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

Of the many tricks in Paul de Man's bag, my favorite has always been the one that reads a commonplace set of objections to a position as structural components of the position itself. If enough people consistently make the same "mistake" about something over a long enough period of time, de Man saw, we ought to read the mistake not as a mis- but as a taking, an apprehension that grasps something on the inside of a problem. Reading Alex Woloch's The One vs. the Many, I found myself frequently reminded of de Man's drive to "inscribe the polemics inside the question rather than having them determine it," a critical gesture Woloch pulls off with a great deal of flair and intelligence.¹

The polemics in Woloch's book surround the longstanding struggle around the meaning and value of literary characters, which divides those (so often our students) who treat literary characters as people, from those who insist (after Barthes, Robbe-Grillet and other narratologists) that characters are simply sets of semantic units united by the "precious remainder" of a Proper Name.² The problem with such disagreements, Woloch sees, is that "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" (17). Better, he argues, to understand characters as acting with all the resonance and power of a fully implied humanity at the same time as they appear before us as narrative elements within a discursive structure organized according to rules of aesthetics, form, or genre. The One vs. the Many is a sustained examination, perhaps even a discovery of, "the junction between implied person and narrative form," an attempt "to read characterization in terms of the tension that narrative continually elicits between an individual who claims our interest and a fictional totality that forces this individual out of, or beneath, the discursive world" (38).

The book's title refers to the novel's unequal distribution of discursive privilege, in which the figure of the protagonist, the "one," gains its rich and textured humanity only in relation to the many minor characters: we know what "round" characters look like because we have the experience of "flat" ones. Minor characters emerge, Woloch argues, in the space between story and discourse, occupying a percentage of the words on the page that must be understood as intimately tied to their relevance to a story in which they never fully take part (but which nonetheless indicates their possible centrality to other stories). And any given novel's arrangement of discursive privilege can be understood as a "character-system" that structurally disposes its "character-spaces" in patterns that comment on and interact with the telling of its story. The distribution of such patterns, once seen, emerges into the readable. The task of Woloch's book is to demonstrate how and why such readings are worth pursuing.

It does so through a sustained attention to three major nineteenth-century novels: Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Dickens's Great Expectations, and Balzac's Le Père Goriot. Each of these illustrates a different organization of the character-system, and in each case Woloch's readings offer not only an interrogation and elaboration of those systems but also a good deal of metacritical work designed to articulate his mode of reading. With Austen, for instance, Woloch shows how Elizabeth Bennet's interior development as an implied person mirrors (and in some sense refers to) her emergence as the novel's protagonist (and thus her "formal" or "structural" role), so that the "field of characterization rigorously links the protagonist's interior development to the dispersion and fragmentation of the many other minor characters" (124). As Elizabeth gains in narrative centrality, she also gains in discursive power, her thoughts taking...