One of the virtues, indeed the pleasures, of genre study is the fact that it allows for telescoping between levels of analysis. Genre study endeavors like much historicist and sociological literary scholarship to tease out the relations between literary forms and broader social and cultural phenomena. This book has argued for a triple-stranded approach to studying genre, as it sits at the intersection of form, history, and the workings of social institutions. Analyzing the variations on the formula or recipe that constitute a genre aims to elucidate the transformations and adaptability of a literary form. The conventions that appear across a cross-section of a genre communicate a common set of assumptions, a shared social logic that helps explain why a succession of writers gravitate to a generic technique at a particular historical moment. And genres serve institutional and marketplace functions, helping producers target audiences and gain strategic advantages in the market, and providing satisfactions for readers. But because any text that utilizes a genre shares features with a wider corpus of texts while departing from them in other ways, genre study allows scholars to strive for claims about a genre’s greater social significance while remaining sensitive to the innovative or idiosyncratic features of individual texts. Genre, that is, appeals to the scholar who wants to reach for the breadth of social significance without abandoning the nuance of close reading. One can zoom in on a novel such as Coetzee’s
Foe, which departs from the bulk of minor-character elaborations by maintaining Friday’s silence and opacity, insisting that a contemporary author cannot in any straightforward way allow a previously minor character to speak for himself, that histories of violence and oppression are irrevocable. Or one can attend to the particularities of a book such as Naslund’s
Ahab’s Wife, which holds in common with so many texts using the genre a commitment to rendering the unique interiority and rich subjectivity of a central protagonist but is unique in the degree to which it traces the development of that subjectivity to the protagonist’s immersion in the great books of the Western literary tradition. At the same time, because genres overlap with and share characteristics with kindred genres, analysis of one genre opens up insights into a host of related phenomena, vistas onto a wider landscape of genres.
Zoom out from minor-character elaboration and one discovers that the genre takes part in several larger trends—suggesting that analysis of this particular genre helps illuminate facets of contemporary literary production more broadly. If, as I have been arguing, minor-character elaborations epitomize a pervasive politics of literary form that understands the creation of fully fleshed-out, individuated characters as an enactment of democratic principles, it should be no surprise that that one discovers expressions of this political aesthetic elsewhere in the contemporary literary landscape. While minor-character elaborations seek to remedy imaginatively the injustice (purportedly) done to flat, typological, or stereotyped minor characters in canonical texts by remaking them as round protagonists, an array of contemporary fictions performs a similar operation on their own imaginary worlds. A genre one might dub “multiprotagonist fictions” has also flourished over the last several decades. Novels such as David Mitchell’s
Ghostwritten (1999) and
Cloud Atlas (2004), Colum McCann’s National Book Award–winning
Let the Great World Spin (2009), Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize–winning
A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), and Jonathan Franzen’s
Freedom (2010) consist of numerous interlocking stories told from diverse perspectives. None of these works centers on a single protagonist. Each book is divided into many parts or chapters, each adopting the point of view of a different character; a minor figure in one section frequently becomes the focal point of a later one. George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire (1996–2011) series works by a similar method, with each chapter focalized through one of the extensive panoply of characters in his Westeros. These multiprotagonist fictions are committed to the same political aesthetic as minor-character elaborations. “Let there be no minor characters!” they seem to proclaim. Dedicated to multiplying points of view and the futile endeavor of eliminating minorness, these novels affirm that any figure that enters their fictional worlds, no matter how fleetingly, has a rich interiority and a radical particularity that could serve as a novelistic center of consciousness. Like minor-character elaborations, multiprotagonist fictions embrace the traditional liberal aesthetic of the novel, extending the franchise of the sympathetic imagination and affirming the unique subjectivity of each individual.
1 Though literary scholars frequently emphasize postmodernist, posthumanist, and all manner of other “posts,” these genres suggest that we are still very much in a moment of literary history dedicated to the psychological project of the realist novel and its liberal, humanizing claims.
While minor-character elaborations expand on figures from canonical texts and multiprotagonist fictions flesh out minor figures that appear elsewhere in the same work, a torrent of recent novels undertake a parallel project of making protagonists out of subjects on the periphery of major historical events and personages—including many famous authors.
2 Many of these works center on the wives or lovers of eminent men and so share an obvious affinity with novels like Atwood’s
Penelopiad, Le Guin’s
Lavinia, or Naslund’s
Ahab’s Wife. Nancy Horan’s
Loving Frank (2007) adopts the perspective of Mamah Cheney, the ill-fated mistress of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose lovers are also the subject of T. C. Boyle’s
The Women (2009); Melanie Benjamin’s
The Aviator’s Wife (2012) makes a protagonist of Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Paula McLain’s
The Paris Wife (2011) and Erika Robuck’s
Hemingway’s Girl (2012) revolve around the tortured love life of Papa, and Robuck followed the latter with
Call Me Zelda in 2013, appearing the same year as Therese Anne Fowler’s
Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald and R. Clifton Spargo’s
Beautiful Fools: The Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. To these fictional depictions of tragic literary liaisons one could add Lynn Cullen’s
Mrs. Poe (2014), which imagines the affair of Edgar Allan with the previously obscure poet Frances Sargent Osgood. Cullen has published earlier works like
I Am Rembrandt’s Daughter (2008) and
Moi and Marie Antoinette (2006), a children’s book narrated by the queen’s dog Sebastian.
3 One could go on and on citing novels that have focused on minor historical figures, from Philippa Gregory’s enormously popular
The Other Boylen Girl (2001) and its successors, to Goce Smilevski’s
Freud’s Sister (2012), Karen Mack’s
Freud’s Mistress (2013), and Jennifer Chiaverini’s
Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker (2013). These works are often billed as behind-the-scenes looks at what goes on in the “shadows” behind major events or personages.
4 Like minor-character elaborations, such books testify to a shift of attention to the periphery, to narratives of women, socially marginal figures, or other unheralded individuals. Many such texts, like Benjamin’s
The Aviator’s Wife, focus on the talents and accomplishments of women who were overshadowed by their famous husbands. These historical fictions parallel, in turn, the emergence of many nonfiction works that retell history from the margins or from “below.” Landmarks such as Howard Zinn’s
A People’s History of the United States (1980) and Joyce Johnson’s
Minor Characters (1983) were published around the same time minor-character elaborations began to appear with frequency. The dramatic recent proliferation of fictions about minor historical figures suggests, however, how mainstream the once-revisionary intervention of alternative histories has become—that, predictably, the margin has become the center. Again, my analysis of minor-character elaboration intimates some reasons why this has occurred. Historical fictions about the wives of Lincoln or Lindbergh or Hemingway combine the recognizable symbolic signifier of the famous figure with an alternative take or perspective, familiarity and prestige with novelty, and the trappings of an inclusive, progressive politics.
Another kindred genre, the contemporary mania for novels about famous novelists, demonstrates the way canonical authors and their celebrated works endure as highly marketable signifiers, brand names laden with symbolic capital in the market for cultural goods. Novels like Coetzee’s
Master of Petersburg (1994), Cunningham’s
The Hours (1998), Colm Tóibín’s
The Master, and David Lodge’s
Author, Author—the latter two of which appeared in 2004, the year of Henry James—turn famous writers into the protagonists of new fictions. Julian Barnes’s
Arthur and George (2006) fuses “author as protagonist” with “historical minor figure,” taking as its dual heroes Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji, as does Susan Scarf Merrell’s
Shirley (2014), which is narrated by a graduate student who lives for a year with Shirley Jackson and her now overshadowed husband Stanley Hyman. These books testify to the efforts of contemporary producers of “literary” fiction to engage with and place themselves on the same footing as their predecessors and a desire to penetrate the mystique, and often the tragic circumstances, surrounding writers of genius, suggesting that if the author as privileged origin and arbiter of a text’s meaning is dead, her name as sign of prestige, cultural authority, and heroic but mysterious creative force is alive and well.
These networks of generic kinship can threaten to extend indefinitely. Novels that make protagonists of literary celebrities share concerns and features with biographies and single-author critical studies, in the nonfiction direction, and works such as P. D. James’s
Death Comes to Pemberley (2011) and Matthew Pearl’s literary thrillers
The Dante Club (2004),
The Poe Shadow (2006), and
The Last Dickens (2009), in the fictional. Novels and memoirs about novel readers and devoted fans such as Karen Joy Fowler’s
The Jane Austen Book Club (2004) and Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’s
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society (2008) dramatize the pleasures of literary fandom and active readership—as of course do the vast volumes of fan fiction being published online.
5 Fowler’s and P. D. James’s books in turn exemplify the continued proliferation of Austen sequels, spinoffs, and adaptations.
6 These flourishing genres point, on the one hand, to the vibrant activity of literary and fan communities—to the turn toward readerly activism and appropriation that I trace in
chapter 1—that disseminate their writings for free and appear to function outside of the market, and, on the other, to the eagerness of the consolidated publishing industry to capitalize on devoted readers’ willingness to buy fresh takes on their old favorites—to the ways the culture industry interpellates consumers, generating subcultures and communities defined by their dedication to a particular mass-cultural franchise. HarperCollins’s house-generated “Austen Project,” which has slated popular writers of “literary” fiction like Alexander McCall Smith, Joanna Trollope, Val McDermid, and Curtis Sittenfeld to rewrite Austen’s works for contemporary readers, epitomizes this recent publishing trend. In the abundance of these intertextual and author-centered genres, one discovers how today’s large-scale publishers have embraced bibliophilic works as a strategy for targeting established reading publics and those publishers’ perennial reinvestment in the recognizable symbolic signifiers that are canonical authors and texts. These authors serve as stalwart literary idols, bookish brand names, and known quantities that offer reliable sales, as opposed to the unique demands of a work that has no connection with established literary or historical figures. Hollywood’s remake impulse is an obvious parallel in film. Just as the contemporary boom in all forms of genre fiction is the result of the publishing industry’s strategy for identifying audiences and minimizing risk, so is that industry’s reliance on the prestige and familiarity of the traditional literary canon and its celebrated author figures.
But one can perhaps zoom too far out. In observing a constellation of genres, patterns emerge but nonetheless demand closer inspection; each of the genres I’ve briefly traversed here offers an opportunity for more detailed scholarly investigation. This inquiry into minor-character elaboration demonstrates, I hope, how genres function at the intersection of formal iteration, the politics of cultural forms, and the institutions and material channels of cultural production—as well as the utility and rewards of genre study.