A Review of The One Versus The Many by Woloch

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

Protagonist in the Novel (review)
Deidre Lynch
Victorian Studies, Volume 47, Number 2, Winter 2005, pp. 281-282 (Review)
Published by Indiana University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/vic.2005.0071
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/185321
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BOOK REVIEWS
The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel,
by Alex Woloch; pp. ix + 391. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2003,
$65.00, $21.95 paper, £41.95, £13.95 paper.
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 democ-
racy 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 “distrib-
uted 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 scruti-
nize, 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 struc-
tured 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
WINTER 2005
282
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 character system that is associated by this book
exclusively with Dickens. Symptoms of Woloch’s adherence to an old-style comparativism
are visible elsewhere. His description of how the opening of Pride and Prejudice makes us
uncertain whether the narrative will be about five marriageable Bennet sisters or one is
tremendously smart. But it is strange that to describe this jostling for narrative attention he
draws on Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and neglects, for example,
Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), whose account of her world’s
inequitable allotment of the signs of personhood seems equally pertinent. (Why are “all
women to be levelled, by meekness and docility, into one character,” Wollstonecraft asked,
indicating one reason Austen’s marriage plotting must also plot a protagonist’s struggle not
to get lost in the crowd.)
For Woloch as for the great mid-twentieth-century theorists of realism, real
history is the (nineteenth-century) history of class relations. He describes how Austen’s ways
of making some fictional personages minor register “the new, dynamic competition . . .
emerging in her period” (60) and also register “the division of labor” (156), and yet he
nowhere acknowledges that the gender system was being refashioned alongside the class
system during that period or that gender entails its own distorting division of labor.
Woloch’s is very much a Victorian Austen, not an eighteenth-century or Romantic novelist.
Another missed opportunity here is accordingly the neglect of the novel in letters—the
form in which Pride and Prejudice was originally written. Woloch’s chapter on Austen might
well have considered whether the equitable time-sharing between “co-protagonists” (245)
that for him is finally unrealizable in nineteenth-century novels might have enjoyed a quite
different standing in epistolary fictions.
For all its innovations, then, this account does proffer one overfamiliar lesson: I
have learned once again that novel studies as a field remains reluctant to grant eighteenth-
century writers even bit parts, and that this is so even in books that are, like this rather prolix
one, able to accommodate Homer and Sophocles. I was reminded, too, that literary history
was simpler and tidier back when gender was something outside history, before critics
began to connect the rise of the novel not simply to the rise of capitalism but also to, for
instance, the transition from the control of marriage to the deployment of sexuality that
centers Foucauldian histories. The clarity and magisterial tone that are the consequence of
Woloch’s return to the selective canon and the historical “grand narratives” that informed
early work on realism number among his book’s many, many virtues. Even so, some readers
might, after reading Woloch, long for a little more confusion and conviviality.
Deidre Lynch
Indiana University
VICTORIAN STUDIES

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The One vs.

the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the

Published by Indiana University Press

For additional information about this article

meanings as industrialization hardens the “division of labor” and as that system

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