Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 2020"

Realism and Dialectic: The Speculative Turn and the History of the Nineteenth-Century European Novel

Abstract: A narrative impulse and a scenic impulse: as Fredric Jameson persuasively argues in The Antinomies of Realism, the history of literary realism has been shaped by the dialectic between these two competing drives, each identified by a specific temporality. Yet realism's dialectic between a narrative and a scenic impulse omits something crucial if we are to understand European realist narrative, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century. This article reassesses Jameson's dialectical view of realism in light of the speculative turn in the history of the European novel in 1860s Russian and 1880s French narrative. I will query Jameson's dialectic of realism and subsume it under a larger dialectical framework encompassing a further, temporally neuter impulse. This is the speculative impulse, which will help us reconsider some of the most important developments of nineteenth-century European realism.

Anti-individualism in the Victorian Family Chronicle

Abstract: The bildungsroman privileges singularity: the unique and, often, the only child. This essay turns away from familiar literary narratives of a protagonist's personal development in order to examine the narrative possibilities of a genre that instead maintains focus on a group of siblings: the Victorian family chronicle. Family chronicles understand their large families as systems; they celebrate the replaceability of relationships rather than the irreplaceability of individuals. By insisting that a flourishing group can function in the absence of any particular person, they achieve fulfillment not in individualist plots but in group activities and brimful houses. The most influential Victorian family chronicler was Charlotte Mary Yonge. Yonge's episodic form was taken up by Anthony Trollope, Margaret Oliphant, Louisa May Alcott, and Margaret Sidney. These writers’ chronicles are non-protagonistic, nearly plotless, and potentially endless. They have been dismissed as minor works; nonetheless the anti-individualism of the large family chronicle offers an innovative approach to the nineteenth-century novel's tense negotiation between individual needs and group membership. Glimpses of chronicle narration can be seen operating within and against the competitive character systems that dominate canonical Victorian novels. A twentieth-century variant, Gilbreth and Carey's Cheaper by the Dozen, proves that the mutualistic form is also capable of hardening the boundaries around a family unit in order to compete in a capitalist marketplace. Nonetheless, the family chronicles developed by Yonge model a social economy in which both narrative and economic resources are not concentrated on a single striver but are distributed across a system.

Growing Up Against Allegory: The Late Works of J. M. Coetzee

Abstract: The first two books of J. M. Coetzee's recent trilogy, The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), are extremely strange. Just when “the Australian fiction,” following the works set in South Africa and various international locations, was thought to be the last phase of Coetzee's career, the Nobel laureate changed tack. The Jesus books challenge readers and critics with their sparse tone, lengthy philosophical dialogues, and allegorical obscurity. Their difficulty seems to shed little light on some of the most intriguing questions about Coetzee's writing: namely, its form and its interaction with allegory. Beginning with a reappraisal of a classic work of Coetzee studies, this essay then lays out a theory about the connection between reading and writing allegory within traditions of what constitutes a “novel.” In the second section, examples from Coetzee's earlier fiction are analyzed, with focus on In the Heart of the Country (1977) and Boyhood (1997). Parental roles are found to be vital in the connections between the novel form and allegory. The third section applies these analyses to Childhood and Schooldays. Focus on the books’ references to Plato and Don Quixote helps scrutinize their philosophy and reach the thesis of this essay: that with these books, Coetzee experiments with a form that goes beyond the novel.

“Still There”: (Dis)engaging with Dickens's Minor Characters

Abstract: More can be done in minor character studies to account for the strong sense of being that emerges at the edges of the nineteenth-century novel. By pairing traditional readings of the minor character in narrative theory with sociologist Erving Goffman's writings on disengagement, this article offers a different perspective on the competition for narrative attention as we know it. For example, when disengagement is taken into account, Alex Woloch's losers in the competition for narrative attention become winners in the formulation of a fulfilling social life. Dickens's minor characters take part in central spaces while not being contained by them. Their distance from main scenes and settings, captured in passing by a gaze that has no interest in registering these elsewheres in any level of depth, has the effect of making minor characters appear strange, memorable, or other, even though their worlds are quite rich. But Dickens's minor characters define the ingenuity of counterintuition, pointing toward a suppressed energy that belies the flatness of a minor character. Drawn with care, these characters build alternative, codependent ways of surviving on the edges of the characterological field.

Casting Shadows at Chesney Wold: Empty-House-Time and Realism in the British Novel

Abstract: What insights into literary realism can be found by dwelling in the empty rooms and abandoned spaces of Bleak House, a novel more often read for its representation of overcrowded environments? Traveling between and imaginatively inhabiting empty houses of Charles Dickens's and Virginia Woolf's construction, this article proposes empty-house-time as a distinctive narrative chronotope, one that nineteenth- and twentieth-century British writers use to investigate the processes of realist fiction, especially its affective dimensions. Taking the character-less built environment as a figure for the novel form, the article shows that the chromatic present that characterizes narratives of spaces like Chesney Wold when the Dedlocks are absent throws into flux boundaries between the fictional and the real, the reader and the world of the text, and different modes of imagining. It opens up continuums along which strategies of realist characterization and world-building are dramatized and interrogated. Most powerfully, empty-house-time reveals how affects associated with imagining the world going on without you shape encounters with fiction. Identifying the vital, ongoing existence of unoccupied rooms in Dickens's writing can in turn revitalize studies of the relationship between Victorian and modernist novels and theories of realism. This article concludes by turning to the Ramsays’ abandoned coastal home in To the Lighthouse, in which Woolf, like Dickens, links an interrogation of realist fictionality to a historically specific reimagining of the household.

“Supreme Simplicity”: Reading the Child and Childlike Reading in Henry James's What Maisie Knew

Abstract: By foregrounding the difficulties with reading the child, Henry James's What Maisie Knew reconfigures the relationship between simplicity, transparency, and opacity to create reparative “styles of knowing” in the novel. This article proposes that the difficulty with reading the child is tied to the child as reader; childlike reading in James uses style as an entry point through which to join in with lies, to repair them by making them performatively true. The author suggests that by analyzing texts that challenge the “supreme simplicity” of childhood and expose transparency as a strategy for obfuscation, we can develop a new practice of reading that is capable of interpreting performances of transparency, performances that currently work to deflect suspicious modes of interpretation. This article demonstrates how James's development of a childlike reading practice, which is founded in and embraces interpretative struggle, can provide possible ways forward in this regard.

Kazuo Ishiguro's Non-Actors

Abstract: At center stage in Kazuo Ishiguro's work is the figure of the nonactor: a character type that confronts us time and again with scenarios in which action is devalued. This essay shows that, despite finding themselves in situations that mandate action, Ishiguro's characters opt instead for risk-averse and mechanical-like behaviors that are antonymous to change. This, however, is not a solely aesthetic phenomenon, and the essay examines the figure of the nonactor in Ishiguro's novels as part of a broader turn toward nonaction. It does so by considering this figure in relation to a distinctly twentieth-century context within which, as Hannah Arendt has it, human action came to be seen as more dangerous than ever before. Ishiguro's nonactors can be seen as the legacy, but also as the mutations, of this understanding in our own era and in the contemporary novel. This legacy, the essay demonstrates, reveals an underexamined aspect of the neoliberal mind-set that dominates the post–Cold War world. Rather than promote the worthiness of individual, self-serving action, Ishiguro's novels bring to the forefront something different though no less pernicious: a wholescale devaluation of the individual's capacity to act.

Representing the Planet: Affect, Scale, and Utopia

Abstract: The discourses of planetarity and globalization are both governed by the relationship between the maximal scale of the world and the subsidiary scalar levels that constitute it. However, if in globalization those subsidiary levels are envisioned as converging on a homogenous whole, in planetarity the aim is to maintain them in a dialogic relationality. On the face of it, such a recalibration seems relatively straightforward. However, the three novels discussed in this essay suggest that the retention of the maximal scale as a constituting frame for representation risks forestalling any attempt to move beyond the paradigms of globalization. In both Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City (1969) and Ben Lerner's 10:04 (2015), the relationship between parts and whole takes shape via the medium of affect, as the defining characteristic of the part becomes a desire for the whole that is seemingly destined to extinguish it. Consequently, both novels turn to a formal modeling in which individual and collective can supposedly blend without either suffering reduction—a maneuver also characteristic of many theoretical discussions of planetarity. Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora (2015), in contrast, self-consciously repudiates the possibility of representing the maximal scale, instead prioritizing narrative over the kinds of formal modeling seen in the other texts. This point of difference allows the periodization entailed by the planetary turn to engage with the work of that preeminent theorist of periodization, Fredric Jameson: in particular, with his account of the relationship between spatiality, temporality, and the utopian impulse.

Ralph Ellison's Contemporaneity

Abstract: This article begins by noting that recent debates about the relevance of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man to contemporary American culture enact an opposition between historicism (the idea that the novel is a Jim Crow artifact) and universalism (the idea that it transcends the circumstances of its production). The author then argues that Ellison's novel models a contemporaneity that cannot be equated to either the assertion or disavowal of contemporaneousness. At the heart of this account stands the narrator's sense that he “must emerge,” which follows from his perception that he has failed to communicate the nature of his invisibility to his reader, and that his act of writing has therefore disarmed him. The article shows that the narrator's emergence—an event that is necessitated by the narrative but which the narrative, by the very logic of that necessity, cannot itself contain—constitutes the hinge between the textual temporality of his underground existence and the social temporality that abuts it. As such, it offers the possibility that these two temporalities—which may be thought of as referring to the temporality of writing and the temporality of reading, respectively—may be linked, and that this linkage could lead to forms of recognition that appear only at the limit of narrative form.

Ruth Ozeki's Floating World: A Tale for the Time Being's Spiritual Oceanography

Abstract: This essay explores the intertwined oceanographic and spiritual imaginations structuring Ruth Ozeki's novel A Tale for the Time Being, which she rewrote in the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. A Tale for the Time Being's new, metafictional frame story dramatizes a citizen-science response to marine debris and theorizes marine science as a mode of witnessing and a mode of reading. Furthermore, by bringing her depictions of marine science into conversation with the Zen Buddhist practice of not-knowing, Ozeki meditates upon the idea that attempts to know or understand necessarily mean coexisting with what cannot be known, discovered, or recovered.

Fiction Cares: J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man

Abstract: J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man considers “care” in contemporary liberal-capitalist societies, including the ostensibly frivolous care of and care for literature. In contrast to grander affects and occupations, care often seems to be “just care,” as if it fails to live up to certain criteria of reality in much the same way that one says something is “just fiction.” If in its literary investigation of such serious issues as disability, aging, and immigration, Slow Man turns into a reflection on the ontology of fiction, this is not mere metafictional frivolity—for care shares the disparaged form of fiction. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello writings, of which Slow Man appears to be the last, advocate in fiction an “ethics of care.” They are concerned with modes of attention that lack the categorical determinacy of the discourse of rights and of justice and are instead characterized by what I propose to call “justness.” In this light, the novel can be read as examining the skepticism and disappointment with which, on account of this justness, earnest pleas for an ethics of care, or apologies for fiction, are met. The advocacy of care, as of fiction, requires not only good will but also good humor, even if this comes at the cost of being taken seriously. Accordingly, Slow Man proves to be one of the most heavy-going but also lighthearted of Coetzee's novels. It is, after all, “just a joke.”

On Gathering: Or, The Birth of Global Fiction from the Spirit of Tragedy

Abstract: This article examines how certain works of global fiction have conceived of their ethical and political agency through the form and act of gathering. Discussions of the global novel's relationship to collective life have often adapted the ideas of Benedict Anderson in order to suggest that contemporary fiction extends “imagined community” from the nation to the globe. Yet political theorists such as Wendy Brown have shown how global economic integration under neoliberalism comes at the price of national social disintegration. In search of a collective imaginary outside the terms of global integration and nationalist resurgence, this article looks to the 1930s (rather than 1990s) as an origin point for global fiction, finding in “British” works attuned to the disintegration of the liberal world-system a model of fiction's agency relevant for neoliberal times. Works by Mulk Raj Anand, Virginia Woolf, and, later, Zadie Smith respond to social and political disintegration by insisting upon fiction's capacity to gather together a disparate audience; and they suggest how gatherings afford an unbounded, eventual, and non-sovereign arrangement of collective life within the ruins of global modernity.

The Mob: J. G. Ballard's Turn to the Collective

Abstract: The article identifies a shift in J. G. Ballard's work from a preoccupation with the individual to a preoccupation with the collective. It reads Ballard's late fiction as being part of a wider turn in the culture of Western, neoliberal states toward a reignition of a spirit of collectivism. With Ballard's work, this is most striking in the novels' depiction of neoliberal societies themselves, and so the essay begins with a treatment of how they are figured. What emerges from this is that Ballard's depiction of potentially new collective forms of life is at once utopian and dystopian. In fact, the dystopian elements identified lead on to a much deeper trait of the work. That is the reactionary tendency to portray the collective as a violent mob, which, as is demonstrated, has a long history and an increasingly prominent present.

Affective Entropy: Cultural Difference and the Decline of Wonder on Ivu'ivu

Abstract: Situated at the intersection of postcolonialism and affect studies, this essay explores the significance of wonder in Hanya Yanagihara's The People in the Trees (2013). In her novel, Yanagihara provides a detailed account of an anthropological expedition to the remote Micronesian island of Ivu'ivu, where a “lost tribe” is rumored to be living. As is typical of such discovery narratives, the affective response of wonder initially dominates the discourse. Over time, however, this sense of wonder is transformed into the more durable feeling of curiosity, which in turn initiates a dialectical interplay of opposites—bringing together the familiar and the strange, the legible and the opaque, the boring and the fascinating. Although the narrator, Norton Perina, does everything he can to sustain this dialectic, the attenuated form of wonder that drives his curiosity eventually dissipates, giving rise to a debilitating sense of apathy and indifference. This is a process that occurs not once but three times within the narrative—under quite different circumstances in each case. In the first instance, the trajectory belongs to the category of the ethnographic; in the second, it acquires a broader postcolonial significance; and finally, in the novel's tragic conclusion, readers are exposed to its potential psychological consequences, as a displaced sense of “wonder” resurfaces in the pathological form of a pedophilic encounter.

Live for Me: Vicarious Experience and Aesthetic Education in The Ambassadors and Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

Abstract: A capacity for vicarious experience is one of Lambert Strether's most celebrated characteristics, apparent not only in his famous injunction to Little Bilham to “live all you can,” but also in his more general attitude toward Chad Newsome's life in Paris, which he proposes, at one point, to regard as a substitute for his own youth. This incorrigible tendency to live his life through the experiences of others might seem to conflict with the goals of Bildung or aesthetic education, since, if nothing else, the experiences that constitute such an education ought surely to be one's own. But although the bildungsroman as a genre is often thought to be concerned with the formation of an individual subject, the concept of Bildung articulated by Goethe and his Weimar associates in the 1790s in fact assigns a particular importance to the idea of vicarious experience. In the archetypal bildungsroman, for instance, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Wilhelm's education is not complete until he can see himself as a “representative of the species,” in Schiller's phrase, and thus seek consolation for his own limitations in the achievements of other human beings. In this perspective, James's portrait of a “man of imagination” whose education consists in imagining the experiences of others is not a deviation from the tradition of the bildungsroman but a realization of one of the genre's originary possibilities.

Letters and the Contemporary Novel: Materiality and Metaphor in Ian McEwan's The Children Act

Abstract: Daily communication today is predominantly digital, but contemporary novels continue to be interested in paper letters. Why? What do letters, written on paper, offer to the novel in the twenty-first century? This essay explores the material letter's contemporary value as metaphor, reading as a case study Ian McEwan's The Children Act. McEwan's novel dramatizes a conflict between religion and the secular law, which is an example of the type of dispute that Jean-François Lyotard identifies in The Differend: a dispute that is unresolvable because the process for regulating it is unable to register the wrong that one side suffers. In their different modes, these two texts consider intractable conflict and the ethics of its regulation, the workings of which are analyzed here through the suggestive correspondences between the dynamics of Lyotard's differend and those of letters. These correspondences derive, this essay argues, from the letter's material properties, which underlie its ability to function as metaphor. The letter's temporal structure of delay and the silences and instability that delay produces, in particular, have productive affinities with the workings of the differend. These correspondences help to delineate the conflicts of The Children Act and to reveal the value of the letter as metaphor more generally. This case study presents an example of the letter as a metaphorical resource, whose possibilities are distinct from those of digital communications and whose flexibility and nuance help to account for contemporary novels' continued interest in the letter.

Jewett in the Systems Epoch

Abstract: This article focuses on Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, the most famous example of the realist genre of local color. Published in 1898, the novel was written during the very moment of the generic collapse of local color. That collapse occurs within the literary system, in which any work of literature is enfolded—the functionally differentiated system that comprises writers, readers, genres, styles, the critical apparatus, and the publishing apparatus. As Firs stages the death of a small Maine community, it models its own death as a generic instance within the literary system. Firs both encodes and observes the gradual denaturing and collapse of its own classical-realist premises, which cannot abide the drawing into equivalence of character, interiority, and interpersonal communication with the inhuman formalism of systems. In the wake of the collapse of its classical-realist premises, the novel offers a final, speculative vision of a realism for the systems epoch.

Liberalism and Inner Life: The Curious Cases of Mansfield Park and Villette

Abstract: This article takes up two famously disliked nineteenth-century novels—Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Charlotte Brontë's Villette—and argues that they are dissatisfying to readers because their protagonists fail to cohere as liberal subjects around a legible interior realm. Mansfield Park initially offers its east room as a spatial analogue for Fanny Price's interior, but it gradually revokes narrative access to the space in order to defer wholly to external status markers. Likewise, Villette's Lucy Snowe creates architectural constructions as a means of representing her inner realm to an outside world. However, each instance results in an impossible space that fails to establish the contours of Lucy's interior. The article reads the failures of subjectivation in the two novels in light of critical accounts that link the nineteenth-century novel to liberalism, a link that is often established through a shared emphasis on the interior. It thus examines what could come next once such a link is broken: a reevaluation of the default political perspective of the nineteenth-century novel but also a renewed understanding of the variety of subjective forms that liberalism is able to capture.

Temporality and the Unconfident Heroine in Henry James's The Golden Bowl

Abstract: Readers traditionally associate heroism with risk and confidence in one's abilities. Yet within the realist tradition, Henry James creates a portrait of an unconfident heroine. The Golden Bowl's Maggie Verver demonstrates she has the ability to become an effective actor, and she can be read as a special case within the underdog character type. Despite being caught in a deception plot, she surprises readers with the pleasure of a “win” by developing a specific know-how that relies on reading temporal tensions. The article uses theoretical work on temporality by Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Lacan, and Alain Badiou to explore how Maggie's confidence and courage emerge from the depths of anxiety and how this process allows James to create a narrative in which the reader learns to gauge and appreciate human action in process.

Untimely Love: The Aesthetics and Politics of Anachronism in The Age of Innocence

Abstract: “Untimely Love” reassesses the aesthetic choices and political implications of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920), first by highlighting a surprising overlap between Wharton and the anarcho-feminist Emma Goldman. Wharton's novelistic critique of New York society's marriage rituals, spurred by an unconsummated affair between Newland Archer and his wife's cousin Ellen Olenska, follows Goldman in positing an antagonism between the hierarchies of marriage and the equalizing nature of love. For Wharton, however, this antagonism will not be resolved with free love one day triumphing. To explain her position, the article turns to Jacques Rancière's unresolvable antagonism between “politics” and “the police,” which has an aesthetic analogue in the clash between the formally anarchic modern novel and premodern hierarchies of genre. Wharton unearths 1870s New York like an archeologist to expose how its patriarchal logic polices women's sexuality within and outside marriage, making expressions of love quite rare. Wharton unleashes the disruptive power of love through formal experimentation, temporarily subverting her own historical realism, when she has Ellen and Archer visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park, which did not yet exist in the novel's timeframe. The Met's impossible location and its uncataloged holdings open to public viewing upset New York's social and aesthetic hierarchies. It is in this anachronistic and democratic context that Archer first sees “love visible” in the world, rearranging his entire worldview. Wharton, in a related political gesture of aesthetic dissensus, aligns her untimely lovers with the museum's suddenly visible ghosts of history.