Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 2019"

The Describer's Nightmare: Touching Form in Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days

Abstract: The form and formlessness of histories, regions, races, ballads, fictions, lists, characters, and mountains are among the topics of concern in Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days, and they pose a real challenge to conveying what this novel is like. Caroline Levine's Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network advocates considering forms in terms of their affordances, “the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs” (6). This depends, however, on the reliable identification of forms in a particular text, activity, or material; and the critical response to John Henry Days gives us evidence that, while we can analyze forms the novel deploys and contains, it remains a challenge to identify the novel's form as a whole. In a different vein, Heather Love's work on description is explicitly concerned with “forms of analysis,” but not with the analysis of form per se. The present examination of John Henry Days attempts to bridge such valuable conversations about form and description. This article argues that as John Henry Days grapples with describing forms that constantly remake themselves, it takes a position akin to science and technology studies scholar Michael Lynch's theoretical agnosticism with respect to capital-O Ontology. Refusing anything like a full-blown theory of form, John Henry Days both practices and advocates provisional taxonomy—touching and moving on—as a way of knowing its ever-changing material. This article's analysis of the describer's nightmare is thus a case study for Lynch's claim that “particular descriptions—including descriptions of ontologies—can make sense, apparently even to others who do not share our grand theories.”

Vection, Vertigo, and the Historical Novel

Abstract: Although accounts of the realist novel have not always adequately examined the experience of movement through space, this embodied epistemology is critical to the genre's development. Drawing on the physiology of perception as investigated by Erasmus Darwin and others, Scott makes the realist novel historical through the representation of motion as vertiginous sensation and as a problematic register of experience. The very uncertainty of the sensation of motion evokes history as a horizon rather than as a causal sequence. The term vection came to be used later in the nineteenth century to refer to sensory uncertainty about whether movement in space is one's own or a sensation produced by external objects. For Scott, the related phenomena of vertigo and vection become perceptual metonyms of historical change. In the plot of vection, as opposed to the plot of action, movement cannot always be identified as forward or backward, up or down, as self-motion or as the ambient motion of the world. His novels engage the question of large-scale epochal historical transitions through the micro-level of the sensory experience of movement.

Why Lucy Doesn't Care: Migration and Emotional Labor in Villette

Abstract: The main character of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), Lucy Snowe, suffers from a famously incomprehensible psychological trauma. Like Ginevra, readers find her “so peculiar and so mysterious.” Villette is often read as a surreal fairy tale or a protomodernist experimental narrative, but I want to argue that its innovative writing derives from what Leila May has called the “political and economic forces of materiality” affecting Lucy’s conception of herself (60). Lucy is a female migrant caregiver, a situation that generates a crisis about identity, vulnerability, and language, and in this article I draw on recent sociological studies to show that her “mysterious” psychological state actually conforms to well-known conditions among this vulnerable population. If Lucy is in many ways typical of the migrant caregiver, however, she is not just one among many such subjects; she is unique in that she is a fictional construct developing her own narrative, and that position allows us to recognize just how the interiority so fundamental to the novel form depends on class privilege. A subject who experiences her emotions as exploited for money, altered by migration, publicly erased, or privately fetishized cannot offer those feelings as unproblematic truths. Rather, I argue, the strategies that allow Lucy to survive her employment leave traces in language, and in this article, I show how Villette develops an alternative form of narrative. Villette is unusual, but it is not alone. It is, rather, a crucial early narrative of this emerging sector of the global economy, and it can help us understand how to read other Victorian caregivers. The factors that afflict Lucy are actually widespread in Victorian fiction, which is full of governesses, companions, and nurses—people who give care for money without necessarily caring much at all, like Miss Briggs in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Miss Macnulty in Anthony Trollope’s

Political Melodrama Meets Domestic Fiction: The Politics of Genre in North and South

Abstract: Recent attempts to redeem Condition of England novels from charges of conservatism often turn to the politics of form. Much attention has focused lately, for example, on what Amanda Anderson calls “the mode of (embedded) argument” in these novels, which she regards as an implicit endorsement of “democratic practice” (347). Michael Lewis has elaborated similar claims in an essay about Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), and his conviction that the novel’s argumentative mode sustains a democratic ethos has been echoed by other readers who align its formal irresolution with progressive attitudes toward ideological debate (Lewis, “Democratic” 247–49). But formal and argumentative irresolution make shaky grounds for political claims. Does the mode of argument exemplify democracy or dysfunction? In Chris Vanden Bossche’s view, arguing characters in North and South talk past one another, and their debates “merely serve to reinforce the class ideals and identities of the respective speakers” (179). It is difficult to adjudicate these interpretations of an isolated formal mode like argument without attending to the broader narrative frameworks in which it is embedded. For that reason, my essay traces Gaskell’s politics of form back to the genre conventions that shape the meaning of North and South’s political debates. Genre weaves formal elements together with thematic and rhetorical conventions in a thick discursive web. Generic innovation thus has the potential to create strong new frameworks for political discourse rather than gesture uncertainly toward ideological values through form alone. Recent genre theory has raised the stakes for its practitioners in precisely these terms. Rejecting 1970s dismissals of genre as a mystified concept, theorists have insisted that thematic and even semantic meaning is profoundly genre-bound. As John Frow puts it, genre is what makes it possible to “actively generate and shape knowledge of the world” (Genre 2). Strong epistemological claims of this kind have, indeed, fueled much recent work on the social impact of genre.

Bothering to Believe: Acts of Faith in J. M. Coetzee's Late Novels

Abstract: J. M. Coetzee's late fictions display a recurrent fascination with attitudes of faith and belief. This preoccupation has been read sometimes as an effort to reinvigorate the novel's engagement with materiality and embodied life, other times as an elegy to the waning power of belief in fiction. But belief is not a monolithic term in Coetzee's late work, nor does his disposition toward it remain static. This article examines two texts that display a related yet evolving concern with faith and belief—Elizabeth Costello (2003) and The Childhood of Jesus (2013). These works not only share a thematic interest in various forms of belief; they are also linked by the scene of a petitioner “at the gate.” In the final lesson of the earlier novel, aging novelist Elizabeth Costello finds herself in a purgatorial border town, where she must produce a statement of belief in order to pass on. In the opening paragraphs of Childhood, the characters arrive on the other side of a similar portal, entering a world whose institutions reject belief as a form of unreasoned, passionate commitment. Where Costello refuses the institutional demand for belief, insisting that belief in fiction is incompatible with the stronger form of commitment in excess of reason, Childhood's characters attempt a reconciliation between reading and believing. Read together, these texts present an apocalyptic vision of the novel after the end of formal realism, when readerly belief requires more than a weak trust in fiction's mimetic capacities.

Peripheral Urbanism, Imperial Maturity, and the Crisis of Development in Lao She's Rickshaw and Mulk Raj Anand's Coolie

Abstract: The theory of combined and uneven development has provided a new interpretive framework for studies of the novel in recent years, opening up connections between the central premise that capitalism produces an “amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms” and modernist experiments with narrative time. This article locates antidevelopmental narratives in the uneven culture of the peripheral metropolis, focusing on two twentieth-century urban novels: Lao She's Rickshaw (1936–37) and Mulk Raj Anand's Coolie (1936). Tracing the journeys of migrant workers engaged in informal labor in Peking (Beijing) and Bombay (Mumbai), respectively, the novels juxtapose the visual cultures of colonial modernization with everyday, arresting experiences of poverty and precarity on the city streets. In staging the untimely deaths of their rickshaw-pulling protagonists, they not only interrupt individual developmental trajectories but also challenge the progressive telos underpinning discourses of “imperial maturity” in their respective cities. Central to this challenge is the rickshaw itself, as both a symbol of uneven development and a vehicle that literally and metaphorically drags the protagonists back, bringing an abrupt end to the journey to maturity and, consequently, to the narrative arc of the bildungsroman. In this way, the novels' proto-postcolonial formal interventions are grounded in the visible unevenness of their urban settings.

Beware of Pity: Stefan Zweig and the Fate of Narrative Empathy under Surveillance

Abstract: In the epigraph to his 1939 novel Beware of Pity, Stefan Zweig distinguishes between a form of “unsentimental but creative” empathy and a mode of “weak-minded, sentimental pity” that serves only as a “way of defending yourself against someone else's pain.” Focusing on Beware of Pity as well as The Post Office Girl and Chess, this article interprets Zweig's epigraph as a commentary on narrative as well as interpersonal forms of engagement, centered upon his conception of the relationship between author/narrator and suffering protagonist. Drawing on the work of David Rosen and Aaron Santesso, it further posits “empathetic surveillance” as a figure through which to assess this relationship, because Zweig can frequently be found to experiment with narrative distance and observation where the scene of suffering is concerned. His late writing demonstrates an attempt to work through his own conflicting wartime experiences of fellow feeling, but it also offers a sustained reflection on the implications of a broader crisis in empathy on a narrative level around the Second World War. The article characterizes Zweig's particular approach to narrative empathy in terms of an “empathic realism,” which can be defined both against what Meghan Marie Hammond has recently called “empathic modernism” and in contradistinction to nineteenth-century “sympathetic realism.” Poised between pre- and postwar outlooks, his work provides valuable insights on the changing contours of empathetic authorship across the twentieth century.

The Emergence of the Global South Novel: Red Sorghum, Présence Africaine, and the Third Novelists' International

Abstract: This article focuses on an overlooked connection between the “cultural fever” in China in the 1980s and a comparable cultural fever that emerged in Africa and the Caribbean in the mid-1950s through the writing of Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Stéphen Alexis, and others. It argues that, in the mid-1950s, these writers politicized their discourse on culture partly under the influence of Mao's “Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art.” In particular, they translated the tension between the state and the local, which is intrinsic to Mao's “Talks,” into the dialectical opposition between nationalism and pan-Africanism. In post-Mao China, Chinese writers released the local from the grip of the state and aligned localism with a nascent cosmopolitanism, which inclined them to identify with Third World cosmopolitan writers. In the process of translating post-Mao Chinese literature into the mechanism of the world literary system, writers and translators transformed localism into an assimilable cult of culture. By looking at the shift of value in Chinese literature in the 1980s in relation to a change of consciousness in Euro-American literary culture in the same period, this article further argues that the context of Third Worldism is largely eliminated in the reception of global South literature in the world literary setting. It contends that recognizing the formation of Third World cosmopolitan novelists in the milieu of an international socialist literary culture oriented to the Third World necessitates the construction of a global history of the novel that will redress the myopia in novel studies, postcolonialism, and contemporary theories of world literature.

Flaubert versus the Enlightenment: The Libidinal Economy of Knowledge in Bouvard et Pécuchet

Abstract: This article reads Flaubert's unfinished final novel Bouvard et Pécuchet as a two-volume epic that demonstrates the secret of the encyclopedia: the fact that different calculi of truth functions can be seen to operate independently in different areas of knowledge, that knowledge itself contains contradictions. Taking Lukács's distinction between “narrative” and “descriptive” realism as a starting point, I argue that Bouvard in fact “narrates” the very changes Lukács describes, depicting a historical shift that speaks not only to changes in literary practice but to fundamental changes in the theory and organization of knowledge itself (compare Umberto Eco's From Tree to Labyrinth). Drawing on Bernard Stiegler's theory of the “proletarianization of consumption” in the postmodern “libidinal economy,” I read Flaubert as offering a prophetic Marxist critique of the political economy (centered around the consumption of information) that determines Bouvard and Pécuchet's estate. The novel's structure as an immoralist bildungsroman—in which the protagonists’ faithful pursuit of Enlightenment ideals eventually leads them to directly reject those ideals—corresponds to and predicts the situation diagnosed by Stiegler in For a New Critique of Political Economy. Finally, I point to a cycle of sublimation and desublimation in the novel regarding knowledge and stupidity, a complex cycle that nonetheless makes it possible to read the ascetic-aesthetic copy-mapping project of volume 2 (the Sottisier) as a cynical but effective response to dehumanizing capitalist processes like proletarianization and the desublimation of knowledge.

“Our Sense of Purpose”: Speculative Fiction and Systems Reading

Abstract: This article reads Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park (1990) and Chang-rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea (2014) as works of speculative fiction that engage with the scientific concept of “the system” that emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century. It tracks this history, showing how ecologists and engineers generated their own speculative fictions of possible dystopian futures—environmental collapse, depletion of resources, and overpopulation—through models of dynamic systems. In turn, works of speculative fiction also began to borrow these models for understanding their own relationship to the world around them. This article argues that Jurassic Park and On Such a Full Sea reject the possibility of representing reality as a way to understand what a novel is. While speculative fiction primarily has been read as a popular vehicle for political critique, this article suggests how genre fiction can also generate new forms of literary critique and systems of reading.

The Ghost in the Account Book: Conrad, Faulkner, and Gothic Incalculability

Abstract: “The Ghost in the Account Book” claims that the imperial fiction of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner rejects accounting as a totalizing logic and, by extension, questions the English novel's complicity in propagating faith in that false logic. Accounting, which had remained unobtrusively immanent to realist novels of empire such as Mansfield Park and Great Expectations, surfaces to the diegetic level and becomes available for critical scrutiny in high modernist novels such as Heart of Darkness or Absalom, Absalom! Drawing from writings by Max Weber (on guarantees of calculability) and Mary Poovey (on the accuracy effect), this essay attends to the dandy accountant of Heart of Darkness, the accretive narrative structure of Nostromo, and Shreve's recasting of Sutpen's life as a debtor's farce in Absalom, Absalom! If Conrad bluntly equates accounting with lying, Faulkner reveals secrets elided in rows of debit and credit one by one as sensational truths; to those ends, both writers invoke Gothic conventions. By dispatching the totalizing technique that had been invented by early modern merchants and finessed by realist novelists to generate faith in a stable fiduciary community, Conrad and Faulkner impel the invention of newer forms and figures with which to express the new imperial (and later, postcolonial) world order.

“This Dizzy Affair”: Quantum Measurement, Schrödinger's Cat, and Hammett's Falcon

Abstract: The article explores the so-called quantum measurement problem, or the collapse of a wave function in the act of observation, as a reading and interpretive strategy. In particular, the article argues that the Maltese falcon, if it exists at all, does not exist in Dashiell Hammett's noir version of San Francisco until Sam Spade attempts to find it in a particular place. Further, reading from a quantum perspective suggests that Casper Gutman does not really want to find the jewel-encrusted statuette, or one would have appeared more often. Drawing on the work of Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Henry P. Stapp, and other quantum physicists, the article explores the role that consciousness and acts of observation play in the calling into being of material reality as it is imagined in narrative fiction.

Frances Burney and the Art of Accident

Abstract: This article argues that Frances Burney's long, diffuse works of fiction develop an ethics of accident within the history of the novel. Whereas critics from the eighteenth century to today have privileged “art”—in the sense of careful, deliberate skill and conduct—as a crucial marker of human character, Burney insists on filling her novels with a succession of unexpected events and a multitude of characters surprised by their own actions. By refusing to treat accident as a mistake to be improved upon—in the realm of either characterological conduct or authorial craft—Burney posits an ethics of the novel that treats matters of chance and modes of depleted agency as central aspects of the human condition rather than as markers of moral or aesthetic failure. Setting Burney's texts within ascendant modes of economy and finance in the eighteenth century, the article suggests that this ethics marks a key change within the rise of the novel that continues well into late capitalism.

Ishiguro at the Limit: The Corporation and the Novel

Abstract: The early twenty-first century has seen a radical shift in how the aesthetic form of the novel addresses the abstraction of labor and the precarity of minority communities that have come to epitomize neoliberal capital. Novels increasingly attempt to formulate institutions apart from the privatizing drive that seeks to corporatize all civil society. This ambition to differentiate the novel from the primary ideology of this period has been marked by the emergence of a particular mode of critical rejoinder to the pervasive corporatist mind-set, a mode called limit thinking, in which novels draw attention to themselves as texts with which to produce new forms of thinking rather than as storehouses of information or political treatises. The writer Kazuo Ishiguro's novels Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go present limit thinking as a means to offset the prevailing form of totalizing thinking in the West: corporate personhood. That corporate body, with its obvious intentions toward absolute privatization, has been allowed a unique form of embodiment. The imagined body of the corporation has been gifted the presumption of thought. Understanding the limits of the novel—and by contrast the seeming limitlessness of the corporate state of mind—prepares us to understand how the novel resists an epistemological system into which it incorporated and how, in doing so, it shifts the kinds of questions we ask of the novel from those of what does the novel know? to how is the novel thinking?