How minor must a minor character be?
The answer might lie in how self-defining their profession is, and whether taking them out of it interests the novelist
To nudge the main figure(s) into thought or conversation or action; to light up, with this or that peculiarity, the screen of readerly imagination for a short while; and then to vanish somewhere outside the pages—this is, crudely speaking, what a minor character in a novel is there for. Big novels are likely to have several of them—especially those big novels that are concerned not just with ideas but with nourishing the visual imagination in a solidly built world, novels which have to, therefore, be well populated. In recent times, with an aptly growing concern for the liminal and the marginal in literature, a novel’s treatment of minor characters can occasionally be an electrode attracting critical sediment. The volume and quality of attention that a minor character receives, complicated by the crisscrossing of operative authorial identity, narratorial identity, and minor-character identity, is often observed and commented on by critics and readers. Writers who are found to pause at a minor character and make attempts to make them ‘fuller’ are usually appraised well, at least as far as this parameter goes.
When I started reading War and Peace last year, I held with me the notion—perchance invigorated by the Yiyun Li readalong during the first Covid year and seeping into culture ever since—that Tolstoy is generous and marvelous with his minor characters. This didn’t prove to be the case in the early chapters, or at least not across class boundaries. While aristocrats who would not reappear in the novel got ample attention from our near-omniscient narrator, the footmen who helped ladies and gents onto carriages at the end of a soirée remained just nameless footmen, and even when a gesture on the face of one of them was noted, it was so only to better illustrate the brewing drama among the aristocrats. Later, butlers and valets and other servants inside houses and estates got more attention, but this attention seemed of a part with what may be called peripheral vision: Tolstoy didn’t, in my noticing, linger on any minor character in a way that might warrant commendation.
This changed significantly, however, around the middle of the novel, where Tolstoy delivered a series of chapters around a cinematic hunting expedition. The expedition takes place on and around a rural estate. It is September, and the Rostovs, the family that owns the estate, is engaging in their last burst of outdoor activity before winter prohibits such exertions for the rest of the year. They shall kill wolves and foxes on horseback, the hunting aided by scores of well-trained borzois and hounds.
But borzois and hounds trained by whom?
This question does not come up while reading the novel. The Rostovs employ several huntsmen and kennel-men, and Tolstoy presents the head of this employee base, one Danilo, early. In fact, Tolstoy’s rendering of this minor character is a work of great precision and artifice, in that the specificities provided become coterminous with the general qualities that we are hoodwinked, through phrasal magic (emphasised below), into expecting in a man of this rough, outdoorsy profession:
‘O-hoy!’ came at that moment that inimitable huntsman’s call which unites the deepest bass with the shrillest tenor, and round the corner came Danilo the head huntsman and head kennel-man, a grey, wrinkled old man with hair cut straight over his forehead, Ukrainian fashion, a long bent whip in his hand, and that look of independence and scorn of everything that is only seen in huntsmen. He doffed his Circassian cap to his master and looked at him scornfully. This scorn was not offensive to his master. Nikolai [Rostov] knew that this Danilo, disdainful of everybody and who considered himself above them, was all the same his serf and huntsman.
In preparing for a thrilling aristocratic pastime, then, of which it is possible Tolstoy knew details mostly because of his own background, the Russian master pauses to describe the serf who makes it all possible, granting him, in the same profile, the quirk of aloof superiority. One senses in this a certain regard of expertise on the author’s part, and also a keen awareness of how a specialist’s narrow world-view becomes a curious constituent of personality. Danilo’s sense of superiority is limited to the activity of hunting, but the resultant disdain has, one assumes from just the evidence of this paragraph, spilled over and become general. We see a gruff old man, fully accepting of his station in life and given, presumably, to communicating through winking and spitting and cussing and making animal noises, a man who can give no thought to the possibility that those he softly scorns for, say, misreading the weather or mishandling borzois or letting prey pass in indecision might, in other near or distant worlds, know and do things he cannot. Danilo hasn’t seen other worlds.
A few chapters further down, we meet Balaga, a troika driver in Moscow, who is similar to Danilo in that he’s made available to us primarily through, and for, his profession. His appearance:
Balaga was a fair-haired, short, and snub-nosed peasant of about twenty-seven, red-faced, with a particularly red thick neck, glittering little eyes, and a small beard. He wore a fine, dark-blue, silk-lined cloth coat over a sheepskin.
Balaga is an immigrant worker, a peasant who is now a Moscow cab driver for a couple of rich bad boys in the novel, a job that requires him to jaw a bit. He does not shy away from recounting his exploits with horses. Just like the aristocrats he serves, whom he serves with no permanence (unlike Danilo’s case with the Rostovs), and whom he understands as needing his services only for mischief, Balaga is performatively rash and unscrupulous by principle. There is greed and appetite in him. One could say that he is wise to the ways of the city, as he has to be. While rustic Danilo relies on benign masters, Balaga has to service an indulgent clientele. Tolstoy knows what the difference is.
The examples of Danilo and Balaga made me ponder two possibilities. Firstly whether minor characters, given specific tasks in large narratives, are doomed to be seen only in and through their professions. This would mean, of course, that they are not rendered ‘fully’. We don’t know, for example, if Danilo and Balaga are married, if their work sustains a family; we don’t know what personal tragedies and achievements they negotiate in those parts of their lives that are outside their professions or the performances those professions require. Secondly, I wonder if presentation-through-profession is a complex kind of fullness. Are there professions, I ask, that envelope personalities so totally that nothing significant can be said to remain outside the package, where acquiring specialisation has limited the range in other aspects of existence? In other words: are there people whose presentation-through-profession leaves a sense of fullness in and of itself, leaving no novelistic curiosity about the rest of their lives? I felt so while reading Danilo and Balaga; they are minor characters, yes, but their minorness in the novel has its own completeness. One is not curious to know them more.
To come to a more recent example: in Jeet Thayil’s The Elsewhereans, a major character walking through Hong Kong streets in the 60s comes across a shop sign that says Free Stock Market Tips. The vendor, a Homer Wai Pang, delivers a well-rehearsed short speech, in which he recounts, in a somewhat enthralling, salesperson-like way, the obvious benefits of buying stocks low and selling them high. Homer doesn’t get much more bandwidth than the paragraph containing this speech; his minorness in the novel is wrapped up totally in this crucial performance of his profession—of a street-side wise guy with claims to expertise in the stock market—and we don’t need anything more than that.
Staying with the stock markets, I think of the profession of a derivatives trader. The anxiety constitutive of the profession, with the highs of abnormal gains and the crushing lows of bets gone stupendously wrong, is expansive enough to wrap the whole person. Unless a novel was to centre a person in this profession, any appearance of a derivatives trader in a novel is likely to present them in minorness that feels no need of going beyond what is implicit in the profession, even if such a thing offers but a limited range, even if it is too stereotypical. It being another matter that it is nigh unthinkable for a derivatives trader to be inside a novel, peripherally or centrally. Novelists just don’t know people from that profession enough. Why? Well, excellence in contemporary literary fiction today relies on the writer being dedicated to matters of craft and writerly community to such an extent that they have little interface with people in capitalist-y professions outside publishing, academia, or the consumer-service industries. You are more likely to have as minor character a barista, a customer-service exec, a telecaller, a security guard, a mechanic, a waiter, an autowala, an insurance salesman, a lawyer, a writer, an editor, a therapist, a masseur, or a make-up artist in the grand novel you’re reading than a B2B salesman of heavy machinery, a derivatives trader, a middle manager at an NTPC power plant, a GM-purchase in ONGC, or a zonal manager in an insurance company. There are some professions that our novelists just don’t get to see; consequently, their protagonists also don’t see them.
What about reducing the minorness of a minor character? I don’t think it is something any novelist needs to consider as mandatory, notwithstanding the critical sediment mentioned in this essay’s first paragraph. In a novel of about 300 pages, which seems the standard length for published novels today, it follows that there will be a few characters that can be called minor. If there are some that can acquire a certain fullness through their professions, fine; if they can’t, fine. Perspectival range and multiplicity of narrators is á la mode in Indian English novels today, especially in debut or sophomore work, but in their large chadors of spiralling empathy these novels sometimes end up dedicating bandwidth to characters whom it would be better to keep as minor. Upshot is the sensation of reading something overwritten even when it is short.
A work of great length can do it differently. By great length I mean War and Peace-like length—a relic among novels, simply because the form isn’t allowed to accrete through serialisation anymore—which is a reality for TV shows. Shows can choose to straddle two complex narratorial intents: one that accepts the stereotypes around so-called minor characters and happily includes some of the pickings in the presentation, and the other that is invested in endowing these characters with pasts and futures outside their professions. The TV shows Downton Abbey and The Gilded Age, both created by Julian Fellowes, take up this straddling as a side project. Concerned largely with the romantic lives and mildly imperilled fortunes of aristocrats—early-20th-century Britain in Downton Abbey, late-19th century America in The Gilded Age—these shows have adequate bandwidth reserved for the tales of those who live downstairs, i.e. the servants. None of the stereotype-mining energy is lost, though. The butlers in both shows are what we expect butlers to be: reserved, witty, knowledgeable about the general customs of aristocratic living and the specific oddities of their masters. The ladies’ maids and valets and footmen are what we expect them to be: intimately aware of their masters’ lives, and thus negotiating potentials of gossip while busying themselves with the requirements of this dinner or that party. Both shows, however, make it a point to choose some members of this cast in whose lives they go deeper outside their professions. A history of crime, a busted marriage, a dollop of debt, crushing care-giving burden, the possibility of romance, the navigation of talent or genius, or an arrival of unexpected riches… the servants in these shows may be given any one of such plots, and the shows’ persistence with their stories eventually earns the viewers’ interest, even if only as interregnum from the drama upstairs, whose centrality the shows are deft not to abandon.
In The Gilded Age, the most interesting of these sideshows is the fate of John “Jack” Trotter (played by Ben Ahler), a footman employed by one of the two main aristocratic families of the show. Trotter is capable as a footman, but is presently ill-prepared for any kind of elevation in rank. Filling in for the butler one afternoon, his hands shake while he’s serving food, or it’s just that he forgets when to take off his glove or when to keep it on. The show tries to move him towards a love plot, but then changes its mind—immensely for the better. Made curious by a malfunctioning alarm clock (this is the 1880s, note), Trotter is shown to be fiddling with it over several episodes, till he ends up inventing an solution, a patentable solution. The patent transpires (after some initial help from the servants and later by the master), and then Trotter is on his way to setting up a business. This slow metamorphosis, from footman to inventor, contains in it the possibility of breaking off from a life of servitude under the old world and seizing the day in a new, unfolding one—of truly, incontrovertibly, taking a shot at the American dream. But what I find most noteworthy in this promise of a grant of majorness to the minor character of John “Jack” Trotter is its foundation: a desire to escape one’s profession. For a minor character to stop being minor, the single biggest definitive detail about them—their profession—must change. The young footman, otherwise relegated to sweeping the housefront every morning, to unloading carts of kitchen supplies at the side gate, and to doing sundry tasks that the butler directs him towards, must find in himself—no, birth in himself—an altogether new skill, and then he must have the smarts to turn this skill into industry. It is refreshing to see The Gilded Age’s awareness of the dramatic potential of this de-minoring.
Well done. Food for thought.