The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel

THE ONE VS. THE MANY

THE ONE VS. THE MANY

MINOR CHARACTERS AND THE SPACE OF THE PROTAGONIST IN THE NOVEL

Alex Woloch

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2003 by Princeton University Press

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Excerpt from The Last Romantic from Wakefulness by John Ashbery.

Copyright © 1998 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Farrar,

Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Woloch, Alex, 1970–

The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist

in the novel / Alex Woloch.

p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN: 978-1-40082-575-2

1. Characters and characteristics in literature.

2. European fiction—

19th century—History and criticism. 3. Realism in literature.

I. Title: One versus the many. I. Title.

PN3411.W64 2004

809.3´927—dc21 2003043333

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I have met so many men, he pursued, with momentary sadness—met them too with a certain—certain—impact, let us say . . .

—Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Contents

PROLOGUE The Iliad’s Two Wars

The Proem

When Achilles Disappears: A Reading of Book 2

The Death of Lykaon

INTRODUCTION Characterization and Distribution

Character-Space: Between Person and Form

Characterization and the Antinomies of Theory

They Too Should Have a Case

Two Kinds of Minorness

Function and Alienation: The Labor Theory of Character

Realism, Democracy, and Inequality

Austen, Dickens, Balzac: Character-Space in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

The Minor Character: Between Story and Discourse

CHAPTER ONE Narrative Asymmetry in Pride and Prejudice

Minor Characters in a Narrative Structure

The Double Meaning of Character

The One vs. the Many

Asymmetry: From Discourse to Story

Characterizing Minorness 1: Compression

The Space of the Protagonist 1: Elizabeth’s Consciousness

Characterizing Minorness 2: Externality

Helpers: Charlotte Lucas and the Actantial Theory

The Space of the Protagonist 2: Elizabeth’s Self-Consciousness

Wickham: How He Lived I Know Not

Minor Minor Characters: Representing Multiplicity

CHAPTER TWO Making More of Minor Characters

Distorted Characters and the Weak Protagonist

Between Jingle and Joe: Asymmetry and Misalignment in The Pickwick Papers

Seeing into Sight: Mr. Elton and Uriah Heep

Partial Visibility and Incomplete Vision: The Appearance of Minor Characters

Repetition and Eccentricity: Minor Characters and the Division of Labor

Monotonous Emphasis: Minorness and Three Kinds of Repetition

CHAPTER THREE Partings Welded Together: The Character-System in Great Expectations

Between Two Roaring Worlds: Exteriority and Characterization

The Structure of Childhood Experience

Interpreting the Character-System: Signification, Position, Structure

Metaphor, Metonymy, and Characterization

Getting to London

Three Narrative Workers and the Dispersion of Labor in Great Expectations

Wemmick as Helper (the Functional Minor Character)

Magwitch’s Return (the Marginal Minor Character)

Orlick and Social Multiplicity (the Fragmented Minor Character)

The Double: A Narrative Condition?

CHAPTER FOUR A qui la place?: Characterization and Competitionin Le Père Goriot and La Comédie humaine

Typification and Multiplicity

The Problem: Who Is the Hero?

Character, Type, Crowd

Balzac’s Double Vision

The Character-System in Le Père Goriot

La belle loi de soi pour soi

Goriot: The Interior as Exterior

Rastignac: The Exterior as Interior

Between the Exterior and the Interior

Interiority and Centrality in Le Père Goriot and King Lear

The Shrapnel of Le Père Goriot

Recurring Characters, Le Père Goriot, and the Origins of La Comédie humaine

The Social Representation of Death: Le Père Goriot and Le Cousin Pons

Cogs in the Machine: Les Poiret between Le Père Goriot and Les Employés

Competition and Character in Les Employés

AFTERWORD Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and the Prehistoryof the Protagonist

Notes

Works Cited

Acknowledgments

THE ONE VS. THE MANY

Prologue

The Iliad’s Two Wars

The Proem

The beginning of almost any literary work is loaded with disproportionate significance, but Greek epic consolidates these pressures into a realized device. The Iliad starts with seven lines, called a proem, that are designed to encapsulate in miniature the entire poem which will follow:

Wrath, goddess, sing, the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles and its devastation, which put a vast quantity of pain upon the Achaians, hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting of dogs, of all the birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished since that time when first there stood in division of conflict Atreus’ son, the lord of men, and brilliant Achilles.¹

The proem stands as a kind of gateway into the massive and intricate narrative, suggesting that the Iliad, despite its range and complexity, will be a unified, coherent whole.² Such unity is at the crux of Aristotle’s famous discussion of the Iliad in the Poetics, which aims to distinguish literary narrative from history:

), little connected as the events may be. (89)

Aristotle frames a formal question here that has been central to aesthetic theory ever since: how can a single composition have many parts? But lurking beneath Aristotle’s theory of compositional unity we find a second crucial question: How can many people be contained within a single narrative? This other question—which shadows Aristotle’s theory of the unified form—concerns not only the textual arrangement of multiple elements but also the social balancing and comprehension of multiple characters or persons.

Compositional unity can be threatened by our arrangement of the fictional characters within the narrative world. Just as a single unified form comes to resemble, according to Aristotle, an independent living organism, so narrative often revolves merely around one life story, one living person whose distinct personality is externalized through the literary work as a whole. But the Iliad is starkly divided between focusing its attention on a singular and central character and refracting the experience of war through multiple and intentionally varied individuals. Is Achilles the controlling figure or only the most important of many vital characters who are all essential to the Iliad? Does centrality within the thematic and narrative structure of the Iliad distinguish Achilles qualitatively, or only by degree, from such memorable characters as Hector, Diomedes, Sarpedon, or Patroklos? More exactly: are these other characters integrated into the poem merely in symbolic relationship to Achilles or as they compel attention in-and-of-themselves?³

A quick answer is: both at once; the Iliad is about one life and many. But this reply prevents us from seeing how the question itself is so important to the epic’s formal construction. Narrative meaning takes shape in the dynamic flux of attention and neglect toward the various characters who are locked within the same story but have radically different positions within the narrative. In the Iliad, as with so many narratives, this arrangement of characters is structured around the relationship between one central individual who dominates the story and a host of subordinate figures who jostle for, and within, the limited space that remains. These secondary characters frequently make claims on the narrative only to be overwhelmed by the narrative presence of Achilles, the central consciousness who conspicuously—but always incompletely—organizes the contours of the fictional structure as a whole.

We can see this relationship between the space of the protagonist and minor characters in the very syntactic shaping—or misshaping—of the Iliaddescribes the most salient characteristic of Achilles. This opening stroke suggests a credible location for the entire poem: as chiefly, or essentially, the story of Achilles, of his individual experience and singular development. In this framework, the Iliad’s artistic coherence revolves around its depiction of Achilles. The poem itself, like its opening noun, stands in a genitive relationship to the protagonist: the wrath of Achilles, the story of Achilles.

Pursuing the nature of Achilles’ anger, however, the proem turns quickly from his subjective experience of wrath to its external consequence, its devastation. Initially, this devastation is presented in subordinate relation to Achilles’ manifestation of anger. Devastation merely elaborates the wrath that causes it, emanating out of and reflecting back on Achilles. However, in attempting to comprehend this destruction, the poet almost immediately becomes absorbed in its particularity. The characters who experience devastation begin to interest him not merely in symbolic relation to Achilles—as the residual consequences of another’s wrath—but as real, suffering individuals. This pressure leads to a syntactic dilation. The explicitly relative clause—its devastation, which put a vast quantity of pain—dramatically strains against its subordinate position, shattering the frame of the sentence through an almost ungrammatical bulge:but [the dying soldiers] gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting of dogs, of all the birds. Finally, in an effort to rein in the uncontrollable drift of this image, the sentence invokes a teleotic order—the will of Zeus was accomplished—that motivates its own formal closure. Like the gods who famously step in to solve the plot complications in some Greek tragedies, Zeus seems to arrive here to set the syntactic problems of this sentence to rest. Resisting that drift from the multitudes of men to all of nature, the proem returns to Achilles.But the very repetition of Achilles within one sentence indicates that we have somehow left him. Now Achilles is depicted from the outside, delimited by a social relationship, in division of conflict [with] Atreus’ son, the lord of men.

This syntactic imbalance might be the key to the proem: the strange formulation of the sentence, torn between dominant and subordinate clause, dramatizes an essential aspect of the Iliad itself. The epic as a narrative whole, as much as its opening sentence, is divided between representing Achilles’ singular experience and representing many other characters who—if only by the fact of this multiplicity—are configured as exterior, social, and delimited agents.Robert J. Rabel terms the Iliad a double plotted work, with the wrath of Achilles furnishing the major plot, and with the Trojan War unfolding in tandem within a subplot (26). Thus Zeus promises Thetis "to do honor to Achilles and to destroy many beside the ships of the Achaians" (1.558–59, emphasis added). Achilles’ honor is produced through this destruction of the many, but such destruction can always potentially wrest attention away from the protagonist. The poet’s point of view, although omniscient, is never secure. It wavers between representing individuals in terms of their own particularity and integrating them into a larger aesthetic structure that, finally, revolves around a singular personality. This play between the absorption of secondary characters into Achilles’ central situation and the framing of Achilles himself within a much larger narrative field is an animating tension of the entire epic.We might say that there are two wars in the Iliad. Embedded within the Trojan conflict recounted in the tale we can find a battle on the discursive plane, not between the characters as individual soldiers on the field but between the characters as more or less important figures within the narrative structure. The formal clash between protagonist and minor characters redounds back on, and is motivated by, the clashing world of the story itself.

When Achilles Disappears: A Reading of Book 2

The Iliad only includes so many secondary characters because Achilles himself withdraws from the battle in Book 1. If Achilles’ refusal to fight causes grave military and political problems for the Greek army, his retreat as a central protagonist also raises a series of narrative problems.Without a central protagonist to justify a limited focus, how can the epic begin to coherently represent the mass of humanity involved in a war? Book 2 introduces the range of these secondary characters and dramatizes the narrative crisis caused by Achilles’ absence. This crisis is depicted in two essential and dialectically linked extremes in two famous set pieces of Book 2: the provocation by Thersites and the Catalogue of Ships. These scenes—which focus, respectively, on the singular individual and the innumerable crowd—are each significant in their own right but have never been read in terms of their close juxtaposition.

First there is Thersites, who disrupts the Greek social order through his egalitarian demands and embodies a vertiginous hyperindividualism:

Now the rest had sat down, and were orderly in their places, but all alone Thersites, of the endless speech, still scolded, who knew within his head many words, but disorderly; vain, and without dignity, quarreling with kings with any word he thought might be amusing to the Argives.

(2.211–15)

Thersites is perhaps the first truly minor character in Western literature. It is not simply that he has a subordinate narrative role, but that his striking fictional identity emerges through, and revolves around, this subordinated position. The collapse of authority signaled by Achilles’ withdrawal seems to produce this narrative intrusion, this disruptive character. Thersites is so despicable because he refuses a delimited position; while others are orderly in their place, even in the absence of Achilles, Thersites threatens to speak endlessly to drag the assembly (and the epic itself) in toward his own endless self. And, as with a minor character in Dickens, who will be one of the principal figures in this study, Thersites’ disruptive position generates a sequence of heightened descriptive language. While the text is utterly dismissive of Thersites, it lavishes physical attention on him. The portrait of Thersites is actually more detailed than any physiognomy to this point in the poem, more precise than any description of Achilles or Agamemnon in Book 1.

This was the ugliest man who came beneath Ilion. He was bandy-legged and went lame of one foot, with shoulders stooped and drawn together over his chest, and above this his skull went up to a point with the wool grown sparsely upon it.

(2.216–19)

This detailed picture of Thersites is strangely linked to the thematic subordination of his disruptive political viewpoint. The text seems ironically able to dismiss him only by emphasizing him: pointing out his flaws also singles him out; he is not simply shameful and ugly but the most ⁴

Soon after, in the last third of Book 2, the Catalogue of Ships unfolds, tellingly chosen as the episode par excellence in Aristotle’s discussion of epic unity.⁵ The Catalogue of Ships—clearly the widest representation of who is involved in the war—exemplifies for Aristotle that element of the epic which, because it lies beyond Achilles, diversifies the poem. It also lies beyond the vision of the narrator himself, who breaks down in the face of such human multiplicity:

I could not tell over the multitude of them nor name them, not if I had ten tongues and ten mouths, not if I had a voice never to be broken and a heart of bronze within me, not unless the Muses of Olympia, daughters of Zeus of the aegis, remembered all those who came beneath Ilion.

I will tell the lords of the ships, and the ships’ numbers.

(2.488–93)

There is a crucial relationship between the way Thersites exceeds, and threatens, the hierarchical framework of the Greek army camp and the way the soldiers, en masse, exceed the empirical gaze of the poet. The two episodes, together, precisely render the dialectical relationship between crowd and individual: the mass of soldiers is unspeakable only as it is an aggregation of distinct individuals, while Thersites is threatening, not merely as an individual, but insofar as his hostility might express (or become) the sentiment of a crowd.⁶ Thus the poet’s inability to adequately represent the soldiers who have come to Troy hinges on the distinction between seeing the number of soldiers and being able to name them. As G. S. Kirk writes, He is not able to tell who were the troops, as he had with the leaders, . . . but rather how many they were (167). The distinction between counting and naming occurs precisely at the fault line where an individual ceases to command attention as a qualitatively distinct being and begins to be viewed as a quantitative unit, absorbed into a larger number even as the ordinary soldiers are encompassed by the lords of the ships who represent them and do get named.

Both the obstreperous minor character and the nameless multitudes of soldiers enter the narrative in explicit relation to Achilles’ absence, emphasizing how the narrative threats of both the endless individual and the measureless crowd (which are really interdependent) emerge out of the temporary lack of a central, orienting narrative figure. Thersites thus motivates his speech—which radically challenges Agamemnon’s authority—with a reference to Achilles’ altercation with the king: And now he has dishonored Achilles, a man much better / than he is. He has taken his prize by force and keeps her (2.239–40). Similarly, the Catalogue of Ships ends by contrasting all the other troops marshaled for battle with Achilles’ idle camp, in a way which suggests that but for Achilles’ retreat there would be no need to list the mass of soldiers.The shift to Achilles is folded within a complicated double comparison:

Tell me then, Muse, who of them all was the best and bravest, of the men, and the men’s horses, who went with the sons of Atreus.

Best by far among the horses were the mares of Eumelos Pheres’ son, that he drove, swift-moving like birds, alike in texture of coat, in age, both backs drawn level like a plumb-line . . .

Among the men far the best was Telamonian Aias while Achilles stayed angry, since he was far best of all of them, and the horses also, who carried the blameless son of Peleus.

But Achilles lay apart among his curved sea-wandering vessels, raging at Agamemnon. . . .

(2.761–772, emphasis added)

The belated inclusion of Achilles, which nullifies Ajax’s superiority, oddly circles back to undermine the previous claim about the superiority of Eumelos’s mares. The very mechanism of comparison, which underlies the Catalogue, is ushered in only through Achilles’ absence, since his exalted status and distinctive superiority renders comparative judgments (and thus comprehensive catalogs) obsolete. As Seth Benardete notes, As long as Achilles was in the field, the Trojans never ventured into the plain, and as long as Achilles fought no Achaean could hope to do anything of consequence (Aristeia of Diomedes, 26). Neither Thersites’ propulsion into the narrative nor the indescribable Catalogue of Ships would occur, or be motivated, without the retreat and absence of the central protagonist.

The disappearance of Achilles also prompts the emergence of a third kind of character in Book 2, or, more precisely, a group of characters, who spring up right in between these two episodes and occupy a place in between the threatening singularity of Thersites and the dispersed multiplicity of the Catalogue. As though in response to this dual threat of overdefined individual and anonymous crowd, the circle of great Greek warriors first enters the narrative, hastily assembled by a worried Agamemnon:

[The king] . . . summoned the nobles and the best men of all the Achaians, Nestor before all others, and next the lord Idomeneus, next the two Aiantes and Tydeus’ son Diomedes, and sixth Odysseus, a man like Zeus himself for counsel.

Of his own accord came Menelaos of the great war cry who knew well in his own mind the cares of his brother.

They stood in a circle about the ox and took up the scattering barley. . . . (2.404–11)

Leadership—both social and narrative—devolves to this group of human beings, and it is precisely in their status as a group that they can anchor and sustain a distributed field of characterization that neither collapses into the one nor explodes out toward many. These characters—so memorable within the consciousness of European literature—exemplify the Iliad’s ability to present a variety of individual characters as fully realized and specific human personalities. The foremost fighters (promachoi) among the Greeks, this group forms a precarious and embattled middle space between the two extreme modes of characterization that this book will explore: the protagonist, whose identity rests on a narrative centrality that always threatens to take the form of wrath (erasing or absorbing all the other persons who surround him), and the minor characters who, simply through their subordinated multiplicity, hover vulnerably on the borderline between name and number. On the one hand, the qualities of each of these promachoi emerge only within a larger social, and narrative, structure. They are not only subject to but constituted through delimitation and juxtaposition. None of these characters can control or hope to anchor the entire formal or thematic architecture of the Iliad: we would never consider the epic as essentially about Diomedes or Odysseus. On the other hand, this delimitation does not corrode their distinctive independence. Each of the characters has enough narrative space to emerge as a unique and coherent individual.Such circumscribed uniqueness is most significantly expressed through the series of aristeiai that help organize the narrative structure of the Iliad and memorably define the various warriors.⁷ (With Diomedes, ironically, it is his very frustration at not being able to command a certain kind of centrality that gives him a coherent and unique identity.)

In one of the most important twentieth-century theories of characterization (before the question of character, as I will discuss in the introduction, drops out of literary theory), Erich Auerbach argues that Dante transformed the nature of the literary character by making his fictional figures into the fusion of the particular and the essential, the transient and the permanent. The rich particularity of Dante’s characters somehow erupts out of their atemporal destinies:the figures in the Inferno (the main locus for his theory) exist in a static world where time has essentially stopped, but are still paradoxically recognizable as their own secular, contingent selves.⁸ Auerbach further suggests that Homeric characterization—which seizes on the essential characteristics of specific and varied individuals—anticipates the way that Dante will construct persons as both delimited and unique or complete.⁹ But this dialectical configuration of character is most fully realized with the group of leading soldiers, each of whom is configured as a distinct, compelling personality even as he is embedded within a larger social, and narrative, context. The coherence of these characters relies on, and is indissociable from, their status as a finite, delimited group.¹⁰ Coming together in a circle, this assembly of individuals saves the epic narrative from the destabilizing possibilities that emerge out of Achilles’ absence. The demiheroes, who will absorb most of the narrative’s interest and attention until Achilles’ return, work between the uncontrollable, endless Thersites and the indescribable masses. It is an astonishing narrative instantiation of aristocratic politics.¹¹

The Death of Lykaon

Book 21 of the Iliad revolves around an unfair fight. Achilles, beginning his violent avenging of Patroklos’s death, comes across a young nobleman named Lykaon fighting for Troy. Lykaon’s poignant and unique fate is encapsulated in 125 lines near the beginning of the book. The compact space devoted to his fate is essential to our understanding of it, as the way Lykaon’s tragic death gets squeezed into the episode forms an inherent aspect of the tragedy. And just as each line in the compressed scene develops Lykaon’s encounter, as a fictional person, with Achilles, so each line modulates his configuration within the narrative—using various perspectives and shifting voices to intensify or diminish his narrative presence. If Book 2 illustrates the essential structure of the relationship between the one and the many, or the protagonist and the multitude of participants in the war, the Lykaon episode in Book 21 exemplifies how a particular encounter between one minor character and the protagonist is configured within this structure.

In the Lykaon episode, Homer threads a remarkable story into the epic: a fantastic instance of terrible luck that, in its very rarity, speaks powerfully to the essential nature of warfare. We quickly learn that Lykaon had been captured by Achilles only twelve days earlier and, in a rapid series of events, has been shipped from captor to captor until he is ransomed back by his wealthy Trojan family to enjoy a brief week and a half of freedom before reencountering his nemesis on the battlefield:

For eleven days he pleasured his heart with friends and family after he got back from Lemnos, but on the twelfth day once again the god cast him into the hands of Achilles, who this time was to send him down unwilling on his way to the death god.

(21.45–48)

Confronting this extraordinary destiny of Lykaon—which bursts into the poem from out of nowhere—the narrative is pulled in two inverse directions: toward the overwhelming pathos of Lykaon’s subjective experience, as a discrete individual, and toward the function of Lykaon’s strange doom within the development of Achilles’ own story. The scene wavers between absorbing Lykaon’s character into the narrative as a whole (centering on the foe who kills him) and rendering the particularity of this character’s own life.

Real life is full of uneven matches, but fictional representation can uniquely amplify such disparities within the narrative form itself. While the representation of Achilles’ personhood unfolds gradually, over the course of the narrative, Lykaon’s whole being is squeezed into this one brief episode—he gets both ushered into and pushed out of the Iliad in this scene. Lykaon’s character-space does not have nearly enough time to unfold, just as his character does not enjoy nearly enough freedom after captivity before he is pushed toward his strange death. There is a profound relationship between the story’s events and the way these events get narratively structured—between the fate of Lykaon on the battlefield, as a weak individual overwhelmed by a strong soldier, and the fate of Lykaon as a subordinate character, within the tale, who gets absorbed into the plot of a strong protagonist.

Achilles’ aristeia works like the wrath of the opening lines: it actualizes itself through the subsumption of other individuals. Just ten lines prior to his encounter with Lykaon, the poem offers a graphic image of this asymmetry: [Achilles], when his hands grew weary with killing, / chose out and took twelve young men alive from the river / to be vengeance for the death of Patroklos, the son of Menoitis (21.26–28). These twelve unnamed individuals gain no inflection into the narrative—and the compression of so many figures into one line is crucial to our sense of the violence that Achilles is here enacting.¹² Similarly, Achilles’ response to Lykaon’s plea absorbs Lykaon’s discrete perspective into the larger, central perspective of the epic as a whole:

So the glorious son of Priam addressed him, speaking in supplication, but heard in turn the voice without pity:

"Poor fool, no longer speak to me of ransom, nor argue it. . .

So friend, you die also. Why all this clamor about it?

Patroklos also is dead, who was better by far than you are.

Do you not see what a man I am, how huge, how splendid and born of a great father, and the mother who bore me immortal?

Yet even I have also my death and my strong destiny, and there shall be a dawn or an afternoon or a noontime when some man in the fighting will take the life from me also either with a spearcast or an arrow flown from the bowstring."

(21.97–113)

The paragraph abstractly generalizes Lykaon’s death and then relates it back to the more significant destiny of the epic’s protagonist.¹³

But the unique unluckiness of Lykaon’s destiny must also elude the parameters of how it functions in relation to Achilles; or, more precisely, it functions so effectively within Achilles’ revenge only because of an irreducibly specific aspect of it. In contrast to the cold reply that ruthlessly subordinates Lykaon—making him into another unit like the twelve anonymous prisoners, who, en masse, will constitute the externalization of Achillean wrath—the episode is infused with Lykaon’s specificity and inflects his subjective experience of his fate into the text. Thus the initial description of the two soldiers’ previous encounter is strangely divided, flowing back and forth between Achilles’ and Lykaon’s consciousnesses, almost to the point of redundancy:

And there he came upon a son of Dardanian Priam as he escaped from the river, Lykaon, one whom he himself had taken before and led unwilling from his father’s garden on a night foray. He with the sharp bronze was cutting young branches from a fig tree, so that they could make him rails for a chariot, when an unlooked-for evil thing came upon him, the brilliant Achilles, who that time sold him as slave in strong-founded Lemnos carrying him there by ship, and the son of Jason paid for him. . . .

(21.34–41)

The description begins from Achilles’ perspective but unpredictably drifts into the consciousness of Lykaon. We arrive at the incident through the memory of Achilles, the captor, so that Lykaon enters into the Iliad Lykaon, the young man’s memory of the event seems to impress itself onto the narrative. The middle of the sentence shifts away from Achilles toward Lykaon’s own recollection, as though the experience of the captive always potentially lurks inside the captor’s own consciousness. Only this shift justifies the strange repetition of Achilles, as the putatively remembering subject has become an object within the memory—When an unlooked-for evil thing came upon him, the brilliant / Achilles, who that time sold him.

Again, when the poem shifts back into the present, it begins from Achilles’ point of view.

Now as brilliant swift-footed Achilles saw him and knew him naked and without helm or shield, and he had no spear left but had thrown all these things on the ground, being weary and sweating with the escape from the river, and his knees were beaten with weariness, disturbed, Achilles spoke to his own great-hearted spirit. . . .

(21.49–53)

Once more the protagonist’s external perception of Lykaon seems to drift into Lykaon’s own interior feelings, moving from he had no spear left (something Achilles can plainly see) to being weary and sweating (something Achilles’ could infer or sympathetically imagine) to his knees were beaten with weariness (an interior sensation that seems to intrude in on the description) until it finally returns to Achilles’ own disturbed emotional state.

Even the final reply by Achilles—a death sentence that abolishes Lykaon within the text’s overall hierarchy of character—is presented through Lykaon’s consciousness, as the text adds the crucial detail: but [Lykaon] heard in turn the voice without pity. And in Lykaon’s own supplication we can trace a tension between his formulaic invocations and a deeper sense of bitterness and despair that penetrates through the rhetoric, bespeaking once more the singularity of what he is experiencing. In the compact presentation of Lykaon, every word counts—not simply as it unfolds the events, but as it continually modulates the configuration of Lykaon’s space within these events. The form encapsulates and substantiates the essential crisis provoked by the avenging protagonist’s encounter with a doomed minor character.¹⁴ And this moral crisis is generated out of a larger social crisis. The particular intricacy of Lykaon’s formed space within the epic emerges out of, and is amplified by, the governing narrative tension between the one and the many.

In constructing the idea of formal coherence, Aristotle performs a stunning act of alchemy: he transforms a work of art into a nearly sentient entity. The resemblance Aristotle draws between a unified composition and a living organism underlies the foundational premise of formalist criticism, which highlights the immanent unity of the aesthetic object as a closed and self-sufficient structure. This analogy allows us to imagine a beautiful kind of literary history. From the Iliad on, we can unfold the story of how each literary form comes to resemble a living organism, in a kind of supreme aesthetic entelechy. But there is that second question which we find in Aristotle’s discussion as well: How can many people be contained within a single narrative?How do different narrative forms accommodate the surge of many people into a single story? How do they encapsulate and convey the impact of a human being—of varied human beings—within a coherent literary structure? In these questions we can see the outline of a different, almost inverted, history: a history that would trace not how the literary form, in its intricate coherence, is rendered into a living organism, but how living persons get rendered into literary form.

Introduction

Characterization and Distribution

They told him there were too many characters in your novel, that the plot was still complicated, but still they keep coming on, there must have been a leak, wait, it’s not even that, there are just too many people out there.

—John Ashbery, The Last Romantic

"Done because we are too menny."

—Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

Character-Space: Between Person and Form

Lykaon, Thersites, Achilles, Diomedes, Odysseus, the anonymous men fleetingly registered in the Catalogue of Ships: over and over again we are presented with different inflections of individuals into the total work of art. The rich diversity of these characters—themultitudinous ways in which the Iliad comprehends the human—depends on each character’s structured position within the literary totality, or the narrative space that he occupies. In each instance, the 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 and the descriptive configuration that flows out from this position.

Now wol I stynte of Palamon a lite, writes Chaucer in The Knight’s Tale, registering the way that narrative progress always entails a series of choices: each moment magnifies some characters while turning away from—and thus diminishing or even stinting—others.¹ Such a process runs implicitly through any number of narratives and occasionally breaks out to the surface of the fiction itself. Consider these two quotations from Dostoevsky and Trollope. First, from The Idiot:

Let us not forget that the motives behind human actions are usually infinitely more complicated and various than we assume them to be . . . do as we will, we are now under the absolute necessity of devoting to this secondary character in our story rather more space and attention than we originally had intended. (502)

And, from Barchester Towers, at the very end of chapter 3:

Mr. Slope, however, on his first introduction must not be brought before the public at the tail of a chapter. (21)

Both of these passages explicitly render the novel’s own awareness of the amount of narrative space allocated to a particular character. Squeezing a character into the end of a chapter creates a tension between our sense of the character as an actual human placed within an imagined world and the space of the character within the narrative structure. Trollope’s example—a character who is too important to get pushed into the end of a chapter—is expanded into a general principle by Dostoevsky: all characters are potentially overdelimited within the fictional world—and might disrupt the narrative if we pay them the attention they deserve.²

Dostoevsky focuses on that gap between what he calls motive and action—or between the interior thoughts of a human being (which are infinitely complicated) and the finite, limited manifestation of this consciousness through external, social actions. If the narrative registers only action, it will elide the perspective of characters; if it attempts to register motive, it might lose the thread of narrative progression and have to devote too much space and attention to minor characters. That two novelists who represent such different extremes of nineteenth-century realism as Dostoevsky and Trollope share a similar ground for their systems of characterization speaks to the importance of this narrative process.

Trollope’s comment about Mr. Slope and the tail of a chapter is so suggestive because it relies both on our ability to imagine a character as though he were a real person, who exists outside of the parameters of the novel, and on our awareness of such a highly artificial and formal aspect of the narrative structure as chapter divisions. The character-space marks the intersection of an implied human personality—that is, as Dostoevsky says, infintely complex—with the definitively circumscribed form of a narrative. It is the point where Mr.Slope can meet the tail of a chapter. In this perspective the implied person behind any character is never directly reflected in the literary text but only partially inflected: each individual portrait has a radically contingent position within the story as a whole; our sense of the human figure (as implied person) is inseparable from the space that he or she occupies within the narrative totality.

The One vs. the Many seeks to redefine literary characterization in terms of this distributional matrix: how the discrete representation of any specific individual is intertwined with the narrative’s continual apportioning of attention to different characters who jostle for limited space within the same fictive universe. We have seen how the dynamic flux of attention underlies important incidents and narrative strategies in the Iliad. Both the distorted physical description of Thersites and the partial, but ultimately elided, inscription of Lykaon’s point of view flow out of the distributional pressures that inform these scenes. These examples are not rare. My study addresses and connects a series of questions that have never been conceptually formulated but that are provoked by, and often essential to, any number of narratives. What is the purpose or significance of a particularly marginal character? How much access are we given to a certain character’s thoughts, and how does the partial enactment of this perspective or point of view fit into the narrative as a whole? Why and how are certain narratives divided between two or three central characters? How often, at what point, and for what duration does a character appear in the text? How does she enter and exit specific scenes? How does her delimited position intersect with the achieved representation of her speech, actions, or physiognomy? How are her appearances positioned in relation to other characters and to the thematic and structural totality of the narrative? Why does a particular character suddenly disappear from the narrative or abruptly begin to gain more narrative attention? How does the text organize a large number of different characters within a unified symbolic and structural system? As these questions flow into each other, I will begin to construct a new framework for interpreting both characterization itself—the literary representation of imagined human beings—and the design and significance of a number of nineteenth-century novels. My interpretive method rests above all in the combination of two new narratological categories which I will formulate and continually return to: the character-space (that particular and charged encounter between an individual human personality and a determined space and position within the narrative as a whole) and the character-system (the arrangement of multiple and differentiated character-spaces—differentiated configurations and manipulations of the human figure—into a unified narrative structure). In developing these categories through a series of nineteenth-century novels, I want to demonstrate the importance of distributed attention not just to the realist novel but to the vexed problem of characterization itself: a problem that lies at the heart of contemporary literary theory.

Characterization and the Antinomies of Theory

The literary character: so important to narrative praxis but ever more imperiled within literary theory. For a long time now, characterization has been the bete noire of narratology, provoking either cursory dismissal, lingering uncertainty, or vociferous argument. As Jonathan Culler writes, Character is the major aspect of the novel to which structuralism has paid least attention and has been least successful in treating (230). Other narrative theorists concur:

It is remarkable how little has been said about the theory of character in literary history and criticism. (Chatman, 107)

Whereas the study of the story’s events and the links among them has been developed considerably in contemporary poetics, that of character has not. Indeed, the elaboration of a systematic, non-reductive but also non-impressionistic theory of character remains one of the challenges poetics has not yet met. (Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction, 29)

That no one has yet succeeded in constructing a complete and coherent theory of character is probably precisely because of this human aspect. The character is not a human being, but it resembles one. (Bal, 80)

Rimmon-Kenan’s opposition between the impressionistic and the systematic signals the crux of a problem that characterization has posed within narrative theory. How does an interpretive practice that focuses on the syntax of narrative as a system conceptualize the implied resemblance between the character and the human being? Focusing on the character-system—and the character-spaces that it encompasses and puts into relation—highlights the way that the human aspect of a character is often dynamically integrated into, and sometimes absorbed by, the narrative structure as a whole. As this study will demonstrate, character-space draws on and redefines our understanding of both impression and system, continually establishing a relationship between the referential elaboration of a character, as implied individual, and the emplacement of a character within a coordinated narrative structure.

By analyzing the distribution of attention within narrative, we can thus reconfigure a seemingly implacable conflict within theories of characterization:the tension between the authenticity of a character in-and-of-himself and the reduction of the character into the thematic or symbolic field. Harry Berger aptly summarizes such a problem in Spenser: When the poet states or suggests that Woman A stands for Idea B, a dilemma is forced on us. Does Woman A disappear completely into Idea B? . . . Or is such sleight of hand impossible to a poet—doesn’t a fable by its very nature have some elements of concreteness (belonging to the ‘image of human life’) that cannot be translated? (120).³ Mieke Bal’s stress on the problematic human aspect of characterization comes out of a particular and highly influential perspective on this tension within twentieth-century literary theory. Beginning with the Russian formalists, the decoupling of literary characters from their implied humanness becomes the price of entry into a theoretical perspective on characterization. For instance, Boris Tomachevski analyzes the hero not as the central person whose story the literary text elaborates, but rather as a central device that acts as glue for the text itself, a sort of living support for the text’s different motifs. Tomachevski continues:

The hero is hardly necessary to the story. The story, as a system of motifs, can entirely bypass the hero and his characteristic traits. The hero comes out of the transformation of the material in the discourse and represents, in one part, a means to tie together the motifs and, in another part, a personified motivation for the connection between the motifs. . . . The hero is necessary so that one can tie together anecdotes around him. (293–98)

French structuralists, poststructuralists, and new novelists return to and elaborate Russian formalism, arguing, even more insistently, against the anthropo-morphic component of characterization. The attack on reference gets implicated in more ambitious schemes, whether ideological (Hélène Cixous and Alain Robbe-Grillet), hermeneutic/semantic (A. J. Greimas and Philippe Hamon), or both (Roland Barthes).⁴ Thus while Cixous and others argue that the referential basis of character underlies a particularly bourgeois notion of personhood, Greimas tries to show that our very cognition of characters is mediated through syntactic structures. Building on the earlier work of Vladimir Propp, Greimas categorizes all characters within an actantial model, according to six positional functions that are homologous to syntactic elements.⁵

This model of criticism has both relied on, and continually generated, an opposed perspective on characterization, which defines characters by their referential aspect. While formalists and New Critics attacked the psychological and moralistic basis of character-criticism, some recent studies have been increasingly troubled by the excision of the human from narratology.⁶ Throughout the twentieth century, analysis of character repeatedly seems to devolve into polemics, where both sides ironically depend on the viewpoint that they are dismissing. Such divisions fall into the more endemic alternations—and altercations—between intrinsic and extrinsic criticism that have been identified by Paul de Man and others as a kind of metastructure of twentieth-century literary theory.⁷

Let me present two polemical passages that illustrate the nature of this division: on the one hand, L. C. Knights’s famous 1933 attack on Shakespearean character-criticism (How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?); and, on the other hand, Irving Howe’s more recent broadside against the poststructuralist attack on literary character:

To examine the historical development of that kind of criticism which is mainly concerned with character is to strengthen the case against it. . . . Wherever we look we find the same reluctance to master the words of the play, the same readiness to abstract a character and treat him (because he is more manageable that way) as a human being. . . . The habit of regarding Shakespeare’s persons as friends for life or, maybe, deceased acquaintances, is responsible for most of the vagaries that serve as Shakespeare criticism. . . .Not only do we lose the necessary aloofness from a work of art (to be distinguished from an inability to respond imaginatively) but we lose the dramatic pattern and we are inhibited from the full complex response which a play of Shakespeare’s can evoke. (Knights, 11 and 27–28)

The sophisticated if just barely readable French theorist Hélène Cixous writes that a novel with mimetic characters turns into a machine of repression, bourgeois repression of course, since it presents a historical given as if it were everlasting and thereby thwarts all hope for transcendence. . . . There is something bizarre in the notion that fictional characterization is an agency of repression . . . this is to confuse narrative conventions with social categories. Where, in any case, have our strongest visions of possibility, as also our most telling social criticisms, come from if not the great novelists—it is they who have given imaginative substance to what the young Marx called the human essence, and far better and more fully than any social theorists. . . . The great fictional characters, from Robinson Crusoe to Flem Snopes, from Tess to Molly Bloom, cannot quite be fitted into or regarded solely as functions of narrative. Why should we want to? What but the delusions of system and total grasp do we gain thereby? Such characters are too interesting, too splendidly mysterious for mere functional placement. (Howe, 38 and 42)

These two starkly contrasting—and equally convincing—perspectives are typical of theoretical positions about characters: both Howe and Knights are urging the reader to choose. Ironically, the formalist and referential positions seem to rely on each other—both are generated only through the opposed position, which they configure into an extreme in order to reverse. Thus such debates circle around and around; as de Man argues an undeniable and recurrent historical fact . . . this sort of thing happens, again and again, in literary studies (Allegories 3–4).

In viewing these contrary positions as dialectically linked and strangely dependent upon each other, we can begin to see a single opposition—or antinomy—that structures and gives form to seemingly distinct, and irreconcilable, points of view. Characterization has been such a divisive question in twentieth-century literary theory—and has created recurrent disputes between humanist and structural (or mimetic and formal) positions—because the literary character is itself divided, always emerging at the juncture between structure and reference. In other words, a literary dialectic that operates dynamically within the narrative text gets transformed into a theoretical contradiction, presenting students of literature with an unpalatable choice: language or reference, structure or individuality. My study recasts theoretical conflict back into literary process. By interpreting the character-system as a distributed field of attention, we make the tension between structure and reference generative of, and integral to, narrative signification. The opposition between the character as an individual and the character as part of a structure dissolves in this framework, as distribution relies on reference and takes place through structure.⁸ Thus the dimensions of both structure and reference—the scope of a complex, organizing formal system and the compelling human singularity of fictional individuals—become available to each other, rather than remaining mutually exclusive.

To link structure and reference in this way, in terms of distribution, brings out an inherently social dimension to narrative form as such. This socioformal dimension of a narrative is qualitatively distinct from (even if often related to) any social interactions that we might derive or extrapolate outside of the form, in the referenced social conflicts and relations between posited or implied persons within the imagined world of the story itself. For the character-system offers not simply many interacting individuals but many intersecting character-spaces, each of which encompasses an embedded interaction between the discretely implied person and the dynamically elaborated narrative form. While characters themselves might or might not gain a relationship, character-spaces inevitably do.⁹ To put this differently, all character-spaces inevitably point us toward the character-system, since the emplacement of a character within the narrative form is largely comprised by his or her relative position vis-à-vis other characters. If the character-space frames the dynamic interaction between a discretely implied individual and the overall narrative form, the character-system comprehends the mutually constituting interactions among all the character-spaces as they are (simultaneously) developed within a specific narrative. None of these characters get elaborated in a vacuum, even if the particular configuration of a specific character can tempt the reader to consider him outside of or extract him from the coordinated narrative. There is never a purely isolated conflict between one character and the form—as in the image of Mr. Slope clashing against the edge of a chapter. Rather, the space of a particular character emerges only vis-à-vis the other characters who crowd him out or potentially revolve around him. It is precisely here that the social dimension of form emerges, revolving around the inflection rather than the simple reflection of characters.

This socioformal organization of individuals within the character-system allows us to approach the tension between representing and allegorizing in terms of the tension between focusing on one life and focusing on many. Thus, for example, A. Bartlett Giamatti, discussing perhaps the most traditional structure for elaborating a literary hero, argues that [e]pic poems focus on that core of experience where our humanity is defined by the opposites it encompasses (74–75). Facilitating this arrangement, a narrative can organize its discursive universe into a referential core—the central condition of the protagonist—and a symbolic field that elaborates and nuances this core: the peripheral representations of minor characters. Secondary characters—representing delimited extremes—become allegorical, and this allegory is directed toward a singular being, the protagonist, who stands at the center of the text’s symbolic structure, or what Giamatti calls the single and abiding visionary core.¹⁰ Giamatti’s version of the epic hero is far from incidental. The tension between the one and the many intrudes continually upon theories of epic poetics, which anticipate and lay the ground for questions of characterization that the realist novel will later face. Building on Giamatti’s comments, we might consider the debate between single-plot and multiplot narrative that dominates Italian Renaissance literary criticism. William W. Ryding describes this argument in terms of two warring literary genres: holistic, often allegorical, texts that are embedded in the defensive unitarian framework of late medieval Christianity, and epic romances which privilege discrete and heterogeneous narrative strands that stem from, reflect on, and forward secularizing trends. The most influential criticism in this period attempts to establish a relationship between unity and heterogeneity, deriving an aesthetics that draws on the merits of both competing tendencies. Ryding distinguishes Tasso’s synthetic approach to the dilemma between the parts and the whole as by far the most lucid and thoughtful of those written during this period (10). For Tasso, the epic poem, like the universe itself, is a complex piece of machinery in which every gear and lever performs a necessary function with respect to the whole. Take out a part or change its position, and the machine is destroyed (15). Tasso thus tries to construct an aesthetic framework at once heterogeneous and unified, and this model hinges precisely on the strength of functionality. Diverse parts can enter into a narrative, but only as they bear a useful relationship to a central whole. The very emergence of heterogeneity in Tasso’s aesthetic rests conditionally on a countervailing process of function, or symbolic integration.¹¹

This tension between the one and the many becomes particularly pressing in the realist novel, which has always been praised for two contradictory generic achievements: depth psychology and social expansiveness, depicting the interior life of a singular consciousness and casting a wide narrative gaze over a complex social universe. The novel’s commitment to everyday life promotes an inclusive, extensive narrative gaze, while its empiricist aesthetics highlights the importance and authenticity of ordinary human interiority. In his canonical account of the connection between the English novel and the turn toward everyday life, Ian Watt describes a broad historical relationship between realist aesthetics and larger cultural and philosophical tendencies: [B]oth the philosophical and the literary innovations must be seen as parallel manifestations of a larger change—that vast transformation of Western civilization since the Renaissance which has replaced the unified world picture of the Middle Ages with another very different one—one which presents us, essentially, with a developing but unplanned aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and at particular places (31). The redundant profusion of particulars inWatt’s sentence subtly illustrates the formal problem that arises out of the process he describes: once you are committed to particularity, how do you curtail it? As Roland Barthes writes, nothing could indicate why we should halt the details of the description here and not there; if it were not subject to an aesthetic or rhetorical choice, any ‘view’ would be inexhaustible by discourse: there would always be a corner, a detail, an inflection of space or color to report (Reality Effect, 145). Recasting Barthes’s reality effect, I want to argue that the realist novel is structurally destabilized not by too many details or colors or corners, but by too many people. It is the claim of individuals who are incompletely pulled into the narrative that lies behind the larger empirical precision of realist aesthetics.¹² As the logic of social inclusiveness becomes increasingly central to the novel’s form—with the development of eighteenth-century empiricism and nineteenth-century omniscient social realism—this problem becomes more pressing. The novel gets infused with an awareness of its potential to shift the narrative focus away from an established center, toward minor characters.

In this inclusiveness, the realist novel never ceases to make allegorical (or functional) use of subordinate characters, but it does ferociously problematize such allegory, by more clearly and insistently putting it in juxtaposition with reference. Allegorical characterization now comes at a price: the price of the human particularity that it elides. In other words, the realist novel systematically reconfigures its own allegorical reduction of characters through a pervasive awareness of the distributional matrix. This awareness lies behind the flatness that E. M. Forster so insightfully conceptualizes: a flatness that would seem to go against the basic tenets of realism but, in fact, becomes essential to realism.¹³ Flatness simultaneously renders subordinate characters allegorical and, in its compelling distortions, calls attention to the subordination that underlies allegory. Flat characters—or the flattening of characters—becomes a primary site for the dialectic between reference and allegory that is generated out of the distributional