Minor Characters Have Their Day

MINOR CHARACTERS HAVE THEIR DAY

Literature Now

LITERATURE NOW

Matthew Hart, David James, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Series Editors

Literature Now offers a distinct vision of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century literary culture. Addressing contemporary literature and the ways we understand its meaning, the series includes books that are comparative and transnational in scope as well as those that focus on national and regional literary cultures.

Caren Irr, Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Century

Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect

Mrinalini Chakravorty, In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary

Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel

Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature

Carol Jacobs, Sebald’s Vision

Sarah Phillips Casteel, Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination

Minor Characters Have Their Day

GENRE AND THE CONTEMPORARY LITERARY MARKETPLACE

Jeremy Rosen

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press

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Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54240-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rosen, Jeremy.

Title: Minor characters have their day: genre and the contemporary literary marketplace / Jeremy Rosen.

Description: New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. | Series: Literature now | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016002788 (print) | LCCN 2016025468 (e-book) | ISBN 9780231177443 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231542401 (e-book) | ISBN 9780231542401

Subjects: LCSH: Characters and characteristics in literature.

Classification: LCC PN3411 .R67 2016 (print) | LCC PN3411 (e-book) | DDC 809/.927—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016002788

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CONTENTS

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction

Three Axes of Genre Study

Chapter One

Active Readers and Flexible Forms: The Emergence of Minor-Character Elaboration, 1966–1971

Chapter Two

The Real and Imaginary Politics of Minor-Character Elaboration, 1983–2014

Chapter Three

An Insatiable Market for Minor Characters: Genre in the Contemporary Literary Marketplace

Chapter Four

The Logic of Characters’ Virtual Lives

Coda

Genre as Telescopic Method

APPENDIX: MINOR-CHARACTER ELABORATIONS SINCE 1966

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

PREFACE

Minor Characters Have Their Day is a book about genre and a case study of a booming contemporary genre. It attempts to explain how genres work, what defines them—form? content? a particular publishing niche?—how they emerge and develop, what they reveal about the cultural moment at which they flourish and about the literary, cultural, and commercial institutions and networks through which they circulate. The book draws its insights about genre through the focused analysis of a particular genre that has flourished since the late 1960s and become particularly visible since the late 1990s. These insights may not apply universally, to all genres. Like the varied array of texts that deploy a given genre, genres share some characteristics while diverging from one another in other ways. But since this book argues that genres are by their nature variable, adaptable technologies rather than rule-bound categories, the fact that genres differ from one another is fully compatible with the general theory offered here.

Minor Characters Have Their Day understands genre as a dynamic kind of textual and rhetorical practice with a real historical existence that must be analyzed along several intersecting axes. The most familiar of these axes of inquiry, for today’s literary scholars, considers the cultural work of genre. The idea here is that a genre’s conventional form and thematic preoccupations make legible the social and political concerns of the historical moment at which that genre flourishes. The cultural politics of genre cannot be neatly separated, however, from the formal and institutional pressures that give genres their shapes. A genre becomes visible as such when a succession of producers plays out a set of formal possibilities. This process of formal iteration is never simply reiteration. The riffing on a form that constitutes a genre is also what generates its internal variation and thus the permeable boundaries of generic categories. How much modification of an inherited form can occur before we detect the presence of a new genre? The recent vogue of quantitative literary scholarship abjures such questions, ignoring the internal heterogeneity and porous borders of actual genres, the fact that they are defined by a combination of similarity and difference, stability and dynamism. Furthermore, formal experimentation does not occur in a vacuum. Perhaps the most important argument of Minor Characters Have Their Day emerges out of my insistence that we cannot apprehend the full social and cultural implications of genre, the function of form, without taking into account the commercial and symbolic economies through which genres circulate. Writers adopt genres because they provide existing forms that can be adapted to particular purposes but also because those genres serve strategic functions in a competitive literary field. Publishers seize on a genre and spur its production according to their perception of the readership for such texts and also because those publishers are subject to economic pressures from parent companies and responsive to broader cultural and marketplace transformations. Genre subsists, then, at the nexus of form, cultural history, and material conditions of production and consumption.

The introduction to this book undertakes two considerable tasks—and is, as a result, a considerable length for an introduction. It argues that genre needs to be studied along the three intersecting axes traced above, and it introduces readers to some principal characteristics and representative texts of a genre, about which they might have only an intuitive awareness. Attempting to draw a general theory of genre study and acquaint readers with a genre that they will immediately start noticing everywhere in the popular literary landscape, the introduction lays down a methodological framework that the subsequent chapters apply to the genre I have dubbed minor-character elaboration.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many minor characters lurking in the background of this text, but only one narrator-protagonist. The fact that they are not visible in the body of this book should not be mistaken for insignificance. On the contrary, I could not have completed it without their help. I won’t elaborate each character into an entire novel, but I hope each of you knows how grateful I am for your help. My first thanks are owed to Mollie Godfrey for providing the conversation that sparked this project and for her challenging and thoughtful responses to my work for a long time afterward. The most major minor characters of this project, those whose efforts appear most prominently in this text yet remain largely hidden, are my graduate advisors Deborah Nelson, Kenneth Warren, and Sandra Macpherson, who spent countless hours reading drafts, discussing the project on the phone and in person, and constantly pushing me to refine my thinking. Thank you, Debbie, for challenging me to take genre fiction seriously and for refusing to apologize for the fact that it is genre fiction. Ken, thanks for helping me put pressure on the political claims of minor-character elaborations and for making me figure out social formalism in Colloquium. And thank you, Sandra, for helping me see the centrality of minor characters to the history of the novel, for provoking me to a more nuanced understanding of the politics of form, and, most of all, for the constant generosity and confidence you have extended to me. The project’s origins also owe much to a number of other mentors at the University of Chicago with whom I began discussing a set of issues surrounding point of view, sympathy, rewritings of canonical texts, and the workings of the culture industry and around which this project coalesced: Jim Chandler, Bill Veeder, and Miriam Hansen. Conversations with other colleagues at Chicago were indispensable. Thanks to Robin Valenza, Mark Hansen, Leela Gandhi, Jackie Goldsby, Elizabeth Chandler, Benjamin Blattberg, Bobby Baird, Amy Gentry, Nathan Wolff, Moacir de Sa Pereira, Josh Kotin, Lubna Najar, Tom Perrin, and the members of the American Cultures Workshop. Thanks also to the Caribbean English Teachers Association, the CUNY Graduate Center, and James Madison University for allowing me to present parts of this work in progress.

I have had the great good fortune of finding a set of colleagues of the University of Utah who have shared with me their rare combination of incisive critical thought and incredibly warm generosity. Many of them have read parts of this work with great care, and all have helped support me in the writing of it and in the adjustment to a new job and home. They have motivated and inspired me with the example of their work and the desire to remain in their company. Immense thanks go to Scott Black, Kate Coles, Al Duncan, Howard Horwitz, Lauren Jarvis, Andrew Franta, Anne Jamison, Stacey Margolis, Michael Mejia, Matt Potolsky, Angela Smith, Kathryn Stockton, Barry Weller, and Michelle Wolfe.

I also send my gratitude to Rita Felski and the editors at New Literary History, as well as the readers and editors at Contemporary Literature, who gave great suggestions that helped sharpen portions of this book. Thanks to the Literature Now editors, Matthew Hart, David James, and Rebecca Walkowitz, and to Philip Leventhal and the editors and readers at Columbia University Press.

To my family I owe debts, material and intangible, that cannot be conveyed here. Thank you, Linda Rosen, Jon Rosen, Ben Rosen, and Christine Maiello for bearing with my moods, keeping me going, and continuing to support me and love me over the long haul.

Introduction

THREE AXES OF GENRE STUDY

Minor characters: overshadowed by definition, all of a sudden they are taking over the popular literary landscape. These characters have help, of course. Over the last several decades, an eclectic and ever-growing assortment of contemporary writers has been seizing minor figures from the original texts in which they appeared and recasting them in leading roles. Take, for example, Christopher Moore, whose Fool (2009) retells Shakespeare’s King Lear from the perspective of Lear’s jester. Fool offers readers a particular pleasure, the kind conjured by the very title of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which appeared in the same year: the frisson of witnessing the symbolic desecration of a hallowed literary monument. In an Author’s Note, Moore unrepentantly describes his desire to put [his] greasy hands all over [and] befoul Shakespeare’s perfectly elegant tragedy.¹ Moore has made a career of putting ribald spins on popular genres,² and in travestying a classic story while narrating from the point of view of its protagonist’s sidekick he reprised a formula he had already exploited in Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (2002). The reliability of this recipe has not escaped the notice of the author or his publisher HarperCollins; Moore has recently dipped into the well again, publishing a sequel to Fool entitled The Serpent of Venice (2014), a mash-up of Shakespearean characters and settings, rolled together with allusions to other canonical literary works. In fact, Moore is far from alone in recognizing the vast potential for iterations of this formula. With these novels, he joined the steadily growing international throng of authors who, since Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), have adopted the genre I call minor-character elaboration, a genre constituted by the conversion of minor characters from canonical literary texts into the protagonists of new ones.

It might seem perverse to cite Rhys and Moore in the same sentence—perhaps even in the same book. Aggressively rewriting Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to focus on the now famous madwoman in the attic, Wide Sargasso Sea has become canonical in its own right, a paradigmatic text for feminist and postcolonial scholarship. Whereas Fool proudly advertises itself, in a pull-quote blazoned on the back cover of the Harper paperback edition and in a prefatory WARNING, as a bawdy tale containing gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity. But the ostensible perversity of linking these texts actually demonstrates the wide range of uses to which the techniques made famous by Rhys’s novel have been adapted in the decades since its publication as well as the popularization and conventionalization of gestures that seemed radical when Wide Sargasso Sea appeared.

To date, the flourishing popular genre Rhys’s novel helped inaugurate has remained largely invisible to literary scholars precisely because when they have written about contemporary rewritings of canonical literature they have tended to focus their attention on texts such as Wide Sargasso Sea that mount a critique of the traditional Western canon and ignored many others such as Fool that fail to adopt a stance of political opposition. To be sure, a series of contemporary writers have closely followed Rhys’s precedent by constructing narratives around the perspectives of socially marginal figures from canonical texts, often seeking to critique the ideologies underlying the manner in which those texts represent minor characters—or their failure to represent socially marginal figures at all. This subset includes Christa Wolf’s Cassandra (1983), which revisits the Trojan War and the story of Agamemnon’s homecoming from the perspective of the eponymous Trojan prophetess; Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (2001), which imagines a slave half-sister for Gone with the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara; and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), which converts Penelope and a chorus of the twelve maids hanged by Odysseus into dueling narrators. But, as the playfully profane case of Fool indicates, contemporary authors have put minor-character elaboration to varied use. Perhaps the most visible marker of the genre’s success as a vehicle for contemporary cultural production—conspicuous signs of it hailed me from the roofs of taxicabs and towering billboards in New York and Chicago as I began this project—remains Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995) and the hugely popular Broadway musical adapted from that novel. ³ Many other works since John Gardner’s Grendel (1971) have imagined the perspectives of famous villains, including John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius (2000); John Clinch’s Finn (2007), the story of Huck’s abusive, alcoholic Pap; and John Scieszka’s delightful The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, by A. Wolf (1989). ⁴ Like Scieszka, a number of writers have playfully reimagined nonhuman characters as their protagonists. Madison Smartt Bell’s Small Blue Thing (2000) makes Poe’s raven even more talkative, and when one gets acquainted with the woodworm aboard Noah’s Ark who narrates Stowaway, the opening chapter of Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1990), it becomes tempting to say that in the house of contemporary fiction minor characters have been coming out of the woodwork. In novels such as Robin Lippincott’s Mr. Dalloway (1999); Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia (2008), which makes a heroine of Aeneas’s wife; and David Malouf’s Ransom (2009), which centers on Priam’s journey to redeem the corpse of Hector from an enraged Achilles, contemporary writers pay homage by imaginatively expanding the worlds of their illustrious forebears. Still other works, such as Geraldine Brooks’s Pulitzer Prize–winning March (2004), which makes a protagonist of the absent father from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, seem little interested in dialogue, polemical or otherwise, with their predecessors, and use them as pretexts for the creation of historical fictions. These subgroupings inevitably overlap; many minor-character elaborations blend homage, critique, historical fiction, and humor.

This book began as an effort to explain how the proliferation of minor-character elaboration happened. When did this genre begin to flourish, and why have so many authors adopted its techniques over the past several decades? What satisfactions do such texts provide (or purport to provide) for their readers? What (real or imaginary) social needs does the genre fulfill? Why have publishers embraced these books, and how have they marketed them? And what can analyzing this genre reveal about the forms, politics, and institutions of the contemporary literary marketplace and postwar culture more broadly? At minimum, the fact that practiced genre-fiction hands such as Moore have gravitated to minor-character elaboration suggests that we need to revise our sense of revision—that is, our understanding of contemporary intertextual production,⁵ the fortunes of canonical literary works, and the politics of popular literary culture at the turn of the millennium. Literary scholars’ near-exclusive attention to intertextual works that endeavor to subvert their predecessors and can be championed as instances of feminist re-vision or writing back from the margins,⁶ ironically, seems analogous to the kind of exclusive focus for which minor-character elaborations fault their canonical predecessors. The protagonists of existing critical accounts of contemporary intertextuality, one might say, are works that mount an ideological critique of the canon for excluding or silencing socially marginal characters. While those purportedly subversive texts and the hopes scholars have attached to them are an important part of the story I tell here, when one widens the focus to observe the array of uses for which the generic technology of minor-character elaboration has been deployed, a different picture appears. One is forced to confront the (seemingly obvious) fact that a great many intertextual works do not launch a critique of the canon and that even those that do may not be performing the political work we think they are. I will argue that they instead serve to prop up liberal individualism and are deeply embedded in the mass-production cycles of multinational capitalism. Because if Wide Sargasso Sea offered a revisionary paradigm for feminist and subaltern responses to the canon,⁷ it also served as a template for a popular genre. The endlessly iterable form of minor-character elaboration, its aura of literariness, inclusive politics, and its message that we are all equally compelling individuals—equally deserving of protagonist status—have combined to make the genre an appealing vehicle for the culture industry to target baby boomers schooled in the liberal arts during the postwar expansion of higher education and sympathetic to ostensibly subversive or oppositional politics.

The trajectory of the genre—from its emergence amid the insurgent political movements and postmodernist experimentation of the 1960s; through the mid-1980s, when it is increasingly deployed and its principal conventions become visible; to the 1990s and 2000s, when the culture industry embraces and aggressively markets minor-character elaboration as a form of genre fiction—illuminates successive stages of the cultural history of the last five decades, demonstrating both the ambitions and the overly sanguine hopes of left cultural politics over this period. Minor-character elaboration initially seemed to brim with the potential to facilitate a radical critique of the literary tradition for neglecting subaltern perspectives and to help recover submerged narratives of violence and oppression, and literary scholars have embraced and helped propagate the genre accordingly. I show, however, the limitations of a textual politics that counts the liberation of the voices of fictional characters as success and that often relies on essentialist claims about who can access minor characters’ authentic voices. Rather than a subversive challenge, the genre’s ascendance signals a broad spirit of liberal pluralist inclusiveness and the prevalence of some postmodern banalities (there is no truth, only perspectives; everyone deserves a voice). The truism that any story can be retold from countless perspectives ends up helping well-read contemporary authors gain an elevated foothold in a competitive market for books and facilitating scores of genre-fiction iterations for a consolidated global publishing industry, which preserves the traditional canon’s cultural centrality by trading on its prestige. The canon thus returns triumphant, in and through a genre that seemed determined to point up its outdatedness, and it does so in the prevailing form triumph takes in contemporary life: triumph in the marketplace.

Because the production of minor-character elaborations has absolutely taken off in the past several decades, a narrow focus on politically oppositional texts also, and I think as importantly, represents a missed opportunity for studying genre: the adaptation of a literary form to diverse purposes, the way conventional forms disclose shared assumptions and social commitments, and the way such forms circulate through institutions and material channels of production and consumption. Literary and cultural scholars have not only focused the bulk of their energies on subversive texts. They have also defined intertextual genres according to such texts’ shared political affinities. ⁸ It should be fairly easy to see the problem of selection bias that results when one categorizes texts based on their common political commitment. Analysis of such texts will inevitably generate a partial picture of contemporary intertextuality, both incomplete and biased, in which subversiveness reigns supreme. If one understands genre, instead, as the shared adoption of a textual practice, as writers’ repeated adherence to and variation upon a given literary form, one is forced to confront the wide array of political and aesthetic purposes for which such a practice gets adopted. But one also finds that reading across the range of production using minor-character elaboration, of which I have so far merely sketched the surface, reveals deep continuities between a seemingly disparate assortment of writers. My analysis of minor-character elaboration thus offers to demonstrate what can be gleaned from the sustained and in-depth study of a genre, especially when a history of the evolution of literary forms is combined with cultural history and a literary sociology of the material conditions under which such forms circulate. And so, while I initially set out to write a book that explained how a particular kind of novel had become ubiquitous in the contemporary literary marketplace, somewhere along the way it became clear that Minor Characters Have Their Day was also a book about genre as such—what a genre is; how and why a given form comes to prominence, evolves, and gets re- and deformed over time; how genres function in cultural hierarchies and markets; and about the virtues and pitfalls of genre as an analytic method.

Minor-character elaboration offers a particularly instructive and topical case study for an investigation into the workings of genre—so topical, in fact, that writing this book has been an exercise in trying to keep up with each new instance reviewed in the New York Times Book Review or that I learn about from a friend or colleague. Because such a variety of writers spanning national boundaries, the political spectrum, and the ostensible divide of literary and genre fiction have adopted this genre in recent decades, it represents an object of inquiry with the potential to convey a wide-ranging picture of contemporary literary production that nonetheless remains focused on a particular kind of textual practice. Moreover, minor-character elaboration usefully demonstrates the overlapping of cultural spheres that are often thought to be in tension if not antithetical. The genre has become a popular form of genre fiction but also a vehicle that has launched prestigious prizewinning works of literary quality. Engagé writers have gravitated to the genre in order to articulate subaltern perspectives or critique the politics of representation in canonical texts, but others have used it to launch explicit programs of cultural conservation and homage. As the genre emerged to prominence in the late 1960s and has flourished over the decades since, its history runs alongside the culture wars and offers to disclose the outcome of those battles, the fate in contemporary culture of both the traditional canon and revisionist strategies pitted against it. The increasing adoption of the genre also coincides with the era of the publishing industry’s consolidation, suggesting that the success of minor-character elaboration in the marketplace can shed light on the effects of that consolidation, the kinds of texts that appeal to large-scale corporate publishers and their smaller independent competitors, and the ways such publishers market their wares to contemporary readers. And, as the writers who have seized on canonical minor characters hail from several continents, the genre demonstrates how form is portable, how influence hurdles borders, and how genre—and the global media corporations who dominate today’s publishing industry—establish transnational literary communities.

The remainder of this introductory chapter lays out, in three sections, the three methodological axes along which this book pursues its study of minor-character elaboration, methods it argues are fundamental to any inquiry into genre. The introduction derives a general theory of genre, using minor-character elaboration as an exemplary case and seeking to familiarize readers with the common features of this genre and some of its representative texts. The first section sketches the history of minor-character elaboration, which exemplifies the fact that genres are historically shifting practices that are both reiterable and variable, and situates this book among recent calls for renewed attention to genre. The writers who adopt minor-character elaboration test the endless possibilities, formal, thematic, and political, offered by the basic framework of the generic practice, altering the material that hangs on that framework or the form itself, in pursuit of their representational goals. Though instances of a genre’s deployment thus differ from one another in practice, I show in the second part of this introduction that the common features that constitute a genre’s central conventions convey a shared social logic. In the case of minor-character elaboration, the genre’s conventional form of imaginatively constructing a formerly minor character’s perspective, depicting the character’s psychology or narrative voice, indicates the extension of a liberal individualist project for the realist novel. The genre’s conventional form articulates the notion that everyone has an equally compelling subjectivity, a unique perspective, and thus is qualified for, even deserving of, protagonist status. The third section argues that genres must be studied in the context of the markets and cultural institutions in which they circulate. The fact that we use the same word to designate kinds of literary practice and the popular forms often disparagingly called genre fiction is not coincidence or linguistic slippage. I stress that producers necessarily deploy the formal reiteration and variability of a given genre in order to meet the demands of material conditions of production and consumption and to secure positions in symbolic cultural hierarchies. The social consensus that a genre’s conventional structures register likewise proves instrumental in such contexts, helping producers appeal to and access audiences who hold those consensus values. To exemplify the study of genre in its institutional context, I trace a sociology of minor-character elaboration’s function in the marketplace, demonstrating how the genre’s social logic is deeply compatible with its market logic as the inclusion of the perspectives or voices of socially marginal figures make it a reliable vehicle for appealing to identity-group readerships. The publishers who have embraced the genre value both its apparent subversiveness and its ability to trade on the prestige of the traditional canon, and they market such books by positioning the contemporary authors alongside their renowned predecessors. After its principal tasks of introducing minor-character elaboration and outlining these three major axes of genre study, the introduction, like the book as a whole, delves deeper to address fundamental theoretical questions surrounding the extratextual lives of literary characters that are provoked by this genre and then opens outward to suggest how the study of one genre can offer insights into a succession of related genres and, thus, convey a broader picture of contemporary cultural production.

WRESTLING PROTEUS: GENRE AS SHAPE-SHIFTING PRACTICE

Like Christopher Moore, Margaret Atwood has found in minor-character elaboration a formal resource that she has returned to throughout her career. In her very short story Gertrude Talks Back (1992), Atwood converts Hamlet’s mother into a narrator and protagonist, anticipating Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius by several years, and she returned to Hamlet in Horatio’s Version (2006). ⁹ (Moore, Atwood, Updike: such are the strange bedfellows, surprising affiliations, for which genre study forces us to account.) In The Penelopiad, Atwood turns to the Odyssey, using her versions of Penelope and the hanged maids as alternating narrators who recount the events at Ithaca during the wanderings of Odysseus. Here the author’s purpose will likely strike literary scholars as a familiar one. Atwood has Penelope protest the official version of her story, Homer’s Odyssey, for using her character as an edifying legend. A stick used to beat other women with. Why couldn’t they be as considerate, as trustworthy, as all-suffering as I had been?¹⁰ Atwood’s Penelope protests the ideological function of her character in the Odyssey, the way the character presents an idealized portrait of female fidelity. The author’s conversion of Penelope into a narrator and use of the maids as a choral counterpoint take part in a well-established feminist tradition of recovering previously silent voices from the margins of canonical narratives. ¹¹ In their final song, Envoi, the maids lament: we had no voice / we had no name /… / it was not fair / but now we’re here /… / now, we call / to you to you (Atwood, Penelopiad, 195). Atwood’s maids entreat contemporary readers to attend to their song and condemn the honour killing (193) that follows the climactic scene of the Odyssey and that the epic presents as part of the hero’s necessary purification of his home. ¹²

Like the Penelopiad, Le Guin’s Lavinia makes a narrator and protagonist out of the wife of an epic hero, but the novels differ markedly in structure and in their stance toward their predecessors. Le Guin’s Lavinia narrates the entire book, and when the author strayed from her home provinces of fantasy and science fiction to publish a novel set in antiquity, she set out to offer a song of praise. In the Aeneid, Lavinia is the Latin princess whose suitors Aeneas battles in order to win her hand and establish his dynasty on the territories that will later become Rome. While Virgil thus installs Lavinia in a crucial structural position in the epic, he has her appear fleetingly in it and does not give her a speaking part. But rather than attempt to critique the official version, Le Guin poses her novel, in an afterword, as a meditative interpretation suggested by a minor character in the Aeneid. ¹³ Le Guin’s précis captures quite succinctly the artistic venture that authors of minor-character elaborations undertake. Even literary works of epic magnitude (perhaps especially these) point to excesses that they cannot or choose not to contain—backstories, possible sequels or continued adventures, characters that readers barely glimpse. Contemporary writers take these hints, suggestions of stories untold or available to be told differently, meditate on them, and offer their own interpretation in the form of a new literary work. Le Guin seems aware of the broader recent trend in which Lavinia takes part, but in the novel, afterword, and interviews, she takes pains to reject the assumption one might leap to: that she intends Lavinia as a feminist response to or subversion of the Aeneid. Lavinia’s narration anticipates the desire for readers to enlist the novel to a feminist project and preempts dismissals from the likes of Harold Bloom: I am not the feminine voice you may have expected. Resentment is not what drives me to write my story (Le Guin, Lavinia, 68). ¹⁴ In the afterword, Le Guin makes plain, for any reader who might have missed the reverential posture of the novel proper, that she sees the book as homage, an act of gratitude to the poet, a love offering. Far from intending an assault on the Western canon, its values, or its hold on the imaginations of successive generations, Le Guin sees her project as a literal act of cultural conservation. She poses the novel as a bulwark for tradition, a defense against the eventuality that Virgil’s voice will be silenced with the true death of his language (273). ¹⁵

In interviews, Le Guin has been even more explicit in rejecting the mode of feminist re-vision or subversion. She maintains that she knows how well Virgil understood women and the respect he had for them and thus that Lavinia was not written like Margaret Atwood’s Penelope book to right a wrong, or set Homer straight. You don’t need to set Virgil straight on women.¹⁶ However one might be inclined to disagree with Le Guin on the politics of Virgil’s representations of female characters or distrust her comments in light of the independent heroine and single mother portrayed in her novel, what I want to stress here is how, by invoking Atwood’s Penelopiad, Le Guin registers her understanding that she is working alongside contemporary writers employing similar forms and methods without necessarily using those forms and methods for the same literary or political purpose—in other words, that she is working within and using a genre. The example of Le Guin and Atwood offers a compelling way of thinking about genre: not as an ideal category with static rules or criteria but as a malleable, historically dynamic kind of literary and rhetorical practice that may be manipulated according to the needs and purposes of those who adopt it. Thomas Pavel describes genre in similar terms, suggesting that genres are norms constituted by a unique mixture of stability and flexibility and lucidly defining genre as a set of good recipes, or good habits of the trade, oriented towards the achievement of definite artistic goals.¹⁷ With the exception of strict formal genres such as the sonnet, Pavel indicates that genres are flexible technologies, methods that may rely on a typical thematic content, formal device, or a combination of both. ¹⁸

After a period in which genre had experienced a decline as a vital issue in contemporary literary theory, recent years have seen a growing consensus about both the errors of earlier modes of genre study and the benefits of a renewed, more supple