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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 narrator-protagonists 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 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 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 self-recognition 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 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 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 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. 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 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.

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 minor-character 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 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.

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, 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 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, 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 minor-character elaboration being tested at this early moment—one that few writers will endeavor to imitate. ⁶⁶

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, non-realistic 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 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 minor-character 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.

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 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 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 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 minor-character 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 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 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 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 minor-character 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 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. 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 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 often-anthologized (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 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.