Showing papers in "Studies in The Novel in 2014"

Sleep and Sleep-watching in Dickens: The Case of Barnaby Rudge

Abstract: When William Powell Frith unveiled his portrait of Charles Dickens at the Royal Academy in May 1859, his fellow artist Edwin Landseer was taken aback by the sense of uncanny wakefulness that the author's image seems to radiate: "I wish he looked less eager and busy, and not so much out of himself, or beyond himself. I should like to catch him asleep and quiet now and then" (Forster 162). But the alternative portrait that Landseer sketches in his mind's eye, in which the pretematurally wakeful novelist would be restored by sleep to the proper confines of his body, seems almost unthinkable. A lifelong insomniac and hyperactive nocturnal flaneur, Dickens is the last novelist you would expect to find "asleep and quiet." What is more, Dickens understands nights spent "glaringly, persistently, and obstinately, broad awake" ("Lying Awake" 89) to be among the formative conditions of possibility of his writing. It is with a certain rueful exuberance that in such essays as "Lying Awake" and "Night Walks" he becomes a founding member of the writer-as-insomniac school of modern literature, a school whose illustrious alumni include Proust, Kafka, and Nabokov, all of whom are grimly happy to trade the collective mediocrity of slumber for solitary privileges of high literary style. (1) One of those privileges is the vantage point that insomnia gives the writer on the sleep of others. Somnolent bodies are everywhere in Dickens, simultaneously taunting the author with glimpses of the restful state from which he is excluded and flattering him with confirmation of his tenaciously unbroken sentience. Critics have had relatively little to say about Dickens's quirky obsession with sleeping bodies. (2) It took a scientist, the neurologist J. E. Cosnett, to notice that Dickens is a systematic "Observer of Sleep and its Disorders" whose evocations of human slumber are remarkable for their physiological vividness and accuracy. Cosnett treats Dickens's fiction as a veritable sleep laboratory in which all the clinical symptoms of disturbed slumber--hypnic jerks, restless leg syndrome, sleep paralysis, obstructive sleep apnea--are exhibited by his somnolent characters several decades before the discourse of modern sleep medicine began to take shape. Of course when Dickens observes sleep and its disorders he does so with a decidedly unscientific emphasis on what is funny rather than what is empirically observable or measurable in the sleeping body. Exemplary in this regard is the heroically somnolent Joe, the so-called "Fat Boy" in The Pickwick Papers, a kind of narcoleptic anti-Dickens who marks his entrance into the novel by falling asleep seven times in as many pages (46-52). Joe typifies Dickens's sense of sleep as an affair of farcical nontranscendence in which our higher faculties submit, bumblingly and bathetically, to the primitive needs of our bodies. The comedy lies not simply in the banal triumph of the body over the mind, but in what you might call the unexpected social life of the sleeper, the idiosyncratic social presence that we may continue to have in our own psychological absence. The mysterious psychological vanishing-act of sleep has long puzzled philosophers, but the sleeper is still undeniably there, stranded at the "complicated cross-roads of choke and snore" ("Night Walks" 134), where s/he is dumbly available for inspection by a writer who is no respecter of the privacy of slumber--and there for the taking as a potential object of laughter or figure of fun. Typical of Dickens's sense of the comic possibilities of sleep is his satirical jeu d'esprit "Snoring for the Million," which appeared in the Examiner in December 1842. A parody of the government's "Singing for the Million" initiative of the 1840s, "Snoring for the Million" sets out detailed recommendations for a nationwide program in which the British people would be systematically educated in the art of sleeping. Sleep, Dickens proposes, will be taught by experts in "hypnology"--his facetious term for the art of inducing sleep without recourse to mesmerism or narcotics--based at a central "school of Snoring for the Million" that will operate six days per week (with Sunday as a rest day) to impart sleeping skills to everyone from establishment grandees to the affluent middle classes to impoverished laborers and artisans. …

Abandoned Creatures: Creaturely Life and the Novel Form in J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man

Abstract: In an often-quoted interview from 1990, J. M. Coetzee describes the relation between his literary work and his life as "a person" in unexpectedly direct terms: Let me add ... that I, as a person, as a personality, am overwhelmed, that my thinking is thrown into confusion and helplessness, by the fact of suffering in the world, and not only human suffering. These fictional constructions of mine are paltry, ludicrous defenses against that being-overwhelmed, and, to me, transparently so. (Doubling 248) Such a plain statement was all the more surprising coming from a writer whose work was, at the time of the interview, routinely categorized as 'metafiction.' It is remarkable that this writer confesses that he is deeply affected by the very thing his fictional work, on an ungenerous but far from uncommon reading, seemed unable to confront directly: "the fact of suffering in the world." Coetzee's statement explicitly connects this affective experience to his writings, which are not to be taken as a failure to acknowledge the affect generated by the fact of worldly suffering, but rather as so many "defenses" against it; his fictions serve as a strategy to contain the "overwhelm[ing]" intensity of the affect. Yet if they manage to mitigate this intensity, they do not neutralize it completely: the defenses constructed by fiction are "paltry, ludicrous." Coetzee's statement not only offers us a glimpse into the affective economy propelling his fiction, it also obliquely registers a limitation of his early work; in this way, it anticipates several of the trajectories that his work will explore after 1990. Coetzee describes his ambition to convey an affective response to suffering, yet he also subtly signals an awareness that his work has failed to do so effectively when he notes that the status of his fictions as "paltry, ludicrous defenses" is a fact, and "to me [Coetzee], transparently so." This phrasing indicates that this understanding of his fiction is less transparent to people other than the author, as the reception of his early work seems to confirm. There are at least two suggestions embedded in this dense passage, both of which are instructive for an understanding of Coetzee's trajectory in the last two decades: first, it announces Coetzee's exploration of different modes of writing that more successfully communicate the affect of suffering, and second, it indicates that two of the notions that will have to be renegotiated in such a writing practice are 'authorship' and 'authority.' Coetzee's fiction in the last two decades has returned time and again to these two closely interlinked projects. The reconsideration of authorship and authority was already central in The Master of Petersburg, the first novel he published after the interview, and it directly implicated the person of Coetzee himself in his three peculiar autobiographical fictions (Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime). And as David Attwell has noted, in Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man, and Diary of a Bad Year, "the practice of authorship itself' has become "[t]he overriding subject" (217); the same can be said about his Nobel lecture, "He and His Man." As for the attempt to convey a more direct affective response to suffering, the publication of Disgrace in 1999 seemed to announce a shift to a markedly more topical and realist register in its merciless depiction of the life of a white man in a post-Apartheid South Africa that has totally erased the terms of the social contract that used to pertain. The outspoken reactions to its depiction of new race relationships, lingering xenophobia, and sexual abuse seemed to signal that Coetzee, without abandoning his signature self-reflexivity, had finally managed to convey and provoke an affective response to the reality of suffering to which his work is committed. It is somewhat surprising, then, that Coetzee's twenty-first-century novels have not continued in this more realist vein. …

Toward a Counter-Poetics of Quixotism

Abstract: One who studies the novel is likely to encounter the problem of quixotism. Anthony Cascardi has written, "there is something quixotic about the novel itself," and, as J. A. G. Ardila has added, "Cervantean novels are some of the best novels ever written in English" (185; 14). These are among the newer formulations of the influential remarks of Ortega y Gasset ("every novel embeds the Quijote within itself like a secret watermark") and Harry Levin QDon Quixote is ... the exemplary novel of all time") (qtd. in Gilman xiv). Few critics would doubt the plausibility of these observations, nor the relevance of these claims to the study of the novel. Yet quixotism remains among the slipperiest and, by virtue of that, most troublesome concepts in literary studies. Like an amalgamation of Dickens's Ghosts of Christmas, the specter of quixotism takes on multiple forms and makes numerous representations, beckoning us to make some productive sense of it in the end. The problem is that "quixotism," "quixotic," and their related terms are used so indiscriminately that they have come to stand in as synonyms for virtually all aspects of Cervantes's prodigious literary influence. Ardila recognizes this problem and attempts at the outset of The Cervantean Heritage: Reception and Influence of Cervantes in Britain to differentiate between "quixotic" ("a narrative which relates the adventures of a Quixote"), "Cervantean" ("when ... form as been influenced ... by Cervantes' novelistic techniques as employed in Don Quixote"), "Cervantic" ("the employment of a quixotic character obsessed with the adventures and stereotypes they have read in romances"), and "Cervantine" (seemingly of or related to Cervantes in general) (11, 13, 16). We can observe, however, that even Ardila's careful differentiations direct us back into the infinite loop of Cervantes-Don Quixote, the signifier "quixotic" pointing to something formally and stylistically of Cervantes, and the signifiers "Cervantean," "Cervantic," and "Cervantine" always referencing the influences of that dominant text in Cervantes's oeuvre, Don Quixote (1605-15). In other words, so long as "quixotic" is predominantly used in literary studies as a taxonomic term to relate some allusive or structural aspect of a text back to Don Quixote as a source-text, "quixotic" will be conflated with an unwieldy array of allusions, authorial devices, and structural components that can be found not merely in that protean group of texts that has come to be known as "quixotic fictions," but in countless other novels for which Don Quixote is perhaps a member of the same species (novel), but a different genus. (1) This essay proposes an exit from the disorienting Cervantes-Don Quixote loop by way of a counter-poetics of quixotism. If achieving something like a poetics of quixotism has been a cumulative project in the literatures-in-English wing of quixote studies--a project that has focused on tracing the influence of Don Quixote on subsequent literatures--a counter-poetics of quixotism aims instead to develop a fuller sense of the character and ideology of quixotism itself, and of quixotic behavior, for consideration of how these are reproduced in novels and prose fictions. I call this approach a counter-poetics because it counters the critical project of categorizing, defining, or theorizing a class of "quixotic" literatures according to formal attributes. (2) Instead of asking whether this or that novel is "quixotic" (or bears characteristics that are "Cervantean," "Cervantic," or "Cervantine"), taking "quixotic" as a taxonomic term used to define a kind of narrative, I would like to ask what is a quixote, what is the character of quixotism, and why else are they important for the study of the novel? Focusing on the distinct character of quixotism is important for the study of the novel largely because, as Vladimir Nabokov so eloquently argued, Don Quixote has been called the greatest novel ever written. …

Walking alone together: Family monsters in the Haunting of Hill House

Abstract: Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there walked alone. - Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (3) Elaine Tyler May has observed that "the legendary family of the 1950s, complete with appliances, station wagons, backyard barbecues, and tricycles scattered on the sidewalks, represented...the first wholehearted effort to create a home that would fulfill virtually all its members' personal needs through an energized and expressive personal life" (11). The energies thus expended in pursuit of such easeful fulfillment were, ironically, volatile, if much of the popular print and screen discourse from that era devoted to promulgating the sacralization of the nuclear family is to be believed. For in the media (if not necessarily in actuality) the iconic households that aspired to keep the outer world at bay were spaces besieged from within—"haunted" is an appropriate metaphor—by family members intent upon usurping complete control over the premises in pursuit of their own whims and desires, thereby undermining the communal basis of the familial model. Overly needy personal lives too self- seeking threatened to usurp all the family's energies unto themselves. Wise, authoritative fathers could become overbearing tyrants; affectionate nurturing mothers could become smotheringly manipulative Moms; and adorably lively children could become egocentric little monsters. The title of one of the many screeds of the time that sounded alarm bells about the perilous consequences of domesticity gone awry provided a concise bestiary of the trio of mythic figures that were allegedly threatening the nation's well-lit living rooms: Dangerous

Double Visions and Aesthetics of the Migratory in Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project

Abstract: An old photograph in a cheap frame hangs on a wall of the room where I work It's a picture dating from 1946 of a house into which, at the time of its taking, I had not yet been born 'The past is a foreign country,' goes the famous opening sentence of LP Hartley's novel The Go-Between, 'they do things differently there' But the photograph tells me to invert this idea; it reminds me that it's my present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time --Salman Rushdie (1) With their memories permanently on overload, exiles see double, feel double, are double Andre Aciman (2) The detection of truth is the necessary goal of all serious literature, but the entire enterprise nonetheless remains an impossible business --W G Sebald (3) Aleksandar Hemon's recent novel, The Lazarus Project (2008), (4) exemplifies a migrant consciousness epitomized by a fractured yet facilitating perspective instigated by the rupture of migration (5) I will explore the ways in which the fragmented consciousness of the migrant finds expression not only in the subject matter of Hemon's novel, but also in its structure, which is characterized by a series of dualities, ruptures, and fractions As such, the novel illustrates both the "experiences of transition as well as the transition of experience itself into new modalities, new art work, new ways of being" (Durrant and Lord 12) (6) Rupture and fragmentation are introduced by Hemon through the inclusion of photography within the narrative structure, initiating a dual--verbal and visual--storyline Given that photographs inherently embody rupture and fragmentation--by means of their subject-matter as well as by their unique representation of time--their inclusion within the framework of the novel underscores the concept of rupture as a central theme of Hemon's work Hemon further explores the rupture lying at the heart of the migratory experience through the creation of a dual time frame, divided between the early twentieth century (the historical story of Lazarus Averbuch as imagined and narrated by Vladimir Brik) and the post-9/11 moment (the fictional story of Vladimir Brik, and his research of Lazarus Averbuch's history) The split time frame is echoed in the structure of the novel, which is divided into alternating chapters, 'historical' chapters relating Lazarus's life, death, and its aftermath, and contemporary chapters, narrating Brik's experiences while researching Lazarus's life Hemon's introduction of two time frames, featuring two displaced ethnic Europeans relocated to Chicago, is another manifestation of his fractured yet enhancing consciousness, while it simultaneously facilitates contemplation of issues seminal to the migratory consciousness, such as memory, loss, dislocation, and the ever elusive question of what constitutes home Subsumed within this fractured time frame is the traversing of the boundaries of fact and fiction, explored through the alternate storylines, which blend historical anecdote (Lazarus Averbuch's history) with fictional accounts (Brik's story) and create further parallels and dualities between narrator (Brik) and subject (Lazarus) Significantly, the author, Hemon, shares many biographical details with his narrator, Vladimir Brik Both are natives of Sarajevo and of Ukrainian Christian origin (yet agnostic); both were stranded in America when war broke out in former Yugoslavia and worked as teachers of English to foreign students; both write a column in a local paper, marry American women, and live in Chicago Yet most pertinently, in a meta-fictional twist, both author and narrator are researching and writing a story about the historical figure Lazarus Averbuch, a young Jewish man who migrated from Europe to Chicago in 1907, following the Kishinev Pogrom (1903) On March 2, 1908, for reasons unknown to this day, Lazarus went to the home of George Shippy, the Chief of Police of Chicago, where he was shot and killed on the spot …

Redefining Shared Narrative in Lisa Fugard's Skinner's Drift and Zoë Wicomb's Playing in the Light

Abstract: Questions of ownership occupy a central place in recent South African fiction. On one hand, novelists seek ways to develop a new sense of ownership for those dispossessed by racism and poverty. Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), K. Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001), Kgebetli Moele's Room 207 (2006), Kopano Matlwa's Coconut (2007), and Sifiso Mzobe's Young Blood (2010) exemplify this concern. On the other hand, numerous writers struggle to own up to the history of apartheid in the face of the denials that characterized the apartheid system. Thus, while literary critics have celebrated the freedom to explore a broader range of subjects than apartheid and its legacies (see, for example, Chapman; Frenkel and MacKenzie), a dominant strain in the fiction of the past fifteen years has nevertheless returned to the violence of the past in order to analyze the nuances of guilt and responsibility. Yet paradoxically, such efforts to confront a history of violence often end in reinscribing a desire for control over that history. Emphasizing a commonality of experience, many of these novels deflect attention from different ways of experiencing the same events and ongoing inequalities that underlie such differences. In 2000, Michiel Heyns analyzed how several confessional narratives by white writers, including Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples (1993) and Jo-Anne Richards's The Innocence of Roast Chicken (1998), exculpated their protagonists--and by extension the white beneficiaries of apartheid-while seemingly acknowledging the varied forms of complicity apartheid had engendered. Novels with more complex approaches to guilt and responsibility have sometimes left the same blind spots. Published in the first decade of the new millennium, Jann Turner's Southern Cross (2002), Sarah Penny's The Beneficiaries (2002), which was well reviewed by Heyns, and Rachel Zadok's highly praised debut Gem Squash Tokoloshe (2005) explore the interconnections between privilege, oppression, and culpability as a means of taking ownership for the authors' own complicities. But each ultimately relegates questions of responsibility to the past. These texts illustrate a pervasive desire to reclaim individual and collective feelings of belonging through shared narratives of the past and its implications; yet they also reveal how that desire for belonging can entrench further divisions. Lisa Fugard's Skinner's Drift and Zoe Wicomb's Playing in the Light, both published in 2006 by expatriate South African writers, explore alternatives to this quandary. This is not to suggest that Fugard and Wicomb are the only South African writers to grapple with the importance and risks of shared narrative as a foundation for reconciliation. Their approaches to this issue position them within a literary community that includes authors such as J. M. Coetzee and Achmat Dangor, who interrogate "the idea that past trauma may be wrapped up and put to rest" and acknowledge that "remembered violence does not necessarily lead to reconciliation" (Barnard 659-60). Like their contemporaries, Fugard and Wicomb insist on the importance of excavating traces of the past in order to create new narratives for the future. But they consider how predicating reconciliations on shared accounts of the past can oversimplify the complexities of the present. Taken together, the novels intimate that shared narratives with the power to build new relationships require ceding control over the limits of one's story in a necessarily incomplete responsibility for the voices of others--the stories they have to tell, the experiences they have undergone, and the conditions in which they live. At the same time, Wicomb complicates this vision. She explores the ways in which an ethics of self-dispropriation, whereby a person is dispossessed of his or her identity in order to enact hospitality toward someone else, wars with the need for those who still face unequal opportunities to reappropriate their identities and surroundings. …

Feminism, Vegetarianism, and Colonial Resistance in Eighteenth-Century British Novels

Abstract: Contrary to accepted belief, a vegetarian discourse replete with religious, medical, and moral arguments emerged during the eighteenth century. Moreover, anti-meat utterances, whenever they occurred, were often politically charged--shot through with questions regarding the status of women, animals, and vegetarian "Hindoos" (Regan 15). Until recently, most histories of vegetarianism paid little attention to the eighteenth century, making only passing reference to it and reserving rigorous explication of the discourse for the mid-nineteenth century and later. A few anthologies, however, went a step further and assembled canonical eighteenth-century statements on the issue but stopped short of treating them as literary phenomena. (1) This belated attention to the proto-vegetarianism of the eighteenth century is not surprising given that the word "vegetarian" was not coined until 1847, and vegetarianism did not find its institutional expression until 1849 with the founding of Great Britain's Vegetarian Society. (2) Figuring prominently into this proto-vegetarian discourse are British perceptions of India. In eighteenth-century writings on India, the vegetarianism of the Hindus was at first considered a curiosity and later as evidence of racial inferiority. The English had associated their own hearty consumption of beef with military superiority. (3) But now (as we shall see in the writings of Dow, Orme, Falconer, and others) they were associating beef-eating with superiority over not just military rivals but colonial subjects like the East Indians, who were, according to William Smellie's 1791 Philosophy of Natural History, a "meager, sick, and feeble race" due to their vegetarian diet (144). A vegetable diet, it was thought, contributed to weakness, indolence, and military ineptitude and, consequently, races like the East Indians were destined for subordination. But such politicized colonial discourse soon gave rise to its obverse. Female novelists like Phebe Gibbes in Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) and Eliza Hamilton in Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796) opposed the denigration of the vegetarian other by contributing to an incipient feminist-vegetarian discourse (a discourse more explicit in the essays of contemporaries like Catharine Macaulay and Mary Hays). Both created a voice of female-centered authority in the literature of romantic orientalism, a voice of authority from which to critique the imperial project. They inevitably noticed an important fact about India that makes it unique among the world's cultures: vegetarianism was a normative feature of the culture. Critics have been divided over whether these novels support or criticize the imperialist project and over the extent to which they critique structures of class, race, and gender in Great Britain. One thing is certain--both defend the colonial administration of Warren Hastings and the East India Company. Mona Narain finds in Hamilton's novel such strong support for a paternalistic vision of a "benevolent English empire" that any critique of patriarchy is compromised (598). Claire Grogan, on the other hand, asserts that Hamilton's critique of patriarchy is alive and well, as evidenced by her creation of an "alternative female discourse of the East--one that contributes to and contests the field of Orientalism" (29). Gibbes, too, explores a new discursive space in her creation of Sophia Goldbourne, a voice of moral authority on the East who speaks the language of sensibility. In what follows, I first establish how the imperial discourse surrounding vegetarianism reflects a gendered language of emasculation. Next, I examine Hamilton's and Gibbe's novels as critical responses. Such responses, when read through a feminist viewpoint, can be understood as contributing to the emergence of a modern, politically self-conscious vegetarian discourse. These novels, through their encounter with the vegetarian other, express sensitivity to the parallel oppression of women and animals in a patriarchal culture. …

How to Write Yiddish in English, or Israel Zangwill and Multilingualism in Children of the Ghetto

Abstract: In 1888, an Orthodox English-language newspaper, the Jewish Standard, published an article series, "Jews in Fiction," that looked critically at Jewish characters in English literature. The series began with Sir Walter Scott's Isaac of York, then featured Benjamin Disraeli's Sidonia and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. After critiquing Fagin and Riah, the April 20th column conjectured what it might look like for Charles Dickens to use his "magician's wand" to write a more nuanced treatment of everyday Jewish life: How he would have reveled in the description of the ostentation, the generosity, the kindliness, the harshness, the thousand and one contradictions to be found in our fellow-Jews and Jewesses. [How he would have treated] ... Mr. and Mrs. Z--, with all their children--how they went to synagogue Saturday morning gorgeously attired.... Then Dickens would describe how the family go home to luncheon, a better luncheon most likely than on weekdays, because paterfamilias is at home. How our author would revel over the fried fish and various orthodox dainties. (3) Envisioning Jewish life through the lens of an outside observer, the columnist's flight of fancy focuses more on the imagined pleasure Dickens would take in the spectacle, how he would "revel" in the scene, than on the interior lives of the Jewish characters. The writer then exclaims, "Shade of Dickens! would that your mantle might descend on my shoulders, that I might worthily describe all this." The irony is, of course, that the writer has just described this scene, but as the imagined Dickens. This passage from the Jewish Standard dramatizes the pressure of external Jewish stereotypes on the self-conception of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish community. In the very act of portraying this community, the columnist negates the act by calling upon Dickens to make the anonymous columnist a worthy narrator for depicting Jewish life. On one level, this negation seems to present an ambivalence about the potential for Jewish authorship and literature. Yet the writer also imagines Dickens relishing the material culture of Anglo-Jewish life and finding charm in its difference from the English everyday: the synagogue, the fried fish, the "orthodox dainties." The writer in effect calls for a Jewish Dickens, a persona that is both English and Jewish. At the time of this column's printing, Israel Zangwill--the man who would later be called the "Jewish Dickens"--was subeditor of the Jewish Standard and writing a satiric column about Anglo-Jewish life called "Morour and Charouseth." (1) Born to immigrants from czarist Russia in 1864 and raised in London's East End, Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill became famous for his realistic depiction of Jewish East End life in his 1892 novel Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People, which was considered the foremost representation of Jewish life in both Great Britain and the United States. Zangwill was a transatlantic celebrity in his time and a political activist in the international Jewish community. He has, however, been largely marginalized in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, arguably in the first instance because of his opposition to a Jewish state in Palestine. Critic Meri-Jane Rochelson has worked to correct misconceptions about Zangwill and to make him a central figure of Victorian studies. In A Jew in the Public Arena, Rochelson critiques scholars like Joseph Udelson who reduce Zangwill's world view to one divided between assimilation in the West and Orthodoxy elsewhere. She also critiques readings that represent tensions and inconsistencies in Zangwill's work as evidence of his ambivalence toward his Jewish identity. Instead, she sees these inconsistencies as a pragmatic response to lived situations: she writes, "By insisting upon both sides of his identity, his Jewishness and his Englishness, Zangwill made choices that are indeed emblematic of those faced by many in his generation and later . …

"Laura was not thinking": Cognitive Minimalism in Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes

Abstract: Sylvia Townsend Warner is one of the most curious literary figures to rise to prominence in England in the 1920s. A prolific writer, Warner wrote seven novels, hundreds of short stories, thousands of letters, and kept an extensive diary for most of her adult life. Lolly Willowes (1926), her first novel, became a bestseller and the first selection of the "Book-of-the-Month" Club. (1) She remains, nonetheless, a peripheral figure for literary studies of the period, which tend to focus on more easily recognizable modernist formal experiments. For Gillian Beer, Warner "abuts the Modernist" by virtue of her use of "surreal appositions, nonsense, narrative fractures, and shifting scales" (77). The most significant "surreal apposition" of Lolly Willowes is that the first half reads much like a realist novel concerned with a timely issue. Laura Willowes, upon the death of her father, is taken in by her brother and his family whom she lives with as a spinster (aunt "Lolly") for many years. The novel explores the familial and societal forces that prevent Laura from determining the course of her life, a social problem of particular concern at the time of its writing, when the Great War left a decimated male population imbalanced by the number of unmarried or widowed women. But the latter half of Lolly Willowes has more in common with the "fantasy" novel that enjoyed a surge of popularity in the 1920s. (2) Decades later, during middle age, Laura decides abruptly to move to a remote village in the country. She realizes that she is a witch and makes a pact with Satan, who makes a number of appearances within the novel. But as Jane Marcus observes, albeit ironically, "everything that happens in Lolly Willowes can be explained naturally, if the mind is so inclined" (157). While critics have uniformly seen the apparent generic shift as the most noticeable feature of Lolly Willowes, there has been little consensus about whether to call the novel literal or fantastic, realist or modernist. (3) I want to turn away from the generic shift for a while and suggest another route by which we can approach Warner's position among the categories of literary comprehensibility. In what follows, I will argue that one of the most experimental yet underexplored features of Lolly Willowes is that the protagonist frequently and markedly does not think. (4) The plot of the novel hinges on the mental actions of Laura's deciding to move and realizing she is a witch. Yet in passages describing her mental life, Laura often has a blank mind, minimal sensation, or only an occasional word or phrase in her head. The peculiarly "thoughtless" Laura stands apart from the murky inwardness so frequently attributed to the modernist protagonist. The "critical orthodoxy" surrounding modernist fiction, Patricia Waugh has recently written, sees it "almost exclusively identified with the defensive and deceptive, the unreliable and darkly inconceivable, the introspective plumbing of unconscious depths, the probing of self-deceptions, desires and obscure drives and the self dramatizations that hide characters from themselves and their best-laid plans" (85). But emerging approaches under the umbrella term of "cognitive literary studies" are beginning to rethink the reliance on such tropes for understanding literary minds, even minds at their least transparent. (5) As Waugh suggests, "we need a better account of the modernist mind" (85). Reading Lolly Willowes for its depiction of thinking provides not just a new vantage on Warner's novel but also a connection to the modernist experimentation from which she might otherwise seem to stand apart. Rather than abutting the traditionally modernist, Lolly Willowes provides a new way of understanding modernism's "inwardness" starting at the lowest thresholds of cognition--thinking in a narrow band of time. The novel's cognitive minimalism forms the basis of an account of the modernist mind informed by the cognitive sciences and centered on literary renderings of simple mental functions, rather than obscure recesses. …

The Citizen's Progress: Irony, Agency, and the Evolution of the Bildungsroman in Américo Paredes's George Washington Gómez

Abstract: From the moment of its belated publication, (1) the formal unorthodoxies of Americo Paredes's George Washington Gomez have captured the attention of its readers and critics. In his introduction to the first published edition of the novel, Rolando Hinojosa apologetically remarks: "[ijt's a first draft, and it should be seen as an historical work, not as an artifact" (5). Hinojosa's separation of the historical and the literary, the factual and the artifactual, suggests a model of literary production and critical reception in which the novel's purported shortcomings with respect to what he seems to consider the temporally autonomous rules of aesthetic form result in an imperfect structuring of historical content. No doubt this impulse to separate history and aesthetics stems from Paredes's own determination to publish the novel unrevised, in the form he had left it more than half a century before. (2) But if we take seriously the notion that, in so doing, Paredes was presenting, as he describes it in the novel's acknowledgments, an "archeological piece" (3), a different sense of the relation between literary form and the operations of ideology emerges. Thus understood, we do better to view George Washington Gomez less as a draft than as a record of the aesthetic possibilities available at a particular historical moment for negotiating that moment's ideological conflicts. Indeed, we might better say, at two particular historical moments. For if the formal structure of the book Paredes composed in the late thirties/early forties responds to one set of historical needs, his decision in 1990 to publish it as it was indicates an evolved interest, from the vantage of the cultural historian, in the issues. The novel's aesthetic possibilities, framed with respect to their moment of production, provide, in Michael McKeon's formulation about genre, following Claudio Guillen, "a problem-solving model on the level of form" (McKeon 1). As such they limn the conditions of possibility for agency and subjectivity at the moment of the novel's composition. (3) Their deployment fifty years later marks Paredes's interest in the broader, ongoing dynamics of the Mexican-American subject. Subsequent critics have been somewhat more integrated in approaching the problem of form and content while nevertheless keeping the issue of their relation at the center of concern. The majority of these have closed the gap by asserting that, far from being somehow inadequate to its representational content, the novel's form is a manifestation of the ideological operations it represents. For Hector Perez, for example, the novel inflects the form of the Bildungsroman with a naturalism that is ultimately antithetical to the genre--with the result of ultimately circumscribing the protagonist's agency. Similarly, Maria Josefina Saldana-Portillo sees the protagonist's subject formation as irreconcilably riven by the conceptual reductions that occur when a complicated Mexican racial economy is translated into the relatively less complicated, though no less discriminatory, US one. Likewise, for Christopher Schedler, "[t]he ever present gap in narrative meaning and sense of absence within the apparently unified subject points to the impossibility of closure for George G. Gomez's identity or for Americo Paredes' novel" (Schedler 172). And Leif Sorenson's excellent reading of the novel stakes out yet another version of this homology between "failed" form and ideological unrest: "Each option, I contend, misses the mark, effacing Paredes's critique of both forms [corrido and Bildungsroman] and the subjectivities they produce. In my view, Paredes's rejection of both forms represents the conditions of cultural emergence with uncompromising rigor." He concludes that "[w]e must face the disturbing realization that by the end of the novel, Chicano/a literary emergence seems impossible" (Sorensen 114, 135). Various as their particular foci and concerns are, the majority of readings of the novel share a couple of clear, though not always explicitly asserted, suppositions. …

"Being Myriad, One": Melville and the Ecological Sublime in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses

Abstract: Since the 1970s, environmental ethicists and deep ecologists have devoted increasing attention to the relationship between ethics, ontology, and the environment. However, these examinations are by no means new; many of the ideas that are now being bandied about in the fields of environmental philosophy and ethics have roots in an ecocentric metaphysics that burgeoned during (but also predates) British and American Romanticism. Herman Melville and William Faulkner are inheritors of these traditions, and through their extensive ruminations upon the natural world and their employment of sublime encounters in Moby-Dick (1851) and Go Down, Moses (1942), both Melville and Faulkner ask a simple but pressing question: What, if anything, can we learn about ethics from our interactions with the environment? The connections between Moby-Dick and Go Down, Moses are not the product of mere speculation. In 1927, Faulkner told the book editor of the Chicago Tribune, "I think that the book which I put down with the unqualified thought T wish I had written that' is Moby Dick" ("To the Book Editor" 197). Additionally, Faulkner has said in interviews that he read Moby-Dick every four or five years and that he was reading it to his daughter Jill while writing and revising Go Down, Moses (Lion in the Garden 48, 110). Rick Wallach suggests that Moby-Dick is the-"parent text" to "The Bear" and, more broadly, Go Down, Moses, and as such critics should consider the intertextual dialogue between the two works (43). Reprising Joseph Campbell's theorization of archetypes and Harold Bloom's notion of influence and daemonization, Wallach argues that Faulkner purposefully draws upon and ultimately surpasses the literary and mythic power of Moby-Dick. Given the similarities between Moby-Dick and Go Down, Moses as well as Faulkner's repeated praise of Melville, it seems worthwhile to extend considerations of the sublime, especially as conceived by Melville, for an analysis of Go Down, Moses. The fact that Faulkner may not have read all of the foundational figures, such as Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, who developed sublime theory, is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. We know that Melville read these figures and that Faulkner read Melville frequently and perhaps even obsessively. Therefore, through Melville, Faulkner is heir to a sublime tradition that flowered during the period of American Romanticism, and, regardless of whether he was fully aware of his position within this lineage, Faulkner employs and extends this particular iteration of the sublime in Go Down, Moses. Several ecocritical scholars, including Bart H. Welling, Louise Westling, William Howarth, and Lawrence Buell, have recently discussed Go Down, Moses relative to environmental ethics, but no one has provided an extended analysis of Faulkner's use of the sublime and its significance for this conception of ethics. While Susan V. Donaldson argues that Faulkner "generally resorted to the vocabulary of the romantic sublime when he talked about the ideals that shaped his role as an artist" (359), she does not utilize sublime theory to examine Go Down, Moses. Neglecting to study sublime theory alongside Faulkner's fiction, particularly Go Down, Moses, represents a critical gap in the recent greening of Faulkner studies; (1) this gap is particularly significant given Faulkner's investment in a Romantic tradition that relied heavily upon sublime theory when investigating the connections between human and nonhuman systems. Therefore, examining Faulkner's relationship to the sublime is imperative for our critical understanding of Go Down, Moses, in which instances of the sublime, especially Melville's reconfigurations of the sublime, are pervasive. For Ishmael and Isaac McCaslin, (2) the confrontation with the sublime results in an egalitarian vision wherein they imagine the interconnectedness and interdependency of all people and all earthly materiality. This trajectory of the sublime experience has been criticized for engendering a highly idealized, and even utopian, vision of humans' interactions with the environment. …

Ontology and Narrative Technique in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled

Abstract: The Unconsoled (1995), Kazuo Ishiguro's fourth novel, received decidedly mixed reviews at first, some reviewers declaring it a masterpiece, others a failure, but all agreeing that it is a deeply enigmatic work. (1) The story is unmistakably dreamlike, but readers are puzzled about the ontological status of events narrated: is the narrator, Ryder, literally dreaming? Does he suffer from amnesia, dementia, or some other mental disability? Does he inhabit some alternate reality, and if so, of what sort? The explanations that Ishiguro himself has offered to interviewers address these questions but have failed to settle them unambiguously. Critics have found it notoriously difficult to formulate even the most basic description of the plot without distorting it. Natalie Reitano, for instance, describes Ryder as "beset by an amnesia he barely acknowledges" (361), and Barry Lewis begins his plot description, Ryder, an internationally acclaimed concert pianist, is the victim of an inexplicable amnesia. He arrives on a Tuesday at an unnamed town, somewhere in the heart of Europe, without a schedule. But this is not just another venue on his tour: it is the home of his partner, Sophie, and child, Boris, facts that have curiously slipped his mind. (104) But these descriptors require qualification. If Ryder is simply a victim of amnesia, why does Sophie's father, Gustav, not recognize him? And if he has lived with Sophie in this town (and at one point he has vague memories of their apartment [283-84]), why is he known only by reputation to the musical elite of the town who have invited him to perform? In the three-stage argument that follows, I first address what has been the major interpretive puzzle about this novel, namely the ontological status of its characters and events. In my view, the events are not those of a proper dream to be related to some ulterior reality; rather, they belong to a world in which events and the main character's psychological reactions operate as they do in a dream, but which is itself the ultimate reality. The second section discusses the narrative challenges of describing such a dreamworld and the techniques of "oneiric realism" which the author has devised to meet those challenges. The final section argues that in this narrative mode the concept of narratorial consistency and reliability as well as the moral responsibility of the characters must be reexamined and explains why this mode is particularly well suited to Ishiguro's stated intentions in the novel. Ontology in The Unconsoled The dreamlike quality of The Unconsoled has naturally invited psychoanalytic interpretations. Since Freud, literature and film have created a genre of works whose plots include some act of detection involving the discovery of an amnesiac's identity and personal history through the interpretation of dreams. Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound is a paradigm case: in this film Gregory Peck plays an amnesiac who has reason to believe that he has committed a murder; Ingrid Bergman is a psychiatrist who discovers by interpretation of one of his dreams that he is innocent and that he instead suffers from a guilt complex deriving from the repressed memory of a childhood accident that killed his brother. Her interpretation consists of identifying events in the amnesiac's real life corresponding to their coded counterparts in the dream imagery and, on the basis of this encryption, diagnosing her patient's psychological affliction. Similarly, readers of The Unconsoled repeatedly search for some reality behind the dreamlike surface of the plot. An early reviewer says, For as the tale progresses Mr. Ishiguro artfully points to the fact that alongside the dream-story of Ryder's European sojourn exists another story, Ryder's real story. While Ryder grapples with the complications of his schedule, Sophie and Boris, incidental characters--the daughter and grandson of the hotel porter--impinge on Ryder's attention until it slowly becomes evident that they are not wholly unfamiliar to him, that they are, in fact, his wife and child. …

Never Great, Only Popular: Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Doctor's Wife and The Literary Marketplace

Abstract: From the time of its initial publication, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's 1864 novel The Doctor's Wife (1) has most frequently been read in relation to Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856), the plot of which Braddon borrowed for her first serious foray into realist fiction. In terms of style, character, and, for the most part, plot, The Doctor's Wife presents an ostensible departure from the sensation fiction on which Braddon had built her reputation, yet as the Pall Mall Gazette recognized in an 1865 review, the tie to Madame Bovary rather cleverly positioned the novel for success in the literary marketplace: [A] good stroke of business may sometimes be done by taking a clever but improper French novel, omitting the improper incidents or transforming them when they are not hopelessly bad into proper ones, and giving the residuum to the world as an entirely original story. The great advantage of this literary and commercial operation ... lies in the fact that in England the improper original, whatever scandal may say to the contrary, is tolerably sure not to have been read by ladies; and they are the great supporters of novel literature. (4) In his analysis of the commercially-driven motives he assumes were behind Braddon's choice to adapt Flaubert's novel, this reviewer conflates Braddon with Sigismund Smith, her sensation novelist alter-ego within The Doctor's Wife; to Smith, the reviewer attributes the ingenious plan to make money by transforming Flaubert's story for an English audience, while to Braddon, he assigns blame for presenting a corrupting influence to impressionable young ladies through a novel that is "superficially 'proper'" but "altogether unsound" (4). The business of novel-writing, the destructive models of behavior fiction provided for women readers, and Braddon's self-representation through Smith are indeed central concerns in The Doctor's Wife, yet these themes work together to quite different ends than the Pall Mall Gazette's reviewer supposes. Braddon's novel certainly resembles Madame Bovary in its use of a romantic heroine who marries a boring country doctor and then engages in an extramarital relationship (albeit an innocent one in Braddon's version of the story) to experience some of the romance she desires in her life, but the two novels are quite different beyond this shared plotline. Reading novels initially feeds Emma Bovary's dreams of a luxurious lifestyle, yet Flaubert shows little interest in chronicling the details of what Emma reads. (2) The Doctor's Wife, on the other hand, is concerned with the specifics of the heroine's reading as well as the business of novel-writing. Unlike Flaubert, Braddon includes references to specific character names and plot points when describing Isabel Gilbert's reading, and she could safely assume that her readers would understand these allusions because she cites only famous, highly-respected authors--Byron, Shelley, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer-Lytton, Tennyson, and Charlotte Bronte are featured most prominently. Braddon moves even farther away from Madame Bovary through her inclusion of Sigismund Smith, who allows her to engage quite pointedly in the heated debate over sensation fiction at the center of which she found herself because of her wildly successful novels. Braddon's contemporaries were confused by her overt references to sensation fiction in The Doctor's Wife. The Bristol Mercury (in a favorable 1864 review) misinterprets Braddon's characterization of Smith as well as the types of works her heroine reads: To show how much she despises the fame of a mere 'sensation' writer, as against the reputation of an author who regards true artistic development, she introduces, as one of the characters of the book before us, Sigismund Smith, a shining light of that 'raw-head and blood-bones' kind of literature which figures in numerous penny publications, and no small pains are taken to hold up the class he represents to ridicule. …

Redeeming the National Ideal: Revisiting E. L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel and Its Political Implications

Abstract: As many critics have pointed out, Louis Althusser's theory of ideology shifts focus from a validating framework (i.e., truth vs. falsity) to a discursive one through which the individual incorporates him/herself into the symbolic social order. (1) For Althusser, ideology is "a system (with its own logic and rigour) of representations (images, myths, ideas of concepts, depending on the case) endowed with a historical existence and role within a given society" (.For Marx 231). Althusser maintains that one adopts the society's dominant knowledge and values, such as "images, myths, ideas of concepts," in order to represent social reality and define his/her position within the social order. As a result of this process, ideology turns a pre-social individual into a socialized subject by '"recruiting]' subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or 'transform[ing]' the individual into subjects (it transforms them all)" (Lenin 118). Thus, Althusser's theory acknowledges both the representative and the incorporative dimensions of ideology. His theory is representative in that it rearticulates the cultural vocabularies commonly used within the society, and it is incorporative in that it sutures individuals to the society's dominant mode of thought. Ideology, represented as a discursive means of social suturing, is likewise a key element in Sac van Bercovitch's critique of American literature and its political implications. According to Bercovitch, ideology establishes "the ground and texture of consensus ... the system of ideas interwoven into the cultural symbology through which 'America' continues to provide the terms of identity and cohesion in the United States" (355). Through the consensus process of incorporating social values and rhetoric, "America" becomes a symbolic terrain whereby the nation's dominant logic is reiterated and thus its ideological cohesion is reassured. Bercovitch defines this consenting impulse as a distinctive pattern in American literature, from Puritan writings to the American Renaissance works. He particularly directs attention to the antagonistic relation between self and society, which is offered in these works as a form of social criticism. In his view, this kind of social subversion is already part of the main lexicons in American political discourses, in which individual dissent has been acknowledged as a socially consented form of harnessing a better national future. Therefore, the surface-value of rupturing from the social ironically serves to buttress the unified significances of "America": The immemorial response of ideology ... has been to redefine protest in terms of the system, as a complaint about shortcomings from its ideals, or deviations from its myths of self and community. Thus the very act of identifying malfunction becomes an appeal for cohesion. (366) For Bercovitch, this mechanism of absorbing radical impulse into the national identity is the very basis of how ideology functions within American literature. The political criticism offered in it serves to testify to the cultural hegemony of liberal democratic ideals, and in this process, the authors construct politically subversive narratives in such a way that the latter becomes culturally identified with the nation's fundamental logics: in Bercovitch's own words, "the classic American authors...were imaginatively nourished by the culture, even when they were politically opposed to it" (16). Bercovitch's argument provides a theoretical framework crucial to appreciating E. L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel. To discuss this matter, we need to turn first to the novel's reception history. While widely disagreeing about the value of its political intention, most critics invariably agree on its radical reconfiguration of national identity. The text's description of the Rosenberg Trial as well as its unrelenting attack on Cold War politics has led Joseph Epstein to label it as a typical representative of "the adversary culture. …

The New Revenge Novel

Abstract: In the opening chapter of The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (2010), Marylou Ahearn, a seventy-seven-year-old retired schoolteacher, contemplates murdering a doctor who fed her radiation cocktails a half century earlier. The novel's protagonist tracks her poisoner to Florida, only to discover that Alzheimer's has stolen the doctor's memory of seven hundred pregnant women on whom he experimented. Stalking her geriatric prey from afar, Marylou recalls the unconventional circumstances of her vengeance: Of course, the radiation she'd swallowed had made her sick. Weak. Anemic. Dizzy. Prone to headaches. Bleeding gums. And because she'd swallowed it, she'd killed Helen. After Helen's death she'd had to focus her anger somewhere, and since the government of the United States as a thing to hate was too unwieldy, and all the idiots who got caught up in cold war paranoia--the morons who devised and funded and carried out the radiation experiments--were too numerous and anonymous to collectively despise, she focused her hatred on Wilson Spriggs. (5) Within this brief explanation of a lethal plot, author Elizabeth Stuckey-French captures some of the most important and innovative features of the new revenge novel. First, the target of Marylou's vengeance is not her true enemy. The doctor-poisoner Wilson Spriggs is a proxy representative upon whom Marylou heaps her anger at the United States government. Although medical labs victimized citizens during the Cold War, including the narrator's daughter, those programs are too structurally diffuse to detest in any practical way. Blame for Helen's demise belongs equally to the nation's policy makers, financiers, and scientists. In order to shape vengeful desire into something purposeful, Marylou channels her rage toward a single figure. She transforms Spriggs into the embodiment of mid-century US domestic politics, enlarging him into a symbol yet reducing the nation to a convenient personification. While Spriggs retains his individual complicity in Marylou's suffering, the avenger's moral code also holds him accountable for every other governmental misdeed. Stuckey-French's novel follows an abiding necessity in recent revenge fiction whereby the aggregate guilt for systemic crimes gets transferred to a synecdochal villain. Second, attributing a government's scientific abuses to one doctor gets Marylou closer to her dream of harming an abstract foe. According to her internal monologue, Marylou faults "numerous and anonymous" entities for a "cold war paranoia" motivating the deadly experiments. But that sort of adversary is useless to the avenger out for blood. Not only does it resist identification by hiding in obscurity, it verges on immateriality. Vengeance, a proportional retaliation designed for private satisfaction, cannot sink its claws into intangible enemies. Payback needs physical recipients to collect what is owed, even when it chases a dispersed antagonist like the government. Stuckey-French understands this basic rule of the genre and, in turn, her character knows the limits of vengeful craving. Marylou's debt can only be repaid by destroying another person in kind. Thus, tabbing Spriggs as her mortal foe is not a narrative selection of convenience, but a necessity. By walking readers through Marylou's thought process, explaining how Spriggs came to be the vengeful object, Stuckey-French demonstrates a dilemma common to revenge literature. Because recent history spreads its malevolence across complex systems, old narrative modes of arch villainy have become obsolete. Nemesis, that ancient, singular opponent at the center of honor sagas and revenge tragedies, disaggregates under modernity by seeping into intricate networks or fading into a barely perceptible realm. How can novelists represent the distributed nature of modern antagonism yet still depict visceral retribution? What does a revenge narrative adjusted to the reality of contemporary geopolitics look like? …

Of Trains and Relativity: Einstein and Perspective in Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding

Abstract: From the opening sentences of Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, "The nickname of the train was the Yellow Dog. Its real name was the Yazoo-Delta," the train that acts as a central image in the stories of the Fairchild family has a multiple existence (91). Officially named the "Yazoo-Delta," the train is nicknamed the "Yellow Dog" by the local community. What you call the train depends on who and where you are. That the identity of the train is relative to the person viewing it foreshadows the story of a near-fatal train incident told and retold by Fairchild family members according to their differing viewpoints. The train incident does not simply furnish the occasion for various characters to pass along a good story; it signals the novel's engagement with the dramatic revelations of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and the resulting focus on perspective. Einstein often used an example involving a train to introduce relativity to lay audiences, explaining that a traveler on the train and an observer on the embankment would see two flashes of lightning differently, with the observer seeing the flashes simultaneously and the traveler seeing them in sequence. The theory not only provided a scientific basis to the subjectivity of perspective, it extended this subjectivity to time, previously thought to be a constant. Welty's train story builds on the insights of Einstein's train story to show that one perspective is not better than another and thus to expose the faulty privileging of perspectives based on race or social status. The result is a fictional exploration of relativity's implications both for Welty's time and for the novel's historical context. Writing in 1945 about a white aristocratic southern family in 1923 may seem more like nostalgia than exploration. Critics from Diana Trilling in 1946 forward complain about Welty's overly positive depiction of the family members, who are oblivious to the outside world and to the African Americans who serve them. More recently, scholars have argued that the novel is instead critiquing the family's nostalgia by exposing it as highly constructed. (1) My reading of the novel's engagement with relativity extends this line of thinking by dramatizing how Welty highlights the subjectivity of any perspective regardless of the race or class of the viewer. Each character's story of the train incident is limited by the character's physical location and, more dramatically, by the character's location in time, a location not shared because time is relative. Although the family members retell the train story to reify the power of the family hero, George, the piling on of different perspectives undermines the story's validity and the Fairchild family's power. (2) The family may ignore the perspectives of the African Americans in their midst, but the novel's attention to subjectivity challenges the valuing of a perspective because of the subject's social status. The implications, however, extend beyond the microcosm of this one family. That Welty also includes a train story told by a photographer and an outsider to the community allows her to test the implications of relativity by placing it in conversation with the discourse of photography. Photography's ability to capture a moment in time and thus document its subject without bias may seem to give it a claim to objectivity. In Delta Wedding, though, photography simply provides one more perspective as even the selection of a subject to photograph involves the photographer's subjective agency. In wielding modern technology the photographer's status may at first seem superior, but, for Welty, neither his camera nor his outsider status brings his perspective closer to objective truth. Welty's use of relativity to undermine the privileging of perspectives based on status certainly explains its presence in the novel, but Delta Wedding's investment in exploring relativity takes on greater weight when we consider that when Welty was writing the book in 1945 questions of who owns the truth were fought by armies. …

The omnicompetent narrator from george eliot to jonathan franzen

Abstract: In April of 1873, four months after the publication of the final volume of Middlemarch, a glowing appraisal of George Eliot appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. Whether her latest novel was a "success or a failure," the reviewer, Arthur George Sedgwick, hesitated to say. Rosamond and Mr. Brooke, he thought, were less memorable than Becky Sharpe or the members of the Pickwick Club, and Eliot's portrait of a provincial society was less "beautiful" than her portrait of sibling dynamics in The Mill on the Floss. Still, Middlemarch established Eliot as a novelist whose "erudition" was unprecedented: "History, science, art, literature, language, she is mistress of' (493). Along with her keen moral insight, one of Eliot's great gifts as a novelist, according to Sedgwick, was the sheer range of her knowledge. It is often said that the realist novel, relative to other literary modes (epic or romance) and genres (poetry or drama), orients itself toward the empirical realm, studding its plots with information about the natural and social world. (1) But certain realist novelists repeatedly get singled out for how much they seem to know. (2) Reviewers have praised, for instance, Goethe, Balzac, or Melville in the terms that Sedgwick applied to Eliot--whereas those terms are rarely applied to, say, Austen, Flaubert, or James. This holds true of contemporary fiction as well: novelists like Marilynne Robinson or Joseph O'Neill are hailed for their taut prose or control of mood, while Richard Powers and Jonathan Franzen are more often championed for their encyclopedic intellects. One 2002 reviewer of The Corrections marveled that the novel's author seemed to know everything, from "the names of the flowers chosen by corporate gardeners (mums, begonias, liriope)" to "the wear and tear--both natural and malign--suffered by the signalling systems of branch railway lines in the rural Midwest" to "the depredations suffered by Brezhnev-era power generators in Soviet satellite countries" (Lezard). (3) Of course, not all critics find such knowledge praiseworthy. In 2001, James Wood famously denounced what he called the "hysterical realism" infecting contemporary fiction, exemplified by novelists such as David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith, who showcase a "wealth of obscure and far-flung social knowledge" by peppering their plots with information about everything from "the sonics of volcanoes" to "how to make a fish curry in Fiji" to "terrorist cults in Kilbum! And about the New Physics! And so on" (n.p.). While Wood credits (or rather faults) Don DeLillo for this trend in its recent iteration, the hyper-informed narrator is part of a long novelistic tradition, one that was crucially shaped, I argue, by George Eliot. By the end of her career, Eliot had become associated with a certain type of omniscient narrator--I will call it the omnicompetent narrator--that would be adopted by several novelists in her immediate wake (including Trollope, Flowells, and Dreiser), and would be revitalized by Smith, Franzen, and their peers. One factor that provoked Eliot to experiment with the omnicompetent narrator, I claim, was her fear that a specializing division of labor was leading to the extinction of the generalist. Some of Eliot's contemporaries attributed the rapid pace of specialization, in the late nineteenth century, to an accelerating pace of knowledge production: "Formerly, all science could be grasped by a single mind," remarked William Dean Flowells in 1891, "but now the man who hopes to become great or useful in science must devote himself to a single department" (144). But specialization, Eliot recognized, was not simply an organic effect of there suddenly being more to know. The notion that an individual needed to "devote himself' to a single field in order to be credible was also an ideological product of professionalization. Striving to establish "monopolies of competence" (Larson 15) over fields of knowledge, nineteenth-century professional organizations needed to persuade the public to distrust nonprofessionals: to distrust, that is, practitioners who had not been through their systems of training and credentialing. …

The Economy of Affect in Frank Norris's Vandover and the Brute

Abstract: "I don't want anything fancy," he said to Field. "No big per cents, and bigger risks. If I've got to live economically I want something that's secure. A good solid investment, don't you know, with a fair interest; that's what I'm looking for." "Yes," answered the lawyer grimly; "I've been looking for that myself ever since I was your age." --Frank Norris, Vandover and the Brute (124) Concerns over financial matters, such as the housing bubble, unemployment rates, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement, have become commonplace in the shock waves of the recent economic recession. The fictional exchange above between a lawyer and his client in Frank Norris's Vandover and the Brute, although penned at the end of the nineteenth century, feels especially relevant to our present economic climate when a "secure" or "solid investment" may seem particularly elusive. Norris wrote Vandover and the Brute in the aftermath of the economic Panic of 1893, yet its cautionary tale remains timely. Although Vandover is typically thought of (when he is thought of at all, that is) as the young man who succumbs to lycanthropy in Norris's sensational first novel, the passage above portrays him as a cautious investor, seeking prudent financial advice from his lawyer. Given Vandover's rapid fall in social class as he moves from his family home to a bachelor apartment to a rented room in the slums, one way we might understand Norris's plot of decline is to pay closer attention to Vandover's failure to hold on to property than to his degeneration from man to animal. In this essay, I contend that Vandover's demise is not simply the plot of a man's descent into brutishness, but indicative of a wider cultural change that many other young bachelors living in cities encountered after the Panic of 1893. Moreover, I argue that Vandover's behavior, defined by a "certain pliability" (20), should be understood as a defensive tactic for negotiating diminished socioeconomic expectations, even though it does not prevent his failure at the novel's end. Although seemingly counterintuitive, this argument puts pressure on a common critical tendency to dismiss Vandover's affective responses as merely symptomatic of his failure. By giving serious attention to Vandover's behavior as a response to depressed market conditions, this essay extends and complicates a recent line of critical inquiry into the relationship between economics and affect in modern American fiction. David Zimmerman's Panic!, for instance, explores the confluence of affect and financial downturn in panic fiction at the fin de siecle. With a focus on novels that feature what he terms "market crowds," Zimmerman argues that panic novelists made visible how individuals were lodged within economic and affective matrices otherwise too vast and abstract to apprehend and how they bore--suffered as well as passed along--the emotions and designs of myriad other individuals across these matrices, spreading trauma and disruption (or, conceivably, salvation) along the way. (5-6) (1) Seth Moglen identifies a similar process within American modernist literature which, he claims, is "an effort to mourn the destructive effects of modern capitalism--and to mourn, most of all, for the crisis of alienation" (xiii-xiv). I do not read Vandover as an example of either panic fiction (given its lack of market crowds) or a response to a "crisis of alienation" (a subject position that Vandover is, arguably, too early to adopt). These scholars, however, convincingly elucidate how affective responses are not only symptomatic of economic distress in the fiction they study but are often shared, or even transferred, from one character to the next. Understandably, Zimmerman and Moglen are both interested in characters with negative emotional reactions to their economic circumstances. We expect, in other words, that economic downturns will evoke feelings of panic, anxiety, and mourning from their victims, whether real or their fictional counterparts. …

Humanity's "true moral test": shame, idyll, and animal vulnerability in milan kundera's the unbearable lightness of being

Abstract: Irony and Vulnerability "Man thinks, God laughs": so goes the proverb that Milan Kundera has so famously associated with the art of the novel (Art 158). According to Kundera, the novel captures an "echo" of God's laughter at the thinking of mankind, a Western Man who thinks that the truth is obvious, the same for all, and that he is capable of knowing himself. When we laugh at the pretentions of characters or when we weep (or scoff) at their weaknesses, we are not necessarily rejecting their aspirations, but understanding these characters as weak in relation to them. And if we look at them with irony, it is because there is a gap between their practical identities--the way they hold themselves forth in being--and how they fulfill them. (1) Novels attach themselves to these ironies with humor, pathos, and sometimes indignation. Their characters begin a voyage out into the world, but discover a world uncannily beyond their intellectual grasp. Quoted in passim throughout Kundera's work, the recurring figure of Western tradition's aspirations is Descartes's declaration that man is "the master and proprietor of nature" (see, for example, Art 4). Descartes's pronouncement demonstrates a pretention to self-knowledge (a spiritual definition of the "human") and to mankind's place high above the rest of nature. The Kunderian novel toys with such pretentions in ways made familiar by many critics. To the unknowable selves, the terminal paradoxes, and the criticism of totalitarian regimes (among a host of other approaches), this essay adds a new facet to the understanding of Kundera's irony: the significance of the suffering of animals, both human and nonhuman, to human self-conception. By examining animality and suffering in Kundera's best-known novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, this essay will describe how it challenges the borders that Western humanity has erected between humans and their own animality, humans and animals, and generally between humans and the natural world. When the novel was published (1984 in French and English), the philosophical debate on animal welfare was just starting to take on its modern vigor. The ensuing upsurge in thinking about animals, in philosophy and animal studies, prepares a sophisticated background for a new analysis of the book. That the theme of animal suffering probes deep into the heart of Western anthropogenesis can be sensed in the tone of declarations such as the following: Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental [radical] test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all the others stem from it. (289) (2) Such provocations do not seem like the final summary of a moral argument in favor of animal rights. Since the foundational writings of Peter Singer and Tom Regan, most philosophers and proponents of animal rights have worked hard to establish indisputable criteria, such as sentience or consciousness, which would provide clear answers to moral questions involving animals, often strongly condemning contemporary practices. In the quote above we get the strong condemnation, a biting denunciation, but we do not get the reasoned demonstration. This is because Kundera sees such demonstration as indeed wrapped up in the very spiritualist aspirations of the Western tradition. Kundera's provocation is entirely coherent with his loose definition of the novel as "an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become" (26): I would even say it [the novel] is purposely a-philosophic, even anti-philosophic, that is to say fiercely independent of any system of preconceived ideas; it does not judge; it does not proclaim truths; it questions, it marvels, it plumbs; its form is highly diverse: metaphoric, ironic, hyperbolic, aphoristic, droll, provocative, fanciful; and mainly it never leaves the magic circle of its characters' lives; those lives feed it and justify it. …

Textual Unreliability, Trauma, and the Fantastic in Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby

Abstract: Introduction A detailed analysis of Palahniuk's early novels, from Fight Club (1996) to Choke (2001), shows the existence of a number of motifs that are systematically repeated from book to book. A pattern emerges with one or several traumatized protagonists who willingly inflict pain upon themselves; the resulting effects of such action are understood by the characters as a necessary ritual of passage to rid themselves of their previous identities. Furthermore, Palahniuk's protagonists choose to rebel against social conventions and embrace the old ways of the questing hero, a mythic figure now filtered by contemporary American culture, especially by its patterns of video clips and the road movie genre. Accordingly, his main characters begin a journey of initiation, either psychic or physical or both, hoping to develop a new identity (compare Campbell 45-233). But always at the end of the novel the reader is left with the impression that, in contrast to the old mythic models, good has not finally overcome evil, and that everybody, actual reader or fictional character, still remains trapped in a condition of ethical inconclusiveness. Nihilism is frequently counterbalanced by the new, apparently better identity but it is never clear that the hero's new identity is leading her or him anywhere. Strategically, the inconclusive condition of his protagonists' quest keeps readers questioning the writer's ultimate moral aims. The early novels also elicited strong reactions from readers and critics on account of the excessively grotesque and sordid nature of some scenes and themes. Additionally, Palahniuk's books seem to follow his self-imposed norm to write a type of fiction that fits within the literary parameters of realism and minimalism. On several occasions, the author has described his minimalist style as necessary for the "transgressional" quality of his fiction. He has praised Amy Hempel's works explicitly and also confessed his attraction to Tom Spanbauer's "dangerous writing," a style that demands the author express his own fears of embarrassing sentiments and themes by adopting a minimalist approach (Stranger Than Fiction 141-46). However, in 2002 Palahniuk published Lullaby, the first in a sequence of novels that incorporates overt fantasy elements. The writer describes in it an unnerving, fantastic reality, opened to the manifestation of ghosts and magic spells, supernatural features unknown so far in his fiction but which will reappear in later books such as Diary (2003), Haunted (2005), and more recently in Damned (2011). This paper analyzes both the narrative techniques and the main themes the writer deploys in Lullaby with a double aim: first, to describe the structure of the novel and evaluate whether the intrusion of explicit fantastic elements in Lullaby really represents a departure from Palahniuk's earlier fiction; and secondly, to interrogate the importance that critics, readers, and Palahniuk himself have given to the deadly power inherent in language as the central theme in this novel. The following analysis shows that the power of language to kill is only one of the two main subjects of Lullaby. Eventually this power gives way to the spell of occupation, an attribute from the fantastic that symbolically condenses narrative anxieties about free will, identity, and ethics in contemporary society. In order to carry out the analysis, the following features will be examined: the narrative structure of the novel, the role of the narrator as traumatized personage and his use of well-known critical and cultural theories, the function that unreliability and uncertainty play in the narrator's understanding of reality, and the significance that magic and witchery achieve in the qualification of Lullaby as a socially committed novel that pursues a moral aim. The condition specifically new that distances Lullaby from realist fiction is not the protagonist's traumatized distortion of a believable reality in his role as narrator--an elusive gothic trait that Palahniuk has used before--but the presence of some elements both in the story world and in the act of narrating that intrude visibly from the gothic and, more specifically, from the fantastic mode. …

Space, aesthetic power, and true falsity in the known world

Abstract: On the wall of a small jail in Edward P. Jones's fictional Manchester County hangs a map of "The Known World." Florida does not exist on the sixteenth-century map; North America is too small, and nameless. But the map's owner, local sheriff John Skiffington, is satisfied with the "Known World" as he knows it, flawed or not (Jones 174-75). Skiffington is holding together a flawed world of his own in Manchester, where wealthy landowners control the law, vindictive slave patrollers flout the law, and black slaveholders severely complicate the law. It is this last group, the black slaveholders, who confound and fascinate both the characters of Jones's 2003 novel and its readers. One slave overseer, Moses, "[takes] more than two weeks to come to understand that someone wasn't fiddling with him and that indeed a black man," Henry Townsend, "two shades darker than himself, owned him and any shadow he made" (8-9). Most critics and scholars have centered their work around this issue of black slaveholders, (1) along with the book's long view of time, which allows readers to see what the future holds for many of Manchester's large cast of characters (as well as the fate of the doomed county itself). (2) Sheriff Skiffington's out-of-date map, however, also points toward a type of geographical rubric at play in the novel, which draws attention to a marriage between space and structures of power. Throughout, The Known World highlights the roles of space and place in establishing and perpetuating systems of thought, and when we approach the novel from that angle, we find sketches for a productive action of resistance against those systems that is rooted in aesthetic power and modeled by the novel itself. The key form of resistance Jones's novel will position against the categories and boundaries that insist we can "know" the world--and the form of resistance that has been little discussed beyond reference to its climactic instantiation on the book's final pages--is an aesthetics that resists linearity and the idea of space as stable, truthful, and natural. It is this aesthetics I will describe as insisting upon a "true falsity" that reveals and reinscribes the systems of thought that underlie, manufacture, and disguise the arbitrary nature of the boundaries and borders with which we construct and assign meaning to space. Systems of power tend to benefit from a double move--a "false falsity"--by both constructing space and disguising its constructed nature. The true falsity modeled in and by The Known World reinscribes systems and spaces while highlighting (in fact, celebrating) the impermanent and arbitrary nature of inscription. That is, a true falsity is a falsity that is not disguised. In this view, productive action insists on staying in-production: a permanent productivity demands a permanent instability and a never-fully-known world. Productive action, then, cannot be defined as following one specific trajectory or philosophy. Productive action must be action that refuses the convenient stability of closure or definition. For all its radical refusal of closure, however, this model functions happily in an apparently stable (intricately-plotted, in fact) novel. The Known World is coherent and comprehensible to a degree not often seen in works with such a postmodern agenda. This coherent instability is perhaps among its most important contributions to the contemporary novel. It illustrates and demonstrates the work of art that does more than simply expose or explode our conceptions of truth and art. It holds the ideas of time, space, and structure up for interrogation while utilizing the productive possibilities of such restricted forms as the novel and the sculpture. In this way, it refuses surrender or submission to anarchy as options in a world where unchallenged systems of power create real-life horrors. Productive art, in this model, straddles the same line as productive action: it exposes the realities of artistic space and then reinscribes that space in a way that insists no inscription is permanent. …

Messianism and the Abject: Reading D. H. Lawrence's the Plumed Serpent

Abstract: In 'The Sabbath Guests,' a story attributed to Rabbi Eizik of Kallo, a famous Hungarian master[,] the Shekhinah and the Messiah arrive unexpectedly at Rabbi Eizik's house on the Sabbath as a couple wishing to be married. The rabbi recognizes them, but his guests, visiting Hasidim, do not recognize the bride and groom and do not assent to the marriage, thus losing another opportunity to unite the Messiah and the Shekhinah, repair the universe, and ultimately usher in the messianic age. --KARLA SUOMALA Though only one strand of a multiplicity of mystical traditions that informs his oeuvre, the Kabbalah has been documented as influential in D. H. Lawrence's writings. Lawrence may have encountered Kabbalah literature as early as 1908, including techniques for mystical and magical practice. According to Charles Burack, Lawrence got most of his Kabbalic understanding from the theosophists Helen Blavatsky and Annie Besant, but also possibly from members of the Golden Dawn Society in London, like A. E. Waite and S. L. MacGregor Mathers, both of whom translated a few Kabbalistic works (53). Even while she argues that Kabbalic references in Lawrence's work are legion, Nanette Norris notes that Lawrence made use of Kabbalic portions sparingly in his work and left no written statements concerning the Kabbalah. T. R. Wright points out that Lawrence's engagement of a variety of religions into his work resembles a form of postmodern bricolage, in the way he deploys Judeo-Christianity, Frazer's religious anthropology, and "theosophical revampers of rabbinic and Kabbalistic traditions" by less scientific religious writers like Madame Blavatsky (2). His letters and records of his conversations are full of references to the Bible, from Genesis to the Apocalypsis. Robert E. Montgomery documents Lawrence's fascination with theosophy (in which the Kabbalah plays a prominent role) as a way to reconcile poetry and philosophy, religion and the mind. Concerning messianism and eschatology, we see already a tension between destruction and reconstruction in Lawrence's writings. As Burack argues, in Lawrence's vitalist phase (in The Rainbow, for example), he tends to use Kabbalic mystical concepts, while in his "destruction" phase he uses magical terms. Burack goes on to argue, "The mysticism-magic distinction is important because Lawrence associated mysticism with an unselfconscious, receptive, unitive experience while he identified magic with selfish, manipulative, knowledge-driven action" (52). The relationship between mysticism and magic is more complex in The Plumed Serpent, however. Before her conversion, Kate appears to regard the fascination Cipriano exercises upon her as a type of magic of charm and seduction and she finds herself in opposition to what she deems to be a form of manipulation and control on the one hand, while experiencing an inexplicable attraction on the other. Burack argues that while mysticism focuses on a reverent and obedient union with God, magic emphasizes the human endeavor to wield the human will and intellect in order to gain knowledge and control that leads to an imbalance of power (76). Because magic is functional and instrumental, it favors the intellect and the will over the soul and intrudes upon the mystical that magic destroys, whereas mysticism puts humans in contact with God and restores the lost spiritual balance (85). Further, Burack sees mysticism as associated with spiritual ascension, the union with the Shekhinah, and the entrance into the paradise of knowledge. Such an entrance "symbolizes a sustained state of mystical union with the immanent God" (57). Magic, on the other hand, is usually conflated with scientific discourse and a system of oppositions--attraction and repulsion--whose mechanistic processes prove destructive when applied to human relationships and sex (Burack 85). However, Moshe Idel approaches the issue of theurgism more comprehensively, as the task of "fully activating] both the spiritual and the corporeal components of . …

The Monumental Failure of Howards End

Abstract: E. M. Forster opens his 1910 novel Howards End with letters, remarking "One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister" (5). The initial resignation to the epistolary form (which persists for only two relatively short letters) quickly foregrounds Howards End's uncertain position on the continuum of the novel's generic evolution. Neither experimental nor rigorously realist, Howards End seems to reside in the indeterminate space between the modernist and the Victorian novel--indeed, Fredric Jameson calls Forster "at best a closet modernist" (159). Nevertheless, Forster's work has often been read by critics as demanding inclusion in the modernist canon. (1) Howards End, I contend, practices a limited modernism that is rooted in the very gap between its traditional form and its modern content that renders it so difficult to characterize. The novel's symbolic economy is mobilized around the discord between the realist, Victorian form of Howards End and its modernist, Edwardian content. The novel and its titular house, Howards End, overlap within the same signifier, Howards End. The letters that open the novel bear a metonymic relationship with the house (and thus the novel) in that this correspondence itself is about architecture. This interchangeability and variation between architecture and space represents, as I will show, the novel's central formal configuration. Helen responds to her sister, an absent interlocutor, by launching into a lengthy description of the architectural and spatial make-up of the eponymous house: "From hall you go right or left into a dining-room or drawing-room ... there's a very big wych-elm--to the left as you look up--leaning a little over the house, and standing on the boundary between the garden and meadow" (5). Forster describes the house and its environs in terms of how both determine the motions of daily life and define space; instead of being confirmed, however, this correlation between spatial categories and the social life they are meant to impose is compromised and ultimately undermined as the novel progresses. Howards End is often understood as a novel that is primarily concerned with place by virtue of its title alone; the title also marks the English home as the novel's definitive 'place.' Critics have often taken the lead from the title: while as Jon Hegglund claims, "[e]ven the most casual reader of Howards End cannot fail to notice the centrality of houses in the novel" (401), rigorous readers have also focused on the symbolic centrality of the house. (2) Beyond the walls of the house, Jason Finch has identified the persistent attention that critics have paid to "the spirit of a place, the genius loci" in Forster's work, which absorbs the house itself into a broader, though still localized, consideration of place and being (2). Howards End has also been included in notable assessments of the significance of the colonial in modernism; Jed Esty best sums up this approach in claiming that, for Forster, "metropolitan perception subsumes the lost value of territorial coherence while registering the epistemological privilege associated with modernity's borderless spaces" (28). In this line of argument--which originates with Fredric Jameson--the unrepresentable but economically necessary colonial spaces can only be articulated in a discourse that opposes the 'lost' totality of the premodern with the chaotic totality of the metropolis. In this essay, I reconcile readings of the novel that focus on the home itself with those that center around the colonial and domestic/metropolitan divide. As I will show, Howards End tries and fails to serve as the 'monumental' English space that Forster sets it up to be, partially due to its status as a pastiche that attempts to pass as an 'authentic' English home. Furthermore, in contrast with the house, colonial space in the novel can only haunt the margins of the text, and while definitively different from the monumental architecture of the home, it is absent in a way that emphasizes the novel's incomplete spatial representation of the English nation. …

Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square: The Chinese Literary Diaspora and the Politics of Global Culture by Belinda Kong (review)

Abstract: KONG, BELINDA. Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square: The Chinese Literary Diaspora and the Politics of Global Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. viii + 278. $86.50; $26.95. Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square analyzes one of the most infamous events in modern history, training its focus on four literary works that portray, with varying degrees of directness, what has come to be known as the "Tiananmen Square Massacre" of June 4, 1989. (Reliable figures on the number of killed and wounded are unavailable, though the International Red Cross initially announced on June 5 that the death toll stood at 2,600, with most people actually killed to the west of the Square.) As Belinda Kong documents, the Tiananmen Square Massacre has been the subject of numerous representations across a variety of literary genres and artistic media (though most of these productions have not circulated within China itself). From this extensive body of work, she examines in rich detail one play and three novels in support of her primary thesis that, "more than any other episode in recent world history, Tiananmen has brought about, and into stark relief, a distinctly politicized Chinese literary diaspora" (2). Politics has different emphases and valences in the works that Kong considers: Gao Xingjian's short play, Escape (1990), Ha Jin's The Crazed (2002), Annie Wang's Lili: A Novel of Tiananmen (2001), and Ma Jian's Beijing Coma (2008). Gao is of course the best known of these writers globally, due to his receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, a matter that Kong takes up at some length. She points out the considerable irony of Gao's lionization in the West as a major opponent of China's governing elite, even though Gao's creative and critical writings proclaim only a general commitment to individual human rights, rather than a particular concern for the rights of the Chinese people as a collectivity. The oldest writer under discussion here, Gao is clearly the odd man out philosophically among the figures Kong discusses. The Middle-Aged Man--one of three characters in Escape--serves as an authorial persona, evincing a kind of obdurate asocial existentialism that stands in strong contrast to the politically engaged, if naive, Young Man and Girl with whom he is in dialogue as a Tiananmen-like event appears to be unfolding around them in an unnamed city. For Kong, Escape operates at the level of historically de-contextualized allegory, and therein suffers from a lack of "political and ethical urgency" (84). Like Gao, Ha Jin was living abroad in June of 1989, and, like Gao, he chose to go into self-exile in the aftermath of Tiananmen. In Kong's reading, The Crazed presents Tiananmen Square as a "spatial aporia" in that the student protagonist, Jian Wan, never manages to quite reach the Square as the military crackdown descends on it and surrounding areas, remaining caught up in a peripheral zone by army violence and then compelled to flee to save himself; collaterally, in this psychologized, if not consistently psychoanalytical reading, Ha Jin himself also experiences the Square as a place beyond his direct experience, but one that he seeks to protect from, in his own words, "historical amnesia" (qtd. 111). Building on Marianne Hirsch's trauma theory, Kong sees The Crazed as an instance of "diasporic postmemory, a form of remembering origin's trauma via its dispersed and scattered afterimages" (116). Among Kong's four subject writers, Annie Wang enjoys a couple of singular distinctions. Not only has her novel escaped official opprobrium and/or proscription in the People's Republic of China, she herself continues to live in her native country, although she also resides some of the year in California. …

Maria Edgeworth's Harrington as a Utopian Novel

Abstract: Since the reception history of Maria Edgeworth's Harrington has long been dominated by disappointment at the concluding revelation that its Jewish heroine is a Protestant Christian after all, readers might think that "Harrington as a dystopian novel" would be a more accurate title for my essay. Instead of letting the plot of Harrington's overcoming his prejudice usher in a "good society" in which tolerance, diversity, and cosmopolitanism triumph over anti-Semitism, uniformity, and ethnocentrism, the conclusion revives the old social divisions that subject Jewish characters to Christian norms. This outcome neither advances Edgeworth's goal of making amends for the negative stereotypes of Jews in her earlier novels nor offers itself as a blueprint for the Enlightened social relations that Edgeworth valorized in Harrington and in most of her other writing. Though Harrington's shortcomings concede to the prejudices of Edgeworth's historical moment, (1) they remain troublingly inconsistent with Edgeworth's outspoken commitment to improving social relations. In this essay, I suggest a way of interpreting Harrington that aligns its conclusion more closely with Edgeworth's larger goals. Specifically, I posit that Harrington is strategically effective when read as a utopian novel. New scholarship that understands utopianism as a method or process of encouraging social change rather than as a blueprint for an ideal society brings to light Harrington's broader social commitments. This view of utopianism has been most fully conceptualized and implemented by Ruth Levitas, who has devised a method of utopian inquiry that functions as "speculative" sociology and leads to the "imaginary reconstitution of society." Crucial to Levitas's method is the activation of a desire for society to be "otherwise," both in its institutional arrangements and in personal conduct. People can bring about changes in their own character and relations, and in the larger structures that these comprise, if they recognize a gap between existing norms and some alternative norm more in keeping with their value system and if they then try to become the kind of people who would inhabit the alternative society. Successful modifications are neither perfect nor static; they are steps toward an imagined "good society" that can continue to be approached through ongoing reflections and adjustments. A desire for self and society to be "otherwise" is likewise crucial to Harrington. At one level the novel depicts its protagonist's growing wish to free himself, his family, and his society from religious and ethnic biases. At this level, it describes the irrational and unjust treatment of Jews in Harrington's society; it shows, through the reasonable and generous behavior of Mr. Montenero and other characters, the alternative interactions that could occur among open-minded people, (2) and it charts Harrington's progress toward reforming his character until he is ready to marry Berenice despite his father's and his culture's doubts about the viability of a marriage between people of different faiths. At that point, narrative sleight-of-hand supplies a Christian identity for Berenice, allowing the novel to stop short of the behavioral and structural changes it promised. As historical research confirms, this descriptive level offers an accurate and realistic account of Anglo-Jewish relations during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the time frame of Harrington's setting, composition, and publication. According to Todd Endelman's study of The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000, much "acculturation" had occurred by the eighteenth century: especially in the upper tiers of society, Jews and Christians interacted freely in literary, artistic, athletic, and scientific spheres, and many regarded religion as a private matter of no concern in public life as long as secular laws were obeyed (65-76). But Endelman distinguishes between "acculturation" and institutional integration, with the normalization of intermarriage and political participation. …

Confessions of a Mass Public: Reflexive Formations of Subjectivity in Early Nineteenth-Century British Fiction

Abstract: The title page of Thomas Little's Confessions of an Oxonian (1826) features this epigraph from Byron: "The world will wonder at two things; that I should have had so much to confess; and that I should have confessed so much." The notion of excess evoked by this quotation (and its originator) persists throughout the text that follows, which chronicles the Oxonian's experience during his university years and beyond. Prefacing this narrative, however, is an introduction from Little, who casts himself as the "editor" of the Oxonian's manuscript and "confirms" its authenticity: The author of these Confessions fell a victim to the prevalence of typhus fever, some time ago, leaving, in the hands of the Editor, the production, now submitted to the public. It was, evidently, intended as an exposure of the real mischief, which the levities, so frequently, not to say generally practised [sic], during a residence at college, are calculated to produce. (1: i-ii) Here, Little describes the Oxonian as emblematic of a type: the mischievous university student. Just a few sentences later, however, Little undermines this characterization by bringing attention to the Oxonian's individuality: [A]lthough the author related the various follies and vices, which it is his object to condemn, as taking place in his own character, it is a question of doubt, whether, in the actual commission of them, he could have, himself, borne a part, since his high sense of morality, and a religious principle, unconsciously often, and often, designedly, evinces itself, in the course of his work. (1: ii) Little's objection to the Oxonian's pretense of representing the typical student is articulated in terms that also draw attention to the fabricated quality of the work; the Oxonian reveals himself to have exemplary morals "unconsciously" as well as "designedly," so that his singularity is at once unintentional and deliberate. In this description of the confessor's subjectivity, then, lies a paradox that is germane to the genre of the fictional confession itself; it asks to be read as both real and fabricated, as both the intimate disclosure of a single individual and as a commercial good created for public consumption. This is a paradox that persists across an entire set of novels published in early nineteenth-century Britain that, until now, have been neither widely known nor widely accessible: (1) * R.P. Gillies, The Confessions of Sir Henry Longueville (1814) * Thomas Little, Confessions of an Oxonian (1826) * Edmund Carrington, Confessions of an Old Bachelor (1827) and Confessions of an Old Maid (1828) * The Countess of Blessington, Confessions of an Elderly Gentleman (1836) and Confessions of an Elderly Lady (1838) * John Ainslie, Antipathy: or, the Confessions of a Cat-Hater (1836) * Charles Lever, The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer (1839) Together, these works form a subgenre of the novel that brands itself "confessions" while featuring formal and thematic traits that are conspicuously fictional. It is a curious mode that differs sharply from the traditional confession (exemplified by Augustine and Rousseau) in that it rejects the imperative to tell an essential truth about a self. It also differs from Romantic works (by Goethe, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley) that employ confession as a literary technique designed to "achieve authenticity in the depiction of characters, and vividness and immediacy in the fabrication of scene and situation" (Stelzig 18). Instead, the fictional confessions listed above seem to provide no discernible writerly subjectivity to which readers might direct their interest, let alone "bond" to such an extent that "life and art, the reader's and the speaker's experience, appear to be aligned on the same plane" (19). If, as Susan Levin has argued, "Romantic confessions revise the autobiographical convention in which the subject of the text is identical in name to the author in the text" (7), these works take this revision to an extreme. …

Recreating Genre: Structure, Language, and Citation in Nathanael West's the Dream Life of Balso Snell

Abstract: Though much has been written on Nathanael West's corpus, very little critical work exists on West's first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, a strange, 62-page novella composed of a series of seemingly disjunctive narrative vignettes. As a critical survey of the novel reveals, critics tend to view the novel as an inferior work in a developing writer's canon--or an interesting, if not derivative, exercise in surrealistic and Dadaist montage. As a result, the novel is rarely considered a site for serious inquiry, and the text as a whole is often overlooked in favor of West's later novels, Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust. Recently, however, a number of critics have begun to take note of The Dream Life of Balso Snell's formal ingenuity. As Deborah Wyrick observes, "Surprisingly, the question of structure in West's first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, has been largely ignored. Instead, critics agree that it is formless, chaotic, a juvenile pastiche of bathroom jokes, college magazine parody, and borrowings from contemporary avant-garde authors" (156). As Wyrick argues, Balso Snell is not simply a juvenile exercise in pastiche; in fact, a closer look at the form of the novel raises resoundingly complex questions of structure, imitation, and appropriation. Indeed, Balso Snell possesses a dizzying narrative structure, one in which a seemingly interminable number of episodic narrative vignettes emerge only to recede into the background of the text. The complexity of form in the novel, then, is momentously important to understanding West's aesthetic, and should thus be considered more deeply. My goal in this essay, however, is not simply to rescue West's work from its critical detractors, but to further the emerging discussion of form in the novel. To that end, I want to consider the extent to which West's novel can be reconsidered in relation to genre studies--that is, I want to expose how West's novella reveals a compelling examination of genre in the age of modernism. Building off Wyrick's analysis, this essay argues that form functions in West's novel as a means to examine the limits of genre. In other words, I read formal experimentation in Balso Snell as West's attempt to self-reflexively rethink and rewrite stagnant generic conventions. Accordingly, I choose to consider the novel not in terms of plot; instead, I suggest that each of the novel's many vignettes reveal a confrontation with an array of disparate genres. These vignettes reveal a critical examination of literary and generic conventions. Indeed, West's text incorporates and explores linguistic and textual instabilities through a structure that blends, weaves, and collapses several literary styles and conventions into one another. Throughout the novel, West introduces a multitude of literary genres solely to debilitate and dismantle them. Literary biography, epistolary narration, journalism, and the crime novel all appear in the text--and are all subsequently dismantled and reconfigured. Readers are therefore instigated to reconsider the manner in which we perceive literary conventions by rethinking and reconceiving the boundaries that separate differing genres. Thus, I read West's novel as a self-reflexive, critical exegesis of conflicting ideologies of genre. By further considering the novel's formal complexity, we can begin to understand how West's work interprets the function and conventions of genre in the modern novel. Moreover, as I will show, The Dream Life of Balso Snell confronts the relevancy and longevity of seemingly antiquated genres and, in doing so, reveals a need to rethink the contemporaneity of an array of disparate genres--and the critical practices through which we confront them. Genre, Myth, and Citation West's novel begins with an immediate citation of the epic as a site of generic play. In a parodic allusion to the epic of the Trojan War, Balso Snell, the novel's protagonist, comes across the dilapidated ruins of the Trojan horse. …

The Danger of Rereading: Disastrous Endings in Paul Auster's The Brooklyn Follies and Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth

Abstract: The ethical and aesthetic challenges of narrating recent, real world catastrophes have been taken up by a number of major literary figures today, including Don DeLillo, Haruki Murakami, Jonathan Safran Foer, Art Spiegelman, and Dave Eggers. Disaster fascinates and confounds the imagination, and thus contemporary fiction grapples with the overwhelming sense of unreality experienced by witnesses to catastrophe. Literature seems to offer the chance to return to the moments before a natural or man-made disaster and, with retrospective understanding, re-experience an event that spectators witnessed uncomprehendingly when it occurred. In other words, literature gives us the chance to reread the historical disaster in light of its outcome. But what can we make of fiction such as Paul Auster's novel The Brooklyn Follies (2006) or Jhumpa Lahiri's short story collection Unaccustomed Earth (2008), which are not about a disaster, but which use a disaster as an instrumental narrative device? Unlike the authors mentioned above, neither Auster nor Lahiri offers a sustained literary treatment of a catastrophic event, its aftermath, or the representational challenges it poses for the fiction writer. Rather, they each employ a catastrophe to terminate their plots. Auster's novel, the picaresque tale of Nathan Glass, a retired man re-embracing life after cancer, ends abruptly on the morning of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In the concluding story of Lahiri's collection, the potential marriage plot of characters Kaushik and Hema is aborted when Kaushik drowns in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami during his seaside vacation in Thailand. As their plots wind down, the logic of Auster's and Lahiri's fictional worlds self-destructs, seemingly without reason. In a sense, Auster and Lahiri employ disasters as deus ex machina to abruptly conclude, but not resolve, their plots. The deus ex machina, or "god from the machine," a device originally employed in Greek drama, resolves a seemingly inextricable narrative bind through a miraculous intervention: lowering a god onto the stage by machine. Auster's and Lahiri's catastrophes arrive like gods descending out of the clear blue sky. The concluding lines of The Brooklyn Follies, referencing the bright blue morning sky on September 11, 2001, invite readers to imagine the veering plane, whose hijackers conceived of themselves as instruments of god piloting the machine. Unaccustomed Earth is brought to a close by a stupendous tsunami wave, a natural disaster that some might call an "act of god." As in Greek tragedy, the spectacular disaster as deus ex machina in contemporary fiction abruptly punctures the logic of the plot, and invites disbelief. Aristotle's Poetics critiques the contrived, "irrational" (29) nature of the deus ex machina, and argues that narrative resolutions should develop organically from previous events: "the unravelling of the plot ... must arise out of the plot itself, it must not be brought about by the deus ex machina" (28). The author's recourse to the deus ex machina reveals his or her failure to achieve a logical and harmonious conclusion. Admittedly, Auster's and Lahiri's deployment of disaster do not constitute deus ex machina in the strictest sense because rather than solve a narrative problem, each disaster precipitates a total traumatic rupture. The uncanny invocation of the veering plane or the looming wave splits the narrative, situating everything preceding it as definitively "before." In Auster's and Lahiri's narratives, we do not know what comes "after" the disaster for the characters, and therefore narrative closure eludes us. What after-effects do such disastrous endings create? How does the surprising invocation of catastrophe in the concluding pages of a narrative impact our interpretation of the text as a whole? The unsettling and even frustrating conclusions of Auster's and Lahiri's fiction evoke the confusion and sense of unreality generated by mass disasters. …

Social Reform in Gothic Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764-1834 by Ellen Malenas Ledoux (review)

Abstract: LEDOUX, ELLEN MALENAS. Social Reform in Gothic Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764-1834. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 238 pp. $90.00. The Gothic has long taken a backseat to realism in studies of genre. Ellen Malenas Ledoux's Social Reform in Gothic Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764-1834 challenges entrenched generic hierarchies, arguing that "Gothic writing has a particular power, greater than that of verisimilar writing, to raise audience consciousness about political issues" (1). By remapping the generic and national boundaries that have limited studies of the Gothic, Ledoux frames Gothic writing as an activist "mode" and surveys novels, plays, and poems from Britain, Colonial America, and the Caribbean. She invites readers to look beyond the discussions of domesticity and nationalism that have dominated studies of the early Gothic and instead establishes how a range of Gothic texts--from Horace Walpole's The Mysterious Mother and Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho to Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn and Matthew Lewis's Journal of a West Indian Proprietor--served as transnational tools for reform. By beginning her study with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, she inevitably retraces familiar ground; however, the literary texts and historical situations she reads alongside these oft-studied novels create fresh vantage points for her readers. By pairing Walpole's novel with his play The Mysterious Mother, she emphasizes the way in which Walpole combined narrative and tragedy to "dramatize how political events originate" (27). The tragic formula Walpole exploits conditioned readers' responses to political events, such as the Gordon Riots and the discussions of class and race that the riots triggered. In her second chapter, she usefully complicates standard feminist readings of the "female Gothic" that rely almost exclusively on Radcliffe's fiction. She finds in other Romantic-era novelists alternatives to Radcliffe's treatment of space and domestic politics. For instance, the castles in Radcliffe's novel have been read as symbols of patriarchal repression; however, the castle in Charlotte Smith's Emmeline serves as a symbol of matriarchal power and reconfigures the gender politics of the Gothic. Most interestingly, she reads the working-class author Sarah Wilkinson's bluebook The Castle of Montabino as challenging the bourgeois biases built into The Mysteries of Udolpho and generating a working-class critique of Radcliffean politics. In Wilkinson's novel, readers "are left with an unnerving feeling that 'virtue' is over-rewarded in some classes and that suffering goes unacknowledged in others" (91). From domestic politics, Ledoux moves to William Godwin's treatment of political economy in St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century. St. Leon relates the adventures of a sixteenth-century alchemist who "uses magic to engage in an economic thought experiment" (95), which advocates a radical form of equality and critiques class hierarchies. …