Minor Characters Have Their Day

Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace

Jeremy Rosen

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231542401
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

How do genres develop? In what ways do they reflect changing political and cultural trends? What do they tell us about the motivations of publishers and readers? Combining close readings and formal analysis with a sociology of literary institutions and markets, Minor Characters Have Their Day offers a compelling new approach to genre study and contemporary fiction. Focusing on the booming genre of books that transform minor characters from canonical literary texts into the protagonists of new works, Jeremy Rosen makes broader claims about the state of contemporary fiction, the strategies of the publishing industry over recent decades, and the function of literary characters.

Rosen traces the recent surge in "minor-character elaboration" to the late 1960s and works such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. These early examples often recover the voices of marginalized individuals and groups. As the genre has exploded between the 1980s and the present, with novels about Ahab's wife, Huck Finn's father, and Mr. Dalloway, it has begun to embody the neoliberal commitments of subjective experience, individual expression, and agency. Eventually, large-scale publishers capitalized on the genre as a way to appeal to educated audiences aware of the prestige of the classics and to draw in identity-based niche markets. Rosen's conclusion ties the understudied evolution of minor-character elaboration to the theory of literary character.

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 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 minor-character 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. 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 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 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 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 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...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Three Axes of Genre Study
• 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