The one vs. the many : minor characters and the space of the protagonist in the novel
09 Feb 2009-
About: The article was published on 2009-02-09. It has received 315 citations till now.
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01 Jan 2013
TL;DR: Clark et al. as discussed by the authors argue that the readerly experience of identification with characters remains implicitly desirable, risking what Wayne Booth described as an immature experience, while also showing limits a means for Eliot's failures.
Abstract: Centers of Consciousness: Protagonism and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel Anna Elizabeth Clark Since Aristotle, we have categorized characters in terms of relative quantity and proportion. From Henry James’s “center of consciousness,” to E. M. Forster’s theory of “round” and “flat,” to Deirdre Lynch’s “pragmatics of character,” to Alex Woloch’s influential “one and many,” scaled distinctions between “major” and “minor” characters have remained unchallenged since the Poetics. Yet, such classifications don’t speak to the ways characters generate interest and consequence disproportionate to their textual presence. My dissertation counters scaled definitions of character by proposing a form of characterization called protagonism. Here, limited amounts of text yield the kind of capacious subjectivity we normally associate with copious amounts of dialogue or exposition, as formal narrative features such as point of view and interpolation produce richly compact portraits, often of otherwise ancillary figures. Protagonism may lack the “exhaustive presentation” that Ian Watt claims is inherent to the novel, but it is nonetheless rich in the personality and specificity we typically associate with protagonists. Indeed, many canonical novels, especially those of literary realism’s highpoint in nineteenth-century Britain, resist the character hierarchy implied by distinctions such as major and minor. In addition to manifest examples such as Collins’s “experiment” with many narrators in The Woman in White (1859), we can count instances in which novels juxtapose quantitatively significant characters in qualitative terms. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), where the title character’s protagonistic potential is undermined by his creature’s arresting autobiography, to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), in which readerly affections are split between a Jewish hero, an egoistic heroine, and a narrator’s attempt to relate “everything” to “everything else,” novels that are far from generic outliers fit uneasily into scaled models of characterization, even when their titles and critics imply otherwise. Protagonism is how such novels disrupt the impulse for sustained identification with a single exceptional perspective, directing attention towards characters who might otherwise appear nondescript, inscrutable, or threatening. As my project traces protagonism’s adaptable formal applications, it considers a version of figurative individuality based not in self-differentiation, but in what I refer to as social recognition: in contrast to readings of the nineteenth-century novel as a site in which individual and social agon find expression before an ultimate reconciliation or synthesis, protagonism’s brief, concise, and instantaneous markers of richly individualized perspective foreground the perception of subjectivity over its descriptive representation, flattening out tensions between individuality and its inscription within a social body. Narrative techniques such as focalization, free indirect discourse, and autodiegetic narration all serve to produce the kind of reflexive recognition more commonly associated with sight, evoking a precise subjectivity at first “glance.” This version of literary individuality both reflects and complicates the social purpose that Victorian authors such as Dickens and Eliot claim for the novel. As Eliot suggests in “The Natural History of German Life,” literature should “amplif[y] experience and exten[d] our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot,” resisting stock figures and stereotypes to produce a readerly relationship with realist characters that is deliberate, sustained, and self-reflective. This view of the novel’s morally instructive capacity is refracted in recent arguments by scholars such as Martha Nussbaum, who argues that readers’ engagement with the novel’s prolonged form and involved descriptions cultivates their ethical imagination. Yet for both Eliot and latterday critics, the readerly experience of identification with characters remains suspect, if still implicitly desirable, risking what Wayne Booth has described as an “immature” experience of literature divorced from its “aesthetic experience.” Protagonism reveals such dissonances while also showing how characterization itself is a means for the novel to explore individuality’s social obligations. Protagonism models the inclusive social sympathy Eliot seeks; it also demonstrates the limits and failures of such collective ends.
19 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the nineteenth-century novel is anomalous using as an example an anomalous novel, Catharine Parr Traill's Canadian Crusoes (1852), which is not well-known now, although it was well reviewed and popular in its time and for about fifty years thereafter.
Abstract: am going to argue that the nineteenth-century novel is anomalous using as an example an anomalous nineteenth-century novel. The anomalous novel, Catharine Parr Traill's Canadian Crusoes (1852), is not well-known now, although it was well reviewed and popular in its time, and for about fifty years thereafter. A genre fiction in at least two ways—as a young adult novel and as an adven- ture fiction—it is also an emigration novel, which may or may not be a genre. It was written in Canada by a pioneer who is often described as "British-Canadian" and who began writing children's books at the age of sixteen to support herself and her family after her father died. The field, in Pierre Bourdieu's sense, might best be described as that of "colonial letters." 1 I mean "letters" in both the sense of belles lettres and in the sense of epistles written home. 2 Anglophone Canadian fic- tion and travel writing of the nineteenth century was not usually read by Canadians, but rather by Britons in Britain, who might or might not be prospective Canadians. The writers in the field of colonial letters who imagined and constructed fictional settlements such as the ones proposed in Canadian Crusoes "participate in domination, but as domi- nated agents; they are neither dominant, plain and simple, nor are they dominated." Parr Traill, as the wife of a British army officer, is mildly privileged in the colonial social hierarchy, but just by virtue of having to participate in emigration, she is among the dominated citizens of nineteenth-century Britain. Her participation in the representation of empire is accordingly complex: her writing encourages emigration to Canada's forested "north" and also depicts the intense hardship and tragedy that so often attends it. Bourdieu has argued that "literary fiction is . . . a way of making known that which one does not wish to know." We can bear novelistic revelations because they remain "veiled." 3 It is this figure that I wish to amplify and revise in what follows. I want to suggest a specifically "colo- nial effect." The idea of the "colonial" in this effect must be understood both literally and figuratively. It refers both to the way in which the
19 citations
TL;DR: In this article, optative or counterfactual self-understanding both in general and as it shapes the narrative structure, moral psychology, and emotional logic of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations is discussed.
Abstract: This paper concerns optative or counterfactual self-understanding both in general and as it shapes the narrative structure, moral psychology, and emotional logic of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. Who Pip is, in that novel, is thoroughly expressed by his understanding of who he is not; before anything else, he is not the sort of man Estella would love. In claiming that this optative self-understanding structures the narrative he authors, I also propose that it has internal and essential relations to realism more broadly.
18 citations