Continuing with my reading of bibliography on the minor characters, this week I’ve perused David Galef’s The Supporting Cast: A Study of Flat and Minor Characters (1993), a volume less well regarded than Alex Woloch’s The One and the Many but still quite remarkable. Whereas Woloch focuses on the 19th century novel (Austen, Dickens, Balzac), Galef traces the dissolution of the minor character from Conrad to Woolf, passing through Forster, or, as he says, from Impressionism to Post-Impressionism.
Woolf famously criticized, in her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs Brown,” Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy for being unable to create character without a thick framework of social and economic information, arguing that novelists should be able to find the essence of character in the person, not so much in the context. Forster, as Galef notes, slyly pointed out that one does not find memorable characters in Woolf, beyond some specific protagonists. Since I have never liked Woolf or Modernism, I’ll side with Forster to point out that the mark of a good storyteller is an ability to create memorable secondary characters, and justify the presence of the lesser ones. Think, respectively, of Kurtz’s Russian acolyte in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and of the two women in black knitting in the Belgian office that Marlowe visits.
I’m not, however, about to embark on a discussion of what makes a minor character memorable. It is my intention today to take a novel and see into how many levels its characters are organized. Forster’s classic distinction between flat and round characters refers to the density of their characterization, but as Galef demonstrates it is not quite useful to distinguish the protagonists from the minor characters, who can be initially flat and eventually become round, or vice-versa. Protagonists, besides, can be quite flat in action-driven narrative which requires no deep characterization. I’m interested, rather, in how many levels minor characters occupy, but so far I have not found a solid scheme. Galef’s discussion of flat and minor characters results in great close readings of the selected authors, but I don’t find his method applicable to other texts, which is the whole point of theorization. I already discussed in my previous post how suspect the reasons behind certain kinds of theorization are, so I’ll do here something eminently practical.
Like Woloch, I’ve been thinking that I need to look at very long, very dense 19th century novels to understand all the levels of characterization, but Galef shows that a novella like Heart of Darkness is sufficient, and also that Woolf’s Jacob Room (under 300 pages) uses hundreds of characters, if only in allusion. I have, therefore, decided to take the last novel I have read and see how it works. This is Manuel de Pedrolo’s Visita a la senyora Soler, which the author wrote in 1959, abandoned in 1971 when the censors forbade its publication, and eventually destroyed. A copy was retrieved from the archives of Francoist censorship in Alcalá de Henares when the Càtedra Màrius Torres (Universitat de Lleida) started digitalizing in 2019 Pedrolo’s censored books. Publishers Fonoll issued the rescued text in 2022. I’ve been asked to peer review a translation into English of the first chapter and I ended up reading the whole novel which, if you ask me, the author did well to destroy. Pedrolo felt that this novel was outdated and he was perfectly right.
Visita a la senyora Soler (Visit to Mrs Soler) is a 300-page novel, subdivided into three very long chapters, with plenty of dialogue and few locations. It narrates the story of how twenty-seven-year-old Jordina, a secretary, loses her onerous virginity when her best friend Simona convinces her that the recurrent nightmare she’s having is proof of her sexual repression. The topic was certainly very daring for 1959 Spain (the novel is set in Barcelona) but, far from being satisfactory, the denouement is quite depressing. One night, Jordina manages to hook up at a party with an attractive young man, Daniel, whom she lures into Simona’s empty flat. He is reluctant to spoil what promises to be a romantic relationship with a premature sexual act with no intimacy whatsoever (Jordina, besides, does not mention she’s still a virgin). Once her deflowering is over, she chucks Daniel out coldly, only to regret it as soon as she narrates the disastrous encounter to her sister Maria Alba. Still hopeful, Daniel left a note with his phone number but Jordina lost it and when the sisters retrieve it, the note has been ruined and the numbers are illegible. Jordina is left devastated but hoping, as Maria Alba suggests, that Daniel might find her since he knows where she works. Having read Anna Maria Villalonga’s enthusiastic preface I expected Jordina to be exultant after losing her virginity, but I was very much disappointed by a novel which is both daring and backwards, though I can see why the censors were so concerned.
I’m inserting this plot summary because in all the bibliography I’m reading this is something I miss. I don’t know why academic literary specialists seem to believe that their readers have already read the texts they are discussing or will read them anyway. I always suppose that my readers have no idea about the books I discuss and offer plot summary; if they are classics I begin with “as it is well known…” When reading Galef’s book, I had a wonderful time enjoying his analysis of Heart of Darkness, which I used to teach in Victorian Literature, but I had to use Wikipedia summaries for Forster’s Howard’s End, which I read possibly thirty-five years ago, and for Jacob’s Room, which I have not read, nor am I planning to read.
So, now that you know what Visita a la senyora Soler is about, I’ll discuss the structure of the cast of characters, commenting that, whereas Anglophone theorization about character hardly ever goes beyond the ‘secondary’, in Spanish-language theorization it is not uncommon to speak of ‘tertiary or incidental characters’. You will see, however, that things are not so easy. Here we go.
Jordina Blanes is no doubt the protagonist, also in her incarnation as Sra. Soler in her nightmares. I might be satisfied by saying that the rest, from her sister down to the group of anonymous middle-aged men seen in a bar Jordina visits are minor characters, but, clearly, this is not satisfactory. To begin with, I find that the secondary characters are actually divided into three tiers: the top one is occupied by Maria Alba and Simona; the second by Jordina and Maria Alba’s ageing, unnamed mother; and the third by the men closest to Jordina: Conrad Miret (the man in the recurrent nightmare), Conrad (her deceased boyfriend), Daniel and Sr. Enric (Jordina’s workplace harasser). I’m establishing a subdivision, on the basis of in how many scenes and pages they appear. No, I have not counted them, but I think I should in future studies of character.
The rest of characters are tertiary, that is to say, their roles could be occupied by other similar characters or they could be absent and the plot would not be substantially altered. They mostly appear in just one scene, mainly to show aspects of Jordina’s characterization we might not be aware of. Amazingly, for I thought this was a novel with very few characters, Jordina interacts in significantly long dialogue (beyond one or two lines) with twenty characters. Again, I would subdivide them into four tiers, depending on their significance and extension of their presence in terms of pages and scenes. I’m not going to describe them all, just note that there is an obvious difference between Jordina’s boss Sr. Rosés (tertiary, tier 1), the sex worker who strips at a party Jordina attends (tertiary, tier 2), a client who drinks bad liquor at a bar Jordina visits (tertiary, tier 3) and Sr. Font, a shop owner who simply greets Jordina (tertiary, tier 4).
There is then another group that I will call incidental and who are characterized because they are present but with no dialogue (incidental, tier 1) or because they are alluded to but are of slight importance for the plot (incidental, tier 2). Tier 1 includes incidental characters such as the bus drivers of the buses Jordina takes or people she sees in the street but does not interact with. Tier 2 includes characters mentioned in passing, from Sra. Mafeira’s useless daughter-in-law to Sra. Puig, a neighbour Jordina and Maria Alba fail to remember despite their mother’s insistence. Some of the incidental characters are necessary (Jordina needs to move about in the city by bus and taxi) but others seem totally superfluous, such as the guests that, according to Simona, her sister is having for dinner.
I have used here ten levels, from the protagonist down to the incidental characters mentioned only in passing, which shows that speaking of minor or secondary characters is extremely imprecise. You might say that nothing is gained by speaking of characters as ‘tertiary, level 4, with some dialogue’ but theatre managers and film producers will probably laugh at you, since actor wages are organized according to the importance of their characters. To my surprise, I learned recently that Spanish background performers (as extras prefers to be called) distinguish between roles that require doing something (like driving a car) and simply being on set (though no extra is simply there, doing nothing). So, when we think of characters in novels, perhaps we should think of them as performative roles and consider which actor we might employ to play them, if we were to direct a stage or film adaptation.
I have not checked yet any handbooks teaching prospective novelists how to create characters, but that might be my next step, since theorization tends to shy away from the more pragmatic perspective. I don’t know, and I think that no narrative theorist (or narratologist) knows, how and why authors make the decision to introduce superfluous tertiary and incidental characters. Pedrolo, in particular, does something quite peculiar in this novel: he introduces the top tertiary characters in a quite direct way that makes you think they might have a role in Jordina’s story, but then they are simply dropped, which is tantalizing. Perhaps this is closer to life than presenting a neat character network in which each of them has a clear function. Something else to consider.
More next week!