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

When critics have remarked on the type of novel Costello has written, they have generally wielded this detail to help untangle the Gordian knot that is the question of how much Coetzee is speaking through his fictional author. James Wood, for example, understands Elizabeth Costello as “deeply confessional” and proffers the fact that Costello is “famous like Coetzee for her rewriting of a classic novel” as evidence of the real and fictional novelists’ shared concerns. ² Samuel Durrant, by contrast, stresses that Coetzee’s Foe (1985), which rewrites Robinson Crusoe (and more subtly Defoe’s other novels), differs profoundly from what we learn about The House on Eccles Street: “While Costello has apparently rewritten Ulysses from the perspective of Molly Bloom, Coetzee has written a book about the impossibility of recovering the point of view of Friday from Robinson Crusoe.”³ Durrant pinpoints the crucial distinction between Costello’s and her creator’s confidence in their sympathetic imaginations, their ability to adopt and inhabit another’s perspective: Costello’s seems boundless; Coetzee’s meets frustration at, or rather refuses the presumption to understand, the experience of the radically other.

Coetzee’s choice to make his protagonist famous for writing a novel from Molly Bloom’s perspective does largely function, in Elizabeth Costello, to occasion debates about writers’ sympathetic imaginations; the novel touts Costello’s capacity to “think her way into other people, into other existences,” even “into the existence of a being who has never existed,” like Molly (Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 22, 80). But Coetzee’s acute awareness of the political demands placed on contemporary novelists also yields a perspicacious diagnosis of the rift between how texts like Eccles Street—that is, actually existing minor-character elaborations—have been received by critics and how they are understood by their producers. When Coetzee stages an interview between Costello and a scholar who “teaches in California and edits a journal” (7), the scholar offers a reception history that serves as an effective précis of the extant criticism on minor-character elaborations: “Critics have concentrated on the way you have claimed or reclaimed Molly… challenging Joyce, one of the father-figures of modern literature, on his own territory” (12). Costello, however, does not view her project as subversion, as feminist appropriation or Electral conflict with her modernist forefathers, but as an elaboration of Joyce, in the word’s initial sense: “to fashion (a product of art or industry) from the raw material.”⁴ She responds that the breadth of Ulysses allowed, even seemed to beg, for imaginative expansion; her novel is animated by the fact that Joyce created in Molly “an engaging person.” “No, I don’t see myself as challenging Joyce,” Costello continues. “But certain books are so prodigally inventive that there is plenty of material left over at the end, material that almost invites you to take it over and use it to build something of your own” (12–13). In crafting this exchange, Coetzee intuits a pervasive disconnect between the scholarly propensity to emphasize elements of political critique and subversion when they have read texts that elaborate minor characters and their authors, who are less apt to embrace such a stance and often prefer, like Costello, to view themselves as participating in the construction of a literary tradition than in the overturning of an oppressive one. The fact that critics have not made the connection between Costello’s The House on Eccles Street and the real and vibrant genre to which it alludes reflects a wider failure to notice the phenomenon that minor-character elaboration has become and the particular characteristics of this intertextual practice. In the previous chapter, I argued that writers began to deploy the genre’s techniques in the late 1960s. But the most vigorous production using the genre begins in the mid-1980s, around the time Foe is published, and it only accelerates into the 1990s and 2000s; by the time Elizabeth Costello appears, the practice of elaborating minor characters has become so popular that even fictional novelists are doing it.

In this period the genre has become a global and, at least for one who is looking, near-ubiquitous phenomenon that shows no sign of slowing. As I wrote the initial version of this chapter, I discovered in the New York Times Sunday Book Review that David Malouf, perhaps Australia’s most prominent real novelist, had published a new novel, Ransom (2009), which makes a protagonist out of Priam and enlarges the episode in book 24 of the Iliad in which he journeys to redeem Hector’s desecrated body from Achilles. Literary scholars have engaged with isolated texts that elaborate minor characters but have tended to receive them primarily in terms of their political opposition to or subversion of their predecessors—a model tough to reconcile with an example like Ransom. The Times reviewer recognized as much, writing, “It will inevitably be said that Malouf’s novel ‘subverts’ or ‘undermines’ the ‘Iliad’” and countered that its faithful “redeployment” of the epic’s themes “belie[s] such a rote notion.”⁵ Many writers taking up the practice in this period have indeed endeavored to reimagine socially marginal characters. But literary scholars who have commented on individual examples of minor-character elaboration have tended to parrot the “rote notion” that these works are therefore politically subversive. More specifically, commentators have consistently understood such texts to be “giving voice” to previously “silenced” characters and applauded them for doing so. Eileen Williams-Wanquet’s comments regarding Marina Warner’s Indigo—a double-plotted novel, in which sections alternate between a story set in 1980s London and the Caribbean and another set on Shakespeare’s sixteenth-century island and focusing on Sycorax—are emblematic: Warner “gives back a voice to the silenced female presence in The Tempest who never appears onstage.”⁶ Marta Bryk similarly contends that Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly (1990) offers an “act of historical reparation” for the injustice done to the “maidservant who has been denied the right to speak” in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. ⁷ Linda Schelbitzki Pickle writes that Christa Wolf attempts to “scratch away the entire male tradition” by “letting Cassandra speak for herself.”⁸ The authors of minor-character elaborations often formulate their projects in similarly phonocentric terms. On the second page of Cassandra, Wolf has her title character ask: “Why did I want the gift of prophecy, come what may? To speak with my voice: the ultimate.”⁹ In The Penelopiad, Atwood intersperses chapters of Penelope’s narration with verse sections “sung” by a chorus of the twelve maids hanged by Odysseus. In the last of their droll ditties the maids make their plea: “we had no voice / we had no name… we took the blame / it was not fair / but now we’re here… / now, we call / to you to you” (195). In her best-selling The Red Tent (1997), Anita Diamant makes a narrator-protagonist out of the biblical Dinah and sets her character’s narration against “the voiceless cipher in” Genesis (Diamant, The Red Tent, 1). These authors and critics follow a longstanding feminist tradition dedicated to “recovering” voices from the silences of history and canonical literary texts.

In reiterating the language of “giving voice to the silenced,” however, scholars who have written on these texts understand them in mimetic and phonocentric terms that misstate and overrate the kind of political work they might accomplish. Thus when Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes, as part of an amicus brief defending Alice Randall’s right to publish The Wind Done Gone against a suit brought by Margaret Mitchell’s estate, “At last the slaves of Tara have found their voices, and I say, ‘Amen!’” his metaphor inflates a sense of (liberal) political triumph. ¹⁰ When Randall’s publishers subsequently used Gates’s praise for a paperback blurb, this metaphor encourages Randall’s readers to understand minor-character elaboration in the same terms. Someone, this language suggests, has been granted agency, autonomy, the freedom to speak—“a voice with which to speak of her own experience,” as Heidi Gilpin writes of Wolf’s Cassandra. ¹¹ Gained in this slippage is a pyrrhic victory that enables critics to laud such texts as subversive or liberatory—“scratching away” an oppressive tradition, winning justice or “reparations” for fictional characters—rather than performing the more modest political work of countering a previous literary representation with one that is presumably more salutary and possibly more historically accurate. Lost is attention to representation in both senses: to the fact that a literary depiction of a “voice” has been constructed by a contemporary author, who is writing on behalf of the formerly minor character. ¹² Ironically, then, the critics and authors who frame minor-character elaborations in phonocentric terms retain the perspectivism but abandon the self-reflexive alertness to discursive constructedness, and the inevitably ideological nature of such constructions, that texts such as Wide Sargasso Sea, which appeared at the genre’s vanguard, were determined to foster. Such accounts also gloss over the fraught transaction of elites speaking on behalf of a subordinated group that has preoccupied postcolonial studies since Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”¹³ Treating subaltern characters as if they were actually speaking, critics repress the obvious fact that their authors are the ones doing so—authors who are manifestly in possession of the cultural capital of the traditional canon and who deploy that capital in the service of marking their own literariness.

In describing the form of character narration, that is, the representation of a character’s voice, as the liberation of that character, writers adopting minor-character elaboration and their critics demonstrate a commitment to the broader tendency in twentieth-century theories of the novel that Dorothy J. Hale has identified as “social formalism.” According to Hale, social formalists understand a novel’s formal registering of the speech or thoughts of a character as both the means to represent that character and to engender that character’s unique identity; thus the rendering of a character’s “internal discourse, the language of consciousness” becomes “not just the truth of what he believes, but… the truth of who he is” (166). This understanding of narrative form fosters the notion that adopting the point of view of a character not only represents that character truly and authentically but amounts to “characterological emancipation” (89), a liberation from the oppression of authorial control that allows the (patently imaginary) person to speak as she will. Conflating literary representation with democratic self-representation, with autonomous free speech, authors and critics who describe minor-character elaborations as “giving voice to the silenced” understand the redistribution of narrative attention as a kind of justice. The registering of a panoply of character voices becomes, in such accounts, not merely a broadening of the purview of the novel to imagine the experiences of the socially marginal but an expansion of the franchise, a triumph of democracy. The reception of texts in the genre thus participates in the critical practice endemic to the canon debates of the 1980s and 1990s that John Guillory has called an “imaginary politics”—not one that is insignificant or a figment but one that “conceives the literary canon as a hypothetical image of social diversity, a kind of mirror in which social groups either see themselves or do not see themselves, reflected.”¹⁴ In Guillory’s view, this “politics has real work to do… but it is also inherently limited by its reduction of the political to the instance of representation, and of representation to the image” (Guillory, Cultural Capital, 7–8). Canon revision has been concerned with producing a corpus of texts and authors that more accurately reflects social diversity, and minor-character elaborations seek to generate a range of protagonists that is similarly “representative.” A kind of reflectionism—the belief that literary images reflect a preexisting reality—underlies this imaginary politics. It is easy to see how reflectionism founders in practice. That female characters speak with authority or demonstrate radical agency in Shakespeare’s plays does not mean that women of his period were emancipated. Likewise, when the maidservant in Mary Reilly is “given a voice,” working-class women have not suddenly gained democratic access. Literary images might well change how readers think about the social groups represented and spur such readers to activism on their behalf, but only through this indirect route do images democratize or alter the material relations of society. Just as Guillory concludes that “there must be some relation between the representation of minorities in power and the representation of minorities in the canon” (7), so must there be between oppressed social groups and the social types that are typically rendered as minor characters in literary works. But this relationship is not one of identity. It follows that to reverse the relationship, to make minor characters into protagonists, does not remedy structural inequalities or obtain representation for those who lack it.

This chapter argues that although scholars who have written on individual instances of minor-character elaboration have stressed their participation in a purportedly subversive feminist and multicultural project, to consider this flourishing genre as a whole makes legible its actual significance: the genre articulates a broad contemporary commitment to a subjectivist perspectivism compatible with the reigning tenets of liberal pluralism. In the genre’s primary convention—the adoption of the perspective of a formerly minor character—one discovers an assertion of the unique subjectivity of every individual and a consequent insistence on a plurality of perspectives rather than any single truth. While a number of authors have indeed adopted the techniques of minor-character elaboration to critique their predecessors, the paradigmatic reception of such texts mischaracterizes the nature of their political work and allows critics to read subversive agendas into texts that claim liberal democratic rights on behalf of fictional characters. These texts and the critics who have championed them actually exemplify a thoroughgoing traditionalism; dedicated to the proposition that all characters are created equal, they reduce the project of novelistic representation to the rendering of interiority and voice and shrink the political sphere to the right of the individual to speak freely.

Minor-character elaboration, like any genre, is constituted by a heterogeneous constellation of textual practices that nonetheless share a set of similarities or conventions, in which the genre’s underlying social meaning can be discerned. This chapter analyzes a cross-section of the genre, reading its significance in the conventional structures that appear in the aggregate. As I showed in chapter 1, the minor-character elaborations that appeared at the moment of high postmodernism did not cultivate a straightforward sympathetic identification with the characters they appropriated, nor did they pose coherent “voices” in place of “silences” in canonical texts—strategies that become the hallmarks of the genre in later decades. In the first part of this chapter, I document the genre’s phonocentric emphasis on voice and expand the critique initiated above, showing through analysis of critics’ responses to minor-character elaborations, authorial pronouncements, and the conventional features of the texts themselves how the political claims advanced by and on behalf of such texts rest on a dubious conflation of the representation of characters’ voices with the “recovery” of actual historical voices. Even more egregious has been the propensity to applaud such representations not as welcome responses to previous ones but as the liberation of minor characters—an accomplishment I insist takes place only in the imagination. The critical response to minor-character elaborations, however, is hardly anomalous. Rather, I show that it is symptomatic of a broader ideology of the novel that construes novels as first and foremost dedicated to representing the unique consciousnesses of their characters and that valorizes the extension of democratic freedoms even to fictional beings. Minor-character elaborations emerge and flourish, I argue, to reinforce what I refer to as “liberal subjectivism” and “perspectival pluralism”; proclaiming the unique individuality of any character, the genre reasserts the autonomous subject in the face of its poststructuralist critique and insists on a pluralist, perspectival notion of truth in place of a postmodern understanding of narrative and the self as constituted by discourse. I conclude by posing Coetzee’s Foe (1986) as a rejection of the conventions of minor-character elaboration, a fictional treatise on the problems with and limitations of “giving voice to the silenced.” But I also suggest that literary scholars too often focus on exceptional texts like Foe at the expense of the conventional and thus overlook the broader contemporary episteme that becomes visible across a genre.

This chapter functions, then, at a number of intersecting levels. It explains why minor-character elaboration flourishes between the 1980s and the present, as it assimilates feminist and multicultural demands to liberal-pluralist tenets. In doing so, the chapter shows how genre study can be usefully deployed to answer problems of scale facing contemporary literary study, approaching far-reaching cultural phenomena through analysis of conventional generic forms while remaining attentive to the disjunctive or experimental features of individual works. The chapter extends a critique of the pervasive politics of literary form that minor-character elaborations epitomize, one that understands the representation of a character’s narrative voice and interiority not only as the conventional route toward “majorness” or protagonist status but as an enactment of democratic principles. In the slippage between viewing images of socially marginal characters as desirable and hailing their discovery of a voice, one discovers a principal route by which critics overvalue the political efficacy of literary texts. Finally, I show that while scholars have frequently attended to radical or postmodern texts that “write back” to canonical predecessors, are preoccupied with histories of violence and exploitation, and reflect on the problems of representing history in narrative form, the lion’s share of contemporary intertextual production remains dedicated to its unproblematic recovery. ¹⁵

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

After a decade-and-a-half lag—perhaps the time it took Wide Sargasso Sea and its contemporaries to garner a critical mass of notice—minor-character elaborations begin to appear with frequency in the early 1980s. In 1982 Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon made protagonists of the female characters of Arthurian legend. In that same year, Wolf gave her Cassandra lectures. In 1983, Christine Brückner, on the other side of the Berlin Wall, issued a collection of monologues translated as Desdemona—If You Had Only Spoken! and subtitled Eleven Uncensored Speeches of Eleven Incensed Women (trans. 1992). ¹⁸ A similar phonocentric emphasis emerged everywhere in the mid-1980s, a high-water mark for the “recuperative paradigm” in Anglo-American feminist studies and also the moment when Mikhail Bakhtin’s mode of discourse analysis arrived in English translations. ¹⁹ In this period, the liberal subjectivism of the genre, its commitment to representing the unique subjectivity of the individual, becomes legible in its primary convention: the conversion of a minor character to a narrator-protagonist. Whereas Wide Sargasso Sea and Grendel flaunted the fictiveness of their characters and depicted fractured subjects constituted by conflicting discourses, the minor-character elaborations published from the mid-1980s through the present tend to project coherent speakers who purport to offer faithful accounts of their true selves. Contesting a previous depiction of character on the grounds of its necessarily ideological character, such texts ironically claim their versions to be authentic and realistic. In imagining the conversion of a minor character into a narrator-protagonist as the route to authentic self-representation, these texts epitomize the liberal theorization of the novel that Hale labels “social formalism.” Hale traces a lineage of theorists of the novel who posit that “characterological freedom [can] be achieved” when a character gets the chance “to express himself in his own terms” (93). Appearing to speak for themselves, characters cease to be “created beings” and are understood as “wholly autonomous subjects” (120). ²⁰ Authors who have elaborated minor characters and the critics who have embraced them adhere to this tradition, construing the formal registering of a character’s thoughts or voice as “giving” the character a chance to speak for herself and thus granting agency and autonomy to one who had been the victim of an oppressive silencing.

Minor-character elaborations enact their social formalism in their conventional form, and they frequently make explicit the social meaning of this form by thematizing the character’s desire to speak freely. “Voice” serves as the ambiguous mediating term in these works, a shorthand that encapsulates their project of (imaginatively) transforming a minor character from an object to a speaking subject. As Brückner’s titles alone demonstrate, Desdemona articulates and attempts to satisfy the desire to “hear” from characters that are understood as having been silenced, or “censored,” in the past, and it endeavors to remedy these silences in vociferously oppositional terms. One finds a similarly sharp rebuke and an equally revealing title in Atwood’s short story “Gertrude Talks Back,” in which Hamlet’s mother discloses that it was she, not Claudius, who killed her husband. ²¹ As a set of monologues for performance by the female voice, Brückner’s book exhibits an even greater investment in vocal presence than many of her nondramatic counterparts. The content of the speeches almost compulsively consists of demands to be heard. Clytemnestra shouts, “You never listened to me—listen to me now, listen well, dead Agamemnon!”²² Desdemona similarly refuses: “No, Othello, no! I will not hold my peace” (Brückner, Desdemona, 115). And Brückner’s Virgin Mary protests to the Lord, “I am almost suffocated with this silence that You have laid upon me!” (128). In these monologues, Brückner undertakes a fictional liberation of the voices of these female figures,²³ fulfilling the desires of any reader or audience who has “resisted” earlier representations of these women, failed to find them convincing, wondered what they were thinking, or wanted to know more about a mere sketch of a figure.

One does not have to look far to discover the forces motivating authors like Brückner and Wolf to “give voice” to female characters at this historical moment. Both make explicit the feminist aspirations of their work, and the 1970s and 1980s were distinguished by a widespread feminist project of calling attention to the historical and cultural silencing of women and seeking to repair those silences by “recovering” their hidden experiences and voices. The “recuperative paradigm” in feminist scholarship has most visibly engaged in its canon building: an “archeological” project of “excavating” a largely forgotten history of female authorship from the archive, as part of the “reconstructive act of establishing a parallel tradition.”²⁴ The construction of fictional voices for female characters previously appearing at the margins of canonical texts or stereotypically represented therein represents an analogous project undertaken at the same historical moment and with a similar impulse—although it has often been conflated with, rather than likened to, the literary historical rediscovery of female authors. ²⁵ Feminist minor-character elaborations correspond more directly with a longstanding tradition of feminist criticism that seeks to highlight the politics of representation in canonical texts—the ways in which images in those texts both reflect and reinforce patriarchal ideologies. ²⁶

Perhaps the most striking link between the theory and practice of liberal feminist scholars and the fictional practice of minor-character elaboration is the phonocentric emphasis of both, their reliance on “voice” as “a crucial signifier for female authority and autonomy.”²⁷ Bakhtin’s work has often served as the linchpin between formal, narratological analyses of discourse and political or sociological deployments of “voice” that motivate it as a signifier for resisting oppressive power structures. Susan Snaider Lanser writes, “when these two approaches to ‘voice’ converge in what Mikhail Bakhtin has called a ‘sociological poetics,’ it becomes possible to see narrative technique not simply as a product of ideology but as ideology itself: narrative voice… embodies the social, economic, and literary conditions under which it has been produced.”²⁸ This gesture of making narrative voice “embody” social conditions, however, converts a representation of discourse into the concrete actualization of social relations and has thus often enabled scholars to mischaracterize the political work of minor-character elaborations: they take an author’s construction of a narrative voice to be that character’s voice, erasing the scene of representation and applauding the liberation of imaginary people.

As with her counterpart in the West, Wolf is overwhelmingly concerned with constructing a voice for her Cassandra. Although Kristevan and poststructuralist feminists have advocated a more radical linguistic subversion of syntax and narrative conventions, the adoption of female points of view and development of complex female characters are realist methods that have resonated with many liberal Anglo-American feminists. They have called for and welcomed women’s “revisionary” strategies to combat “the voicelessness—as well as the lack of human subjectivity—of women characters in much of the traditional body of literature” and endeavored to show how frequently female characters have functioned only in relation to male protagonists. Such liberal feminist strategies have typically attempted to “fill the old stereotypical female ‘vessels’ with character portraits that are complex, individual and unique” and “retell the world from the women’s perspective.”²⁹ Wolf’s entire Cassandra project, the novel and essays taken together, purposefully puts forth an unruly, sui generis, and undecidable textual “fabric.”³⁰ But the approach she takes to create her portrait of Cassandra in the novel proper is to make her into a narrator-protagonist. In the essays, Wolf articulates the political logic behind her imaginative extension of narrative agency to the enslaved Trojan: “do we suspect, how difficult and in fact dangerous it can be when life is restored to an ‘object’? When the idol begins to feel again? When ‘it’ finds speech again? When it has to say ‘I’ as a woman?” (Wolf, Cassandra, 298). Wolf refers not only to Cassandra’s objectification here but to that of women throughout history; elsewhere she maintains that she intends her Cassandra to reflect the experience of the woman writer. Wolf has Cassandra speak in the first person, then, as a way of having her reclaim subject status. ³¹ Moreover, Wolf has maintained that constructing the novel through Cassandra’s narration was motivated by her desire to solicit the reader’s identification: “I wrote sixty pages in the third person before I noticed that did not achieve what I was after. I then wrote the whole thing as a monologue, and this allowed a greater intensity and stronger identification with the figure, which may transfer itself to the reader.”³²

Cassandra appears to be a particularly apt choice of a minor character to recreate as a narrating subject since in earlier depictions her object status was so conspicuous. In Aeschylus, she remains the captive of Agamemnon, and she recounts how Apollo gave her the gift of foresight, only to add the curse that she would never be believed when she reneged on her promise to sleep with him. Cassandra’s voice becomes ineffectual, her prophetic power a source of personal anguish rather than public authority, precisely at the point when she attempts to exercise autonomy over her body. Wolf leaves Apollo out of the story; the royal Trojan family ignores Cassandra’s warnings simply because she is a woman and not to be consulted in matters of state policy. But Wolf poses Cassandra’s training as a priestess as motivated by the desire for agency and authority. Wolf also depicts Cassandra as a woman for whom speech constitutes public political action as well as the exercise of individual liberty; she dares to protest against the saber rattling of her father and brothers and is punished for her transgression. In the novel’s climactic scene, the Trojans plot to ambush Achilles, heedless of Cassandra’s objections. (Significantly, they want to use Polyxena as bait, so this particular objection is to the instrumentalization of Cassandra’s sister.) In response to the demands of Priam, who embodies the patriarchal order, to “keep silent,” Cassandra refuses with a single syllable and is imprisoned for treason and accused of madness (127). Sadistically jailed in the palace’s “grave of the heroes,” Cassandra compulsively replays the scene of her refusal but refuses to relent: “A hundred times I said no again. My life, my voice, my body would produce no other answer. ‘You don’t agree?’ No. ‘But you will keep silent?’ No. No. No. No” (131). ³³ Cassandra’s Lear-like repetition compounds and extends the novel’s own relentless reiteration of the word “voice,” its thematization of the political necessity and danger of speaking out, and Wolf’s representation of a female narrating voice.

Within the novel, Cassandra’s narrative is a private, extended interior monologue in the moments before her death, but Cassandra is also typical in the genre for self-reflexively offering itself as part of the construction of a feminine storytelling tradition. Wolf has Cassandra express the desire to have her story told to a future audience, preferring that it be passed on orally. “Send me a scribe,” she apostrophizes Clytemnestra, “or better yet a young slave woman with a keen memory and a powerful voice. Ordain that she may repeat to her daughter what she hears from me. That the daughter in turn may pass it on to her daughter, and so on. So that alongside the river of heroic songs this tiny rivulet too, may reach those faraway, perhaps happier people who will live in times to come” (81). Although Cassandra knows Clytemnestra will not grant her such a wish, and Wolf, analogizing the Trojan War with the nuclear threat of the Cold War, is not suggesting this rosy view of the future without irony, the wish for a matriarchal inheritance of stories to counter a bellicose Western tradition of “heroic songs” surely animates her project.

A similar desire, likewise conveyed through the use of character narration that emphasizes voice, reverberates through later minor-character elaborations, such as Nancy Rawles’s My Jim (2005) and Anita Diamant’s immensely popular The Red Tent. ³⁴ Diamant’s novel explicitly states its desire to establish a matriarchal rejoinder to the biblical narrative by making Dinah into its narrator-protagonist. The Red Tent opens with Dinah addressing the contemporary reader, lamenting the loss of feminine histories and the fact that her story has been pushed to the Bible’s margins—or, rather, been buried in a footnote.

Even in a minor-character elaboration that features an omniscient, heterodiegetic narrator, in order to focalize the narrative through the perspectives of multiple protagonists, such as in Bradley’s massive saga The Mists of Avalon, “voice” looms prominently as both narrative device and central plot element. While Bradley focalizes the bulk of her novel through the women of Arthurian legend, the book begins with an italicized prologue, headed in capitals with the subtitle “MORGAINE SPEAKS.”³⁵ Morgaine, better known as Morgan le Fay in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, narrates this section, and Bradley intersperses italicized “MORGAINE SPEAKS” sections throughout the novel. Mists dramatizes the overturning of a pagan, goddess-worshipping matriarchy with the rise of Christianity, and ends (after nearly nine hundred pages) with Morgaine trying to reconcile old and new faiths in a Christian chapel. In this sanctuary, she kneels to pray but beseeches the ancient spirit of the Goddess rather than the Christian God or Christ. As if in answer, her mother “Igraine’s voice” suddenly “rushe[s] over her like a great light” (Bradley, The Mists of Avalon, 876), intimating that a matriarchal spirit lives on, covertly, in Britain’s Christian era.

Presenting formerly minor characters as autonomous speaking subjects, contemporary authors ironically obscure their own agency in creating new versions of these characters. Atwood writes in her introduction to The Penelopiad that she has “chosen to give the telling of the story to Penelope and to the twelve hanged maids,” as if upon that choice she ceded control of the novel to her characters (Atwood, The Penelopiad, xv; emphasis added). If Atwood and Le Guin diverge in their views of the gender politics of their predecessors, they share a commitment to authenticity and the belief that the use of a character as a narrator is the way to achieve it. Atwood thinks that Homer’s story “doesn’t hold water” (xv), and her Penelope explicitly critiques the ideology promulgated by “the official version” in deploying her character as “an edifying legend. A stick used to beat other women with. Why couldn’t they be as considerate, as trustworthy, as all-suffering as I had been?” (2). And while Le Guin claims Virgil could authentically represent women when he wanted to, in Lavinia she intimates that Virgil’s depiction of Aeneas’s wife in the Aeneid follows a particular set of narrative conventions and generic imperatives. Le Guin’s narrator rejects “the poet’s portrait” of her “as a shrinking silent maiden” (Le Guin, Lavinia, 19). Virgil later appears to Lavinia and, in one of a series of Pirandellian tête-à-têtes, admits his depiction of her was “stupid, conventional, unimagined. I thought you were a blonde!” Though Virgil concedes that he made Lavinia into a stereotypical heroine, he defends his narrative priorities even as Le Guin’s undercuts his justification: “You can’t have two love stories in an epic. Where would the battles fit? In any case, how could one possibly end a story with a marriage?” (58). Le Guin thus attributes Lavinia’s conventionality to limits on narrative space but also—in posing the conventional resolution to the romance plot as an ending that Virgil cannot imagine—to generic priorities that determine the narrative centrality of some characters and not others.

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

If such a view of fictional entities seems manifestly mystified, it nonetheless represents a widely shared understanding of literary narrative as, ideally, a reflection of liberal-pluralist democracy, in which each character has the right to speak on her own behalf and advocate her interests rather than be subjected to the whims of a tyrannical author. Such a liberal poetics of the novel has been advanced by a host of twentieth-century novelists and theorists. E. M. Forster famously described his characters as “full of the spirit of mutiny.” The author’s upholding of order requires a delicate balancing act with regard to these unruly figures: “if they are given complete freedom they kick the book to pieces, and if they are kept too sternly in check, they revenge themselves by dying, and destroy it by intestinal decay.”³⁹ Iris Murdoch asserted that the “individuals portrayed in the novels are free, independent of their author, and not merely puppets in the exteriorization of some closely locked psychological conflict of his own.”⁴⁰ Even György Lukács viewed the conventional, fully fleshed-out realist character as generating an autonomous existence: “realism means a three-dimensionality, an all-roundness, that endows with independent life characters and human relationships.”⁴¹ By contrast, Vladimir Nabokov infamously responded to Forster’s difficulty maintaining an orderly ship by declaring his characters to be “galley slaves.”⁴² Extending Forster’s maritime metaphor and punning on uncorrected manuscript proofs, Nabokov insists on the textuality of his characters, reiterating a warning against confusing art and life that runs throughout his fiction.

This type of confusion recurs through social-formalist accounts and becomes an explicitly “socioformal” theory of characterization in Alex Woloch’s The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Woloch reasonably argues that because narratives have limited space, one character’s development happens at the expense of other characters, a parceling out of attention that minor-character elaborations seek to redistribute. But when Woloch writes that “narrative progress always entails a series of choices: each moment magnifies some characters while turning away from—and thus diminishing or even stinting—others” (12), he sounds a lot like Le Guin’s Lavinia (“He scanted me”), treating characters as if they were extant persons whom authors either “magnify” or ignore. Though Woloch insists that character emerges in and through the tension between structure (characters as discursive constructs) and reference (characters as implied human persons), time and again he figures characters’ existence to precede structure. Minor characters are oppressed, “the proletariat of the novel” (27), and victims of the painful-sounding process of “compression,” in which the (ostensibly already existing) “full person is squeezed into the flat character” (69). Woloch insists that functional minor characters each possess a unique “orienting consciousness that, like the protagonist’s own consciousness, could potentially organize an entire fictional universe” (22). This statement sums up the aesthetic ideology of minor-character elaborations and the broader liberal novelistic tradition to which they belong. In this account, not all characters have been created equal, but each has the potential to be a protagonist because each is somehow still endowed with a distinctive individual consciousness. If one believes this, it’s not a far cry to insist that minor characters have a right to speak that shall not be infringed.

Woloch sees the history of the realist novel as a field that not only represents—constructs images of—the social but also mirrors and instantiates the promise and failures of liberal democracy. He asserts that the realist novel’s “wide range of narrative structures… enact and represent both the premises of democratic equality and the pressures and consequences of social stratification” (Woloch, The One vs. The Many, 41, emphasis added). This view treats literature as a pure reflection and instance of social relations and literalizes a metaphor: the “flat” character becomes a flattened person rather than an underdeveloped image produced by a text. Again, the simple remedy prescribed for rounding out this flat figure is to “giv[e] a character voice (by registering his or her perspective, point of view, and interior thoughts)” (41). Woloch perpetuates a widespread view according to which the telos of novelistic representation is the depiction of characters’ rich interiority. ⁴³ Applied to minor-character elaborations, this understanding of character produces a mischaracterization of the canonical text—as silencing, excluding, or “compressing” persons rather than posing an image that, like all cultural artifacts, is determined by myriad factors—and a tendency to prize too highly the accomplishment of “giving voice” to minor characters.

The recourse to “giving voice” and the tendency to treat characters as deserving of democratic rights illustrate the way critical responses to minor-character elaborations reprise a series of errors endemic to the canon wars. Guillory has persuasively shown how “a certain confusion… founds and vitiates the liberal pluralist critique of the canon, a confusion between representation in the political sense—the relation of a representative to a constituency—and representation in the rather different sense of the relation between an image and what the image represents” (Guillory, Cultural Capital, vii–viii). Extant accounts of minor-character elaborations display a similar confusion: the literary depiction of a character’s voice is redescribed as an act of political self-representation, which occludes the fact that an (elite) author is writing on the character’s behalf. Such descriptions recast as emancipation what I have referred to, pace Guillory, as an “imaginary politics,” a project that consists of “correcting… images for stereotyping, or for a failure to represent minorities at all.” Guillory makes the obvious but necessary point that constructing a “‘representative’ canon does not redress the effects of social exclusion” but rather “reconstruct[s the canon] as a true image (a true representation) of social diversity” (8). Minor-character elaborations produce a more diverse array of protagonists who appear “fleshed out” rather than stereotyped, but supplementing previous images with more salutary ones should not be confused with the bestowal of agency on the previously oppressed. Further, imaginatively granting speech to characters does little to account for—let alone remedy—the structural inequalities that enable some democratic citizens, when they exercise their right to speak freely, to have far greater power than others to be heard. In addition to relying, then, on a conception of the liberal subject that much recent theory has questioned, the commitment to a politics of the image establishes limits to the horizon of the genre’s political aims. Minor-character elaborations are, at root, committed to equality of vision. They ask us to see differently, to see characters for who they truly are, a truth that can only be conveyed through their rich interiority or authentic voice. Williams-Wanquet’s response to Indigo is again typical and indicative of the limitations of an imaginary politics: “Warner deconstructs traditional history to reveal another story, that of the silenced other. This encounter with the other is a call to know and respect each other’s differences” (Williams-Wanquet, “Marina Warner’s Indigo,” 268). Understood as “revealing” stories equally deserving of respect but hitherto ignored, minor-character elaborations participate in what Walter Benn Michaels has described, in another context, as a “neoliberal aesthetics,” one characterized by a dedication to the “recognition of an equality that already exists but that our falsely hierarchical vision has kept us from seeing.” The politics of this aesthetics is limited by an “indifference to those social structures that, not produced by how we see, cannot be overcome by seeing differently.”⁴⁴

Guillory’s account of the canon debate points to the way minor-character elaborations rely on a number of theoretically suspect categories: they depend on claims to authenticity and reflectionism, presume the self-constituting liberal subject, and reproduce an essentialist form of identity politics. Critics influenced by poststructuralism have long taken issue with a politics of the image in which, as Toril Moi argues, “writing is seen as a more or less faithful reproduction of an external reality to which we all have an equal and unbiased access, and which therefore enables us to criticize the author on the grounds that he or she has created an incorrect model of the reality we somehow all know.”⁴⁵ When minor-character elaborations like Lavinia or The Penelopiad seek to “correct” conventional images of female characters in canonical texts by countering them with “truer” ones, these texts assert a narrator’s capacity to present a true account of the self and are thus committed to the autonomous, fully constituted subject that can be authentically rendered. But while the conventional images (as well as their replacements) are surely ideological, critics who presume an identity between social hierarchies and narrative conventions fail to apprehend the complex set of historical determinants of such images. Molly Hite, for example, writes that Wide Sargasso Sea prompts us to discover the exclusionist focus embedded in English literary conventions, the fact that “certain categories of socially marginal human beings are by virtue of this social marginality fitted only to be minor characters.”⁴⁶ Hite argues,

While in the aggregate it may be true that socially marginal characters are less frequently protagonists, conventions do not “restrict” production, and cultures do not “mandate” stories that “affirm a dominant ideology.” One need only consider the prominent role of the slave and captive Cassandra in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, or the early novelistic example of Moll Flanders to find a prominent socially marginal narrator-protagonist, or Jane Barker’s A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies for an author who rejects a conventional romantic ending. ⁴⁷ Conventions, that is, become visible retrospectively; they are not constraints but patterns. But the example of Moll Flanders, in which a male author, Daniel Defoe, constructs the voice of a female narrator-protagonist, is most illustrative since implicitly authorizing many a minor-character elaboration’s claim to represent authentically a character alleged to be inauthentically drawn in a predecessor is the identity of the contemporary author. This contemporary author’s ability to speak on behalf of the formerly minor character presumes commensurability between the experience of the author and the marginal subject she claims to represent—a correspondence that must appeal to identity, the uniformly shared experience of marginalization as a member of a historically disenfranchised group. ⁴⁸ The claim that characters are “given a voice” effaces this problematic essentialism and the way such texts reproduce the power dynamic of an elite speaking on behalf of a subaltern, to which much antiessentialist feminist and postcolonial criticism has drawn attention.

Keeping the act of representation in the foreground is important for a number of reasons besides pointing out the susceptibility of the textual politics of minor-character elaborations to the well-rehearsed theoretical pitfalls enumerated above. First, by doing so, rather than viewing these texts as newly liberated characters’ autonomous speech, one is forced to attend to the manifold factors determining the contemporary representation—a representation that may well be based on meticulous historical research but might also be utterly conventional or, as Wolf freely admits of Cassandra, subjective, polemical, willfully anachronistic, and inflected by a host of present-day concerns. ⁴⁹ Regardless of the quality of these representations or the value we attribute to calling attention to, critiquing, and imaginatively repairing the silences or absences in the canon that motivate them, we should be clear about what replacing such silences with “voices” does and does not mean. Such voices are not the self-representation, artistic or political, of hitherto oppressed persons, and they will reflect contemporary concerns and values as much as any previously submerged “reality.” Second, accounting for the complexities of the representation in the canonical predecessors ought also to be the task of contemporary scholarship. The oversimplified view that “the canon” is complicit in a uniform silencing or exclusion of the perspectives of women and minorities reduces texts produced under disparate historical and geographic circumstances—which are often themselves sites of ideological contest—to the singular function of reinforcing a dominant ideology. ⁵⁰ It was in fact Aeschylus’s rendering of Cassandra’s haunting voice that initially captivated Wolf. And while women were not permitted on stage or in the audience of Athenian tragedies—making any dramatization of female speech a multiply mediated act of ventriloquism⁵¹—Wolf is well aware that like many Athenian dramatists Aeschylus, far from reflecting reality, created female characters who demonstrate a radical agency, autonomy, and political sway that no woman in fifth-century Athens actually possessed. ⁵² Women in Attic tragedy were not simply represented as either passive victims or transgressive villainesses. Aeschylus has both Cassandra and Clytemnestra, in the Agamemnon, speak with a force rarely rivaled in tragedy. Cassandra does not rave madly but lucidly warns the Chorus, who inexplicably cannot understand her. “And yet I know my Greek, too well,” she utters, in frustration. ⁵³ She also renounces Apollo, treading her oracular trappings in the dust, and the Chorus compliments her courage in going to her death. Even Clytemnestra, though clearly portrayed as villainous, is hardly the stereotypical adulteress and traitor that she is often said to epitomize; she participates in an intergenerational and intergender cycle of revenge and insists that she kills Agamemnon to avenge his sacrifice of Iphigenia. Her husband’s instrumentalization of their daughter, then, is the principal grounds for Clytemnestra’s vengeance. ⁵⁴ Along similar lines, to Brückner’s monologues one might reply that Desdemona has spoken, that while Othello throttles her, Shakespeare first has her eloquently protest the injustice done to her. And though Othello frames this injustice in terms of the tragic undoing of its male protagonist, the play is unique to its epoch for condemning violence that is plainly an honor killing. ⁵⁵ One would be hard-pressed to find a more emphatic representation on the stage of a female character demanding to be heard than Emilia’s “‘Twill out, ’twill out. I peace! / No, I will speak as liberal as the north: / Let heaven and men and devils, let them all, / All, all, cry shame against me, yet I’ll speak” (5.2.225–228). Finally, attention to the manifold factors determining both the contemporary representation and its canonical predecessor helps forestall the common critical misapprehension of minor-character elaborations. Scholars who have written on texts using the genre, failing to note the extent and degree of homage such texts pay their predecessors and perhaps wanting to see their own oppositional politics echoed in fiction, have tended exclusively to focus on, and vastly overrate,⁵⁶ the subversiveness of such texts—and they have all but ignored a whole body of texts that make no pretense to such a stance of political opposition. Exclusive attention to texts that adopt socially minor characters as protagonists, overemphasis of aspects of critique and subversion at the expense of homage and continuity, and the propensity to prize too highly the act of “giving voice” have caused scholars to misconstrue the social and political significance of these texts. When the character narrations of minor-character elaborations are viewed as the inventions of well-read contemporary authors rather than the authentic, autonomous speeches of formerly oppressed characters, room is cleared to consider the actual political effect of such texts: the reaffirmation of each individual’s unique subjectivity and right to speak.

While the genre’s primary convention affirms every individual’s unique subjectivity and the liberal prerogatives that follow from it, the formal intertextuality of minor-character elaboration—the posing of an alternative viewpoint in response to a canonical predecessor—registers the genre’s underlying perspectivist epistemology, or what is often called the Rashomon effect: the notion that different observers will perceive an event differently and produce conflicting accounts of it, demonstrating that meaning is contingent on a given subject position, be it spatial or ideological. ⁵⁷ Perspectivism underlies the reorientation of narrative, the point-of-view shift, foundational to the genre, a fact made explicit in a host of self-referential moments. Rhys’s protagonist encapsulates her creator’s project: “There is always the other side, always” (128). Gardner’s narrator-protagonist in Grendel avers, “They have their own versions, but this is the truth” (52). In The Penelopiad, Atwood’s chorus of maids registers the uncertainty of any given narrative: “There was another story / Or several, as befits the goddess Rumour” (147). Her Penelope reminds readers that Odysseus was notoriously “tricky and a liar” and sets out to dispel the idea that “his version of events was the true one” (2). Atwood makes the Odyssey into a tale told by Odysseus, even though he is only an inset narrator of books 9 through 12 and not the teller of any of the events regarding Penelope’s conduct at Ithaca, of which he could not have any firsthand knowledge. ⁵⁸ This mischaracterization of the Odyssey as its protagonist’s “version” rather than that of “Homer” is a revealing one; it evinces a broad commitment to the notion that all stories belong to a particular perspective and to a conventional, but by no means necessary, alignment between the perspective of the protagonist and that of the implied author.

The intertextual dialogues of minor-character elaborations, in other words, reassert the axiom that there are at least two sides to every story. As the heavy-handed narrator of Madison Smartt Bell’s “Small Blue Thing” (2000), which retells Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” from the point of view of the bird, puts it, “All a matter of perspective, don’t you see?”⁵⁹ But while these texts often underscore their adoption of another side or perspective, after the ironic metatexts of Wide Sargasso Sea and Grendel they tend to do so without any self-consciousness of the way the insistence on narrative multiplicity undermines their own claims to offer up a true account. The genre, then, fits comfortably within a postmodernist epistemology of skepticism toward received narratives, but such texts do not reflect on their own narrative procedures in the manner characteristic of “historiographic metafiction.”⁶⁰ They thus perpetuate the epistemological problem they endeavor to solve, contesting previous fictional narratives while posing accounts that are equally subjective and open to contestation from another side.

Julian Barnes’s “The Stowaway,” the opening vignette of A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), stands as one exception, evincing a knowing self-parody of the genre’s conventional gestures and the irony of countering an extant narrative with an equally contestable one. A woodworm aboard Noah’s Ark narrates “Stowaway,” and in its overt and self-reflexive challenging of the biblical flood narrative, this humorous example usefully manifests the contest implicit in a great many other minor-character elaborations. Quarrelsome language litters the chapter: “It wasn’t like those nursery versions in painted wood”; “Now, I realize that accounts differ. Your species has its much repeated version which still charms even sceptics.”⁶¹ Barnes recapitulates common objections to a given narrative’s claim to truth: a nostalgic tendency to idealize the past, subjective and ideological bias, and the inertial force of existing accounts. And while the content of the woodworm’s debunking does not lack interest or humor (Noah was a drunken tyrant, a hapless sailor, and a eugenicist determined to rid the earth of “cross-breeds” [Barnes, A History of the World, 15–16]), it is the form of providing an alternative point of view on a prior narrative that it shares with the genre at large. What makes Barnes’s vignette particularly ingenious is how it goes to lengths to undermine that point of view ironically. Despite the woodworm’s insistence that his perspective is unbiased (“gratitude puts no smear of Vaseline on the lens” [4]) and reliable (“My account you can trust” [4]), Barnes undercuts his claims to authority. Among the woodworm’s allegations of violence perpetrated by Noah is the assertion that he “casseroled” the unicorns, causing the extinction of the species that we mistakenly believe mythical. “I can vouch for that,” the woodworm assures us: “I spoke personally to the carrier-hawk who delivered a warm pot” (16). Later, accusing Noah of navigational ineptitude, the worm concedes, “Again, I am reporting what the birds said” (19). Barnes flags a number of the worm’s assertions as based on hearsay—received narratives. His perspective is limited and needs to be augmented by some bird’s-eye view. Later, the woodworm abandons his claims to know what happened at all: “At this point we leave the harbour of facts for the high seas of rumour…. There were two main stories, and I leave you to choose between them” (23). In offering the woodworm’s narrative as a corrective to the biblical one while exposing the revision as equally limited and ending with a choice between two conflicting stories, Barnes points to the epistemological underpinning of the genre: not the assertion of a true story against a previous one but the insistence that all stories are merely perspectives.

The macrostructure of Barnes’s History suggests the impossibility of a totalizing, objective history and enacts an alternative by disposing of any pretense of completeness, presenting a disparate assemblage in its highly idiosyncratic form. While “Stowaway” employs minor-character elaboration, the rest of the book consists of a discontinuous collage of vignettes, loosely connected by thematic echoes; each chapter differs in narration, characters, and setting and varies in genre from realist narratives to a personal meditation narrated by one “Julian Barnes.” In the “half”-chapter “Parenthesis,” the musing author-narrator articulates the quintessential postmodern problem with characteristic wit: “We all know objective truth is not obtainable, that when some event occurs we shall have a multiplicity of subjective truths which we assess and then fabulate into history, into some God-eyed version of what ‘really’ happened” (243). The brilliance of this formulation inheres in its encapsulation of the irony—and, by now, the banality—of a postmodern consensus (“We all know”) about the impossibility of resolving many subjective versions of the truth into a single objective one.

Modern literature, perhaps modernity itself, has been preoccupied with the absence of an Archimedean perspective, a preoccupation that has only been intensified in the more extreme versions of postmodern relativism. ⁶² Michaels, for example, argues that the continual “appeal to perspective [or subject position]… eliminates disagreement” by substituting the incontrovertible claims of subjective experience for any claims to truth. ⁶³ Viewed in this light, minor-character elaboration has its philosophical foundation and less proximate cause in a novelistic tradition of perspectival experimentation, and a more recent force is the postmodern valorization of the subject position. While many of the minor-character elaborations I have discussed (perhaps unwittingly) reproduce the epistemological dilemma they endeavor to solve, by disputing a prior narrative with an equally contestable one, a number of recent deployments of the genre follow Wide Sargasso Sea more faithfully by juxtaposing conflicting perspectives within a given text. Wolf, reprising her Cassandra project with a difference, published her Medea: A Modern Retelling in 1996 (trans. 1998). In alternating chapters, Wolf positions her Medea alongside five other character narrators. A list of dramatis personae precedes the novel, with the six narrators listed under “The Voices”; the other seventeen characters are merely “Other Characters.”⁶⁴ This list alone throws into relief the persistence of a hierarchy of narrating and non-narrating characters, on which the genre’s principal convention relies, and the novel proper bolsters its formal registering of conflicting accounts by thematizing the conflict between official stories, rumors, and the unverifiable realities that lie beneath them. ⁶⁵

Atwood, who wrote an introduction for the English edition of Medea, emulates Wolf’s contrapuntal structure in The Penelopiad, alternating chapters narrated by Penelope with choruses from the twelve maids. Not surprisingly, Penelope’s famed fidelity emerges as the major point of dispute. While Penelope denies as “slanderous gossip” any accusations about her “sexual conduct” (143), the maids claim she urged Odysseus to kill them in order to safeguard her reputation: “privy to [her] every lawless thrill,” they had to be “silenced, or the beans they’[d] spill!” (150–151). Geraldine Brooks’s March (2004) also counterposes conflicting versions of events. A glaring discrepancy arises between March’s interpretation that his wife blessed his decision to go to war and her version, in which he ignores her plea that he stay. ⁶⁶ Though these examples intimate the myriad potential variations of number and reliability of narrative voices available, the technique of embedding competing narratives merely represents an extension or refinement of the skepticism in which the genre is rooted. Critics influenced by Bakhtin have often valorized polyphonic narratives as politically resistant,⁶⁷ combating monologic authority, yet it is easy to see how predominant, even banal, the epistemological uncertainty registered by polyvocal form has become. Whether multiple “voices” compete for priority in an intratextual struggle or a single voice undertakes an intertextual contesting of a canonical narrative, the underlying logic remains rooted in the perspectivist claim that the truth of any story is subject to rebuttal from some previously unheard side.

If the subjectivism of the genre reveals its compatibility with basic liberal tenets, its perspectivism articulates a sociopolitical logic that is eminently pluralist. As early as 1986, W. J. T. Mitchell wrote that “pluralism is the reigning ideology of American politics on both the Right and the Left,” and many theorists have understood pluralism as the necessary corollary of an understanding of truth as multiple and perspectival. ⁶⁸ Donald Crosby posits: “if pluralism means… that the world is made up of countless perspectives… then an irreducible plurality of such perspectives is entailed.”⁶⁹ Mark McGurl has argued for a similar correspondence between the array of voices and perspectives represented across the field of contemporary fiction and the pluralist ideal. For McGurl, “the dynamics of narrative focalization project a simplified model of the modern pluralistic society as an assemblage of different and sometimes conflicting, but always aesthetically redeemable, points of view.”⁷⁰ But while McGurl sees this cultural pluralism in terms of various authors’ claims to identity-based group membership and views their self-conscious writing “from the point of view of one or another hyphenated population” as signaling the “collapse of the assumption” that the literary tradition will unify writers from separate racial, ethnic, and geographic groups, minor-character elaboration demonstrates how that tradition remains the focal point of diverse perspectives. ⁷¹ While the genre takes part in a broader modern tendency toward perspectivist experimentation, which refracts pluralist politics into literary form, the genre redeploys the traditional literary canon as the meeting ground and common discursive plane for its pluralistic debates. Though the canon no longer simply functions as a repository of timeless truths, its cultural centrality is everywhere visible, its stockpile of characters perpetually available for adaptive reuse. While the proliferation of “voices” and perspectives registering the competing interests of various individuals and groups represents what Bakhtin calls the “centrifugal” force of social discourses, the use of the canon as a relatively fixed point of reference emerges as a counterbalancing centripetal force of stability. ⁷²

That these opposing forces manifest themselves in the same genre illustrates how its conventions function to reconcile imaginatively social conflict rather than foment it. Just as the pluralist ideal (far from the reality) envisions broad participation and competing interests,⁷³ the genre emerges as a space of competing narratives in which each formerly minor character asserts her “version” to be the true one. For pluralists, that is, there is some truth out there—even if parties disagree about what it is. Hayden White differentiates the pluralist conception from a radical “pan-textualist” understanding of history, in which “any representation of history has to be considered a construction of language, thought, and imagination rather than a report of a structure of meaning presumed to exist in historical events themselves.”⁷⁴ The flourishing genre of minor-character elaboration projects a pluralist field of competing accounts of the truth rather than a pantextualist view of any such account as a linguistic construction, and the genre evinces a commitment to the unique, autonomous individual over a view of narrative and subjectivity as constituted by discourse. The genre thus serves to shore up liberal-pluralist ideology despite its foundations in postmodern understandings of narrative and the self.

Foe is largely the narrative of Susan Barton, a figure that readers familiar with Defoe’s lesser-known works come to recognize as a reincarnation of the title character and narrator-protagonist of his Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (1724). Coetzee’s novel begins with Susan’s shipwreck onto the island of Robinson Crusoe (renamed “Cruso”). Coetzee thus fuses plots and characters from several of Defoe’s novels, along with a fictionalization of Defoe himself. While Foe’s plot centers on Susan’s efforts to get the author Daniel Foe to publish her story “The Female Castaway,” Coetzee’s novel continually draws attention to two figures who haunt Susan throughout her narrative: Friday and a girl who claims to be Susan’s daughter but whom Susan denies having laid eyes on. Coetzee foregrounds two minor characters from Robinson Crusoe and Roxana: Crusoe’s slave and one of the daughters Roxana abandons in order to pursue her career as the mistress of a series of wealthy gentlemen. These characters’ stories linger as suggestive absences in Defoe’s corpus, narratives of interest for a contemporary audience: the experience of Friday’s enslavement from his perspective, the story of the girl orphaned because of Roxana’s choice of a profitable career over motherhood and destitution, and that which Roxana declines to narrate: the psychic cost of such a choice. Coetzee, accordingly, represents these stories as objects of desire within Foe. “I should have said less about” Cruso, admits Susan, “more about myself. How, to begin with, did my daughter come to be lost… ?”⁷⁵ Foe encourages Susan to record the story of “the loss of the daughter,” (Coetzee, Foe, 117), but Susan refuses to do so: “I choose not to tell it,” she explains, “because to no one, not even to you, do I owe proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world… for I am a free woman who asserts her freedom by telling her story according to her own desire” (131). Coetzee declines to “recover” the narrative of Roxana’s renunciation of motherhood, but he takes pains to point to its persistent absence. He also raises skepticism—in Susan’s simultaneous declaration of narrative agency and refusal to offer a story as “proof” of her being—toward the social-formalist premises of minor-character elaboration: that to convert a character to a narrator is to tell the truth of that character and that the offering up of one’s story is the necessary condition for the acquisition of full subject status.

But the more prominent silence that persists from Defoe into Foe is that of Friday. Coetzee converts Defoe’s Native American Friday into an African slave, whose tongue has either been excised by slave traders or by Cruso, unless, as Foe subtly suggests, Friday has a tongue but is assumed incapable of speech by his paternalistic masters. The novel thus draws attention to the palpable absence and irrevocability of Friday’s voice and story. Susan admits of her castaway narrative: “If the story seems stupid, that is only because it so doggedly holds its silence. The shadow whose lack you feel is there: it is the loss of Friday’s tongue” (117). But this story “is a story unable to be told, or unable to be told by me,” Susan avers. “That is to say, many stories can be told of Friday’s tongue, but the true story is buried within Friday, who is mute. The true story will not be heard until by art we have found a means of giving voice to Friday” (118). While Susan appears to be a pluralist (many possible stories may be told) and a social formalist (when Friday is given a voice, the truth will be known), since no one—neither Susan, nor Foe, nor Coetzee—provides this “art,” the novel declares that Friday’s silencing, the absent history of his enslavement, cannot simply be undone, replaced with a voice. Friday’s story remains “properly not a story but a puzzle or hole in the narrative” (121). Foe thus continually communicates and frustrates the desire to hear Friday’s story, and Coetzee refuses to speak the unspoken.

The voluminous scholarship on Foe has amply documented the significance of the novel’s refusals, which amount to a fictional diagnosis and critique of the politics of giving voice adopted by so many minor-character elaborations. ⁷⁶ Coetzee calls attention to the narratives of domination that haunt the founding texts of the English novelistic tradition but refuses the prerogative of speaking on behalf of the Other, rejects the transparency of representation, denies that narrative can capture the authentic essence of a subject (or that such an essence exists), and raises skepticism that history can be “recovered.” Scholars have thus seen Foe as a kind of fictional primer of postmodern, postcolonial, poststructuralist, and feminist thought. ⁷⁷ The novel’s theoretical self-consciousness and many readers’ preference for its tactics of calling attention to literary and historical silences without presuming to be able to fill those silences with voices explain why it has become a central text for scholars, embraced by them, in the words of Sarah Brouillette, as “a kind of cookie-cutter introduction to the major tendencies of postmodern literature and thought.”⁷⁸

Brouillette’s comment captures the usefulness of Foe for teaching theory, but it does not capture the novel’s distinctiveness, especially when compared with the majority of texts to adopt the techniques of minor-character elaboration in recent decades. Many readers have intuited this distinctiveness. Derek Attridge makes a case for the “otherness” of Coetzee’s works, their “singular inventiveness,” describing this singularity in terms of the reader’s encounter with alterity, an experience that has the power to transform her “habits, expectations, understanding of the world.”⁷⁹ This chapter has not sought to deny that literature might perform radical work—that it might wield the kind of transformative power Attridge attributes to it—but to insist that it performs its work by constructing representations, not by liberating people or by recovering history. If placing Foe alongside the genre of minor-character elaboration offers a more tangible way of measuring the novel’s originality, a way of apprehending its formal and political uniqueness, the reverse is also true. Reading Coetzee’s novel against the genre underscores the fact that texts like Foe are exceptional, marginal even, in the wider field of contemporary literary production, in which the imaginary political project of recovering voices has been paramount.

My point here is not simply to argue that the postmodern strategies of texts like Foe and Wide Sargasso Sea are preferable for acknowledging the discursive constitution and ideological nature of subjects and narratives. Such acknowledgments do help avoid the mistakes of replacing the silence of the subaltern with speaking on her behalf and the overly sanguine notion that “giving her a voice” remedies either historical or present-day wrongs. My point has been to show that the genre of minor-character elaboration is flourishing because it reinforces, rather than challenges, the premises that valorize narrating characters for appearing to be autonomous agents and that understand all stories as contending perspectives. The fact that an increasing number of feminist and multicultural responses to the canon have adopted this form demonstrates the way the genre fulfills the social need of assimilating their demands to prevailing liberal-pluralist tenets. Making sense of the conventional structures that appear across a wide constellation of texts, over and above the exceptional instances that tend to attract scholarly attention, genre study stands as a methodology uniquely capable of revealing such broader social functions.

It’s worth returning momentarily to Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello since, in addition to suggesting that many writers feel more comfortable than he does with “thinking [their] way into” and speaking through minor characters and to diagnosing perceptively how scholars have embraced minor-character elaborations for their purported subversiveness, Coetzee illustrates how adopting the techniques of the genre (as well as an outwardly oppositional politics) constitutes an effective strategy for contemporary writers to gain consecration in a competitive literary marketplace. The scholarship on Elizabeth Costello—perhaps preoccupied with the intriguingly undecidable question of the extent to which Costello speaks for her creator, perhaps less than eager to engage the unflattering portrait Coetzee draws of the academics in the novel—has neglected how shrewdly the novel represents and satirizes the politics, economics, and cultural hierarchies of contemporary literary institutions: the interviews, literary prizes, and lucrative speaking engagements that become routine for contemporary writers, along with the parasitic fans, cloying acolytes, and scholarly societies that cling to them. ⁸⁰ The novel’s first chapter suggests that Costello wins her prestigious Stowe Award primarily because of her identity as a writer of antipodal origins—because “1995 has been decreed to be the year of Australasia” (8). Though Susan Moebius, the scholar who interviews Costello, reads the latter’s writings as subversive and is eager to enlist her in the project of reconstructing alternative literary traditions (Moebius has published a book called “Reclaiming a History: Women and Memory” [29] and asks her to comment on “the project of reclaiming women’s lives in general” [14]), Coetzee portrays his novelist and the institutions of literary production, circulation, and sanctification as far from radical—indeed as a sector of the culture industry. “A small critical industry” has cropped up around Costello (1); upon leaving town with her prize, she forgets the copy of Moebius’s book that the scholar gave her but makes sure to ask her son if he remembered the fifty-thousand-dollar check that accompanied the Stowe; and famous writers work the cruise-ship circuit, giving occasional lectures to tourists and retirees. (Who could imagine a more efficient shorthand for authors’ complicity with neocolonialism?) Not only does Costello see herself as paying homage to the Homeric myths along with Joyce (13), but she also frankly admits that her youthful ambition was “to have [her] place on the shelves of the British Museum, rubbing shoulders with the other Cs, the great ones, Carlyle and Chaucer and Coleridge and Conrad” (16). Though Costello recognizes the vanity of her thirst for immortality, Coetzee implies that professional novelists are at least as likely to be motivated by the desire to gain entry to the canon as by the impulse to deconstruct it. In the next chapter, I argue that adopting the genre of minor-character elaboration has become an incomparable strategy for writers seeking to secure such a place and a profitable resource for the consolidated global publishing industry. Behind the question of the ideological work accomplished by a given text looms a set of material relations through which that text circulates. Genre functions, in these relations, as a technology that facilitates continued production and the identification of audiences, and minor characters from canonical texts represent a vast reserve of raw material, rich with centuries of accumulated symbolic capital, available for such production—“material left over at the end,” in the words of Costello, “material that almost invites you to take it over and use it to build something of your own.”