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

The Eyre Affair (2001), the first installment of Jasper Fforde’s genre-scrambling Thursday Next series, introduces readers to an alternative British history in which the English literary canon is the very stuff of pop culture. Kids avidly collect Henry Fielding bubblegum cards; flocks of devotees make “literary pilgrimages” to Anne Hathaway’s cottage, the Brontës’ Haworth House, and Dickens’s Gad’s Hill; and hotels keep Shakespeare’s Complete Works in the nightstand alongside the Gideons’ Bible, the Koran, the teachings of Buddha, and the hymnal of Global Standard Deity, a fictive fusion of world religions. ¹ (Fforde’s England is chiefly bardolatrous but also eminently multiculturalist.) With the increased cultural centrality of all things literary comes profitability but also an elevated threat of unauthorized use, desecration, and theft; “big criminal gangs ha[ve] moved in on the lucrative literary market,” and Fforde’s heroine Thursday Next belongs to the Literary Detectives Division of a far-reaching state police apparatus that prosecutes forgeries, copyright violators, and suppresses “overtly free thespian interpretations” (Fforde, The Eyre Affair, 2, 133). The Eyre Affair’s plot hinges on a fantastic device called the Prose Portal, which allows readers to enter physically the world of their favorite book. The eponymous affair occurs when archvillain Acheron Hades steals the manuscript of Jane Eyre from Haworth House, purloins the Prose Portal, and attempts to kidnap Jane out of the book, threatening to erase permanently the heroine from every extant copy of Brontë’s beloved novel.

The Eyre Affair does not itself elaborate minor characters, but it’s easy to recognize Fforde’s choice of Jane Eyre as the target of Hades’ theft as a canny allegorical nod to Wide Sargasso Sea and to the way rewritings have the potential to alter the way their predecessors are read by successive generations. Rhys’s novel, of course, plucks Bertha out of Jane Eyre, and while this character “kidnapping” has not transformed Brontë’s classic as a material object, it has been forever altered in the imaginations of contemporary readers. The Eyre Affair thus subtly suggests Fforde’s awareness of the flourishing genre that is minor-character elaboration, and the novel testifies more broadly to ambivalent contemporary attitudes toward canonical texts—to the sense that readers are free to enter, appropriate, and rewrite them at will but also to attendant anxieties about the integrity of intellectual-property rights and about symbolic violence aimed at these sacred monuments of literary culture. That Fforde registers the persistence of such anxieties within a popular bestseller that brazenly parades its pastiche of witty allusions, borrows genre-fiction conventions from Conan Doyle to J. K. Rowling, and climaxes in a cheerful reworking of Jane Eyre’s famously interrupted wedding scene is only one of the milder postmodern ironies Fforde’s novel flaunts.

For while The Eyre Affair’s overt and conventional villain is the bulletproof Hades, the novel is shadowed by an even more resilient malevolent force: the Goliath Corporation, a many-tentacled conglomerate that owns Toad News, “the biggest news network” in Fforde’s Europe; manufactures military technology for a still ongoing Crimean War; and holds sway over Parliament, exercising a “pernicious hold on the nation” (6–7). Goliath temporarily joins forces with Hades in order to double-cross him and appropriate the Prose Portal, which the corporation covets so it might produce otherwise impossible weapons that can be transported from fiction into the “real world,” via the Portal, and sold to the state for boundless profit. Though the sci-fi elements of this scenario are wildly fantastic, as allegory it again testifies to Fforde’s shrewd intuition regarding contemporary literary production in our world. When he wrote The Eyre Affair, Fforde could not have known that his novel would be brought out in Britain by Hodder & Stoughton, an imprint of the United Kingdom’s largest book publisher, Hachette. ² But his depiction of Goliath’s investment in both literary and military technologies looks eerily prescient and darkly ironic in light of the fact that Hachette is a subsidiary of the French media conglomerate Lagardère, which owns major television and radio stations; publishes Harlequin France, Elle, and Paris Match magazines; and was, until recently, the largest private French shareholder of EADS (the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company), the multinational high-tech partnership that owns Airbus and manufactures everything from communications satellites to cruise missiles and pilotless drones. ³

The broadest significance of this irony ought to surprise no one by now: the culture industry’s capital is inseparable from that of any other industry, and Goliathan multinationals are eager to tote to market any kind of profitable product, even their own critique. (Especially when it’s wrapped in lighthearted Ffordian packaging. Would you like to buy a Goliath Corporation© “For all you’ll ever need”™ T-shirt? They’re available on Fforde’s website for only eight pounds plus shipping.)⁴ The more salient local point is that if Fforde’s Prose Portal can be seen as a sci-fi contraption that allegorizes the procedures of contemporary authors who imaginatively enter and alter canonical texts, including the practitioners of minor-character elaboration, his depiction of Goliath’s aggressive pursuit of the Portal serves as an effective analogy for the way the culture industry has co-opted the genre. In recent years major publishing houses owned by real-life Goliaths like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation have embraced and aggressively marketed texts using the technology of minor-character elaboration for its capacity to facilitate profitable reworkings of canonical material. As Fforde’s series, with its accessible assemblage of witty allusions and wry recycling of classic plots, suggests, minor-character elaboration participates in a broader contemporary boom in the stylish repackaging of canonical literature. But why has minor-character elaboration, a genre that emerged at the moment of postmodernist experimentation and feminist and postcolonial re-vision, become such a proven vehicle for the culture industry’s products? Why do producers and consumers alike seize on this particular form, and how does it circulate in the marketplace? And what has happened to the genre’s politics in the process?

Much of the recent revitalization of the field of genre theory takes as axiomatic the premise that scholars can extrapolate from a genre’s conventional form its underlying social logic. ⁵ Deidre Lynch, for example, concisely describes the task of genre theory and criticism as “pursuing the social meanings with which genre is freighted.”⁶ Similarly, in his Graphs, Maps, Trees, Franco Moretti calls “deducing from the form of an object the forces that have been at work… the most elegant definition ever of what literary sociology should be.”⁷ In the previous chapter, I argued that while the politics of individual minor-character elaborations vary, the genre’s conventional form—the conversion of a minor character into a narrator-protagonist who “tells her side of the story”—registers a widespread commitment to liberal-pluralist tenets by reaffirming the unique subjectivity of every individual and generating an array of contending perspectives. But how is it that literary form comes to index or encode the social? In this chapter, I propose that we can produce a fuller account of how and why genres emerge and flourish, and of their reciprocally determining relation with their historical moments, by analyzing how the social logic of literary forms gets deployed in their more immediate contexts: the institutional locations, channels of production and reception, and the commercial and symbolic economies through which such forms circulate. Genres do not rise and fall of their own accord, thriving when they vibrate with the zeitgeist. ⁸ The agents in this process are, well, agents—and also the authors, editors, and publishing executives who choose to produce and promote certain kinds of texts based on their perceived audience and marketability, as well as reviewers both professional and amateur, who help condition whether and how readers will approach such texts.

Janice Radway’s work on the romance novel remains the exemplar of a second approach to genre, attending less to the politics of form than to genre in the material context of its production and consumption. Though Radway ultimately concludes that romance reading provides a “compensatory solution” through which women “vicariously fulfill their needs for nurturance,” her opening chapter on the “Institutional Matrix” of romance publishing demonstrates how that genre’s popularity is also a function of “important changes in book production, distribution, advertising and marketing techniques.” Romance reading “may well be attributed to women’s changing beliefs and needs,” but Radway insists “we must entertain the alternate possibility that the apparent need of the female audience for this type of fiction may have been generated or at least augmented artificially.”⁹ But whether publishing-industry experts have ingeniously manipulated consumers or just given the latter what they want, Radway’s crucial insight is that genre as such serves the industry as the technology that proposes to satisfy those demands over and over again, with each book-buying and reading experience.

Minor-character elaboration makes for a particularly revealing case of an emergent literary form that gets taken up and spurred by producers for its ability to fulfill social needs that are propagated, if not manufactured, by the publishing industry because it is a popular form that trades on the prestige of the traditional literary canon while accommodating “voices” from the margins. The genre, that is, allows producers to exploit both the timeless value of the classics and ostensibly oppositional political energies simultaneously. In this chapter, I identify the mechanism by which minor-character elaboration becomes pervasive and comes to refract a moderate contemporary politics, demonstrating how the market logic of the book industry and the symbolic economy of the literary field shape the conventional forms that have come to dominate that field. ¹⁰ Today’s risk-averse large-scale publishers have embraced and actively promoted the genre because its formal logic—explicit intertextual dialogue tethered to the adoption of diverse points of view—helps them identify and appeal to niche markets: an educated and well-capitalized “bibliophile” niche of readers who recognize the prestige of the great books even if they haven’t read them and identity groups that are reconceived as target publics. The genre proliferates, that is, because of the particular ways it is instrumental in helping producers accrue economic and symbolic capital.

In “New Sociologies of Literature,” a 2010 special issue of New Literary History, Mark McGurl called for an “increased empirical focus on contemporary literary institutions and their functions in both transmitting the texts of the past to living readers and undergirding contemporary practices of reading and writing.” “Rather than exploring our essential interest in stories,” such a project “would ask how that interest is concretized in specific media, genres, institutions, and practices.”¹¹ An empirical approach to contemporary literary production does not, however, demand adoption of the abstract quantitative methodology and “distant reading” that Moretti has advocated so prominently, and there are considerable drawbacks to those methods. Moretti and others who would count and graph books “belonging” to a given genre published each year obscure the heterogeneity of actual genres—the fact that determining a text’s genre is a matter of interpretation—and they assign each instance of the genre, the paltry print run and the bestseller, equal weight in the metric claiming to examine its social effects. ¹² Quantifying an emergent but as yet unrecognized genre poses a particularly formidable challenge. ¹³ Radway’s method, interviewing producers and consumers of popular fiction, presents its own hurdles: the reluctance of publishers to disclose sales numbers or strategies, the difficulty for scholars in determining whether readers’ reported needs preexist or are generated by the work of the culture industry, and the time- and capital-intensive nature of such research.

The qualitative empiricism I adopt involves less number crunching and fewer interviews. Instead, I direct attention to all that envelops a corpus of texts: their paratexts and the literary marketplace in which they circulate. As Jim Collins’s Bring on the Books for Everybody (2010) demonstrates, we are surrounded by this vibrant marketplace, and much of the analysis of contemporary literary institutions that McGurl advocates can be done while sitting in a Barnes & Noble, browsing Amazon.com, or skimming reviews on Goodreads.com. ¹⁴ To analyze the functioning of minor-character elaboration in the contemporary literary marketplace, I thus adopt a method that is purposefully anecdotal, and I endeavor to legitimate my findings by triangulating texts, marketing, reception, and a range of institutional contexts. ¹⁵ Hayden White follows Jerome McGann in arguing that “our problems with the question of genre” stem “from our failure ‘to execute in regular ways our theoretical views about the material and performative character of textual works of imagination.’”¹⁶ The study of paratexts—the way a text’s packaging tells us what to do with what’s inside—becomes crucial,¹⁷ as does shifting analysis further outside the text, into the ways literary forms function to generate and conserve forms of capital within the literary field and the broader economy.

The progressive consolidation of the publishing industry has intensified investment in all forms of genre fiction. After an intricate and ongoing series of mergers and acquisitions, three publishers owned by multinational corporations now control nearly half of the U.S. trade-publishing market. ¹⁸ The 2013 merger of Penguin and Random House by their parent companies Pearson and Bertelsmann represents a giant step toward monopoly but also the logical extension of a process that has been unfolding over decades. ¹⁹ In its consolidation, the publishing industry resembles other sectors, particularly in media, and conglomerate publishers have been active promoters of minor-character elaborations. HarperCollins, for example, the largest trade publisher in the United States (before the Penguin-Random merger) and a subsidiary of Murdoch’s News Corp., publishes Gregory Maguire’s Wicked; Universal Pictures, a subsidiary of NBC Universal, lately a division of Comcast Corp., produces Wicked the musical, which has grossed over $2.9 billion worldwide. ²⁰

Minor-character elaborations have occasionally, as in the case of Wicked, become blockbuster sensations. But the genre has proven better suited to the smaller audiences that Pierre Bourdieu calls the “range of intermediaries” between mass production aimed at the widest market and the other pole of avant-garde production. ²¹ Though the publishing industry presses ever closer to monopoly, mid-twentieth-century critics did not foresee how that industry would cater to a fragmented array of subcultures rather than imposing a homogeneous culture on conforming masses. ²² In his invaluable Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (2010), John B. Thompson shows how competition between large-scale publishers does produce a relentless search for blockbusters and “a degree of homogeneity or ‘me-too’ publishing.” But this competition also fosters variation as it “produces an intense desire to find the next big thing.”²³ The disaggregated, umbrella structure of media corporations (parent multinationals own megapublishers, which are subdivided into specialized imprints, formerly independent houses) facilitates such corporations’ targeting of diverse audiences. Such companies’ insistence on perennial growth has also generated a strict imperative to find books that will be profitable immediately. Memoirs by publishing executives like André Schiffrin and Jason Epstein describe the disappearance of a cottage business dedicated to printing culturally valuable books; houses used to subsidize with their more commercial output books that were unlikely to make money in the short run. ²⁴ Genres, in today’s climate, serve as indispensable technologies for minimizing risk and targeting readerships, because “semi-programmed”²⁵ literature that follows a proven formula and appeals to a preexisting audience helps combat the uniqueness and hence unpredictable sales of any new book. Minor-character elaborations have flourished alongside a broader genre-fiction regime, and the minor-character genre combines several qualities that make it particularly appealing to producers and consumers.

Although minor-character elaboration is as yet a relatively unfamiliar genre classification, its formula, retell classic X from character Y’s point of view, is standard and succinctly conveyed by publishers, as in the antique-scripted subtitle on the cover of the HarperCollins paperback of Janet Aylmer’s Darcy’s Story (2006): “Pride and Prejudice told from a whole new perspective.” If Darcy’s name were not enough of a cue to readers, the subtitle indicates the novel’s precursor and premise in a few words. And while the formula is constant, its potential iterations are as various as the universe of minor characters. Elaborating a character from King Lear will differ widely in setting, plot, theme, and verbal register compared with a character from Huckleberry Finn. And Nancy Rawles’s My Jim (2005), the story of Jim’s wife left behind in slavery, differs considerably from Jon Clinch’s Finn (2007), the tale of Huck’s alcoholic Pap, though both are permutations of the same formula. This variability within the formula serves as a boundless resource and obscures the routinized nature of the basic premise.

The intertextual dialogue initiated by minor-character elaboration, an attribute it shares with other intertextual genres, similarly serves a crucial strategic function: helping contemporary authors annex their predecessors’ symbolic capital, as the former hitch their new books to established stars. Thompson lucidly parses Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital as “the accumulated prestige, recognition and respect accorded to certain individuals or institutions,”²⁶ and through interviews with editors, literary agents, and publishing executives, Thompson shows that a given book’s “sales potential, that is, its capacity to generate economic capital,” and “its quality,” its “capacity to generate symbolic capital,” are, in the industry, the “only two criteria—there simply are no other.”²⁷ The clearest evidence that publishers recognize the utility of minor-character elaboration for generating both forms of capital is simply the volume of recent production in the genre. And in at least several cases, one discovers that publishers are actively spurring this production. In an “Author’s Note” following his Fool, Christopher Moore recalls approaching his editor at HarperCollins with the idea of writing about either a generic clown or Lear’s fool. The editor responded: “Oh, you have to do Lear’s fool.”²⁸ Moore’s editor intuited that even Lear’s clown carries with him the symbolic capital of Lear,²⁹ and Fool aims to capture an audience by appealing to the prestige of Shakespeare even as Moore makes that prestige into an object of roguish desecration.

Conglomerates and independent publishers alike are driving minor-character elaboration. Atwood’s Penelopiad appeared in 2005 as part of the Myths series launched by the Scottish publisher Canongate, in partnership with forty independent houses and featuring other titles such as Jeanette Winterson’s Weight (2005), a reimagining of the Atlas myth. In her acknowledgments, Atwood intimates that she was exhorted to write the book, thanking “Jamie Byng [director] of Canongate, who leapt out from behind a gorse bush in Scotland and talked [her] into it” (Atwood, Penelopiad, 199). Similarly, in her introduction to Weight, Winterson concedes: “If the call had not come perhaps I would never had written the story, but when the call did come, that story was waiting to be written.”³⁰ By calling attention to such disclosures, I do not mean to suggest that the authors lacked interest in or control over what they wrote. Atwood has ventriloquized mythic female figures throughout her career and twice adopted the perspectives of minor characters from Hamlet. ³¹ Rather, such disclosures confirm that publishers have recognized the genre’s market potential and recruited prominent authors to execute “house-generated ideas.”³² The slew of imitators that surfaced in the wake of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) and HarperFiction’s launch of a series of Austen rewritings following P. D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley (2011) similarly demonstrate contemporary publishing’s “me-too” impulse and the perceived reliability of house-generated intertextual genres. ³³

Canongate’s Myths series reveals the way minor-character elaboration helps amalgamate the prestige of big-name contemporary writers with that of their canonical predecessors, enabling small publishers to compensate for a deficit of economic resources by amassing symbolic capital. Even Canongate’s name evokes entry into the canon along with the historic street in Edinburgh. Upon launching the series, the publisher boasted of both the global scale and the literary pedigree of the Myths project, calling it “the most ambitious simultaneous world-wide publication ever undertaken” and “THE major literary event of 2005.”³⁴ The house has since adopted an anticorporate rhetoric, describing its website as a “cultural hub… totally independent in its spirit and content.”³⁵ Canongate is a small independent publisher, and for the Myths series it allied itself with comparable houses, such as Grove/Atlantic, which puts out The Penelopiad in the United States. But the formation of such alliances clearly represents an effort to compete with conglomerates, and Canongate’s touting of the scale of the project reveals its assertions of “independence” as instances of the strategic disavowal of the economic that Bourdieu describes as characteristic of the “restricted” subfield of cultural production. ³⁶

The popular reception of works such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia reveals the effectiveness of such strategies. One of the most accomplished living science-fiction novelists, Le Guin seizes on the wife of Aeneas to set a piece of speculative fiction in prehistoric Rome. Reviewing Lavinia, Alan Cheuse exhibited a lighthearted weariness with its conceit: “It seems no novelist will ever have to worry about having a subject or subject matter if he or she merely consults a concordance of the Bible for the names of various minor figures, or works with all the warriors in The Iliad, or all the travelers and wanderers and kings and princesses and gods and goddesses in The Odyssey.” Nonetheless, Cheuse concludes Lavinia is “one of the finest novels [Le Guin] has ever made” and asserts that she “has come up through the ranks of genre fiction and now… takes her place in the mainstream.”³⁷ Cheuse adheres to a traditional cultural hierarchy according to which genre fiction serves as something like the minor leagues to serious literature. ³⁸ But despite his sense of the prevalence of minor-character elaboration, Cheuse doesn’t see that it also constitutes a form of genre fiction because of the way it enables authors to accrue symbolic capital and mask the formulaic features of their works behind others that confer prestige.

Far from attempting to diminish the serious aims of minor-character elaborations, my aim is to underscore how nominally literary purposes—dialogue, critique, homage, imaginative play—are entirely compatible with the commercial aims of publishers. Le Guin would be unlikely to admit that such strategic motives guided her, maintaining in an afterword that Lavinia aims to halt the silencing of Virgil in an age in which Latin has begun “to wither away into a scholarly specialty.” Le Guin calls the novel “a love offering” to the poet, and undoubtedly there is merit to her suggestion that the Aeneid is “essentially untranslatable” (273). But it is hard to see how writing a novel in English will remedy the situation; even if admiring readers of Lavinia purchase or dust off volumes of Virgil, how many will buy a Latin grammar? As a strategy for achieving her own consecration, however, positioning herself in an intermillennial dialogue has proven far more effective. Dinah Birch in the Times Literary Supplement (a News Corp. subsidiary) applauds Le Guin’s “modesty”—she “would not claim to have superseded Virgil’s achievement”—and considers Lavinia a “moving testament to the conversations that great writers sustain through the centuries.”³⁹ Such conversations distribute symbolic capital to both parties, which can be converted to economic capital. If Virgil’s language receives little help, Le Guin’s due modesty reconsolidates his prestige; meanwhile, readers of TLS may boost sales of both Lavinia and the Aeneid.

If annexation requires the conservation of the classic’s symbolic capital, only the contemporary author who has amassed ample cultural capital can adopt such a strategy. Maguire has achieved a near-alchemical transformation of his English Ph.D. (from Tufts University) into economic capital,⁴⁰ and Sena Jeter Naslund, the author of Ahab’s Wife, and Robin Lippincott, the author of Mr. Dalloway, are colleagues on Spalding University’s MFA faculty. Rewriting a touchstone of the modernist and feminist traditions, Mr. Dalloway appeals to educated readers who, like its author, have acquired stores of cultural capital and with whom a liberal gender politics is expected to resonate.

Madeline Miller’s debut novel The Song of Achilles (2012), which makes a narrator-protagonist of Achilles’ companion Patroclus, similarly combines its appeal to a bibliophile niche with a progressive sexual politics, and the circumstances surrounding its publication illuminate many facets of the literary marketplace that I am considering here. After a Wall Street Journal review brought the novel to my attention,⁴¹ I visited Amazon.com, where I could preorder the hardcover and read an interview with Miller conducted by none other than Gregory Maguire. The ample precedent for The Song of Achilles suggests that when Maguire wondered where Miller got the “noive” to rework “one of the great foundation texts of world literature,”⁴² he was either being disingenuous or repressing just how reliable minor-character elaboration has become. The flyleaf of Miller’s novel prominently mentions her master’s in classics from Brown University, and it will hardly be surprising to learn that Maguire and Miller share a publisher in HarperCollins. Neither does it demand extensive research to discover that the newspaper reviewing Miller’s book and her publisher share a parent company in News Corp., but literary and cultural scholars have barely begun to address the way such synergistic, journalism-cum-marketing practices have been facilitated by media consolidation. ⁴³ Here, the publisher that has embraced minor-character elaboration for its ability to annex the classic’s prestige and the reviewing organ, which pronounces on the merit of the contemporary author, are controlled by the same multinational corporation.

The sociopolitical and literary-cultural implications of these marketplace transformations are hardly straightforward, however. My anecdote certainly points to the increasing concentration of capital and power in the hands of Murdoch’s and similar corporations and their resultant influence on what gets reviewed, bought, and read. But it doesn’t follow that Miller must toe the line of Fox News’s reactionary politics, and The Song of Achilles foregrounds a homoerotic relationship barely hinted at in the Iliad. And while HarperCollins surely has News Corp. shareholders to satisfy and thus has revenue growth, rather than a particular partisan agenda, as its primary aim, this aim proves profoundly compatible with the promotion of a vibrant literary culture and an active public and blogosphere. One can find the entire Maguire-Miller interview on “Library Love Fest,” a website that is clearly a vehicle for promoting new HarperCollins titles for collection development but that also offers book-club suggestions and enables community librarians to invite authors for speaking engagements. Further complicating the dynamics of today’s literary marketplace are of course the emergence of e-books and consequent efforts by publishers to preserve the distinctive aura surrounding hard copies. Several months prior to the Wall Street Journal review, a New York Times piece featured Miller’s novel, focusing not on her reworking of the Iliad but on her book’s cover, on which is blazoned an “embossed helmet sculpted with punctures, cracks and texture, giving the image a 3-D effect.”⁴⁴

The Song of Achilles has also won acclaim for what lies between its covers, though its success derives as much from Miller’s annexation of Homeric prestige and from the institutional force and marketing efforts of her publishers as from the novel’s immanent qualities. The “independent” publisher Bloomsbury (with subsidiaries in New York, New Delhi, and Sydney) puts out Miller’s novel in the United Kingdom, where it garnered the thirty-thousand-pound Orange Prize in 2012 (now the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction), a prize that “celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world”⁴⁵ and that was sponsored by the mobile carrier Orange, the flagship brand of French Telecom. Vividly illustrating the imbrication of symbolic capital, identity politics, and the corporate promotion of cultural prizes described by James English,⁴⁶ Miller’s alleged “noive” in rewriting the Iliad proves a prize-winning gambit for winning acclaim and a broad readership. Meanwhile, a telecom giant highlights its cultural beneficence and support of women writers.

Harper’s marketing of Fool demonstrates the way contemporary publishers have utilized electronic advertising, prominent placement in chain bookstores, and invocations of the stature of canonical predecessors in order to pitch minor-character elaborations to a bibliophile niche. In February 2009, Fool discovered me in the form of a piece of spam e-mail from the now defunct Borders Booksellers. This promotion revealed how such texts are marketed on release to self-identified frequent book buyers, who like me had enrolled in the Borders “Rewards” program, signing away our e-mail addresses in return for coupons on coffee and books. ⁴⁷ The physical layout of Moore’s book reveals the versatile manipulation of symbolic capital in the marketplace, specifically a two-pronged strategy by which producers hail readers who know the classics while reassuring others who recognize their prestige but are unfamiliar with or reluctant to return to them. The back cover of the HarperCollins paperback flaunts a USA Today blurb that accurately asserts: “Whether you need to read the original King Lear before you read Moore’s Fool is debatable. Seems a fool’s errand to us. Just enjoy.” An irreverent entertainment like Fool hardly demands a reader who knows Lear’s heath speech verbatim, and the publisher displays these reassurances to expand the market from the class of readers who know their Shakespeare to the universe of those who “just enjoy.”

Of course, for Shakespeare buffs, Fool offers added pleasures of recognition and allusive inside jokes. Such readers might share a privileged chuckle when Pocket, Moore’s protagonist, muses that “Moors are said to be talented wife-stranglers” (21) or when a ghost advises him to seek answers “with the witches of Great Birnam Wood” (78). By mixing unmarked if hardly obscure allusions to Shakespeare’s corpus with his primary point of reference, Lear, Moore rewards the reader who can identify them with a pleasure ancillary to the ribald laughter that the rest of the novel solicits. In his review of Fool, the blogger at ShakespeareGeek.com opined that while the novel “los[t] a few points” for lacking fidelity, he “appreciate[d]” that the intrusions of Macbeth’s witches were “cameo appearances for the benefit of Shakespeare geeks.”⁴⁸ This review suggests that minor-character elaborations tap readers’ reserves of cultural capital, activating a self-deprecating intellectual pride along with the solitary pleasures of recognition. ShakespeareGeek describes himself as a software engineer and thus a “computer geek” by trade. And though he “wish[es he] could explain” the “weird combination” of his passions for software and Shakespeare, his bio solves the mystery. He writes that the liberal-arts requirement at his technical college demanded he “spend the first two years studying humanities, and for some reason [he] latched on to Shakespeare.”⁴⁹ As literature departments continue to disseminate the cultural capital of the traditional canon, it remains available for consumers’ recreational use. Writers like Moore and publishers like HarperCollins are clearly wagering that readers will pay to exercise their atrophied literary muscles.

Many of Moore’s allusions, however, are explicitly marked so as not to alienate readers who do not have this cultural capital at the ready. When Pocket calls out, “Hail, Edmund, you bloody bastard!” avid Shakespeareans won’t need to be told that Edmund is Gloucester’s illegitimate son. Moore, however, explains the slur to everyone else by having another character warn Pocket that Edmund is “sensitive about his bastardy” (7). The novel is also filled with direct quotations from Lear, which are clearly marked with footnotes that cite act and scene. Fool thus exemplifies the two-pronged strategy for repackaging and marketing the symbolic capital of the canon, which reappears throughout the minor-character elaborations I consider in this chapter. Such texts hail a bibliophilic niche that possesses the necessary cultural capital, even when this only amounts to being a fan or lover of a single book, and who will recognize veiled allusions and be able to access the range of intertextual meanings available. Meanwhile, to attract the much wider audience that recognizes the canonical names and prestige associated with them but lacks detailed knowledge or recollection of the predecessor, producers employ tactics to preserve the association with high culture without demanding readers’ command of that culture. These include paratexts that provide crucial information about the precursor and flagged allusions that explain themselves. This double strategy allows producers to sell knowing winks to the cultured and to profit on the whiff of literariness by enabling readers to “get” the contemporary text even if they haven’t read the original.

One reason readers can follow a minor-character elaboration without being familiar with its predecessor is that many such recent texts do not share with a novel like Wide Sargasso Sea an investment in producing a re-vision or critical rereading of the precursor. In other words, the classic serves as a pretext, a jumping-off point, rather than a sincere object of dialogue. This is overwhelmingly the case in Fool, where efforts to ridicule Lear’s folly in particular and parody Shakespeare in general are subordinated to Moore’s primary project of refining the art of bawdry. Geraldine Brooks’s March would seem to share little with Fool aside from its genre. But March also eschews substantive engagement with its predecessor yet is heavily invested in annexing the prestige of the traditional canon. March, which converts the father from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women into its protagonist, is principally a historical novel of the Civil War and a fictionalization of Bronson Alcott, and it only requires its readers to know of Little Women that the patriarch is absent for the majority of that novel. Brooks (or Penguin) obligingly provides the relevant information in an epigraph from Little Women that refers to “father far away, where the fighting was” (Brooks, March, n.p.). Combine this quotation, its source clearly marked, with the rest of the paperback’s paratextual apparatus—an afterword by Brooks and the synopsis on the back cover—and rereading Little Women becomes an academic if not a “fool’s errand,” one necessary for a complete intertextual reading but wholly in excess of what it takes to appreciate March as historical fiction. ⁵⁰

In addition to annexing the prestige of their primary intertexts, minor-character elaborations frequently mark their literariness by alluding to other canonical authors and texts and by thematizing reading and education. ⁵¹ March begins with a missive from the eponymous narrator to his wife, and his self-consciousness regarding his overwrought prose (“The line I have set down is, perhaps, on the florid side of fine, but no matter: she is a gentle critic”) can easily be read as Brooks’s anxious projection about how her own literary ambitions will be received. Still on the first page, March asks his wife if she “recall[s] the marbled endpapers in the Spenser that” he used to read to her. “If so,” he continues, “then you, my dearest one, can see the sky as I saw it here tonight, for the colors swirled across the heavens in just such a happy profusion” (3). The same poet makes a conspicuous appearance among the profuse allusions in Ahab’s Wife. Naslund names her protagonist “Una Spenser,” conflating the poet’s name with that of the blameless heroine of The Faerie Queen and of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter, named after the same paragon of virtue. How to understand the fact that both of these contemporary novels allude to Edmund Spenser so prominently? In all likelihood, one could produce an intertextual reading of the resonance of the poet in each, but the primary function of these allusions has less to do with the content of the reference than with the act of alluding as such. This fact becomes abundantly clear in Brooks, when we recognize that March compares the evening sky not to any image in Spenser but to the pattern on ornamental pages in the edition they own. Any book with “marbled endpapers” would serve March’s description of the twilit sky equally well, just as for Brooks an allusion to any prestigious author would. Such name-dropping does not demand that the reader of March recall her English Lit. survey in detail—and far less that she be a Spenser “geek”—but merely to register that alluding to Elizabethan poetry is the kind of thing only a literary novel would do. As Little Women is typically viewed as a classic for girls, allusion serves Brooks as a necessary technology for garnering prestige, a bid to be considered serious literature that in the case of March, which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2006, clearly paid off.

One might object that the Spenser reference is March’s name-dropping, not Brooks’s, and that it is meant to reveal the character’s intellectual disposition. But the creation of a bookish protagonist, one “more interested in laying up the riches of the mind” than in economic gain (18), constitutes a complementary strategy to appeal to an audience that self-identifies as intellectual. March’s rejection of vulgar materialism refracts Brooks’s own claim to disinterested production, which reinforces her endeavor to acquire a literary readership. March is hardly alone in the genre in converting a previously minor character into a bookish protagonist. The Wind Done Gone’s Cynara cites Shakespeare’s sonnets, Othello, and The Tempest; mentions her enjoyment of Scott’s sagas, Mansfield Park, and Great Expectations; and compares the end of Reconstruction to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. ⁵² Naslund’s cerebral heroine is addicted to allusion, and hers are almost always marked with their sources for the reader who would not recognize them. Even Moore’s clown boasts of his erudition in order to impress “tarts” and “wenches” (“I am a walking library of learning—bound in comely leather and suitable for stroking”). ⁵³ Thematizing reading with their cultured protagonists, these texts not only repackage their canonical predecessors but also literary culture as such. Selling books that feature booklovers to booklovers emerges as a reliable strategy for producers to reinforce the prestige of the literary and thus perpetuate a desire for their wares. ⁵⁴

Certain pleasures and even certain texts, however, are undoubtedly reserved for the initiated—that is, for fans and lovers of the canonical predecessor. Although at some point either booksellers or Houghton Mifflin decided that Randall’s The Wind Done Gone would appeal primarily to an African American audience, Randall appears to have anticipated one consisting of devotees of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Randall renames all the characters from Mitchell’s blockbuster, so that Scarlett O’Hara is referred to throughout as “Other,” Gerald and Ellen O’Hara are “Planter” and “Lady,” Rhett Butler is “R.B.,” and Pork becomes “Garlic.” While this strategy is interesting for, among other things, the transparency of some of these name changes, which became a legal matter in the unsuccessful lawsuit that Mitchell’s estate brought against Houghton Mifflin, and the ironic reversal that converts Scarlett into “Other” in the process of condemning Gone with the Wind’s persistent othering of its black characters, it is more fundamentally a strategy that demands familiarity with the predecessor text for its coherence. The name “Garlic” would seem inexplicably idiosyncratic to a reader who does not recall Pork, and while “Dreamy Gentleman” and “Mealy Mouth” for Ashley and Melanie Wilkes are typological names that indicate their character traits, for readers unfamiliar with Gone with the Wind such names cede their parodic function and may merely confuse. ⁵⁵ Of course, the fact that the class of “initiates” to Gone with the Wind, especially if one includes viewers of Victor Fleming’s 1939 film, is an extremely populous one helps Randall’s novel retain a wide resonance despite the demands for recognition it places on readers. Texts that elaborate on characters from predecessors belonging to the “social” as opposed to academic canon take advantage of wider audience familiarity with the precursor while relying less on the precursor’s high literary prestige. Wicked similarly capitalizes on the far greater contemporary film audience of The Wizard of Oz, compared to the modern readership of L. Frank Baum’s series of books. One may speculate that Wicked’s phenomenal success stems less from its immanent qualities than from its ability to engage a range of audiences: for Baum’s books (which were hugely popular in their day); those of the theatrical adaptations; the huge viewership of the film version (like Gone with the Wind, directed by Fleming and also appearing in 1939), especially its annual television airings; as well as audiences of later cartoon versions, the musical The Wiz, and its screen adaptation in the 1978 Sidney Lumet film starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. While elaborating a minor character from Shakespeare or Virgil emerges as a reliable strategy for appealing to a bibliophilic niche, doing so with a character from a popular novel or film enables producers to target a mass audience.

While some minor-character elaborations target the massive preexisting fan bases of their predecessors and some tout the symbolic capital associated with theirs, others appeal to particular fan communities. A revealing example of the latter is Janet Aylmer’s Darcy’s Story, which takes part in the staggering contemporary proliferation of Jane Austen sequels, spinoffs, parodies, biographies, transpositions, and television and film adaptations. This mountain of “Austenalia” is fertile ground for future research, but such texts employ widely diverging generic techniques: some are fictional biographies of Austen (Becoming Jane Austen [2003] and The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen [2008]); others like Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996), Amy Heckerling’s film Clueless (1995), and Jane Austen in Boca (2002), are transpositions of Austen plots set in the contemporary world; a number treat the pleasures and pains of being an Austen fanatic, such as The Jane Austen Book-Club (2004), Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict (2008), and Jane Austen Ruined My Life (2009); still others are self-help books (Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating [2005], Dear Jane Austen: A Heroine’s Guide to Life and Love [2005], and Jane Austen’s Guide to Good Manners [2006]); and the latest craze has been to travesty Austen’s books by blending her plots with other genres—the more incongruous the better—as in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (2009), Mr. Darcy, Vampyre (2009), and Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen (2001). But by far the most prolific category has been sequels and spinoffs, in particular of Pride and Prejudice. ⁵⁶

I have pointed to the distinction between minor-character elaboration—in which the shift in perspective or focus to a minor character produces a revised understanding of that character—and such related forms as sequels and spinoffs, which generally do not revise the precursor text in a significant way but merely extend its plot or provide more of a given character. But Darcy’s Story demonstrates that this distinction constitutes a blurry line indeed. Drawing it requires deciding when similarity slides into difference, whether a character is merely extended or demonstrably transformed. Though Aylmer’s novel does not encourage any major reconsideration of Darcy, it does adopt the principal formal strategies of the genre; the shift in the narration to Darcy’s perspective is characteristic of the genre. The novel’s tagline, mentioned above, points to the appeal of such texts for consumers and producers alike. For readers, the combination of a return to the romance of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy with the shift to “a whole new perspective” offers up the twinned pleasures of “repetition with variation,” the “comfort of ritual with the piquancy of surprise,” which characterize the experience of explicit intertextual engagement theorized by Linda Hutcheon. ⁵⁷ Producers are clearly eager to sell this type of pleasurable experience. The added virtue of minor-character elaboration is that its premise is easily encapsulated in a brief formula that immediately provokes a mystery for the reader, spelled out on the back cover of Darcy’s Story: “But what was Darcy thinking?” Alluding to a beloved story while destabilizing it, the taglines pithily summarize the story’s intertextual project and pique the reader’s interest with the promise of fleshing out a shadowy character.

It turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Darcy’s Story is wholly faithful to its predecessor, full of verbatim quotations, and does not alter readers’ perceptions of Darcy so much as confirm what they already learn by the end of Austen’s novel (that the Bennets were mistaken in their initial disapproval of him). But despite the fact that I consider Aylmer’s novel more of a sequel than an elaboration, it provides an instructive example of how the publishing industry has adopted the genre’s basic framework and employed its technology to churn out profitable commodities. Part of this instructive quality derives from the fortuitous fact that I found a promotional copy of the novel in its uncorrected proof stage while browsing used books at Alibris.com; the other part comes from Aylmer’s unique success story. The publicity copy offers a number of insights into how HarperCollins promoted the novel; the back cover boasts a “National Marketing Campaign,” including “National Print Advertising in Romantic Times,” “National Review Attention” (a review appearing in Romantic Times, the same publication in which it was advertised, gave the novel four and a half stars, and USA Today called it a “delectable crumpet”),⁵⁸ “National Radio Interviews, including NPR,” as well as “Online Promotion” and an “Online Reading Group Guide.” These marketing strategies suggest the scale Harper had in mind for the sales of Aylmer’s book and an overlap between romance readers and devotees of the Austen industry. Of perhaps even greater interest is the letter from the Harper editor Jill Schwartzman found inside the front cover of the uncorrected proof. Her letter begins by stressing the marketability of Darcy’s Story. “Dear Readers, / There’s obviously an insatiable market for all things Pride & Prejudice—over 100,000 copies of the book were sold just in the last year. Film and TV versions are equally popular—there have been four major adaptations in the last ten years. But Janet Aylmer had a new and different vision.”⁵⁹ It’s no surprise that editors are concerned with demand for their books, but this letter confirms that the publishing industry perceives the “insatiable market” for Austenalia to be fertile ground for the sale of “new and different” reworkings of the same old canonical material. Schwartzman’s citation of the perennially robust sales of P&P also reinforces the intuition that, contra guardians of intellectual-property rights, derivative works funnel readers back to the originals, increasing their cultural visibility and consequently their sales. Schwartzman goes on to recount the unique scenario by which Harper obtained the rights to publish Darcy’s Story in the United States. Aylmer was inspired to write the novel after watching the 1995 BBC miniseries featuring Colin Firth and discussing with her daughter how little Austen reveals about Darcy. Aylmer first published the novel privately, writes Schwartzman, borrowing funds “to print 2,000 copies, only to sell out in six weeks—and that’s with no marketing and only a handful of shops selling the book.” With the help of a small publisher in Bath, which prints only Darcy’s Story and two other books, Aylmer went on to sell twenty thousand copies in thirty-seven countries. ⁶⁰ Schwartzman gleefully announces: “Now it’s finally available in the United States, and I’m delighted to say that Harper paperback is the publisher! If you’re a Jane Austen fan—and really, who isn’t?—I absolutely guarantee you’re going to love Darcy’s Story.” Aylmer’s story looks like the Horatio Alger tale of the book world: the self-published novel that captivates readers until it’s noticed by the big players and sales really take off. Aylmer’s website now claims the book has sold 130,000 copies. ⁶¹

On the surface, the grassroots success of Darcy’s Story looks like it might assuage some of the worst fears of the mass-culture critics of the postwar era. According to Theodor Adorno the use of “culture industry” as a replacement for “mass,” “popular,” or “folk” culture was meant to “exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves…. The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumer from above.”⁶² Aylmer’s novel was initially produced from “below,” as with the current profusion of online fan fiction. Her conversation with her daughter seems to exemplify the “writerly” reading theorized by Roland Barthes, replacing a passive act of consumption with active production. The fact that Aylmer sold out her initial print run of two thousand copies without marketing seems to attest to a preexistent demand, to the fact that the “insatiable market” for all things Austen predates the work of culture-industry advertising and promotion. When one takes into account, however, the fact that the occasion for Aylmer’s writing was actually the 1995 miniseries—which likely whetted many of her readers’ appetites for more P&P as well—and considers that Harper’s distribution resources and marketing efforts enabled her novel’s sixtyfold sales increase, the picture begins to look quite different. Instead of culture either imposed from above or spontaneously generated from some unspoiled folk, we see a reciprocal interchange fueling production, in which the culture industry engenders acolytes devoted to its wares, fans who may be inspired to become producers in their own right—only to have their products reappropriated by the culture industry and sold back to the same devoted buyers. Aylmer’s ostensible grassroots, popular success, and the corporate mechanisms that enabled and capitalized on it in fact resemble nothing more than the fairy tale of radically democratic talent discovery–cum–mass marketing that is American Idol. And HarperCollins and the Idol shows share a parent company in Murdoch’s News Corp.

Again, these large-scale producers have found it profitable to cater to many niche audiences, so the point here is not to reassert mid-twentieth-century fears of the fascistic potential inherent in the imposition of a uniform, conformist mass culture and certainly also not to extend the overcorrection of the 1970s and 1980s by valorizing the popular, as such, as a site of resistance, community, or radically democratic access. Nor is the point simply to observe that a genre that emerged in postmodernist experiment and feminist and postcolonial critique has itself been colonized by a consolidated global publishing industry—though this is certainly the case. Multinational corporations will eagerly co-opt genre along with any other technology that turns a profit. Instead, the point is that the publishing industry has embraced the conventional form of minor-character elaboration precisely because its politics are so anodyne and already compatible with its ends. The analogy with American Idol is not a trivial one—a matter of taking a shot at Murdoch or at reality TV. The Idol shows and the lion’s share of minor-character elaborations project a similar egalitarian fantasy: everyone has a chance to have her voice heard on American Idol, just as every character gets a chance to tell her side of the story. But this fantasy masks the obvious fact that while only a lucky few will get to be the next American Idol, News Corp. will always win. Similarly, minor-character elaborations offer an image of social diversity, but authors in possession of ample cultural capital are actually speaking, and media conglomerates are profiting. ⁶³ When these authors and the multinational corporations who control today’s publishing industry “allow” minor characters “to speak,” the images they project help reinforce the neoliberal tenet that the free market does not discriminate and offers fair and egalitarian competition. It’s not, then, that the process of popularization has blunted the subversive edge of the genre, watered down its once robust politics, but that the political project of “giving voice” to minor characters (only one possibility offered by the genre’s technology) became conventional in the 1980s and 1990s as a literary form that neatly complemented the rise of neoliberal ideology.

That said, it almost goes without saying that the many recent texts adopting the techniques of the genre have become less critical and more reverential toward their canonical predecessors. The back cover of the fair copy of Darcy’s Story insists on Aylmer’s fidelity to her source even while paradoxically claiming her inventiveness and daring: “With the utmost respect for Austen’s original masterwork… Aylmer loving [sic] retells Pride and Prejudice…. One of fiction’s greatest romantic heroes becomes even more sympathetic, compelling, attractive, and accessible, all through the imagination and artistry of a truly gifted storyteller.” An example of similar homage, though many are possible, is Robin Lippincott’s Mr. Dalloway, which reworks Woolf’s classic but focalizes most of its narrative through Richard’s perspective—though its narration formally mimics its predecessor, moving in and out of the consciousnesses of other characters as well. In an “Author’s Note,” Lippincott makes his homage explicit.

It is difficult to imagine a more dramatic illustration of the strategy of annexation. Lippincott exalts Woolf, claims that she not only authorized his work but invited it, and finally poses his humble admiration as the privileged kind only a writer can feel. If the overt concern of Lippincott’s novel is to show that Richard Dalloway was, like his wife, forced to suppress his homosexual desire and to foster sympathy with his perspective, underlying this project is Lippincott’s possession of stores of cultural capital accumulated over twenty-five years. If, as Guillory writes, the author “returns in the critique of the canon, not as the genius, but as the representative of social identity,” in the genre of minor-character elaboration this identity similarly may be a matter of race, gender, or sexual orientation, but it is unlikely to be a lower-class one. ⁶⁵

Caroline Rody, writing about Wide Sargasso Sea in 1993, anticipated the utility of intertextual revisions for a culture industry eager to exploit the oppositional political energies of identity groups: “It probably wouldn’t surprise us at all to walk into a bookstore, someday soon, and find a two-volume boxed set of the Brontë and Rhys novels, issued by a major publishing house… targeted at the feminist market—special window displays for Mother’s Day.”⁶⁶ To my knowledge, no such boxed set yet exists, but Rody cannily foresaw that feminist readers, like all demographic groups, constitute a prospective market and that just as authors would find in Wide Sargasso Sea a “revisionary paradigm,” publishers would discover a model for promoting books that target such readers. It is not simply that the political force of the genre has dissipated, its radical potential sapped through contamination with the marketplace; instead the genre’s revisionist politics constitutes a crucial component of its popular appeal.

Christa Wolf’s Medea exemplifies the way conglomerate publishers have co-opted oppositional political energies by embracing minor-character elaboration as well as how they employ prestigious writers in their catalogue to promote other house writers and have developed shrewd electronic marketing strategies. In 1998, Nan A. Talese, at the time an imprint of Bantam Doubleday Dell (BDD), a Bertelsmann subsidiary, published Medea in the United States. ⁶⁷ In an introduction that prefaced first editions in the United States and United Kingdom, Margaret Atwood stresses the feminist stakes of Medea—“Of all the seductive, sinister and transgressive women who have haunted the Western imagination, none has a reputation more lurid than Medea’s”—and applauds Wolf’s “head-on and original” attack on the myth and its contemporary resonance: “This tale is about Medea, yes; but it is also about us” (Atwood, in Wolf, Medea, ix, xii, xv). Beyond the particular claims Atwood makes for Wolf’s novel, such introductions function as what Bourdieu calls “instances of consecration.”⁶⁸ In marketing terms, the reasons Atwood gives for promoting Medea are ultimately less significant than the fact that she is offering her cultural authority to legitimate Wolf to an English-speaking audience. Authors puffing for one another is of course nothing new, but Bourdieu argues that instances of consecration are characteristic of the “restricted” subfield of cultural production, the relatively autonomous sphere characterized by production for other producers, as opposed to “large-scale” production, “which submits to the laws of competition for the conquest of the largest possible market.”⁶⁹ Atwood’s endorsement of Wolf, likely under the aegis of Doubleday, their publisher, reveals how, with the consolidation of the industry, the distinction between “large-scale” and “restricted” production, always more a matter of belief than of fact, has all but vanished. Doubleday prominently marked Medea’s cover with Atwood’s endorsement, as did Virago in the United Kingdom, and her name functions to confer legitimacy and as a shorthand marker that conveys its appeal to female readers. In the case of the UK edition, Virago’s imprint on the binding helps further establish Medea’s feminist standing. Virago has had a singularly influential history of publishing feminist texts and discovering and rediscovering female authors. But the fact that Virago was sold to Little Brown in 1995, in turn acquired by Hachette in 2006,⁷⁰ demonstrates the way the umbrella structure of modern publishing preserves the feminist press and prestigious house names as specialized imprints that cater to niche audiences.

Such niches overlap, and Atwood’s introduction marks Medea with both literary prestige and feminist standing. In a similar fashion, the cover of the Grove paperback of Atwood’s Penelopiad touts her as the “Booker Prize–winning author of The Blind Assassin” and broadcasts a blurb from the Independent: “Half–Dorothy Parker, half–Desperate Housewives.” Grove simultaneously pitches the novel’s literary quality (Parker, the Booker, and Atwood herself), its mildly salacious entertainment (Desperate Housewives), and, running through all these signifiers (in different kinds and degrees, to be sure), its feminist credentials. The prominent placement of this blurb might make Atwood cringe, but it delights the scholar of the contemporary literary marketplace: here is evidence that these varied signifiers of symbolic value circulate in the same market for cultural goods.

In addition to prefacing Medea with Atwood’s introduction, BDD published it in Bold Type, “an interactive magazine for people who love to read,” which the conglomerate launched in 1997, when the Internet was itself novel. Bold Type offered commentary, excerpts, and author interviews and touted itself as an online community: “a forum for authors and readers to meet each other head-on.”⁷¹ Of course, what all the excerpts in Bold Type had in common was that they were written by BDD and, later, Random House authors—a prestigious lot indeed. Bold Type featured material from the likes of Atwood, Rushdie, and Sebald and, under Random’s Vintage imprint, posthumous cameos from Plath, Nabokov, and Ellison. Once one realizes this ’zine is a promotional vehicle, there’s nothing too insidious about Bold Type as a means for prospective buyers to browse. But Bold Type’s rhetoric illuminates how conglomerate publishers have sought to cultivate community and tap into oppositional political energies. The inaugural issue posed this publicity venture as a cultural “forum” and a site of resistance: “We want you to be subversive. Print out interesting essays and leave them in cafés and on the subway. Copy and forward articles to your friends via email. Post provocative short stories above the copier in your office. Read book excerpts while you should be working…”⁷² Bold Type’s incitement to mild-mannered radicalism illustrates the pervasive corporate co-option of counterculture energies described by Thomas Frank. ⁷³ Minor-character elaborations, with their revisionism and compatibility with feminist and multicultural agendas, have become a compelling technology for publishers eager to exploit such energies.

Bold Type’s foray into digital marketing captures an ambivalent moment of possibility in the early days of the Internet. For corporations like BDD and later Bertelsmann, this moment demanded new ways of attracting potential book buyers. Bold Type’s editor asserts that literary culture is thriving despite “naysayers [who] are busy proclaiming the ‘Death of the Novel,’ and of literature in general,” offering up its own interactive content “as evidence that this is an exciting time for fiction” and asserting that “bookstores across the country are more crowded than ever, the proliferation of cafés that sponsor reading series continues, and most importantly there is a wealth of great books being written by compelling new authors.”⁷⁴ The bankruptcy of Borders suggests that e-books and Amazon continue to threaten the economic health of brick-and-mortar bookstores. ⁷⁵ But Bold Type testifies to the interest of media conglomerates in propagating literary culture—thus in values that exceed market share—and minor-character elaboration has proven appealing to existing bibliophiles, resonant with identity-group audiences, and uniquely capable of reinforcing the cultural centrality of the literary.

Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife or, The Star-Gazer may represent the apotheosis of the compatibility of the genre’s political project of imagining female and other subaltern perspectives absent in canonical texts with the strategy of leveraging the symbolic capital of the canon in the service of the contemporary author’s own self-promotion and corporate publishers’ low-risk profit seeking. Naslund’s novel displays epic ambition at several levels: her stargazing title character undertakes an adventurous saga of self-making; the novel self-consciously chases the cultural leviathan that is its predecessor, Moby-Dick; and the book’s publishers positioned it to be a blockbuster market success. HarperCollins brought out the book in hardcover under its William Morrow imprint in 1999 “with a huge first printing” and later as a Perennial paperback. ⁷⁶ It was a Book-of-the-Month-Club main selection and was named one of Time’s top five novels of 1999—although since Time Warner owned the BOMC at the time (Bertelsmann later bought it in 2007 and sold it in 2008), the distinction looks somewhat dubious. ⁷⁷ Ahab’s Wife aims for the grandeur its predecessor has come to represent, and though Naslund’s publishers aspired to a greater commercial sensation than Melville achieved (initially),⁷⁸ her novel’s literariness presents a crucial component of, rather than a hindrance to, its palatability to popular tastes.

Ahab’s Wife’s bid to annex Melville’s symbolic capital and acquire a similar prestige manifests itself outwardly in the book’s physical architecture, which formally parodies its predecessor. Ahab’s Wife is a hefty book—if it were a whale, Ishmael would class it as a “Folio”— weighing in at almost seven hundred pages, divided into some 150 short, titled chapters. (This mimicry might suggest what Moby-Dick represents in the popular imagination: a really long book with a lot of little chapters.) And like Moby-Dick, or, The Whale, Naslund’s novel offers a “choice” of two titles; is prefaced by a dedication, “In Token of My Admiration” (to her husband, rather than to Hawthorne); and a series of quotations under the heading “Extracts,” and it contains a number of illustrations in the style of nineteenth-century woodcuts. Naslund’s novel also features a self-consciously narrating protagonist, chapters that utilize other characters as narrators, and still others that render dialogue in dramatic form. Naslund’s section of paratextual “Extracts” provides the relevant quotations from Moby-Dick in which Ahab’s wife is mentioned as a “sweet, resigned girl.” As with many minor-character elaborations, Naslund relies heavily on the symbolic capital of Melville but does not demand her readers remember that Ahab had a wife.

Naslund’s first “extract” summarizes her project of imagining a sprawling maritime adventure featuring a female heroine and creating a historical novel that celebrates the achievements of nineteenth-century American women. She quotes Margaret Fuller: “Let them be sea-captains—if they will!”⁷⁹ Rather than mount a critique of Moby-Dick for failing to consider the perspectives of women or seek to dramatize the effects of structural inequalities on women of the period, Ahab’s Wife undertakes the liberal feminist project of imagining the unique subjectivity of its protagonist and advocating the freedom of individuals to be allowed to do what “they will.” Naslund’s heroine Una does not become a captain, but she does stow away on a whaler dressed as a cabin boy, and her adventures include attending Fuller’s lectures in Boston and befriending the writer and activist as well as the Nantucket astronomer Maria Mitchell. On the surface, Ahab’s Wife neatly fits the mold of the popular feminist novel. Far from being the “sweet, resigned girl” envisioned by Melville, from childhood Una establishes herself as a freethinker who rebels against the patriarchal order of her devout father by refusing to accept his god. Consequently, her mother sends her to live with an aunt and uncle who manage a lighthouse on a utopian island off Massachusetts. (Among the novel’s scores of allusions, the lighthouse is an oblique reference to Woolf, Una’s father is named Ulysses, and her mother is called Bertha. Perhaps by making Una into Bertha’s daughter, Naslund buries a suggestion of her debt to Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.) Seeking adventure, Una takes to sea on a whaler with a kindly captain until the ship is stove by a whale, and she is left on the Pacific in an open boat. Threatened with starvation, the survivors draw lots, and Una and her friends Kit and Giles survive by cannibalizing the captain, his son, and their other boatmates. Una’s literal cannibalism helps establish her neo-Platonic compatibility with Melville’s presumably metaphorical “cannibal old” Ahab, but it is not difficult to read the novel’s obsession with anthropophagy as symptomatic of Naslund’s anxiety about her literary parasitism. Naslund bases this episode on the historical whale ship Essex, which also inspired Melville,⁸⁰ but when Una and friends are rescued by the Albatross, the reader also recognizes an extensive reworking of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”—one of many instances of the novel’s blending of a pastiche of literary predecessors with historical events.

Wracked by survivor’s guilt and horror at having turned cannibal, Giles kills himself aboard the Albatross. Una and Kit find consolation in each other, but Kit begins to go mad. Enter Ahab, who offers to return Una and Kit to Nantucket aboard the Pequod and officiates the marriage of the grieving couple aboard his ship. At Nantucket, Kit’s madness grows; he turns abusive and abandons Una, running off to live with Native Americans in the West. Naslund’s exceedingly gentle version of Ahab takes Una aboard his ship, dissolves her marriage to Kit, and marries her himself. She moves into Ahab’s stately captain’s house, and Una and Ahab spend a single idyllic night together before he goes a-whaling. The plot of Ahab’s Wife is as baroque as the prose of Moby-Dick, but the pattern throughout is a thoroughly conventional, if secularized, narrative of trial and salvation. Una’s father menaces her; she goes to live with gentle relatives. Her insane husband beats and rapes her; she finds her soulmate in Ahab. Ahab is dismasted, goes mad, and is lost at sea; she finds true companionship with Mary Starbuck, her gay neighbors, and finally Ishmael—whom she marries and settles down with to write companion narratives.

When Naslund self-reflexively hints at the way Ahab’s Wife is meant to complement its predecessor, she captures her novel’s tendency to rose-color history and its romantic insistence on happy endings: “if one wrote for American men a modern epic, a quest, and it ended in death and destruction, should such a tale not have its redemptive features? Was it not possible instead for a human life to end in a sense of wholeness, of harmony with the universe? And how might a woman live such a life?” (Naslund, Ahab’s Wife, 417). This passage suggests both how Naslund reads Moby-Dick—primarily as a story of adventure, as “a quest,” rather than (of many choices) an allegory of capitalism, of U.S. imperial ambitions, of antebellum America’s self-destructive pursuit of a phantasm of whiteness while depending on the labor of dark-skinned “savages”—and how resolutely she insists on liberating her protagonist from all constraints. This forces Ahab’s Wife to ignore actual historical circumstances of privation for women in the nineteenth century and results in a novel that is a paean to unfettered individualism.

Above all, Naslund’s novel views freedom as a spiritual and intellectual matter. Her fictionalized Fuller praises Una in a letter, and the reader is meant to concur: “You create your own being… you send your spirit voyaging; you think. You are the American woman, an Eve more fittingly named Dawn, new and brave” (591). This emphasis on Una’s intellectual and spiritual adventure in fact renders all her external exploits extraneous, and Ahab’s Wife celebrates the odyssey of self-discovery as its true epic. Married to Ahab, Una discovers her spirit can remain free while her body stays at home as a mom: “So during Ahab’s third voyage, I made something of a Quaker woman of myself, in placid manner and even temperament. My greatest joy, after mothering, was my sewing, and while I stitched, my mind lay smooth and quiet” (520). Una revels in married life. A chapter entitled “Wife” begins: “What magic there was in the word when it named all that I would be!” With Ahab at sea, Una declares: “I kept my house as though my husband were there so that when he did come, every household task would be practiced and perfected,” and she declines invitations to visit Fuller because Ahab “must find his wife at home” whenever he returns (457). Even her uncanny apprehension that Ahab has been killed at sea fails to occasion mourning because she has achieved a truer marriage to her self. Una’s premonition that she has been widowed only provokes another of the novel’s countless records of her musings, as she wonders, “where is the journey to the place that is limitless? I find it within. Last night I found it within me—independent and single. No, I do not unmarry Ahab. But I marry myself” (561). Not trivially, Una can be so spiritually content because Ahab’s whaling leaves her so well provided for materially. More than a room of her own, Naslund portrays a woman’s spiritual independence as requiring a house or two. When Ahab shows Una their second home, she follows him “from room to room, [her] soul ever expanding” (361). Naslund seems to have ignored Melville’s critical exposure of whaling wealth as blood money; her jolly Ahab encourages his new bride, “make yourself merry in all your living and spending till I come home,” and Una boasts to a friend, “We can buy anything we please. Captain Ahab is very rich” (365, 381).

Naslund’s novel actually inverts much of Melville’s critique, and one begins to wonder about the influence of Murdoch’s neoconservative politics on HarperCollins’ editorial decisions when, completely extraneous to the main plot, another whaling captain tells Una that he has invested in a “new kind of oil, oozed from the ground,” because “someday the whales will all be dead, hunted to extinction by the likes of Captain Ahab and myself.” Una does not linger on the portent of whale extinction but jumps at the prospect of trading one ecologically devastating energy source for another, investing “substantially” in “this new oil”—even after being told that “When you burn it, it billows noxious black smoke” (530). ⁸¹ As I read these words during the 2010 British Petroleum oil spill, I had to wonder what Melville would have thought of seeing “this new oil” pour into the Gulf of Mexico like so much whale blood. Naslund, however, does not limn her narrator-protagonist with any discernible irony or make Una, already “very rich” from Ahab’s fortune, seem greedy or exploitative for investing in black gold; instead, Naslund offers this episode to demonstrate her heroine’s keen business acumen.

If the overwhelming neoliberalism of Ahab’s Wife makes it an exceptional case, it converges with the broader tendency of minor-character elaborations in its cultural conservatism. The novel combines an eminently inclusive appreciation of difference with a trumpeting of the timeless value of the Western canon. Naslund depicts a multicultural sisterhood, embraces noncanonical figures like Fuller, and pastiches Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin when Una helps a runaway slave cross the Ohio by leaping across perilous ice floes. Updating Melville’s depiction of the Pequod as a chowder pot of the world’s races for a multicultural age, Naslund has Una befriend a corpulent Nantucket innkeeper named Rebekkah Swain, who embodies a contemporary ideal of diversity: “Her complexion… was more yellow and Chinese-like than black—see how in her person she gathers in the nations?… In that moment, she seemed a woman of all time as well as the melded personification of the geographically diverse human race” (128). Characteristically, while Swain’s body contains multitudes, Naslund couches the innkeeper’s ability to transcend history in terms that echo Ben Jonson’s praise of Shakespeare as “not of an age, but for all time.” Similarly, while Swain’s appearance encompasses nations, Naslund has her speech evoke the English: “Her eyes tilted up at the corners—the Chinese again!—the lips, full and negroid, and the words they shaped… there was her kinship with the kings and queens of England” (128). Simultaneously, Ahab’s Wife pays lip service to the appreciation of human diversity and heaps praise on the English language and its most exalted exponent, privileging the cultural production of the West by continually drawing attention to its masterworks.

Ahab’s Wife pays homage to the traditional Western canon and poses knowledge of those masterworks as the key that opens the gates for Una’s journey to spiritual independence. Una is a dedicated reader—with Ahab’s largess she goes to Boston to buy “Not only… furnishings, china, and silver, but also books by the boxload” (374)—and the novel is strewn with scores of flagged allusions to the classics. By the second page, Una recalls sitting with her mother, “reading again those great books of literature” (2–3), and she continually intersperses her narrative with references that range across the centuries. ⁸² When she takes a steamboat north, Una looks at the wheel and thinks of “Don Quixote’s windmill” (25), and, late in the novel, she improbably encounters a five year-old Henry James, who “amaz[es her] by his spiraling sentence” (664). Of Keats’s “Eve of Saint Agnes” Una rhapsodizes: “I want to eat the language… I wanted rich words, and none are richer than Keats’s.” Una continues, speaking to her mother but clarifying for the reader: “‘Heard sounds are sweet; unheard, sweeter,’ I quoted freely from ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’” (403). Naslund includes gratuitous allusions, as with Cervantes, and marks the source of any quotation, as with Keats. Again, the logic of these allusions depends on the act of citation, not on the content of the reference; the reader does not have to identify the source but merely Naslund’s literariness. And throughout the novel Una hobnobs with American Renaissance literati, encountering Hawthorne (who quotes from his own “Village Uncle”) on the way to Emerson’s house, hearing Frederick Douglass speak, and stumbling upon little James on the strand. One Amazon.com reviewer aptly compares Ahab’s Wife to a nineteenth-century Forrest Gump, and Una’s mingling with literary celebrities stands as a transparent enactment of her author’s aspirations to do the same. ⁸³ Of course, Melville himself comes in for some of Naslund’s most fawning homage. After Una overhears Ishmael spouting Moby-Dick’s ornate prose verbatim in conversation, she tells him: “You are a wonderful narrator.” Ishmael replies, “I would suppose that you yourself have a story to tell” (644). Ahab’s Wife thus painstakingly positions its own narrative alongside that of its illustrious predecessor.