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

Alex Woloch, Professor of English at Stanford University Alex Woloch

Princeton University Press, 2003 - Literary Criticism - 391 pages

Does a novel focus on one life or many? Alex Woloch uses this simple question to develop a powerful new theory of the realist novel, based on how narratives distribute limited attention among a crowded field of characters. His argument has important implications for both literary studies and narrative theory.

Characterization has long been a troubled and neglected problem within literary theory. Through close readings of such novels as Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, and Le Père Goriot, Woloch demonstrates that the representation of any character takes place within a shifting field of narrative attention and obscurity. Each individual--whether the central figure or a radically subordinated one--emerges as a character only through his or her distinct and contingent space within the narrative as a whole. The "character-space," as Woloch defines it, marks the dramatic interaction between an implied person and his or her delimited position within a narrative structure. The organization of, and clashes between, many character-spaces within a single narrative totality is essential to the novel's very achievement and concerns, striking at issues central to narrative poetics, the aesthetics of realism, and the dynamics of literary representation.

Woloch's discussion of character-space allows for a different history of the novel and a new definition of characterization itself. By making the implied person indispensable to our understanding of literary form, this book offers a forward-looking avenue for contemporary narrative theory.

Contents

• The Iliads Two Wars: 1
• A Reading of Book 2: 3
• The Death of Lykaon: 8
• Characterization and Distribution: 12
• Characterization and the Antinomies of Theory: 14
• They Too Should Have a Case: 21
• Two Kinds of Minorness: 24
• The Labor Theory of Character: 26
• Realism Democracy and Inequality: 30
• CharacterSpace in the NineteenthCentury Novel: 32
• Between Story and Discourse: 37
• Narrative Asymmetry in Pride and Prejudice: 43
• The Double Meaning of Character: 50
• The One vs the Many: 56
• From Discourse to Story: 62
• Compression: 68
• Elizabeths Consciousness: 77
• Externality: 82
• Charlotte Lucas and the Actantial Theory: 88
• Elizabeths SelfConsciousness: 97
• How He Lived I Know Not: 103
• Representing Multiplicity: 116
• Making More of Minor Characters: 125
• Asymmetry and Misalignment in The Pickwick Papers: 133
• Mr Elton and Uriah Heep: 143
• The Appearance of Minor Characters: 149
• Minor Characters and the Division of Labor: 155
• Minorness and Three Kinds of Repetition: 167
• Partings Welded Together The CharacterSystem in Great Expectations: 177
• The Structure of Childhood Experience: 188
• Signification Position Structure: 194
• Metaphor Metonymy and Characterization: 198
• Getting to London: 207
• Three Narrative Workers and the Dispersion of Labor in Great Expectations: 213
• Wemmick as Helper the Functional Minor Character: 214
• Magwitchs Return the Marginal Minor Character: 217
• Orlick and Social Multiplicity tthe Fragmented Minor Character: 224
• A Narrative Condition?: 238
• A qui la place? Characterization and Competition in Le Pere Goriot and La Comedie humaine: 244
• Character Type Crowd: 246
• Balzacs Double Vision: 255
• The CharacterSystem in Le Pere Goriot La belle lot de soi pour soi: 260
• The Interior as Exterior: 265
• The Exterior as Interior: 267
• Between the Exterior and the Interior: 272
• Interiority and Centrality in Le Pere Goriot and King Lear: 282
• The Shrapnel of Le Pere Goriot: 288
• Le Pere Goriot and Le Cousin Pons: 295
• Les Poiret between Le Pere Goriot and Les Employes: 303
• Competition and Character in Les Employes: 308
• Sophocless Oedipus and the Prehistory of the Protagonist: 319
• Notes: 337
• Works Cited: 375
• Acknowledgments: 383
• Index: 385

About the author

Alex Woloch is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University and is coeditor of Whose Freud?: The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The One Vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel
• Authors: Alex Woloch, Professor of English at Stanford University Alex Woloch
• Contributor: American Council of Learned Societies
• Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2003
• ISBN: 0691113130, 9780691113135
• Length: 391 pages
• Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh