The Elastically Clumsy Novel

I have always had trouble understanding the shifting mood of a sentence in Virginia Woolf's essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown that describes the novel form as “so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive” (Woolf 9–10). The contradiction allows Woolf's assessment of the novel to hover between condescension and reverence; this is, after all, an essay that wants to show us what the novel could and should be, as compared to how it really is. Reading John Plotz's prodigiously wide-ranging Semi-detached: The Aesthetics of Virtual Experience since Dickens, however, I finally understood Woolf's contradiction more clearly, not as a lamentation that the novel remains so clumsy when it could be so elastic, but perhaps as an insistence that the novel form is, necessarily, both at the same time. Can a form be both clumsy and elastic—or even better, clumsily elastic, elastically clumsy? Plotz's productively capacious concept of semi-detachment, which names “a suspended duality of experience” that characterizes novel-reading and that is often thematized within novels themselves, also functions for him as a principle of novelistic structure (7). Performing what can look on the surface of things like a clumsy kind of inarticulacy, novels in fact make themselves supple, double-jointed, elastic.In that spirit, I would describe Semi-detached as a book primarily about the double-jointedness of the novel form, a form barely held together by loose and flexible connections. The novel relies upon our ability to attach to it without becoming bound to it. We enter into it halfway, our minds hooked by a fictional world while also remaining tethered to a real world and a real body. Like René Descartes's soul, which connects to the brain (how? through what commerce of the physical and the immaterial?) at the pineal gland, our readerly mind can seem, Plotz argues, to be two things at once, both unreal and real, or to exist in two worlds at once: the world of actual experience and the virtual world of the fictional imagination.Any summary of this book's contents will necessarily remain incomplete, since part of the excitement of reading it arises out of its own formal experimentation. Plotz breaks out of the usual structures of the monograph, dividing the book into nine chapters in addition to a substantial introduction and afterword, and the chapters move between historical periods (from the early nineteenth century to the modernist period), between Britain and the United States (with some excursions to France and Russia), and between genres (from short fiction to the novel to painting to cinema). For the purposes of this review in the pages of Novel, I will focus my attention on the book's argument about the novel form and its history, noting that by bracketing all of its extra-novelistic excursions I am also doing a certain kind of injustice to the uniqueness of Plotz's project. Suffice it to say that the sections titled “Visual Interludes,” which turn to Pre-Raphaelite painting, William Morris's experiments in typography, and Buster Keaton's films, function as a rich surround even for readers most interested in the book's contributions to novel studies. They help to make concrete some of Plotz's most suggestive claims and to indicate the complexity of Plotz's thinking about genre and history. Uninterested in limiting the movement of his central concept, Plotz puts the novel at the center of this book while indicating at every turn how this project might shade over into other kinds of projects, and he is admirably self-aware about the delicate balancing of historicism and presentism that this kind of structure requires.The book's first chapter, “Pertinent Fiction: Short Stories into Novels,” charts an innovative history of the novel and the ways in which it develops partly by absorbing smaller units of fictional form: the short story and the character sketch. In this first chapter of the book, “semi-detachment” names the kind of structural link by which semi-independent modules join together to make the novel. But in order to figure out how the short story might become a symbiotic partner to the novel rather than its feeble and eternally neglected sibling, Plotz first must show how short fiction itself cultivates states of semi-detached reading, in which our absorption is left partially suspended when a story leaves its edges ragged, its central questions radically undecidable.Plotz calls into question the commonplace idea that the genre of the British short story went into a kind of hibernation for most of the Victorian period, overshadowed by the long, serialized novel, only to reemerge at the fin de siècle. Because we have been so focused on Edgar Allen Poe's criteria for the successful short story—“compression, psychological penetration, and above all singleness of effect have been at the heart of every generic taxonomy since Poe,” Plotz insists—we often do not know what to do with the nineteenth-century British tradition of “short fiction defined not by singleness but by incompletion, rupture, uncertainty” (21). Plotz traces this alternative short-fiction tradition from the work of James Hogg in the first third of the century, with his commitment to “staging the intersection of profoundly disjunctive belief systems within [the fictional world] itself” (23), to the work of John Galt and Charles Dickens in the early Victorian period, in which the character sketch opens out beyond the logic of character types toward the opacity and ineffability of the individual. “In each period,” Plotz argues, “the possibility of semi-detachment, and the question of what it means for someone to become partially absorbed in the world of the story, shaped the writing of short fiction in subtle but ultimately crucial ways” (20).Having offered us this persuasive and original new story about the short story, Plotz can then develop an even more challenging kind of claim: that around the dawn of the Victorian period, rather than coming to dominance at the expense of short fiction, “the realist novel starts to function as a repository of short stories” (38). The interpolated tale, which seems to disappear from the novel after Dickens's Pickwick Papers, is actually supplanted, according to Plotz, by the “pseudo-interpolated story” (40). In Oliver Twist, for example, when Monks tells Oliver the story of his aunt, Rose Maylie, he tells it as if it were a fiction, before the startling reveal in which he points to Rose herself, standing beside Oliver, and reveals her as the story's main character. As Plotz puts it, “What seems to be a story from another world is suddenly made pertinent by a pointing finger: there stands the story's subject” (41). Here we find what I described earlier as the novel's “double-jointedness”: semi-detachment allows for the kind of structural adaptability by which novels swallow up short stories without digesting them. They remain distinct parts of a larger whole, “pertinent” to the novels in which they find themselves embedded and yet still potentially detachable.If the first chapter reinvigorates our understanding of one overlooked Victorian genre—the short story—making it central to the history of the novel, then chapter 4, “Virtual Provinces, Actually,” the book's next novel-focused chapter, turns our attention to a much more ubiquitous and yet still peculiar, indeterminate genre: the provincial novel. Sometimes understood as “ur-realism, the center from which all Victorian novels truly emerge,” and sometimes understood, conversely, as a limited subgenre of realism, the provincial novel can be both big and little, locating us “at once in a trivial (but chartable) Nowheresville and in a universal (but strangely ephemeral) everywhere,” so that the genre requires of us a particular mode of readerly semidetachment: “[E]ntering the provincial spaces carved out by such novels requires an imaginative conception of oneself as existing at once within and without a tiny beehive of a world” (102–3).Taking Plotz's account of provincial fiction, in which he turns from George Eliot and Thomas Hardy to the prolific but still under-studied Margaret Oliphant—alongside his account of short fiction's relationship to the novel form, in which he places the obscure John Galt alongside Dickens—helps us to see how Plotz's consideration of semi-detachment becomes a theory of canonicity, in which some authors are permanent fixtures in the stories we tell about the history of the novel, while others hover around the edges, partly because their peculiarity seems to make them unassimilable. Plotz's reading of Oliphant's fiction, and his argument for what I would call her semi-detached centrality to the canon of the Victorian novel, is inspired. Oliphant's characters, and indeed the novelist herself, Plotz shows, are resentful of the many small distractions of the everyday, unable to find the space and time for thought, “continuing to strive for a ‘life elsewhere’ even as they are surrounded by those things, those blocky objects, that make life real” (116). Oliphant is forced to produce fiction through distraction, and that is what makes the aesthetic of semi-detachment uniquely important to her novels. Just as we might understand provincialism either as central to the realist tradition or as a very specific subgenre of realism, we might also understand a novelist such as Oliphant as either deep in the heart of the canon—so committed to the provincialism typical of realism as to become invisible and indistinct—or at the edges of the realist tradition, so purely provincial as to appear esoteric. Plotz shows us how Oliphant might occupy both of these positions at once, and how in doing so she might become differently central to our histories of the realist novel.In chapter 5, “Experiments in Semi-detachment,” Plotz returns to figures traditionally understood to be at the core of the canon: Dickens, Eliot, and Henry James. But here he begins to wonder, “If semi-detachment comes to look like an answer in Victorian fiction, it is crucial to know what the question is” (123). Plotz names this question at one point as that of the “semi-dislocation” by which novels represent characters inferring the workings of other minds and the shapes and structures of a wider social world (138). The more specific questions he pursues are various and stimulating. How does Dickens represent the simultaneity of thought and embodied action even when forced to use the sequential structure of sentences and paragraphs to do so? How does Eliot's “suturing together of distinct plots” in Middlemarch force her to reckon with social semi-detachment and the ingeniously complex “narratorial movement” in and out of individual consciousness that is required to provide Eliot “a placeholder for some kind of detached viewpoint on one's own life” (130–31)? How does she then move on in her strange late work Impressions of Theophrastus Such to even bolder experiments in the “spirals” and “turns” and “twists” of narrative point of view, which help her demonstrate “the ways in which characters are constituted not just from the inward out nor solely by their public appearance in the world, but by the externalization of the outward into the inner, so that what others think of us becomes a significant portion of our inner lives” (134–35). Finally, the chapter concludes with an examination of James's representations of “the utterly inescapable and ordinary business of moving through a world in which the ‘objective knowledge of subjectivity’ and the knowledge of objectivity itself can prove breathtakingly hard to disentangle” (150). As becomes clear by the conclusion of this very full paragraph, this chapter bursts at the seams. One of the thrills of reading Plotz's book is that each chapter seems as if it could provide questions sufficient for an entire monograph—in this case the techniques of realism for representing the twists and entanglements of what we might call semi-detached points of view—but that at the same time, the very range of reference that Plotz commands makes the crowdedness of the book exciting, original, generative in its bustle and its noise.After another “visual interlude” focusing on William Morris, Plotz returns to the novel in a pair of chapters on modernist fiction, which offer us, once again, an unexpected genealogy. In this version of the story, we move into the modernist period through the fin-de-siècle “scientific romances” of H. G. Wells and the experiments in “layering” and “overtone” that characterize the novels of Willa Cather. These two chapters, despite the very different authors and genres they examine, are connected by an interest in the fantasies made available by the novelistic uses of semi-detachment. In Wells's case, we imagine the character who travels into alternate dimensions while always remaining rooted in reality: having existed in two places at once, both in and out of each, Wells's characters always return to singleness altered in profound ways, their bodies scrambled, or suffering from a profound kind of “cognitive disruption” that follows directly from the kind of mind-blowingly indeterminate short fiction that Plotz examines in chapter 1. Cather, on the other hand, imagines again and again “moments in which the past is overlaid upon the present,” when memories seem to become semi-material as they lay translucently over an empty room (206). Plotz insists that the centrality to Cather's fiction of this kind of overlaying of immaterial thought, memory, and feeling upon the material world puts her into a vexed, semi-detached relationship to the naturalist tradition that would reduce experience and emotion alike to brute materiality.Semi-detached is a remarkable book, and I am aware as I conclude that I have expended a great deal of energy in trying to summarize it, to indicate everything that it is about—and yet still with a feeling of falling short, wanting to follow the many threads of Plotz's thinking even further. That will have to remain for future work, both my own and that of novel studies more broadly, in which this book is sure to have a place for a long time to come. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once described something like what Plotz calls semi-detachment, but in very different terms, as “[t]hat inexplicit compact by which novel-readers voluntarily plunge into worlds that strip them, however temporarily, of the painfully acquired cognitive maps of their ordinary lives (awfulness of going to a party without knowing anyone) on condition of an invisibility that promises cognitive exemption and privilege” (Sedgwick 97). What Sedgwick understands as a painful, awful plunge, into the party at which I'm a stranger—but at least a party at which I get to be invisible!—Plotz understands as central to the pleasure of reading and to the elastic form of the novel, not a risk to the coherence of the self but an experience that reinforces that coherence even as I seem to become split in two. I have left Plotz's book behind and returned it to its place on my shelf, but some part of my mind will remain with it, semi-detached.

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