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

A similar oscillation occurs throughout the authors’ explanatory notes, introductions, acknowledgments, and interviews that seem almost de rigueur in the genre, as well as in metafictional moments within minor-character elaborations proper. When Nancy Rawles wonders about Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (“Who was he to his family and community? Who was he to his wife?”),² she conveys the impression that information might be discovered about Jim, outside of what Twain tells in his novel, as if Jim had a life and set of relationships beyond what Twain deigned to reveal. In a similar fashion, David Malouf explains the motivation behind his Ransom (2009); he “was interested” if in the Iliad “there weren’t some little places in that telling where things are not told which one could now begin to tell, and one of those things is the story of Priam’s childhood, which doesn’t appear anywhere else as far as I know.”³ Just as Rawles suggests that there was some relationship between Jim and his community, Malouf treats Priam as if he had a childhood, about which writers have thus far “not told.” By contrast, when Margaret Atwood, in The Penelopiad has her title character object to the way her portrayal in “the official version” serves as “an edifying legend,”⁴ Atwood points to the ideological function of the character, the way Homer’s Penelope is constructed to produce a morally instructive effect. When Atwood claims that the Homeric version of the story “doesn’t hold water” (Atwood, The Penelopiad, xv), she is not saying that the patently fictional epic is false but rather that she doesn’t find it plausible, realistic, or authentic. It would seem, then, that Atwood recognizes the Odyssey’s characters as constructed representations determined by the beliefs and agendas of its author(s) and its historical moment, as discursive constructs that might be executed better or worse, appear more or less convincing, and not as reflections of reality or as beings with an independent existence. But despite understanding Homer’s character as a representation, when Atwood claims in her introduction that she has “chosen to give the telling of the story to Penelope and to the twelve hanged maids,” she seems to pose her own characters as real, authentic, autonomous, as capable of speaking for themselves (xv; my emphasis). A similar doubleness emerges in Le Guin’s Lavinia. ⁵ Le Guin has her eponymous protagonist confront Virgil and quarrel with “the poet’s portrait” of her “as a silent shrinking maiden” (Le Guin, Lavinia, 19). Virgil eventually concedes the point and acknowledges his depiction of Lavinia was “stupid, conventional, unimagined” (58). Like Atwood, Le Guin understands the canonical incarnation of her character as a “portrait,” constructed along “conventional,” ideologically saturated lines. But when Le Guin has Virgil meet and get to know better the character he has in actuality created, he discovers she is more complex than he had thought her to be. “Perhaps I did not do you justice, Lavinia” (40). And, as we’ve seen, despite having Lavinia possess a metafictional knowledge of her textuality, of “the splendid, vivid words [she’s] lived in for centuries,” Le Guin has the character claim a prior existence, independent of Virgil’s Aeneid. “He slighted my life, in his poem. He scanted me…. If I must go on existing century after century, then once at least I must break out and speak” (3–4). ⁶

In oscillating between conceiving of minor characters as textual representations and as autonomous entities whose existence exceeds the bounds of the text that constitutes them, the authors of minor-character elaborations foreground in particularly vivid fashion a conflict between structural and referential conceptions of character that has been a persistent theoretical preoccupation in studies of character and the novel. While I argued in chapter 2 that literary scholars who understand formerly minor characters as autonomous entities given the freedom to speak by contemporary authors engage in a dubious textual politics (by reconceiving the construction of a fuller, less stereotypical, representation of a character as an act of liberation), writers of minor-character elaborations repeatedly describe the characters they appropriate as possessing lives outside of the texts that constitute them, and such descriptions reflect the common experience of a great number of readers who engage with the imaginary worlds generated by narrative fictions. Rather than fall into the familiar position of the professor chiding his undergraduates for treating characters as if they were people, I want to argue that extratextual speculation by the likes of Brooks and Malouf is both typical of the referential construal of character that is often deemed naïve and an essential part of the imaginative process that we engage in when we read realist fiction. Priam never had a childhood for the reason that he never existed, and no childhood is referred to in the texts that generate his fictional existence. Nonetheless, within the fictional world of the Iliad, Priam’s childhood is logically entailed by the fact of his having attained old age. When readers and writers wonder about a character’s motivation or backstory, that is, they are not just making a category error in supposing the character has a life outside what is mentioned in the text. When authors of minor-character elaborations describe formerly minor characters as both conventional constructions and as having a prior, fuller existence that has gone untold or been “scanted” in canonical works, these authors are not only expressing a preference for their own versions. Nor are they simply making the ironic mistake of critiquing a prior representation for being ideological and posing their own as “real.” Instead, these authors are engaged in a process of negotiation between ways of construing characters, a process in which readers are constantly and often unconsciously engaged. Because minor-character elaboration hinges on this doubleness—an awareness and rejection of the manner in which a minor character is constructed in a canonical text and a concomitant effort to imagine that character as if it had an autonomous existence that exceeded the representation that constituted it—the genre throws into relief the very functioning of literary character, helps clarify the vexed question of character in theories of the novel, and elucidates an array of cultural phenomena, from readers’ passionate attachments to fictional entities to the vast accumulations of online fan fiction.

This chapter takes the authors of minor-character elaborations as exemplary realist readers, who swing between the “twofoldness” of character, treating characters as if they had full lives, while at the same time and at another level knowing that characters have a merely textual existence, are at best mental images generated by words on a page. Production utilizing the genre hinges on the fact that the textual material that generates character can never achieve fullness both because any text occupies a finite space and because the ideology of liberal subjectivity posits a bottomless depth and an endless individual complexity, a “precious remainder” that texts can never fully capture. ⁷ Because all characters and the fictional worlds they occupy are structurally incomplete, realist readers continually supplement texts with outside information, hanging a referential body on the gappy structure posed by the text. Reference emerges from structure but also from readers’ supplementation of textual material, an unruly process that generates the doubleness of character—an existence that is a consequence of both textual structuration and variable (but also often predictable) acts of readerly imagination. This supplementation is common practice in conventional realist modes of reading character and generative of readers’ sense of characters’ virtual lives. Minor-character elaborations make this process particularly visible because when contemporary authors become fascinated with a minor figure they dramatically extend, and physically enact with the production of a new fiction, a process of supplementation that is mental and imaginary in everyday reading. Understanding characters as constituted both by textual information and by an unregulated, variable process of readerly inference and supplementation generates an unstable, protean theory of character. Characters are both what their texts say about them and what readers make of them. Readers cannot, however, extend characters indefinitely or revise them completely and still call them “the same” character. The limits to this process suggest that character nonetheless demands a modicum of consistency, that to appropriate and revise extant characters—rather than to generate new ones—means adhering to some qualities while altering others.

Authors of minor-character elaborations frequently construe their projects as efforts to discover what happens outside the boundaries of a canonical text rather than as the fabrication or imaginative creation of this extratextual material. In doing so, they engage in the kind of speculation famously proscribed by L. C. Knights in his “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” (An inevitable candidate, Lady Macbeth became the subject of not one but two minor-character elaborations, both in 2008: Susan Fraser King’s Lady Macbeth and Maggie Power’s Lady Macbeth’s Tale.) The banning of such speculation was part of the New Critical emphasis on the primacy of the text, and structuralist scholars have engaged in a parallel attack on treating characters as if they were persons—deeming such reading naïve—rather than as the textual effect produced by the sum of the signifiers attached to a character’s name in a given text. ⁸ While no such speculation can have a bearing on a given text’s immanent meaning, readers do not only read literary texts to pursue or produce meanings; they engage in a variety of affective and imaginative practices.

In recent years, a host of literary scholars and theorists have recognized that the structuralist attack on referential reading was rooted in an ideological critique that, in seeking to demystify the effect of character, neglected to explain just how and why readers imagine characters to have an autonomous personhood in the first place. John Frow writes that structuralism does not “account for the textual conditions of existence of characters as quasi-subjects, and for the activity of the reader in the constitution of these represented subjects; it fails to explain the affective force of the imaginary unities of character.”⁹ In a similar vein, Deidre Lynch takes issue with the tendency of structuralist and poststructuralist critics to dismiss humanistic (that is, mimetic or referential) approaches to the question of character on the grounds of their “fetishistic assumption that character exceeded the formal means of its representation.” Character, to the structurally minded, “was ‘really’ no more than an illusory effect engendered by the words on the page.” Lynch argues that the demystification of the illusion of character “dismisses the plenitude it should explain. It does not account for how characters’ excesses… the augmented vitality that humanist accounts ascribe to characters who seem to live lives off the page—have been effective in history.”¹⁰ Lynch insists that readers’ attachments to and affiliations with character are real phenomena, even if the object of those attachments is imaginary or “illusory,” and she historicizes the reading practices that gave rise to this plenitude. “At the turn of the nineteenth century characters became the imaginative resources on which readers drew to make themselves into individuals, to expand their own interior resources of sensibility” (Lynch, Economy, 126). Lynch aligns herself with a now familiar narrative of the rise of the novel. Characters’ excesses, their virtual lives, materialize in the service of the liberal, self-making imperative of a particular historical moment. Characters are functional; the apparent fullness of their imaginary lives helps readers imagine themselves as individuals similarly endowed with a rich and unique subjectivity. “The expanded inner life of the literary character” emerges, for Lynch, as “an artifact of a new form of self-culture and as the mechanism of a new mode of class awareness” (126).

More recently, Blakey Vermeule has explained our attachment to literary characters and our tendency to “talk about a fictional character as though he were a real person,” as a mental exercise that performs the adaptive, evolutionary function of providing necessary “social information.”¹¹ We treat characters as if they were people, according to Vermeule, because we rely on them as a training ground for actual social interactions. “Innovations in narrative technique,” she argues, “are driven by the need to ratchet up pressure on our mind-reading capacities” (Vermeule, Why Do We Care, 98), by which she means our ability to know what “other people are thinking and being able to predict what they are going to do… two of the most important cognitive skills we humans possess” (34). ¹² While Lynch historicizes the modern conception of character and Vermeule universalizes our fascination with fictional beings into the fulfillment of a deeply rooted evolutionary need, both understand the referential aspect of character as functional, as emerging out of the use to which characters are put. ¹³ The tendency to treat characters as if they “lived lives off the page” stems from the need to employ characters as models for self-fashioning (Lynch) or for understanding others (Vermeule). Both of these accounts end up looking strangely, if differently, instrumental and circular. We treat characters as if they were people because we can only exploit them for our needs if we treat them as if they were people.

Alex Woloch’s ambitious theory of characterization The One vs. the Many is expressly concerned with the relative attention or “character space” apportioned to protagonists and minor characters. Rather than seeing character’s referential function as a product of the use to which characters are put, Woloch conceives of reference as generated by the character’s “structured position within the literary totality.” A character’s “referential personality—the unique sense and abiding impression that the character leaves us with—emerges in-and-through, not despite, his textual position.”¹⁴ Woloch rejects the “unpalatable choice” between structure and reference, formalist or mimetic approaches to character, by asserting: “the tension between structure and reference” is “generative of, and integral to, narrative signification” (Woloch, The One vs. the Many, 17). Although Woloch wants to answer “both” rather than choose structure or reference, his account continually lands on the side of reference by treating characters as if they were persons who preexist their place in the narrative and continually make demands for more space. The “subordinate figures” in the Iliad “jostle for, and within, the limited space that remains” when Achilles retreats from the fight, and they “frequently make claims on the narrative only to be overwhelmed by” the son of Peleus’s “narrative presence” (2). While Woloch maintains that the referential sense of a character as an imaginary person “emerges in-and-through” the character’s structured position in a narrative, he also imagines that when structuring time comes, minor characters are lined up and clamoring for more space. In his determination to read literary form as an index of historical inequality, Woloch’s explicitly “socioformal” approach is compelled to treat the unequal parceling out of narrative space among fictional entities as the unjust allocation of attention to them (17). According to Woloch, “the asymmetric structure of realist characterization—which rounds out one or several characters while flattening, and distorting, a manifold assortment of characters—reflects actual structures of inequitable distribution” (31). ¹⁵ When Woloch suggests that characterization “flattens” some characters or, quoting Ian Watt, argues that the “functionalization of minor characters effaces ‘the definite manifestations of definite qualities of individuals’” (27), he conveys the impression that minor characters are individuals that once had a fullness that has been “flattened,” “distorted,” or “effaced.” Woloch claims that character emerges at the intersection of structure and reference but repeatedly figures reference to precede structure—structuration as a field where (already animate) characters vie for attention, or a process through which minor characters have their full personhood effaced or compressed.

Though Woloch seems misguided in suggesting that characters’ personhood preexists the structuring of the narrative that constitutes them, his move to choose “both” in the contest of “structure vs. reference” strikes me as the right one. ¹⁶ The film scholar Murray Smith has argued for another manner of reconciling this tension via a concept he calls the “twofoldness of character.” Borrowing a set of terms from Richard Wollheim, Smith argues that “‘twofoldness’ describes… our apprehension, at once, of both the depicted object and the marked surface… the recognitional and configurational aspects of” depiction. ¹⁷ Smith’s “recognitional” aspect corresponds to the referential view of character: “So readily do we recognize in fictions those ‘virtual persons’ we call characters that we can speak of them and respond to them in many ways just as if they were actual persons.” Smith’s example is the distraught reaction by fans of the BBC radio serial The Archers to the death of the character Nigel Pargetter, but one could easily substitute Rawles’s desire to “learn who Jim was to his community.” The “configurational” or structural aspect of character surfaces “whenever we note or notice something bearing upon the designed status of a character, when we see a character as an element in a representation” (Smith, “On the Twofoldness,” 280). Smith’s example here is when viewers discuss how well or ill an actor performs in a film—the acknowledgment that character is an effect of an actor’s presentation. We see “configurational” or structural responses to minor characters when Atwood highlights Penelope’s ideological function as a “stick to beat other women with” or when Le Guin refers to Lavinia’s conventional depiction in the Aeneid. But the key for Smith is how easily we shuttle between both aspects of character, between thinking of Roger Thornhill in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) “as a middle-aged advertising executive in a fix” and evaluating “how Thornhill is ‘configured’ through Cary Grant.” We “apprehend both of these aspects of the film at once” (280). ¹⁸ A similar dual apprehension occurs when we read fiction, and this process becomes particularly visible as authors of minor-character elaborations explain their fascination with, and speculation about, the “untold” stories that lurk behind the traces of minor figures.

A vivid example of twofoldness, the ease with which readers shuttle between these two aspects of character, appears in an oft-quoted letter from Jean Rhys to Francis Wyndham. Rhys writes of Bertha in Jane Eyre:

Reference is not a matter of imaginary persons fighting for narrative space or clamoring for attention, the author’s or the reader’s. Instead, minor-character elaboration helps us see that reference derives from structure, that apprehension of a character’s fullness emerges as part of the semantic process of meaning making, on the part of the reader. Characters are generated by structure, by the set of signifiers present in the text. But readers supplement those signifiers with a wealth of extratextual information. In an “Author’s Note” to her Longbourn, Jo Baker writes that the main characters of her book are “the ‘proxy’ by which the shoe-roses for Netherfield Ball are fetched” in Pride and Prejudice but insists that “they are—at least in [her] head—people too.”²⁰ Reference emerges out of the play of presence and absence of information about a character, through the need or desire for readers to make inferences or fill in story elements—even if only in their heads—that are absent from the text’s discourse. Minor-character elaborations, like fan fiction and other modes such as apocryphal prequels and sequels, make this process particularly visible because they hinge on a reader’s filling absence with presence, a recognition of the constructed or configured aspect of character and a desire to revise and supplement that configuration to produce, in a new text, a character that seems realer. Authors of minor-character elaborations typically couch “the desire to produce a character that seems realer” in referential terms: to find out who the character really was, what he was like, to let her tell her own story. But the filling in of information that produces our sense of an implied person is part of everyday reading practice as well. ²¹

In S/Z (1970), Roland Barthes famously theorizes and attempts to demonstrate that this process of supplementation is a runaway one, unruly, potentially infinite: “Character is an adjective, an attribute, a predicate…. Even though the connation may be clear, the nomination of its signified is uncertain, approximate, unstable” (Barthes, S/Z, 190). Barthes argues that what gives this uncertain progression toward a signified an illusory coherence is the proper name and the humanist ideology of the unique individual subject that underlies it: “the illusion that the sum is supplemented by a precious remainder (something like individuality, in that, qualitative and ineffable, it may escape the vulgar bookkeeping of compositional characters) is the Proper Name” (191). But while Barthes is determined to show how the process of signification can proliferate endlessly, varying between different readings and readers, and that the name constitutes the heading under which all such readings congregate to generate a false coherence, he elsewhere points to the fact that shared “cultural codes” and assumptions produce a degree of consensus among readers at a given time and place, causing them to supplement information that is not provided in a text with common knowledge (18). ²² In Fictional Worlds (1986), his masterful theory of fiction, Thomas Pavel emphasizes the relative stability of such processes against the “semantic fundamentalism” that he argues has dominated literary scholarship informed by structural linguistics (Pavel, Fictional Worlds, 6). Pavel argues that structuralist critics, inspired by Saussurean linguistic theory, have systematically neglected the referential capacity of fiction. Such critics err in stressing the arbitrariness of the relationship between signifier and signified “since the principle of arbitrariness maintains only that there is no motivated link between the conceptual side and the phonetic side of a linguistic sign; it does not deny the stability of linguistic meaning, once the semiotic system has been established” (3). This critical tendency discounts the common practices of readers and the intuitions they bring to fictions, including an “inference system” that “relate[s] the passages of the book to an extratextual cultural and factual framework” (17).

Readers need to supplement fictional texts with extratextual information because of what Pavel calls “incompleteness.” Because statements such as “Vautrin has a cousin” and “Lady Macbeth has four children” cannot be assigned truth or falsity with respect to their fictional worlds, these worlds are incomplete (107). Many modernist and postmodernist fictions revolve around a central lack of information or display a radical incompleteness to suggest the fragmentation of the real world as currently understood. But Pavel stresses that such radically incomplete fictions are a recent development and may not persist indefinitely. The more “stable world view” that underlies classical realist novels, such as the “vast realist constructions” of Balzac, seeks to minimize incompleteness by employing strategies that attempt to “extend texts as far as possible, filling them with lifelike effects, as if the difference between incomplete fictional worlds and the actual universe were one of quantity” (108). While this strategy implies confidence in a finite world that can be known, its project is necessarily futile within a finite text. The incompleteness of fictional worlds thus provokes the question of whether “one should refrain from adding to [the fictional] world facts and laws that are not alluded to in the text” or to “make the opposite choice, which is to limit these worlds to what is described, unambiguously implied, or alluded to in the text” (106–107). The latter choice reflects semantic fundamentalism, and readers—whether they generate an “uncertain” progress toward a signified or adopt the shared assumptions of “cultural codes” and “inference systems”—import information from outside the boundaries of what a given text refers to and take certain things for granted. It has of course been the aim of many minor-character elaborations and literary scholars of the past several decades to show that the gaps or lacunae in canonical texts, that which goes without saying, are motivated and ideological, not random or necessary byproducts of the finitude of a book as material object. But taking seriously Pavel’s assertion that incompleteness is a fundamental feature of fictional worlds suggests that such critiques are part of a larger process, one in which readers are led to conjecture, speculate, and complete imaginatively what is inevitably left incomplete in any given narrative.

Taking an example of characterization, more or less at random, helps demonstrate that the imaginative completion of an incomplete fictional world both generates the referential aspect of character and is part of the everyday semantic process of reading realist texts. We can take Nancy Rawles’s prompting and look at the way Twain introduces Jim in chapter 4 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

Once one understands the importing of knowledge to fill in the gaps in fictional worlds as an obligatory part of the reading process, one sees that the type of mimetic responses readers typically engage in—and that are frequently deemed “naïve” and anathema to the poses of detached scholarly practice—are simply extensions of this process, different in degree but not in kind. Just as readers will typically infer that Jim has the usual number of ears, eyes, and feet, even though these assumptions are not warranted by the text, they may speculate about other information referred to nowhere in the text. When students ask about characters’ motivations or when writers of fan fiction generate prequels or continued adventures for their beloved characters, they are simply taking further steps down the road of reference. ²⁴ Authors of minor-character elaborations may vary or contest the depictions of the characters they appropriate, but they necessarily extend the fictional worlds of their canonical predecessors, building up the previously minor figure. In the “Author’s Note” to Finn, Jon Clinch writes of his fidelity to Twain and his extension of Pap.

To see that limiting fictional worlds to information explicitly mentioned or unambiguously implied by the text is foreign to readers’ usual way of apprehending meaning, we can look again to Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair. When Fforde’s heroine Thursday Next enters Jane Eyre via the Prose Portal, she discovers a world that is radically incomplete, ending at the borders of what is narrated by Jane. When Thursday asks Rochester what he will do when Jane refuses his offer to become his mistress and leaves Thornfield, Rochester replies, “Do? I won’t do anything. Existence pretty much ceases for me about then.” In contrast to “poor” mortals who are born and die, Rochester says he “come[s] into being at the age of thirty-eight and wink[s] out again soon after.”²⁶ Fforde’s otherwise improbable novel adheres to a hyperbolic structural literalism here. (When Thursday’s aunt gets trapped in “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the poem’s entire world is an endless field of daffodils.) Having a character’s existence end when the discourse leaves him runs contrary to the principles of continuity and consistency that we presume in the process of understanding characters’ referential aspects. We don’t think existence stops for characters when the narrative ceases to refer to them, that they freeze in the place where we last left them. Eric Hayot refers to this continuity over time as “persistence” and writes that the “gap between individual works set in the same world… creates a strong sense of the persistence of elements of the diegesis (objects, characters) beyond the immediate attention of the controlling narrative.” We project a “sense of completeness” and take for granted that “undescribed, unnarrated events have occurred” even though the narrative itself is incomplete. ²⁷

When authors of minor-character elaborations seek to produce more complete imaginative worlds by expanding on previously minor figures, they engage in a two-part process. First, these writers become fascinated with a minor character, which may be merely hinted at, scantily represented, or stereotypically drawn in a canonical text. Second, these authors imagine and write into existence a fuller narrative for the minor figure—an endeavor that may involve the kind of unregulated, variable process of readerly supplementation that Barthes describes but that frequently follows fairly predictable lines. Christa Wolf opened the series of lectures at the University of Frankfurt in 1982 that she later published in English in the volume Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays with a description of herself as a reader utterly captivated by a minor character. While waiting to embark on a trip to Greece, Wolf read Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and experienced “a panic of rapture,” which “reached its pinnacle when a voice began to speak.” Cassandra, Wolf explains, “the captive, took me captive; herself made an object by others, she took possession of me.”²⁸ Writers like Wolf frequently describe their fascination with a minor figure in similar terms, as a kind of supernatural possession—a metaphor that captures both the airy, insubstantiality of a minor character’s initial incarnation and that character’s disproportionate ability to command the reader’s attention. Rhys famously wrote of Brontë’s Bertha: “she seemed such a poor ghost, I thought I’d like to write her a life.”²⁹ Atwood claims in the introduction to The Penelopiad that she had “always been haunted by the hanged maids” in The Odyssey (xv), and in her introduction to Wolf’s Medea asserts that “of all the seductive, sinister and transgressive women who have haunted the Western imagination, none has a reputation more lurid than Medea’s.”³⁰ These hauntings are of course metaphorical, and the metaphor inverts the agency by suggesting that minor characters skulk around in the shadows of readers’ imaginations instead of what actually occurs: that readers continue to think about these figures long after their brief appearances in canonical texts.

When these readers become fascinated with and expand on the provocative trace of a minor character, they frequently seek historical accuracy or to produce a more plausible representation of the character. Rawles, for example, sought to offer a historically informed portrait of the everyday lives of slaves—a set of experiences that are all but absent from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She acknowledges her indebtedness to “new scholarship… about the lives of individual American slaves” and writes that she “wanted My Jim to follow history as closely as fictionally possible.”³¹ But there is no true way to represent a fictional character, and as Clinch’s comments above make clear, contemporary authors cannot avoid “filter[ing]” their take on a character “through a different sensibility” that is the product of “passing time and critical sensibilities.”³² The process of expansion by which a contemporary author makes a minor figure into a protagonist—and the everyday behavior of readers who supplement textual material and generate the referential sense of a fictional being—is necessarily presentist, informed by a contemporary sense of what is realistic, plausible, truthful, or authentic. ³³ Such presentism can lead to glaring cases of anachronism, as in Miller’s The Song of Achilles. Miller reimagines Patroclus and Achilles as a peace-loving homosexual couple who are compelled into fighting at Troy against their wills. Her Achilles does not covet Briseis as a war bride but endeavors to shelter her because he and Patroclus “know what will happen to her in Agamemnon’s tent.”³⁴ This case strikes me as a domestication of the Iliad, a failure to imagine a radically different time in which sexuality was not binary and where rape, enslavement, and brutality were commonplace and not incompatible with intimate male companionship. But readers cannot escape their presentist perspective; contemporary concerns, ideologies, and understandings of reality, a host of subjective factors, and the particular agendas of a given writer will always infect the inference making and supplementation that allow readers to elaborate minor characters.

It is thus neither the fact that no individual is “really” coherent nor that the character might have been constructed inconsistently in the “original” text (or that there may be no “original”) that makes Richardson’s approach look overly strict and contrary to our experience of “transtextual characters.” Later incarnations of character that have gained wide cultural currency, such as Virgil’s Aeneas or Césaire’s Caliban, betray a marked inconsistency with their “originals,” but undoubtedly they “add knowledge” to the character and may even come to supplant, as in Virgil’s case, the original. Even if the knowledge is considered spurious or contrary to the original, that knowledge has a real force that informs readers’ conception of that character. The text, and thus the structural aspect, of Brontë’s Bertha persists unchanged, but the referential aspect—which, I have been arguing, abides in the imaginations of readers—appears differently after one has read Wide Sargasso Sea, and this is true even though Rhys yokes her character’s semes to the proper name “Antoinette.” I do not mean that readers will consider Rhys’s novel to provide or fill in the “true” backstory or to offer the “real” Bertha but that elaborations, revisions, and strong critical readings can expand or alter the way readers think of characters. Antoinette and Bertha share some characteristics and diverge in others. Antoinette both is and is not Bertha.

But how far can such expansion and revision go? How much may a character be altered and still be said to be the same character at all? Minor-character elaboration foregrounds this question, which has obvious application for fan fiction as well, much of which produces a frisson from the radical revision or perversion of a familiar character. Zachary Mason’s debut novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2010) is not a minor-character elaboration, but it forces the question of how much a character can be manipulated and still be understood as the same character. And treating it here makes for a vivid illustration of the fact that genres share qualities with other, related genres, contrary to scholars who would understand literary effects and social meaning as immanent to a given form. Mason’s brilliant book performs an irreverent set of riffs on the Homeric epic, riffs that remain faithful to their predecessor in their very infidelity. A prefatory note explains Mason’s central conceit; the text we are about to read was translated from a “pre-Ptolemaic papyrus excavated from the desiccated rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus” (an actual archaeological site in Egypt), and the document was found to contain “forty-four concise variations on Odysseus’s story that omit stock epic formulae in favor of honing a single trope or image down to an extreme of clarity.”³⁷ The short “books” that follow have an unmistakably Borgesian air. The vignettes are filled with doppelgangers and characters that become their own authors. One fragment claims the Trojan War was, prior to the embellishment of poets, a game of chess. In another, a particularly autocratic Agamemnon commands his subjects to excavate a labyrinthine fortress out of the Troad, the “negative image of a palace in the white plain,” and he commissions an encyclopedia that “clearly and explicitly explained everything under the sun… in no more and no less than a thousand pages” (Mason, The Lost Books, 23–24).

At the same time, the form of Mason’s book, a compendium of variations on narratives from the Homeric epics, is suggested within the Odyssey itself by the many plots that shadow the main one: the parallel story of Agamemnon’s disastrous return from Troy and the many backstories and alter egos that Odysseus crafts for himself to hide his true identity—not to mention the fact that we presume a lost reservoir of pre-Homeric narratives that predate the particular form of the epic. Mason, that is, seizes on tensions within the Odyssey: the simultaneous consistency and variability of Odysseus’s character, the latent, unfulfilled narrative possibilities suggested in the poem. Homer’s epic is emphatic about the defining traits of its protagonist; he is a master of strategy, “craft,” or “cunning,” and he is determined in his desire to return home. “Hurry, please,” Odysseus begs the Phaeacian king Alcinous, in Robert Fagles’s translation, “set your unlucky guest on his own home soil… Oh just let me see / my lands, my serving men and the grand high-roofed house— / then I can die in peace.” The longing for a quiet domestic life resounds throughout the epic, and several times Odysseus repeats some version of the following sentiment: “I myself, I know no sweeter sight on earth / than a man’s own native country.”³⁸ But other, equally central aspects of the character strain against this consistency of motive and single-mindedness of purpose.

The poem marks Odysseus first and foremost—from the opening invocation—as polumêtis, the “man of twists and turns” or of “many turnings.” Aptly polyvalent, the Homeric diction suggests both the hero’s torturous course home and the shiftiness of his character. The personae and tales Odysseus warily invents while disguised as a beggar provoke in the wary auditor or reader a healthy dose of skepticism, a suspicion that none of the stories Odysseus tells are truer than others, that the long inset narrative at the Phaeacian court in books 9 through 12 may be embroidered if not entirely fabricated. Following the suggestion of other narratives within the Odyssey, subsequent poets have crafted versions of the hero that strain against Homer’s insistence on the desire for the familiarity, peace, and security of home, even though the epic is unequivocal about its hero’s fate. After a pious but tedious errand to “carry [his] well-planed oar until [he] come[s] / to a race of people who know of nothing of the sea… and sacrifice[s] fine beasts to” Poseidon, at last “death will steal upon” Odysseus, “a gentle, painless death, far from the sea… with all [his] people there in blessed peace around” him (253). Yet Dante imagines his Ulysses as prevailed upon by a “fervor” to travel once again and “gain experience of the world,” and Tennyson famously grasps the thread of Dante’s counternarrative to create a Ulysses who is unable to abide the monotony of a peaceful home life and, determined to “drink / Life to the lees,” departs once again, “to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the Western stars, until [he] die[s].”³⁹ Tennyson is not simply overlaying a romantic attitude on an ancient text but elaborating a narrative possibility suggested within the epic. When concealing his identity from Eumaeus the swineherd, Odysseus poses as a Cretan rover, who after a decade laying siege to Troy returns home but can stay there “no more than a month… taking joy / in [his] children, loyal wife and lovely plunder” before “a spirit” urges him to return to sea (309). One can read Odysseus’s yarn as the prefiguration of an unconscious wish to leave home as soon as he’s returned, even though such an urge runs counter to the motive and motor of the rest of the epic’s plot.

Mason, then, continues a tradition of expanding on such suggestions and also reverts to the multiplicity of stories and the pliable sense of character that predate the epic’s consolidation and institution of textual limits and an authoritative (if internally contradictory) version of the narrative. In Mason’s first fragment, Odysseus returns home to find Penelope has taken another husband and is living a quiet domestic life with him. This opening story embeds a subtle nod to Mason’s own project (Odysseus has “spent the days of his exile imagining different homecoming scenarios,” though he had not anticipated this one), and the fragment ends with another turn of the metafictional screw, as Odysseus “realizes that this is not Penelope” but “a vengeful illusion, the deception of some malevolent god,” and flees knowing the “real Ithaca is elsewhere” (5). In another tale, Penelope has died, and Odysseus meets only her ghost upon his return. In yet another vignette, he marries Nausicaa and grows old with her until Athena belatedly urges him to set sail once again for Ithaca. A brief “about the author” notes that Mason is a “computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence” (n.p.), and one is tempted to say that he has run a series of algorithms on the scenarios put forth in the Homeric poems, the narratives boiled down to a field of possible actions, human character stripped down to an actant or placeholder, reduced to form.

Yet such a description would not be right, or not entirely. Because the identifying, individualizing marks of character persist in Mason’s Lost Books. Even when Mason has varied some aspect of the character, his Odysseus retains defining traits from Homer. In a tale entitled “The Iliad of Odysseus,” the hero is a coward who “did not wish to number [him]self among the sacrifices and therefore became a skilled tactician” (93). While a cowardly Odysseus registers as inconsistent with the epic—and would thus constitute for Richardson an “illusory variant”—this variation is coupled with and made to explain the hero’s principal trait of cunning. In “Killing Scylla,” a blasphemous Odysseus spearheads the butchering of Apollo’s cattle, but even as the “blade slid[es] in” to the “first cow’s throat,” he thinks: “This is not who I am…” (106). The killing of the sun’s cattle contradicts the pious hero of the epic, and Mason’s Odysseus somehow knows the impiety runs contrary to his character even as his action proves otherwise. Similarly, Mason’s Odysseus retains his name, the aegis behind which hides a spurious unity, according to Barthes, and the marker that the hero insists on uttering to the Cyclops to his great suffering, so that his fame be known (perhaps a moment that makes one rethink the widely accepted account of the subject as a modern liberal humanist invention). And Mason retains the distinguishing mark on Odysseus’s body. Many “fragments” refer to Odysseus’s scar, including one in which an uncanny double visits the hero in his tent on the beach at Troy. The doppelganger is a Trojan who looks nothing like Odysseus yet claims to be the real Odysseus and knows secrets only the wily tactician could know. The Trojan Odysseus, tormented at having awoken to be trapped in the city and body of his enemy, takes a dagger to his thigh and carves his own scar there from memory. Even when Odysseus uncannily inhabits a different body, Mason has him retain his memories and insist on reinstating the signal physical marker of his identity.

The consistency that persists among Mason’s versions of Odysseus is perhaps most apparent in “The Book of Winter,” in which the hero suffers from amnesia and lives a hermitlike existence. One day he discovers a book hidden in his cabin that tells “the story of Odysseus, soldier and diplomat, a man of versatile intelligence.” The book ends “with Odysseus allaying Poseidon’s wrath by walking inland with an oar,” which prompts the amnesiac’s “shock of revelation.” “At last, I know myself… having finally solved the riddle” (143). This incarnation of Odysseus discovers that he forgot himself on purpose: “Immortal Poseidon’s wrath was implacable—in order for Odysseus to escape from his vengeance once and for all it was necessary that he cease to be Odysseus. What would the cleverest of Greeks have done in that situation? He would have gone somewhere remote… and, somehow, forgotten everything, and thereby been himself no more” (144). Playing on the famous trick in which Odysseus tells the Cyclops his name is “No Man,” Mason presents us with a hero so clever that he sheds his own identity, a cunning man who ceases to be himself by being his cunning self so completely. But “The Book of Winter” offers a final wrinkle. The amnesiac Odysseus speculates on how he was able to expunge willfully all of his memories: “Perhaps he went through each scene of his life and held it fixed in his mind’s eye until it disappeared…. Then, perhaps, he contaminated and diluted the remaining fragments of memory, rearranging them in every possible permutation…. I who was once Odysseus and now am no one” (144–145). Gesturing again to his method, Mason evacuates character by retaining it, scrambles and dissolves it as confirmation of its consistency. Mason might seem to echo a notion of the self or identity as illusory here, but steeped as he seems to be in postmodern and poststructuralist thought, he has not jettisoned the subject but has rather shuffled its contents and expanded its borders while adhering to central features that constitute the consistency of humanist character.

Both Odysseus and not. Mason’s treatment of character in The Lost Books suggests a way of rethinking Richardson’s account of transtextual characters and our conception of literary character in general. In Mason’s hands, Odysseus can be altered quite drastically, can be a coward, heedless of the gods, can settle down with Nausicaa instead of maintaining his determination to return to Ithaca. But he cannot, it would seem, be altered beyond all recognition. Contrary to Richardson, characters can be altered dramatically and still “add to our knowledge of the original.” Mason’s Odysseus who stays with Nausicaa prompts us to linger over the moment in the Odyssey when the hero tarries with Circe and has to be reminded by his crew of the home that seems to have slipped his mind. Mason’s coward recalls us to the tale of the world’s first draft dodger, of Odysseus’s attempt at feigning madness to avoid going to Troy. Aristotle insists: “Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the unity of the hero. For infinitely various are the incidents in one man’s life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action.”⁴⁰ An inconsistent depiction by a later author only adds to inconsistency already present in the original character. Rather than insist on “originals” at all, pace Richardson, it makes more sense to think of character as a shifting field that can be transformed by later writers (or by artists adapting the character in different media), whose reconstructions of the character gain currency. Such an understanding of character acknowledges the historicity of thinking of character as constituted and delimited by “the text itself” as a relatively brief moment, instituted by a modern notion of authorship, intellectual property, and the book as a medium—its covers as a way of enclosing and demarcating limits. To adopt a more pliable sense of character is to return to a moment before the reduction of character to an authoritative incarnation, to understand that many incompatible stories about a given character might circulate without the burden of reconciliation or the injunction to authorize some versions and not others.

But Mason’s book also suggests that a character’s field cannot be shifted to an unlimited degree. In fan fiction, a character like Captain Kirk might have a different sexual orientation or might be the manager of a Starbucks instead of a starship, but he would not resemble the Kirk we know at all if he were an uninsured part-time barista at that same Starbucks and talked like Spock. The need to retain some recognizable features suggests that the poststructuralist emphasis on the subject’s continual shifting and difference neglects the persistence of a measure of stability within that flux. In a recent essay, Julian Murphet makes a characteristic poststructuralist claim: “Character is not an enduring individual substance, it is an ever-changing set of intersubjective relations.”⁴¹ Murphet’s initial example is Stephen Dedalus’s musings about his internal multiplicity and flux in Ulysses. Murphet cites Stephen’s attempt to rationalize his failure to pay a debt as an illustration of the way the proper name serves to impose a false unity on the multiplicity of character, in “an alchemical transubstantiation of compositeness into unity” (Murphet, “The Mole and the Multiple,” 256): “You owe it. Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other now. Other I got pound. Buzz. Buzz. But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms.” Murphet reads this passage as performing the magical reconciliation of a “disjunctive unity” out of “a perfect multiple” and a “perfect singular.” But in construing Stephen’s reflections as referring to “the ‘buzz buzz’ of a teeming submicroscopic mutability” (257), Murphet misses the allusion to Hamlet’s bored dismissal of the tedious Polonius and thus fails to see how Joyce has Stephen undermine his own argument for no longer being responsible for his debt as so much pseudoscientific prattle. Stephen’s memory persists amid the flux, and no amount of insistence that he is an ever-changing multiplicity will erase the sense that it was “I” who borrowed the money. Joyce does not alchemically resolve a “perfect multiple” and a “perfect singular” into a spurious unity but rather shows how a singular can be composed of ceaselessly changing multitudes and still remain a singular. Joyce points to the combination of stability and inconsistency that constitutes character and the subject. ⁴² Minor-character elaborations, fan fictions, and other instances of transtextual character appropriation demonstrate this doubleness, the constant play of variability and consistency that constitutes character.

It is another intertextual genre, transposition—which overlays a familiar or archetypal storyline and cast of characters onto a new setting—that perhaps best illustrates the degree to which a character can be transformed and still be said to be, at some level, the same character. In almost all his particular characteristics, Leopold Bloom is not Ulysses. Yet in his basic structural situation, as wanderer and exile, Bloom is a Ulysses—if an ironic one. In character transpositions, then, we encounter the intersection of two functions of character typically understood to be at odds: character as the embodiment of a type and character as the representation of a distinct, particularized individual—the sense we recognize as realist character. ⁴³ To transpose the plot of King Lear onto an Iowa cornfield, as Jane Smiley does in A Thousand Acres, is to retain the character types of imperious father and loyal and hostile daughters while transforming the characters (Lear, Cordelia, etc.) and limning new individuals in all their particulars. While transpositions retain typology and alter particularity, minor-character elaborations work to expand type into full personhood. Minor characters frequently strike readers as flat, not fully fleshed out, unsatisfying, or ideological—stereotyped—insofar as they are typological. (Recall Rhys’s musings on Brontë’s “lay figure.”) And minor-character elaborations respond to such typological characters by appropriating them and adding flesh, particular characteristics absent in a precursor, and constructing a fully realized—that is, fully realistic, because individualized—character. Minor-character elaboration can be seen, then, as a genre that not only demonstrates the way reference emerges through the supplementation of structure but also as one that epitomizes and enacts the realist injunction that all characters should be round, that the best representations are full ones. ⁴⁴ Taking the basic structure that is a typological minor character and expanding upon that structure, elaborating it to produce the referential sense of a full, imaginary person, minor-character elaborations perform in fiction the mental work that generates realist characters.