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

How is it that nobody has heard of Jane Austen's Confusion and Conviviality? In Jasper Fforde's Lost in a Good Book (2002), the protagonist Thursday Next learns the reason. The story of this novel's extraordinary fate is recounted to Thursday by none other than Marianne Dashwood, in a scene in which the twenty-first-century heroine, propelled inside Sense and Sensibility (1811), meets her nineteenth-century counterpart. "There was a revolution," Marianne whispers: "They took over the entire book and decided to run it on the principle of every character having an equal part, from the Duchess to the cobbler!" The result was catastrophic. The novel was—in Fforde's sci-fi, Lewis Carrollian phrase—"boojumed."

One way to describe Alex Woloch's ambitious project in The One vs. the Many is as follows: this book on minor characters and their relations with protagonists gives us the means of applying to actually existing novels the cautionary tale about the limits of democracy and the precariousness of narrative order that Marianne tells about the nonexistent Confusion and Conviviality. Through readings of Pride and Prejudice (1813), Great Expectations (1861), and Le Père Goriot (1834), Woloch offers a series of brilliant insights into the "distributed field of attention" (17) that orders our experience of narrative. After reading him one becomes conscious as never before of the asymmetries that novels establish, and also scrutinize, while they carry on their characterizing, and of the manner in which novels offset their production of singular protagonists with their production of those environing figures who by their very nature are (like the children in Jude the Obscure [1894–95]) "too menny." Woloch grants novel readers a new language to describe our strange affective attachments to that latter group, narratives' "workers" and "eccentrics" (25), who stand out from the crowd only to be absorbed back into it and yet manage even so to "enfold the untold tale into the telling" (42). In Woloch's account, as that last evocative quotation suggests, novels are structured by their awareness that they do not grant all characters, cobblers as well as duchesses, equal shares of roundness or of attention. Ever conscious that narrative focus could well be placed elsewhere and shifted from their centers to their subordinated margins, novels inscribe "the very absence of voice that the distributional system produces" (42).

Woloch begins with the Iliad and ends, symmetrically, with Oedipus Rex. But nineteenth-century fiction is at the heart of his book, because the realist novelist's project of engaging both psychological inwardness and social diversity is facilitated by asymmetric structures of characterization that lock together both round protagonists and flat minor characters. For Woloch those asymmetric norms represent, as well, a formal structure capable of comprehending the dynamics of alienated labor within a capitalist order's class structure. His "Labor Theory of Character" proposes that the "functions" to which minor characters, the novel's proletariat, are consigned inevitably take on new social meanings as industrialization hardens the "division of labor" and as that system constricts—or flattens—human beings to "increasingly specialized roles" (26).

These echoes of the negotiations between form and history that once engaged Marxist critics such as Lucien Goldmann and Gyorgy Lukács sometimes give The One vs. the Many an old-fashioned feel—although such untimeliness has undeniably tonic effects. Woloch's decision to work wholly within a traditional comparativist mode means, similarly, that there are few surprises in his cast of novelists: he prompts readers to reread, rather than sending them to something new. It is surprising that Walter Scott is omitted from Woloch's scheme. Surrounding his insipid, passive heroes with scene-stealing minor characters, and drawing interest from his plots' centers to their peripheries, Scott is (perhaps along with Tobias Smollett) the major architect of the...