Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age by Timothy Bewes (review)

Reviewed by: Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age by Timothy Bewes Joel Evans Timothy Bewes. Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age. New York: Columbia UP, 2022. Pp. 336. US$140.00 hardcover, US$35.00 paperback, US$34.99 ebook. We are perhaps at a point in criticism and theory today at which, if you wanted to be a bit daring or avant-garde, you might carry out a strident defence of, or a critique based on, the representative model in some form or other, so entrenched have models of criticism that found themselves in opposition to this mode of reading become in academic discourse. It is to Timothy Bewes's credit, then, that he manages in this book to construct an antirepresentative model that sheds new light on contemporary writing. This is achieved in part by how the book dissects the notion of representation and tracks its legacy within a mode of reading that operates as a kind of cipher or late stage of the thing itself (more on this in a moment). But the novelty of the book and its approach to what we might call, perhaps reductively, the question of method, also makes itself felt in one of its other key topics; namely, what Bewes calls "postfiction." It is fair to say that this is a theoretically dense book, and so to get into what it has to say about each of the issues just mentioned, it is worth giving a systematic rundown of the key arguments. Below, then, is my attempt at doing this, after which we can move onto some further analysis of the book, and an assessment of its contributions and problems. The order in which the arguments are laid out is not necessarily how they are laid out in the book, but rather, what seems to me to be the most lucid way of articulating a complex of claims and positions that are both provocative and, at points, slightly elusive. The first thing to say is that this book suggests that fiction, and the novel in particular, has changed fundamentally, albeit not totally, in the last fifty years or so. Indeed, it has become increasingly difficult to work out the precise delimitations of what counts as fiction, at least when we focus on the group of texts that Bewes designates as "postfictional," which include novels by the likes of W.G. Sebald, J.M. [End Page 465] Coetzee, and Rachael Cusk. For Bewes, "postfiction" puts into question and draws attention to the fallacy of what he calls the "instantiation relation." What he means by the "instantiation relation" is the procedure whereby characters, events, or ideas in novels and fiction more broadly are shown to correspond to the world at large. As Bewes puts it: the positive use of the term "instantiation" in the context of literary works […] implies that the relation between the work and the world is that of a part to a whole, a particular to a universal; that the work is capable of "instantiating" an idea, a character type, a narrative situation, an ethical or practical quandary; that such instantiation can be directly beneficial for the reader's experience and understanding of the world; that the work makes possible a degree of (no doubt imperfect) knowledge or judgment about life and society, philosophy and art, state and political structures, and available modes of resistance to them. (86) From this, it ought to be clear that instantiation is a form of representation and is subtly different from full-blown models of signification or communication. The breakdown in the instantiation relation makes connections between parts and wholes, particulars and universals seem either arbitrary or impossible: indeed, writers like Coetzee and Sebald foreground this situation directly in their work. What arises as a result is a mode of narration that Bewes dubs the "free indirect," which is, as he puts it near the start of the monograph, a "non-anchored, non-centered perspective" (38). It is the moment at which parts and wholes, and connections between different moments, processes, and states break down that the free indirect comes fully into play for Bewes, as a species of free indirect...

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.