Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 2017"

We Have Never Been Critical: Toward the Novel as Critique

Abstract: The president of the Modern Language Association, higher education policy wonks, and the governor of Wisconsin all readily agree that our current present represents a crisis for the humanities. Cosigning that consensus would seem an obligatory opening for any stock-taking essay like this one, assessing fifty years of Marxist literary theory. Yet the struggle to justify the humanities, however vitiating at this moment, is not readily periodizable: as Friedrich Nietzsche and Matthew Arnold already argued, education in arts and ideas inherently clashes with the roiling wheels of modern democratic capitalism. Even though critical thinking and cultural difference are so frequently brandished as banners for the unceasing expansion of the world market, aesthetic-philosophical inquiry into the allusive values of the beautiful and the good can never be wholly assimilated to the regime of surplus value; reveling in uselessness can never be wholly incorporated in the reign of instrumental reason; heralding the singular and the universal can never be wholly squared with institutionalized pluralism. Within this long arc, the present moment can only appear new qua the quantitative intensification of the crisis after the 2008 financial meltdown and qua the internalization of crisis into an engine of methodological innovation and strife. Indeed, the very latest trends in the academic humanities—big data, thin description, positivist historicism, and the critique of critique—enjoy the veneer of the cool and roll deep as the funded, but must all be grasped as so much soul-searching and epistemic capitulation inevitably consequent upon crisis. This is of course not how these movements see themselves, but that is in no small part because they do not see the humanities’ permanent war for legitimacy (nor even that war’s contemporary front). In this essay, I argue that Marxist theories of the novel, embedded within broader Marxian approaches to crisis and to the aesthetic, continue to frame urgent questions for the study of the novel and continue to illuminate avenues for future study that confronts contradictions in the social life of literature. Arguing this persistent importance requires tackling the contemporary repudiation of Marxist literary theory in the movement known as “postcritique.” While numerous schools of recent literary criticism have resigned both the aesthetic and the political purviews of Marxism, the utopian dimensions of Marx’s own work and of the finest Marxist literary readers still remain promising arcs for tracing the unique values of literary production, literary reading, and literary critique today. The most prominent platform of postcritique is Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015), poised as ex post facto manifesto for the past decade of method wars and

Everyday War: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virginia Woolf in World War II

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Introduction: The Prosaic Imaginary

Abstract: This exchange constitutes one of the classic statements of the novel’s resistance to form: shaped like a life, the novel refuses to grant, or is incapable of granting, the end-directed structure of a destiny. The picaresque autobiography that Gines has written (it is so good, he says, “that Lazarillo de Tormes will have to look out” [Cervantes 176]) has the shape of a series of disconnected happenings, tied together only by the figure who embodies both the I of narration and the narrated hero. Its temporality is contingent and bounded at its end point by nothing more than a provisional decision to stop writing. As it happens, Gines reappears in part 2 of Cervantes’s novel in the guise of Master Peter the puppeteer. He is now, as perhaps he was before, an illusionist, a manipulator of flimsy simulacra of persons in improbable romances. The illusionism is stressed by the fact that Don Quixote takes the performance so seriously that he intervenes to save the puppet-hero from the Moors, while Gines implores him to recognize that the characters are only made of cardboard (“no son verdaderos moros, sino unas figurillas de pasta” [Don Quijote 1592]). Gines is thus the creator of two kinds of narration, each of which forms one of the narrative poles of Don Quixote: the open-ended story that we know as the picaresque, characterized by its autobiographical structure and its fidelity to the world of mundane events, and the romance that casts the world as an illusory structure made up of destinies and noble sentiments. Georg Lukács’s theorization of the novel as the ironic representation of a fallen world is predicated on a tension within the form between these two primordial modes. That theorization sets up a very rough ontological division between the prosaic novel and the epic or its degraded but still elevated form, the romance (ideally assigned to the realm of verse, even if its medium is prose). Most of the canonical specifications of the novel (Ian Watts’s “formal realism,” for example) work with a similarly defining opposition. But it is surely the case that any such dichotomy simplifies the diversity of the novel’s representational reach, the multiplicity of overlapping genres of which it is composed, and thus the multiplicity of modes of the real that it is capable of projecting. We tend to think of “the novel” as a genre, but it may be better to think of “the novel as genres,” as a collection of forms

Things and Nothings: Henry Green and the Late Modernist Banal

Abstract: The tension between precisions and generalities that catches scholars seeking to define the character of literary modernism fruitfully animates the work of novelist Henry Green Green takes as his subject matter the ordinary stuff of life—commonplace language, routine experiences, unremarkable relationships—transforming dullness into novelistic event Two novels demonstrate Green's extraordinary effects achieved through and with the banal, the boring, the vague, and the everyday: Party Going (1939) and Nothing (1951) In Party Going, a group of people stranded at a train station wait with their luggage, order drinks, and lose and find various members of their party In its attention to the bathetic quotidian, Party Going animates a range of late modernist anxieties about time, leisure, and subjective experience that manifest in the novel's fretful leveling of objects and experiences using the repeated, vague signifier things Later, in Nothing, a group of socialites—a young couple, their parents, who were former lovers, and the parents’ lovers—have conversations in restaurants and pubs Nothing dramatizes the inane nature of polite conversation, in which "-thing" is used as a block, as though to empty a conversation of significant information The multiple subjects and objects embraced by the vague term things suggests that Green's fiction is preoccupied with the "utter contingency of everything (and every thing)" in the modernist period, as Douglas Mao notes In these novels’ recourse to the any, some, every, or no things of the quotidian, Green explores the potential difference, remarkable sameness, and fuzzy difficulty of late modernist style