Difference between revisions of "Woloch 2003"

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Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton UP, 2003. Print.

• Overall note: his examples from novels are extraordinarily clear and precise. Their range is amazing but their clarity is even better.

Prologue

• 1 proem to Iliad: a kind of gateway into the massive and intricate narrative
  • potentially interesting to think too of this gateway with paratextual gateways
• citing Aristotle Poetics talking about Iliad and how narrative should have "a single action" (vs history that has a single period): "A frames a formal question here that has been central to aesthetic theory ever since: how can a single composition have many parts? ...How can many people be contained within a single narrative?"
  • I may be thick but I don't know that I think the second question is that difficult, one person seems more rare
• 2 Narrative meaning takes shape in the dynamic flux of attention and neglect toward the various characters who are locked within the same story but have radically different positions within the narrative.
  • ex on ff: Achilles' wrath central, but thersites threatens to break the narrative hierarchy, the kings like Odysseus stay in middle focus between generality and singularity
  • then Lykaon's death on 8-9: "the scene wavers between absorbing Lykaon's character into the narrative as a whole (centering on the foe who kills him) and rendering the particularity of this character's own life"
• 11 the "beautiful history" of literary form in Aristotle's living organism (an entelechy, full realization and final form) vs "How can many people be contained within a single narrative? How do different narrative forms accommodate the surge of many people into a single story? How do they encapsulate and convey the impact of a human being - of varied human beings - within a coherent literary structure? In these questions we can see the outline of an...inverted history: a history that would trace not how the literary form, in its intricate coherence, is rendered into a living organism, but how living persons get rendered into literary form."

Intro: Characterization and Distribution

• 12 The rich diversity of these characters - the multitudinous ways in which the Iliad comprehends the human - depends on each character's structured position within the literary totality, or the narrative space that he occupies. In each instance the 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 and the descriptive configuration that flows out from this position.
  • ex of how this breaks the surface of fiction in Trollope Barchester Towers: "Mr Slope, however, on his introduction must not be brought before the public at the tail end of a chapter." -- amt of narrative space allocated to a character
    • relies on our ability to imagine Slope as real but also on our apprehension of the artifice of chapter divisions
• 13 character-space: "the intersection of an implied ["infinitely complex] human personality...with the definitively circumscribed form of a narrative."
• 14 character-system: the arrangement of multiple and differentiated character-spaces - differentiated configurations and manipulations of the human figure - into a unified narrative structure
• 15 Mieke Bal - troubling and difficult to theorize "human aspect of characters," which post-Russian formalist narratology often treat as a functional delivery mechanism for poesis
  • formalist vs referential ("the human essence" - Marx)
  • l/u Paul de Man on C20 lit criticism with a - metastructure of extrinsic and intrinsic criticism
• 17 the antinomy (opposition) of characterization: "the literary character is itself divided, always emerging at the juncture between structure and reference."
• 20 good on Forster flat characters, which are "essential" to realism: "Flatness simultaneously renders subordinate characters allegorical and, in its compelling distortion, calls attention to the subordination that underlies allegory."
  • is he using allegory as an umbrella term for other symbolic acts, eg, Jo as synecdoche for the poor in Bleak House (Dickens, 1853)?
• it is often precisely in the interaction between character-spaces (rather than merely in the characters and stories themselves) that 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 functionalised comprsssjon of real persons in the actual world. This is one reason why c19 social realism is a key literary site - perhaps the key site - for highlighting the conceptual character-system and character-space.
  • the referential stakes of realism and the formal qualities of social representation
• 22 case study of James's Wings of the Dove, in which he talks about minor characters (the "circumference") function to elucidate the development of the "center" character, but that each still has a "'case,' an organizing consciousness that, like the protagonist's own consciousness, could potentially organize an entire fictional universe."
  • the paratextual space of the preface here an interesting one for James's aesthetic and mimetic "plan" -- this is also to the NY collected edition (cf Piper 2009 ch 1, Kornbluh about the architecture of realism in these prefaces)
• 24 Narrative flatness...produces a disjunction btwn "personality" and "presence," dissociating the full weight of interior character from its delimited, distorted exterior manifestation. Forced to circumscribe the interior lives of many characters in the elaboration of a singular central consciousness, the novel has to radically delimit and distort the exterior manifestation of "roundness and fullness."
• 25 two types ("extremes") of c19 realist minor characters: the worker and the eccentric
  • worker "absorbed as a gear within the narrative machine, at the cost of his own free interiority,"
  • eccentric "grates against his or her position and...as a consequence [is] wounded, exiled, expelled, ejected, imprisoned, or killed (within the discourse if not the story)"
  • ex: Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre (1848), who is discursively imprisoned and only occasionally let out for her disruptive energy before she's ultimately killed within the story
• 26 How can a human being enter into a narrative world and not disrupt the distribution of attention? Such a question might be the axiom of this entire study.
  • Whose attention, the author's or the reader's or both? He seems to shuttle between them. Not bad just unclear
• 26-30 good section on "labor theory of characterization" with reference to industrialization, worker function: "minor characters are the proletariat of the novel" (27)
  • 28 character spaces of the gardener and maid distending the syntax in Proust
  • also moretti on bildung, bourgeoisie, social mobility
• 30 The inclusive aesthetics of the c19 realist tradition - with its dual impulses to bring in a multitude of characters and to bring out the interiority of a singular protagonist - illuminates particularly well the tension between the structural and referential axes of characterization.
• I want to explore...the relationship btwn what I will call an asymmetric structure of characterization - in which many are represented [31] but attention flows toward a delimited center - and the c19 comprehension of social stratification.
• 31 On the one hand, 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. On the other hand, the claims of minor characters on the reader's attention - and the resultant tension between characters and their functions - are generated by the democratic impulse that forms a horizon of c19 politics.
  • Example - Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872): M's remarkable character-system achieves a precarious balance between different patterns of distribution. It can be read in terms of a singular protagonist (Dorothea), a pair of co-protagonists (including Lydgate), a series of principal characters (including Mary and Fred, Will, Rosamond, Casaubon, and Bulstrode) or a manifold group of characters, extending from principals to nearly anonymous figures, who all compete for attention within the narrative web. Eliot's desire to preserve a singular protagonist and to extend narrative attention to a broad mass of characters evocatively parallels JS Mill's strange compromise position on universal suffrage, which idealistically insists on democratic principles (both morally and politically) and tries to preserve basic structures of class privilege. Mill imagines a franchise that is both stratified and universal[.]
• 33 [method] ...we need both to coordinate the large list of characters and to consider how each individual character-space is combined and differentially refracted through the narrative structure.
• 35 Dickens's panoply of eccentrics and grotesques brings minor characters to the center of his novels by increasing their distortion [vs Balzac who tries to give every character roundness]
• 38 ...the minor character, by calling attention to character-space, helps establish the relationship of "story" to "discourse" - the events in the novel and the rendition of these events in the narrative itself... The character-space provides a new framework through which we can apprehend an important mode of signification that is produced - like most narrative meaning - in the intersection of story and discourse.
  • 39 ex) Mansfield Park: "Not even Fanny had tears for aunt Norris - not even when she was gone forever" (she disappears from story and then from discourse): "Such a conflation indicates a narrative process that flows smoothly from the imagined world into the narrative's discursive structure. The character-space always arises at the intersection of story and discourse."
• 40 The minor character rests in the shadow-space between narrative position and human personality: an implied human being who gets constricted into a delimited role, but who has enough resonance with a human being to make us aware of this constricted position as delimited. The strange resonance of minor characters - the way that we so often come away from a novel, a drama, or a film remembering a marginal player, a side story, a fate only faintly illuminated or etched - stems from the intricacy of this narrative process; from the character who is not directly or fully represented in the narrative, and who comes to command a peculiar kind of attention in the partial occlusion of his fullness.

1: Narrative Asymmetry in Pride and Prejudice

• 43 To be a character in Austen is to get continually contrasted, juxtaposed, related to others. and, as such, to help build the thematic architecture that critics then discern.
• another good def of narrative asymmetry: "the dynamic narrative subordination of potentially full human beings" (44)
• 45 The dynamic, asymmetrical balance between different characters - and btwn different modes of characterization - is it simply a thematic concern of Austen's novels, nor a moral or political question that we impose on the finished text, but rather a narrative process that is entwined with, and unfurls out of, the novels' basic internal structure.
  • interesting political stress here
• 47 The combination of [E Bennet's] the sisters' continual subordination by the narrative and their resilient utility within it forces us to examine the logic behind a discursive system that repeatedly calls attention to persons, and modes of action, that it is only interested in dismissing, in order to elaborate a symbolic register that it is only interested in rejecting or destroying.... In the story itself the sisters are, certainly, what Elizabeth needs to get away from in order to be her own singular self - but on the level of narrative discourse they are precisely what she needs to have around.
• 53 ...two different conceptions of character that coexist in JA: character as social being (a person is a character) and character as inner quality (a person has a character). The narrative structure that mediates between them is precisely asymmetry. Austen famously transforms the novel into a genre that abstracts, elucidates, and diagnoses human characteristics... this is most obvious in the well known contrast of abstract nouns in the twin titles Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.
• 63 the collectivity of minor characters ("the girls," the many) juxtaposed with the singularity of Elizabeth adds a characterological antinomy to Armstrong 2005: major/minor, individual/collective
• 123 To understand the characters in P & P as linked together within a common, although asymmetrical structure helps us to understand the complicated relationship between the form of Austen's novel and the emergent social structure [agrarian hierarchy -> bourgeois capitalism, cf. 60-2] that is both a source and end point of this narrative form.
• 124 The system of characterization in P & P shows that Austen is not simply using secondary characters to reflect back on the real center of interest, Elizabeth and Darcy, but rather that Elizabeth, Darcy, and all the secondary characters fit into one unified although asymmetric field, which is the controlling structure and final representation of the novel. This field of characterization rigorously links the protagonist's interior development to the dispersion and fragmentation of the many other minor characters, producing a textual structure homologous to the social structure of capitalism.

2: Making More of Minor Characters (Dickens)

• will he consider the bibliographic formal question of how character systems develop in serialized narratives vs intentionally totalized novels like James?
• 125 ...the radical stylistically of characterization that run through and across all of D's novels and rest near the center of his literary achievement.
• ...consider both the essential significance of D's distorted and exaggerated minor characters and the over-significance of minor characters within the novels.
• 127 minor characters taking on synecdochal/analogical and thematic significance poses a fundamental question: "why are minor characters made to stand for so much in the first place?"
  • l/u Lawrence Frank, CD and the Romantic Self (analysis of Silas Wegg)
• Thesis: minor characters used to map social relations, externalize different psych aspects of the protagonist, present a range of variety within a thematic field. But they also compel attention through the config of their personalities and physiognomy, the textures of their speech, and their interactions with protagonists. "This is the fundamental achievement of D's depiction of minor characters: he dramatizes the [128] écartement [spreading] between a minor character's function and his or her own fictional being, showing how the very subordinated nature of minor characters catalyzes new kinds of affective presence."
• 129 ...his strange prominence is inseparable from his obscurity. The surging fifth of minor characters...always takes place in relation to this socionarrative position: the character's presence (visually, affectively) is intrinsically linked to his or her simultaneous effacement (structurally, axiologically [Of of relating to values]).
• 132

All D's protagonists are sometimes "unable to think," because the narrative relentlessly moves away from their thoughts, from their inferiority, toward the external events, and minor characters, who overwhelm them (thus shaping their thoughts). This configuration of consciousness is diametrically opposed to what we have seen in P & P. In Austen, a strong interiority grappled with the outside world and absorbs it into categories of consciousness. This process leads to the broader structure of the narrative, to the conversion of characters into characteristics (and, through the narrator's ironic omniscience, to the total structure of narrative asymetry that is at once objective and subjective). In Dickens, the protagonist's interiority is overwhelmed by the very exterior content that it attempts to process, and this condition also underlies the structure of the character-system, motivating the strong minor characters who are, in one sense, the distorted consequence of the protagonist's incomplete processes of consciousness and perception.
** this is such an important point, I think: from David's inability to comprehend Barkis's interiority to Esther'a being overwhelmed by London
* Jingle and decapitation in pickwick: "...the essential way that dickens made more of minor characters: not by rounding out their flatness or reducing their distorted nature, but...by extending their flatness in such a compelling way that it focuses the reader's interest."
*143 minor characters redirect attention but they never fully succeed in "destroying the asymmetric structure that condemns them to minorness."
*145 "minor characters are often not established or motivated in D's novels; they simply appear."
*148 like a verb turning into a noun, the socionarrative process that always underscores the substance of minor characters in Austen has essentially disappeared. 
*149 Dickens consistently replaces incomplete vision with distorted visibility, hardening a social process into a substantive physical phenomenon. 
* treatment of half visibility/visual field in Bleak House (Dickens, 1853)
*152 Half visibility is, in fact, the necessary consequence of social multiplicity, and such multiplicity is narratively enacted by the variously "extraordinary" minor characters who are crowded into every Dickens novel and who signify their subordination in their distortion, fragmentation, and eccentricity. 
*156 using the division of labour as the social process that links socioeconomic theory to c19 character-systems
** in Austen we see minor characters transform into delimited characteristics; in Dickens this process has hardened into structural and descriptive stasis 
*158 the privileging of "appearances" over "processes" reflects the terrible rigidity of social circumstances in Britain. This tendency is stylistic, it's consequences social: if the novels accept stratification as a kind of tragic precondition...the discourse instantiates minorness and flatness as narrative preconditions. 
*162 ...the two types of minor characters that structure the omniscient, asymmetric novel. the functional automaton and the deviant eccentric, are both the results of the division of labor. [Its distortion of interiority and exteriority, for Marx repetition and dislocation]
** as Gaskell diagnoses in North and South (Gaskell, 1855): "the hard spade-work robs their brain of life; the sameness of their toil deadens their imagination. ...they go home brutishly tired, poor creatures! Caring for nothing but food and rest."
*165 In this analysis of the division of labor we can see a kind of social grounding for the two forms of psychological failure Lawrence Frank identifies [paralysis and disintegration]. More powerfully than any previous novelist,  Dickens integrates both, contradictory aspects of specialization into the distortion that marks his minor characters - characters whose very doomed circumscription into minorness, on the level of the narrative discourse, registers the nature of Mid c19 social stratification. A key achievement of Dickensian characterization rests in the uncanny combination of these two discrepant modes. 
** nice phrase on 166 "the social structure that is grasped through this characterization"
*167 repetition is the horizon and boundary of Dickensian mjnorness...repetition is both local and intervallic: the minor character will typically repeat himself...and then repeat this repetition when he appears again... Repetition thus bridges the structural emplacement of the minor character..and the descriptive disarticulation of the minor character within any scene 
**again I want to link this to the serial and the periodic nature of these narratives, which itself is a material armature that is "local and intevallic"
*170 ...D's minor characters are both typical and peculiar, a paradoxical conjunction ultimately inseparable from the way that...minor characters conjoin repetition with eccentricity and link together emphasis with obscurity.
*171 3 modes of repetition: gestures, narrative appearances, and persons (other minor characters)
** ex) Barkis (the wagon man) in David Copperfield (Dickens, 1850): "Barkis is willing!", who is a "dramatic embodiment of Eliot's dialectic between subjectivity and exteriority, illustrating one way that the 'roar which lies on the other side of silence' gets incompletely filtered out" (172)

• • • after the specificity of fleshing out Barkis's way of speaking ("Are you pretty comfortable, though") he shifts to "the plane of achieved distortion that runs throughout Dickens's novel, and which I have been analyzing as a kind of totalized, symptomatic representation of specialization and its discontents." (174)

3: The Character-System in Great Expectations