Recently I've been thinking a bit about novels that take place, to some extent, inside other novels -- books that borrow stories and characters from other writers and then flip things around, telling the tale from the perspective of a minor character, selecting as major plot points episodes only briefly touched upon in the earlier work, and filling in gaps with new occurrences, new people, and new ideas. Famous examples include Grendel and Wide Sargasso Sea.
These are sometimes called "parallel novels." The idea behind the term must be that this new story is transpiring alongside the old one in the same fictional universe, but I think it's a misnomer: parallel lines do not intersect, but here, intersection is the point. The author meets the events of the earlier story from a different angle, mining them for lost details and hidden implications. In the case of Wide Sargasso Sea, "perpendicular novel" seems more appropriate than "parallel novel."
This is hardly a major genre, but there are plenty of reasons for a novelist to be attracted to it. Some merely wish to enter into a dialogue with a great writer. Others attempt to engage the classics in moral warfare, often objecting on ideological grounds to their treatment of certain characters: in Wide Sargasso Sea, the Dominican novelist Jean Rhys humanizes Jane Eyre's madwoman in the attic, the Caribbean first wife of Mr. Rochester, whose insanity Charlotte Bronte unsympathetically traces, with more than a hint of typical 19th-century racism, to her Creole heritage. Margaret Atwood has confessed that The Penelopiad, a wry novella narrated by Odysseus's wife, was inspired by a small incident in the Odyssey that Homer passes over in only a few lines: the senseless hanging of Penelope's 12 maids, a disturbing moment that snagged Atwood's attention when she was a young reader. In Grendel, John Gardner applies a bleakly modern, existentialist worldview to the ancient epic Beowulf, which casts human history as a heroic narrative, the triumphant battle of good against evil, where "good" and "evil" are distinct and knowable. Here, one of Beowulf's villains becomes the protagonist.
Of this fine trio, Wide Sargasso Sea is probably the best book, but I especially relate to Atwood's impetus for writing. The Penelopiad is frequently (and not incorrectly) called a "feminist take" on the Odyssey, but to me it's less a rewrite than it is an expansion. When I think about it, I think about all the times when, listening to an anecdote, I've gotten hung up on the irrelevant details, hoping for the storyteller to explain these, which to me were more interesting than the main thrust of the tale. Atwood explores the directions Homer didn't take; she focuses on the domestic comedies and tragedies that Odysseus's adventure pushed out of the frame and adopts the voices that Homer's homophonic poem could not accommodate.
These books remind us that every story we read or hear is actually just one version of a million potential stories. The story of one football team's thrilling Super Bowl victory is also the story of another's heartbreaking defeat. For the veteran quarterback, the game is the climax of his career; for the rookie wideout who catches one pass, it is an auspicious beginning. For the ant squished in the stadium concourse, it is a tragedy; for the hot dog vendor, it's just another day at work. For the celebrating fan, it's the cause of his DUI, which in turn causes him to quit drinking. For the TV viewer whose wife has left him that day, it's the background noise of devastation.
One of the purposes of storytelling is to whittle the world down to a pleasing size, to shape it in such a way that events, though they may mean many things, do not mean all things; they are part of a beginning or a middle or an end, part of a coherent unit of life for a specific person or group of people, whom they affect in positive or negative or neutral ways. In a story, we do not get every perspective; if we did, the result would be chaos. It would be not a story but life itself, where everything that happens is crucial and insignificant, familiar and distant, ugly and beautiful, happy and sad, clear and opaque, a start and a midpoint and a finish; in short, everything is everything, instead of being something, as stories require. This makes me think that the "omniscient narrator" is a myth; if he really were omniscient, he wouldn't know what to say -- there would be too much. Have you ever driven on a busy highway and considered that every person in every car you see has a life that is as important to him as yours is to you? It's overwhelming.
Another purpose of storytelling is to help us understand the world, and one thing we must understand is that there are countless ways of understanding it. Every detail is worth getting hung up on. This, too, can seem overwhelming. "Parallel novels" both dramatize the problem and chip away at it; each suggests that we must learn to view stories from multiple perspectives, and then it sketches one perspective we might take. It is both hermeneutic and creative, which is, I think, the right way to approach life: subjecting what we see to vigorous interpretation and using our imagination to conjure as much as we can of that which lies outside our field of view.
There are works that function much like Grendel and The Penelopiad without using prior fiction as their starting point. The first such book I read was a children's story called Ben and Me, which told of the life of Benjamin Franklin from the perspective of a mouse, who, according to the author, was largely responsible for many of Franklin's inventions. The 2006 movie Bobby starts with an historical event with which we all are familiar -- the assassination of Robert Kennedy -- but portrays it obliquely, following a chef, a waitress, a singer, and a beautician around the Ambassador Hotel on the day of the shooting and attempting to figure out what June 6, 1968 meant to them. Many films are self-reflexively hermeneutic, inventing a series of events and then revising it again and again as it moves from one character's interpretation of the events in question to another's; this is the influence of Rashomon and can be seen in Courage Under Fire and One Night at McCool's. None of these movies are really great, but their structure makes them more interesting than they might otherwise be.
Writing about all this has also reminded me of a few classic novels like My Ántonia and The Great Gatsby, narratives that are one degree removed from their titular characters. Gatsby is the tragic hero of Fitzgerald's novel, and Ántonia is the heroine of Cather's, but Fitzgerald and Cather do not tell us of Gatsby or Ántonia directly; instead, we see these characters through a couple of less glamorous intermediaries, Nick Carraway and Jim Burden, their neighbors. Nick and Jim are only minor players in the lives of Gatsby and Ántonia, but their interpretations of the novels' protagonists provide additional layers of meaning to their triumphs and tragedies. Episodes in the lives of Gatsby and Ántonia take on a different significance for the onlookers than they do for the participants. Rather than witnessing only Gatsby's lavish lifestyle and doomed yearnings and Ántonia's rough beauty and free spirit, we also learn what they mean to an unambitious bond salesman and a mild-mannered lawyer, who aggregate and analyze details that their idols would ignore. In the end, these inglorious biographers seem as important as their subjects; we care about the fates of Gatsby and Antonia, but we care just as much about how their fates affect their observers, whose modest lives and profound reflections illuminate as much of the human condition as do the fireworks of their charismatic counterparts. Each novel gives us two stories in one -- the story of the doer and the the story of the watcher. The effect is something like having Homer's Odysseus and Atwood's Penelope in the same volume.
Speaking of which, I've done a little Internet research, which has yielded some more novels featuring characters who, like Atwood's Penelope, have been appropriated from famous stories in they played secondary roles and have been repositioned as protagonists. At some point, I'll certainly check out Updike's Gertrude and Claudius, a sort of prequel to Hamlet. Ursula K. Le Guin's Lavinia apparently gives voice to a silent character from Virgil's Aeneid, and it's supposed to be good, but I never finished reading the Aeneid, and I have no idea who Lavinia is, so maybe Tony would get more out of that one. Geraldine Brooks's March, based on Little Women, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006, but I'm even more unfamiliar with Louisa May Alcott than I am with Virgil, though I feel considerably less guilty about it. Mary Reilly, Valerie Martin's retelling of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, looks promising, as does Jon Clinch's Finn, which concerns the deadbeat father of Huckleberry Finn. The most famous work of this kind, however, may be a play, not a novel: Tom Stoppard's delightful Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which, funnily enough, seems to argue against the theory that the minor personages of fiction can, from an alternate perspective, be heroes, too. Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are helpless and interchangeable pawns trapped inside Shakespeare's plot, compelled by forces they don't understand to perform confusing actions and suffer absurd deaths. It's Hamlet's world, and they're just living in it (for now).
While we're on this subject, it may be worth your time to read Anthony Hecht's poem "The Dover Bitch," provided you already know Matthew Arnold's immortal "Dover Beach." It's a funny send-up, which views Arnold's love through the eyes of a sympathetic friend who understands why her relationship with the plaintive Victorian poet didn't work out.
Can you think of any other works belonging to this genre? Which are your favorites?
