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)

3: The Character-System in Great Expectations