penelopiad that she has “chosen to give the telling of the story to Penelope and to the twelve hanged maids,” as if upon that choice she ceded control of the novel to her characters (Atwood, The Penelopiad, xv; emphasis added). If Atwood and Le Guin diverge in their views of the gender politics of their predecessors, they share a commitment to authenticity and the belief that the use of a character as a narrator is the way to achieve it. Atwood thinks that Homer’s story “doesn’t hold water” (xv), and her Penelope explicitly critiques the ideology promulgated by “the official version” in deploying her character as “an edifying legend. A stick used to beat other women with. Why couldn’t they be as considerate, as trustworthy, as all-suffering as I had been?” (2). And while Le Guin claims Virgil could authentically represent women when he wanted to, in Lavinia she intimates that Virgil’s depiction of Aeneas’s wife in the Aeneid follows a particular set of narrative conventions and generic imperatives. Le Guin’s narrator rejects “the poet’s portrait” of her “as a shrinking silent maiden” (Le Guin, Lavinia, 19). Virgil later appears to Lavinia and, in one of a series of Pirandellian tête-àtêtes, admits his depiction of her was “stupid, conventional, unimagined. I thought you were a blonde!” Though Virgil concedes that he made Lavinia into a stereotypical heroine, he defends his narrative priorities even as Le Guin’s undercuts his justification: “You can’t have two love stories in an epic. Where would the battles fit? In any case, how could one possibly end

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a story with a marriage?” (58). Le Guin thus attributes Lavinia’s conventionality to limits on narrative space but also—in posing the conventional resolution to the romance plot as an ending that Virgil cannot imagine—to generic priorities that determine the narrative centrality of some characters and not others. While Le Guin does not see sexism as the reason behind the conventionality of Virgil’s Lavinia, she shares with Atwood the social-formalist logic that treats prior representations in canonical texts not merely as ideologically determined conventions but as injustices committed against minor characters; the failure to represent them adequately in a literary work becomes a failure to represent them politically or a positive act of oppression. The remedy to such an injustice is couched as giving the character the freedom of self-representation, the chance to speak on her own behalf. Thus even though Le Guin’s Lavinia has a metafictional awareness of her textual existence, “the splendid, vivid words [she’s] lived in for centuries,” she simultaneously claims a prior, independent one unjustly ignored by Virgil: “He slighted my life, in his poem. He scanted me” (3–4). Later, in one of Lavinia’s exchanges with the poet, he admits, “Perhaps I did not do you justice, Lavinia” (40). Le Guin endeavors to correct this injustice by setting Lavinia free to tell her tale, granting her the agency of narrative selfdetermination: “If I must go on existing century after century, then once at least I must break out and speak. He didn’t let me say a word. I have to take the word from him” (4). Social formalists often pose the relationship between characters and authors as a contest for narrative authority, a character’s revolt against a repressive author—a tendency evident in the extant scholarship on minor-character elaborations.36 While most critics have lauded Wolf for “allow[ing] Cassandra,” in the words of Hajo Drees, “to speak in the first person,”37 Karen Jacobs proposes that “Wolf ’s appropriation of Cassandra’s voice” makes the author “complicit in the instrumental rationality and violence that she critiques as masculinist throughout the novel.”38 But whether they celebrate the benevolent contemporary writer for liberating a character’s voice or chide the novelist for using it as a means to her own ends, these critics perform a dubious alchemy of political criticism, transfiguring fictional representations of discourse into autonomous speech. In staging a battle for control of voice or “the word,” such commentary treats characters as if they had existences independent of the representations that constitute them, reads conventionally or scantily drawn

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characters as victims of narrative injustice, and, conversely, imagines narrators or focalizers to be autonomous and free. If such a view of fictional entities seems manifestly mystified, it nonetheless represents a widely shared understanding of literary narrative as, ideally, a reflection of liberal-pluralist democracy, in which each character has the right to speak on her own behalf and advocate her interests rather than be subjected to the whims of a tyrannical author. Such a liberal poetics of the novel has been advanced by a host of twentieth-century novelists and theorists. E. M. Forster famously described his characters as “full of the spirit of mutiny.” The author’s upholding of order requires a delicate balancing act with regard to these unruly figures: “if they are given complete freedom they kick the book to pieces, and if they are kept too sternly in check, they revenge themselves by dying, and destroy it by intestinal decay.”39 Iris Murdoch asserted that the “individuals portrayed in the novels are free, independent of their author, and not merely puppets in the exteriorization of some closely locked psychological conflict of his own.”40 Even György Lukács viewed the conventional, fully fleshed-out realist character as generating an autonomous existence: “realism means a three-dimensionality, an all-roundness, that endows with independent life characters and human relationships.”41 By contrast, Vladimir Nabokov infamously responded to Forster’s difficulty maintaining an orderly ship by declaring his characters to be “galley slaves.”42 Extending Forster’s maritime metaphor and punning on uncorrected manuscript proofs, Nabokov insists on the textuality of his characters, reiterating a warning against confusing art and life that runs throughout his fiction. This type of confusion recurs through social-formalist accounts and becomes an explicitly “socioformal” theory of characterization in Alex Woloch’s The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Woloch reasonably argues that because narratives have limited space, one character’s development happens at the expense of other characters, a parceling out of attention that minor-character elaborations seek to redistribute. But when Woloch writes that “narrative progress always entails a series of choices: each moment magnifies some characters while turning away from—and thus diminishing or even stinting—others” (12), he sounds a lot like Le Guin’s Lavinia (“He scanted me”), treating characters as if they were extant persons whom authors either “magnify” or ignore. Though Woloch insists that character emerges in and through

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the tension between structure (characters as discursive constructs) and reference (characters as implied human persons), time and again he figures characters’ existence to precede structure. Minor characters are oppressed, “the proletariat of the novel” (27), and victims of the painful-sounding process of “compression,” in which the (ostensibly already existing) “full person is squeezed into the flat character” (69). Woloch insists that functional minor characters each possess a unique “orienting consciousness that, like the protagonist’s own consciousness, could potentially organize an entire fictional universe” (22). This statement sums up the aesthetic ideology of minor-character elaborations and the broader liberal novelistic tradition to which they belong. In this account, not all characters have been created equal, but each has the potential to be a protagonist because each is somehow still endowed with a distinctive individual consciousness. If one believes this, it’s not a far cry to insist that minor characters have a right to speak that shall not be infringed. Woloch sees the history of the realist novel as a field that not only represents—constructs images of—the social but also mirrors and instantiates the promise and failures of liberal democracy. He asserts that the realist novel’s “wide range of narrative structures . . . enact and represent both the premises of democratic equality and the pressures and consequences of social stratification” (Woloch, The One vs. The Many, 41, emphasis added). This view treats literature as a pure reflection and instance of social relations and literalizes a metaphor: the “flat” character becomes a flattened person rather than an underdeveloped image produced by a text. Again, the simple remedy prescribed for rounding out this flat figure is to “giv[e] a character voice (by registering his or her perspective, point of view, and interior thoughts)” (41). Woloch perpetuates a widespread view according to which the telos of novelistic representation is the depiction of characters’ rich interiority.43 Applied to minor-character elaborations, this understanding of character produces a mischaracterization of the canonical text—as silencing, excluding, or “compressing” persons rather than posing an image that, like all cultural artifacts, is determined by myriad factors— and a tendency to prize too highly the accomplishment of “giving voice” to minor characters. The recourse to “giving voice” and the tendency to treat characters as deserving of democratic rights illustrate the way critical responses to minor-character elaborations reprise a series of errors endemic to the

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canon wars. Guillory has persuasively shown how “a certain confusion . . . founds and vitiates the liberal pluralist critique of the canon, a confusion between representation in the political sense—the relation of a representative to a constituency—and representation in the rather different sense of the relation between an image and what the image represents” (Guillory, Cultural Capital, vii–viii). Extant accounts of minor-character elaborations display a similar confusion: the literary depiction of a character’s voice is redescribed as an act of political self-representation, which occludes the fact that an (elite) author is writing on the character’s behalf. Such descriptions recast as emancipation what I have referred to, pace Guillory, as an “imaginary politics,” a project that consists of “correcting  .  .  . images for stereotyping, or for a failure to represent minorities at all.” Guillory makes the obvious but necessary point that constructing a “ ‘representative’ canon does not redress the effects of social exclusion” but rather “reconstruct[s the canon] as a true image (a true representation) of social diversity” (8). Minor-character elaborations produce a more diverse array of protagonists who appear “fleshed out” rather than stereotyped, but supplementing previous images with more salutary ones should not be confused with the bestowal of agency on the previously oppressed. Further, imaginatively granting speech to characters does little to account for—let alone remedy— the structural inequalities that enable some democratic citizens, when they exercise their right to speak freely, to have far greater power than others to be heard. In addition to relying, then, on a conception of the liberal subject that much recent theory has questioned, the commitment to a politics of the image establishes limits to the horizon of the genre’s political aims. Minor-character elaborations are, at root, committed to equality of vision. They ask us to see differently, to see characters for who they truly are, a truth that can only be conveyed through their rich interiority or authentic voice. Williams-Wanquet’s response to Indigo is again typical and indicative of the limitations of an imaginary politics: “Warner deconstructs traditional history to reveal another story, that of the silenced other. This encounter with the other is a call to know and respect each other’s differences” (Williams-Wanquet, “Marina Warner’s Indigo,” 268). Understood as “revealing” stories equally deserving of respect but hitherto ignored, minor-character elaborations participate in what Walter Benn Michaels has described, in another context, as a “neoliberal aesthetics,” one characterized by a dedication to the “recognition of an equality that already exists but that our falsely

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hierarchical vision has kept us from seeing.” The politics of this aesthetics is limited by an “indifference to those social structures that, not produced by how we see, cannot be overcome by seeing differently.”44 Guillory’s account of the canon debate points to the way minor-character elaborations rely on a number of theoretically suspect categories: they depend on claims to authenticity and reflectionism, presume the self-constituting liberal subject, and reproduce an essentialist form of identity politics. Critics influenced by poststructuralism have long taken issue with a politics of the image in which, as Toril Moi argues, “writing is seen as a more or less faithful reproduction of an external reality to which we all have an equal and unbiased access, and which therefore enables us to criticize the author on the grounds that he or she has created an incorrect model of the reality we somehow all know.”45 When minor-character elaborations like Lavinia or The Penelopiad seek to “correct” conventional images of female characters in canonical texts by countering them with “truer” ones, these texts assert a narrator’s capacity to present a true account of the self and are thus committed to the autonomous, fully constituted subject that can be authentically rendered. But while the conventional images (as well as their replacements) are surely ideological, critics who presume an identity between social hierarchies and narrative conventions fail to apprehend the complex set of historical determinants of such images. Molly Hite, for example, writes that Wide Sargasso Sea prompts us to discover the exclusionist focus embedded in English literary conventions, the fact that “certain categories of socially marginal human beings are by virtue of this social marginality fitted only to be minor characters.”46 Hite argues, even though conventions governing the selection of narrator, protagonist, and especially plot restrict the kinds of literary production that count as stories in a given society and historical period, changes in emphasis and value can articulate the “other side” of a culturally mandated story, exposing the limits it inscribes in the process of affirming a dominant ideology. (Hite, The Other Side, 4)

While in the aggregate it may be true that socially marginal characters are less frequently protagonists, conventions do not “restrict” production, and cultures do not “mandate” stories that “affirm a dominant ideology.” One need only consider the prominent role of the slave and captive Cassandra

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in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, or the early novelistic example of Moll Flanders to find a prominent socially marginal narrator-protagonist, or Jane Barker’s A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies for an author who rejects a conventional romantic ending.47 Conventions, that is, become visible retrospectively; they are not constraints but patterns. But the example of Moll Flanders, in which a male author, Daniel Defoe, constructs the voice of a female narrator-protagonist, is most illustrative since implicitly authorizing many a minor-character elaboration’s claim to represent authentically a character alleged to be inauthentically drawn in a predecessor is the identity of the contemporary author. This contemporary author’s ability to speak on behalf of the formerly minor character presumes commensurability between the experience of the author and the marginal subject she claims to represent—a correspondence that must appeal to identity, the uniformly shared experience of marginalization as a member of a historically disenfranchised group.48 The claim that characters are “given a voice” effaces this problematic essentialism and the way such texts reproduce the power dynamic of an elite speaking on behalf of a subaltern, to which much antiessentialist feminist and postcolonial criticism has drawn attention. Keeping the act of representation in the foreground is important for a number of reasons besides pointing out the susceptibility of the textual politics of minor-character elaborations to the well-rehearsed theoretical pitfalls enumerated above. First, by doing so, rather than viewing these texts as newly liberated characters’ autonomous speech, one is forced to attend to the manifold factors determining the contemporary representation—a representation that may well be based on meticulous historical research but might also be utterly conventional or, as Wolf freely admits of Cassandra, subjective, polemical, willfully anachronistic, and inflected by a host of present-day concerns.49 Regardless of the quality of these representations or the value we attribute to calling attention to, critiquing, and imaginatively repairing the silences or absences in the canon that motivate them, we should be clear about what replacing such silences with “voices” does and does not mean. Such voices are not the self-representation, artistic or political, of hitherto oppressed persons, and they will reflect contemporary concerns and values as much as any previously submerged “reality.” Second, accounting for the complexities of the representation in the canonical predecessors ought also to be the task of contemporary scholarship. The oversimplified view that “the canon” is complicit in a uniform silencing

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or exclusion of the perspectives of women and minorities reduces texts produced under disparate historical and geographic circumstances—which are often themselves sites of ideological contest—to the singular function of reinforcing a dominant ideology.50 It was in fact Aeschylus’s rendering of Cassandra’s haunting voice that initially captivated Wolf. And while women were not permitted on stage or in the audience of Athenian tragedies—making any dramatization of female speech a multiply mediated act of ventriloquism51—Wolf is well aware that like many Athenian dramatists Aeschylus, far from reflecting reality, created female characters who demonstrate a radical agency, autonomy, and political sway that no woman in fifth-century Athens actually possessed.52 Women in Attic tragedy were not simply represented as either passive victims or transgressive villainesses. Aeschylus has both Cassandra and Clytemnestra, in the Agamemnon, speak with a force rarely rivaled in tragedy. Cassandra does not rave madly but lucidly warns the Chorus, who inexplicably cannot understand her. “And yet I know my Greek, too well,” she utters, in frustration.53 She also renounces Apollo, treading her oracular trappings in the dust, and the Chorus compliments her courage in going to her death. Even Clytemnestra, though clearly portrayed as villainous, is hardly the stereotypical adulteress and traitor that she is often said to epitomize; she participates in an intergenerational and intergender cycle of revenge and insists that she kills Agamemnon to avenge his sacrifice of Iphigenia. Her husband’s instrumentalization of their daughter, then, is the principal grounds for Clytemnestra’s vengeance.54 Along similar lines, to Brückner’s monologues one might reply that Desdemona has spoken, that while Othello throttles her, Shakespeare first has her eloquently protest the injustice done to her. And though Othello frames this injustice in terms of the tragic undoing of its male protagonist, the play is unique to its epoch for condemning violence that is plainly an honor killing.55 One would be hard-pressed to find a more emphatic representation on the stage of a female character demanding to be heard than Emilia’s “ ’Twill out, ’twill out. I peace! / No, I will speak as liberal as the north: / Let heaven and men and devils, let them all, / All, all, cry shame against me, yet I’ll speak” (5.2.225–228). Finally, attention to the manifold factors determining both the contemporary representation and its canonical predecessor helps forestall the common critical misapprehension of minor-character elaborations. Scholars who have written on texts using the genre, failing to note the extent and degree of homage such texts

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pay their predecessors and perhaps wanting to see their own oppositional politics echoed in fiction, have tended exclusively to focus on, and vastly overrate,56 the subversiveness of such texts—and they have all but ignored a whole body of texts that make no pretense to such a stance of political opposition. Exclusive attention to texts that adopt socially minor characters as protagonists, overemphasis of aspects of critique and subversion at the expense of homage and continuity, and the propensity to prize too highly the act of “giving voice” have caused scholars to misconstrue the social and political significance of these texts. When the character narrations of minor-character elaborations are viewed as the inventions of well-read contemporary authors rather than the authentic, autonomous speeches of formerly oppressed characters, room is cleared to consider the actual political effect of such texts: the reaffirmation of each individual’s unique subjectivity and right to speak. PERSPECTIVAL PLURALISM

While the genre’s primary convention affirms every individual’s unique subjectivity and the liberal prerogatives that follow from it, the formal intertextuality of minor-character elaboration—the posing of an alternative viewpoint in response to a canonical predecessor—registers the genre’s underlying perspectivist epistemology, or what is often called the Rashomon effect: the notion that different observers will perceive an event differently and produce conflicting accounts of it, demonstrating that meaning is contingent on a given subject position, be it spatial or ideological.57 Perspectivism underlies the reorientation of narrative, the point-of-view shift, foundational to the genre, a fact made explicit in a host of self-referential moments. Rhys’s protagonist encapsulates her creator’s project: “There is always the other side, always” (128). Gardner’s narrator-protagonist in Grendel avers, “They have their own versions, but this is the truth” (52). In The Penelopiad, Atwood’s chorus of maids registers the uncertainty of any given narrative: “There was another story / Or several, as befits the goddess Rumour” (147). Her Penelope reminds readers that Odysseus was notoriously “tricky and a liar” and sets out to dispel the idea that “his version of events was the true one” (2). Atwood makes the Odyssey into a tale told by Odysseus, even though he is only an inset narrator of books 9 through 12 and not the teller of any of the events regarding Penelope’s conduct at

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Ithaca, of which he could not have any firsthand knowledge.58 This mischaracterization of the Odyssey as its protagonist’s “version” rather than that of “Homer” is a revealing one; it evinces a broad commitment to the notion that all stories belong to a particular perspective and to a conventional, but by no means necessary, alignment between the perspective of the protagonist and that of the implied author. The intertextual dialogues of minor-character elaborations, in other words, reassert the axiom that there are at least two sides to every story. As the heavy-handed narrator of Madison Smartt Bell’s “Small Blue Thing” (2000), which retells Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” from the point of view of the bird, puts it, “All a matter of perspective, don’t you see?”59 But while these texts often underscore their adoption of another side or perspective, after the ironic metatexts of Wide Sargasso Sea and Grendel they tend to do so without any self-consciousness of the way the insistence on narrative multiplicity undermines their own claims to offer up a true account. The genre, then, fits comfortably within a postmodernist epistemology of skepticism toward received narratives, but such texts do not reflect on their own narrative procedures in the manner characteristic of “historiographic metafiction.”60 They thus perpetuate the epistemological problem they endeavor to solve, contesting previous fictional narratives while posing accounts that are equally subjective and open to contestation from another side. Julian Barnes’s “The Stowaway,” the opening vignette of A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), stands as one exception, evincing a knowing self-parody of the genre’s conventional gestures and the irony of countering an extant narrative with an equally contestable one. A woodworm aboard Noah’s Ark narrates “Stowaway,” and in its overt and self-reflexive challenging of the biblical flood narrative, this humorous example usefully manifests the contest implicit in a great many other minor-character elaborations. Quarrelsome language litters the chapter: “It wasn’t like those nursery versions in painted wood”; “Now, I realize that accounts differ. Your species has its much repeated version which still charms even sceptics.”61 Barnes recapitulates common objections to a given narrative’s claim to truth: a nostalgic tendency to idealize the past, subjective and ideological bias, and the inertial force of existing accounts. And while the content of the woodworm’s debunking does not lack interest or humor (Noah was a drunken tyrant, a hapless sailor, and a eugenicist determined to rid the earth of “cross-breeds” [Barnes, A History of the World, 15–16]), it is the form of

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providing an alternative point of view on a prior narrative that it shares with the genre at large. What makes Barnes’s vignette particularly ingenious is how it goes to lengths to undermine that point of view ironically. Despite the woodworm’s insistence that his perspective is unbiased (“gratitude puts no smear of Vaseline on the lens” [4]) and reliable (“My account you can trust” [4]), Barnes undercuts his claims to authority. Among the woodworm’s allegations of violence perpetrated by Noah is the assertion that he “casseroled” the unicorns, causing the extinction of the species that we mistakenly believe mythical. “I can vouch for that,” the woodworm assures us: “I spoke personally to the carrier-hawk who delivered a warm pot” (16). Later, accusing Noah of navigational ineptitude, the worm concedes, “Again, I am reporting what the birds said” (19). Barnes flags a number of the worm’s assertions as based on hearsay—received narratives. His perspective is limited and needs to be augmented by some bird’s-eye view. Later, the woodworm abandons his claims to know what happened at all: “At this point we leave the harbour of facts for the high seas of rumour. . . . There were two main stories, and I leave you to choose between them” (23). In offering the woodworm’s narrative as a corrective to the biblical one while exposing the revision as equally limited and ending with a choice between two conflicting stories, Barnes points to the epistemological underpinning of the genre: not the assertion of a true story against a previous one but the insistence that all stories are merely perspectives. The macrostructure of Barnes’s History suggests the impossibility of a totalizing, objective history and enacts an alternative by disposing of any pretense of completeness, presenting a disparate assemblage in its highly idiosyncratic form. While “Stowaway” employs minor-character elaboration, the rest of the book consists of a discontinuous collage of vignettes, loosely connected by thematic echoes; each chapter differs in narration, characters, and setting and varies in genre from realist narratives to a personal meditation narrated by one “Julian Barnes.” In the “half ”-chapter “Parenthesis,” the musing author-narrator articulates the quintessential postmodern problem with characteristic wit: “We all know objective truth is not obtainable, that when some event occurs we shall have a multiplicity of subjective truths which we assess and then fabulate into history, into some God-eyed version of what ‘really’ happened” (243). The brilliance of this formulation inheres in its encapsulation of the irony—and, by now, the banality—of a postmodern consensus (“We all know”) about

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the impossibility of resolving many subjective versions of the truth into a single objective one. Modern literature, perhaps modernity itself, has been preoccupied with the absence of an Archimedean perspective, a preoccupation that has only been intensified in the more extreme versions of postmodern relativism.62 Michaels, for example, argues that the continual “appeal to perspective [or subject position] . . . eliminates disagreement” by substituting the incontrovertible claims of subjective experience for any claims to truth.63 Viewed in this light, minor-character elaboration has its philosophical foundation and less proximate cause in a novelistic tradition of perspectival experimentation, and a more recent force is the postmodern valorization of the subject position. While many of the minor-character elaborations I have discussed (perhaps unwittingly) reproduce the epistemological dilemma they endeavor to solve, by disputing a prior narrative with an equally contestable one, a number of recent deployments of the genre follow Wide Sargasso Sea more faithfully by juxtaposing conflicting perspectives within a given text. Wolf, reprising her Cassandra project with a difference, published her Medea: A Modern Retelling in 1996 (trans. 1998). In alternating chapters, Wolf positions her Medea alongside five other character narrators. A list of dramatis personae precedes the novel, with the six narrators listed under “The Voices”; the other seventeen characters are merely “Other Characters.”64 This list alone throws into relief the persistence of a hierarchy of narrating and non-narrating characters, on which the genre’s principal convention relies, and the novel proper bolsters its formal registering of conflicting accounts by thematizing the conflict between official stories, rumors, and the unverifiable realities that lie beneath them.65 Atwood, who wrote an introduction for the English edition of Medea, emulates Wolf ’s contrapuntal structure in The Penelopiad, alternating chapters narrated by Penelope with choruses from the twelve maids. Not surprisingly, Penelope’s famed fidelity emerges as the major point of dispute. While Penelope denies as “slanderous gossip” any accusations about her “sexual conduct” (143), the maids claim she urged Odysseus to kill them in order to safeguard her reputation: “privy to [her] every lawless thrill,” they had to be “silenced, or the beans they’[d] spill!” (150–151). Geraldine Brooks’s March (2004) also counterposes conflicting versions of events. A glaring discrepancy arises between March’s interpretation that his wife blessed his decision to go to war and her version, in which he ignores her

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plea that he stay.66 Though these examples intimate the myriad potential variations of number and reliability of narrative voices available, the technique of embedding competing narratives merely represents an extension or refinement of the skepticism in which the genre is rooted. Critics influenced by Bakhtin have often valorized polyphonic narratives as politically resistant,67 combating monologic authority, yet it is easy to see how predominant, even banal, the epistemological uncertainty registered by polyvocal form has become. Whether multiple “voices” compete for priority in an intratextual struggle or a single voice undertakes an intertextual contesting of a canonical narrative, the underlying logic remains rooted in the perspectivist claim that the truth of any story is subject to rebuttal from some previously unheard side. If the subjectivism of the genre reveals its compatibility with basic liberal tenets, its perspectivism articulates a sociopolitical logic that is eminently pluralist. As early as 1986, W. J. T. Mitchell wrote that “pluralism is the reigning ideology of American politics on both the Right and the Left,” and many theorists have understood pluralism as the necessary corollary of an understanding of truth as multiple and perspectival.68 Donald Crosby posits: “if pluralism means . . . that the world is made up of countless perspectives . . . then an irreducible plurality of such perspectives is entailed.”69 Mark McGurl has argued for a similar correspondence between the array of voices and perspectives represented across the field of contemporary fiction and the pluralist ideal. For McGurl, “the dynamics of narrative focalization project a simplified model of the modern pluralistic society as an assemblage of different and sometimes conflicting, but always aesthetically redeemable, points of view.”70 But while McGurl sees this cultural pluralism in terms of various authors’ claims to identity-based group membership and views their self-conscious writing “from the point of view of one or another hyphenated population” as signaling the “collapse of the assumption” that the literary tradition will unify writers from separate racial, ethnic, and geographic groups, minor-character elaboration demonstrates how that tradition remains the focal point of diverse perspectives.71 While the genre takes part in a broader modern tendency toward perspectivist experimentation, which refracts pluralist politics into literary form, the genre redeploys the traditional literary canon as the meeting ground and common discursive plane for its pluralistic debates. Though the canon no longer simply functions as a repository of timeless truths, its cultural centrality is everywhere

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visible, its stockpile of characters perpetually available for adaptive reuse. While the proliferation of “voices” and perspectives registering the competing interests of various individuals and groups represents what Bakhtin calls the “centrifugal” force of social discourses, the use of the canon as a relatively fixed point of reference emerges as a counterbalancing centripetal force of stability.72 That these opposing forces manifest themselves in the same genre illustrates how its conventions function to reconcile imaginatively social conflict rather than foment it. Just as the pluralist ideal (far from the reality) envisions broad participation and competing interests,73 the genre emerges as a space of competing narratives in which each formerly minor character asserts her “version” to be the true one. For pluralists, that is, there is some truth out there—even if parties disagree about what it is. Hayden White differentiates the pluralist conception from a radical “pan-textualist” understanding of history, in which “any representation of history has to be considered a construction of language, thought, and imagination rather than a report of a structure of meaning presumed to exist in historical events themselves.”74 The flourishing genre of minor-character elaboration projects a pluralist field of competing accounts of the truth rather than a pantextualist view of any such account as a linguistic construction, and the genre evinces a commitment to the unique, autonomous individual over a view of narrative and subjectivity as constituted by discourse. The genre thus serves to shore up liberal-pluralist ideology despite its foundations in postmodern understandings of narrative and the self. FOE: EXCEPTIONAL TEXTS, AND THE RULE

Coetzee’s awareness of the pitfalls of identity politics, the illusory coherence of subjectivity conveyed by first-person narratives, the fact that history cannot be recovered but only textually constructed, and the imperfect alignment between the interests of elite authors and their subaltern characters surely helps explain why he refuses the presumption to speak on Friday’s behalf in Foe (1986), a novel that looms as a counterexample, even a rebuke, to the genre’s conventional conversion of a minor character into a narrator-protagonist. I lack the space to treat all the complexities of Foe, but the novel is useful to consider in concluding this chapter precisely because it shares preoccupations with minor-character elaborations yet

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adopts narrative procedures antithetical to those that have come to dominate the genre. Foe is obsessed with minor characters, with silences in history and the canon, and with the possibility of “recovering” submerged narratives from the margins of other narratives. Coetzee, however, scrupulously refuses to replace textual silences with voices, to patch narrative holes with new stories. Reading Foe over and against the mass of minorcharacter elaborations demonstrates that while a genre’s conventions register its underlying social logic, they cannot be said to regulate or restrict production; literary history is full of such Tristram Shandy–like cases, texts that allude to, parody, critique, and reject burgeoning conventions even as they emerge. Foe is largely the narrative of Susan Barton, a figure that readers familiar with Defoe’s lesser-known works come to recognize as a reincarnation of the title character and narrator-protagonist of his Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (1724). Coetzee’s novel begins with Susan’s shipwreck onto the island of Robinson Crusoe (renamed “Cruso”). Coetzee thus fuses plots and characters from several of Defoe’s novels, along with a fictionalization of Defoe himself. While Foe’s plot centers on Susan’s efforts to get the author Daniel Foe to publish her story “The Female Castaway,” Coetzee’s novel continually draws attention to two figures who haunt Susan throughout her narrative: Friday and a girl who claims to be Susan’s daughter but whom Susan denies having laid eyes on. Coetzee foregrounds two minor characters from Robinson Crusoe and Roxana: Crusoe’s slave and one of the daughters Roxana abandons in order to pursue her career as the mistress of a series of wealthy gentlemen. These characters’ stories linger as suggestive absences in Defoe’s corpus, narratives of interest for a contemporary audience: the experience of Friday’s enslavement from his perspective, the story of the girl orphaned because of Roxana’s choice of a profitable career over motherhood and destitution, and that which Roxana declines to narrate: the psychic cost of such a choice. Coetzee, accordingly, represents these stories as objects of desire within Foe. “I should have said less about” Cruso, admits Susan, “more about myself. How, to begin with, did my daughter come to be lost . . . ?”75 Foe encourages Susan to record the story of “the loss of the daughter,” (Coetzee, Foe, 117), but Susan refuses to do so: “I choose not to tell it,” she explains, “because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world . . . for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom

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by telling her story according to her own desire” (131). Coetzee declines to “recover” the narrative of Roxana’s renunciation of motherhood, but he takes pains to point to its persistent absence. He also raises skepticism—in Susan’s simultaneous declaration of narrative agency and refusal to offer a story as “proof ” of her being—toward the social-formalist premises of minor-character elaboration: that to convert a character to a narrator is to tell the truth of that character and that the offering up of one’s story is the necessary condition for the acquisition of full subject status. But the more prominent silence that persists from Defoe into Foe is that of Friday. Coetzee converts Defoe’s Native American Friday into an African slave, whose tongue has either been excised by slave traders or by Cruso, unless, as Foe subtly suggests, Friday has a tongue but is assumed incapable of speech by his paternalistic masters. The novel thus draws attention to the palpable absence and irrevocability of Friday’s voice and story. Susan admits of her castaway narrative: “If the story seems stupid, that is only because it so doggedly holds its silence. The shadow whose lack you feel is there: it is the loss of Friday’s tongue” (117). But this story “is a story unable to be told, or unable to be told by me,” Susan avers. “That is to say, many stories can be told of Friday’s tongue, but the true story is buried within Friday, who is mute. The true story will not be heard until by art we have found a means of giving voice to Friday” (118). While Susan appears to be a pluralist (many possible stories may be told) and a social formalist (when Friday is given a voice, the truth will be known), since no one—neither Susan, nor Foe, nor Coetzee—provides this “art,” the novel declares that Friday’s silencing, the absent history of his enslavement, cannot simply be undone, replaced with a voice. Friday’s story remains “properly not a story but a puzzle or hole in the narrative” (121). Foe thus continually communicates and frustrates the desire to hear Friday’s story, and Coetzee refuses to speak the unspoken. The voluminous scholarship on Foe has amply documented the significance of the novel’s refusals, which amount to a fictional diagnosis and critique of the politics of giving voice adopted by so many minor-character elaborations.76 Coetzee calls attention to the narratives of domination that haunt the founding texts of the English novelistic tradition but refuses the prerogative of speaking on behalf of the Other, rejects the transparency of representation, denies that narrative can capture the authentic essence of a subject (or that such an essence exists), and raises skepticism that history

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can be “recovered.” Scholars have thus seen Foe as a kind of fictional primer of postmodern, postcolonial, poststructuralist, and feminist thought.77 The novel’s theoretical self-consciousness and many readers’ preference for its tactics of calling attention to literary and historical silences without presuming to be able to fill those silences with voices explain why it has become a central text for scholars, embraced by them, in the words of Sarah Brouillette, as “a kind of cookie-cutter introduction to the major tendencies of postmodern literature and thought.”78 Brouillette’s comment captures the usefulness of Foe for teaching theory, but it does not capture the novel’s distinctiveness, especially when compared with the majority of texts to adopt the techniques of minor-character elaboration in recent decades. Many readers have intuited this distinctiveness. Derek Attridge makes a case for the “otherness” of Coetzee’s works, their “singular inventiveness,” describing this singularity in terms of the reader’s encounter with alterity, an experience that has the power to transform her “habits, expectations, understanding of the world.”79 This chapter has not sought to deny that literature might perform radical work—that it might wield the kind of transformative power Attridge attributes to it— but to insist that it performs its work by constructing representations, not by liberating people or by recovering history. If placing Foe alongside the genre of minor-character elaboration offers a more tangible way of measuring the novel’s originality, a way of apprehending its formal and political uniqueness, the reverse is also true. Reading Coetzee’s novel against the genre underscores the fact that texts like Foe are exceptional, marginal even, in the wider field of contemporary literary production, in which the imaginary political project of recovering voices has been paramount. My point here is not simply to argue that the postmodern strategies of texts like Foe and Wide Sargasso Sea are preferable for acknowledging the discursive constitution and ideological nature of subjects and narratives. Such acknowledgments do help avoid the mistakes of replacing the silence of the subaltern with speaking on her behalf and the overly sanguine notion that “giving her a voice” remedies either historical or present-day wrongs. My point has been to show that the genre of minor-character elaboration is flourishing because it reinforces, rather than challenges, the premises that valorize narrating characters for appearing to be autonomous agents and that understand all stories as contending perspectives. The fact that an increasing number of feminist and multicultural responses to the canon

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have adopted this form demonstrates the way the genre fulfills the social need of assimilating their demands to prevailing liberal-pluralist tenets. Making sense of the conventional structures that appear across a wide constellation of texts, over and above the exceptional instances that tend to attract scholarly attention, genre study stands as a methodology uniquely capable of revealing such broader social functions. It’s worth returning momentarily to Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello since, in addition to suggesting that many writers feel more comfortable than he does with “thinking [their] way into” and speaking through minor characters and to diagnosing perceptively how scholars have embraced minor-character elaborations for their purported subversiveness, Coetzee illustrates how adopting the techniques of the genre (as well as an outwardly oppositional politics) constitutes an effective strategy for contemporary writers to gain consecration in a competitive literary marketplace. The scholarship on Elizabeth Costello—perhaps preoccupied with the intriguingly undecidable question of the extent to which Costello speaks for her creator, perhaps less than eager to engage the unflattering portrait Coetzee draws of the academics in the novel—has neglected how shrewdly the novel represents and satirizes the politics, economics, and cultural hierarchies of contemporary literary institutions: the interviews, literary prizes, and lucrative speaking engagements that become routine for contemporary writers, along with the parasitic fans, cloying acolytes, and scholarly societies that cling to them.80 The novel’s first chapter suggests that Costello wins her prestigious Stowe Award primarily because of her identity as a writer of antipodal origins—because “1995 has been decreed to be the year of Australasia” (8). Though Susan Moebius, the scholar who interviews Costello, reads the latter’s writings as subversive and is eager to enlist her in the project of reconstructing alternative literary traditions (Moebius has published a book called “Reclaiming a History: Women and Memory” [29] and asks her to comment on “the project of reclaiming women’s lives in general” [14]), Coetzee portrays his novelist and the institutions of literary production, circulation, and sanctification as far from radical—indeed as a sector of the culture industry. “A small critical industry” has cropped up around Costello (1); upon leaving town with her prize, she forgets the copy of Moebius’s book that the scholar gave her but makes sure to ask her son if he remembered the fifty-thousand-dollar check that accompanied the Stowe; and famous writers work the cruise-ship circuit, giving occasional lectures

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to tourists and retirees. (Who could imagine a more efficient shorthand for authors’ complicity with neocolonialism?) Not only does Costello see herself as paying homage to the Homeric myths along with Joyce (13), but she also frankly admits that her youthful ambition was “to have [her] place on the shelves of the British Museum, rubbing shoulders with the other Cs, the great ones, Carlyle and Chaucer and Coleridge and Conrad” (16). Though Costello recognizes the vanity of her thirst for immortality, Coetzee implies that professional novelists are at least as likely to be motivated by the desire to gain entry to the canon as by the impulse to deconstruct it. In the next chapter, I argue that adopting the genre of minor-character elaboration has become an incomparable strategy for writers seeking to secure such a place and a profitable resource for the consolidated global publishing industry. Behind the question of the ideological work accomplished by a given text looms a set of material relations through which that text circulates. Genre functions, in these relations, as a technology that facilitates continued production and the identification of audiences, and minor characters from canonical texts represent a vast reserve of raw material, rich with centuries of accumulated symbolic capital, available for such production—“material left over at the end,” in the words of Costello, “material that almost invites you to take it over and use it to build something of your own.”

Chapter Three

“AN INSATIABLE MARKET” FOR MINOR CHARACTERS Genre in the Contemporary Literary Marketplace

The Eyre Affair (2001), the first installment of Jasper Fforde’s genre-scrambling Thursday Next series, introduces readers to an alternative British history in which the English literary canon is the very stuff of pop culture. Kids avidly collect Henry Fielding bubblegum cards; flocks of devotees make “literary pilgrimages” to Anne Hathaway’s cottage, the Brontës’ Haworth House, and Dickens’s Gad’s Hill; and hotels keep Shakespeare’s Complete Works in the nightstand alongside the Gideons’ Bible, the Koran, the teachings of Buddha, and the hymnal of Global Standard Deity, a fictive fusion of world religions.1 (Fforde’s England is chiefly bardolatrous but also eminently multiculturalist.) With the increased cultural centrality of all things literary comes profitability but also an elevated threat of unauthorized use, desecration, and theft; “big criminal gangs ha[ve] moved in on the lucrative literary market,” and Fforde’s heroine Thursday Next belongs to the Literary Detectives Division of a far-reaching state police apparatus that prosecutes forgeries, copyright violators, and suppresses “overtly free thespian interpretations” (Fforde, The Eyre Affair, 2, 133). The Eyre Affair’s plot hinges on a fantastic device called the Prose Portal, which allows readers to enter physically the world of their favorite book. The eponymous affair occurs when archvillain Acheron Hades steals the manuscript of Jane Eyre from Haworth House, purloins the Prose Portal, and attempts to kidnap Jane out of the book, threatening to erase permanently the heroine from every extant copy of Brontë’s beloved novel.

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The Eyre Affair does not itself elaborate minor characters, but it’s easy to recognize Fforde’s choice of Jane Eyre as the target of Hades’ theft as a canny allegorical nod to Wide Sargasso Sea and to the way rewritings have the potential to alter the way their predecessors are read by successive generations. Rhys’s novel, of course, plucks Bertha out of Jane Eyre, and while this character “kidnapping” has not transformed Brontë’s classic as a material object, it has been forever altered in the imaginations of contemporary readers. The Eyre Affair thus subtly suggests Fforde’s awareness of the flourishing genre that is minor-character elaboration, and the novel testifies more broadly to ambivalent contemporary attitudes toward canonical texts—to the sense that readers are free to enter, appropriate, and rewrite them at will but also to attendant anxieties about the integrity of intellectual-property rights and about symbolic violence aimed at these sacred monuments of literary culture. That Fforde registers the persistence of such anxieties within a popular bestseller that brazenly parades its pastiche of witty allusions, borrows genre-fiction conventions from Conan Doyle to J. K. Rowling, and climaxes in a cheerful reworking of Jane Eyre’s famously interrupted wedding scene is only one of the milder postmodern ironies Fforde’s novel flaunts. For while The Eyre Affair’s overt and conventional villain is the bulletproof Hades, the novel is shadowed by an even more resilient malevolent force: the Goliath Corporation, a many-tentacled conglomerate that owns Toad News, “the biggest news network” in Fforde’s Europe; manufactures military technology for a still ongoing Crimean War; and holds sway over Parliament, exercising a “pernicious hold on the nation” (6–7). Goliath temporarily joins forces with Hades in order to double-cross him and appropriate the Prose Portal, which the corporation covets so it might produce otherwise impossible weapons that can be transported from fiction into the “real world,” via the Portal, and sold to the state for boundless profit. Though the sci-fi elements of this scenario are wildly fantastic, as allegory it again testifies to Fforde’s shrewd intuition regarding contemporary literary production in our world. When he wrote The Eyre Affair, Fforde could not have known that his novel would be brought out in Britain by Hodder & Stoughton, an imprint of the United Kingdom’s largest book publisher, Hachette.2 But his depiction of Goliath’s investment in both literary and military technologies looks eerily prescient and darkly ironic in light of the fact that Hachette is a subsidiary of the French media conglomerate

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Lagardère, which owns major television and radio stations; publishes Harlequin France, Elle, and Paris Match magazines; and was, until recently, the largest private French shareholder of EADS (the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company), the multinational high-tech partnership that owns Airbus and manufactures everything from communications satellites to cruise missiles and pilotless drones.3 The broadest significance of this irony ought to surprise no one by now: the culture industry’s capital is inseparable from that of any other industry, and Goliathan multinationals are eager to tote to market any kind of profitable product, even their own critique. (Especially when it’s wrapped in lighthearted Ffordian packaging. Would you like to buy a Goliath Corporation© “For all you’ll ever need”™ T-shirt? They’re available on Fforde’s website for only eight pounds plus shipping.)4 The more salient local point is that if Fforde’s Prose Portal can be seen as a sci-fi contraption that allegorizes the procedures of contemporary authors who imaginatively enter and alter canonical texts, including the practitioners of minor-character elaboration, his depiction of Goliath’s aggressive pursuit of the Portal serves as an effective analogy for the way the culture industry has co-opted the genre. In recent years major publishing houses owned by real-life Goliaths like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation have embraced and aggressively marketed texts using the technology of minor-character elaboration for its capacity to facilitate profitable reworkings of canonical material. As Fforde’s series, with its accessible assemblage of witty allusions and wry recycling of classic plots, suggests, minor-character elaboration participates in a broader contemporary boom in the stylish repackaging of canonical literature. But why has minor-character elaboration, a genre that emerged at the moment of postmodernist experimentation and feminist and postcolonial re-vision, become such a proven vehicle for the culture industry’s products? Why do producers and consumers alike seize on this particular form, and how does it circulate in the marketplace? And what has happened to the genre’s politics in the process? Much of the recent revitalization of the field of genre theory takes as axiomatic the premise that scholars can extrapolate from a genre’s conventional form its underlying social logic.5 Deidre Lynch, for example, concisely describes the task of genre theory and criticism as “pursuing the social meanings with which genre is freighted.”6 Similarly, in his Graphs, Maps, Trees, Franco Moretti calls “deducing from the form of an object the

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forces that have been at work . . . the most elegant definition ever of what literary sociology should be.”7 In the previous chapter, I argued that while the politics of individual minor-character elaborations vary, the genre’s conventional form—the conversion of a minor character into a narratorprotagonist who “tells her side of the story”—registers a widespread commitment to liberal-pluralist tenets by reaffirming the unique subjectivity of every individual and generating an array of contending perspectives. But how is it that literary form comes to index or encode the social? In this chapter, I propose that we can produce a fuller account of how and why genres emerge and flourish, and of their reciprocally determining relation with their historical moments, by analyzing how the social logic of literary forms gets deployed in their more immediate contexts: the institutional locations, channels of production and reception, and the commercial and symbolic economies through which such forms circulate. Genres do not rise and fall of their own accord, thriving when they vibrate with the zeitgeist.8 The agents in this process are, well, agents—and also the authors, editors, and publishing executives who choose to produce and promote certain kinds of texts based on their perceived audience and marketability, as well as reviewers both professional and amateur, who help condition whether and how readers will approach such texts. Janice Radway’s work on the romance novel remains the exemplar of a second approach to genre, attending less to the politics of form than to genre in the material context of its production and consumption. Though Radway ultimately concludes that romance reading provides a “compensatory solution” through which women “vicariously fulfill their needs for nurturance,” her opening chapter on the “Institutional Matrix” of romance publishing demonstrates how that genre’s popularity is also a function of “important changes in book production, distribution, advertising and marketing techniques.” Romance reading “may well be attributed to women’s changing beliefs and needs,” but Radway insists “we must entertain the alternate possibility that the apparent need of the female audience for this type of fiction may have been generated or at least augmented artificially.”9 But whether publishing-industry experts have ingeniously manipulated consumers or just given the latter what they want, Radway’s crucial insight is that genre as such serves the industry as the technology that proposes to satisfy those demands over and over again, with each book-buying and reading experience.

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Minor-character elaboration makes for a particularly revealing case of an emergent literary form that gets taken up and spurred by producers for its ability to fulfill social needs that are propagated, if not manufactured, by the publishing industry because it is a popular form that trades on the prestige of the traditional literary canon while accommodating “voices” from the margins. The genre, that is, allows producers to exploit both the timeless value of the classics and ostensibly oppositional political energies simultaneously. In this chapter, I identify the mechanism by which minorcharacter elaboration becomes pervasive and comes to refract a moderate contemporary politics, demonstrating how the market logic of the book industry and the symbolic economy of the literary field shape the conventional forms that have come to dominate that field.10 Today’s risk-averse large-scale publishers have embraced and actively promoted the genre because its formal logic—explicit intertextual dialogue tethered to the adoption of diverse points of view—helps them identify and appeal to niche markets: an educated and well-capitalized “bibliophile” niche of readers who recognize the prestige of the great books even if they haven’t read them and identity groups that are reconceived as target publics. The genre proliferates, that is, because of the particular ways it is instrumental in helping producers accrue economic and symbolic capital. In “New Sociologies of Literature,” a 2010 special issue of New Literary History, Mark McGurl called for an “increased empirical focus on contemporary literary institutions and their functions in both transmitting the texts of the past to living readers and undergirding contemporary practices of reading and writing.” “Rather than exploring our essential interest in stories,” such a project “would ask how that interest is concretized in specific media, genres, institutions, and practices.”11 An empirical approach to contemporary literary production does not, however, demand adoption of the abstract quantitative methodology and “distant reading” that Moretti has advocated so prominently, and there are considerable drawbacks to those methods. Moretti and others who would count and graph books “belonging” to a given genre published each year obscure the heterogeneity of actual genres—the fact that determining a text’s genre is a matter of interpretation—and they assign each instance of the genre, the paltry print run and the bestseller, equal weight in the metric claiming to examine its social effects.12 Quantifying an emergent but as yet unrecognized genre poses a particularly formidable challenge.13 Radway’s method, interviewing

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producers and consumers of popular fiction, presents its own hurdles: the reluctance of publishers to disclose sales numbers or strategies, the difficulty for scholars in determining whether readers’ reported needs preexist or are generated by the work of the culture industry, and the time- and capital-intensive nature of such research. The qualitative empiricism I adopt involves less number crunching and fewer interviews. Instead, I direct attention to all that envelops a corpus of texts: their paratexts and the literary marketplace in which they circulate. As Jim Collins’s Bring on the Books for Everybody (2010) demonstrates, we are surrounded by this vibrant marketplace, and much of the analysis of contemporary literary institutions that McGurl advocates can be done while sitting in a Barnes & Noble, browsing Amazon.com, or skimming reviews on Goodreads.com.14 To analyze the functioning of minor-character elaboration in the contemporary literary marketplace, I thus adopt a method that is purposefully anecdotal, and I endeavor to legitimate my findings by triangulating texts, marketing, reception, and a range of institutional contexts.15 Hayden White follows Jerome McGann in arguing that “our problems with the question of genre” stem “from our failure ‘to execute in regular ways our theoretical views about the material and performative character of textual works of imagination.’ ”16 The study of paratexts—the way a text’s packaging tells us what to do with what’s inside—becomes crucial,17 as does shifting analysis further outside the text, into the ways literary forms function to generate and conserve forms of capital within the literary field and the broader economy. MINOR CHARACTERS IN THE MARKETPLACE

The progressive consolidation of the publishing industry has intensified investment in all forms of genre fiction. After an intricate and ongoing series of mergers and acquisitions, three publishers owned by multinational corporations now control nearly half of the U.S. trade-publishing market.18 The 2013 merger of Penguin and Random House by their parent companies Pearson and Bertelsmann represents a giant step toward monopoly but also the logical extension of a process that has been unfolding over decades.19 In its consolidation, the publishing industry resembles other sectors, particularly in media, and conglomerate publishers have been active promoters of minor-character elaborations. HarperCollins, for example, the largest

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trade publisher in the United States (before the Penguin-Random merger) and a subsidiary of Murdoch’s News Corp., publishes Gregory Maguire’s Wicked; Universal Pictures, a subsidiary of NBC Universal, lately a division of Comcast Corp., produces Wicked the musical, which has grossed over $2.9 billion worldwide.20 Minor-character elaborations have occasionally, as in the case of Wicked, become blockbuster sensations. But the genre has proven better suited to the smaller audiences that Pierre Bourdieu calls the “range of intermediaries” between mass production aimed at the widest market and the other pole of avant-garde production.21 Though the publishing industry presses ever closer to monopoly, mid-twentieth-century critics did not foresee how that industry would cater to a fragmented array of subcultures rather than imposing a homogeneous culture on conforming masses.22 In his invaluable Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (2010), John B. Thompson shows how competition between largescale publishers does produce a relentless search for blockbusters and “a degree of homogeneity or ‘me-too’ publishing.” But this competition also fosters variation as it “produces an intense desire to find the next big thing.”23 The disaggregated, umbrella structure of media corporations (parent multinationals own megapublishers, which are subdivided into specialized imprints, formerly independent houses) facilitates such corporations’ targeting of diverse audiences. Such companies’ insistence on perennial growth has also generated a strict imperative to find books that will be profitable immediately. Memoirs by publishing executives like André Schiffrin and Jason Epstein describe the disappearance of a cottage business dedicated to printing culturally valuable books; houses used to subsidize with their more commercial output books that were unlikely to make money in the short run.24 Genres, in today’s climate, serve as indispensable technologies for minimizing risk and targeting readerships, because “semiprogrammed”25 literature that follows a proven formula and appeals to a preexisting audience helps combat the uniqueness and hence unpredictable sales of any new book. Minor-character elaborations have flourished alongside a broader genre-fiction regime, and the minor-character genre combines several qualities that make it particularly appealing to producers and consumers. Although minor-character elaboration is as yet a relatively unfamiliar genre classification, its formula, retell classic X from character Y’s point of

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view, is standard and succinctly conveyed by publishers, as in the antiquescripted subtitle on the cover of the HarperCollins paperback of Janet Aylmer’s Darcy’s Story (2006): “Pride and Prejudice told from a whole new perspective.” If Darcy’s name were not enough of a cue to readers, the subtitle indicates the novel’s precursor and premise in a few words. And while the formula is constant, its potential iterations are as various as the universe of minor characters. Elaborating a character from King Lear will differ widely in setting, plot, theme, and verbal register compared with a character from Huckleberry Finn. And Nancy Rawles’s My Jim (2005), the story of Jim’s wife left behind in slavery, differs considerably from Jon Clinch’s Finn (2007), the tale of Huck’s alcoholic Pap, though both are permutations of the same formula. This variability within the formula serves as a boundless resource and obscures the routinized nature of the basic premise. The intertextual dialogue initiated by minor-character elaboration, an attribute it shares with other intertextual genres, similarly serves a crucial strategic function: helping contemporary authors annex their predecessors’ symbolic capital, as the former hitch their new books to established stars. Thompson lucidly parses Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital as “the accumulated prestige, recognition and respect accorded to certain individuals or institutions,”26 and through interviews with editors, literary agents, and publishing executives, Thompson shows that a given book’s “sales potential, that is, its capacity to generate economic capital,” and “its quality,” its “capacity to generate symbolic capital,” are, in the industry, the “only two criteria—there simply are no other.”27 The clearest evidence that publishers recognize the utility of minor-character elaboration for generating both forms of capital is simply the volume of recent production in the genre. And in at least several cases, one discovers that publishers are actively spurring this production. In an “Author’s Note” following his Fool, Christopher Moore recalls approaching his editor at HarperCollins with the idea of writing about either a generic clown or Lear’s fool. The editor responded: “Oh, you have to do Lear’s fool.”28 Moore’s editor intuited that even Lear’s clown carries with him the symbolic capital of Lear,29 and Fool aims to capture an audience by appealing to the prestige of Shakespeare even as Moore makes that prestige into an object of roguish desecration. Conglomerates and independent publishers alike are driving minorcharacter elaboration. Atwood’s Penelopiad appeared in 2005 as part of the Myths series launched by the Scottish publisher Canongate, in partnership

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with forty independent houses and featuring other titles such as Jeanette Winterson’s Weight (2005), a reimagining of the Atlas myth. In her acknowledgments, Atwood intimates that she was exhorted to write the book, thanking “Jamie Byng [director] of Canongate, who leapt out from behind a gorse bush in Scotland and talked [her] into it” (Atwood, Penelopiad, 199). Similarly, in her introduction to Weight, Winterson concedes: “If the call had not come perhaps I would never had written the story, but when the call did come, that story was waiting to be written.”30 By calling attention to such disclosures, I do not mean to suggest that the authors lacked interest in or control over what they wrote. Atwood has ventriloquized mythic female figures throughout her career and twice adopted the perspectives of minor characters from Hamlet.31 Rather, such disclosures confirm that publishers have recognized the genre’s market potential and recruited prominent authors to execute “house-generated ideas.”32 The slew of imitators that surfaced in the wake of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) and HarperFiction’s launch of a series of Austen rewritings following P. D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley (2011) similarly demonstrate contemporary publishing’s “me-too” impulse and the perceived reliability of house-generated intertextual genres.33 Canongate’s Myths series reveals the way minor-character elaboration helps amalgamate the prestige of big-name contemporary writers with that of their canonical predecessors, enabling small publishers to compensate for a deficit of economic resources by amassing symbolic capital. Even Canongate’s name evokes entry into the canon along with the historic street in Edinburgh. Upon launching the series, the publisher boasted of both the global scale and the literary pedigree of the Myths project, calling it “the most ambitious simultaneous world-wide publication ever undertaken” and “THE major literary event of 2005.”34 The house has since adopted an anticorporate rhetoric, describing its website as a “cultural hub . . . totally independent in its spirit and content.”35 Canongate is a small independent publisher, and for the Myths series it allied itself with comparable houses, such as Grove/Atlantic, which puts out The Penelopiad in the United States. But the formation of such alliances clearly represents an effort to compete with conglomerates, and Canongate’s touting of the scale of the project reveals its assertions of “independence” as instances of the strategic disavowal of the economic that Bourdieu describes as characteristic of the “restricted” subfield of cultural production.36

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The popular reception of works such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia reveals the effectiveness of such strategies. One of the most accomplished living science-fiction novelists, Le Guin seizes on the wife of Aeneas to set a piece of speculative fiction in prehistoric Rome. Reviewing Lavinia, Alan Cheuse exhibited a lighthearted weariness with its conceit: “It seems no novelist will ever have to worry about having a subject or subject matter if he or she merely consults a concordance of the Bible for the names of various minor figures, or works with all the warriors in The Iliad, or all the travelers and wanderers and kings and princesses and gods and goddesses in The Odyssey.” Nonetheless, Cheuse concludes Lavinia is “one of the finest novels [Le Guin] has ever made” and asserts that she “has come up through the ranks of genre fiction and now . . . takes her place in the mainstream.”37 Cheuse adheres to a traditional cultural hierarchy according to which genre fiction serves as something like the minor leagues to serious literature.38 But despite his sense of the prevalence of minorcharacter elaboration, Cheuse doesn’t see that it also constitutes a form of genre fiction because of the way it enables authors to accrue symbolic capital and mask the formulaic features of their works behind others that confer prestige. Far from attempting to diminish the serious aims of minor-character elaborations, my aim is to underscore how nominally literary purposes— dialogue, critique, homage, imaginative play—are entirely compatible with the commercial aims of publishers. Le Guin would be unlikely to admit that such strategic motives guided her, maintaining in an afterword that Lavinia aims to halt the silencing of Virgil in an age in which Latin has begun “to wither away into a scholarly specialty.” Le Guin calls the novel “a love offering” to the poet, and undoubtedly there is merit to her suggestion that the Aeneid is “essentially untranslatable” (273). But it is hard to see how writing a novel in English will remedy the situation; even if admiring readers of Lavinia purchase or dust off volumes of Virgil, how many will buy a Latin grammar? As a strategy for achieving her own consecration, however, positioning herself in an intermillennial dialogue has proven far more effective. Dinah Birch in the Times Literary Supplement (a News Corp. subsidiary) applauds Le Guin’s “modesty”—she “would not claim to have superseded Virgil’s achievement”—and considers Lavinia a “moving testament to the conversations that great writers sustain through the centuries.”39 Such conversations distribute symbolic

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capital to both parties, which can be converted to economic capital. If Virgil’s language receives little help, Le Guin’s due modesty reconsolidates his prestige; meanwhile, readers of TLS may boost sales of both Lavinia and the Aeneid. If annexation requires the conservation of the classic’s symbolic capital, only the contemporary author who has amassed ample cultural capital can adopt such a strategy. Maguire has achieved a near-alchemical transformation of his English Ph.D. (from Tufts University) into economic capital,40 and Sena Jeter Naslund, the author of Ahab’s Wife, and Robin Lippincott, the author of Mr. Dalloway, are colleagues on Spalding University’s MFA faculty. Rewriting a touchstone of the modernist and feminist traditions, Mr. Dalloway appeals to educated readers who, like its author, have acquired stores of cultural capital and with whom a liberal gender politics is expected to resonate. Madeline Miller’s debut novel The Song of Achilles (2012), which makes a narrator-protagonist of Achilles’ companion Patroclus, similarly combines its appeal to a bibliophile niche with a progressive sexual politics, and the circumstances surrounding its publication illuminate many facets of the literary marketplace that I am considering here. After a Wall Street Journal review brought the novel to my attention,41 I visited Amazon.com, where I could preorder the hardcover and read an interview with Miller conducted by none other than Gregory Maguire. The ample precedent for The Song of Achilles suggests that when Maguire wondered where Miller got the “noive” to rework “one of the great foundation texts of world literature,”42 he was either being disingenuous or repressing just how reliable minor-character elaboration has become. The flyleaf of Miller’s novel prominently mentions her master’s in classics from Brown University, and it will hardly be surprising to learn that Maguire and Miller share a publisher in HarperCollins. Neither does it demand extensive research to discover that the newspaper reviewing Miller’s book and her publisher share a parent company in News Corp., but literary and cultural scholars have barely begun to address the way such synergistic, journalism-cummarketing practices have been facilitated by media consolidation.43 Here, the publisher that has embraced minor-character elaboration for its ability to annex the classic’s prestige and the reviewing organ, which pronounces on the merit of the contemporary author, are controlled by the same multinational corporation.

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The sociopolitical and literary-cultural implications of these marketplace transformations are hardly straightforward, however. My anecdote certainly points to the increasing concentration of capital and power in the hands of Murdoch’s and similar corporations and their resultant influence on what gets reviewed, bought, and read. But it doesn’t follow that Miller must toe the line of Fox News’s reactionary politics, and The Song of Achilles foregrounds a homoerotic relationship barely hinted at in the Iliad. And while HarperCollins surely has News Corp. shareholders to satisfy and thus has revenue growth, rather than a particular partisan agenda, as its primary aim, this aim proves profoundly compatible with the promotion of a vibrant literary culture and an active public and blogosphere. One can find the entire Maguire-Miller interview on “Library Love Fest,” a website that is clearly a vehicle for promoting new HarperCollins titles for collection development but that also offers book-club suggestions and enables community librarians to invite authors for speaking engagements. Further complicating the dynamics of today’s literary marketplace are of course the emergence of e-books and consequent efforts by publishers to preserve the distinctive aura surrounding hard copies. Several months prior to the Wall Street Journal review, a New York Times piece featured Miller’s novel, focusing not on her reworking of the Iliad but on her book’s cover, on which is blazoned an “embossed helmet sculpted with punctures, cracks and texture, giving the image a 3-D effect.”44 The Song of Achilles has also won acclaim for what lies between its covers, though its success derives as much from Miller’s annexation of Homeric prestige and from the institutional force and marketing efforts of her publishers as from the novel’s immanent qualities. The “independent” publisher Bloomsbury (with subsidiaries in New York, New Delhi, and Sydney) puts out Miller’s novel in the United Kingdom, where it garnered the thirtythousand-pound Orange Prize in 2012 (now the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction), a prize that “celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world”45 and that was sponsored by the mobile carrier Orange, the flagship brand of French Telecom. Vividly illustrating the imbrication of symbolic capital, identity politics, and the corporate promotion of cultural prizes described by James English,46 Miller’s alleged “noive” in rewriting the Iliad proves a prize-winning gambit for winning acclaim and a broad readership. Meanwhile, a telecom giant highlights its cultural beneficence and support of women writers.

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MARKETING TO A BIBLIOPHILE NICHE

The authors and publishers of minor-character elaborations deploy a host of strategies, textual and paratextual, to appeal to a bibliophile niche that comprises the genre’s principal target audience. I roughly delineate this audience as encompassing readers who revisit the classics and buy new “literary fiction,” those who encountered canonical texts in school but haven’t opened them in years, and readers who recognize the allure of the great names even if they haven’t read them or find them boring or obscure. (If the mainstream bibliophilia in Fforde’s Eyre Affair looks fantastic, as a representation of a college-educated upper-middle-class segment of the reading public it may be far less so.) Most minor-character elaborations include or offer weblinks to book-club guides, and almost all contain authorial commentary explaining the decision to engage a canonical predecessor—or in the words of Christopher Moore, the desire to go “thrashing around in the deep end of genius with the greatest artist of the English language who ever lived” (Moore, Fool, 305). Such addenda express the authors’ stated intentions and often offer apologias for borrowing their material despite well-known precedents and a contemporary milieu overrun with intertextual appropriations. Harper’s marketing of Fool demonstrates the way contemporary publishers have utilized electronic advertising, prominent placement in chain bookstores, and invocations of the stature of canonical predecessors in order to pitch minor-character elaborations to a bibliophile niche. In February 2009, Fool discovered me in the form of a piece of spam e-mail from the now defunct Borders Booksellers. This promotion revealed how such texts are marketed on release to self-identified frequent book buyers, who like me had enrolled in the Borders “Rewards” program, signing away our e-mail addresses in return for coupons on coffee and books.47 The physical layout of Moore’s book reveals the versatile manipulation of symbolic capital in the marketplace, specifically a two-pronged strategy by which producers hail readers who know the classics while reassuring others who recognize their prestige but are unfamiliar with or reluctant to return to them. The back cover of the HarperCollins paperback flaunts a USA Today blurb that accurately asserts: “Whether you need to read the original King Lear before you read Moore’s Fool is debatable. Seems a fool’s errand to us. Just enjoy.” An irreverent entertainment like Fool hardly demands a reader

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who knows Lear’s heath speech verbatim, and the publisher displays these reassurances to expand the market from the class of readers who know their Shakespeare to the universe of those who “just enjoy.” Of course, for Shakespeare buffs, Fool offers added pleasures of recognition and allusive inside jokes. Such readers might share a privileged chuckle when Pocket, Moore’s protagonist, muses that “Moors are said to be talented wife-stranglers” (21) or when a ghost advises him to seek answers “with the witches of Great Birnam Wood” (78). By mixing unmarked if hardly obscure allusions to Shakespeare’s corpus with his primary point of reference, Lear, Moore rewards the reader who can identify them with a pleasure ancillary to the ribald laughter that the rest of the novel solicits. In his review of Fool, the blogger at ShakespeareGeek.com opined that while the novel “los[t] a few points” for lacking fidelity, he “appreciate[d]” that the intrusions of Macbeth’s witches were “cameo appearances for the benefit of Shakespeare geeks.”48 This review suggests that minor-character elaborations tap readers’ reserves of cultural capital, activating a selfdeprecating intellectual pride along with the solitary pleasures of recognition. ShakespeareGeek describes himself as a software engineer and thus a “computer geek” by trade. And though he “wish[es he] could explain” the “weird combination” of his passions for software and Shakespeare, his bio solves the mystery. He writes that the liberal-arts requirement at his technical college demanded he “spend the first two years studying humanities, and for some reason [he] latched on to Shakespeare.”49 As literature departments continue to disseminate the cultural capital of the traditional canon, it remains available for consumers’ recreational use. Writers like Moore and publishers like HarperCollins are clearly wagering that readers will pay to exercise their atrophied literary muscles. Many of Moore’s allusions, however, are explicitly marked so as not to alienate readers who do not have this cultural capital at the ready. When Pocket calls out, “Hail, Edmund, you bloody bastard!” avid Shakespeareans won’t need to be told that Edmund is Gloucester’s illegitimate son. Moore, however, explains the slur to everyone else by having another character warn Pocket that Edmund is “sensitive about his bastardy” (7). The novel is also filled with direct quotations from Lear, which are clearly marked with footnotes that cite act and scene. Fool thus exemplifies the two-pronged strategy for repackaging and marketing the symbolic capital of the canon, which reappears throughout the minor-character elaborations I consider

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in this chapter. Such texts hail a bibliophilic niche that possesses the necessary cultural capital, even when this only amounts to being a fan or lover of a single book, and who will recognize veiled allusions and be able to access the range of intertextual meanings available. Meanwhile, to attract the much wider audience that recognizes the canonical names and prestige associated with them but lacks detailed knowledge or recollection of the predecessor, producers employ tactics to preserve the association with high culture without demanding readers’ command of that culture. These include paratexts that provide crucial information about the precursor and flagged allusions that explain themselves. This double strategy allows producers to sell knowing winks to the cultured and to profit on the whiff of literariness by enabling readers to “get” the contemporary text even if they haven’t read the original. One reason readers can follow a minor-character elaboration without being familiar with its predecessor is that many such recent texts do not share with a novel like Wide Sargasso Sea an investment in producing a revision or critical rereading of the precursor. In other words, the classic serves as a pretext, a jumping-off point, rather than a sincere object of dialogue. This is overwhelmingly the case in Fool, where efforts to ridicule Lear’s folly in particular and parody Shakespeare in general are subordinated to Moore’s primary project of refining the art of bawdry. Geraldine Brooks’s March would seem to share little with Fool aside from its genre. But March also eschews substantive engagement with its predecessor yet is heavily invested in annexing the prestige of the traditional canon. March, which converts the father from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women into its protagonist, is principally a historical novel of the Civil War and a fictionalization of Bronson Alcott, and it only requires its readers to know of Little Women that the patriarch is absent for the majority of that novel. Brooks (or Penguin) obligingly provides the relevant information in an epigraph from Little Women that refers to “father far away, where the fighting was” (Brooks, March, n.p.). Combine this quotation, its source clearly marked, with the rest of the paperback’s paratextual apparatus—an afterword by Brooks and the synopsis on the back cover—and rereading Little Women becomes an academic if not a “fool’s errand,” one necessary for a complete intertextual reading but wholly in excess of what it takes to appreciate March as historical fiction.50 In addition to annexing the prestige of their primary intertexts, minorcharacter elaborations frequently mark their literariness by alluding to

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other canonical authors and texts and by thematizing reading and education.51 March begins with a missive from the eponymous narrator to his wife, and his self-consciousness regarding his overwrought prose (“The line I have set down is, perhaps, on the florid side of fine, but no matter: she is a gentle critic”) can easily be read as Brooks’s anxious projection about how her own literary ambitions will be received. Still on the first page, March asks his wife if she “recall[s] the marbled endpapers in the Spenser that” he used to read to her. “If so,” he continues, “then you, my dearest one, can see the sky as I saw it here tonight, for the colors swirled across the heavens in just such a happy profusion” (3). The same poet makes a conspicuous appearance among the profuse allusions in Ahab’s Wife. Naslund names her protagonist “Una Spenser,” conflating the poet’s name with that of the blameless heroine of The Faerie Queen and of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter, named after the same paragon of virtue. How to understand the fact that both of these contemporary novels allude to Edmund Spenser so prominently? In all likelihood, one could produce an intertextual reading of the resonance of the poet in each, but the primary function of these allusions has less to do with the content of the reference than with the act of alluding as such. This fact becomes abundantly clear in Brooks, when we recognize that March compares the evening sky not to any image in Spenser but to the pattern on ornamental pages in the edition they own. Any book with “marbled endpapers” would serve March’s description of the twilit sky equally well, just as for Brooks an allusion to any prestigious author would. Such name-dropping does not demand that the reader of March recall her English Lit. survey in detail—and far less that she be a Spenser “geek”—but merely to register that alluding to Elizabethan poetry is the kind of thing only a literary novel would do. As Little Women is typically viewed as a classic for girls, allusion serves Brooks as a necessary technology for garnering prestige, a bid to be considered serious literature that in the case of March, which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2006, clearly paid off. One might object that the Spenser reference is March’s name-dropping, not Brooks’s, and that it is meant to reveal the character’s intellectual disposition. But the creation of a bookish protagonist, one “more interested in laying up the riches of the mind” than in economic gain (18), constitutes a complementary strategy to appeal to an audience that self-identifies as intellectual. March’s rejection of vulgar materialism refracts Brooks’s own claim to disinterested production, which reinforces her endeavor to acquire

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a literary readership. March is hardly alone in the genre in converting a previously minor character into a bookish protagonist. The Wind Done Gone’s Cynara cites Shakespeare’s sonnets, Othello, and The Tempest; mentions her enjoyment of Scott’s sagas, Mansfield Park, and Great Expectations; and compares the end of Reconstruction to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung.52 Naslund’s cerebral heroine is addicted to allusion, and hers are almost always marked with their sources for the reader who would not recognize them. Even Moore’s clown boasts of his erudition in order to impress “tarts” and “wenches” (“I am a walking library of learning—bound in comely leather and suitable for stroking”).53 Thematizing reading with their cultured protagonists, these texts not only repackage their canonical predecessors but also literary culture as such. Selling books that feature booklovers to booklovers emerges as a reliable strategy for producers to reinforce the prestige of the literary and thus perpetuate a desire for their wares.54 Certain pleasures and even certain texts, however, are undoubtedly reserved for the initiated—that is, for fans and lovers of the canonical predecessor. Although at some point either booksellers or Houghton Mifflin decided that Randall’s The Wind Done Gone would appeal primarily to an African American audience, Randall appears to have anticipated one consisting of devotees of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Randall renames all the characters from Mitchell’s blockbuster, so that Scarlett O’Hara is referred to throughout as “Other,” Gerald and Ellen O’Hara are “Planter” and “Lady,” Rhett Butler is “R.B.,” and Pork becomes “Garlic.” While this strategy is interesting for, among other things, the transparency of some of these name changes, which became a legal matter in the unsuccessful lawsuit that Mitchell’s estate brought against Houghton Mifflin, and the ironic reversal that converts Scarlett into “Other” in the process of condemning Gone with the Wind’s persistent othering of its black characters, it is more fundamentally a strategy that demands familiarity with the predecessor text for its coherence. The name “Garlic” would seem inexplicably idiosyncratic to a reader who does not recall Pork, and while “Dreamy Gentleman” and “Mealy Mouth” for Ashley and Melanie Wilkes are typological names that indicate their character traits, for readers unfamiliar with Gone with the Wind such names cede their parodic function and may merely confuse.55 Of course, the fact that the class of “initiates” to Gone with the Wind, especially if one includes viewers of Victor Fleming’s 1939 film, is an extremely populous one helps Randall’s novel retain a wide

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resonance despite the demands for recognition it places on readers. Texts that elaborate on characters from predecessors belonging to the “social” as opposed to academic canon take advantage of wider audience familiarity with the precursor while relying less on the precursor’s high literary prestige. Wicked similarly capitalizes on the far greater contemporary film audience of The Wizard of Oz, compared to the modern readership of L. Frank Baum’s series of books. One may speculate that Wicked’s phenomenal success stems less from its immanent qualities than from its ability to engage a range of audiences: for Baum’s books (which were hugely popular in their day); those of the theatrical adaptations; the huge viewership of the film version (like Gone with the Wind, directed by Fleming and also appearing in 1939), especially its annual television airings; as well as audiences of later cartoon versions, the musical The Wiz, and its screen adaptation in the 1978 Sidney Lumet film starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. While elaborating a minor character from Shakespeare or Virgil emerges as a reliable strategy for appealing to a bibliophilic niche, doing so with a character from a popular novel or film enables producers to target a mass audience. While some minor-character elaborations target the massive preexisting fan bases of their predecessors and some tout the symbolic capital associated with theirs, others appeal to particular fan communities. A revealing example of the latter is Janet Aylmer’s Darcy’s Story, which takes part in the staggering contemporary proliferation of Jane Austen sequels, spinoffs, parodies, biographies, transpositions, and television and film adaptations. This mountain of “Austenalia” is fertile ground for future research, but such texts employ widely diverging generic techniques: some are fictional biographies of Austen (Becoming Jane Austen [2003] and The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen [2008]); others like Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996), Amy Heckerling’s film Clueless (1995), and Jane Austen in Boca (2002), are transpositions of Austen plots set in the contemporary world; a number treat the pleasures and pains of being an Austen fanatic, such as The Jane Austen Book-Club (2004), Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict (2008), and Jane Austen Ruined My Life (2009); still others are self-help books (Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating [2005], Dear Jane Austen: A Heroine’s Guide to Life  and Love [2005], and Jane Austen’s Guide to Good Manners [2006]); and the latest craze has been to travesty Austen’s books by blending her plots with other genres—the more incongruous the better—as in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (2009),

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Mr. Darcy, Vampyre (2009), and Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen (2001). But by far the most prolific category has been sequels and spinoffs, in particular of Pride and Prejudice.56 I have pointed to the distinction between minor-character elaboration— in which the shift in perspective or focus to a minor character produces a revised understanding of that character—and such related forms as sequels and spinoffs, which generally do not revise the precursor text in a significant way but merely extend its plot or provide more of a given character. But Darcy’s Story demonstrates that this distinction constitutes a blurry line indeed. Drawing it requires deciding when similarity slides into difference, whether a character is merely extended or demonstrably transformed. Though Aylmer’s novel does not encourage any major reconsideration of Darcy, it does adopt the principal formal strategies of the genre; the shift in the narration to Darcy’s perspective is characteristic of the genre. The novel’s tagline, mentioned above, points to the appeal of such texts for consumers and producers alike. For readers, the combination of a return to the romance of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy with the shift to “a whole new perspective” offers up the twinned pleasures of “repetition with variation,” the “comfort of ritual with the piquancy of surprise,” which characterize the experience of explicit intertextual engagement theorized by Linda Hutcheon.57 Producers are clearly eager to sell this type of pleasurable experience. The added virtue of minor-character elaboration is that its premise is easily encapsulated in a brief formula that immediately provokes a mystery for the reader, spelled out on the back cover of Darcy’s Story: “But what was Darcy thinking?” Alluding to a beloved story while destabilizing it, the taglines pithily summarize the story’s intertextual project and pique the reader’s interest with the promise of fleshing out a shadowy character. It turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Darcy’s Story is wholly faithful to its predecessor, full of verbatim quotations, and does not alter readers’ perceptions of Darcy so much as confirm what they already learn by the end of Austen’s novel (that the Bennets were mistaken in their initial disapproval of him). But despite the fact that I consider Aylmer’s novel more of a sequel than an elaboration, it provides an instructive example of how the publishing industry has adopted the genre’s basic framework and employed its technology to churn out profitable commodities. Part of this instructive quality derives from the fortuitous fact that I found a promotional copy of the novel in its uncorrected proof stage while browsing used books at

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Alibris.com; the other part comes from Aylmer’s unique success story. The publicity copy offers a number of insights into how HarperCollins promoted the novel; the back cover boasts a “National Marketing Campaign,” including “National Print Advertising in Romantic Times,” “National Review Attention” (a review appearing in Romantic Times, the same publication in which it was advertised, gave the novel four and a half stars, and USA Today called it a “delectable crumpet”),58 “National Radio Interviews, including NPR,” as well as “Online Promotion” and an “Online Reading Group Guide.” These marketing strategies suggest the scale Harper had in mind for the sales of Aylmer’s book and an overlap between romance readers and devotees of the Austen industry. Of perhaps even greater interest is the letter from the Harper editor Jill Schwartzman found inside the front cover of the uncorrected proof. Her letter begins by stressing the marketability of Darcy’s Story. “Dear Readers, / There’s obviously an insatiable market for all things Pride & Prejudice—over 100,000 copies of the book were sold just in the last year. Film and TV versions are equally popular—there have been four major adaptations in the last ten years. But Janet Aylmer had a new and different vision.”59 It’s no surprise that editors are concerned with demand for their books, but this letter confirms that the publishing industry perceives the “insatiable market” for Austenalia to be fertile ground for the sale of “new and different” reworkings of the same old canonical material. Schwartzman’s citation of the perennially robust sales of P&P also reinforces the intuition that, contra guardians of intellectual-property rights, derivative works funnel readers back to the originals, increasing their cultural visibility and consequently their sales. Schwartzman goes on to recount the unique scenario by which Harper obtained the rights to publish Darcy’s Story in the United States. Aylmer was inspired to write the novel after watching the 1995 BBC miniseries featuring Colin Firth and discussing with her daughter how little Austen reveals about Darcy. Aylmer first published the novel privately, writes Schwartzman, borrowing funds “to print 2,000 copies, only to sell out in six weeks—and that’s with no marketing and only a handful of shops selling the book.” With the help of a small publisher in Bath, which prints only Darcy’s Story and two other books, Aylmer went on to sell twenty thousand copies in thirty-seven countries.60 Schwartzman gleefully announces: “Now it’s finally available in the United States, and I’m delighted to say that Harper paperback is the publisher! If you’re a Jane Austen fan—and really, who isn’t?—I absolutely

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guarantee you’re going to love Darcy’s Story.” Aylmer’s story looks like the Horatio Alger tale of the book world: the self-published novel that captivates readers until it’s noticed by the big players and sales really take off. Aylmer’s website now claims the book has sold 130,000 copies.61 On the surface, the grassroots success of Darcy’s Story looks like it might assuage some of the worst fears of the mass-culture critics of the postwar era. According to Theodor Adorno the use of “culture industry” as a replacement for “mass,” “popular,” or “folk” culture was meant to “exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves.  .  .  . The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumer from above.”62 Aylmer’s novel was initially produced from “below,” as with the current profusion of online fan fiction. Her conversation with her daughter seems to exemplify the “writerly” reading theorized by Roland Barthes, replacing a passive act of consumption with active production. The fact that Aylmer sold out her initial print run of two thousand copies without marketing seems to attest to a preexistent demand, to the fact that the “insatiable market” for all things Austen predates the work of culture-industry advertising and promotion. When one takes into account, however, the fact that the occasion for Aylmer’s writing was actually the 1995 miniseries—which likely whetted many of her readers’ appetites for more P&P as well—and considers that Harper’s distribution resources and marketing efforts enabled her novel’s sixtyfold sales increase, the picture begins to look quite different. Instead of culture either imposed from above or spontaneously generated from some unspoiled folk, we see a reciprocal interchange fueling production, in which the culture industry engenders acolytes devoted to its wares, fans who may be inspired to become producers in their own right—only to have their products reappropriated by the culture industry and sold back to the same devoted buyers. Aylmer’s ostensible grassroots, popular success, and the corporate mechanisms that enabled and capitalized on it in fact resemble nothing more than the fairy tale of radically democratic talent discovery–cum–mass marketing that is American Idol. And HarperCollins and the Idol shows share a parent company in Murdoch’s News Corp. Again, these large-scale producers have found it profitable to cater to many niche audiences, so the point here is not to reassert mid-twentiethcentury fears of the fascistic potential inherent in the imposition of a

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uniform, conformist mass culture and certainly also not to extend the overcorrection of the 1970s and 1980s by valorizing the popular, as such, as a site of resistance, community, or radically democratic access. Nor is the point simply to observe that a genre that emerged in postmodernist experiment and feminist and postcolonial critique has itself been colonized by a consolidated global publishing industry—though this is certainly the case. Multinational corporations will eagerly co-opt genre along with any other technology that turns a profit. Instead, the point is that the publishing industry has embraced the conventional form of minor-character elaboration precisely because its politics are so anodyne and already compatible with its ends. The analogy with American Idol is not a trivial one—a matter of taking a shot at Murdoch or at reality TV. The Idol shows and the lion’s share of minor-character elaborations project a similar egalitarian fantasy: everyone has a chance to have her voice heard on American Idol, just as every character gets a chance to tell her side of the story. But this fantasy masks the obvious fact that while only a lucky few will get to be the next American Idol, News Corp. will always win. Similarly, minor-character elaborations offer an image of social diversity, but authors in possession of ample cultural capital are actually speaking, and media conglomerates are profiting.63 When these authors and the multinational corporations who control today’s publishing industry “allow” minor characters “to speak,” the images they project help reinforce the neoliberal tenet that the free market does not discriminate and offers fair and egalitarian competition. It’s not, then, that the process of popularization has blunted the subversive edge of the genre, watered down its once robust politics, but that the political project of “giving voice” to minor characters (only one possibility offered by the genre’s technology) became conventional in the 1980s and 1990s as a literary form that neatly complemented the rise of neoliberal ideology. That said, it almost goes without saying that the many recent texts adopting the techniques of the genre have become less critical and more reverential toward their canonical predecessors. The back cover of the fair copy of Darcy’s Story insists on Aylmer’s fidelity to her source even while paradoxically claiming her inventiveness and daring: “With the utmost respect for Austen’s original masterwork . . . Aylmer loving [sic] retells Pride and Prejudice. . . . One of fiction’s greatest romantic heroes becomes even more sympathetic, compelling, attractive, and accessible, all through the imagination and artistry of a truly gifted storyteller.” An example of similar

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homage, though many are possible, is Robin Lippincott’s Mr. Dalloway, which reworks Woolf ’s classic but focalizes most of its narrative through Richard’s perspective—though its narration formally mimics its predecessor, moving in and out of the consciousnesses of other characters as well. In an “Author’s Note,” Lippincott makes his homage explicit. This book is a creative response to the great novel Mrs. Dalloway, following twenty-five years of passionate immersion in the life and work of Virginia Woolf. The extracts from Woolf ’s writings which appear at the beginning of the book both inspired Mr. Dalloway and invited me to write it. I offer it as a token, however meager, of my admiration—the kind of admiration only one writer can have for one another.64

It is difficult to imagine a more dramatic illustration of the strategy of annexation. Lippincott exalts Woolf, claims that she not only authorized his work but invited it, and finally poses his humble admiration as the privileged kind only a writer can feel. If the overt concern of Lippincott’s novel is to show that Richard Dalloway was, like his wife, forced to suppress his homosexual desire and to foster sympathy with his perspective, underlying this project is Lippincott’s possession of stores of cultural capital accumulated over twenty-five years. If, as Guillory writes, the author “returns in the critique of the canon, not as the genius, but as the representative of social identity,” in the genre of minor-character elaboration this identity similarly may be a matter of race, gender, or sexual orientation, but it is unlikely to be a lower-class one.65 “BE SUBVERSIVE”

Though recent minor-character elaborations tend to adopt postures that are more reverential than critical, many continue to articulate a politics of difference, and such political orientations have proven effective strategies for appealing to demographics expected to identify with socially marginal perspectives. Hunting for a paperback of Randall’s The Wind Done Gone in a Borders store on the South Side of Chicago, I found it pressed up against Rawles’s My Jim in the “African-American Interest” section. I knew about Rawles’s novel, narrated by the wife of Jim from Huck Finn, but this alphabetical coincidence confirmed that these books occupied the same

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market niche. Both novels, as trade paperbacks, are put out by major publishing houses, Randall’s by Mariner, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin, and Rawles’s by Three Rivers, a Crown imprint and Random House subsidiary. But it appears that at some point Borders, perhaps following the publishers’ advice, determined that the books would appeal primarily to African American readers, with whom revisionist texts featuring black female protagonists were expected to resonate. The back cover of the paperback of The Wind Done Gone suggests that Mariner had a similar conception of the book’s intended audience, as it touts Randall as a finalist for the 2002 NAACP Image Award in literature and features a blurb (“At last the slaves of Tara have found their voices, and I say, ‘Amen!’ ”) pulled from a letter written by Henry Louis Gates Jr. as part of an amicus brief filed in support of the publication of Randall’s novel against the lawsuit brought by Margaret Mitchell’s estate. In the book’s placement within a chain bookseller and the paratextual apparatus on its cover, the identitarian logic that a novel featuring a mixed-race protagonist will predominantly interest African American readers combines with the markers of prestige conferred by Gates and the NAACP to appeal to a market niche constituted by race. Caroline Rody, writing about Wide Sargasso Sea in 1993, anticipated the utility of intertextual revisions for a culture industry eager to exploit the oppositional political energies of identity groups: “It probably wouldn’t surprise us at all to walk into a bookstore, someday soon, and find a twovolume boxed set of the Brontë and Rhys novels, issued by a major publishing house . . . targeted at the feminist market—special window displays for Mother’s Day.”66 To my knowledge, no such boxed set yet exists, but Rody cannily foresaw that feminist readers, like all demographic groups, constitute a prospective market and that just as authors would find in Wide Sargasso Sea a “revisionary paradigm,” publishers would discover a model for promoting books that target such readers. It is not simply that the political force of the genre has dissipated, its radical potential sapped through contamination with the marketplace; instead the genre’s revisionist politics constitutes a crucial component of its popular appeal. Christa Wolf ’s Medea exemplifies the way conglomerate publishers have co-opted oppositional political energies by embracing minor-character elaboration as well as how they employ prestigious writers in their catalogue to promote other house writers and have developed shrewd electronic

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marketing strategies. In 1998, Nan A. Talese, at the time an imprint of Bantam Doubleday Dell (BDD), a Bertelsmann subsidiary, published Medea in the United States.67 In an introduction that prefaced first editions in the United States and United Kingdom, Margaret Atwood stresses the feminist stakes of Medea—“Of all the seductive, sinister and transgressive women who have haunted the Western imagination, none has a reputation more lurid than Medea’s”—and applauds Wolf ’s “head-on and original” attack on the myth and its contemporary resonance: “This tale is about Medea, yes; but it is also about us” (Atwood, in Wolf, Medea, ix, xii, xv). Beyond the particular claims Atwood makes for Wolf ’s novel, such introductions function as what Bourdieu calls “instances of consecration.”68 In marketing terms, the reasons Atwood gives for promoting Medea are ultimately less significant than the fact that she is offering her cultural authority to legitimate Wolf to an English-speaking audience. Authors puffing for one another is of course nothing new, but Bourdieu argues that instances of consecration are characteristic of the “restricted” subfield of cultural production, the relatively autonomous sphere characterized by production for other producers, as opposed to “large-scale” production, “which submits to the laws of competition for the conquest of the largest possible market.”69 Atwood’s endorsement of Wolf, likely under the aegis of Doubleday, their publisher, reveals how, with the consolidation of the industry, the distinction between “large-scale” and “restricted” production, always more a matter of belief than of fact, has all but vanished. Doubleday prominently marked Medea’s cover with Atwood’s endorsement, as did Virago in the United Kingdom, and her name functions to confer legitimacy and as a shorthand marker that conveys its appeal to female readers. In the case of the UK edition, Virago’s imprint on the binding helps further establish Medea’s feminist standing. Virago has had a singularly influential history of publishing feminist texts and discovering and rediscovering female authors. But the fact that Virago was sold to Little Brown in 1995, in turn acquired by Hachette in 2006,70 demonstrates the way the umbrella structure of modern publishing preserves the feminist press and prestigious house names as specialized imprints that cater to niche audiences. Such niches overlap, and Atwood’s introduction marks Medea with both literary prestige and feminist standing. In a similar fashion, the cover of the Grove paperback of Atwood’s Penelopiad touts her as the “Booker Prize– winning author of The Blind Assassin” and broadcasts a blurb from the

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Independent: “Half–Dorothy Parker, half–Desperate Housewives.” Grove simultaneously pitches the novel’s literary quality (Parker, the Booker, and Atwood herself), its mildly salacious entertainment (Desperate Housewives), and, running through all these signifiers (in different kinds and degrees, to be sure), its feminist credentials. The prominent placement of this blurb might make Atwood cringe, but it delights the scholar of the contemporary literary marketplace: here is evidence that these varied signifiers of symbolic value circulate in the same market for cultural goods. In addition to prefacing Medea with Atwood’s introduction, BDD published it in Bold Type, “an interactive magazine for people who love to read,” which the conglomerate launched in 1997, when the Internet was itself novel. Bold Type offered commentary, excerpts, and author interviews and touted itself as an online community: “a forum for authors and readers to meet each other head-on.”71 Of course, what all the excerpts in Bold Type had in common was that they were written by BDD and, later, Random House authors—a prestigious lot indeed. Bold Type featured material from the likes of Atwood, Rushdie, and Sebald and, under Random’s Vintage imprint, posthumous cameos from Plath, Nabokov, and Ellison. Once one realizes this ’zine is a promotional vehicle, there’s nothing too insidious about Bold Type as a means for prospective buyers to browse. But Bold Type’s rhetoric illuminates how conglomerate publishers have sought to cultivate community and tap into oppositional political energies. The inaugural issue posed this publicity venture as a cultural “forum” and a site of resistance: “We want you to be subversive. Print out interesting essays and leave them in cafés and on the subway. Copy and forward articles to your friends via email. Post provocative short stories above the copier in your office. Read book excerpts while you should be working . . .”72 Bold Type’s incitement to mild-mannered radicalism illustrates the pervasive corporate co-option of counterculture energies described by Thomas Frank.73 Minorcharacter elaborations, with their revisionism and compatibility with feminist and multicultural agendas, have become a compelling technology for publishers eager to exploit such energies. Bold Type’s foray into digital marketing captures an ambivalent moment of possibility in the early days of the Internet. For corporations like BDD and later Bertelsmann, this moment demanded new ways of attracting potential book buyers. Bold Type’s editor asserts that literary culture is thriving despite “naysayers [who] are busy proclaiming the ‘Death of the

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Novel,’ and of literature in general,” offering up its own interactive content “as evidence that this is an exciting time for fiction” and asserting that “bookstores across the country are more crowded than ever, the proliferation of cafés that sponsor reading series continues, and most importantly there is a wealth of great books being written by compelling new authors.”74 The bankruptcy of Borders suggests that e-books and Amazon continue to threaten the economic health of brick-and-mortar bookstores.75 But Bold Type testifies to the interest of media conglomerates in propagating literary culture—thus in values that exceed market share—and minor-character elaboration has proven appealing to existing bibliophiles, resonant with identity-group audiences, and uniquely capable of reinforcing the cultural centrality of the literary. AHAB’S WIFE: TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL

Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife or, The Star-Gazer may represent the apotheosis of the compatibility of the genre’s political project of imagining female and other subaltern perspectives absent in canonical texts with the strategy of leveraging the symbolic capital of the canon in the service of the contemporary author’s own self-promotion and corporate publishers’ low-risk profit seeking. Naslund’s novel displays epic ambition at several levels: her stargazing title character undertakes an adventurous saga of self-making; the novel self-consciously chases the cultural leviathan that is its predecessor, Moby-Dick; and the book’s publishers positioned it to be a blockbuster market success. HarperCollins brought out the book in hardcover under its William Morrow imprint in 1999 “with a huge first printing” and later as a Perennial paperback.76 It was a Book-of-the-MonthClub main selection and was named one of Time’s top five novels of 1999— although since Time Warner owned the BOMC at the time (Bertelsmann later bought it in 2007 and sold it in 2008), the distinction looks somewhat dubious.77 Ahab’s Wife aims for the grandeur its predecessor has come to represent, and though Naslund’s publishers aspired to a greater commercial sensation than Melville achieved (initially),78 her novel’s literariness presents a crucial component of, rather than a hindrance to, its palatability to popular tastes. Ahab’s Wife’s bid to annex Melville’s symbolic capital and acquire a similar prestige manifests itself outwardly in the book’s physical architecture,

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which formally parodies its predecessor. Ahab’s Wife is a hefty book—if it were a whale, Ishmael would class it as a “Folio”— weighing in at almost seven hundred pages, divided into some 150 short, titled chapters. (This mimicry might suggest what Moby-Dick represents in the popular imagination: a really long book with a lot of little chapters.) And like Moby-Dick, or, The Whale, Naslund’s novel offers a “choice” of two titles; is prefaced by a dedication, “In Token of My Admiration” (to her husband, rather than to Hawthorne); and a series of quotations under the heading “Extracts,” and it contains a number of illustrations in the style of nineteenth-century woodcuts. Naslund’s novel also features a self-consciously narrating protagonist, chapters that utilize other characters as narrators, and still others that render dialogue in dramatic form. Naslund’s section of paratextual “Extracts” provides the relevant quotations from Moby-Dick in which Ahab’s wife is mentioned as a “sweet, resigned girl.” As with many minorcharacter elaborations, Naslund relies heavily on the symbolic capital of Melville but does not demand her readers remember that Ahab had a wife. Naslund’s first “extract” summarizes her project of imagining a sprawling maritime adventure featuring a female heroine and creating a historical novel that celebrates the achievements of nineteenth-century American women. She quotes Margaret Fuller: “Let them be sea-captains—if they will!”79 Rather than mount a critique of Moby-Dick for failing to consider the perspectives of women or seek to dramatize the effects of structural inequalities on women of the period, Ahab’s Wife undertakes the liberal feminist project of imagining the unique subjectivity of its protagonist and advocating the freedom of individuals to be allowed to do what “they will.” Naslund’s heroine Una does not become a captain, but she does stow away on a whaler dressed as a cabin boy, and her adventures include attending Fuller’s lectures in Boston and befriending the writer and activist as well as the Nantucket astronomer Maria Mitchell. On the surface, Ahab’s Wife neatly fits the mold of the popular feminist novel. Far from being the “sweet, resigned girl” envisioned by Melville, from childhood Una establishes herself as a freethinker who rebels against the patriarchal order of her devout father by refusing to accept his god. Consequently, her mother sends her to live with an aunt and uncle who manage a lighthouse on a utopian island off Massachusetts. (Among the novel’s scores of allusions, the lighthouse is an oblique reference to Woolf, Una’s father is named Ulysses, and her mother is called Bertha. Perhaps by making Una into Bertha’s

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daughter, Naslund buries a suggestion of her debt to Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.) Seeking adventure, Una takes to sea on a whaler with a kindly captain until the ship is stove by a whale, and she is left on the Pacific in an open boat. Threatened with starvation, the survivors draw lots, and Una and her friends Kit and Giles survive by cannibalizing the captain, his son, and their other boatmates. Una’s literal cannibalism helps establish her neoPlatonic compatibility with Melville’s presumably metaphorical “cannibal old” Ahab, but it is not difficult to read the novel’s obsession with anthropophagy as symptomatic of Naslund’s anxiety about her literary parasitism. Naslund bases this episode on the historical whale ship Essex, which also inspired Melville,80 but when Una and friends are rescued by the Albatross, the reader also recognizes an extensive reworking of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”—one of many instances of the novel’s blending of a pastiche of literary predecessors with historical events. Wracked by survivor’s guilt and horror at having turned cannibal, Giles kills himself aboard the Albatross. Una and Kit find consolation in each other, but Kit begins to go mad. Enter Ahab, who offers to return Una and Kit to Nantucket aboard the Pequod and officiates the marriage of the grieving couple aboard his ship. At Nantucket, Kit’s madness grows; he turns abusive and abandons Una, running off to live with Native Americans in the West. Naslund’s exceedingly gentle version of Ahab takes Una aboard his ship, dissolves her marriage to Kit, and marries her himself. She moves into Ahab’s stately captain’s house, and Una and Ahab spend a single idyllic night together before he goes a-whaling. The plot of Ahab’s Wife is as baroque as the prose of Moby-Dick, but the pattern throughout is a thoroughly conventional, if secularized, narrative of trial and salvation. Una’s father menaces her; she goes to live with gentle relatives. Her insane husband beats and rapes her; she finds her soulmate in Ahab. Ahab is dismasted, goes mad, and is lost at sea; she finds true companionship with Mary Starbuck, her gay neighbors, and finally Ishmael—whom she marries and settles down with to write companion narratives. When Naslund self-reflexively hints at the way Ahab’s Wife is meant to complement its predecessor, she captures her novel’s tendency to rose-color history and its romantic insistence on happy endings: “if one wrote for American men a modern epic, a quest, and it ended in death and destruction, should such a tale not have its redemptive features? Was it not possible instead for a human life to end in a sense of wholeness, of harmony with

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the universe? And how might a woman live such a life?” (Naslund, Ahab’s Wife, 417). This passage suggests both how Naslund reads Moby-Dick—primarily as a story of adventure, as “a quest,” rather than (of many choices) an allegory of capitalism, of U.S. imperial ambitions, of antebellum America’s self-destructive pursuit of a phantasm of whiteness while depending on the labor of dark-skinned “savages”—and how resolutely she insists on liberating her protagonist from all constraints. This forces Ahab’s Wife to ignore actual historical circumstances of privation for women in the nineteenth century and results in a novel that is a paean to unfettered individualism. Wholly dedicated to the project of liberal self-making, Ahab’s Wife falters whenever it broaches questions of structural inequality—even those of the nineteenth century. After a dinner with the Mitchells, Una ponders “the dark issues of our time—of slavery, of the position of women, of temperance, of the crisis in religious belief.” But she can only conclude that individual liberty is a good, that people should be free to do what they like: “William Mitchell had spoken as an ardent abolitionist at the dinner table, but he mainly invested his time in science. Maria seemed content merely to focus on what she herself wanted to do. Perhaps that was as good an answer as any to the question of the status of women” (466). The novel’s promotion of liberal individualism denies that any obstacles besides knowing one’s mind exist for women (or anyone), and, accordingly, Una reflexively views her life and narrative as instances of radical self-fashioning: “I realized that my life itself was then all a matter of possibility . . . all seemed free and open to me, with only my own mind to consult as to what I hoped or chose” (83); “I had begun to see my own life as a story and myself as the author of it” (158). She even understands her disastrous marriage to Kit as the result of her erroneous abdication of agency rather than as a common instance of spousal abuse: “Once, out of guilt and grief, I had given my will away, but ever after, I kept my soul for myself ” (17). Above all, Naslund’s novel views freedom as a spiritual and intellectual matter. Her fictionalized Fuller praises Una in a letter, and the reader is meant to concur: “You create your own being  .  .  . you send your spirit voyaging; you think. You are the American woman, an Eve more fittingly named Dawn, new and brave” (591). This emphasis on Una’s intellectual and spiritual adventure in fact renders all her external exploits extraneous, and Ahab’s Wife celebrates the odyssey of self-discovery as its true epic. Married to Ahab, Una discovers her spirit can remain free while her body

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stays at home as a mom: “So during Ahab’s third voyage, I made something of a Quaker woman of myself, in placid manner and even temperament. My greatest joy, after mothering, was my sewing, and while I stitched, my mind lay smooth and quiet” (520). Una revels in married life. A chapter entitled “Wife” begins: “What magic there was in the word when it named all that I would be!” With Ahab at sea, Una declares: “I kept my house as though my husband were there so that when he did come, every household task would be practiced and perfected,” and she declines invitations to visit Fuller because Ahab “must find his wife at home” whenever he returns (457). Even her uncanny apprehension that Ahab has been killed at sea fails to occasion mourning because she has achieved a truer marriage to her self. Una’s premonition that she has been widowed only provokes another of the novel’s countless records of her musings, as she wonders, “where is the journey to the place that is limitless? I find it within. Last night I found it within me—independent and single. No, I do not unmarry Ahab. But I marry myself ” (561). Not trivially, Una can be so spiritually content because Ahab’s whaling leaves her so well provided for materially. More than a room of her own, Naslund portrays a woman’s spiritual independence as requiring a house or two. When Ahab shows Una their second home, she follows him “from room to room, [her] soul ever expanding” (361). Naslund seems to have ignored Melville’s critical exposure of whaling wealth as blood money; her jolly Ahab encourages his new bride, “make yourself merry in all your living and spending till I come home,” and Una boasts to a friend, “We can buy anything we please. Captain Ahab is very rich” (365, 381). Naslund’s novel actually inverts much of Melville’s critique, and one begins to wonder about the influence of Murdoch’s neoconservative politics on HarperCollins’ editorial decisions when, completely extraneous to the main plot, another whaling captain tells Una that he has invested in a “new kind of oil, oozed from the ground,” because “someday the whales will all be dead, hunted to extinction by the likes of Captain Ahab and myself.” Una does not linger on the portent of whale extinction but jumps at the prospect of trading one ecologically devastating energy source for another, investing “substantially” in “this new oil”—even after being told that “When you burn it, it billows noxious black smoke” (530).81 As I read these words during the 2010 British Petroleum oil spill, I had to wonder what Melville would have thought of seeing “this new oil” pour into the Gulf of Mexico like so much whale blood. Naslund, however, does not limn

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her narrator-protagonist with any discernible irony or make Una, already “very rich” from Ahab’s fortune, seem greedy or exploitative for investing in black gold; instead, Naslund offers this episode to demonstrate her heroine’s keen business acumen. If the overwhelming neoliberalism of Ahab’s Wife makes it an exceptional case, it converges with the broader tendency of minor-character elaborations in its cultural conservatism. The novel combines an eminently inclusive appreciation of difference with a trumpeting of the timeless value of the Western canon. Naslund depicts a multicultural sisterhood, embraces noncanonical figures like Fuller, and pastiches Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin when Una helps a runaway slave cross the Ohio by leaping across perilous ice floes. Updating Melville’s depiction of the Pequod as a chowder pot of the world’s races for a multicultural age, Naslund has Una befriend a corpulent Nantucket innkeeper named Rebekkah Swain, who embodies a contemporary ideal of diversity: “Her complexion . . . was more yellow and Chinese-like than black—see how in her person she gathers in the nations? . . . In that moment, she seemed a woman of all time as well as the melded personification of the geographically diverse human race” (128). Characteristically, while Swain’s body contains multitudes, Naslund couches the innkeeper’s ability to transcend history in terms that echo Ben Jonson’s praise of Shakespeare as “not of an age, but for all time.” Similarly, while Swain’s appearance encompasses nations, Naslund has her speech evoke the English: “Her eyes tilted up at the corners—the Chinese again!—the lips, full and negroid, and the words they shaped . . . there was her kinship with the kings and queens of England” (128). Simultaneously, Ahab’s Wife pays lip service to the appreciation of human diversity and heaps praise on the English language and its most exalted exponent, privileging the cultural production of the West by continually drawing attention to its masterworks. Ahab’s Wife pays homage to the traditional Western canon and poses knowledge of those masterworks as the key that opens the gates for Una’s journey to spiritual independence. Una is a dedicated reader—with Ahab’s largess she goes to Boston to buy “Not only . . . furnishings, china, and silver, but also books by the boxload” (374)—and the novel is strewn with scores of flagged allusions to the classics. By the second page, Una recalls sitting with her mother, “reading again those great books of literature” (2–3), and she continually intersperses her narrative with references that range across

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the centuries.82 When she takes a steamboat north, Una looks at the wheel and thinks of “Don Quixote’s windmill” (25), and, late in the novel, she improbably encounters a five year-old Henry James, who “amaz[es her] by his spiraling sentence” (664). Of Keats’s “Eve of Saint Agnes” Una rhapsodizes: “I want to eat the language . . . I wanted rich words, and none are richer than Keats’s.” Una continues, speaking to her mother but clarifying for the reader: “ ‘Heard sounds are sweet; unheard, sweeter,’ I quoted freely from ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ ” (403). Naslund includes gratuitous allusions, as with Cervantes, and marks the source of any quotation, as with Keats. Again, the logic of these allusions depends on the act of citation, not on the content of the reference; the reader does not have to identify the source but merely Naslund’s literariness. And throughout the novel Una hobnobs with American Renaissance literati, encountering Hawthorne (who quotes from his own “Village Uncle”) on the way to Emerson’s house, hearing Frederick Douglass speak, and stumbling upon little James on the strand. One Amazon.com reviewer aptly compares Ahab’s Wife to a nineteenthcentury Forrest Gump, and Una’s mingling with literary celebrities stands as a transparent enactment of her author’s aspirations to do the same.83 Of course, Melville himself comes in for some of Naslund’s most fawning homage. After Una overhears Ishmael spouting Moby-Dick’s ornate prose verbatim in conversation, she tells him: “You are a wonderful narrator.” Ishmael replies, “I would suppose that you yourself have a story to tell” (644). Ahab’s Wife thus painstakingly positions its own narrative alongside that of its illustrious predecessor. While Naslund’s inclusion of citations and celebrity sightings functions as a part of her bid to annex the symbolic capital of Moby-Dick by marking her novel’s literariness, these references are also crucially imbricated in its neoliberal ideology since “those great works” that Una reads are what help elevate and ennoble her unique soul on its “inward journey,” thanks to the “voyage of reading” (124). Ahab’s Wife is a romance in many senses, but perhaps the most abiding one lies in its adoption of romantic ideology that replaces religion with poetry, exalting the self, reason, and nature over any deity. Along with Keats, Wordsworth, Byron, and Coleridge are some of Una’s favorites. When Una reads Lyrical Ballads, Naslund makes the substitution explicit: “in the hammock, tended by the summer breeze, the poet’s reverence for Nature helped to fill the vacancy left by my father’s toppled God” (51). When Giles kills himself, the captain of the Albatross

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reads a psalm, and Una follows the prayer with “the poem of Wordsworth that begins ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud . . .’ ” (245). Of course, the real god of Una’s world, like that of Fforde’s England and to a reasonable extent our own secular society, is not a Jewish carpenter but a glover’s son from Stratford. In despair after the whaleboat and Giles’s suicide, Una apostrophizes the literary figures that serve as her deities even while railing against them in Ahab’s Promethean fashion: “I defy you, Shakespeare, and all the other gods—Milton, Bunyan, Homer (not you, Byron; you can be heroic, but that’s only half-god)—to make a heaven of that hell-boat of Three” (236). The moment of defiance passes, but these “gods” continue to populate Una’s Olympus. If Una thinks Keats’s language is the richest, Shakespeare’s is the most spiritually nourishing. A chapter entitled “Shakespeare and Company”—with an anachronistic nod to the famous English bookseller in Paris—depicts another of Una’s moments of despair, after she has lost both her mother and a stillborn infant. Overcome with loneliness, “Furiously, I read Shakespeare to feel that people yet lived and breathed in the world” (418). If mingling with fictional characters seems a strange way to reconnect with people in the world, Ahab’s Wife does not linger over the paradox and tirelessly finds redemption, posing literature as balm for the soul, for even Shakespeare’s tragedies leave “some idea of order or hope, or the memory of some transcendent act” (417). To see how far Naslund’s use of minor-character elaboration has drifted from a critique of the canon for its exclusions, one has to witness Una open her first captain’s copy of the Complete Works and find inscribed there: “Shakespeare is my Harvard and my Yale” (156). Naslund embeds a rare unmarked allusion here, reworking Ishmael’s claim that if he “shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world,” if anyone finds any “precious MSS. in my desk,” then he will “ascribe all the honor and the glory to whaling; for a whaleship was my Yale College and my Harvard” (101). In Moby-Dick, this passage offers a self-reflexive statement of the author’s pride in his own manuscript and stakes a claim for the value of his worldly experience over formal education. The autodidacticism of a Shakespeare or Melville neatly complements Naslund’s paean to the project of liberal self-making, but her reworking of Melville’s dry self-congratulation replaces the notion that worldly experience makes the writer with the idea that reading Shakespeare is a satisfactory surrogate for a university education. Offering literature not as training for writing but for living, for

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setting the soul a-soaring, Naslund conceals the way the cultural capital of the canon actually functions in and through her novel. Ahab’s Wife obscures the fact that its author’s possession of and facility with that cultural capital is—perhaps only for writers and other cultural producers—convertible to economic capital through the annexation and marketing of the prestige singularly associated with names like Melville and Shakespeare. Instead, the novel poses the literary tradition as spiritual nourishment, and to judge by the blurb from Wally Lamb on the back cover of the Perennial paperback (“sustenance for the mind and soul”), it successfully annexes itself to its own conception of this tradition. If Shakespeare facilitates spiritual elevation, then Harvard and Yale are unnecessary—so long as one envisions the purpose of university education as self-improvement rather than preprofessional training, or accreditation necessary for economic success, or, to focus on the humanities, learning how to read Shakespeare. But to read another, oft-ignored type of paratext attached to Ahab’s Wife is to see clearly the author’s leveraging of her cultural capital. The lengthy “About the Author” on the final of the book’s 668 pages, begins, “Sena Jeter Naslund grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, where she attended public schools and received the B.A. from Birmingham Southern College. . . . She received the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.” Her credentials continue, noting that she “directed the Creative Writing Program at the University of Louisville, where she teaches and holds the title Distinguished Teaching Professor,” and concluding that she “lives in Louisville with her husband John C. Morrison, an atomic physicist.” While Naslund’s career as a writer and teacher of writing is certainly impressive, the emphasis on her public-school education and her accomplished husband compound the neoliberal ideology of the novel proper. But more importantly, her ample professional training and the institutional backing of her novel-writing career reveal how instrumental a university education is for acquiring cultural capital that can be repackaged and converted into a highly allusive, explicitly intertextual piece of contemporary fiction. At the novel’s conclusion, Una, about to set pen to paper, thinks of “Sir Philip Sidney’s muse’s injunction: Look in your heart and write” (610). But Naslund’s practice demonstrates that it might be more effective to look in your Norton Anthology. Whether or not people continue to read it, Moby-Dick remains available as a highly recognizable cultural touchstone, one laden with symbolic value that can be converted to both economic and

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symbolic capital and otherwise pressed into service of the agendas of those who would appropriate it. Melville’s novel provides for Naslund, her publisher, and its parent company a source of prestige that may redound to the contemporary author and the opportunity to recast a narrative, in which the individual is effaced as his wishes are subordinated to and eclipsed by the profit- and revenge-driven collective to which he submits himself, as one of the works of uncontested greatness that help liberate the soul of the liberal subject in her quest for self-invention. Since authors who successfully deploy their accumulated cultural capital are actually the ones speaking in and through the voices of formerly minor characters, the diversified chorus of voices resounding through the genre remains a chorus of elites. The fact that these frequently female and multiethnic authors have made their voices heard and are engaging in intertextual dialogues with literary luminaries across the centuries demonstrates both the triumph and limitations of the politics of minor-character elaboration. The strategic conservation of the symbolic capital of the traditional canon is not so much a reversal, then, as it is a logical consequence of the genre’s brand of textual politics. When politics amounts to gaining a voice for minor characters—or, more accurately, their authors—success becomes a matter of joining Shakespeare and company, if not in Una’s literary firmament, then at least rubbing shoulders with them on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. GENRE IN THE MARKETPLACE

In today’s consolidated literary marketplace, publishers are increasingly drawn to all forms of genre fiction, and in this milieu minor-character elaboration has proven particularly attractive to producers and consumers alike. Authors who foreground a minor character are able to claim originality—they offer a “new perspective” on an old text—while borrowing the prestige of their illustrious predecessors. Publishers bill such works as transhistorical dialogues between great storytellers, and reviewers understand them in similar terms. Authors thereby convert their cultural capital into symbolic capital, which may prove lucrative as well. For well-capitalized readers trained in liberal-arts disciplines during the postwar higher-education boom, minor-character elaborations offer the opportunity to mine idle reserves of cultural capital for intellectually satisfying entertainment. Similarly, as this postwar demographic came of age amid the radicalism of

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the 1960s, the genre’s air of iconoclasm makes it attractive to readers with whom the call of “subversive” politics still resonates. And while conglomerate publishers are primarily interested in books that make a profit in the short run, minor-character elaborations also function as long-term reinvestments in the cultural centrality of the canon and the privileged sphere of the literary while assimilating feminist and multicultural demands for recognition. The triumph of minor-character elaboration thus reveals how monopoly capitalism does not simply shed and trample all values in its relentless drive for profit but relies on the maintenance of immaterial, specifically literary values in that pursuit. It may be unsurprising to discover that the multinational corporations who increasingly dominate the publishing industry will co-opt the ideology of timeless literary value and the politics of difference, along with everything else that turns a profit. But the fact that this knowledge reinforces intuition or our worst suspicions should not prevent us from attempting a deeper understanding of the workings of contemporary literary institutions and the ways authors and publishers solicit readers in the highly competitive contemporary market for consumer dollars and attention. There are substantial analytic rewards to a literary history that considers genre not as a formal or aesthetic imperative alone but as a mechanism in the chain of production. To understand the cultural significance of a genre and its function in both the marketplace and symbolic economies, we must supplement our reading of the politics of form, and that expressed within literary texts, with attention to the social and political effects of the way those forms circulate. What happens, for example, to the antiwar stance articulated by the resolute heroine of Le Guin’s Lavinia, written in the runup to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when we consider that Gollancz published the novel in the United Kingdom? Like Virago, Gollancz is an imprint of Hachette, a subsidiary of the French conglomerate Lagardère, which was still at that time the principal private owner of EADS and thus heavily invested in the wars that Le Guin was protesting. What happens, that is, when we stop abstracting literary form out of the social matrix that form purportedly shapes and is shaped by? Between forms and their broader sociohistorical context lies the marketplace, lie institutions; a literary sociology attentive to the function and flow of forms in that marketplace offers a more complete account of the history of literary forms, a fuller explanation of why genres rise and fall.

Chapter Four

THE LOGIC OF CHARACTERS’ VIRTUAL LIVES

What sense does it make to think of characters as having lives outside the texts in which they initially appear? From one perspective, namely a structuralist one, characters are not people who exist on a fictional plane but rather effects or functions of a text. Characters have properties insofar as the signifiers in a text produce them. From another perspective, a referential and everyday one, characters are humanlike entities, and readers—our students are familiar scapegoats here—like to speculate about their motivations, desires, childhoods, and the consequences of their actions, even if these are nowhere mentioned in the text. When contemporary authors have sought to explain their desire to seize on minor characters from canonical texts and make them into the protagonists of new ones, these authors sometimes describe their practice as an imaginative expansion of the fictional worlds of their predecessors, sometimes as a correction to them, sometimes as a recovery of material that was already there, hidden or waiting to be mined. In an afterword to March, Geraldine Brooks offers an equivocal account of her project: “[Louisa May] Alcott’s story is concerned with the way a year lived at the edge of war has worked changes in the characters of the little women, but what the war has done to March himself is left unstated. It is in this void that I have let my imagination work.”1 In the final sentence here, Brooks claims that she imaginatively fills a “void” in Little Women, creating in that empty space a

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depiction of March’s experience of the war. But the previous line suggests that this experience already exists; “what the war has done to March himself is left unstated.” Something has happened to March in the war, Brooks implies, and Alcott has simply declined to mention it. A similar oscillation occurs throughout the authors’ explanatory notes, introductions, acknowledgments, and interviews that seem almost de rigueur in the genre, as well as in metafictional moments within minorcharacter elaborations proper. When Nancy Rawles wonders about Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (“Who was he to his family and community? Who was he to his wife?”),2 she conveys the impression that information might be discovered about Jim, outside of what Twain tells in his novel, as if Jim had a life and set of relationships beyond what Twain deigned to reveal. In a similar fashion, David Malouf explains the motivation behind his Ransom (2009); he “was interested” if in the Iliad “there weren’t some little places in that telling where things are not told which one could now begin to tell, and one of those things is the story of Priam’s childhood, which doesn’t appear anywhere else as far as I know.”3 Just as Rawles suggests that there was some relationship between Jim and his community, Malouf treats Priam as if he had a childhood, about which writers have thus far “not told.” By contrast, when Margaret Atwood, in The Penelopiad has her title character object to the way her portrayal in “the official version” serves as “an edifying legend,”4 Atwood points to the ideological function of the character, the way Homer’s Penelope is constructed to produce a morally instructive effect. When Atwood claims that the Homeric version of the story “doesn’t hold water” (Atwood, The Penelopiad, xv), she is not saying that the patently fictional epic is false but rather that she doesn’t find it plausible, realistic, or authentic. It would seem, then, that Atwood recognizes the Odyssey’s characters as constructed representations determined by the beliefs and agendas of its author(s) and its historical moment, as discursive constructs that might be executed better or worse, appear more or less convincing, and not as reflections of reality or as beings with an independent existence. But despite understanding Homer’s character as a representation, when Atwood claims in her introduction that she has “chosen to give the telling of the story to Penelope and to the twelve hanged maids,” she seems to pose her own characters as real, authentic, autonomous, as capable of speaking for themselves (xv; my emphasis). A similar doubleness emerges in Le Guin’s Lavinia.5 Le Guin has her eponymous

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protagonist confront Virgil and quarrel with “the poet’s portrait” of her “as a silent shrinking maiden” (Le Guin, Lavinia, 19). Virgil eventually concedes the point and acknowledges his depiction of Lavinia was “stupid, conventional, unimagined” (58). Like Atwood, Le Guin understands the canonical incarnation of her character as a “portrait,” constructed along “conventional,” ideologically saturated lines. But when Le Guin has Virgil meet and get to know better the character he has in actuality created, he discovers she is more complex than he had thought her to be. “Perhaps I did not do you justice, Lavinia” (40). And, as we’ve seen, despite having Lavinia possess a metafictional knowledge of her textuality, of “the splendid, vivid words [she’s] lived in for centuries,” Le Guin has the character claim a prior existence, independent of Virgil’s Aeneid. “He slighted my life, in his poem. He scanted me. . . . If I must go on existing century after century, then once at least I must break out and speak” (3–4).6 In oscillating between conceiving of minor characters as textual representations and as autonomous entities whose existence exceeds the bounds of the text that constitutes them, the authors of minor-character elaborations foreground in particularly vivid fashion a conflict between structural and referential conceptions of character that has been a persistent theoretical preoccupation in studies of character and the novel. While I argued in chapter 2 that literary scholars who understand formerly minor characters as autonomous entities given the freedom to speak by contemporary authors engage in a dubious textual politics (by reconceiving the construction of a fuller, less stereotypical, representation of a character as an act of liberation), writers of minor-character elaborations repeatedly describe the characters they appropriate as possessing lives outside of the texts that constitute them, and such descriptions reflect the common experience of a great number of readers who engage with the imaginary worlds generated by narrative fictions. Rather than fall into the familiar position of the professor chiding his undergraduates for treating characters as if they were people, I want to argue that extratextual speculation by the likes of Brooks and Malouf is both typical of the referential construal of character that is often deemed naïve and an essential part of the imaginative process that we engage in when we read realist fiction. Priam never had a childhood for the reason that he never existed, and no childhood is referred to in the texts that generate his fictional existence. Nonetheless, within the fictional world of the Iliad, Priam’s childhood is logically entailed by the fact of his having

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attained old age. When readers and writers wonder about a character’s motivation or backstory, that is, they are not just making a category error in supposing the character has a life outside what is mentioned in the text. When authors of minor-character elaborations describe formerly minor characters as both conventional constructions and as having a prior, fuller existence that has gone untold or been “scanted” in canonical works, these authors are not only expressing a preference for their own versions. Nor are they simply making the ironic mistake of critiquing a prior representation for being ideological and posing their own as “real.” Instead, these authors are engaged in a process of negotiation between ways of construing characters, a process in which readers are constantly and often unconsciously engaged. Because minor-character elaboration hinges on this doubleness— an awareness and rejection of the manner in which a minor character is constructed in a canonical text and a concomitant effort to imagine that character as if it had an autonomous existence that exceeded the representation that constituted it—the genre throws into relief the very functioning of literary character, helps clarify the vexed question of character in theories of the novel, and elucidates an array of cultural phenomena, from readers’ passionate attachments to fictional entities to the vast accumulations of online fan fiction. This chapter takes the authors of minor-character elaborations as exemplary realist readers, who swing between the “twofoldness” of character, treating characters as if they had full lives, while at the same time and at another level knowing that characters have a merely textual existence, are at best mental images generated by words on a page. Production utilizing the genre hinges on the fact that the textual material that generates character can never achieve fullness both because any text occupies a finite space and because the ideology of liberal subjectivity posits a bottomless depth and an endless individual complexity, a “precious remainder” that texts can never fully capture.7 Because all characters and the fictional worlds they occupy are structurally incomplete, realist readers continually supplement texts with outside information, hanging a referential body on the gappy structure posed by the text. Reference emerges from structure but also from readers’ supplementation of textual material, an unruly process that generates the doubleness of character—an existence that is a consequence of both textual structuration and variable (but also often predictable) acts of readerly imagination. This supplementation is common practice in

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conventional realist modes of reading character and generative of readers’ sense of characters’ virtual lives. Minor-character elaborations make this process particularly visible because when contemporary authors become fascinated with a minor figure they dramatically extend, and physically enact with the production of a new fiction, a process of supplementation that is mental and imaginary in everyday reading. Understanding characters as constituted both by textual information and by an unregulated, variable process of readerly inference and supplementation generates an unstable, protean theory of character. Characters are both what their texts say about them and what readers make of them. Readers cannot, however, extend characters indefinitely or revise them completely and still call them “the same” character. The limits to this process suggest that character nonetheless demands a modicum of consistency, that to appropriate and revise extant characters—rather than to generate new ones—means adhering to some qualities while altering others. REFERENCE: THE SUPPLEMENTATION OF TEXTUAL STRUCTURE

Authors of minor-character elaborations frequently construe their projects as efforts to discover what happens outside the boundaries of a canonical text rather than as the fabrication or imaginative creation of this extratextual material. In doing so, they engage in the kind of speculation famously proscribed by L. C. Knights in his “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” (An inevitable candidate, Lady Macbeth became the subject of not one but two minor-character elaborations, both in 2008: Susan Fraser King’s Lady Macbeth and Maggie Power’s Lady Macbeth’s Tale.) The banning of such speculation was part of the New Critical emphasis on the primacy of the text, and structuralist scholars have engaged in a parallel attack on treating characters as if they were persons—deeming such reading naïve—rather than as the textual effect produced by the sum of the signifiers attached to a character’s name in a given text.8 While no such speculation can have a bearing on a given text’s immanent meaning, readers do not only read literary texts to pursue or produce meanings; they engage in a variety of affective and imaginative practices. In recent years, a host of literary scholars and theorists have recognized that the structuralist attack on referential reading was rooted in an ideological critique that, in seeking to demystify the effect of character,

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neglected to explain just how and why readers imagine characters to have an autonomous personhood in the first place. John Frow writes that structuralism does not “account for the textual conditions of existence of characters as quasi-subjects, and for the activity of the reader in the constitution of these represented subjects; it fails to explain the affective force of the imaginary unities of character.”9 In a similar vein, Deidre Lynch takes issue with the tendency of structuralist and poststructuralist critics to dismiss humanistic (that is, mimetic or referential) approaches to the question of character on the grounds of their “fetishistic assumption that character exceeded the formal means of its representation.” Character, to the structurally minded, “was ‘really’ no more than an illusory effect engendered by the words on the page.” Lynch argues that the demystification of the illusion of character “dismisses the plenitude it should explain. It does not account for how characters’ excesses . . . the augmented vitality that humanist accounts ascribe to characters who seem to live lives off the page—have been effective in history.”10 Lynch insists that readers’ attachments to and affiliations with character are real phenomena, even if the object of those attachments is imaginary or “illusory,” and she historicizes the reading practices that gave rise to this plenitude. “At the turn of the nineteenth century characters became the imaginative resources on which readers drew to make themselves into individuals, to expand their own interior resources of sensibility” (Lynch, Economy, 126). Lynch aligns herself with a now familiar narrative of the rise of the novel. Characters’ excesses, their virtual lives, materialize in the service of the liberal, selfmaking imperative of a particular historical moment. Characters are functional; the apparent fullness of their imaginary lives helps readers imagine themselves as individuals similarly endowed with a rich and unique subjectivity. “The expanded inner life of the literary character” emerges, for Lynch, as “an artifact of a new form of self-culture and as the mechanism of a new mode of class awareness” (126). More recently, Blakey Vermeule has explained our attachment to literary characters and our tendency to “talk about a fictional character as though he were a real person,” as a mental exercise that performs the adaptive, evolutionary function of providing necessary “social information.”11 We treat characters as if they were people, according to Vermeule, because we rely on them as a training ground for actual social interactions. “Innovations in narrative technique,” she argues, “are driven by the need to ratchet up

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pressure on our mind-reading capacities” (Vermeule, Why Do We Care, 98), by which she means our ability to know what “other people are thinking and being able to predict what they are going to do . . . two of the most important cognitive skills we humans possess” (34).12 While Lynch historicizes the modern conception of character and Vermeule universalizes our fascination with fictional beings into the fulfillment of a deeply rooted evolutionary need, both understand the referential aspect of character as functional, as emerging out of the use to which characters are put.13 The tendency to treat characters as if they “lived lives off the page” stems from the need to employ characters as models for self-fashioning (Lynch) or for understanding others (Vermeule). Both of these accounts end up looking strangely, if differently, instrumental and circular. We treat characters as if they were people because we can only exploit them for our needs if we treat them as if they were people. Alex Woloch’s ambitious theory of characterization The One vs. the Many is expressly concerned with the relative attention or “character space” apportioned to protagonists and minor characters. Rather than seeing character’s referential function as a product of the use to which characters are put, Woloch conceives of reference as generated by the character’s “structured position within the literary totality.” A character’s “referential personality—the unique sense and abiding impression that the character leaves us with—emerges in-and-through, not despite, his textual position.”14 Woloch rejects the “unpalatable choice” between structure and reference, formalist or mimetic approaches to character, by asserting: “the tension between structure and reference” is “generative of, and integral to, narrative signification” (Woloch, The One vs. the Many, 17). Although Woloch wants to answer “both” rather than choose structure or reference, his account continually lands on the side of reference by treating characters as if they were persons who preexist their place in the narrative and continually make demands for more space. The “subordinate figures” in the Iliad “jostle for, and within, the limited space that remains” when Achilles retreats from the fight, and they “frequently make claims on the narrative only to be overwhelmed by” the son of Peleus’s “narrative presence” (2). While Woloch maintains that the referential sense of a character as an imaginary person “emerges in-and-through” the character’s structured position in a narrative, he also imagines that when structuring time comes, minor characters are lined up and clamoring for more space. In his determination

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to read literary form as an index of historical inequality, Woloch’s explicitly “socioformal” approach is compelled to treat the unequal parceling out of narrative space among fictional entities as the unjust allocation of attention to them (17). According to Woloch, “the asymmetric structure of realist characterization—which rounds out one or several characters while flattening, and distorting, a manifold assortment of characters—reflects actual structures of inequitable distribution” (31).15 When Woloch suggests that characterization “flattens” some characters or, quoting Ian Watt, argues that the “functionalization of minor characters effaces ‘the definite manifestations of definite qualities of individuals’ ” (27), he conveys the impression that minor characters are individuals that once had a fullness that has been “flattened,” “distorted,” or “effaced.” Woloch claims that character emerges at the intersection of structure and reference but repeatedly figures reference to precede structure—structuration as a field where (already animate) characters vie for attention, or a process through which minor characters have their full personhood effaced or compressed. Though Woloch seems misguided in suggesting that characters’ personhood preexists the structuring of the narrative that constitutes them, his move to choose “both” in the contest of “structure vs. reference” strikes me as the right one.16 The film scholar Murray Smith has argued for another manner of reconciling this tension via a concept he calls the “twofoldness of character.” Borrowing a set of terms from Richard Wollheim, Smith argues that “ ‘twofoldness’ describes . . . our apprehension, at once, of both the depicted object and the marked surface . . . the recognitional and configurational aspects of ” depiction.17 Smith’s “recognitional” aspect corresponds to the referential view of character: “So readily do we recognize in fictions those ‘virtual persons’ we call characters that we can speak of them and respond to them in many ways just as if they were actual persons.” Smith’s example is the distraught reaction by fans of the BBC radio serial The Archers to the death of the character Nigel Pargetter, but one could easily substitute Rawles’s desire to “learn who Jim was to his community.” The “configurational” or structural aspect of character surfaces “whenever we note or notice something bearing upon the designed status of a character, when we see a character as an element in a representation” (Smith, “On the Twofoldness,” 280). Smith’s example here is when viewers discuss how well or ill an actor performs in a film—the acknowledgment that character is an effect of an actor’s presentation. We see “configurational” or structural

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responses to minor characters when Atwood highlights Penelope’s ideological function as a “stick to beat other women with” or when Le Guin refers to Lavinia’s conventional depiction in the Aeneid. But the key for Smith is how easily we shuttle between both aspects of character, between thinking of Roger Thornhill in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) “as a middle-aged advertising executive in a fix” and evaluating “how Thornhill is ‘configured’ through Cary Grant.” We “apprehend both of these aspects of the film at once” (280).18 A similar dual apprehension occurs when we read fiction, and this process becomes particularly visible as authors of minor-character elaborations explain their fascination with, and speculation about, the “untold” stories that lurk behind the traces of minor figures. A vivid example of twofoldness, the ease with which readers shuttle between these two aspects of character, appears in an oft-quoted letter from Jean Rhys to Francis Wyndham. Rhys writes of Bertha in Jane Eyre: The Creole in Charlotte Brontë’s novel is a lay figure—repulsive which does not matter, and not once alive which does. She’s necessary to the plot but always . . . off stage. For me . . . she must be right on stage. She must be at least plausible with a past, the reason why Mr Rochester treats her so abominably and feels justified, the reason why he thinks she is mad and why of course she goes mad, even the reason why she tries to set everything on fire, and eventually succeeds.19

Rhys begins by addressing the constructedness of Brontë’s character, how Bertha serves as a functional plot device and thus appears as “a lay figure,” a mannequin or mere dummy, “not once alive.” Rhys critiques the verisimilitude of Bertha’s depiction. Characters are never alive, of course, but Rhys means that the character does not appear lifelike, is not a plausible or realistic representation. Still at a structural level, Rhys ponders her own craft, thinking her version of Bertha will need to be more convincingly drawn. In striving for plausibility, Rhys insists that she will have to expand and explain, give reasons. Then seamlessly, as if Rhys had already succeeded in her attempt, the character appears to take on a life of her own, an agency in the very description: “why of course she goes mad, even the reason why she tries to set everything on fire.” Rhys adds information, gives Bertha a past, explains and offers motivations, and in doing so puts flesh on the lay figure, brings Bertha to life—in a matter of speaking.

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According to realist conventions, offering detailed explanation, more of a character, serves as the means for constructing a plausible, lifelike representation. Constructing a character by adding to existing material. This is what the authors of minor-character elaborations do with the figures they appropriate. It is likewise how readers produce the referential aspect of character, the imagined sense that characters have lives that exceed the texts that constitute them. Reference is not a matter of imaginary persons fighting for narrative space or clamoring for attention, the author’s or the reader’s. Instead, minorcharacter elaboration helps us see that reference derives from structure, that apprehension of a character’s fullness emerges as part of the semantic process of meaning making, on the part of the reader. Characters are generated by structure, by the set of signifiers present in the text. But readers supplement those signifiers with a wealth of extratextual information. In an “Author’s Note” to her Longbourn, Jo Baker writes that the main characters of her book are “the ‘proxy’ by which the shoe-roses for Netherfield Ball are fetched” in Pride and Prejudice but insists that “they are—at least in [her] head—people too.”20 Reference emerges out of the play of presence and absence of information about a character, through the need or desire for readers to make inferences or fill in story elements—even if only in their heads—that are absent from the text’s discourse. Minor-character elaborations, like fan fiction and other modes such as apocryphal prequels and sequels, make this process particularly visible because they hinge on a reader’s filling absence with presence, a recognition of the constructed or configured aspect of character and a desire to revise and supplement that configuration to produce, in a new text, a character that seems realer. Authors of minor-character elaborations typically couch “the desire to produce a character that seems realer” in referential terms: to find out who the character really was, what he was like, to let her tell her own story. But the filling in of information that produces our sense of an implied person is part of everyday reading practice as well.21 In S/Z (1970), Roland Barthes famously theorizes and attempts to demonstrate that this process of supplementation is a runaway one, unruly, potentially infinite: “Character is an adjective, an attribute, a predicate. . . . Even though the connation may be clear, the nomination of its signified is uncertain, approximate, unstable” (Barthes, S/Z, 190). Barthes argues that what gives this uncertain progression toward a signified an illusory

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coherence is the proper name and the humanist ideology of the unique individual subject that underlies it: “the illusion that the sum is supplemented by a precious remainder (something like individuality, in that, qualitative and ineffable, it may escape the vulgar bookkeeping of compositional characters) is the Proper Name” (191). But while Barthes is determined to show how the process of signification can proliferate endlessly, varying between different readings and readers, and that the name constitutes the heading under which all such readings congregate to generate a false coherence, he elsewhere points to the fact that shared “cultural codes” and assumptions produce a degree of consensus among readers at a given time and place, causing them to supplement information that is not provided in a text with common knowledge (18).22 In Fictional Worlds (1986), his masterful theory of fiction, Thomas Pavel emphasizes the relative stability of such processes against the “semantic fundamentalism” that he argues has dominated literary scholarship informed by structural linguistics (Pavel, Fictional Worlds, 6). Pavel argues that structuralist critics, inspired by Saussurean linguistic theory, have systematically neglected the referential capacity of fiction. Such critics err in stressing the arbitrariness of the relationship between signifier and signified “since the principle of arbitrariness maintains only that there is no motivated link between the conceptual side and the phonetic side of a linguistic sign; it does not deny the stability of linguistic meaning, once the semiotic system has been established” (3). This critical tendency discounts the common practices of readers and the intuitions they bring to fictions, including an “inference system” that “relate[s] the passages of the book to an extratextual cultural and factual framework” (17). Readers need to supplement fictional texts with extratextual information because of what Pavel calls “incompleteness.” Because statements such as “Vautrin has a cousin” and “Lady Macbeth has four children” cannot be assigned truth or falsity with respect to their fictional worlds, these worlds are incomplete (107). Many modernist and postmodernist fictions revolve around a central lack of information or display a radical incompleteness to suggest the fragmentation of the real world as currently understood. But Pavel stresses that such radically incomplete fictions are a recent development and may not persist indefinitely. The more “stable world view” that underlies classical realist novels, such as the “vast realist constructions” of Balzac, seeks to minimize incompleteness by employing

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strategies that attempt to “extend texts as far as possible, filling them with lifelike effects, as if the difference between incomplete fictional worlds and the actual universe were one of quantity” (108). While this strategy implies confidence in a finite world that can be known, its project is necessarily futile within a finite text. The incompleteness of fictional worlds thus provokes the question of whether “one should refrain from adding to [the fictional] world facts and laws that are not alluded to in the text” or to “make the opposite choice, which is to limit these worlds to what is described, unambiguously implied, or alluded to in the text” (106–107). The latter choice reflects semantic fundamentalism, and readers—whether they generate an “uncertain” progress toward a signified or adopt the shared assumptions of “cultural codes” and “inference systems”—import information from outside the boundaries of what a given text refers to and take certain things for granted. It has of course been the aim of many minorcharacter elaborations and literary scholars of the past several decades to show that the gaps or lacunae in canonical texts, that which goes without saying, are motivated and ideological, not random or necessary byproducts of the finitude of a book as material object. But taking seriously Pavel’s assertion that incompleteness is a fundamental feature of fictional worlds suggests that such critiques are part of a larger process, one in which readers are led to conjecture, speculate, and complete imaginatively what is inevitably left incomplete in any given narrative. Taking an example of characterization, more or less at random, helps demonstrate that the imaginative completion of an incomplete fictional world both generates the referential aspect of character and is part of the everyday semantic process of reading realist texts. We can take Nancy Rawles’s prompting and look at the way Twain introduces Jim in chapter 4 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Miss Watson’s nigger, Jim, had a hair-ball as big as your fist, which had been took out of the fourth stomach of an ox, and he used to do magic with it. He said there was a spirit inside of it, and it knowed everything. So I went to him that night and told him pap was here again, for I found his tracks in the snow. What I wanted to know was, what he was going to do, and was he going to stay? Jim got out his hair-ball and said something over it, and then he held it up and dropped it on the floor. It fell pretty solid, and only rolled about an inch. Jim tried it again, and then another time, and it acted just the

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same. Jim got down on his knees, and put his ear against it and listened. But it warn’t no use; he said it wouldn’t talk. He said sometimes it wouldn’t talk without money. (18)

Readers will get more information about Jim in the course of the novel, but taken alone this passage presents them with quite an incomplete portrait of the character, and they may be tempted to speculate and make a variety of inferences of differing kinds and significance to fill holes in the structure of the text imaginatively. Readers might wonder how Jim came to possess the hair-ball, if Miss Watson is a kind or cruel mistress, whether Jim believes in the folk magic that attributes clairvoyance to a ball of hair regurgitated by an ox or if he cannily capitalizes on others’ credulity to swindle a quarter here and there. More trivially but no less a part of the reading experience, they might wonder what Jim’s clothes are like, whether his knees are covered or bare, or whether he has more than the one ear mentioned here. If positing this last ambiguity seems unreasonably pedantic, this is my point. Readers assume Jim has two ears, even though the text only mentions one. Likewise, readers infer a great deal of analogous information about the character and the world he inhabits according to “cultural codes,” even if that information is not warranted by textual evidence: that the snow on the ground fell from the sky, that slavery was a legal institution in Missouri in the era depicted (and consequently that the possessive that begins the passage indicates Miss Watson’s ownership of Jim—a property arrangement that the title of Rawles’s My Jim rejects), that hair-balls don’t really talk. The fact that readers in a different time and place might fully believe in the folk wisdom to be acquired from hair-balls suggests what almost goes without saying in literary scholars’ own context: that information that can be assumed or left unsaid by an author is determined by the shared codes of a particular cultural and historical context. The reader that does not assume such external information to abide in the world of the text, perhaps an orthodox New Critic or Proppian structuralist who envisions a one-eared Jim, or who thinks of Jim not as an imaginary person but instead as an agglomeration of signifiers, is an exception and not the rule. Pavel asserts that in practice, the protocols and conventions of realist reading dictate that readers assume fictional worlds like Balzac’s Paris or Twain’s Missouri

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“preserve the properties [they] possess in the actual world, with the laws of nature and the normal causal chains maintained,” and “there is no reason to doubt this regularity as long as the text signals no exception” (105). In reading texts that project a world that resembles our own, we tend to import knowledge from the real world to fill in incomplete details, unless otherwise directed.23 All along, because of the “twofoldness” of character, readers know that this imaginary person they have helped construct is not real. Once one understands the importing of knowledge to fill in the gaps in fictional worlds as an obligatory part of the reading process, one sees that the type of mimetic responses readers typically engage in—and that are frequently deemed “naïve” and anathema to the poses of detached scholarly practice—are simply extensions of this process, different in degree but not in kind. Just as readers will typically infer that Jim has the usual number of ears, eyes, and feet, even though these assumptions are not warranted by the text, they may speculate about other information referred to nowhere in the text. When students ask about characters’ motivations or when writers of fan fiction generate prequels or continued adventures for their beloved characters, they are simply taking further steps down the road of reference.24 Authors of minor-character elaborations may vary or contest the depictions of the characters they appropriate, but they necessarily extend the fictional worlds of their canonical predecessors, building up the previously minor figure. In the “Author’s Note” to Finn, Jon Clinch writes of his fidelity to Twain and his extension of Pap. In matters of location and timing and continuity, the events retold in this novel are fitted meticulously into and around Pap Finn’s appearances, both alive and dead, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The elements of his character—his drunkenness, his cruelty, his virulent and overwhelming hatred of blacks—are all drawn whole from Twain’s novel and followed here to their likely ends.

But Clinch also acknowledges that in expanding in the direction he thinks plausible, he must necessarily be altering Pap and making him his own. A few of Twain’s scenes, filtered through a different sensibility, appear more or less whole in this novel. And in that “more or less” lies the spot where, in the company of passing time and critical sensibilities, and in the service of a

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narrative that requires its own shape and its own energy and must by its own working acquire its own meaning, this story parts company with Twain’s book—and travels down its own treacherous channel.25

With varying degrees and explicitness, minor-character elaborations revise characters, posing their versions as more plausible or realistic (to contemporary audiences) than their prior incarnations. But in extending or imagining characters’ “lives” that exceed the text there are no right or wrong answers. The claim “Vautrin has a cousin” can be proved neither true nor false—which may be what frustrates teachers when students engage in such speculation. But the opposite, limiting stance, the decision that Jim must only have one ear, poses a willful refusal of reference that is contrary to readers’ typical practice. To see that limiting fictional worlds to information explicitly mentioned or unambiguously implied by the text is foreign to readers’ usual way of apprehending meaning, we can look again to Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair. When Fforde’s heroine Thursday Next enters Jane Eyre via the Prose Portal, she discovers a world that is radically incomplete, ending at the borders of what is narrated by Jane. When Thursday asks Rochester what he will do when Jane refuses his offer to become his mistress and leaves Thornfield, Rochester replies, “Do? I won’t do anything. Existence pretty much ceases for me about then.” In contrast to “poor” mortals who are born and die, Rochester says he “come[s] into being at the age of thirty-eight and wink[s] out again soon after.”26 Fforde’s otherwise improbable novel adheres to a hyperbolic structural literalism here. (When Thursday’s aunt gets trapped in “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the poem’s entire world is an endless field of daffodils.) Having a character’s existence end when the discourse leaves him runs contrary to the principles of continuity and consistency that we presume in the process of understanding characters’ referential aspects. We don’t think existence stops for characters when the narrative ceases to refer to them, that they freeze in the place where we last left them. Eric Hayot refers to this continuity over time as “persistence” and writes that the “gap between individual works set in the same world . . . creates a strong sense of the persistence of elements of the diegesis (objects, characters) beyond the immediate attention of the controlling narrative.” We project a “sense of completeness” and take for granted that “undescribed, unnarrated events have occurred” even though the narrative itself is incomplete.27

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When authors of minor-character elaborations seek to produce more complete imaginative worlds by expanding on previously minor figures, they engage in a two-part process. First, these writers become fascinated with a minor character, which may be merely hinted at, scantily represented, or stereotypically drawn in a canonical text. Second, these authors imagine and write into existence a fuller narrative for the minor figure— an endeavor that may involve the kind of unregulated, variable process of readerly supplementation that Barthes describes but that frequently follows fairly predictable lines. Christa Wolf opened the series of lectures at the University of Frankfurt in 1982 that she later published in English in the volume Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays with a description of herself as a reader utterly captivated by a minor character. While waiting to embark on a trip to Greece, Wolf read Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and experienced “a panic of rapture,” which “reached its pinnacle when a voice began to speak.” Cassandra, Wolf explains, “the captive, took me captive; herself made an object by others, she took possession of me.”28 Writers like Wolf frequently describe their fascination with a minor figure in similar terms, as a kind of supernatural possession—a metaphor that captures both the airy, insubstantiality of a minor character’s initial incarnation and that character’s disproportionate ability to command the reader’s attention. Rhys famously wrote of Brontë’s Bertha: “she seemed such a poor ghost, I thought I’d like to write her a life.”29 Atwood claims in the introduction to The Penelopiad that she had “always been haunted by the hanged maids” in The Odyssey (xv), and in her introduction to Wolf ’s Medea asserts that “of all the seductive, sinister and transgressive women who have haunted the Western imagination, none has a reputation more lurid than Medea’s.”30 These hauntings are of course metaphorical, and the metaphor inverts the agency by suggesting that minor characters skulk around in the shadows of readers’ imaginations instead of what actually occurs: that readers continue to think about these figures long after their brief appearances in canonical texts. When these readers become fascinated with and expand on the provocative trace of a minor character, they frequently seek historical accuracy or to produce a more plausible representation of the character. Rawles, for example, sought to offer a historically informed portrait of the everyday lives of slaves—a set of experiences that are all but absent from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She acknowledges her indebtedness to “new scholarship . . . about the lives of individual American slaves” and writes that she

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“wanted My Jim to follow history as closely as fictionally possible.”31 But there is no true way to represent a fictional character, and as Clinch’s comments above make clear, contemporary authors cannot avoid “filter[ing]” their take on a character “through a different sensibility” that is the product of “passing time and critical sensibilities.”32 The process of expansion by which a contemporary author makes a minor figure into a protagonist— and the everyday behavior of readers who supplement textual material and generate the referential sense of a fictional being—is necessarily presentist, informed by a contemporary sense of what is realistic, plausible, truthful, or authentic.33 Such presentism can lead to glaring cases of anachronism, as in Miller’s The Song of Achilles. Miller reimagines Patroclus and Achilles as a peace-loving homosexual couple who are compelled into fighting at Troy against their wills. Her Achilles does not covet Briseis as a war bride but endeavors to shelter her because he and Patroclus “know what will happen to her in Agamemnon’s tent.”34 This case strikes me as a domestication of the Iliad, a failure to imagine a radically different time in which sexuality was not binary and where rape, enslavement, and brutality were commonplace and not incompatible with intimate male companionship. But readers cannot escape their presentist perspective; contemporary concerns, ideologies, and understandings of reality, a host of subjective factors, and the particular agendas of a given writer will always infect the inference making and supplementation that allow readers to elaborate minor characters. ALWAYS INCOMPLETE, MOSTLY INCONSISTENT

Minor-character elaborations expand previously minor figures and the fictional worlds they appropriate. These texts extend their borrowed fictional worlds and characters chronologically or spatially, frequently in both dimensions. Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife adds backstory that precedes the events of Moby-Dick and events that succeed the staving of the Pequod. Naslund also constructs events at a spatial remove from those in Melville, imagining what occurs back in Nantucket while Ahab pursues his quarry. Such acts of expansion by necessity constitute acts of revision since addition of material, elaboration, generates something new. But the degree of alteration varies widely, and, as I discuss in my introduction, the text that alters very little and simply adds more of character toes the line between minor-character elaboration and apocryphal prequel or sequel—though these genres typically

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offer more of a protagonist rather than of minor figures. Genres are flexible practices. Minor-character elaborations range from texts in which characters are largely consistent with their prior incarnations to those that radically revise the appropriated figure. In Finn, Pap closely resembles the abusive, alcoholic ogre of Twain’s novel, though in Clinch we get a lot more of him. In Ahab’s Wife, by contrast, Naslund’s title character is nothing like the “sweet, resigned girl” alluded to in a single line of Melville’s novel. To what extent can we say that these characters are the same character? A rigid structuralist might respond: any addition constitutes an alteration, so any subsequent text produces a new or different character. But if a potentially runaway process of supplementing structural textual information generates reference, must not the mental constructs that “haunt” the imaginations of any two readers of the same text constitute distinct entities? Yet intuition and common practice suggest that different readers think they are responding to the same character. The only theorist to have treated these questions at length is Brian Richardson, in his essay “Transtextual Characters.” Consistency and authorization are the crucial criteria, according to Richardson. For two incarnations of a figure to be considered the same character, Richardson maintains that the later version must be “consistent with essential aspects of the original presentation,” and, if the author is someone other than the original author, she requires “the authorization of the creator or his or her legitimate proxies.” Only, in such cases can the later character “add to our knowledge of the [original] character.”35 Richardson terms “variants” characters that are “recognizable but unauthorized possible continuations or variations of the original figure” (Richardson, “Transtextual Characters,” 531). In the case of “two characters presented as the same but given incompatible characterizations,” he contends that we must think of them as “distinct individuals that share the same name; they can be called illusory variants” (539). Richardson views characters as the property of their creator and as having identities that are governed by the structure of the original text. But both these criteria seem unduly rigid and are contradicted by the practice of minor-character elaboration, to say nothing of the libertine realms of fan fiction. Mythic characters cannot be said to have creators at all, creators who might “authorize” subsequent divergent versions, and texts in the public domain do not require legal authorization for would-be appropriators. Though we might share the sense that Naslund’s Una is a different version, or “variant,” of the character of Ahab’s

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wife, there are many cases when readers understand multiple versions of a character as contributing to their idea of the “same” character. Of Nahum Tate’s bowdlerized King Lear, Pavel suggests that the “more common intuition is rather that Tate has not created a second Cordelia but has simply provided Cordelia with a happier destiny” (34).36 We frequently think of the protagonist of an “unauthorized” Sherlock Holmes film as the same character, as “Holmes” and not a “variant.” Richardson’s principle of consistency likewise looks questionable on a number of grounds, predicated as it is on a humanist view of character that sees individuals as coherent and unified. This is precisely the illusion of characterological unity that Barthes writes of in S/Z: “When identical semes traverse the same proper name several times and appear to settle upon it, a character is created” (67). But the fact that readers might consider multiple incompatible versions of Holmes still to be Holmes demonstrates that readers do not demand pure consistency or unity among different incarnations of the same character. It is thus neither the fact that no individual is “really” coherent nor that the character might have been constructed inconsistently in the “original” text (or that there may be no “original”) that makes Richardson’s approach look overly strict and contrary to our experience of “transtextual characters.” Later incarnations of character that have gained wide cultural currency, such as Virgil’s Aeneas or Césaire’s Caliban, betray a marked inconsistency with their “originals,” but undoubtedly they “add knowledge” to the character and may even come to supplant, as in Virgil’s case, the original. Even if the knowledge is considered spurious or contrary to the original, that knowledge has a real force that informs readers’ conception of that character. The text, and thus the structural aspect, of Brontë’s Bertha persists unchanged, but the referential aspect—which, I have been arguing, abides in the imaginations of readers—appears differently after one has read Wide Sargasso Sea, and this is true even though Rhys yokes her character’s semes to the proper name “Antoinette.” I do not mean that readers will consider Rhys’s novel to provide or fill in the “true” backstory or to offer the “real” Bertha but that elaborations, revisions, and strong critical readings can expand or alter the way readers think of characters. Antoinette and Bertha share some characteristics and diverge in others. Antoinette both is and is not Bertha. But how far can such expansion and revision go? How much may a character be altered and still be said to be the same character at all?

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Minor-character elaboration foregrounds this question, which has obvious application for fan fiction as well, much of which produces a frisson from the radical revision or perversion of a familiar character. Zachary Mason’s debut novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2010) is not a minor-character elaboration, but it forces the question of how much a character can be manipulated and still be understood as the same character. And treating it here makes for a vivid illustration of the fact that genres share qualities with other, related genres, contrary to scholars who would understand literary effects and social meaning as immanent to a given form. Mason’s brilliant book performs an irreverent set of riffs on the Homeric epic, riffs that remain faithful to their predecessor in their very infidelity. A prefatory note explains Mason’s central conceit; the text we are about to read was translated from a “pre-Ptolemaic papyrus excavated from the desiccated rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus” (an actual archaeological site in Egypt), and the document was found to contain “forty-four concise variations on Odysseus’s story that omit stock epic formulae in favor of honing a single trope or image down to an extreme of clarity.”37 The short “books” that follow have an unmistakably Borgesian air. The vignettes are filled with doppelgangers and characters that become their own authors. One fragment claims the Trojan War was, prior to the embellishment of poets, a game of chess. In another, a particularly autocratic Agamemnon commands his subjects to excavate a labyrinthine fortress out of the Troad, the “negative image of a palace in the white plain,” and he commissions an encyclopedia that “clearly and explicitly explained everything under the sun  .  .  . in no more and no less than a thousand pages” (Mason, The Lost Books, 23–24). At the same time, the form of Mason’s book, a compendium of variations on narratives from the Homeric epics, is suggested within the Odyssey itself by the many plots that shadow the main one: the parallel story of Agamemnon’s disastrous return from Troy and the many backstories and alter egos that Odysseus crafts for himself to hide his true identity—not to mention the fact that we presume a lost reservoir of pre-Homeric narratives that predate the particular form of the epic. Mason, that is, seizes on tensions within the Odyssey: the simultaneous consistency and variability of Odysseus’s character, the latent, unfulfilled narrative possibilities suggested in the poem. Homer’s epic is emphatic about the defining traits of its protagonist; he is a master of strategy, “craft,” or “cunning,” and he is determined in his desire to return home. “Hurry, please,” Odysseus begs the

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Phaeacian king Alcinous, in Robert Fagles’s translation, “set your unlucky guest on his own home soil . . . Oh just let me see / my lands, my serving men and the grand high-roofed house— / then I can die in peace.” The longing for a quiet domestic life resounds throughout the epic, and several times Odysseus repeats some version of the following sentiment: “I myself, I know no sweeter sight on earth / than a man’s own native country.”38 But other, equally central aspects of the character strain against this consistency of motive and single-mindedness of purpose. The poem marks Odysseus first and foremost—from the opening invocation—as polumêtis, the “man of twists and turns” or of “many turnings.” Aptly polyvalent, the Homeric diction suggests both the hero’s torturous course home and the shiftiness of his character. The personae and tales Odysseus warily invents while disguised as a beggar provoke in the wary auditor or reader a healthy dose of skepticism, a suspicion that none of the stories Odysseus tells are truer than others, that the long inset narrative at the Phaeacian court in books 9 through 12 may be embroidered if not entirely fabricated. Following the suggestion of other narratives within the Odyssey, subsequent poets have crafted versions of the hero that strain against Homer’s insistence on the desire for the familiarity, peace, and security of home, even though the epic is unequivocal about its hero’s fate. After a pious but tedious errand to “carry [his] well-planed oar until [he] come[s] / to a race of people who know of nothing of the sea  .  .  . and sacrifice[s] fine beasts to” Poseidon, at last “death will steal upon” Odysseus, “a gentle, painless death, far from the sea . . . with all [his] people there in blessed peace around” him (253). Yet Dante imagines his Ulysses as prevailed upon by a “fervor” to travel once again and “gain experience of the world,” and Tennyson famously grasps the thread of Dante’s counternarrative to create a Ulysses who is unable to abide the monotony of a peaceful home life and, determined to “drink / Life to the lees,” departs once again, “to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the Western stars, until [he] die[s].”39 Tennyson is not simply overlaying a romantic attitude on an ancient text but elaborating a narrative possibility suggested within the epic. When concealing his identity from Eumaeus the swineherd, Odysseus poses as a Cretan rover, who after a decade laying siege to Troy returns home but can stay there “no more than a month . . . taking joy / in [his] children, loyal wife and lovely plunder” before “a spirit” urges him to return to sea (309). One can read Odysseus’s yarn as the prefiguration of an unconscious wish

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to leave home as soon as he’s returned, even though such an urge runs counter to the motive and motor of the rest of the epic’s plot. Mason, then, continues a tradition of expanding on such suggestions and also reverts to the multiplicity of stories and the pliable sense of character that predate the epic’s consolidation and institution of textual limits and an authoritative (if internally contradictory) version of the narrative. In Mason’s first fragment, Odysseus returns home to find Penelope has taken another husband and is living a quiet domestic life with him. This opening story embeds a subtle nod to Mason’s own project (Odysseus has “spent the days of his exile imagining different homecoming scenarios,” though he had not anticipated this one), and the fragment ends with another turn of the metafictional screw, as Odysseus “realizes that this is not Penelope” but “a vengeful illusion, the deception of some malevolent god,” and flees knowing the “real Ithaca is elsewhere” (5). In another tale, Penelope has died, and Odysseus meets only her ghost upon his return. In yet another vignette, he marries Nausicaa and grows old with her until Athena belatedly urges him to set sail once again for Ithaca. A brief “about the author” notes that Mason is a “computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence” (n.p.), and one is tempted to say that he has run a series of algorithms on the scenarios put forth in the Homeric poems, the narratives boiled down to a field of possible actions, human character stripped down to an actant or placeholder, reduced to form. Yet such a description would not be right, or not entirely. Because the identifying, individualizing marks of character persist in Mason’s Lost Books. Even when Mason has varied some aspect of the character, his Odysseus retains defining traits from Homer. In a tale entitled “The Iliad of Odysseus,” the hero is a coward who “did not wish to number [him]self among the sacrifices and therefore became a skilled tactician” (93). While a cowardly Odysseus registers as inconsistent with the epic—and would thus constitute for Richardson an “illusory variant”—this variation is coupled with and made to explain the hero’s principal trait of cunning. In “Killing Scylla,” a blasphemous Odysseus spearheads the butchering of Apollo’s cattle, but even as the “blade slid[es] in” to the “first cow’s throat,” he thinks: “This is not who I am . . .” (106). The killing of the sun’s cattle contradicts the pious hero of the epic, and Mason’s Odysseus somehow knows the impiety runs contrary to his character even as his action proves otherwise. Similarly, Mason’s Odysseus retains his name, the aegis behind which hides a spurious unity, according to Barthes, and the marker that the hero insists

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on uttering to the Cyclops to his great suffering, so that his fame be known (perhaps a moment that makes one rethink the widely accepted account of the subject as a modern liberal humanist invention). And Mason retains the distinguishing mark on Odysseus’s body. Many “fragments” refer to Odysseus’s scar, including one in which an uncanny double visits the hero in his tent on the beach at Troy. The doppelganger is a Trojan who looks nothing like Odysseus yet claims to be the real Odysseus and knows secrets only the wily tactician could know. The Trojan Odysseus, tormented at having awoken to be trapped in the city and body of his enemy, takes a dagger to his thigh and carves his own scar there from memory. Even when Odysseus uncannily inhabits a different body, Mason has him retain his memories and insist on reinstating the signal physical marker of his identity. The consistency that persists among Mason’s versions of Odysseus is perhaps most apparent in “The Book of Winter,” in which the hero suffers from amnesia and lives a hermitlike existence. One day he discovers a book hidden in his cabin that tells “the story of Odysseus, soldier and diplomat, a man of versatile intelligence.” The book ends “with Odysseus allaying Poseidon’s wrath by walking inland with an oar,” which prompts the amnesiac’s “shock of revelation.” “At last, I know myself . . . having finally solved the riddle” (143). This incarnation of Odysseus discovers that he forgot himself on purpose: “Immortal Poseidon’s wrath was implacable—in order for Odysseus to escape from his vengeance once and for all it was necessary that he cease to be Odysseus. What would the cleverest of Greeks have done in that situation? He would have gone somewhere remote  .  .  . and, somehow, forgotten everything, and thereby been himself no more” (144). Playing on the famous trick in which Odysseus tells the Cyclops his name is “No Man,” Mason presents us with a hero so clever that he sheds his own identity, a cunning man who ceases to be himself by being his cunning self so completely. But “The Book of Winter” offers a final wrinkle. The amnesiac Odysseus speculates on how he was able to expunge willfully all of his memories: “Perhaps he went through each scene of his life and held it fixed in his mind’s eye until it disappeared. . . . Then, perhaps, he contaminated and diluted the remaining fragments of memory, rearranging them in every possible permutation. . . . I who was once Odysseus and now am no one” (144–145). Gesturing again to his method, Mason evacuates character by retaining it, scrambles and dissolves it as confirmation of its consistency. Mason might seem to echo a notion of the self or identity as illusory here,

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but steeped as he seems to be in postmodern and poststructuralist thought, he has not jettisoned the subject but has rather shuffled its contents and expanded its borders while adhering to central features that constitute the consistency of humanist character. Both Odysseus and not. Mason’s treatment of character in The Lost Books suggests a way of rethinking Richardson’s account of transtextual characters and our conception of literary character in general. In Mason’s hands, Odysseus can be altered quite drastically, can be a coward, heedless of the gods, can settle down with Nausicaa instead of maintaining his determination to return to Ithaca. But he cannot, it would seem, be altered beyond all recognition. Contrary to Richardson, characters can be altered dramatically and still “add to our knowledge of the original.” Mason’s Odysseus who stays with Nausicaa prompts us to linger over the moment in the Odyssey when the hero tarries with Circe and has to be reminded by his crew of the home that seems to have slipped his mind. Mason’s coward recalls us to the tale of the world’s first draft dodger, of Odysseus’s attempt at feigning madness to avoid going to Troy. Aristotle insists: “Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the unity of the hero. For infinitely various are the incidents in one man’s life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action.”40 An inconsistent depiction by a later author only adds to inconsistency already present in the original character. Rather than insist on “originals” at all, pace Richardson, it makes more sense to think of character as a shifting field that can be transformed by later writers (or by artists adapting the character in different media), whose reconstructions of the character gain currency. Such an understanding of character acknowledges the historicity of thinking of character as constituted and delimited by “the text itself ” as a relatively brief moment, instituted by a modern notion of authorship, intellectual property, and the book as a medium—its covers as a way of enclosing and demarcating limits. To adopt a more pliable sense of character is to return to a moment before the reduction of character to an authoritative incarnation, to understand that many incompatible stories about a given character might circulate without the burden of reconciliation or the injunction to authorize some versions and not others. But Mason’s book also suggests that a character’s field cannot be shifted to an unlimited degree. In fan fiction, a character like Captain Kirk might have a different sexual orientation or might be the manager of a Starbucks

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instead of a starship, but he would not resemble the Kirk we know at all if he were an uninsured part-time barista at that same Starbucks and talked like Spock. The need to retain some recognizable features suggests that the poststructuralist emphasis on the subject’s continual shifting and difference neglects the persistence of a measure of stability within that flux. In a recent essay, Julian Murphet makes a characteristic poststructuralist claim: “Character is not an enduring individual substance, it is an ever-changing set of intersubjective relations.”41 Murphet’s initial example is Stephen Dedalus’s musings about his internal multiplicity and flux in Ulysses. Murphet cites Stephen’s attempt to rationalize his failure to pay a debt as an illustration of the way the proper name serves to impose a false unity on the multiplicity of character, in “an alchemical transubstantiation of compositeness into unity” (Murphet, “The Mole and the Multiple,” 256): “You owe it. Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other now. Other I got pound. Buzz. Buzz. But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms.” Murphet reads this passage as performing the magical reconciliation of a “disjunctive unity” out of “a perfect multiple” and a “perfect singular.” But in construing Stephen’s reflections as referring to “the ‘buzz buzz’ of a teeming submicroscopic mutability” (257), Murphet misses the allusion to Hamlet’s bored dismissal of the tedious Polonius and thus fails to see how Joyce has Stephen undermine his own argument for no longer being responsible for his debt as so much pseudoscientific prattle. Stephen’s memory persists amid the flux, and no amount of insistence that he is an ever-changing multiplicity will erase the sense that it was “I” who borrowed the money. Joyce does not alchemically resolve a “perfect multiple” and a “perfect singular” into a spurious unity but rather shows how a singular can be composed of ceaselessly changing multitudes and still remain a singular. Joyce points to the combination of stability and inconsistency that constitutes character and the subject.42 Minor-character elaborations, fan fictions, and other instances of transtextual character appropriation demonstrate this doubleness, the constant play of variability and consistency that constitutes character. CONCLUSION: TRANSPOSITIONS, TYPES, AND INDIVIDUALS

Characters, I have been suggesting, are generated by a set of signifiers in a text, and the arrangement of these signifiers constitutes the structural

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component of character. Reference, the sense of a character as an implied person, arises from both those signifiers and a variable, unregulated process of reader reception and supplementation that builds around the scaffolding that textual structure provides. The authors of minor-character elaboration make the process of supplementation that produces reference particularly visible by radically extending it and physically enacting it, producing a new fiction that enlarges the worlds and characters they appropriate. These authors may expand in any number of directions or manners. They might offer more of a minor character but keep him largely consistent with a prior depiction, as in Clinch’s Finn, or revise her drastically, as in Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife. But just as the inferences readers make about what is incomplete in a given narrative will be determined by a given context, subjective factors, and personal agendas, so are the fictional extensions or supplementations that the authors of minor-character elaborations create. The revised characters that emerge as a result of this process are certainly versions or variations of the original character (insofar as there is an original), but we tend to think of them, at the same time, as the same character. Roger Moore’s Bond is different from Sean Connery’s, yet we recognize both as “Bond.” It is not merely the retention of the proper name as the umbrella under which a set of signifiers congregates, however, but rather the maintenance of signal traits or characteristics that constitutes character. It is another intertextual genre, transposition—which overlays a familiar or archetypal storyline and cast of characters onto a new setting—that perhaps best illustrates the degree to which a character can be transformed and still be said to be, at some level, the same character. In almost all his particular characteristics, Leopold Bloom is not Ulysses. Yet in his basic structural situation, as wanderer and exile, Bloom is a Ulysses—if an ironic one. In character transpositions, then, we encounter the intersection of two functions of character typically understood to be at odds: character as the embodiment of a type and character as the representation of a distinct, particularized individual—the sense we recognize as realist character.43 To transpose the plot of King Lear onto an Iowa cornfield, as Jane Smiley does in A Thousand Acres, is to retain the character types of imperious father and loyal and hostile daughters while transforming the characters (Lear, Cordelia, etc.) and limning new individuals in all their particulars. While transpositions retain typology and alter particularity, minor-character elaborations work to expand type into full personhood. Minor characters frequently

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strike readers as flat, not fully fleshed out, unsatisfying, or ideological— stereotyped—insofar as they are typological. (Recall Rhys’s musings on Brontë’s “lay figure.”) And minor-character elaborations respond to such typological characters by appropriating them and adding flesh, particular characteristics absent in a precursor, and constructing a fully realized— that is, fully realistic, because individualized—character. Minor-character elaboration can be seen, then, as a genre that not only demonstrates the way reference emerges through the supplementation of structure but also as one that epitomizes and enacts the realist injunction that all characters should be round, that the best representations are full ones.44 Taking the basic structure that is a typological minor character and expanding upon that structure, elaborating it to produce the referential sense of a full, imaginary person, minor-character elaborations perform in fiction the mental work that generates realist characters.

Coda

GENRE AS TELESCOPIC METHOD

One of the virtues, indeed the pleasures, of genre study is the fact that it allows for telescoping between levels of analysis. Genre study endeavors like much historicist and sociological literary scholarship to tease out the relations between literary forms and broader social and cultural phenomena. This book has argued for a triple-stranded approach to studying genre, as it sits at the intersection of form, history, and the workings of social institutions. Analyzing the variations on the formula or recipe that constitute a genre aims to elucidate the transformations and adaptability of a literary form. The conventions that appear across a cross-section of a genre communicate a common set of assumptions, a shared social logic that helps explain why a succession of writers gravitate to a generic technique at a particular historical moment. And genres serve institutional and marketplace functions, helping producers target audiences and gain strategic advantages in the market, and providing satisfactions for readers. But because any text that utilizes a genre shares features with a wider corpus of texts while departing from them in other ways, genre study allows scholars to strive for claims about a genre’s greater social significance while remaining sensitive to the innovative or idiosyncratic features of individual texts. Genre, that is, appeals to the scholar who wants to reach for the breadth of social significance without abandoning the nuance of close reading. One can zoom in on a novel such as Coetzee’s Foe, which departs from the bulk

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of minor-character elaborations by maintaining Friday’s silence and opacity, insisting that a contemporary author cannot in any straightforward way allow a previously minor character to speak for himself, that histories of violence and oppression are irrevocable. Or one can attend to the particularities of a book such as Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife, which holds in common with so many texts using the genre a commitment to rendering the unique interiority and rich subjectivity of a central protagonist but is unique in the degree to which it traces the development of that subjectivity to the protagonist’s immersion in the great books of the Western literary tradition. At the same time, because genres overlap with and share characteristics with kindred genres, analysis of one genre opens up insights into a host of related phenomena, vistas onto a wider landscape of genres. Zoom out from minor-character elaboration and one discovers that the genre takes part in several larger trends—suggesting that analysis of this particular genre helps illuminate facets of contemporary literary production more broadly. If, as I have been arguing, minor-character elaborations epitomize a pervasive politics of literary form that understands the creation of fully fleshed-out, individuated characters as an enactment of democratic principles, it should be no surprise that that one discovers expressions of this political aesthetic elsewhere in the contemporary literary landscape. While minor-character elaborations seek to remedy imaginatively the injustice (purportedly) done to flat, typological, or stereotyped minor characters in canonical texts by remaking them as round protagonists, an array of contemporary fictions performs a similar operation on their own imaginary worlds. A genre one might dub “multiprotagonist fictions” has also flourished over the last several decades. Novels such as David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten (1999) and Cloud Atlas (2004), Colum McCann’s National Book Award–winning Let the Great World Spin (2009), Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize–winning A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010) consist of numerous interlocking stories told from diverse perspectives. None of these works centers on a single protagonist. Each book is divided into many parts or chapters, each adopting the point of view of a different character; a minor figure in one section frequently becomes the focal point of a later one. George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire (1996–2011) series works by a similar method, with each chapter focalized through one of the extensive panoply of characters in his Westeros. These multiprotagonist fictions are committed to the same

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political aesthetic as minor-character elaborations. “Let there be no minor characters!” they seem to proclaim. Dedicated to multiplying points of view and the futile endeavor of eliminating minorness, these novels affirm that any figure that enters their fictional worlds, no matter how fleetingly, has a rich interiority and a radical particularity that could serve as a novelistic center of consciousness. Like minor-character elaborations, multiprotagonist fictions embrace the traditional liberal aesthetic of the novel, extending the franchise of the sympathetic imagination and affirming the unique subjectivity of each individual.1 Though literary scholars frequently emphasize postmodernist, posthumanist, and all manner of other “posts,” these genres suggest that we are still very much in a moment of literary history dedicated to the psychological project of the realist novel and its liberal, humanizing claims. While minor-character elaborations expand on figures from canonical texts and multiprotagonist fictions flesh out minor figures that appear elsewhere in the same work, a torrent of recent novels undertake a parallel project of making protagonists out of subjects on the periphery of major historical events and personages—including many famous authors.2 Many of these works center on the wives or lovers of eminent men and so share an obvious affinity with novels like Atwood’s Penelopiad, Le Guin’s Lavinia, or Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife. Nancy Horan’s Loving Frank (2007) adopts the perspective of Mamah Cheney, the ill-fated mistress of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose lovers are also the subject of T. C. Boyle’s The Women (2009); Melanie Benjamin’s The Aviator’s Wife (2012) makes a protagonist of Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife (2011) and Erika Robuck’s Hemingway’s Girl (2012) revolve around the tortured love life of Papa, and Robuck followed the latter with Call Me Zelda in 2013, appearing the same year as Therese Anne Fowler’s Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald and R. Clifton Spargo’s Beautiful Fools: The Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. To these fictional depictions of tragic literary liaisons one could add Lynn Cullen’s Mrs. Poe (2014), which imagines the affair of Edgar Allan with the previously obscure poet Frances Sargent Osgood. Cullen has published earlier works like I Am Rembrandt’s Daughter (2008) and Moi and Marie Antoinette (2006), a children’s book narrated by the queen’s dog Sebastian.3 One could go on and on citing novels that have focused on minor historical figures, from Philippa Gregory’s enormously popular The Other Boylen Girl (2001) and its successors, to Goce Smilevski’s Freud’s Sister (2012),

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Karen Mack’s Freud’s Mistress (2013), and Jennifer Chiaverini’s Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker (2013). These works are often billed as behind-the-scenes looks at what goes on in the “shadows” behind major events or personages.4 Like minor-character elaborations, such books testify to a shift of attention to the periphery, to narratives of women, socially marginal figures, or other unheralded individuals. Many such texts, like Benjamin’s The Aviator’s Wife, focus on the talents and accomplishments of women who were overshadowed by their famous husbands. These historical fictions parallel, in turn, the emergence of many nonfiction works that retell history from the margins or from “below.” Landmarks such as Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) and Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters (1983) were published around the same time minor-character elaborations began to appear with frequency. The dramatic recent proliferation of fictions about minor historical figures suggests, however, how mainstream the once-revisionary intervention of alternative histories has become—that, predictably, the margin has become the center. Again, my analysis of minor-character elaboration intimates some reasons why this has occurred. Historical fictions about the wives of Lincoln or Lindbergh or Hemingway combine the recognizable symbolic signifier of the famous figure with an alternative take or perspective, familiarity and prestige with novelty, and the trappings of an inclusive, progressive politics. Another kindred genre, the contemporary mania for novels about famous novelists, demonstrates the way canonical authors and their celebrated works endure as highly marketable signifiers, brand names laden with symbolic capital in the market for cultural goods. Novels like Coetzee’s Master of Petersburg (1994), Cunningham’s The Hours (1998), Colm Tóibín’s The Master, and David Lodge’s Author, Author—the latter two of which appeared in 2004, the year of Henry James—turn famous writers into the protagonists of new fictions. Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George (2006) fuses “author as protagonist” with “historical minor figure,” taking as its dual heroes Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji, as does Susan Scarf Merrell’s Shirley (2014), which is narrated by a graduate student who lives for a year with Shirley Jackson and her now overshadowed husband Stanley Hyman. These books testify to the efforts of contemporary producers of “literary” fiction to engage with and place themselves on the same footing as their predecessors and a desire to penetrate the mystique, and often the tragic circumstances, surrounding writers of genius, suggesting that if the

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author as privileged origin and arbiter of a text’s meaning is dead, her name as sign of prestige, cultural authority, and heroic but mysterious creative force is alive and well. These networks of generic kinship can threaten to extend indefinitely. Novels that make protagonists of literary celebrities share concerns and features with biographies and single-author critical studies, in the nonfiction direction, and works such as P. D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley (2011) and Matthew Pearl’s literary thrillers The Dante Club (2004), The Poe Shadow (2006), and The Last Dickens (2009), in the fictional. Novels and memoirs about novel readers and devoted fans such as Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club (2004) and Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’s The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society (2008) dramatize the pleasures of literary fandom and active readership—as of course do the vast volumes of fan fiction being published online.5 Fowler’s and P. D. James’s books in turn exemplify the continued proliferation of Austen sequels, spinoffs, and adaptations.6 These flourishing genres point, on the one hand, to the vibrant activity of literary and fan communities—to the turn toward readerly activism and appropriation that I trace in chapter 1—that disseminate their writings for free and appear to function outside of the market, and, on the other, to the eagerness of the consolidated publishing industry to capitalize on devoted readers’ willingness to buy fresh takes on their old favorites—to the ways the culture industry interpellates consumers, generating subcultures and communities defined by their dedication to a particular mass-cultural franchise. HarperCollins’s house-generated “Austen Project,” which has slated popular writers of “literary” fiction like Alexander McCall Smith, Joanna Trollope, Val McDermid, and Curtis Sittenfeld to rewrite Austen’s works for contemporary readers, epitomizes this recent publishing trend. In the abundance of these intertextual and author-centered genres, one discovers how today’s large-scale publishers have embraced bibliophilic works as a strategy for targeting established reading publics and those publishers’ perennial reinvestment in the recognizable symbolic signifiers that are canonical authors and texts. These authors serve as stalwart literary idols, bookish brand names, and known quantities that offer reliable sales, as opposed to the unique demands of a work that has no connection with established literary or historical figures. Hollywood’s remake impulse is an obvious parallel in film. Just as the contemporary boom in all forms of genre fiction is the result of the publishing

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industry’s strategy for identifying audiences and minimizing risk, so is that industry’s reliance on the prestige and familiarity of the traditional literary canon and its celebrated author figures. But one can perhaps zoom too far out. In observing a constellation of genres, patterns emerge but nonetheless demand closer inspection; each of the genres I’ve briefly traversed here offers an opportunity for more detailed scholarly investigation. This inquiry into minor-character elaboration demonstrates, I hope, how genres function at the intersection of formal iteration, the politics of cultural forms, and the institutions and material channels of cultural production—as well as the utility and rewards of genre study.

Appendix

MINOR-CHARACTER ELABORATIONS SINCE 1966

Text / Author

Predecessor

Date

Wide Sargasso Sea / Jean Rhys

Jane Eyre

1966

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead / Tom Stoppard

Hamlet

1967

Flashman / George MacDonald Fraser

Tom Brown’s Schooldays

1969

A Tempest / Aimé Césaire

The Tempest

1969

Grendel / John Gardner

Beowulf

1971

The Mists of Avalon / Marion Zimmer Bradley

Morte d’Arthur; Arthurian Legend

1982

Estella, Her Expectations / Sue Roe

Great Expectations

1982

Desdemona—If You Had Only Spoken! / Christine Brückner (trans. 1993)

Othello; Agamemnon; others

1983

Cassandra / Christa Wolf

Iliad; Oresteia

1983 (trans. 1984)

Foe / J. M. Coetzee

Robinson Crusoe; Roxana

1986 (Continued next page)

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Text / Author

Predecessor

Date

“Stowaway,” in A History of World in 10½ Chapters / Julian Barnes

Genesis Flood Narrative

1989

The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by A. Wolf / Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith

“The Three Little Pigs”

1989

Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde / Emma Tennant

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

1989

Mary Reilly / Valerie Martin

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

1990

Indigo / Maria Warner

The Tempest

1992

“Gertrude Talks Back” / Margaret Atwood

Hamlet

1992

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West / Gregory Maguire

The Wizard of Oz

1995

Caliban’s Hour / Tad Williams

The Tempest

1995

The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein / Theodore Roszak

Frankenstein

1995

The Red Tent / Anita Diamant

Genesis 34

1997

Mr. Dalloway / Robin Lippincott

Mrs. Dalloway

1999

Ahab’s Wife, or, The Star-Gazer / Sena Jeter Naslund

Moby-Dick

1999

Lo’s Diary / Pia Pera

Lolita

1999

Gertrude and Claudius / John Updike

Hamlet

2000

“Small Blue Thing” / Madison Smartt Bell

“The Raven”

2000

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister / Gregory Maguire

Cinderella

2000

Troy / Adèle Geras

The Iliad

2000

The Wind Done Gone / Alice Randall

Gone with the Wind

2001

The Third Witch / Rebecca Reisert

Macbeth

2001

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Text / Author

Predecessor

Date

Lamb: The Gospel Acc. to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal / Christopher Moore

The New Testament

2002

Adèle / Emma Tennant

Jane Eyre

2002

Dating Hamlet: Ophelia’s Story / Lisa Fiedler

Hamlet

2002

Mr. Timothy / Louis Bayard

Great Expectations

2003

Ahab’s Bride / Louise Gouge

Moby-Dick

2004

March / Geraldine Brooks

Little Women

2004

My Jim / Nancy Rawles

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

2005

The Penelopiad / Margaret Atwood

The Odyssey

2005

Weight / Jeanette Winterson

Greek Myth of Atlas

2005

Ithaka / Adèle Geras

The Odyssey

2005

“Horatio’s Version” / Margaret Atwood

Hamlet

2006

Ophelia / Lisa Klein

Hamlet

2006

Romeo’s Ex: Rosalind’s Story / Lisa Fiedler

Romeo and Juliet

2006

Finn / Jon Clinch

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

2007

Bunbury / Tom Jacobsen

Importance of Being Earnest

2008

Imoinda, or She Who Will Lose Her Name / Joan Anim-Addo

Oroonoko

2008

Lavinia / Ursula K. Le Guin

Aeneid

2008

Lady Macbeth / Susan Fraser King

Macbeth

2008

Lady Macbeth’s Tale / Maggie Power

Macbeth

2008

A Lion Among Men / Gregory Maguire

The Wizard of Oz

2008

Fool / Christopher Moore

King Lear

2009 (Continued next page)

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Text / Author

Predecessor

Date

Ransom / David Malouf

The Iliad

2009

Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales / Edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

Various Fairy Tales

2009

King of Ithaka / Tracy Barrett

The Odyssey

2010

Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles / Kim Newman

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

2011

The Song of Achilles / Madeline Miller

The Iliad

2012

Havisham / Ronald Frame

Great Expectations

2013

Longbourn / Jo Baker

Pride and Prejudice

2013

Hyde / Daniel Levine

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

2014

Juliet’s Nurse / Lois Leveen

Romeo and Juliet

2014

The Serpent of Venice / Christopher Moore

Othello, Merchant of Venice

2014

Ruth’s Journey: A Novel of Mammy from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind / Donald McCaig

Gone with the Wind

2014

Thornfield Hall / Jane Stubbs

Jane Eyre

2014

The Meursault Investigation / Kamel Daoud

The Stranger

2015

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: THREE AXES OF GENRE STUDY 1. Christopher Moore, Fool (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 305. 2. See, for example, his trilogy of vampire “love stories”: Bloodsucking Fiends (1995), You Suck (2007), and Bite Me (2010). 3. Maguire provides a knowing self-parody of the genre’s typical gestures, as he has his Elphaba (the Wicked Witch of the West of film fame) born in the remote Oz outpost of “Rush Margins” and makes her green skin color into the subtly racialized grounds for her ostracism. Gregory Maguire, Wicked (New York: ReganBooks, 1995), 6. 4. In Scieszka’s True Story, the Big Bad Wolf explains the accidental deaths of his porcine neighbors as the result of the poor construction of their homes. In children’s literature, see also Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, ed., Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales (New York: Penguin, 2009). 5. As I discuss below (see note 91), “intertextuality” has varied meanings and for some theorists can refer to the way all texts are necessarily dependent on and constructed out of earlier texts. But when I refer to “contemporary intertextual production,” I use the term in a more narrow sense: to refer to contemporary works that with varying degrees of explicitness rework particular, mostly high-profile, literary texts. 6. Adrienne Rich’s concept of feminist “re-vision” and the mode of anticolonial “writing back” have dominated critical accounts of contemporary intertextuality. See Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” College English 34, no. 1 (October 1972): 18–30; and Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989).

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7. Caroline Rody, “Burning Down the House: The Revisionary Paradigm of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea,” in Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure, ed. Alison Booth (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 300–325. 8. See, for two of many possible examples, Peter Widdowson, “ ‘Writing Back’: Contemporary Re-visionary Fiction,” Textual Practice 20, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 491–507; and John Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon (London: Continuum, 2001). Widdowson defines “re-visionary fiction” as novels that “invariably ‘write back’ to the canonic texts of the English tradition . . . and re-write them ‘against the grain’ (that is, in defamiliarising, and hence, unsettling, ways)” (501). Further, he sees such texts as “demanding that past texts’ complicity in oppression  .  .  . be revised and re-visioned as part of the process of restoring a voice, a history and an identity to those hitherto exploited, marginalized and silenced by dominant interests and ideologies” (505–506). Later, I critique the notion that minor-character elaborations (or any “re-visionary” texts) might “restore” the voices of any previously marginalized persons. But at the moment, I simply want to point out the problem with scholars’ common approach of defining a genre around texts that express an oppositional politics toward which they hold sympathies. 9. Margaret Atwood, “Gertrude Talks Back,” in Good Bones (London: Virago, 1993); Margaret Atwood, “Horatio’s Version,” in The Tent (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2006). In her poetry, Atwood has frequently adopted legendary female figures from classic literature and myth as speakers. See, for example, “Siren Song,” in Selected Poems, 1965–1975 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). 10. Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad (New York: Canongate, 2005), 2. 11. In chapter 2, I dispute the notion that such voices are “recovered” as opposed to being created by contemporary authors and show how scholars have conflated the literary creation of fictional representations of female figures with the historical, archaeological project of recovering largely forgotten female authors. (And, of course, Penelope does speak at length in Homer’s Odyssey, but it is Homer’s Penelope—and so one suspects that implicit in Atwood’s critique is the notion that Homer’s depiction of the character is inauthentic, a male poet’s misguided version of what a woman in Penelope’s situation would be like.) 12. The poem largely affirms the actions of its hero, who, in disguise as a vagrant, becomes enraged, in Robert Fagles’s translation, at the spectacle of “the maids who whored in the suitors’ beds each night . . . rut[ting] with their lovers” Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1996), 20.9–14. The epic’s Penelope likewise refers to the maids as “shameless, reckless creatures” (19.172), and Eurycleia calls them “bitches” that “mock” Odysseus-as-beggar with “their wicked barbs” (19.421–22). But the poem also famously describes their hanging with a simile that compares them to “doves or thrushes beating their spread wings / against some snare” (22.494–95), perhaps betraying some sympathy that strains against a wholesale endorsement of the killing. 13. Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia (New York: Mariner, 2009), 274. 14. For the “School of Resentment,” see Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (New York: Macmillan, 1995). 15. The comparison of Le Guin and Atwood usefully demonstrates the slippage around the term “voice” that I explore at length in chapter 2. For Atwood, the

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maids “had no voice,” and so the absent voices refers to silent characters, who are taken to represent a social class of female servants that are not represented or that do not represent themselves (the metaphor’s exact meaning is not explicit) in canonical texts. For Le Guin, the voice that is under threat is the poet’s, and the silencing occurs when people cease to read Virgil’s words because of the waning of Latin instruction. 16. Jacki Lyden, narr., “Novel Gives Roman Maiden Her Moment in the Sun,” All Things Considered, NPR, April 26, 2008. 17. Thomas Pavel, “Literary Genres as Norms and Good Habits,” New Literary History 34, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 202, 210. 18. Similarly, in an oft-cited definition, Carolyn R. Miller refers to genres in literary and social discourse as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations.” Carolyn R. Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (May 1984): 159. See also Anis Bawarshi, “The Genre Function,” College English 62, no. 3 (2000): 336, which defines genres as “typified rhetorical ways communicants come to recognize and act in all kinds of situations, literary and nonliterary.” My desire to maintain a view of genre as rhetorical practice, as a literary technology rather than a category, explains why I frequently employ somewhat laborious language like “texts that use the techniques of the genre” in place of “texts in the genre.” Alastair Fowler, in his magisterial history and theory of genre insists that “the main value of genres is not classificatory” but rhetorical: “In literary communication, genres are functional: they actively form the experience of each work of literature. . . . When we try to decide the genre of a work, then, our aim is to discover its meaning. Generic statements are instrumentally critical  .  .  . they serve to make an individual effect apprehended as a warp across their trama or weft. And when we investigate previous states of the type, it is to clarify meaningful departures that the work itself makes. It follows that genre theory, too, is properly concerned in the main with interpretation.” Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 38–39. 19. John Frow, “ ‘Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything You Need’: Genre Theory Today,” PMLA 122, no. 5 (October 2007): 1627. See also David Duff, introduction to Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (London: Longman, 2000), 1, which notes that in literary theory “few concepts have proved more problematic and unstable than that of genre” but adds that across recent scholarship “a degree of consensus is beginning to emerge about the possibilities and the limitations of the concept” (15). Anecdotal evidence suggests how infrequently genre theory had been employed during this period of decline; in 2008, I had to ask the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago to add Duff ’s essential anthology to its holdings. For another overview of some points of consensus in contemporary genre theory, see Ralph Cohen, “Introduction: Notes Toward a Generic Reconstitution of Literary Study,” New Literary History 34, no. 3 (Summer 2003): v–xvi. 20. Pavel writes: “Those who think about literary (and cultural) genres are therefore subject to two temptations: one is to freeze generic features, reducing them to immutable formulas, another is to deny genres any conceptual stability.” Pavel, “Literary Genres,” 201. 21. Yury Tynyanov’s work has been vital to contemporary theories of the historical evolution of genres: “a static definition of genre, one which would cover all its

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manifestations, is impossible: the genre dislocates itself; we see before us the broken line, not a straight line, of its evolution.” Yury Tynyanov, “The Literary Fact,” trans. Ann Shukman, in Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (London: Longman, 2000), 32. Tzvetan Todorov similarly argues that a “new genre is always the transformation of an earlier one, or of several: by inversion, by displacement, by combination.” Tzvetan Todorov, Genres in Discourse, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 15. Also see David Duff, “Maximal Tensions and Minimal Conditions: Tynianov as Genre Theorist,” New Literary History 34, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 555–563; and Michael McKeon, who writes: “The study of genre is a ‘historical approach’ to literature because it understands literary categories in their contingency. . . . Conceived as integral structures, genres have temporal and spatial existence . . . conceived as parts of greater wholes, genres have a structural existence in relation to other integral formations . . . a complex relationship to other historical phenomena.” Michael McKeon, “Genre Theory,” in Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach, ed. Michael McKeon (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 1. 22. Todorov speculates: “We might go even further and observe that the norm becomes visible—comes into existence—owing only to its transgressions.” Todorov, Genres, 14. 23. Jonathan Culler, The Literary in Theory (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 11. 24. Todorov, Genres, 19–20. 25. Robert Nye’s Falstaff appeared in the middle of this “lag” in 1976, but the novel makes an effective illustration of the instability of generic categories, which I discuss below. Is Falstaff a minor character? In the Henry plays, of course, he threatens to upstage the prince, and his popularity led Shakespeare to make him the protagonist of The Merry Wives of Windsor, which was later adapted into operas by Salieri (1799) and Verdi (1893). Falstaff is also arguably the protagonist of Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1966). 26. See Andrew R. George, “The Epic of Gilgamesh: Thoughts on Genre and Meaning,” in Gilgamesh and the World of Assyria, ed. Joseph Azize and Noel Weeks (Dudley, Mass.: Peters, 2007), 42. 27. See Paula Richman, Questioning Ramayanas, a South Asian Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Paula Richman, ed., Ramayana Stories in Modern South India: An Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 28. For the Odyssey’s textual history, see Bernard Knox, introduction to The Odyssey, trans. Fagles. 29. Chaucer’s source was not Homer, however; when one traces the former’s sources, the long pedigree of intertextual appropriation becomes even clearer. Chaucer borrowed his characters from Boccaccio’s Il filostrato, which borrowed them from the Roman de Troie of Benoît de Sainte-Maure, whose sources were the Latin Dares and Dictys. See The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 471–472: “Boccaccio stimulated a new tradition that flourished in the fourteenth century—taking a small episode or group of episodes from the great chronicles and treating them in more elaborate detail, just as the Greeks had elaborated segments of the Homeric cycles as independent works.” 30. Thanks to Patricia Yaeger for bringing H.D.’s Claribel poems to my attention.

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31. Eudora Welty, “Circe,” in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (New York: Harvest, 1980), 531–537. 32. Sequels, authorized (including cases when authors extend their own fictional universes, as in Balzac, Twain, or Faulkner) and apocryphal, are as old as the modern novel, dating to Don Quixote, and novels that parody others, at least to Fielding’s Shamela and Joseph Andrews. Below, I distinguish among sequels, parodies, and minor-character elaborations, but in brief: sequels generally continue plots and focus on the same principal characters, and parodies exaggerate the features of those characters for comic effect. Minor-character elaborations focus, obviously, on secondary figures, usually recount the same events from a different perspective (though they often also extend a plot temporally), and do not necessarily exaggerate the traits of earlier characters for comic effect—though in some cases, such as Moore’s Fool, elaboration may be combined with parody. 33. For a history of sentimental conventions and the way novelistic and cinematic forms can be manipulated to provoke varying degrees of sympathy and judgment, see James Chandler, An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 34. Karen Jacobs seizes on this aspect of Cassandra in “Speaking ‘Chrissandra’: Christa Wolf, Bakhtin, and the Politics of the Polyvocal Text.” Narrative 9, no. 3 (October 2001): 283–304. 35. Matei Calinescu calls transposition “the most complex and extensive mode of postmodern rewriting.” Matei Calinescu, “Rewriting,” in International Postmodernism: Theory and Practice, ed. Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema (Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1997), 246. 36. Reviewing Randall’s The Wind Done Gone, Marjorie Garber notes the increasing production of novels in which “a character with a minor or even absent role in the original novel now takes center stage and speaks.” But Garber lumps together novels narrated by a minor character from an earlier fiction, such as Pia Pera’s Lo’s Diary (1999), with fictions about literary-historical figures told from a marginal perspective, such as “Margaret Foster’s ‘Lady’s Maid,’ which revisits the courtship and marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning through the eyes of Barrett’s maid.” Marjorie Garber, “The Chapter After ‘The End,’ ” New York Times, April 8, 2001. Garber also writes of characters from “the original novel,” despite the fact that some of her examples, like Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius, adopt minor characters from texts that are not novels. See also Jonathan Dee, “The Reanimators,” Harper’s Magazine 298, no. 79 (January 1999), for the contemporary penchant for “literary graverobbing”: novels about famous historical figures, especially authors. To illustrate the distinction between minor-character elaboration and related but distinct intertextual practices, it’s helpful to compare Michael Cunningham’s immensely popular The Hours (1998)—which won both the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and PEN/Faulkner awards—to Robin Lippincott’s Mr. Dalloway, published a year later. Both novels explicitly engage with Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway, but they adopt markedly different genres to do so. Cunningham’s novel uses a triplestranded structure that alternates among the depiction of a fictionalized version of Woolf, a 1950s homemaker profoundly affected by her reading of Mrs. Dalloway, and the party planning of a woman in 1980s New York that recalls Mrs. Dalloway’s famous day. The first of these subplots adopts the now common practice of writing

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historical fiction featuring famous writers (“authors as protagonists,” we might call this genre); the second strand foregrounds the influence of Woolf ’s novel on later generations of readers (“readers as protagonists”; see also Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Bookclub [2005]); the third segment is a transposition that roughly maps the plot of Mrs. Dalloway onto a new time and place and imagines a contemporary character who evokes Clarissa in some basic structural ways. None of these subplots endeavor to reimagine or recreate the same characters and setting of Mrs. Dalloway. By contrast, Mr. Dalloway retains the diegesis of Woolf ’s London and the architecture of her characters and plot and makes Richard Dalloway into the protagonist. 37. Hans Robert Jauss, “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature,” trans. Timothy Bahti, in Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (London: Longman, 2000). See also Fowler, who writes that “Every literary work changes the genres it relates to. This is true not only of radical innovations and productions of genius. . . . Consequently, all genres are continually undergoing metamorphosis.” Fowler, Kinds of Literature, 23. Fowler’s apprehension of the fact that literary works typically relate to multiple genres suggests the problems with Moretti’s quantitative methods that I discuss below. 38. For an overview of quantitative methods and their critics, see Katherine Bode, Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field (New York: Anthem, 2012). Bode focuses on the way critics of quantitative methods fault those methods for failing to account for literary value. For a critique of quantification for its hypostasizing of extant bibliographies, inability to attend to questions of generic heterogeneity, and susceptibility to misinterpretation, see my “Combining Close and Distant, or, the Utility of Genre Analysis: A Response to Matthew Wilkens’s ‘Contemporary Fiction by the Numbers,’ ” Post45, December 3, 2011, http://post45.research. yale.edu/2011/12/combining-close-and-distant-or-the-utility-of-genre-analysis-aresponse-to-matthew-wilkenss-contemporary-fiction-by-the-numbers/. 39. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (New York: Verso, 2005), 17, 14. Moretti follows the Russian formalists in frequently resorting to anthropomorphic and evolutionary metaphors to describe genres’ “lives.” Below I detail why such metaphors are misleading, but in brief, genres do not have agency on their own but rather are continually adopted and refashioned according to the needs of producers. For another instance of such anthropomorphizing, see Moretti’s “On Literary Evolution,” in Signs Taken for Wonders (London: Verso, 1988): “It is then that [the novel] starts behaving like a genre in the strong sense—reproducing itself with abundance, regularity, and without too many variations” (263). 40. Moretti, Graphs, 15n25; my emphasis. 41. Fowler writes: “Genres have no clear dividing boundaries . . . membership of one by no means rules out membership of others.” Fowler, Kinds of Literature, 37. For a radically skeptical view of such sorting, see Stephen Owen, “Genres in Motion,” PMLA 122, no. 5 (October 2007): 1389–1393. Owen writes that “the common ground” that dictates generic categorization “is the production of a limited set of categories that pretend to cover a field. The actual world of literary texts is a mass of family resemblances, shared terms, and analogies. The putatively complete set of categories is a sorting mechanism to privilege one level of resemblances over

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others and give us the illusion of knowledge” (1392). While deciding whether a text sits predominantly in one genre or another constitutes a contestable matter of interpretation, this hardly means that any act of locating a text among others it resembles generates only “the illusion of knowledge.” Formal similarities, conventions, and shared literary techniques are real, historical phenomena. The claim that a text like Brooks’s March elaborates a minor character and thus resembles Wicked does not invalidate the claim that March is a historical novel and thus resembles Waverley. That is, the effort to understand one text’s relation to a given genre in no way undermines the validity of attempts to situate it with respect to other genres. Owen apparently has in mind a scholarship that can disabuse itself of the naïve pretense to knowledge production. But I, for one, cannot envision what would be left for scholars to do if they had no claim to such production. 42. Wai Chee Dimock, “Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge,” PMLA, 122, no. 5 (October 2007): 1377–1378, 1382. 43. Pavel, “Literary Genres,” 202. 44. Dimock, “Introduction,” 1378. Elsewhere, Dimock makes an eloquent case against the tyranny of the recent quantitative regime: “There are limits to what numbers can tell us. Those limits are especially severe when we are dealing, not with supposedly discrete genres, but with the unplanned, unsupervised, and often unclassifiable relations evolving among genres. A work-in-progress, held in dynamic suspension among multiple players, this intergeneric landscape is most interesting in its incompleteness, its susceptibility to new input, its tendency to confound fixed taxonomies through the unpredictableness of local variations. Since these variations stem from multiple factors, their scales and degrees of resolution have to be determined case by case. They are not countable on any single platform and do not lend themselves to a unified tally. Indeed, they might not even be statistically significant . . . though they are far from negligible from a literary standpoint. Literary history, in this light, stands at the very limits of aggregation: it tells us what tallying and averaging cannot. Not an aerial survey, the most vital form it takes might turn out to be microhistory. . . . This microhistory is crucial, for intergeneric relations are highly specific, highly localized, based not on fungibility but on particularity, and call for a burrowing into the texts, not a bird’s-eye view.” Wai Chee Dimock, “The Egyptian Pronoun: Lyric, Novel, the Book of the Dead,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 620. 45. Fowler, Kinds of Literature, 37. 46. Titles often indicate the character’s name or predecessor text (Grendel, Lavinia, The Wind Done Gone), but other times they do not (Wide Sargasso Sea, Wicked). And sometimes, as with Elizabeth Nunez’s Prospero’s Daughter (2006), titles can be positively misleading. The latter novel does not make Miranda into a protagonist. It is a transposition set in the 1960s, with characters (Virginia, Peter, Carlos) that function as analogues to Miranda, Prospero, and Caliban and a plot structure that roughly corresponds to that of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The title of Orson Scott Card’s Hamlet’s Father (2008) is similarly deceptive; the novella does not transform the elder Hamlet into a protagonist but is rather a novelistic retelling of the play, in which Prince Hamlet remains the protagonist and primary focalizer. Card’s novel imagines the title character was a pedophile murdered by Horatio in revenge for the latter’s childhood molestation and has been widely criticized for its homophobia.

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It may stand as the most vivid illustration of the adaptability of rewritings of canonical texts to widely divergent aesthetic and political projects. Orson Scott Card, Hamlet’s Father, in The Ghost Quartet, ed. Marvin Kaye (New York: Tor, 2008). For the reaction to Hamlet’s Father, see Allison Flood, “Outcry Over Hamlet Novel Casting Old King as Gay Paedophile,” Guardian, September 8, 2011, http:// www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/08/outcry-hamlet-novel-gay-paedophile. 47. Ralph Cohen writes: “To refer to a genre is to refer to a group of texts which have both some features in common and others which are individualized. The implication is that each member text contains a combination of features. But only some of these account for making a genre relatively stable; other features loosen the stability. . . . The alteration of some features that members of a genre display over time while retaining others weakens but does not cancel membership. But this phenomenon makes it possible for a text to belong to more than one genre. Moreover, genres not only change, they can cease to be used but, in time, can be revitalized.” Ralph Cohen, introduction to New Literary History 34, no. 2 (Spring 2003): vi. Cohen’s account captures the instability of generic categories but places its emphasis on determining texts’ “membership” or “belonging” whereas I have been stressing that genre study should be less concerned with the fit between a text and others in a category than with how variations among texts using a genre indicate different rhetorical functions. 48. Franco Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1 (March 2000): 207–227. 49. OED, s.v. “Elaborate,” def. 1. 50. In television spinoffs such as Joey or Frasier, one generally gets more of a minor character rather than a transformed version of that character. (We don’t learn that Joey had a rich inner life neglected in Friends.) The universe of fan fiction encompasses a huge and diverse production of works using characters from popular and classic literature, film, television, and other media. At times, these works elaborate minor characters, but fan fiction takes many forms—sequels, transpositions to new settings, queering (“slash”), kink, etc.—and is generally distinguished from earlier forms of rewriting and readerly appropriation by the kind of producers—amateur fan readers—and the mode of distribution: free, online, and to other members of fan communities. See Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (Dallas, Tex.: SmartPop, 2013). Fan fiction does often elaborate minor characters, and such works thus share many characteristics with the commercially published texts I discuss in this book. But insofar as fan fictions are distributed free online, the genre does not serve the strategic functions I will argue are crucial to the success of minor-character elaboration in the contemporary literary marketplace. For a superb study of the production by adoring readers in the eighteenth century of continued adventures for famous characters such as Gulliver, Sir Roger de Coverley, Falstaff, and Pamela Andrews, see David Brewer, The Afterlife of Character, 1726–1825 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). The characters adopted by admiring eighteenth-century readers were generally major figures in their original incarnations, and in their further adventures the characters retain their principal traits, in the mode of the spinoff and the unauthorized or apocryphal sequel. See also Mary Cowden Clarke’s 1850 prequels, gathered in The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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Though, as I suggest below, the intellectual-property issues raised by elaborating a character from a work still under copyright lie largely outside the scope of this project, it is relevant to the distinction between “elaboration” and “sequel” that the court injunction blocking the publication of Frederik Colting’s Sixty Years Later: Coming Through the Rye rejected the author’s claim that it was a critical parody and transformation of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye by determining that the character (here, notably, the protagonist) remained more or less unchanged from the original. Judge Deborah A. Batts wrote: “To the extent Colting claims to augment the purported portrait of Caulfield . . . those effects were already thoroughly depicted and apparent in Salinger’s own narrative.” Quoted in Sewell Chan, “Judge Rules for J. D. Salinger in ‘Catcher’ Copyright Suit,” New York Times, July 1, 2009. 51. Tom Jacobson’s play Bunbury (2005) offers another example of generic hybridity. Jacobson animates the doubly imaginary Bunbury of Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest and has him team up with Romeo’s earlier love interest Rosaline to insinuate themselves into other classic dramas. 52. A film such as Maleficent (2014), whose protagonist is the witch from Sleeping Beauty, owes a great deal to the precedents of works like Grendel and Wicked. 53. Hayden White writes: “there is no denying that, among modern historians and literary scholars in general, it is the originality and even uniqueness of the individual work, author, person, event, and so forth, rather than its status as a member of a class, genus, or species, that motivates most of the inquiry of a professional kind.” “Commentary: ‘With No Particular Place to Go’: Literary History in the Age of the Global Picture,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 728. 54. Bruce Robbins, “Afterword,” PMLA 122, no. 5 (October 2007): 1650. See also McKeon, who writes that “Genres fill a need.  .  .  . And when they change it is part of a change both in the need they exist to fill and in the means that exist for its fulfillment.” Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 20. According to Ireneusz Opacki, “Royal genres” are dominant forms that “best render the aspirations of the period” and continually influence other genres. Ireneusz Opacki, “Royal Genres,” in Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (London: Longman, 2000), 120. 55. Franco Moretti, “The Soul and the Harpy,” in Signs Taken for Wonders (London: Verso, 1988), 12. John G. Cawelti asserts that conventions “represent familiar shared images and meanings and they assert an ongoing continuity of values” whereas “inventions confront us with a new perception or meaning which we have not realized before.” John G. Cawelti, “The Concept of Formula in the Study of Popular Literature,” in Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 7. 56. Moretti argues that literary historians should not “look only at what is behind the masterpiece, unilaterally emphasizing a break, a rupture of the historical tissue” but also by examining “the consequences of every great work, one should accentuate its function as a genuine producer of historical ‘stability.’ ” Moretti seems to equivocate on this issue, suggesting above that conventions contribute to producing historical stasis—rather than, as I argue, retrospectively registering the consensus of a given historical epoch. At other moments, however, he rejects the Hegelian “Zeitgeist fallacy,” the tendency for literary historiographers to make sweeping generalizations that link a rhetorical form “directly to the idea . . . in which a whole epoch is

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supposedly summed up,” arguing instead that “forms aspire to become” zeitgeists, but their plurality shows they do not. Moretti, “The Soul,” 13, 25. 57. Rhys, quoted in Thieme, Postcolonial, 77; Tom Stoppard, quoted in Anthony Jenkins, “Death in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: II,” in Critical Essays on Tom Stoppard, ed. Anthony Jenkins (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), 51; “A Conversation With Nancy Rawles,” in Nancy Rawles, My Jim (New York: Three Rivers, 2005), 170. 58. Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 12. Below, and more extensively in chapter 2, I argue that Woloch’s notion that narratives “diminish” or “stint” minor characters treats them as if they existed prior to the narrative that constitutes them—a tendency apparent throughout his theory of character— and so fosters the notion that characters have autonomous existences and thus deserve attention and even freedom from authorial control. 59. For the “luminous detail” as a significant “trace” among “the mass of traces that have survived in the archive,” see Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 15. 60. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 66. For an excellent overview of “symptomatic reading” as a central practice in literary criticism since at least the 1980s that seeks to “read a text’s silences, gaps, style, tone, and imagery as symptoms of the queerness or race [or gender or class, one ought to reflexively add] absent only apparently from its pages,” see Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 6. Note that Woloch conceives of minor characters as an “absence of voice” and that Said suggests that “We must  .  .  . give  .  .  . voice” to replace such absences. In chapter 2, I show that texts using the genre frequently bolster their depiction of the formerly minor character’s mental state by emphasizing the character’s voice. “Voice” comes to be a central but fuzzy term signifying on a variety of levels: the narratological (as in the speaker that recounts the story), the political (the character’s conversion from a passive object to an active speaking subject), and the historical (the character’s experience makes visible or gives utterance to an occluded history, as in Said’s formulation above). The slippage around “voice,” I argue, facilitates a sleight of hand in existing critical accounts of minor-character elaboration, where the conversion of a minor character to a narrator becomes an act of liberation, a granting of free speech to that character, and an act of historical recovery. 61. Molly Hite, The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narratives (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 4, 2. 62. For a canonical summary of this politics, see Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). 63. In using “narrator-protagonist” or “character narrator” rather than “first-person narrator,” I follow Gerard Genette’s observation that the latter term conflates grammatical person with the distinction between narrators who are characters and those who speak from outside the narrated world. But I employ James Phelan’s terminology, agreeing that Genette’s “homodiegetic” and “heterodiegetic” are too heavy with narratological jargon. See Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 59; and

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James Phelan, Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), xi. 64. See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), esp. the third essay, section 12, of Genealogy. 65. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, ed. Judith L. Raiskin (New York: Norton, 1999), 77. 66. George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Penguin, 2003), 278. 67. Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia similarly offers an account of the novel as dedicated to the representation of competing voices, in which “the distinctive qualities of a character’s discourse always strive for a certain social significance.” M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 333. Dorothy J. Hale writes that Bakhtin subscribes to “the logic of linguistic intrinsicality . . . the belief that to report ‘what’ someone says is to reproduce who that person is.” Dorothy J. Hale, Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 154. But Bakhtin insists that “a speaking person’s discourse in the novel is not merely transmitted or reproduced; it is, precisely, artistically represented . . . by means of (authorial) discourse” (332). 68. Hale notes that since James’s famous metaphor the novel has been seen to project a world in which “no viewing position is privileged.” Hale, Social Formalism, 25. Elsewhere, Hale argues that in the twentieth century the novel’s “aesthetics of alterity,” its ability to encompass diverse perspectives, has been seen as its crowning achievement. “For these and other English writers, the art of the novel is found in the genre’s inherent capacity for otherness, a capacity that comes to life when author and reader participate in a circuit of interanimation, retaining their own subjective particularity even while they are united in their contact with a commonly shared and uncircumscribed spirit . . . a view of what is outside and beyond self (other to the self) through the lens of subjective perspective.” “The novel reader learns that any seemingly objective value is the projection of an interested point of view, a knowledge that in turn leads to self-consciousness about her own standards of evaluation, irreducibly connected with her own subject position.” Dorothy J. Hale, “The Art of English Fiction in the Twentieth Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Twentieth-Century English Novel, ed. Robert Caserio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 13, 15. 69. Pericles Lewis writes of the modernists’ formal preoccupation with the lack of such an Archimedean perspective and their consequent “rethinking of the relationship between the objective, omniscient narrator and individual characters with limited, subjective perspectives.” Lewis acknowledges that novelists since Defoe “had always depended on—and played with—this relationship” while claiming that what “distinguished the first generation of modernists . . . was their shared concern to work out, in novelistic form, the implications of perspectivism, the notion that no purely objective account of the external world is possible—that any such account would necessarily be the product of a particular consciousness and perspective.” Pericles Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 4–5. Erich Auerbach similarly notes that the early modernist “unipersonal subjectivism” and late-modernist “multipersonal method” of accumulating

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“numerous subjective impressions” are overlapping and closely connected methods for dealing with modernity’s “unsettled ideologies and ways of life” by “dissolv[ing] reality into multiple and multivalent reflections of consciousness.” Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 536, 551. 70. See Phillip Brian Harper, Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 71. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), 157. 72. Linda Schelbitzki Pickle, “ ‘Scratching Away the Male Tradition’: Christa Wolf ’s ‘Kassandra,’ ” Contemporary Literature 27, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 35, 38. See also, for example, James Schiff, who, writing on Lippincott’s Mr. Dalloway, explains the typical functioning of interiority as a means of recentering the reader’s interest on the previously minor character: “The relatively dull and conventional man whose life is briefly sketched in Woolf ’s novel proves to have an even more engaging and surprising interior life than his wife.” James Schiff, “Rewriting Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway: Homage, Sexual Identity, and the Single-Day Novel by Cunningham, Lippincott, and Lanchester,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 45, no. 5 (Summer 2004): 372. 73. Heidi Gilpin, “Cassandra: Creating a Female Voice,” in Responses to Christa Wolf: Critical Essays, ed. Marilyn Sibley Fries (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 350. 74. Deidre Lynch shows the uneven development of the meaning of character, a comprehensive history of writings prior to the moment when “novelists figured out that what their genre did best was mirror subjectivity.” Deirdre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 28. For a refinement of this history that emphasizes the role generic typology had in producing complex, realist characters, see Joshua Gass, “Moll Flanders and the Bastard Birth of Realist Character,” New Literary History 45, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 111–130. 75. Sandra Macpherson persuasively argues that realist novels are often “less an adventure of interiority than of emplotment,” expressing a tragic logic that “ ‘trace[s] complex chains of causality’ in the interest of condemnation rather than pardon.” Sandra Macpherson, Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 10, 12. Elaine Hadley contends that Victorian novels register an “undecidability” about whether the outer marks of character reveal the subject within. Hadley calls this “formal ambivalence” and argues that “it is this undecidability that makes mid-Victorian liberalism so seemingly ambivalent toward human liberty.” Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 105–106. These important countertraditions or ambivalences in the novel’s history demonstrate that the commitment to representing the selfconstituting liberal subject is not a uniformly shared project that reflects a univocal social consensus, but they do not displace the notion that this project is the hegemonic ideological function of conventional realist texts. 76. Nancy Armstrong argues that rather than reflecting and thus historically trailing the rise of the liberal subject, the novel produces it: “the history of the novel and

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the history of the modern subject, are, quite literally, one and the same.” The novel serves as “the culture’s way of maintaining, upgrading, and perpetuating its most basic categories.” Nancy Armstrong, How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 3, 83. 77. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 13. Needless to say, many scholars and theorists have critiqued this individualist ideology. D. A. Miller, for example, argues that the liberal subject’s illusory belief in her sovereignty is a symptom of how power obscures its own workings to help maintain them. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 78. Elsewhere Hale argues that the seeming “ ‘autonomy’ of characterological quotation . . . is caught up in an ideology of liberal selfhood. . . . quotation becomes valued as free speech. The formal autonomy of quotation—its being set off by quotation marks—becomes equated with the autonomy of individual identity.” Dorothy J. Hale, “Structuralism, Narratology, Deconstruction,” in The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1900–2000, ed. Dorothy J. Hale (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), 195. Moretti’s account of free indirect discourse exemplifies this tendency: “by leaving the individual voice a certain amount of freedom, while permeating it with the impersonal stance of the narrator, free indirect style enacted that véritable transposition de l’objectif dans le subjectif which is indeed the substance of the socialization process.” Moretti, Graphs, 82. 79. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, 1927), 67–68. Round characters, by contrast, are those “capable of surprising in a convincing way” and have “the incalculability of life about [them]” (78). 80. Several obvious objections to Woloch’s theory become apparent. To think of characters that perform narrative functions as being forced into servitude is to confuse characters’ textual status with the fate of imaginary persons. Second, protagonists are equally made to perform textual functions, if more elaborate ones. 81. Woloch writes that the “claims of minor characters on the reader’s attention . . . are generated by the democratic impulse that forms a horizon of nineteenth-century politics.” Woloch, The One, 31. Julian Barnes, who begins his A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (New York: Vintage, 1993) with “The Stowaway,” offers elsewhere in that book the epigrammatic quip that “history democratizes our sympathies” as an explanation for the tendency to try to understand the perspectives of, and perhaps pardon, even the most loathsome characters (133). 82. Flann O’Brien’s At-Swim-Two-Birds (1939) offers a humorous take on the rivalry that ensues between authors who would instrumentalize their characters and those characters, who would (if they existed) presumably prefer the freedom of self-expression. O’Brien’s unnamed narrator is a lazy student sometimes engaged in writing a novel about Dermot Trellis, an author of Westerns, whose characters John Furriskey, Anthony Lamont, and Paul Shanahan rebel against Trellis’s control, drug him, and escape the Red Swan hotel in which Trellis has imprisoned them while the latter is asleep. 83. Adam Gopnik wryly observed in response to Randall’s The Wind Done Gone: “There is no surer formula for opening a publisher’s door than saying that you are going to write the same book somebody else did but from a different point of view.” Adam Gopnik, “The Story of Us All,” New Yorker, April 9, 2001.

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84. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods,” in The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 75–77. 85. See John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the TwentyFirst Century (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2010), 116. 86. One only has to glance at the title of another Christopher Moore novel, his sendup of marine biology, Fluke; or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings (2003), with its echoes of Angelou and Melville, to detect the deep compatibility of “high-literary” allusiveness with popular production. For an overview of debates about the status of literary versus genre fiction, interestingly focused on Atwood and Le Guin, see Gerry Canavan and Priscilla Wald, “Preface,” American Literature 83, no. 2 (June 2011): 237–249. Mark McGurl writes that “Dispensing with the frequent bias toward popular (as opposed to literary) culture in cultural studies, sociological literary studies would encourage scholars to explore the material conditions and social meaning of literature in our time. It would, in effect, be a form of cultural studies that looks toward, rather than away, from ‘literature’ as it has been traditionally conceived.” Mark McGurl, “Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies in the Waste Land of the Present,” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 336. 87. See, for example, Viktor Shklovsky: “The form of a work of art is determined by its relationship with other preexisting forms.  .  .  . All works of art, and not only parodies, are created either as a parallel or an antithesis to some model.” Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1991), 20. For the relative autonomy of artistic and literary fields, see Pierre Bourdieu, “The Market of Symbolic Goods,” in The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 112–114. For a discussion of art novels and their imbrication and circulation in specifically literary markets and institutions, see Mark McGurl, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction After Henry James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), esp. 80–82. 88. When Jauss refers above to genres reaching the endpoint of “formal ossification,” he takes part in a common critical fallacy that imagines genre fiction as the teleological terminus of a genre’s lifecycle, at which point the genre can no longer be transformed. 89. http://pushkinchildrens.com/the-story-of-captain-nemo/, including The Story of Gulliver by Jonathan Coe and Sara Oddi, Don Juan by Alessandro Baricco, Captain Nemo by Dave Eggers, and The Betrothed by Umberto Eco. 90. Esteemed “literary” authors have also continued to generate intertextual works using various genres, as in Cunningham’s multiple prize–winning The Hours, Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), or Bharati Mukherjee’s The Holder of the World (1993). Carey’s novel constructs a fictionalized account of the genesis of Dickens’s Great Expectations, featuring an author-character called Tobias Oates, who evokes Dickens, encounters the escaped convict Jack Maggs, and unscrupulously steals the latter’s story for the making of his own novel. Mukherjee’s novel imagines a contemporary historian’s search for the story of a seventeenth-century woman from Salem, Massachusetts, whom the novel poses as a possible progenitor for Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. 91. For many theorists, intertextuality is a constitutive feature of literary production, textuality, or even language. Walter Benjamin, for example, writes: “storytelling is

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always the art of repeating stories.” Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 91. For poststructuralist theorists all texts and utterances are intertextual, insofar as they are woven from strands borrowed from previous texts or echo earlier utterances. See, for example, Roland Barthes: “A text is . . . a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations. .  .  . The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.” Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 146. See also Julia Kristeva, “Revolution in Poetic Language,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 74–88. But it strikes me that texts that explicitly invoke or mark their relation to a predecessor necessarily generate a level of meaning that may not emerge in implicit or unmarked forms of intertextuality. A reader of Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres could easily fail to notice that the plot of three daughters struggling to care for their aging, abusive father on an Iowa farm parallels that of King Lear, whereas in minor-character elaborations like Moore’s Fool the relation is instantly recognizable—marked both within the novel and in paratexts like the book’s cover and “Author’s Note.” Intuition and anecdotal evidence support the notion that readers may miss coded or unmarked relations to previous texts (or detect them even if they were not intended by the author); when I saw a woman reading Smiley’s novel in the Minneapolis–St. Paul airport, she told me she was not aware that the book was a reworking of Lear. 92. For studies that emphasize the oppositional politics of intertextual works without regard for genre, see, for example, Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts, and Judie Newman, The Ballistic Bard: Postcolonial Fictions (London: Arnold, 1995). For Thieme, “con-texts,” “counter-discourse,” and “writing-back” cover a wide range of practices, from the explicit revisions of a precursor to texts that are only implicitly in a dialogue with an earlier work, for example, the relation between Achebe’s Arrow of God and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Newman’s account of “intertextual revisionings” includes many types of engagement, including parody and transposition, and extends to encompass even “interdiscursivity, where collective modes of discourse,” rather than any particular literary text, “are drawn upon” (173). Ankhi Mukherjee, What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and the Invention of the Canon (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2014), takes a similar, if more nuanced, tack regarding postcolonial responses to the canon. Mukherjee proposes “that the canon, and the dominant modalities in which it is received, afford a site of historical emergence through which contemporary English and Anglophone literature and literary criticism can fruitfully rethink their cultural identity and politics” (4). Mukherjee is less concerned, however, with texts that explicitly rewrite canonical works than with postcolonial writers’ alternately admiring and anxious relations to the classics. 93. For “parody,” see Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody (New York: Routledge, 1986). For “pastiche,” see Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (New York: Verso, 1998), 5. For literary “parasitism,” see David Cowart, Literary

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Symbiosis: The Reconfigured Text in Twentieth-Century Writing (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993). Cowart’s book traverses major formal genres and also broadly construes “symbiosis” so that, for example, Pale Fire, in which both the “host” and “guest” texts are Nabokov’s inventions and part of the same novel, counts as an intertextual project. So many intertextual genres have been catalogued as “rewriting” that Christian Moraru observes the term “has come to signify any operation of revaluation, emendation, and working over of a subject, image, motif, style, aesthetic or political model, author or authors in more or less coherent series; a work or set of related works; a cultural period, narrowly or broadly defined; even ‘life’ and ‘reality.’ ” Moraru also defines “rewriting” as any kind of explicit or marked intertextual engagement, as any “intertextual form that entails a strong tie to ‘chronologically prior works,’ the ‘trace’ of which is discernible . . . and is marked by the author as an ‘intentional’ presence.” Christian Moraru, Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 11–12, 19. For broad overviews of various intertextual modes, see Gerard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); Graham Allen, Intertextuality: The New Critical Idiom (New York: Routledge, 2000); and Mary Orr, Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts (London: Polity, 2003). Genette’s massive taxonomy Palimpsests lists “transfocalizations” as a subcategory of intertextual transformations, which would shift the point of view of their precursor “hypotexts.” But Genette suggests that this now prolific form “has been little practiced as yet” (287–288). Most of the attention to minor-character elaborations as a distinct practice has, perhaps understandably for a highly contemporary genre, appeared in the mainstream media. See, for example, Lynn Neary, “Don’t Call It Fan Fiction,” NPR, December 7, 2013, http://www.npr.org/2013/12/07/249058793/ dont-call-it-fanfic-writers-rework-their-favorite-stories. 94. For studies that discuss various intertextual forms based on shared precursors but without distinguishing the genre of engagement, see, for example, Schiff, “Rewriting Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway ”; Ankhi Mukherjee, “Missed Encounters: Repetition, Rewriting, and Contemporary Returns to Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations,” Contemporary Literature 46, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 108–133; Mihoko Suzuki, “Rewriting the Odyssey in the Twenty-First Century: Mary Zimmerman’s Odyssey and Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad,” College Literature 34, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 263–278; Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare and Modern Culture (New York: Knopf, 2008); Elke Mettinger-Schartmann, A Breath of Fresh Eyre: Intertextual and Intermedial Reworkings of Jane Eyre (New York: Rodopi, 2007); Martha Tuck Rozett, Talking Back to Shakespeare (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Press, 1994); Stephen Benson, ed., Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 2008); and Ann F. Howey, Rewriting the Women of Camelot: Arthurian Popular Fiction and Feminism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2001). 95. For a notable exception, see Betina Entzminger, Contemporary Reconfigurations of American Literary Classics: The Origin and Evolution of American Stories (New York: Routledge, 2013), each chapter of which focuses on a particular pairing of a contemporary American author respectfully “reconfiguring” (in different ways—sometimes transposing, sometimes altering the perspective of) a predecessor.

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96. Longbourn “Reader’s Guide,” http://www.randomhouse.com/book/231492/longbourn -by-jo-baker. 97. Dinah Birch, “Fiction Review: Lavinia,” Times Literary Supplement, May 22, 2009. 98. Daniel Mendelsohn, “Mythic Passions,” New York Times, April 27, 2012. Mendelsohn deemed the book an “odd hybrid,” with “the head of a young adult novel, the body of the ‘Iliad’ and the hindquarters of Barbara Cartland.” 99. Francis Wyndham, “Introduction,” in Wide Sargasso Sea, ed. Raiskin, 6. 100. Norma L. Hutman, “Even Monsters Have Mothers: A Study of ‘Beowulf ’ and John Gardner’s ‘Grendel,’ ” Mosaic 9, no. 1 (Fall 1975): 19. 101. A second blurb indicates that the novel is intended both to be accessible and to aim for a bookish, if irreverent audience: “a book for all, especially uptight English teachers, Bardolaters, and ministerial students.” Ironically, considering the torrent of obscenity let loose in Lear, this blurb also activates the fallacious notion of a prudish Bard (and professoriate), in order to amplify the pleasure of profaning a sacred literary text. 102. Liza Nelson, “Review of The Song of Achilles,” O Magazine (March 2012), http:// www.oprah.com/book/The-Song-of-Achilles-by-Madeline-Miller?editors _pick_id=36265. See also Arifa Akbar’s review: “Miller has combined scholarship with imagination to turn the most familiar war epic into a fresh, emotionally riveting and sexy page-turner.” Independent, April 20, 2012, http://www .independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-song-of-achilles-by -madeline-miller-7660983.html. See also Random House’s teacher’s guide for Rawles’s My Jim (which it puts out under its Broadway Books imprint), which acknowledges that “familiarity with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn enriches the Rawles text” but insists that the latter “can be read and understood without any knowledge of Twain’s work.” http//www.randomhouse.com/highschool/catalog /display.pperl?isbn=9781400054015&view=tg. 103. Anita Diamant, The Red Tent (New York: Picador, 1997), 2. 104. The paperback cover also touts a blurb taken from Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Randall’s website links to Patricia Yaeger’s article “Circum-Atlantic Superabundance: Milk as World-Making in Alice Randall and Kara Walker,” American Literature 78, no. 4 (December 2006): 769–798. In addition to our other functions, scholars can of course help sanctify and generate an audience for books we choose to teach and write on. http://www.alicerandall.com/wind_done_gone. 105. In his preface, Dmitri writes of Pera’s aim “to seek inspiration, fortune and fame from a book called Lolita.” Dmitri Nabokov, “On a Book Entitled Lo’s Diary,” in Pia Pera, Lo’s Diary (New York: Foxrock, 1999), vii. 106. The U.S. District Court in Atlanta ruled (somewhat dubiously) that Randall’s novel is a parody and thus protected under “fair use.” See Suntrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin. http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/features/randall_url/courtpapers .shtml. 107. See David Roh, “Two Copyright Studies from a Literary Perspective,” Law and Literature 22, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 110–141; and “Originality,” Harvard Law Review 115, no. 7 (May 2002): 1988–2009, for discussions of the conflict between contemporary literary theory’s views on originality and those of copyright law. The latter article points up the irony that if the court had construed the “target” of Randall’s critique as broader than a single novel, say, as the mythology of the Old South, the

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novel would not be protected under “fair use” as a parody. In other words, critiquing Gone with the wind is parody, and so protected speech; using an elaboration of Gone with the wind to critique a broader ideological formation is not parody, and so a violation of copyright law. 108. McGurl notes the basic conservatism of contemporary cultural appropriation: “An unusual but compelling way of understanding the cultural ‘recycling’ that is such a conspicuous feature of contemporary culture: rather than representing merely a loss of originality or glitch in the engine of human innovation, it is continuous with the kind of recycling of world literature evident in The Waste Land. The remake reflex might be cynically profit driven, but perhaps it is also a symptomatic (and symbolic) attempt to stabilize a culture that has seen enough of certain kinds of change by cycling back through previous cultural forms and, in effect, re-institutionalizing them. There is a certain comfort to be found in repetition, as everyone knows.” McGurl, “Ordinary Doom,” 342. 109. http://www.nancyrawles.com/site/%2FMy_Jim.html#2746. 110. See Julia M. Klein, “Mark Twain Museum Is in Deep Water,” Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2008; “Authors Baldacci, Grisham, Picoult Headed to Foxwoods for Mark Twain Museum Benefit,” Herald News, April 26, 2010. 111. John Guillory persuasively argues that “middlebrow” names “the massified form of high culture.” It is “the ambivalent mediation of high culture within the field of the mass cultural.” Moreover, the form middlebrow culture takes is primarily one of making high culture accessible and revered: “the true voice of the middlebrow: Just shut up and admire!” John Guillory, “The Ordeal of Middlebrow Culture,” review of Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, in Transition 67 (1995): 87, 91. Janice Radway takes a more charitable view of the middlebrow as embodied by the Book-of-the-Month Club editors who, she argues, occupy “a middle space between common readers on one hand and legitimate technical experts on the other,” a space that has its “particular virtues.” Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 112. 112. Wai Chee Dimock, “Introduction: Planet and America, Set and Subset,” in Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 12. I share Dimock’s sense that literary scholars should aim to “come up with well-defined projects that are, at the same time, entry points to a broad continuum” (8). 113. See, for example, John Frow, “Spectacle Binding: On Character,” Poetics Today 7, no. 2 (1986): 227–250.

1. ACTIVE READERS AND FLEXIBLE FORMS: THE EMERGENCE OF MINOR-CHARACTER ELABORATION, 1966–1971 1. A. Alvarez, “The Best Living English Novelist,” New York Times Book Review, March 17, 1974. See also Hannah Carter, “Fated to be Sad: Jean Rhys,” Guardian, August 8, 1968. 2. Clive Barnes, “Theater: ‘Rosenkrantz [sic] and Guildenstern Are Dead’: ‘Hamlet’ Seen Through Eyes of Courtiers,” New York Times, October 17, 1967.

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3. See introduction, note 37. 4. See, for example, Michael Vanden Heuvel, “ ‘Is Postmodernism?’: Stoppard Among/ Against the Postmoderns,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, ed. Katherine E. Kelly (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 213–228. 5. Richard Locke, “ ‘Grendel’ Is a Beauty of a Beast,” New York Times, September 4, 1971. 6. Keith D. Mano, “Grendel,” New York Times, September 19, 1971. Jerome Klinkowitz also begins by expressing skepticism of Gardner’s project as a “Writers’ Workshop trick” in “John Gardner’s Grendel,” in John Gardner: Critical Perspectives, ed. Robert A. Morace and Kathryn VanSpanckeren (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 63. 7. Todorov argues that not all similarities between texts constitute a genre but only “classes of texts that have been historically perceived as such.” But Todorov’s formulation suggests that genres do not exist until they are noticed and named, so he modifies the claim to say that their existence is merely “signaled by discourse” about them. Tzvetan Todorov, “The Origin of Genres,” in Genres in Discourse, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 17; my emphasis. 8. Franco Moretti, “On Literary Evolution,” in Signs Taken for Wonders (London: Verso, 1988), 263. 9. Victor Erlich, quoted in Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (New York: Verso, 2005), 17. 10. Moretti, Graphs, 17n7. One reason for Moretti’s mistaken adherence to this model and assumption that genres either “disintegrate” or persist as tired, slavish adherence to a form, rather than continually change, is his use of already compiled bibliographies as the archive of each genre he graphs—in other words, he is mistaking the fixed abstract category for the fluid field of an actual genre. 11. Quoted in ibid., 17n7. 12. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 93. 13. David Cowart, Literary Symbiosis: The Reconfigured Text in Twentieth-Century Writing (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 49. In chapter 2 I put pressure on the concept of voice as a route to humanizing characters. The obvious objection to Cowart’s account of Wide Sargasso Sea is that characters’ “inner lives” cannot be “recorded” by their author, as if they existed a priori. 14. For an overview of some trends in the copious criticism on the novel, see Carine Melkom Mardorossian, “Double [De]colonization and the Feminist Criticism of Wide Sargasso Sea,” College Literature 26, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 79–95. 15. For one discussion of the liberal feminist project of “giving voice” to render female subjectivity, see Howe and Aguiar, who chronicle the ways contemporary feminist writers have responded to the “voicelessness” and “lack of [authentic] human subjectivity” of female characters in the canon and in so doing heed the call of “years of exhortations by feminist theorists for authors to retell the world from the women’s perspective.” Mica Howe and Sarah Appleton Aguiar, “Introduction,” in He Said, She Says: An RSVP to the Male Text, ed. Mica Howe and Sarah Appleton Aguiar (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), 12–13. 16. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (New York: Penguin, 1996), 327. 17. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly, ed., The Letters of Jean Rhys (New York: Viking, 1984), 297.

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18. According to Gilbert and Gubar’s well-known reading of Jane Eyre, the opposition between Jane and Bertha is only apparent. They view Bertha as the double of both heroine and author, an incarnation of their repressed rage and sexuality. Such a view points to a more sophisticated understanding of minor characters than one that would simply view them as “excluded” or “silenced.” Minor characters may, that is, carry a rhetorical significance that outweighs the quantity or kind of their representation. For example, below I will show how Christophine in Wide Sargasso Sea is a minor character whose wisdom functions as a counter to the ignorance of Rhys’s protagonist, despite the fact that Christophine is a minor character and not a narrating voice. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 339. 19. Mary Lou Emery, “Modernist Crosscurrents,” in Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, ed. Judith L. Raiskin (New York: Norton, 1999). See also Ellen G. Friedman, who writes that Rhys “illustrates how her precursor [Brontë] has restricted [Bertha] to a predetermined narrative,” and “this very illustration liberates” and “delegitimates” Brontë’s “master narrative, and by implication master narratives in general.” Ellen G. Friedman, “Breaking the Master Narrative: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea,” in Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, ed. Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 122–123. In chapter 2, I question who exactly is liberated by Rhys’s critique of Western master narratives. 20. In a more nuanced reading, Teresa Winterhalter thus argues that the novel “demonstrates that giving voice to oppressed peoples is more complicated than merely conferring narrative authority upon speakers.” Teresa Winterhalter, “Narrative Technique and the Rage for Order in Wide Sargasso Sea,” Narrative 2, no. 3 (October 1994): 215. 21. For “distance” between narrator and implied author as the determinant of narrative unreliability, see Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 156. 22. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, ed. Judith L. Raiskin (New York: Norton, 1999), 38. 23. By the end of part 2, however, “Rochester’s” narration emphasizes his agency, demonstrating that he has reacted to his powerlessness with respect to his father by violently exercising power over his new wife: “I’d seen to everything, arranged everything” (101). 24. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 253, emphasis added. 25. Joyce Carol Oates, “Romance and Anti-Romance: From Brontë’s Jane Eyre to Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea,” Virginia Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 54. 26. See Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, ed. Raiskin, 38n4. 27. Mardorossian, “Double [De]colonization,” 90. 28. Seamus Heaney, ed. and trans., Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (New York: Norton, 2001), 9. 29. John Gardner, Grendel (New York: Vintage, 1971), 7. 30. Robert Merrill, “John Gardner’s Grendel and the Interpretation of Modern Fables,” American Literature 56, no. 2 (May 1984): 171, 179. See also Helen B. Ellis and Warren U. Ober, “Grendel and Blake: The Contraries of Existence,” in John Gardner: Critical Perspectives, ed. Robert Morace and Kathryn VanSpanckeren (Carbondale:

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Southern Illinois University Press, 1982): “Indeed Gardner has transformed Grendel . . . into a character so complex, fascinating, and even lovable that readers and critics alike are in danger of being seduced into an uncritical acceptance of his point of view and values as identical with those of the author” (46). 31. Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (New York: Vintage, 1993), 54. 32. My understanding of Grendel as a testing or training ground is indebted to Joshua Landy’s account of “formative fictions” in his How to Do Things with Fictions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Sandra Macpherson argues against seeing the realist novel as an “exculpatory” form that “trace[s] the complex chains of causality” of any event, allowing for explanation and pardon. But Grendel, like Lolita, plays with the conventional structure of a narrator explaining his motives and thus soliciting readers’ pardon. Sandra Macpherson, Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 7. 33. See Spivak’s assumption above that because Wide Sargasso Sea is told from Antoinette’s point of view, Rhys writes “in the interest of the white Creole rather than the native.” 34. See Kenneth Mason, “Of Monsters and Men: Sartrean Existentialism and John Gardner’s Grendel,” in Thor’s Hammer: Essays on John Gardner, ed. Jeff Henderson (Conway: University of Central Arkansas Press, 1985), for the argument that Gardner “intends . . . his novel to expose the shortcomings of Sartre’s philosophy” (102). 35. For a discussion of the structure of the novel as twelve chapters, each centered on a humanistic value that Grendel rejects as a “trap,” see Barry Fawcett and Elizabeth Jones, “The Twelve Traps in John Gardner’s Grendel,” American Literature 62, no. 4 (December 1990): 634–647. 36. The novels are more complex than this binary opposition suggests. Rhys’s novel demonstrates admiration and affiliation with Brontë, and Gardner, in having Grendel argue against Beowulf ’s humanistic values, at least acknowledges the strength of the critiques to which they have been subjected. I take some combination of homage and critique to be characteristic of a great many texts utilizing the genre. 37. For a chronology of Rhys’s work see Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, ed. Raiskin, 259. See, for example, Emery, “Modernist Crosscurrents,” for the modernist claim, and Friedman, “Breaking the Master Narrative,” for Rhys’s postmodernist debunking of master narratives. 38. David Cowart, Arches and Light: The Fiction of John Gardner (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), argues that Grendel’s self-consciously literary selfpresentation reflects the monster’s trying out of an “artistic vocation” that “dates from his first encounter with the Shaper” (39). But Cowart ignores that the monster’s artistry is highly artificial. His possession of modern (or any) English is anachronistic, and the text is full of markers that break the ostensible frame of an unmediated transmission of the monster’s consciousness, calling attention to punctuation and versification, using dramatic form, etc. The formal experiment in the novel, that is, cannot by accounted for within the fictional world and thus points to the monster’s fictionality and to Gardner’s shaping hand. 39. Rhys also has Antoinette offer a Lacanian account of her own self-division. “There is no looking-glass here and I don’t know what I am like now. I remember watching myself brush my hair and how my eyes looked back at me. The girl I saw was myself yet not quite myself ” (107).

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40. George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman: From the Flashman Papers, 1839–1842 (New York: Penguin, 1984), 9. For a discussion of “formal mimetics,” fictional genres that formally imitate nonfiction genres such as memoirs, diaries, letters, and confessions, see Michál Glowínski, “On the First-Person Novel,” New Literary History 9, no. 1 (Autumn 1977): 103–114. 41. The strategy of opening with a declaration of a character’s previous fictional incarnation recalls Huck Finn’s “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ ” but Huck is a sequel, or character spinoff, having the same author and being largely the same character as he is in Tom Sawyer, though we get much more of him. Thanks to Ken Warren for pointing out this parallel. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Bantam, 1981), 3. 42. Ten of the first thirty-four U.S. reviews of the novel “found the book to be genuine autobiography.” Alden Whitman, “Gen. Sir Harry Flashman and Aide Con the Experts,” New York Times (June 29, 1969). 43. Margalit Fox, “George MacDonald Fraser, Author of Flashman Novels, Dies at 82,” New York Times (January 3, 2008). 44. George Macdonald Fraser, “The Last Testament of Flashman’s Creator,” Mail Online, January 5, 2008, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-506219/The-testamentFlashmans-creator-How-Britain-destroyed-itself.html. 45. Ibid. 46. For the paratext as the “threshold” between the inside and outside of the text and as a crucial site of “transaction” between the text and its audience, see Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (London: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2, 16. 47. The matter of character names is rich in implications, and I discuss these in greater detail in chapter 4. To the extent that a minor-character elaboration retains proper names from its predecessor—for example, “Grendel”—we recognize the relation to the predecessor indexically, that the name refers to the same character, though, as in Gardner’s novel, the traits belonging to the character have been altered and revised. In a text like Grendel, however, the same proper name applies to a different aggregate of signifiers. To what extent, then, can Gardner’s “Grendel” and that of the Beowulf poet be considered the same character? This issue is especially relevant to intellectual-property decisions regarding minor-character elaborations: one way to attempt to preempt the claim that copyright has been infringed would be to mask the intertextual appropriation with changed names, as in Nancy J. Jones’s Molly (New York: Crown, 2000), a rewriting of Lolita in which Dolly becomes “Molly” and Humbert Humbert the phallically dubbed “Richard Richard.” As I have alluded to above (see introduction, note 50), keeping the traits of a character the same can, however, void the claim that the rewriting is protected by fair use as a parody. 48. See Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, ed. Raiskin, x. 49. Francis Wyndham, “Introduction,” in Wide Sargasso Sea, ed. Raiskin, 6. 50. Ibid. 51. John Frow, Genre: The New Critical Idiom (New York: Routledge, 2006), 105. Jameson writes that genres are “social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact.” But Jameson’s notion of a “contract” implies a stringency that Frow’s language of “expectation”

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does well to avoid. If a writer withholds the conventional ending of a romance plot, readers may feel angry at the frustration of their expectations and even want their money back—but usually they won’t get it. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 106. 52. The back cover of my Norton paperback (not the Norton Critical Edition) opens with the following: “Jean Rhys’s reputation was made upon the publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of fiction’s most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.” In addition to signaling the intertextual relationship, this paratext serves as an important cue to the other genres Wide Sargasso Sea deploys and as an attempt to establish the novel’s literary merit; the reader is primed to feel passion and heartbreak and, with the mention of Rhys’s reputation, to regard highly this work of a now canonical author. 53. This is certainly not meant to be an exhaustive list of possible authorial motives for elaborating minor characters. 54. For “hyper-canonical,” see Jonathan Arac, Huck Finn as Idol and Target: The Function of Criticism in Our Time (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). See also David Fishelov, “Dialogues with/and Great Books: With Some Serious Reflections on Robinson Crusoe,” New Literary History 39, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 335–353, for the interesting if not wholly convincing hypothesis that a “classic” text derives its canonical status from its having inspired diverse texts in dialogue with it, rather than assuming that already canonical texts inspire imitators and respondents. Brewer advocates a more persuasive claim: that a mutually reinforcing feedback loop applies, where the most frequently reproduced (and rewritten) texts increase the feeling that characters belong to everyone, and this increases the texts’ social canonicity, which increases their reproduction; David Brewer, The Afterlife of Character, 1726–1825 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 97. It also makes sense, for legal reasons, to choose a precursor that is in the public domain. I have already alluded to the lawsuits surrounding the elaborations of Gone with the Wind and Lolita, both still under copyright. 55. See Frow, Genre, 65. 56. Jonathan Culler, “Lyric, History, and Genre,” New Literary History 40, no. 4 (Autumn 2009): 883–884. 57. To oversimplify: in Stoppard’s and Césaire’s plays, the reorientation of attention is largely a matter of a greater quantity of spoken lines, time on stage, and, in the case of Césaire’s Ariel and Caliban, a relationship with each other wholly absent in Shakespeare. As I’ve begun to demonstrate, novels that elaborate minor characters overwhelmingly tend to do so by converting them into narrator-protagonists. Others, such as Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius, to take a relevant example, are multiply focalized through the perspectives of the formerly minor characters, revealing rich interiorities that were not visible in the (in this case, dramatic) predecessor. Hamlet’s interior state is lavishly bestowed upon the audience through his soliloquies, but the technical resources used to convey psychology differ in different media. 58. Anecdotal evidence—reactions when I describe my research—suggests that academic audiences frequently recognize Wide Sargasso Sea as the most prominent example of the genre; nonacademic interlocutors are often more familiar with Wicked, Stoppard’s play, and, occasionally, Grendel. This is surely attributable to the privileged place of Rhys’s novel in feminist and postcolonial scholarship—canonized

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in terms of “what gets taught” in colleges and universities—on the one hand, and to the fact that Stoppard’s play is frequently performed, taught alongside Hamlet in secondary schools, and to the success of the film adaptation, on the other. Wide Sargasso Sea has twice been made into rather terrible films—the Duigan (1996) version receiving a NC-17 rating for what one of my students called its “soft-core porn.” Grendel received a jolt in publicity when Robert Zemeckis’s Beowulf (2007) flopped (Angelina Jolie as Grendel’s mother!) across the big screen. 59. Anne Sexton, Transformations (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001). 60. John Barth, “Menelaiad,” in Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (New York: Anchor, 1968), 130. 61. Eudora Welty, “Circe,” in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (New York: Harvest, 1980), 531–537. 62. The reference here is again to E. M. Forster’s famous division of characters into “flat” and “round.” E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, 1927), 67, 78. 63. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (New York: Grove, 1967), 104. Here we also see how Stoppard has Rosencrantz and Guildenstern serve as emblems of postmodern belatedness, in which original creation has become impossible. Below I discuss how writers of the “high” postmodern moment sought, paradoxically, to turn the experience of that impossibility into the raw material for new art. 64. Hamlet, 2.2.222. Shakespeare might be hinting, with dramatic irony, that the two are not biased toward either Claudius or Hamlet, and Guildenstern picks up the sense of “indifferent” as “neutral”—they are “not over-happy.” But Shakespeare’s polysemy also suggests the now archaic meaning: “Not different in character, quality, effect, incidence, etc.; equal, even; identical, the same.” OED online ed., s.v. “indifferent,” definitions 6 and 9. Stoppard plays on this sense with great comic effect, making the two so similar that they are indistinguishable—even to themselves. 65. See John Britton, “A. C. Bradley and Those Children of Lady Macbeth,” Shakespeare Quarterly 12, no. 3 (Summer 1961): 349–351, for a history of the essay and the exaggerated indictment of Bradley’s criticism that it caused since, ironically, Bradley himself never asked the question invoked in the title. 66. In the next chapter, I suggest that J. M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986) is an exception in that it deploys a similar Beckettian vapidity of character, in his version of Robinson Crusoe’s Friday, to suggest the utter irrevocability of histories of exploitation and of the perspectives of the marginal. 67. Yury Tynyanov’s example in “On Literary Evolution,” in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 2002), 72. 68. Quoted in Gregory L. Morris, A World of Order and Light: The Fiction of John Gardner (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 51. The fantastic aspect of Grendel that Gardner alludes to offers another useful illustration of how texts utilize multiple genres. 69. Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979). 70. See, for example, Laurence Veysey, “The ‘New’ Social History in the Context of American Historical Writing,” Reviews in American History 7, no. 1 (March 1979): 1–12.

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71. Lamming was likely influenced by Fanon, who in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) poses an extensive critique of Octave Mannoni’s reading of The Tempest as a model of the native’s alleged dependence on his colonizers in the latter’s Psychology of Colonialism. For a history of colonial readings of the Caliban-Prospero relationship, see Rob Nixon, “Caribbean and African Appropriations of ‘The Tempest,’ ” Critical Inquiry 13, no. 3 (Spring 1987): 557–578. For a broader history of Caliban’s reception, including performance history, see Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). See also Peter Hulme and William Howard Sherman, ed., “The Tempest” and Its Travels (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 72. Elaine Showalter, “Miranda and Cassandra: The Discourse of the Feminist Intellectual,” in Tradition and the Talents of Women, ed. Florence Howe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 311–327. 73. George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (London: Allison & Busby, 1984), 151–153. 74. C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (Dartmouth, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2001), 125. 75. See, for example, Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 2007); and Bill Ashcroft, Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Postcolonial Literatures (New York: Routledge, 2009). Ashcroft writes that in Caliban’s famous lines “he gives voice to an issue that lies at the center of post-colonial studies: is that language good for nothing but cursing, or can Caliban use that language to change the world?” (2). Moreover, in Caliban’s “The isle is full of noises” speech, Shakespeare gives the slave some of the most beautiful language in the play, suggesting that the playwright rejects Miranda’s account that Caliban is the backward native upon whom “any print of goodness wilt not take” (1.2.358). 76. John Edgar Wideman, Philadelphia Fire (New York: Vintage, 1990), 142. 77. Of the many studies that consider this tension, one might look again to Fanon for “the anxiety shared by native intellectuals to shrink away from that Western culture in which they all risk being swamped.” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 1963), 209. See also Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994): “That is the partial tragedy of resistance, that it must to a certain degree work to recover forms already established or at least influenced or infiltrated by the culture of empire” (210). 78. The fact that Lamming conceives of his collective experience as one shared by “millions of men” like him suggests a number of familiar pitfalls of claims to cultural authority or authenticity as validated by collective experience. The drawing of such identity-based groups posits a unitary, homogeneous experience for all members of the group and excludes others who might have related yet distinct experiences— colonial women, in this case. Moreover, Lamming’s experience is also a relatively privileged one, suggesting that his experience is not “representative,” in the sense of “typical,” despite the fact that he is serving as a “representative” in the sense of an (elite) individual who speaks on behalf of others. 79. Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” College English 34, no. 1 (October 1972): 18. 80. Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), xxii.

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81. Ibid., xxiii. Ironically, Fetterley writes, just before the quoted phrase, that “women obviously cannot rewrite literary works so that they become ours by virtue of reflecting our reality.” While she surely means that women cannot erase or replace earlier texts, it’s surprising that Fetterley, writing in the late seventies, was not familiar with Rhys’s novel—perhaps a testimony to the significance of Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) in advancing Wide Sargasso Sea’s centrality for feminist literary studies. 82. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 4. 83. Barthes, S/Z, 4. 84. Gerry Brenner, Performative Criticism: Experiments in Reader Response (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004). 85. Wyndham and Melly, ed., The Letters of Jean Rhys, 262. 86. Ibid., 297. 87. See, for example, the title of Molly Hite’s book: The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narratives (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). 88. Caroline Rody, “Burning Down the House: The Revisionary Paradigm of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea,” in Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure, ed. Alison Booth (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 302. 89. Nancy R. Harrison also sees in these characters a host of subtexts and Bakhtinian voices that forestall the closure of “the women’s text.” Nancy R. Harrison, Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 183. 90. Rody’s understanding of minor characters as suggestions of other stories points to a tension in scholarly readers’ and writers’ understanding of minor characters as “silenced” or “excluded” in canonical texts. When is a minor character a possibility suggested and when a voice that is suppressed? To return to the example of The Tempest, one could read Caliban as a minor figure with a surprising importance, in which Shakespeare embeds a critique of Prospero’s own will to power by gesturing toward the plight of the dispossessed. Or one could view Caliban as excluded from the play’s central attention, which focuses on the experience of the European characters and gives only minor consideration to, and reproduces stereotypical views about, non-European peoples. 91. Paul Ricoeur, “Memory and Forgetting,” quoted in John J. Su, “ ‘Once I Would Have Gone Back . . . but Not Any Longer’: Nostalgia and Narrative Ethics in Wide Sargasso Sea,” Critique 44, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 157. 92. For example, Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon, whose accounts of the postmodern diverge on the nature of postmodernism’s relation to history and the literary forms of the past, agree about its explicit intertextuality. Jameson writes: “postmodernist art is going to be about art itself in a new kind of way.” Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (New York: Verso, 1998), 7. Hutcheon points out: “Parody—often called ironic quotation, pastiche, appropriation, or intertextuality—is usually considered central to postmodernism, both by its detractors and its defenders.” Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 92.

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93. For a summary of these pronouncements, see Mark Greif, “ ‘The Death of the Novel’ and Its Afterlives: Toward a History of the ‘Big, Ambitious Novel,’ ” boundary 2 36, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 11–29. See also David Lodge, “The Novelist at the Crossroads,” in The Novelist at the Crossroads (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971). For a recounting of these forces in an extremely self-conscious piece of fiction, see Ronald Sukenick’s 1969 “The Death of the Novel,” in The Death of the Novel and Other Stories (New York: Fiction Collective Two, 2003): “Realistic fiction presupposed chronological time as the medium of a plotted narrative, an irreducible individual psyche as the subject of its characterization, and, above all, the ultimate, concrete reality of things as the object and rationale of its description. In the world of post-realism, however, all of these absolutes have become absolutely problematic” (41). For the rise of competing media, see, for example, Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). 94. See Hutcheon, Politics, esp. 93–117, 141–168. 95. John Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” in The Friday Book (New York: Putnam, 1984), 69, 71. 96. Barth, “The Literature of Replenishment,” in The Friday Book (New York: Putnam, 1984), 205. 97. Ibid., 203. Barth admits his ideal postmodernist will nonetheless encounter limits in the democratic appeal of his fiction: “he may not hope to reach and move the devotees of James Michener and Irving Wallace—not to mention the great mass of television-addicted non-readers. But he should hope to reach and delight, at least part of the time, beyond the circle of what Mann used to call the Early Christians: professional devotees of high art” (203).

2. THE REAL AND IMAGINARY POLITICS OF MINOR-CHARACTER ELABORATION, 1983–2014 1. J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (New York: Viking, 2003), 1. 2. James Wood, “A Frog’s Life,” London Review of Books 25, no. 20 (October 23, 2003): 15–16. My principal aim here is not to add to the pile of scholarship that seeks to untangle Coetzee from Costello, but Wood is surely mistaken in suggesting that Coetzee is particularly famous for Foe. Unlike his character Costello, who has overwhelmingly and to her frustration “made her name with” a single novel, Coetzee has produced a large, acclaimed corpus, not a single piece of which is widely agreed to be his most famous or best; he has won the Man Booker Prize twice (for The Life and Times of Michael K [1983] and Disgrace [1999]—neither time, that is, for Foe), and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) remains one of his best-known works. 3. Samuel Durrant, “J.  M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, and the Limits of the Sympathetic Imagination,” in J.  M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual, ed. Jane Poyner (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 119. Laura Wright makes a similar point in “A Feminist-Vegetarian Defense of Elizabeth Costello,” in the same collection. 4. OED, s.v. “Elaborate,” def. 1. 5. Steve Coates, “Troy Story,” New York Times, January 22, 2010.

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6. Eileen Williams-Wanquet, “Marina Warner’s Indigo as Ethical Deconstruction and Reconstruction,” Critique 46, no. 2 (2005): 274. 7. Marta Bryk, “The Maidservant in the Attic: Rewriting Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly,” Women: A Cultural Review 15, no. 2 (2004): 205, 215. 8. Linda Schelbitzki Pickle, “ ‘Scratching Away the Male Tradition’: Christa Wolf ’s ‘Kassandra,’ ” Contemporary Literature 27, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 34. 9. Christa Wolf, Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays, trans. Jan Van Heurck (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 1. 10. Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), n.p. 11. Heidi Gilpin, “Cassandra: Creating a Female Voice,” in Responses to Christa Wolf: Critical Essays, ed. Marilyn Sibley Fries (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 350. I presume that scholars who laud such texts for “giving a voice to the silenced” are being metaphorical—that they don’t really think Sycorax, Cassandra, and company are doing any speaking for themselves. I assume that when Gates welcomes the slaves of Tara at long last finding a voice, he actually means something like: “Randall has created a representation of slaves’ voices, which contests and critiques Mitchell’s depiction of slaves and the racist ideology upon which such stereotypical images were founded, an ideology visible in literary conventions that made Southern belles far more likely than their slaves to be heroines of novels.” But if critics mean something akin to the foregoing sentence, why do they continually return to “giving voice” in their accounts of what such texts do? They gain brevity, certainly; my version is considerably more of a mouthful than Gates’s and does not as easily make the transition to paperback blurb—the shorthand metaphor thus lingers as refrain and residue of a more nuanced, theoretically informed critical account. More significantly, it is a refrain that inflates the sense of a political triumph; rather than lauding authors for creating a preferable representation, critics imagine an act of liberation. And it is a choice of metaphor that reveals the liberal investments—in individual free speech as a primary social value and in the literary creation of round characters with complex subjectivities—of those who deploy it. 12. The experience of the minor character, in turn, is often taken to be representative of that of the subaltern group to which she belongs. 13. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988), 271–313. 14. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 7. 15. On postcolonial “writing back,” see Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989); on postmodern narrative representations of history, see Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989). 16. Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 10. 17. For postmodern self-reflexivity, see Hutcheon, Politics; for postmodern depictions of fragmented subjectivity, see Phillip Brian Harper, Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

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18. Some of Desdemona’s speeches are spoken by fictional characters from earlier literary works (Desdemona, Clytemnestra, and Effi Briest [the title character of an 1895 novel by Theodor Fontane]), some by historical figures (Martin Luther’s wife, Katharina von Bora; Christiane von Goethe; and Sappho), and others by legendary characters who fall somewhere in between (the Virgin Mary, Petrarch’s Laura). While Desdemona thus combines minor-character elaboration with fictionalizations of female historical figures, its central concern to replace a history of women’s silence with speech poses a useful example. The generic hybridity of Brückner’s book, mixing minor-character elaboration with the more common practice of fictionalizing actual historical figures, offers another instance of the overlapping of generic boundaries. Desdemona makes clear that “giving voice” to female fictional characters shares a broader concern to reveal the hidden histories of women’s lives and experiences, which has been a cornerstone of feminist theory and practice. The crucial difference, however, is that minor-character elaborations seek to revise an earlier fictional representation rather than construct one from the historical archive. (The Sappho monologue represents an anomaly, in this regard, as Sappho would seem to be far from “censored,” even in the metaphorical sense of being buried in the historical archive.) 19. One could point to countless calls for, enactments of, and reassessments provoked by “the recuperative paradigm,” but for an overview of the rise to prominence of “silence,” “voice,” and attendant issues in feminist thought, see Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, “Introduction,” in Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 3–15. As a “high-water mark,” 1982 was, for example, the year of Wolf ’s Frankfurt lectures and Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice. By no means, however, do I mean to suggest that the concern with voice began or ended at this moment. See, for example, Cindy Moore’s cleverly titled “Why Feminists Can’t Stop Talking About Voice,” Composition Studies 30, no. 2 (2002): 11–25. 20. Although most of Hale’s examples feature free indirect discourse, the logic of “characterological emancipation” is easily extended to the first-person voice of character narration, in which the protagonist appears to speak without the mediation of an extradiegetic narrator—and thus could be construed as even more autonomous and free to express herself. 21. Rita Felski argues that Atwood frequently makes female characters into villains as well as heroines in order to refute the “entrenched belief that any less-than-flattering portrayal of a woman must be inspired by misogyny.” Rita Felski, Literature After Feminism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 125. 22. Christine Brückner, Desdemona—If You Had Only Spoken! trans. Eleanor Bron (London: Virago, 1992), 142. 23. Below, I consider the myriad potential objections to “voice” as a concept, or to the notion that Clytemnestra or Desdemona—both of whom speak at length in the plays from which they are best known—has been previously silenced, and the implicit claim of inauthenticity on which such a claim of silencing relies. 24. Nancy Miller, quoted in Carla Kaplan, “Reading Feminist Readings: Recuperative Reading and the Silent Heroine of Feminist Criticism,” in Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin

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(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 188n1. For “archeology” and “excavating,” see Shari Benstock and Suzanne Harris, “From a Former Editor’s Perspective: Women’s Literary History, Continued,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 26, no. 1 (2007): 11–14. 25. For example, regarding Cassandra (one of few uses of the genre’s techniques since Wide Sargasso Sea that has received considerable scholarly attention), Heidi Gilpin applauds Wolf ’s respect for her character’s autonomous existence and makes the novel into an act of historical recovery and excavation: “The narrative Cassandra is Wolf ’s exploration of a previously suppressed female voice.” Gilpin goes on to suggest that Wolf has “unearthed this mythical voice,” as if it existed anterior to the author’s act of representation. Similarly, R. McClure Smith asserts that Martin’s “lifting and centering of that inarticulate voice at the heart of her narrative is clearly an empowering act.” If it is clear, however, that Mary Reilly’s narrative voice is not “lifted” but invented by Valerie Martin, it becomes far less clear whom this act is imagined to be empowering. Mary, the fictional entity whose voice has been “lifted”? Victorian maidservants in general? The commercially successful female author, who has clearly “come to voice” before “lifting” that of her character? Gilpin, “Cassandra,” 350, 356; emphases added. R. McClure Smith, “The Strange Case of Valerie Martin and ‘Mary Reilly,’ ” Narrative 1, no. 3 (October 1993): 261n10. 26. For a classic articulation of this practice of feminist literary scholarship, see Lillian S. Robinson, “Treason Our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 2, no. 1 (1983): 83–98, published the same year as Cassandra and Desdemona. 27. Susan Snaider Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 272. See also Kaplan, “Reading Feminist Readings,” 170, who quotes Ann Rosalind Jones on “the phonocentric emphasis in American feminist criticism.” 28. Lanser, Fictions, 5. 29. Mica Howe and Sarah Appleton Aguiar, “Introduction,” in He Said, She Says: An RSVP to the Male Text, ed. Mica Howe and Sarah Appleton Aguiar (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), 12–13. See also Judith Grant, who critically summarizes this strategy for its assumption of an essential female experience: “Since objectivity is merely the name given to the male perspective, one solution to male domination is reinterpretation of the world from ‘women’s point of view.’ ” Judith Grant, Fundamental Feminism: Contesting the Core Concepts of Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, 1993), 76. 30. In the essays, Wolf states her desire to replace the supposed “objectivity” of the Western tradition with a new subjectivity. At one point in the final essay, she acknowledges that her work violates the “objective” rules of literature and that she does not “accept the authority of the literary genres” (278). Despite these assertions, the book’s initial critics lamented its refusal to adhere to generic conventions. Scholars since have recognized in Wolf ’s project an attempt to destabilize literary norms, to reject traditional forms, and produce “an aesthetic of resistance” (236) by engendering a uniquely feminine literary form. The result, which Wolf describes as a dense “fabric” that counters a tradition of “renunciation of the manifoldness of phenomena, in favor of dualism and monism” (287), frustrates the attempt to summarize her project adequately in a small space. See also Elaine Showalter, “Miranda and

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Cassandra: The Discourse of the Feminist Intellectual,” in Tradition and the Talents of Women, ed. Florence Howe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 311–327; W. E. McDonald, “Who’s Afraid of Wolf ’s Cassandra—or Cassandra’s Wolf: Male Tradition and Women’s Knowledge in Cassandra,” Journal of Narrative Technique 20, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 267–283; and James I. Porter, “Resisting Aesthetics: The Cassandra Motif in Christa Wolf and Aeschylus,” in Responses to Christa Wolf: Critical Essays, ed. Marilyn Sibley Fries (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 378–394. 31. Cassandra thus performs a balancing act between liberal and postmodern feminisms—the former, which stresses the urgent need to claim subject status for women, and the latter, which wants to displace and decenter the liberal subject. Cassandra enacts an exemplary compromise between these positions, atypical in the genre, by insisting on the political necessity of women’s speech and by dramatizing, in both the essays and the novel, speakers who neither possess full control of that speech nor produce coherent meanings. Wolf admits that her own essays are full of unfinished thoughts and begins her “Lectures in Poetics” by asserting that she has no poetics. And her Cassandra demands to be heard and is imprisoned for speaking in opposition to Priam, her father, yet her prophetic visions are followed by fits in which her voice escapes unbidden and is marked as having an agency of its own: “it was, it is, an experience when I ‘see,’ when I ‘saw.’ Saw that the outcome of this hour was our destruction. . . . The ultimate estrangement from myself and from everyone. . . . Until finally the dreadful torment took the form of a voice; forced its way out of me, through me, dismembering me as it went; and set itself free . . . ‘Woe,’ it shrieked  . . . ” (59). Wolf ’s, then, is a complex treatment of voice as both a necessary social instrument of authority and agency and one that ultimately exceeds the speaker’s conscious control. 32. Quoted in Gilpin, “Cassandra,” 356. 33. Lanser, Fictions, 183, suggests the implications of such a refusal; she quotes Ellen Moers, in the context of Jane Eyre: “Brontë makes her speaker both a person and a female in the quickest shorthand available to women writers: she has her say no.” 34. On the popular appeal of The Red Tent, not surprisingly focused on voice, see Holly Blackford, “The Wandering Womb at Home in the Red Tent: An Adolescent Bildungsroman in a Different Voice,” ALAN Review 32, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 74–85. Rawles’s My Jim is written in spare oral dialect and posed as a frame tale, in which Sadie tells her life story to her granddaughter, who records a transcript of her voice: “Sometime her voice tremble sometime it shout. I listens to all she say. When she tell it in a small voice I leans close to hear. We cuts the squares and pieces our stories. I writes down everything she say. At the end of the telling I knows what to do.” Nancy Rawles, My Jim (New York: Three Rivers, 2005), 18. 35. Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon (New York: Ballantine, 1982), xi. 36. See the introduction, note 82, for Flann O’Brien’s playful depiction of this rivalry in At-Swim-Two-Birds. 37. Hajo Drees, A Comprehensive Interpretation of the Life and Work of Christa Wolf, Twentieth-Century German Writer (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen, 2002), 129. 38. Jacobs, “Speaking ‘Chrissandra,’ ” 290–291; emphasis added. 39. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, 1927), 66–67, 78. 40. Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful,” Yale Review 49 (1959): 256–257. 41. György Lukács, “European Realism,” in The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1900–2000, ed. Dorothy J. Hale (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), 384.

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42. Vladimir Nabokov, “The Art of Fiction XL: Vladimir Nabokov,” interview by Herbert Gold, Paris Review 41 (1967): 92–111. Taken out of context, this quote has been used to portray Nabokov as authoritarian, even complicit, with his narrator in instrumentalizing Lolita. But just prior to the “galley slaves” quip, Nabokov makes clear both that he views Humbert as villainous for cruelly abusing her and that he simply objects to the idea that an author can do injustice to fictional entities: “I would put it differently: Humbert Humbert is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear ‘touching.’ That epithet, in its true, tear-iridized sense, can only apply to my poor little girl. Besides, how can I ‘diminish’ to the level of ciphers, et cetera, characters that I have invented myself? One can ‘diminish’ a biographee, but not an eidolon” (96). See also James Wood, who writes that Thomas Pynchon’s characters “do not move, because they are the serfs of allegory.” Quoted in Mark McGurl, “The Zombie Renaissance” N+1 9 (Spring 2010): 175; emphasis added. Here again, a flat, typological, or symbolic character is imagined to have its movement restricted; not animated or lifelike, it is figured to be yoked in servitude to a despotic author. 43. See Lynch for a comprehensive history of “how characterization, understood as the representation of subjectivity, came to define the project of the wide range of writings we now assemble under the retroactive rubric ‘the novel.’ ” Deirdre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 8. 44. Walter Benn Michaels, “Neoliberal Aesthetics: Fried, Rancière, and the Form of the Photograph,” Nonsite.org 1 (2011). 45. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (New York: Routledge, 2002), 44. 46. Molly Hite, The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narratives (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 25. While it is true that characters belonging to elite social categories may frequently and conventionally serve as protagonists in a given genre (royalty, in classic tragedy), in other genres (say, the picaresque), the conventions reverse this hierarchy, and protagonists are conventionally “low” born. Hite is certainly mistaken to suggest that “certain categories of socially marginal human beings” only qualify to be minor characters, even in the English novel. One might point to Moll Flanders, or Pip, or even Jane Eyre for that matter, for examples of socially marginal protagonists. 47. On Barker’s refusal of the conventional narrative trajectory for her heroine, see Elizabeth Bennett Kubek, “Women’s Participation in the Urban Culture of Early Modern London: Images from Fiction,” in The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London: Routledge, 1995). 48. Though conventional realist methods of manipulating point of view to create a round character with a complex psychology will make a character seem more realistic to a modern audience, what explanation other than authentic access to the feminine can be given in, for example, claiming that a twentieth-century German author has a better understanding of, and can more accurately represent, an ancient Trojan priestess than can a fifth-century B.C. Athenian playwright? 49. While Wolf researched both Athenian tragedy and pre-Hellenic religion, she insists that she is providing her own subjective interpretation of the mythical characters, one that is ahistorical and anachronistic. She acknowledges of her portrayal of Aeneas: “Consideration, coupled with strength? So, I was transferring a contemporary ideal to a mythological figure who cannot possibly have been that kind of

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person. Of course. What else?” (184). And Wolf frankly states that her Troy “is not a description of bygone days but a model for a kind of utopia” (224). Critics who chided the novel for being “a utopian fantasy without historical basis” seem either determined to believe novels should be historical records or did not read the essays very closely; see, for example, Mary Lefkowitz, “Can’t Fool Her,” New York Times, September 9, 1984. 50. For a critique of the tendency to view canonical literary texts as enforcers of hegemonic ideology, see Savcan Bercovitch, “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 4 (Summer 1986): 631–653. 51. If the author’s identity (i.e., the author’s voice, rather than the represented character’s) is what is at stake in determining whether women have a voice, then nearly all of literary history until the seventeenth century or so is silence. In addition to the essentialism implied by supposing only a woman, but also any woman, can give voice to a female character, if the author’s vocally rendered identity is at stake, it is hard to understand how “giving voice” to a “previously silenced” character would be possible since anything written by a female author would qualify as her voice, not the character’s. One suspects that the author’s social identity is often what is truly at stake in the claim that contemporary authors “give voice” to minor characters when those characters are imagined to have been “silenced” or inauthentically represented in a canonical precursor written by a male author. This explanation helps account for the fact that though Penelope does speak quite extensively in The Odyssey (and her interior state is represented as well), Atwood can consider her to be silenced by Homer, to never have had the chance to tell her story. This is why, for another example, Marjorie Garber can treat the portrayal of Gertrude as a piece of property passed from father to disinterested husband, in Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius, as merely ornamented with “faux-feminist trimmings.” Marjorie Garber, “The Chapter After ‘The End,’ ” New York Times, April 8, 2001. That is, the unspoken identitarian logic underlying such claims rests on the dubious assumption that only authors who belong to the same identity category as the character can authentically represent such a character—or that there is such a thing as an authentic representation. 52. See Wolf, Cassandra, 154: “What [Aeschylus’s Cassandra] says is unsuitable for a woman.” See also Helene P. Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). A play like Euripides’ The Trojan Women, in using the Trojan War to critique the Peloponnesian, shares a great deal with Wolf ’s Cassandra’s use of the same conflict to critique the Cold War. On The Trojan Women, see Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 53. Aeschylus, The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1984), 156. 54. The third play of Aeschylus’s trilogy, The Eumenides, is a more complicated case, in which Athena rules that Orestes killing his mother is a lesser offense than Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon, and so the inequality of women is shown to be constitutive of Athenian justice. While it makes visible this contradiction, the play also concludes by imaginatively resolving it. 55. Sara Munson Deats reads the play “as a critique of uxorial violence and a trenchant interrogation of the venerated ideal of unconditional wifely obedience.” Sara Munson Deats, “ ‘Truly, an Obedient Lady’: Desdemona, Emilia, and the Doctrine of Obedience in Othello,” in Othello: New Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin

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(New York: Routledge, 2002), 234. For the play as a critique of Othello’s internalization of a repressive European ideology of honor and chastity, see Walter Cohen’s introduction to The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997). “Resistant readings” may often be purposeful, productive misreadings, manifestly polemical, attempting to reappropriate a master text rather than provide a faithful close reading. But one task of criticism should be to specify whether a contemporary rewriting is such a resistant reading that uses the precursor as a pretext for a broader point about a history of oppression or is engaged in a critique of the politics of a particular canonical literary text. 56. The response to Martin’s Mary Reilly demonstrates the extremity of the tendency to read minor-character elaborations as subversive. R. McClure Smith admits that “Martin is scathingly dismissive of the notion that she set out with any intentional re-visionary feminist agenda,” and so he is forced into a virtuoso performance of theoretical gymnastics to argue that the novel’s “textual unconscious” overpowers Martin’s conscious efforts and is able to “effect, on its own terms, a more thoroughly subversive critical re-vision” than would result if Martin were intentionally subverting Stevenson. Smith all but undoes his strained reading by admitting its too-clever solution at his essay’s close: “the pleasures of my attempted critical mastery of Mary Reilly might well have followed the same diverse and perverse paths . . . simply producing a maid-to-order reading.” Smith, “Strange Case,” 250, 251, 259. Were Smith’s desire to read a minor-character elaboration as radically subversive an isolated case of critical folly, it might be merely dismissed. Instead it is wholly symptomatic. See also Bryk’s “The Maidservant,” which begins by writing that Martin “clearly has nothing against ‘a revisionism which becomes a kind of homage’ [Showalter 1986: 247], which so many feminist critics have vehemently rejected. Indeed, rather than mounting a challenge to the precursor text, she reproduces it with an almost reverential faithfulness” (205). But refusing to accept that a contemporary historical thriller, because it features a female servant, might have no problems paying homage to Stevenson, Bryk goes to lengths to make the true meaning of Martin’s text run counter to her professed intentions. “Despite Martin’s claims to the contrary, her rewriting sets out to do much more than merely pay homage to the great writer.” Bryk proposes that Martin’s “professed affection for Stevenson’s novella” might be “merely a subterfuge employed to initiate a polemical dialogue” or “an attempt to explode its ideological assumptions from within while simultaneously shamming fidelity,” or perhaps “Martin felt that, like most women writers accessing the maledominated arena of Victorian literature, she ‘had to state her self-definition in codeform, disguising passion as piety, rebellion as obedience’ ” (208). Bryk thus reclaims the novel as one that pays “allegiance to the Marxist-feminist agenda” (215), but she is so eager to see this agenda pursued that she applies the model of Gilbert and Gubar to Martin’s authorship, making Martin suffer from the same anxieties as her Victorian counterparts in order to redeem her novel for a radical cause. But why not, instead of reading her radical intentions as unconscious or encoded, accept that Martin—a commercially successful contemporary writer whose best-known novel is better known in its film version starring Julia Roberts—has no radical intentions at all? Mary Reilly foregrounds the experience of the Victorian servant class and is informed by a wealth of contemporary knowledge and concerns, but should portraying that experience as one of privation qualify as radical political work in the

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present? Nor is it radical—though for a literary scholar it may certainly be worthwhile—to suggest to contemporary readers that servants had rich interior lives that were ignored or repressed in Victorian fiction. Martin’s project is informed by contemporary awareness of historical class oppression, but the novel is hardly subversive for that. Her Mary has internalized the ideology of her epoch, does not question her station, is dedicated to her work, and dreams, though never suspects, she might own a garden of her own someday. Martin depicts these interpellations of ideology, making no effort to critique them or reveal, say, any alienation produced as a result. I read Mary Reilly’s most progressive positions to be that violence against women was a pervasive problem in Victorian London and a liberal uplift ideology that believes that given the ability to read and write (Mary has briefly attended school thanks to the charitable work of Jekyll), servants like Mary might occasionally transcend the station of their birth and make a better life. 57. For the influence of perspectivist epistemology on ethnography, see Karl G. Heider, “The Rashomon Effect: When Ethnographers Disagree,” American Anthropologist 90, no. 1 (1988): 73–81. 58. As part of the long narrative of his adventures, Odysseus recounts his visit to Hades, where he learns from the shade of his mother of Penelope’s faithfulness, grief, and suffering at the hands of the suitors. But as Anticlea’s story, as recounted by Odysseus, accords with the account of the poet/narrator in books 1 through 4, we have no reason to question it. In a similar mischaracterization, Howe and Aguiar argue that in feminist revisions of King Lear such as Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, “Goneril, Regan, and even Cordelia are granted the power of telling their stories, extricating themselves from beneath the weight of centuries of their father’s dominant role as teller of the tale.” Howe and Aguiar, “Introduction,” 13. Howe and Aguiar attribute to Lear’s daughters the agency of self-liberation through narration and make Lear into the “teller” of the drama in which he is the protagonist. 59. Madison Smartt Bell, “Small Blue Thing,” Harper’s Magazine (June 2000): 112. 60. For postmodern skepticism toward metanarratives, see Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); on historiographic metafiction, see Hutcheon, Politics, 72. 61. Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (New York: Vintage, 1993), 3, 4. 62. See the introduction for a discussion the novel’s tradition of perspectival experiment. 63. Walter Benn Michaels, The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 31. 64. Christa Wolf, Medea: A Modern Retelling, trans. John Cullen (New York: Doubleday, 1998), n.p. 65. The rulers of Wolf ’s Corinth seek to maintain its utopian façade by covering up a secret history of human sacrifice, and so many stories circulate around Medea that she laments, “I myself no longer know what I went through” (Wolf, Medea, 40). Even the incontrovertible claims of subjective experience quail here amid the constant flux of competing perspectives and accounts. 66. Geraldine Brooks, March: A Novel (New York: Viking, 2004), 183, 211. 67. See, for example, Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow, eds., A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory and Bakhtin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 68. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Pluralism as Dogmatism,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 3 (1986): 498.

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69. Donald A. Crosby, “Two Perspectives on Metaphysical Perspectivism: Nietzsche and Whitehead,” The Pluralist 2, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 71. 70. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 50, 41. 71. Ibid., 57, 41. 72. M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 272. 73. For a discussion of the pluralist ideal, see David Campbell and Morton Schoolman, eds., New Pluralism: William Connelly and the Contemporary Global Condition (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008). 74. Hayden White, “Historical Pluralism,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 3 (Spring 1986): 483. 75. J. M. Coetzee, Foe (New York: Penguin, 1986), 51. 76. See, for example, Durrant, “J. M. Coetzee.” 77. See, for example, Teresa Dovey, “The Intersections of Postmodern, Post-Colonial, and Feminist Discourse in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe,” Journal of Literary Studies 5, no. 2 (1989): 145–182; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s Crusoe/Roxana,” in Consequences of Theory, ed. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 154–180; Benita Parry, “Speech and Silence in the Fictions of J.  M. Coetzee,” in Critical Perspectives on J.  M. Coetzee, ed. Graham Huggan and Stephen Watson (London: Macmillan, 1996), 37–65; and Brian Macaskill and Jeanne Colleran, “Reading History, Writing Heresy: The Resistance of Representation and the Representation of Resistance in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe,” Contemporary Literature 33, no. 3 (1992): 432–457. 78. Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 120. 79. Derek Attridge, J.  M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 11. 80. In his depiction of literary institutions, Coetzee prefigures recent scholarly interest in the processes of cultural legitimation and the prestige economy, such as Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004) and James F. English’s The Economy of Prestige (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). David Lodge is an exception in detecting “in the book’s implied author, as well as in its heroine, a disillusionment with the value our culture attributes to literature . . . and a kind of restiveness at being regarded as ‘a writer of world importance.’ ” David Lodge, “Disturbing the Peace,” New York Review of Books 50, no. 18 (November 20, 2003).

3. “AN INSATIABLE MARKET” FOR MINOR CHARACTERS: GENRE IN THE CONTEMPORARY LITERARY MARKETPLACE 1. Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair (New York: Penguin, 2001), 12, 31, 119. 2. Hachette publishes under such imprints as Little, Brown and Co. and Back Bay Books in the United States, where Fforde’s novels are published by Penguin, a Pearson subsidiary. By the second installment of the Thursday Next series, Fforde seems to have recognized his own books’ complicity with Goliathan corporations, making Goliath

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look like it has extended its monopolies into our world; the flyleaf of Fforde’s Lost in a Good Book (2002) is ironically stamped with Goliath Corp.’s seal of approval. 3. This information was available publicly on Lagardère’s website, but see also Paul Betts, “Paris Remains Unusually Quiet in Lagardère Battle,” Financial Times, April 27, 2010; and Blaise Robinson and Daniela Pegna, “Lagardère Sells EADS Stake for $3 Billion,” Reuters U.S., April 9, 2013, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/09/us -lagardere-eads-sold-idUSBRE93806G20130409. Lagardère’s unscrupulousness, as opposed to Goliath’s, is of a more traditional kind; the company was at the center of a huge insider-trading scandal in 2009. 4. http://shop.goliathcorp.com. 5. For the “revitalization,” see special issues in NLH (“Theorizing Genres,” 34, no. 2 [Summer 2003]) and PMLA (“Remapping Genre,” 122, no. 5 [October 2007]). On a lapse in the decades prior, see John Frow, “ ‘Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything You Need’: Genre Theory Today,” PMLA 122, no. 5 (October 2007). 6. Though Lynch advocates a materialist, institutional approach of “engagement with the shifting consumption practices that novels have been thought of as soliciting,” she ends up reading how novels are consumed in their immanent form, their “characteristic plottings of the coordinates of response.” Moreover, arguing that “the novel’s special ability to infiltrate everyday life” is “fundamental to  .  .  . its generic identity,” Lynch ironically locates the novel’s particular identity in the very qualities it shares with “other habit-forming commodities.” Deidre Lynch, “The Shandean Lifetime Reading Plan,” in The Work of Genre: Selected Essays from the English Institute, ed. Robyn Warhol (Cambridge, Mass.: English Institute, 2011), 172–173. 7. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (New York: Verso, 2005), 57. 8. Moretti resorts to anthropomorphic and evolutionary metaphors that suggest genres adapt with the times or die out: “a genre exhausts its potentialities—and the time comes to give a competitor a chance—when its inner form is no longer capable of representing the most significant aspects of contemporary reality.” Later, he urges: “take a form, follow it from space to space, and study the reasons for its transformations: the ‘opportunistic, hence unpredictable’ reasons of evolution.” Moretti, Graphs, 17n7, 90. 9. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 85, 84, 20. 10. For the symbolic economy of the literary field see Pierre Bourdieu, “The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods,” in The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 11. Mark McGurl, “Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies in the Waste Land of the Present,” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 335–336. 12. For a more extensive critique of quantitative methodology, see the introduction. 13. Moretti uses extant bibliographies, but to quantify an unnoticed genre one must gather instances and determine whether a given text “counts” or not—an interpretive question that abstract quantitative methods abjure. 14. Collins’s account of the recent shift in the sites and media through which literary culture circulates is indisputable but uncritical of the way publishing conglomerates propagate that culture as self-help therapy. Collins, that is, neglects the ideological nature of the belief in literary value and the way that ideology is deployed

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under monopoly capitalism—an economic context this chapter insists is necessary to understanding the social logic of contemporary literary production. Jim Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010). 15. These qualitative, empirical methods resemble what the social sciences refer to as “prolonged engagement” and “triangulation.” 16. Hayden White, “Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and History for the Study of Literary Genres,” New Literary History 34, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 606–607. 17. For paratexts’ function in establishing genre, see the section “Marketing to a Bibliophile Niche” in this chapter. 18. For the market shares of the major publishers, see John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2010), 116. 19. For the merger, see, for example, Jeremy Greenfield, “Penguin Random House Merger Closed: Three Things To Watch For,” Forbes, July 1, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites /jeremygreenfield/2013/07/01/penguin-random-house-merger-closed-three-things -to-watch-for/. 20. The Australian Wicked website: http://www.wickedthemusical.com.au/about /history.html. 21. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Market of Symbolic Goods,” in The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 127. 22. For midcentury fears about the effects mass culture would have on book publishing, see Evan Brier, A Novel Marketplace: Mass Culture, the Book Trade, and Postwar American Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Dwight Macdonald, however, anticipated and put hope in the idea that “there is not One Big Audience but rather a number of smaller, more specialized audiences that may still be commercially profitable. (I take it for granted that the less differentiated the audience, the less chance there is of something original and lively creeping in, since the principle of the lowest common denominator applies.)” Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult & Midcult,” in Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain, ed. John Summers (New York: NYRB, 2012), 69. 23. Thompson, Merchants, 10. 24. Jason Epstein, Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future (New York: Norton, 2001), 105; André Schiffrin, The Business of Books (New York: Verso, 2000), 75. 25. Robert Escarpit’s term, cited by Radway, Reading, 29–32. 26. John B. Thompson, Books in the Digital Age (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2005), 32. 27. Thompson, Merchants, 10. 28. Christopher Moore, Fool (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 306. 29. In claiming that editors, authors, and other agents needn’t deploy strategic motives consciously, I follow Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus,” a feel for the game “that can be objectively adapted to . . . outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.” Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 53. Understanding the behavior of producers and consumers as following a habitus reveals another reason why Radway’s and Thompson’s methods of extensively interviewing subjects may not be necessary or may even yield misleading information;

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these social actors frequently act without the conscious motive or rationale that the (literary) sociologist may discern. 30. Jeanette Winterson, Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles (New York: Canongate, 2005), xiii–xiv. 31. Margaret Atwood, “Gertrude Talks Back,” in Good Bones (New York: Nan A. Talese, 1994), 16–19; Margaret Atwood, “Horatio’s Version,” in The Tent (New York: Nan A. Talese, 2006), 115–120. 32. For “house-generated” ideas, see Brier, A Novel Marketplace, 78. 33. A host of successors followed in the wake of Grahame-Smith’s sensation, endeavoring to mash up, pastiche, and travesty canonical works by interspersing genre-fiction elements into the actual text of the classic predecessors, for example, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (2009), Jane Slayer (2010), Emma and the Werewolves (2009), The Meowmorphosis (2011; in which Gregor Samsa awakes to find himself transformed into an adorable kitten), Wuthering Bites (2010), Mansfield Park and Mummies (2009), Android Karenina (2010), and Little Vampire Women (2010). A trip to any bookstore will confront one with a host of more earnest recent rewritings of canonical texts, using various genres, for example: Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2010); Peter Ackroyd, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (2008); and Peter Handke, Don Juan: His Own Version (2011). For Harper’s Austen series, see Alexandra Alter, “Austen Power,” Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2013. 34. “The Myths,” Canongate Books, http://www.themyths.co.uk. 35. http://www.canongate.net/. 36. Bourdieu, “Production,” 75–77. Such disavowals seek to mask, yet are always shadowed by, patent economic interests. 37. Alan Cheuse, “A Tale of Love and War Woven from ‘The Aeneid,’ ” Chicago Tribune, April 26, 2008. 38. For “hierarchies of legitimacy,” see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 86. 39. Dinah Birch, “Fiction Review: Lavinia,” Times Literary Supplement, May 22, 2009. 40. Maguire’s novel has sold over four million copies, with 3.3 million of those since the musical opened in 2003. For Maguire’s graduate studies, see Alex Witchel, “Mr. Wicked,” New York Times Magazine, March 11, 2007. 41. Alexandra Alter, “Rewriting the Story of Achilles,” Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2012. 42. “Gregory Maguire Interviews Madeline Miller,” Library Love Fest, http://harper library.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/12/gregory-maguire-interviews-madeline -miller-.html. 43. For analyses of media conglomeration, see Ben H. Bagdikian, The New Media Monopoly (Boston: Beacon, 2004); Robert McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 44. Julie Bosman, “Selling Books by Their Gilded Covers,” New York Times, December 3, 2011. For a spate of stylishly redesigned classics editions, including a HarperCollins Wuthering Heights tie-in with Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, see also Julie Bosman, “To Lure ‘Twilight’ Teenagers, Classic Books Get Bold Looks,” New York Times, June 27, 2012.

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45. The prize is now sponsored by Baileys Irish Cream Liqueur. Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, http://www.womensprizeforfiction.uk. Rewarding “accessibility,” the Baileys prize codifies what many detractors would intuit: that literary prizes are indifferent if not hostile to avant-garde production—a circular system in which marketable books garner prizes, which in turn are crucial to marketing those books. 46. James F. English, The Economy of Prestige (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). 47. The subject heading of the ad-mail (“Coupon, Cupid, and the Bard’s Worst Fear”) reveals a marketing strategy that promotes the fallacious notion of a prudish Bard, who might flinch at Moore’s bawdry, in order to sell Fool as a frisson-producing reading experience of witnessing the desecration of a cultural institution. Harper markets the symbolic violence done to (the supposedly staid) Shakespeare by contrasting the debauchery of Fool with the associations produced by merely naming “Shakespeare” as the paradigmatic bearer of high cultural prestige. See Bourdieu for proper names “as distinctive signs . . . classifying tools which create resemblances and differences by naming them” and function as “emblems which distinguish galleries, groups and artists and therefore the products they make or sell.” Bourdieu, “The Production of Belief,” 106. See also Theodor Adorno, for the claim that “all mass culture is fundamentally adaptation” and the culture industry’s stripping down of cultural goods until only “the luster of the great names” remains. Theodor Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1998), 67. 48. “Review of Fool,” ShakespeareGeek, http://blog.shakespearegeek.com/2009/03 /review-fool-by-christopher-moore.html. 49. “About Me,” ShakespeareGeek; emphasis mine. 50. Brooks notes in the “Afterword” that she has “borrowed from” Alcott for March’s “scaffolding.” Geraldine Brooks, March: A Novel (New York: Viking, 2004). The back cover of the Penguin paperback provides all the relevant information about the predecessor: “From Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has taken the character of the absent father, Mr. March, who has gone off to war, leaving his wife and daughters to make do in mean times. From vibrant New England to the sensuous antebellum South, March adds adult resonance to Alcott’s optimistic children’s novel. A lushly written, wholly original tale steeped in the details of another time, March secures Geraldine Brooks’s place as a renowned author of historical fiction.” In addition to emphasizing the novel’s “wholly original” achievement and conferring the title of “renowned author” upon Brooks, this synopsis accurately reflects the way that historical detail and local color overwhelm any revisionary impulse, which is reduced to adding “adult resonance” to Alcott’s novel. And, characteristically, any allusions within the novel are explained; Jo, for example, is referred to as “my dear young author” (3). If readers don’t recall that Jo is an avid writer and a figure for the author in Little Women, they know now. 51. For Bourdieu on citation as a strategy of affiliation or annexation, see “The Market of Symbolic Goods,” 138. 52. Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 90, 114, 115, 192, 202. 53. Moore, Fool, 25. In Jo Baker’s Longbourn, the laundry maid Sarah is not just literate but well read. She borrows Pamela from Elizabeth Bennet and is sure the book is

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“not quite respectable. . . . All those attempts on the young maid’s honour.” Jo Baker, Longbourn (New York: Knopf, 2013), 58–59. 54. See Brier, A Novel Marketplace, esp. chap. 2, for the postwar book trade’s efforts to cultivate a reading public and reinforce the value of reading by thematizing the value of books, as in Fahrenheit 451. 55. Anecdotal evidence suggests as much. Awarra from Somerset, N.J., a reader/ reviewer on Alibris.com, found the pseudonyms “confusing.” Review of The Wind Done Gone, http://www.alibris.com/booksearch?ework=7237787&keyword=wind +done+gone&cm_sp=works*listing*editions. 56. To name just a few: Elizabeth Aston, Mr. Darcy’s Daughters (2003); Linda Berdoll, The Bar Sinister: Pride and Prejudice Continues (1999); Juliette Shapiro, Excessively Diverted: The Sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (2008); Genevieve Wimer, Honour and Humility (2002); Joan Aiken, Lady Catherine’s Necklace (2000); Emma Tennant, An Unequal Marriage: Pride and Prejudice Twenty Years Later (1995). Tennant has also written a minor-character elaboration derived more closely from Rhys’s model than most in her Adèle: Jane Eyre’s Hidden Story (2003), also published as The French Dancer’s Bastard: The Story of Adèle from Jane Eyre. 57. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), 4. 58. Review of Darcy’s Story. Romance Times, http://www.rtbookreviews.com/book -review/darcys-story. The USA Today reviewer suggests, though does not seem troubled by, the escapist tendency behind the thriving Austen industry: “The more frightening the nightly news seems, the more comfort Jane Austen offers.” Deirdre Donahue, “From the Mind of Mr. Darcy,” USA Today, July 17, 2006. 59. Letter from uncorrected proof. 60. The website of Copperfield Books Ltd. of Bath boasts two books by Aylmer, plus a third. http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/estate/xda34/. Sales figures are from “The Author, Janet Aylmer, Talks About Writing Darcy’s Story,” appended to the Harper paperback. 61. http://www.janetaylmer.com/darcys%20story.html. 62. Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry Reconsidered,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1998), 98. 63. As Walter Benn Michaels has written: “multiculturalism could go from proclaiming itself a subversive politics to taking up its position as a corporate management tool” in “about ten minutes” because a politics of “respecting the Other” is far more attractive to corporate managers than one that seeks to eliminate economic inequality. Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 105. 64. Robin Lippincott, Mr. Dalloway (Louisville, Ky.: Sarabande, 1999), n.p. 65. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 10. 66. Caroline Rody, “Burning Down the House: The Revisionary Paradigm of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea,” in Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure, ed. Alison Booth (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 300. 67. Bertelsmann acquired Bantam in 1977, Doubleday and Dell in 1986, and merged BDD under Random House when it bought the latter in 1998, amid widespread fears about the effects of consolidation on less commercially viable books and the size of author advances. See Doreen Carvajal, “Authors Guild Tries to Block Proposed Merger of Two Publishers,” New York Times, April 27, 1998.

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68. Bourdieu, “Market,” 121. 69. Ibid., 115. 70. “About Virago,” Virago Books, http://www.virago.co.uk/about_virago.asp?TAG =&CID=&PGE=&LANG=EN. For parallel arguments about the promotion of postcolonial authors, see Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). 71. Bold Type, “Buzz,” http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0397/buzz.html. 72. Ibid. 73. Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 74. Bold Type, “Buzz.” Statistics support the notion that the book industry continues to thrive despite occasional downturns: U.S. net book sales, in 2011, fell to $27.2 billion. But the size of the market may not be the only indicator, as commentators such as Schiffrin point to a decline in the range and diversity of titles produced. Jim Milliot, “Book Sales Fell 2.5% in 2011,” Publisher’s Weekly, http://www.publishersweekly.com /pw/by-topic/industry-news/financial-reporting/article/53042-book-sales-fell-2 -5-in-2011.html. 75. For the market dynamics of bookstores, see Laura J. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 76. Stacey D’Erasmo, “Call Me Una,” New York Times, October 3, 1999. 77. “Books: The Best Books of 1999,” Time, December 20, 1999, http://www.time.com /time/magazine/article/0,9171,992900,00.html. 78. Thompson shows that publishing companies gamble that books of literary quality— which they see as having little potential for immediate blockbuster success—may indeed be quite profitable in the long run, as “backlist” titles. Thompson, Merchants, 219–221. 79. Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab’s Wife, or, The Star-Gazer (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), n.p. 80. Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (New York: Viking, 2001), is a work of popular history about these events. 81. See Moby-Dick, ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford (New York: Norton, 2002), chap. 105, “Does the Whale Diminish?—Will He Perish?” for Melville’s witheringly ironic claim that whales won’t suffer the fate of the American buffalo. When Una’s oil investments prosper, her neighbor proclaims, “Kerosene is the name of the new god” (648). At a number of moments in the novel, the contradictions of Naslund’s politics seem near to cracking under the weight of her own equivocation. Una contemplates moving to the West if civil war comes, “for [she] would not be party to any national solution to either slavery or states’ rights, or, indeed, to any political problem, writ largely in blood” (665). Melville insists that the whaling industry, the source of Ahab’s wealth, is steeped in the blood of both whales and the men who lose their lives in the chase, reminding readers: “For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it” (172). Earlier, when Una’s mother broaches the economics of slavery and the possibility of war, declaring that “the mills of England run on cotton picked by Southern slaves,” Una avoids the topic in the escapist manner characteristic of

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the novel: “I did not like to think of alliances among nations and wars that could be fought. I wanted to bring my baby into a peaceful world” (400). In the same conversation, Naslund seems almost schizoid with regard to animal rights, as Una hints at the bloody business that is whaling and, without a beat, enthuses over a morsel of pork: “ ‘The Quakers are a bloody lot when it comes to slaughtering whales.’ How delicious the bacon was that morning!” (400). 82. Una alludes explicitly, mentioning an author’s name or title of a work, in order of appearance and excluding repeat citations, to: Homer, Cervantes, Byron, Aristophanes, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Robert Burns, Sir Thomas More, Beowulf, Goethe, Defoe, Bunyan, Spenser, Scott, The Tempest, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear, Aeschylus, The Merchant of Venice, Pope, Keats, Henry IV [misquoted], Swift, Emerson, Ovid, Donne, Chaucer, Bluebeard, Carlyle, and Sidney. Una’s cultural capital also covers philosophy (Plato, Voltaire, and Montaigne) and plastic art (Da Vinci, Fragonard, and Michelangelo), and she meets or makes reference to her contemporaries Hawthorne, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott, Fuller, and Mitchell. 83. See E. Meyer’s product review, http://www.amazon.com/Ahabs-Wife-Star-gazer -Novel-P-S/product-reviews/0061767654/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_helpful?ie=UTF8&coliid =&showViewpoints=1&colid=&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending.

4. THE LOGIC OF CHARACTERS’ VIRTUAL LIVES 1. Geraldine Brooks, March: A Novel (New York: Viking, 2004), 275. 2. Nancy Rawles, “A Conversation with Nancy Rawles,” in My Jim (New York: Three Rivers, 2005), 170. 3. David Malouf, remarks at University of New South Wales, UNSWriting seminar with Bill Ashcroft. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgHmtoydtfE&sns=em. 4. Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad (New York: Canongate, 2005), 2. 5. Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia (New York: Mariner, 2009). 6. One might object at this point that these contemporary authors’ suggestions that their characters speak autonomously are metaphorical. Atwood and Le Guin don’t think their characters are real or alive; they mean to create the illusion of living people, lifelike characters. They mean that their versions are more realistic, truer to what (they think) these imagined people would be like. Such an objection would undoubtedly be correct, but it misses the central point: despite the fact that Atwood and Le Guin know their characters are just as unreal as Homer’s and Virgil’s, they continue to employ this metaphor, they discuss their characters as if they existed. It is the procedure of treating characters as if they had such an existence that I am arguing is a conventional practice of reading realist fictions. 7. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 191. 8. John Frow writes that the “dominant tone of structuralism is caught in Grivel’s thesis that ‘le personage (comme le nom l’indique) n’est personne’: character is no-one/ is not a person.” Frow adds the important poststructuralist point about the subject’s textuality: “the insistence upon the textuality of character and the denial of any continuity between character and person rests upon an assumption that the two are quite different: the person or subject cannot itself be thought in textual terms.”

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John Frow, “Spectacle Binding: On Character,” Poetics Today 7, no. 2 (1986): 230. For a discussion of proscribed modes of reading, see Michael Warner, “Uncritical Reading,” in Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, ed. Jane Gallop (New York: Routledge, 2004), 13–38. 9. Frow, “Spectacle Binding,” 232. Dorothy J. Hale regards “the novel’s referential lure” as “perhaps the most dominant” of several “abiding preoccupations in the twentiethcentury study of the novel” that “have not as yet been generally acknowledged.” Dorothy J. Hale, “Introduction,” in The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1900–2000, ed. Dorothy J. Hale (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), 8. Hale identifies a gap in the history and theory of the novel but seems to neglect the persistent concern with character and its ambivalent ontological status in theories of fiction. For an overview see Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider, eds., Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media (New York: de Gruyter, 2010). 10. Deirdre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 15–16. 11. Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care About Literary Characters? (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), x, xiv. Vermeule adds that the “simplest reason that we care about fictional characters is that our minds have evolved that way” (xiii). 12. Potential objections to Vermeule’s arguments are legion, but one might begin by questioning whether novel readers are actually more likely to reproduce in a population, whether the kind of social information she discusses (knowing, for example, who might make the best mate) can easily be translated from novel reading to actual social practice, and if novel readers—even professional literary scholars—are any better predictors of human behavior. 13. Lynch also attributes several institutional and market functions to the understanding of characters as individuals with depths that exceed the textual marks that constitute them: providing an endless interpretive quest for readers and a ceaseless authenticity contest for writers. “The literary character’s way of seeming at once self-made, selfexpressive, and a product of conventions gives readers something to do . . . a makework project for literature.” “The emphasis on real depth . . . authorizes each generation to detect the spuriousness of the depths purveyed by their predecessors and then to correct for that superficiality: in this scheme, each generation of writers could feel called on to round and reanimate character anew. To focus fiction on deep inner meanings is, then, to stimulate the market for fiction and call for more novels that might constitute the rise of the genre to which they belong.” Lynch, Economy, 251, 254. 14. Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 12. 15. Woloch’s social formalism recurs throughout, for instance when he claims that in the “interaction between character-spaces . . . novels touch history—not least because the very dynamic tension between reference and structure is itself so socially significant, grounded in the problematic elimination or functionalized compression of real persons in the actual world.” Woloch, The One vs. the Many, 20. But if a scarcity of narrative space generates the conflict between character spaces, this structural economy would seem to be independent of a text’s historical context—a fact that Woloch’s use of the Iliad for his initial example implies—and not “grounded in” a particular era’s reduction of individuals to their functions.

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16. Frow similarly sees the concept of character as “ontologically and methodologically ambivalent” and says one cannot come “to terms with the full complexity of the problem” by adopting one side only, that is, by viewing character as either “the analogue of a person” or as “a textual function.” Frow, “Spectacle,” 228. 17. Murray Smith, “On the Twofoldness of Character,” New Literary History 42, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 279. 18. For Thomas Pavel this dualism derives from the “dual structure” of two ontologies or universes, one real and one make-believe, linked by a relation of correspondence, that characterizes fiction. Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 56–59. This dualism explains the unique ontology of fiction and the reasons it has provided a dilemma for logically “exclusionist” philosophers, in which, for example, both the claims “This actor is Lear” and “This actor is not Lear” can be true at the same time. James Phelan has theorized a three-part structure for the functioning of characters; they can function at the “mimetic,” “thematic,” and “synthetic” levels, which correspond to a character’s representation of an imaginary person, function in conveying a certain idea to readers, and function in relation to the overall design of the text, respectively. See James Phelan, Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005). 19. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly, ed., The Letters of Jean Rhys (New York: Viking, 1984), 136–137. 20. Jo Baker, Longbourn (New York: Knopf, 2013), n.p. 21. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan writes: “In the story [as opposed to the discourse characters] are non (or pre-) verbal abstractions, constructs . . . partly modeled on the reader’s conception of people.” Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Routledge, 2002), 35. Uri Margolin, “Characterization in Narrative: Some Theoretical Prolegomena,” Neophilologus 67 (1983): 4, similarly argues that characters appear humanlike because of reception, the mental process of construction that he calls “character building.” 22. Seymour Chatman emphasizes the way supplementation depends on common knowledge: “a narrative, as the product of a fixed number of statements, can never be totally ‘complete,’ in the way that a photographic reproduction is, since the number of plausible intermediate actions or properties is virtually infinite. . . . Normally, the audience is content to accept the main lines and to fill in the interstices with knowledge it has acquired through ordinary living and art experience.” Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), 29–30. 23. In fictional worlds that diverge substantially from our own, such as those in fantasy or science fiction, readers are less equipped to fill in details, and such texts frequently take pains to detail the arrangement and rules of their worlds. Other kinds of patently unrealistic or minimal worlds such as those of Beckett are also exceptions. We don’t try to fill in such worlds, understanding their emptiness as a constitutive element (perhaps with allegorical significance) rather than a function of limited textual information. 24. Anne Jamison notes that fan-fiction authors often refer to their continuations of previous authors’ characters as “playing in another writer’s sandbox”—a metaphor that aptly captures the act of supplementation of existing material that generates

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reference. Jamison contends that the new online medium, the overt and gleeful appropriation, and the creation and dissemination of fic among communities of fans are what differentiate fan fiction from related earlier modes of adapting, appropriating, and responding to familiar stories. Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World (Dallas, Tex.: SmartPop, 2013), 33–36. 25. Jon Clinch, Finn (New York: Random House, 2007), 285–286. 26. Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair (New York: Penguin, 2001), 331. Fforde’s Rochester, while having an existence limited to his appearances in Jane Eyre, can “move [him] self to anywhere in the book [he] wish[es] at a moment’s notice and back again at will” (332). Thus his resembles Woloch’s view of characters, who are limited by their structural position but possess an agency that strains against those limits. 27. Eric Hayot, “On Literary Worlds,” Modern Language Quarterly 72, no. 2 (June 2011): 149. 28. Christa Wolf, Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays, trans. Jan Van Heurck (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 144. 29. Quoted in John Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon (London: Continuum, 2001), 77. In his introduction to Wide Sargasso Sea, Francis Wyndham takes up Rhys’s metaphor, writing that “for many years, [she] ha[d] been haunted by the figure of the first Mrs Rochester—the mad wife of Jane Eyre.” Introduction to Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (New York: Norton, 1982), 11. 30. Margaret Atwood, introduction to Medea: A Modern Retelling, by Christa Wolf (New York: Doubleday, 1998), ix. In her “Author’s Note,” Baker similarly describes the servants in Pride and Prejudice as “ghostly presences.” Longbourn “Reader’s Guide,” http://www.randomhouse.com/book/231492/longbourn-by-jo-baker. 31. Nancy Rawles, “Acknowledgements,” in My Jim, 170. 32. Marina Warner’s Indigo self-reflexively meditates on the longing for and impossibility of any representation that would offer an objective view of reality. Warner’s Miranda wishes “to make an image of [island] women . . . which would be neither exotic-erotic like Ingres or Matisse odalisques, nor indignant-realist like Abolitionist propaganda, neither Noble Savage nor heroic victim, but would connect with their history all the same. Many of Miranda’s friends from her art student days had turned to photography: the lens’s clean surgical objectivity could excise the corrupt legacy of racism, imperialism, Orientalism, and all the other isms that turned all Western consciousness into damaged goods. . . . I can’t go along with this completely, thought Miranda. When I take a photograph it still comes out with my stamp on it . . . the so-called authentic snapshot always pretends that the photographer didn’t have to be there, isn’t responsible, hadn’t anything to do with it. Like a realist novel, like the comments people make about situations they’re involved in as if they weren’t.” Marina Warner, Indigo, or, Mapping the Waters (New York: Vintage, 1993), 306–307. 33. Pavel writes of the conventional realist orientation toward the referential plausibility of works of fiction: “There are many real historical and social settings in which writers and their public accept the assumption that a literary work speaks of something that is genuinely possible relative to the real world. This attitude corresponds to realist literature, in the broad sense of the term. Seen from this angle, realism is not merely a set of stylistic and narrative conventions, but a fundamental attitude toward the relationship between the actual world and the truth of literary texts. In a realist perspective, the criterion of the truth and falsity of a literary text and of its details

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is based upon the notion of possibility . . . with respect to the actual world.” Pavel, Fictional Worlds, 46–47. 34. Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 286. 35. Brian Richardson, “Transtextual Characters,” in Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media, ed. Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider (New York: de Gruyter, 2010), 539. 36. Pavel elaborates on the proper name, contra Barthes, suggesting that “within fiction names work like usual proper names, that is as rigid designators attached to individuated objects, independent of the objects’ properties.” Pavel, Fictional Worlds, 37. 37. Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey (New York: Picador, 2010), ix. 38. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1996), 186, 212. 39. Dante, The Inferno, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (New York: Anchor, 2000), 483 (26.97–98); Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses,” in The Longman Anthology of British Literature, ed. David Damrosch (New York: Longman, 1999), 2:1198–1199. 40. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 67. 41. Julian Murphet, “The Mole and the Multiple: A Chiasmus of Character,” New Literary History 42, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 274. 42. Joshua Gass writes: “ ‘coherent division’ might be a good definition for character more generally.” Joshua Gass, “Moll Flanders and the Bastard Birth of Realist Character,” New Literary History 45, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 126. 43. Aaron Kunin argues that character is “a formal device that collects every example of a type of person” but sees this as one critical “definition” or “account” of character rather than one way in which characters function in fictions to represent either types or individualized persons. Aaron Kunin, “Characters Lounge,” Modern Language Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2009): 291–292. 44. See Lynch, Economy, 12–13, for the history of how we arrived at the central “article of our literary faith, the notion that a fleshed-out representation is the best representation.”

CODA: GENRE AS TELESCOPIC METHOD 1. It’s impossible to ignore the parallels with Facebook, a platform that allows each individual her own “page,” timeline, soapbox from which to express her own point of view, and opportunity to convey the minutiae of her everyday subjective experience. 2. Christine Brückner’s Desdemona, which I discuss in chapter 2, offers speeches by fictional and historical minor female figures, illustrating the close proximity of these genres. 3. Marie Antoinette is also a favorite of Naslund, the protagonist of her Abundance (2007), and her The Fountain of St. James Court; or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman (2014) tells the story of Élisabeth Vigée-LeBrun, who painted Antoinette’s portraits. 4. Joyce Carol Oates writes that Smilevski “dares to provide a kind of shadow biography” of Freud and his sister Adolfina. Echoing the typical reception of minor-character elaborations, Oates adds that the “challenge for the writer of fictitious history/biography is to create a ‘voice’ that is both original and appropriate.” Joyce Carol Oates, “A Very Sad Freud,” New York Review of Books, December 6, 2012. Smilevski responded to Oates’s

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review in a letter that stressed his intention to convey the rich interiority of the silent Adolfina: “even in periods when they seem passive to others, people who suffer from despair have an active inner life, consisting of the struggle for the meaning of existence. That is the core of Freud’s Sister.” Goce Smilevski, “Freud’s Sad Sister,” New York Review of Books, December 20, 2012. See also Sarah Weinman, “Novels About Famous Writers’ Wives Are a Cheap Trick,” New Republic, May 26, 2014. 5. For two recent memoirs about reading, see Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch (New York: Crown, 2014); and Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (New York: FSG, 2014). Fowler’s We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves (2013), shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, provides another striking example of how contemporary authors have used intertextual works as springboards for their literary careers. 6. Emma Tennant’s career exemplifies the proximity and popularity of these flourishing contemporary genres. Her Sylvia and Ted (2001) fictionalizes the love triangle between Plath, Hughes, and his mistress Assia Wevill, alternating the narrative from each character’s point of view. Tennant detailed her own relationship with Hughes in her memoir Burnt Diaries (1999) and has otherwise made a career of writing minor-character elaborations, including Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde (1989) and Adèle: Jane Eyre’s Hidden Story (2002), and sequels to canonical novels, including Pemberley: Or Pride and Prejudice Continued (1993) and Elinor and Marianne: A Sequel to Sense and Sensibility (1996).

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INDEX

active reading: cultural movements relating to, 70–71; emergence of active readers and, 70–82; feminist “re-vision” and, 76–77; New Critical textual boundaries and, 77; in The Pleasures of Exile, 75; postmodernism and, 71, 80–82 Adèle (Tennant), 189 Adorno, Theodor, 137 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (Twain), 41, 124, 155, 165–68, 189. See also Finn; My Jim Aeneid (Virgil), 9–10, 189 Aeschylus, 103–5, 187 Agamemnon (Aeschylus), 103–5, 187 Ahab’s Bride (Gouge), 189 Ahab’s Wife, or, The Star-Gazer (Naslund), 40, 127, 170–71, 188; analysis of, 132, 143–52; canon and, 148–51; marketing of, 143–44; Shakespeare and, 150–51 Alcott, Louisa May, 3, 131–33, 154–55, 189, 230n50 American Idol, 137–38 Amis, Kingsley, 18 Anim-Addo, Joan, 189

At-Swim-Two-Birds (O’Brien), 203n82 Attridge, Derek, 114 Atwood, Margaret, 192n10; “Gertrude Talks Back,” 8, 188; “Horatio’s Version,” 8, 189. See also Penelopiad, The Auerbach, Erich, 201n69 Austen, Jane, 125, 229n33; in marketplace, 134–37; Pride and Prejudice, 19, 34, 123–24, 134–37, 160, 190 author: identity, 223n51; prestige, 45; as protagonist, 184–85 Aylmer, Janet, 19, 123–24, 134–37 baby boomers, 4 Baker, Jo, 34, 163, 190 Bakhtin, M. M., 94, 201n67 Baldwin, James, 73 Barnes, Julian, 3, 107–9, 188 Barrett, Tracy, 190 Barth, John, 39, 68; “The Literature of Exhaustion,” 81; “The Literature of Replenishment,” 81; on postmodernism, 217n97 Barthes, Roland, 39, 76, 172, 204n91; on character function, 163–64

256 INDEX

Baum, L. Frank, 134, 188, 189 Bawarshi, Anis, 193n18 Bayard, Louis, 189 Behn, Aphra, 189 Bell, Madison Smartt, 3, 107, 188 Beowulf, 34, 187. See also Grendel bibliophiles, 33, 121; marketing to, 127, 129–39; niche markets and, 139–43 Birch, Dinah, 126 Bloom, Harold, 9–10 blurbs, 35, 141–42 Bold Type, 142–43 book sales, 142–43, 232n74 Borges, Jorge Luis, 39, 81 Bourdieu, Pierre, 123, 124, 141, 228n29 Bradley, Marion Zimmer, 90–92, 97–98, 187 Brathwaite, Kamau, 74 Brenner, Gerry, 76–77 Brontë, Charlotte. See Jane Eyre Brooks, Geraldine, 3, 109–10, 131–33, 154–55, 189, 230n50 Brückner, Christine, 92–93, 105, 187, 219n18 Bryk, Marta, 86, 224n56 Bunbury (Jacobson), 189, 199n51 Caliban’s Hour (Williams), 188 Camus, Albert, 190 canon: Ahab’s Wife and, 148–51; hypercanonical texts and, 66–67, 213n54; intertextuality and, 35–36, 66–67; liberal subjectivism and, 101–3, 105–6; marketplace and, 35–36; reading of, 23; social, 18; socially marginal characters in, 51; voice and, 101–2 Canongate Press, 124–25 canonical critique, 4 canonicity, 18 Cassandra (Wolf), 2, 13–14, 83, 169, 187; Gilpin on, 87, 218n11, 220n25; point of view in, 25–26, 94–96; voice in, 94–96, 99, 104–5, 221n31, 222n49 Cawelti, John G., 199n55 Césaire, Aimé, 12, 19, 67–68, 187 character function, 154–58; Barthes on, 163–64; character variants and, 171–72;

inconsistency in, 170–78; Lynch on, 159, 234n13; M. Smith on, 161–62; supplementation of textual structure and, 158–70; transtextual characters and, 171–78; Vermeule on, 159–60, 234nn11–12; in Wide Sargasso Sea, 162–63, 172 characterization: Forster on, 28; historical accuracy and, 169–70; minorcharacter elaboration and, 28–29, 41–42, 50–51; narration and, 100–101; reading and, 41–42; in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 68–69; Woloch on, 28–29, 100–101, 160–61, 234n15 character modification, 18–19 character names, 65, 212n47 characterological emancipation, 87–88, 219n20 character types, 178–80 character variants, 171–72 Chatman, Seymour, 25, 235n22 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 12, 194n29 Cheuse, Alan, 126 Cinderella (folktale/fairytale), 188 “Circe” (Welty), 12, 68 Clinch, John, 3, 37–38, 167–68, 171, 189 Coetzee, J. M.: Elizabeth Costello, 83–85, 115–16; Foe, 84, 111–16, 187 Cohen, Ralph, 198n47 collective experience: novels and, 215n78 Collins, Jim, 122, 227n14 Colonel Sun (Amis), 18 colonial history, 55–56, 66, 77–78 Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (Maguire), 188 consumption practices, 227n6 contemporary intertextual production, 4, 33, 191n5 contemporary literary production, 121– 22; genre and, 42–43; minor-character elaboration and, 42–43 contrapuntal reading, 23 conventions, 104, 222n47 copyright, 36–37 Cowart, David, 49–50 Crosby, Donald, 110

257 INDEX

Cullen, Lynn, 183 Culler, Jonathan, 11, 67 cultural appropriation, 24 cultural conservation, 37 cultural movements, 70–71 cultural pluralism, 110–11 culture: genre and, 20–21, 152–53; industry, 137; literary, 117–19, 128, 130–33, 137, 227n14; middlebrow, 208n111; popular literary, 4; writing back and, 33–34 culture wars, 6 Cunningham, Michael, 195n36 cyclical model of genre, 47 Daoud, Kamel, 190 Darcy’s Story (Aylmer), 19, 123–24, 134–37 Dating Hamlet: Ophelia’s Story (Fiedler), 189 Datlow, Ellen, 190 “Death of the Novel” pronouncements, 80–81 Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe, 19, 84, 112, 187; Roxana, 112, 187 Desdemona—If You Had Only Spoken! (Brückner), 187; analysis of, 92–93; historical figures in, 219n18; speeches of, 219n18; voice in, 92–93, 105 Diamant, Anita, 35–36, 83, 86, 96–97, 188 Dickens, Charles, 187, 189, 190 Dimock, Wai Chee: on genre, 16, 19, 38, 197n44; on literary studies, 16; on quantitative literary scholarship, 197n44; on switch mechanism, 38 distant reading, 15 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 190 Durrant, Samuel, 84 dynamism in genre use, 67–68 Eliot, George, 25 Elizabeth Costello (Coetzee): analysis of, 83–85; Durrant on, 84; publishing of, 83–84; scholarship on, 115–16; Ulysses and, 83, 84–85; Wood on, 84 Emery, Mary Lou, 52–53, 210n19 engagé writers, 6 Enlightenment, loss of faith in, 80

Estella, Her Expectations (Roe), 187 Eyre Affair, The (Fforde), 117–19, 168 Fagles, Robert, 192n12 Falstaff (Nye), 194n22 fan communities, 130–35; novels based on, 185 fan fiction, 18, 177–78, 198n50, 235n24 Fanon, Frantz, 215n77 female authors, forgotten, 192n11 female subjectivity, 209n15 feminist literary practice, 23 feminist minor-character elaboration, 93–94, 98–99 feminist “re-vision,” 4; active reading and, 76–77; Rich on, 39, 75–76, 191n6; Wide Sargasso Sea as, 77–78. See also re-visionary fiction feminist voice, 94–96. See also voice Fetterley, Judith, 39, 76 Fforde, Jasper, 117–19, 168, 236n26 Fictional Worlds (Pavel), 164–65, 235n18 Fiedler, Lisa, 189 Finn (Clinch), 3, 37–38, 167–68, 171, 189 Flashman (Fraser), 44, 187; analysis of, 62–65; “Explanatory Note,” 62–63; installments of, 64; intertextuality in, 65; narration in, 63; opening of, 63; politics of, 64; publishing of, 62; as sequel or spinoff, 63, 64 flexible technology, genre as, 49–57 Foe (Coetzee), 84, 187; analysis of, 111–16; scholarship on, 113–15; voice in, 113 Fool (Moore), 34, 35, 189; allusions in, 130–31; Author’s Note, 1, 124; direct quotes in, 130–31; marketing of, 124, 129–30, 230n47 Forster, E. M., 28, 100 Fowler, Alastair, 16, 193n18, 196n41 Frame, Ronald, 190 Frankenstein (Shelley), 188 Fraser, George MacDonald, 44, 187. See also Flashman Friday (Tournier), 19 Frow, John, 212n51, 233n8, 234n9

258 INDEX

Garber, Marjorie, 195n36 Gardner, John, 70, 187. See also Grendel Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 86–87 generic model, 67 generic technology, 22–23, 49 Genesis, 107–8, 188 Genette, Gerard, 200n63, 206n93, 212n46 genre, 6; analysis of, 11–12, 14–16, 20–21, 41–42; Bawarshi on, 193n18; case study, 6; classification of, 11; Cohen on, 198n47; contemporary literary production and, 42–43; Culler on, 11, 67; culture and, 20–21, 152–53; cyclical model of, 47; development of, 46–47, 70; Dimock on, 16, 19, 38, 197n44; emergence of, 46–47, 70; evolution of, 49; flexibility of, 10–11; Fowler on, 16, 193n18, 196n41; history of, 12–15, 20, 32; Jauss on, 14–15, 204n88; life cycles of, 47–48, 49; in marketplace, 31–33, 40, 123, 152–53; McKeon on, 193n21, 199n54; C. Miller on, 193n18; Moretti on, 15–16, 21, 48, 119–20, 196n39, 209n10, 227n8; multiple, 14; norms and, 10, 12; Pavel on, 10, 16, 193n20; realist novel and, 26–27, 202n75; Robbins on, 21; as shape-shifting practice, 8–20; socially marginal characters and, 22–29; as switch mechanism, 38–43; as telescopic method, 42–43, 181–86; theoretical questions and, 41; theorists, 11, 67; theory, 119–20; Todorov on, 11–12, 21–22, 193n21, 209n7; Tynyanov on, 193n21 Geras, Adèle: Ithaka, 189; Troy, 188 Gertrude and Claudius (Updike), 3, 188 “Gertrude Talks Back” (Atwood), 8, 188 Gilpin, Heidi, 87, 218n11, 220n25 global publishing trade, 40 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell), 2, 36–37, 133–34, 188, 190 Gouge, Louise, 189 Grahame-Smith, Seth, 1, 125 Great Expectations (Dickens), 187, 189, 190 Greek Myth of Atlas, 189

Grendel (Gardner), 3, 12, 34, 44, 106, 187; acclaim for, 46; analysis of, 57–62; ironic narrator-protagonist in, 47, 58; monster figure in, 50, 57–58, 211n38; narration in, 50, 57–59, 61; postmodernist self-reflexivity in, 60; Wide Sargasso Sea compared to, 59–62 Guillory, John, 102; on imaginary politics, 88; on middlebrow culture, 208n111 Hadley, Elaine, 202n75 Hale, Dorothy J., 201nn67–68, 203n78; on social formalism, 27, 87–88, 92 Hamlet (Shakespeare): Dating Hamlet: Ophelia’s Story and, 189; Gertrude and Claudius and, 188; “Gertrude Talks Back” and, 188; “Horatio’s Version” and, 8, 189; Ophelia and, 189; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and, 12, 19, 44–46, 67–69, 187, 214n63 Havisham (Frame), 190 Hayot, Eric, 168 historical fictions, 183–84 historical figures, minor, 183–84, 219n18 historiographic metafiction, 107, 225n60 History of the World in 10½ Chapters, A (Barnes), 3; analysis of, 107–8; narration in, 3; “Stowaway” in, 107–9, 188 Hite, Molly: on feminist literary practice, 23; on socially marginal characters, 23, 103, 222n46 Homer, 8–9, 12, 187, 188. See also specific works “Horatio’s Version” (Atwood), 8, 189 horizon of expectations (Jauss), 14–15 Hours, The (Cunningham), 195n36 Hughes, Thomas, 62–63, 187 humanization, of flat characters, 50 human subjectivity, through narrative voice, 209n15 Hutcheon, Linda, 216n92 Hyde (Levine), 190 hyper-canonical texts, 66–67, 213n54

259 INDEX

Iliad (Homer): Ransom and, 3, 85–86, 155, 190; The Song of Achilles and, 34, 35, 127–28, 170, 190; Troy and, 188. See also Cassandra imaginary politics, 88–89, 102–3 Imoinda, or She Who Will Lose Her Name (Anim-Addo), 189 Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde), 189 Indigo (Warner), 19, 188, 236n32; Williams-Wanquet on, 86, 102 intellectual property, 36–37 intertextual appropriation, 24–25 intertextuality, 204n91; canon and, 35–36, 66–67; character names and, 65; in Flashman, 65; voice and, 107–10; in Wide Sargasso Sea, 65; writing back, re-vision, and, 33 intertextual revisionings, 205nn92–93 ironic narrator-protagonists, 47, 52, 58 Ithaka (Geras), 189 Jacobs, Karen, 99 Jacobson, Tom, 189, 199n51 James, C. L. R., 39, 72 James, Henry, 25 Jameson, Fredric, 48, 212n51; on postmodernism, 216n92 Jamison, Anne, 235n24 Jane Eyre (Brontë), 2, 187; Adèle and, 189; The Eyre Affair and, 117–19, 168; Thornfield Hall and, 190. See also Wide Sargasso Sea Jauss, Hans Robert, 14–15, 204n88 Joyce, James, 83, 84–85 Juliet’s Nurse (Leveen), 190 King, Susan Fraser, 189 King Lear (Shakespeare), 179, 204n91, 225n58. See also Fool King of Ithaka (Barrett), 190 Klein, Lisa, 189 Lady Macbeth (King), 189 Lady Macbeth’s Tale (Power), 189 Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (Moore), 1, 189

Lamming, George, 39, 215n71; on collective experience, 215n78; The Pleasures of Exile, 72–75 Lanser, Susan Snaider, 94 Lavinia (Le Guin), 3, 9–10, 34, 189; analysis of, 98–99, 155–56; Cheuse on, 126; as feminist minor-character elaboration, 98–99; symbolic capital and, 126–27 lawsuits against minor-character elaborators, 36–37, 133 left cultural politics, 4–5 Le Guin, Ursula K., 37; interviews with, 9–10; Lavinia, 3, 9–10, 34, 98–99, 126–27, 155–56, 189 Leveen, Lois, 190 Levine, Daniel, 190 Lewis, Pericles, 201n69 liberal pluralist democracy, 100 liberal pluralist inclusiveness, 5 liberal subjectivism: canon and, 101–3, 105–6; minor-character elaboration and, 89–106; recuperative paradigm and, 92, 93, 219n19; social formalism and, 92–93, 99 Lion Among Men, A (Maguire), 189 Lippincott, Robin, 3, 127, 138–39, 188, 195n36, 202n72 literary culture, 117–19, 128, 130–33, 137, 227n14 literary form, genre and, 5, 80 literary movements, 71 literary prizes, 128, 230n45 literary tradition, 5 “Literature of Exhaustion, The” (Barth), 81 “Literature of Replenishment, The” (Barth), 81 Little Women (Alcott), 3, 131–33, 154–55, 189, 230n50 Lolita (Nabokov), 36, 188 Longbourn (Baker), 34, 163, 190 Lo’s Diary (Pera), 36, 188 Lost Books of the Odyssey, The (Mason), 173–78 Lukács, György, 100 Lynch, Deidre, 119, 202n74, 227n6; on character function, 159, 234n13

260 INDEX

Macbeth (Shakespeare), 188, 189 Macpherson, Sandra, 202n75 magical realism, 70 Maguire, Gregory, 127, 128; Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, 188; A Lion Among Men, 189; Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, 3, 188, 191n3 Malory, Thomas, 187 Malouf, David, 3, 85–86, 155, 189 March (Brooks), 109–10; afterword of, 230n50; Little Women and, 3, 131–33, 154–55, 189, 230n50 marketing, 30–31; of Ahab’s Wife, 143–44; to bibliophiles, 127, 129–39; to fan communities, 130–35; of Fool, 124, 129–30, 230n47; of Longbourn, 34; to niche markets, 139–43; on The Penelopiad, 141–42; of The Wind Done Gone, 36, 133–34, 139–40 marketplace: Austen in, 134–37; blurbs, 35, 141–42; Bold Type in, 142–43; book sales, 142–43, 232n74; canon and, 35–36; consumption practices, 227n6; contemporary intertextual production in, 33; contemporary literary production in, 121–22; genre in, 31–33, 40, 123, 152–53; literary culture and, 117–19, 128, 130–33, 137, 227n14; minor characters in, 29–38, 122–29; publishing industry and, 30–31, 40, 121–28; subversiveness and, 139–43 Martin, George R. R., 182 Martin, Valerie, 86, 188, 224n56 Mary Reilly (Martin), 86, 188, 224n56 Mason, Zachary, 173–78 McCaig, Donald, 190 McGann, Jerome, 122 McGurl, Mark, 121, 204n86, 208n108; on perspectival pluralism, 110 McKeon, Michael, 193n21, 199n54 Medea: A Novel (Wolf), 13, 109, 140–42, 169 Melville, Herman, 188, 189, 232n81, 233n82 Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, The (Roszak), 188 Meursault Investigation, The (Daoud), 190

Michaels, Walter Benn, 102, 231n63 middlebrow culture, 208n111 Middlemarch (Eliot), 25 Miller, Carolyn R., 193n18 Miller, Madeline, 34, 35, 127–28, 170, 190 minor-character elaboration, 2–3; adaptability of, 13; analysis of, 5–6; appellation of, 18; ascendance of, 5; basic formula for, 33, 123–24; canonicity, of predecessor texts, 18; characterization and, 28–29, 41–42, 50–51; character modification in, 18–19; contemporary literary production and, 42–43; feminist, 93–94, 98–99; flexible technology of, 49–57; Garber on, 195n36; generic technology of, 22–23, 49; as genre case study, 6; intertextual appropriation and, 24–25; liberal subjectivism and, 89–106; list and counting of, 17; minor characters, in marketplace, 29–38, 122–29; novel form and, 26–28; perspectival pluralism and, 89–90, 106–11; plot retention in, 17–18; point of view in, 25–27; politics of, 29–30, 90–91; proliferation of, 3–4, 6–7; realist novel and, 26–27, 101; setting free minor characters, 20–29; social formalism and, 27, 92–93, 99–101; social logic of generic conventions and, 20–29; trajectory of, 4–5; Woloch on, 28–29 Mists of Avalon, The (Bradley), 90–92, 187; voice in, 97–98 Mitchell, Margaret, 2, 36–37, 133–34, 188, 190 Mitchell, W. J. T., 110 Moby-Dick (Melville), 188, 189, 232n81, 233n82. See also Ahab’s Wife modernism, 109; dilemmas of, 80 modernists, 12–13, 201n69 monster figures: in Grendel, 50, 57–58, 211n38; in Wide Sargasso Sea, 50 Moore, Christopher, 204n86; Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, 1, 189; The Serpent of Venice, 1, 190. See also Fool

261 INDEX

Moretti, Franco, 199n56; on distant reading, 15; on genre, 15–16, 21, 48, 119–20, 196n39, 209n10, 227n8; on social canon, 18 Morte d’Arthur (Malory), 187 Mr. Dalloway (Lippincott), 3, 127, 138–39, 188; The Hours compared to, 195n36; Schiff on, 202n72 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 139, 188, 195n36 Mr. Timothy (Bayard), 189 Mukherjee, Ankhi, 205n92 multiculturalism, 23–24 multinational capitalism, 4, 153 multiple genres, 14 multiprotagonist fictions, 182–83 Murdoch, Iris, 100 Murphet, Julian, 178 My Jim (Rawles), 36–37, 41, 96, 139–40, 155, 165–66, 189 Nabokov, Vladimir: interview with, 100, 222n42; Lolita, 36, 188 narration, 200n63; characterization and, 100–101; characterological emancipation and, 87–88, 219n20; in Flashman, 63; in Grendel, 50, 57–59, 61; in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, 3; in The Penelopiad, 109; socially marginal characters and, 22–23, 25–26, 40; in Wide Sargasso Sea, 13, 50, 52–55, 65; Woloch on, 100–101 Naslund, Sena Jeter: Ahab’s Wife, or, The Star Gazer, 40, 127, 132, 143–52, 170–71, 188; background on, 151 Nazer, Mende, 37 New Critical textual boundaries, 39, 71, 77, 158 New Historicism, 23 Newman, Judie, 205n92 Newman, Kim, 190 New Social History, 70 New Testament, 189 niche markets, 139–43 nonhuman characters, 3 norms, genre as, 10, 12

novel: “Death of the Novel” pronouncements, 80–81; on fan communities, 185; form, 26–28; Garber on, 195n36; realist, 26–27, 101, 202n75; romance, 120; Victorian, 202n75 Nye, Robert, 194n22 Oates, Joyce Carol, 56, 237n4 objectivity, 95, 220n30 O’Brien, Flann, 203n82 Odyssey (Homer): Ithaka and, 189; King of Ithaka and, 190; The Lost Books of the Odyssey and, 173–78; The Penelopiad and, 8–9, 41, 106–7, 155, 189, 192n12, 225n58 One vs. the Many, The: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Woloch), 22–23, 100, 160, 200n58 Ophelia (Klein), 189 Oresteia (Aeschylus), 187 Oroonoko (Behn), 189 Othello (Shakespeare), 105, 187, 190 paratexts, 66, 213n52 parodies, 195n32 Pavel, Thomas, 236n33; Fictional Worlds, 164–65, 235n18; on genre, 10, 16, 193n20 Penelopiad, The (Atwood), 2, 83, 86; as feminist minor-character elaboration, 98; introduction to, 27, 98; marketing on, 141–42; narration in, 109; Odyssey and, 8–9, 41, 106–7, 155, 189, 192n12, 225n58; publishing of, 124–25 Pera, Pia, 36, 188 Performative Criticism: Experiments in Reader Response (Brenner), 76–77 perspectival pluralism: McGurl on, 110; minor-character elaboration and, 89–90, 106–11; W. J. T. Mitchell, on, 110; voice and, 110–11 Philadelphia Fire (Wideman), 74 Pickle, Linda Schelbitzki, 86 plays, 19

262 INDEX

Pleasures of Exile, The (Lamming): active reading in, 75; politics in, 74–75; The Tempest and, 72–74; West Indian memory in, 74–75 plot retention, 17–18 Poe, Edgar Allen, 3, 107, 188 poems, 19 point of view: in Cassandra, 25–26, 94–96; in minor-character elaboration, 25–27; round characters relating to, 222n48; socially marginal characters and, 25–26 politically oppositional texts, 5 politics: of Flashman, 64; imaginary, 88–89, 102–3; left cultural, 4–5; of minor-character elaboration, 29–30, 90–91; in The Pleasures of Exile, 74–75; of popular literary culture, 4; textual, 5 popular literary culture, 4 postcolonial studies, 11 postmodernism: active reading and, 71, 80–82; Barth on, 217n97; Jameson on, 216n92; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and, 214n63 postmodernists, 24, 50 postmodernist self-reflexivity, 60–61 postmodern relativism, 109 poststructural theorists, 204n91 Power, Maggie, 189 predecessor text canonicity, 18 Pride and Prejudice (Austen): Darcy’s Story and, 19, 34, 123–24, 134–37; Longbourn and, 34, 163, 190 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Grahame-Smith), 1, 125 protagonists: authors as, 184–85; ironic narrator-, 47, 52, 58; socially marginal characters and, 4 publishing industry: consolidation of, 122–23, 231n67; global publishing trade, 40; marketplace and, 30–31, 40, 121–28 quantitative literary scholarship, 14–16, 196n38, 197n44

Radway, Janice, 120, 121–22; on middlebrow culture, 208n111 Randall, Alice, 2, 36–37, 86–87, 133–34, 139–40, 188 Ransom (Malouf), 3, 85–86, 155, 190 Rashomon effect, 106 “Raven, The” (Poe), 3, 107, 188 Rawles, Nancy: My Jim, 36–37, 41, 96, 139–40, 155, 165–66, 189; on socially marginal characters, 22 reading: active, 70–82; of canon, 23; characterization and, 41–42; contrapuntal, 23; distant, 15; methods, 39; realist, 42; symptomatic, 200n60 realist novel: conventions, 25; genre and, 26–27, 202n75; minor-character elaboration and, 26–27, 101; round characters and, 50, 59, 100 realist reading, 42, 156–58, 161–66 recovered voices, 86–87, 192n11 recuperative paradigm, 92, 93, 219n19 Red Tent, The (Diamant), 35–36, 83, 86, 188; voice in, 96–97 Reisert, Rebecca, 188 re-visionary fiction, 192n8, 205n92; feminist “re-vision,” 4, 39, 75–78, 191n6; intertextuality and, 33 Rhys, Jean, 2, 187; background on, 44; classification of, 59–60; letter, to Wyndham, 162; on socially marginal characters, 22. See also Wide Sargasso Sea Rich, Adrienne: on feminist “re-vision,” 39, 75–76, 191n6; on writing back, 39, 191n6 Richardson, Brian, 171–72, 177 Richman, Paula, 12 Robbins, Bruce, 21 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 19, 84, 112, 187 Rody, Caroline, 216n90; on Wide Sargasso Sea, 78–79, 140 Roe, Sue, 187 romance novel, 120; and Austen market, 136 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 189, 190 Romeo’s Ex: Rosalind’s Story (Fiedler), 189

263 INDEX

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard), 12, 19, 44, 187; acclaim for, 45; analysis of, 67–69; characterization in, 68–69; postmodernism and, 214n63; Wide Sargasso Sea compared to, 45–46 Roszak, Theodore, 188 round characters, 26–29, 50, 59, 100, 222n48 Roxana (Defoe), 112, 187 Russian formalists, 47–48, 70 Ruth’s Journey: A Novel of Mammy from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (McCaig), 190 Said, Edward, 23, 200n60 Schiff, James, 202n72 Schwartzman, Jill, 136–37 Scieszka, John, 3, 188, 191n4 sequels, 18, 195n32, 198n50; Flashman as, 63, 64 Serpent of Venice, The (Moore), 1, 190 Sexton, Anne, 68 Shakespeare, William: Ahab’s Wife and, 150–51; Macbeth, 188, 189; Othello, 105, 187, 190; Romeo and Juliet, 189, 190; The Tempest, 72–74, 187, 188, 216n90. See also Hamlet; King Lear Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 188 Shklovsky, Viktor, 48 Showalter, Elaine, 72 “Small Blue Thing” (Bell), 3, 107, 188 Smiley, Jane, 179, 204n91, 225n58 Smith, Lane, 188 Smith, Murray, 161–62 Smith, R. McClure, 220n25, 224n56 social canon, 18 social formalism: Hale on, 27, 87–88, 92; liberal subjectivism and, 92–93, 99; minor-character elaboration and, 27, 92–93, 99–101 socially marginal characters: in canon, 51; feminist literary practice and, 23; genre and, 22–29; Hite on, 23, 103, 222n46; multiculturalism and, 23–24; narration and, 22–23, 25–26, 40; point of view and, 25–26; protagonists

and, 4; Rawles on, 22; Rhys on, 22; silencing of, 4; Stoppard on, 22 Song of Achilles, The (Miller), 34, 35, 127–28, 170, 190 spinoffs, 18, 63, 198n50 Spivak, Gayatri, 55 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 86, 188, 190 Stoppard, Tom, 22. See also Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), 86, 188, 190 Stranger, The (Camus), 190 Stubbs, Jane, 190 subversiveness, 139–43 switch mechanism, genre as, 38–43 symbolic capital, 124, 126–27, 143–44; minor-character elaboration as method of acquiring, 30, 38, 40, 116, 121 symptomatic reading, 200n60 telescopic method, genre as, 42–43, 181–86 Tempest, A (Césaire), 12, 19, 67–68, 187 Tempest, The (Shakespeare): Caliban’s Hour and, 188; Indigo and, 188; minor characters in, 216n90; Philadelphia Fire and, 74; The Pleasures of Exile and, 72–74; A Tempest and, 187 Tennant, Emma, 238n6; Adèle, 189; Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde, 188 textual politics, 5 theoretical questions, genre and, 41 Thieme, John, 192n8, 205n92 Third Witch, The (Reisert), 188 Thompson, John B., 123, 124, 204n85, 228n18, 228n23, 228n26, 228n27 Thornfield Hall (Stubbs), 190 Thousand Acres, A (Smiley), 179, 204n91, 225n58 “Three Little Pigs, The” (folktale/ fairytale), 188 titles, 17, 197n46 Todorov, Tvetzan, 11–12, 21–22, 193n21, 209n7

264 INDEX

Tom Brown’s Schooldays (Hughes), 62–63, 187 Tournier, Michel, 19 transposition, as related genre, 134, 179–80, 195n35, 197n46, 198n50, 205n92 transtextual characters: character function and, 171–78; in The Lost Books of the Odyssey, 173–78; Richardson on, 171–72, 177 Troll’s Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales (Datlow and Windling), 190, 191n4 Troy (Geras), 188 True Story of the Three Little Pigs, by A. Wolf, The (Scieszka), 3, 188, 191n4 Twain, Mark, 37–38; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 41, 124, 155, 165–67, 189 Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde (Tennant), 188 Tynyanov, Yury, 193n21 Ulysses (Joyce), 83, 84–85 Updike, John, 3, 188 Vermeule, Blakey, 159–60, 234nn11–12 Victorian novel, 202n75, 224n56 Virgil, 9–10, 37, 155–56, 189 voice: canon and, 101–2; in Cassandra, 94–96, 99, 104–5, 221n31, 222n49; in Desdemona—If You Had Only Spoken!, 92–93, 105; feminist, 94–96; in Foe, 113; intertextuality and, 107–10; in The Mists of Avalon, 97–98; perspective pluralism and, 110–11; recovered, 86–87, 192n11; in The Red Tent, 96–97; in Wide Sargasso Sea, 51–52 Warner, Marina, 19, 86, 102, 188, 236n32 Watt, Ian, 26, 161, 203n77 Weight (Winterson), 124–25, 189 Welty, Eudora, 12, 68 West Indian memory, 74–75 White, Hayden, 111, 122

Wicked (musical), 3, 123, 134 Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Maguire), 3, 188, 191n3 Widdowson, Peter, 192n8 Wideman, John Edgar, 74 Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys), 2, 187; acclaim for, 44–45; analysis of, 52–57, 59–62, 77–78; Antoinette in, 52, 55–56, 60; character function in, 162–63, 172; Christophine in, 55–56, 210n18; colonial history in, 55–56, 66, 77–78; Cowart on, 49–50; critics of, 13; Emery on, 52–53, 210n19; as feminist “re-vision,” 77–78; Grendel compared to, 59–62; intertextuality in, 65; ironic narrator-protagonist in, 47, 52; monster figure in, 50; narration in, 13, 50, 52–55, 65; paratexts and, 66, 213n52; as popular genre, 4; postmodernist selfreflexivity in, 60–61; publishing of, 12; Rochester in, 52–55, 65, 210n23; Rody on, 78–79, 140; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead compared to, 45–46; scholarship on, 52–53, 77–78, 213n58; Spivak on, 55; voice in, 51–52; Wyndham on, 34, 65–66, 236n29 Wilde, Oscar, 189 Williams, Tad, 188 Williams-Wanquet, Eileen, 86, 102 Wind Done Gone, The (Randall), 2, 86–87, 188; lawsuit over, 36–37, 133; marketing of, 36, 133–34, 139–40 Windling, Terri, 190 Winterhalter, Teresa, 210n20 Winterson, Jeanette, 124–25, 189 Wizard of Oz, The (Baum), 134, 188, 189 Wolf, Christa: lectures by, 169; Medea: A Novel, 13, 109, 140–42, 169; on objectivity, 95, 220n30. See also Cassandra Woloch, Alex: on characterization, 28–29, 100–101, 160–61, 234n15; on minor-character elaboration, 28–29;

265 INDEX

on narration, 100–101; on novel form, 28; The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel, 22–23, 100, 160, 200n58 Wood, James, 84, 222n42 Woolf, Virginia, 139, 188, 195n36

World War II, 80 writing back, 4, 205n92; culture and, 33–34; intertextuality and, 33; Rich on, 39, 191n6; Thieme on, 192n8; Widdowson on, 192n8 Wyndham, Francis, 34, 65–66, 162, 236n29