Realism Reconsidered: New Approaches in Novel Studies

To read these four very fine works of scholarship together is to witness the flux of novel studies of our time—the steady decline of a particular idea of the novel, based on realism, and the development of new ways of thinking about what novels do and how they work. And, what is perhaps especially interesting, reading them together allows us to see how these shifts are happening in both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies, revealing that the assumptions and conventions of the two periods do not perfectly align.Scott Black, in Without the Novel: Romance and the History of Prose Fiction, asks the straightforward but also somewhat surprising question, what if our histories of fiction were centered around the romance, instead of the realist novel? How might they be different? As he explains, we would not only shed the well-worn storyline, now much critiqued, of the connection between the rise of the novel and the emergence of modernity (itself a concept that has been increasingly called into question!), we would also even rid ourselves of the idea of a linear history altogether, and instead appreciate the novel's loops and whirls. We would thus be better able to account, for instance, for the way that a given text can lie in obscurity, even for centuries, before unexpectedly becoming a source of inspiration for a writer halfway around the world. As Black explains, “If the novel has underwritten the self-understanding of modernity as progressive and mature, romance is concerned with the resurgence of putatively residual forms and the extraordinary experiences they generate” (20). And, perhaps most importantly, we would develop a different idea of what novels do and how they act on readers, and instead of insisting on didacticism in the novel, we would begin to appreciate a novel's sense of play. Black's various chapters move nimbly back and forth across the centuries, positing Heliodorus's Ethiopian Story as a model of romance, and suggesting ways to read it, and then, in the next chapter, reviewing variations of this pattern in the work of Chrétien de Troyes, in earlier readings of Heliodorus, and then in its satiric inversion in Don Quixote. The second part of the book focuses on the British eighteenth-century, examining three texts that, though important to the novel, typically figure as anomalies in critical history: Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Fielding's Tom Jones, and Burney's The Wanderer. As Black shows us, reading them as romances makes sense in a way that reading them as novels does not. If these texts “look like strange anomalies in realist literary history, or histories of realism, they offer sites in which to remind ourselves that we do many things when we read, and not all of them are explained by the protocols of formal or moral realism, the way texts refer to the real world or are applied to it” (113). This gives us, for example, a new way to understand Frances Burney's The Wanderer, not as a “failed” novel, but as a romance that refuses to give readers what they expect, by withholding the possibility of identifying with the heroine.This is a reading of Burney that shares much with Wendy Anne Lee's critical project in Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel. Lee upends the idea that novels are empathy machines, emerging from the exploration of inner worlds of characters, whose action is contiguous with feeling, being moved, in both senses of the term, literally moving in place by being provoked into action, and being stimulated into feeling. She suggests, instead, that in some eighteenth-century fiction, there is an obsession with insensibility, apparent in unfeeling characters who throw a wrench into the plot through their refusals to act, thereby provoking a flurry of activity and emotion in the characters around them, all the while themselves remaining impenetrable, opaque. To examine these models is to revisit our ideas of narrative and interiority, to recognize that insensibility is not the end of narrative—a stasis that cannot be represented—but the beginning. As Lee describes it, “This book concerns the essential absence of any emotion, as well as the tenacity with which we try to reconstruct it” (7). Lee begins with “Bartleby the Scrivener,” perhaps the most famous example of such forms of refusal, exploring how the “dependence of narrative on such a figure makes certain elements surprisingly immanent to storytelling: a resistance to depth, the primacy of nonrecognition, and an absence of desire” (26). She then jumps back in time, tracing a longer history of the prude and the ways it is gendered, then pausing over a single text, Richardson's Clarissa, in the second chapter. Demonstrating “the many ways there are to say no” (62), Lee argues, Clarissa has stymied readers and critics alike by being unknowable, incomprehensible. In the third chapter, she shifts to a more thematic focus, considering the problem of humor in a fascinating exploration of the laughter of Charles I on the scaffold, and reviewing accounts of comedy based on theories of sympathy and sentiment, and finally considering the decline of sentimental comedy through a reading the works of Oliver Goldsmith. In the fourth chapter, she turns to the problem of unfeeling in Jane Austen, arguing that in Sense and Sensibility, “Elinor's valor, her ability to order her passions, her style of intelligence do not consist in prioritizing the feelings of others above her own but in knowing that her feelings are not only her own” (161). In her conclusion, she regards Daniel Deronda as a kind of culmination, or end, of Richardsonian fiction.These two scholars, Scott Black and Wendy Anne Lee, have very different approaches: where Lee works, we might say, from within, returning us to novels we thought we knew (Clarissa, Sense and Sensibility, The Vicar of Wakefield, Daniel Deronda) and showing us an entirely different perspective while calling into question some of the basic assumptions of novelistic theory, Black turns to an overlooked or maligned archive (the romance) to advance both a different view of literary history, and a different kind of reading. Both argue, convincingly, that a better understanding of writing from the eighteenth century, and earlier (Black writes about Heliodorus, Lee about La Princesse de Clèves), must inform our idea of the novel and of its continued development.Anna Kornbluh and Elaine Freedgood, meanwhile, work to change our notion of the nineteenth-century novel. Where Freedgood, like Black, argues for an expansion of the archive, a new approach to literary history, and a different mode of reading, Kornbluh, like Lee, offers a radically new theoretical perspective on a seemingly familiar collection of novels, arguing for a fundamentally different idea of what novels do.Anna Kornbluh, in The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space, completely rethinks the ideas of realism, formalism, and literary critique. Against the notion of realism as mimesis, Kornbluh proposes that it is instead an abstract modeling of social space. And against the notion of criticism as deconstruction, breaking things down into ever smaller units moving toward an ostensibly liberatory formlessness, she regards it as a work of building, a formalism that can be put into the service of constructing new and better “socialities,” to use the author's term. Form—“composed relationality” (4)—is a positive value, rather than an oppressive containment. The introduction and opening chapter are a spirited credo that is beautifully enacted in the rest of the book, as Kornbluh examines the architecture of Wuthering Heights, Bleak House, Jude the Obscure, and Alice in Wonderland, each of which is read as realist, in the new way it is defined here: as a formal articulation of an integrated totality, a model (or blueprint) of a social space. Lewis Carroll's fanciful story, therefore, is not meant to be a mimetic description of the world, but a model of the relationship between sovereignty and symbolic logic that reveals the radically contingent nature of the law. Alice in Wonderland “is a book that insistently juxtaposes wordplay and the ambiguity of the signifier to death sentences and the whim of the sovereign—that makes, indeed, of this juxtaposition a comprehensive equation between the sovereign decision on death and the sovereign decision on the signifier; it is called a ‘sentence of execution’ because the order to execute analogizes the order constituted in the sentence” (108). In her final chapter, Kornbluh examines psychoanalysis, or rather, the question of how to formalize psychoanalysis, a project that, Kornbluh shows us, is political, the structuring of a particular kind of social configuration. The conclusion returns insistently to our present moment, and the crisis in the humanities, enjoining literary critics to embrace form and formation, and to use their skills of interpretation and abstract analysis to build a better society.Finally, Elaine Freedgood, in Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel, likewise challenges the paradigmatic idea of realism, albeit in a somewhat different way: by pointing out that it is an optical illusion produced by a shift in literary criticism. Where the Victorian novel had previously been decried as clumsy, fragmented, obsessed with minutia, in the 1970s and 80s, it became, instead, the “great” model of realism. As Freedgood argues, this new theoretical framework has not only given us a false view of Victorian fiction, this image of the realist novel has also become the (illusory) template by which all other novels, especially those written outside of England and France, are judged, and found wanting. If we correct our idea of Victorian fiction, therefore, we open up the possibility of better readings of all kinds of fictions, from all over the world. The five “case studies” that follow cover a variety of texts, some well known, such as works by Gaskell, Eliot, or Wordsworth, others much less so (at least to me, though I am not a Victorianist), such as Parr Traill's Canadian Crusoes, or G. A. Henty's Rujub, the Juggler. Each is organized around, and serves to complicate, a key concept from narrative studies that is often assumed to cohere through formal features of Victorian writing over the course of the nineteenth century: denotation, omniscience, paratext, hetero-ontologicality (the blend of fictionality and reference within a textual world), and reference. The fourth chapter on hetero-ontologicality, for instance, challenges the idea that Victorian fictionality is at all straightforward, illuminating the multiplying complexities of invented characters frolicking in actual cities, by references to real historical personages, in ways that muddy the boundaries between counterfactuality, romance, and historical fiction. As Freedgood notes, “that such ruptures do not feel like ruptures may be the most significant thing about them” (100).What are the implications of these two arguments for eighteenth-century studies? The answer is more obvious in the case of Worlds Enough, as Freedgood's argument dovetails elegantly with Scott Black's. Both texts call for a messier, and more global, history of the novel, if indeed we need to have one at all—both invite us to imagine what possibilities might be opened by jettisoning the idea of such a history altogether. Freedgood's reminder that the Victorian novel is not the formally coherent creature we frequently assume it to be is also a helpful corrective to potential teleological thinking in eighteenth-century studies, a temptation to see its various formal experiments as tending in a specific direction, toward a foregone conclusion. The application of The Order of Forms is more indirect, but just as invigorating. Although Kornbluh locates her account of political formalism at the nexus of the emergence of formalist mathematics and Marxist materialism in the nineteenth century, her proposal for a rejuvenated idea of realism has much to offer a field that is increasingly dissatisfied with the empiricist, Watt-ian version. Although they would seemingly be anachronistic, according to her historical coordinates, I wonder whether eighteenth-century novels could offer some rich case studies for such realist experiments. One example might be found in Stephanie Insley Hershinow's recent account, in Born Yesterday: Inexperience and the Early Realist Novel, of Burney's Camilla as exploring the tension between legal formalism and Bildung. Or perhaps we could unearth an effort to consider the problems attendant to institutionalizing utopia in Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall? This might also invite us to revisit the philosophical contexts that eighteenth-century theories of realism typically emerge from, to consider alternative ways of theorizing both abstraction and realistic world-building. That two other recent books, Abigail Zitin's Practical Form: Abstraction, Technique, & Beauty in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics, and Ashley Cohen's The Global Indies: British Imperial Culture and the Reshaping of the World, 1756–1815, do just that, suggests that we are already beginning to see such a shift in realist paradigms, and that the claims of the importance of eighteenth-century studies, and archives, for understanding the novel form are proliferating.The 2022 annual meeting of ASECS included a panel on the idea of an eighteenth-century realism, in which the participants asked whether the idea of realism remains useful, and if so, how. But they also observed that much of the novel theory describing realism draws on a nineteenth-century archive, and they asked how we might theorize differently if we were instead grounded in eighteenth-century writing. Each of these books could be seen as posing an answer to these questions. Whether realism will prove to be an outdated category, a relic of an older paradigm of literary history, or a term that remains relevant, but is newly cut down to size, one mode of fiction, rather than a stand-in for the novel itself, remains to be seen. But certainly, these four authors testify to a vibrant and ongoing debate within novel studies, and raise many questions worth pondering.

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