Madigan Haley
This chapter explores how the novel genre increasingly becomes a subject of theory after 1965 and how, in turn, theory becomes a subject of novels. This crossing is figured in the heading above as chiasmus, and since chiasmus is also a trope of mirroring, it is meant to suggest a further dynamic: as the genre sees itself reflected in theory, it responds, and its riposte can be registered in the form of certain novels, but also in the consolidated image they offer of theory. This is a consolidated image, since literary theory comes to a new self-consciousness in this period, transitioning from a set of rigorous but largely unarticulated approaches to a defined field of transdisciplinary inquiry. Theory, in this sense of the word, is specific to the period in question and, as Emily Apter writes, to an anglophone context:
an imprecise catchall for a welter of postwar movements in the human sciences – existentialism, structural anthropology, sociolinguistics, semiotics, history of mentalités, post-Freudian psychoanalysis, deconstruction, poststructuralism, critical theory, identity politics, postcolonialism, biopolitics, nonphilosophy, speculative materialism – that has no equivalent in European languages. (2014, vii)
The novelization of theory gives this “welter” distinct contours and helps mediate the series of translations whereby anglophone “theory” becomes global lingua franca.
A discussion of the novel in relation to all the theoretical movements quoted above is beyond the purview of any essay. Instead, I will consider major theoretical accounts of the genre during this period through their novelization in English campus fiction. The English campus novel is not only a prominent subgenre in which theory and theorists are thematized; more importantly, it serves as a form of novel theory in its own right, in a critical landscape often figured as predominantly continental and American. Works by David Lodge, Ian McEwan, and Zadie Smith imagine the campus as theory’s locus. On the one hand, this localization serves as a containment strategy, whereby theory’s account of the novel can be branded as merely academic, and superseded as fiction “graduates” to more serious concerns. Yet, in a deeper sense, the campus in these works becomes a staging ground for reflection on the genre’s form, value, and historical development. If in previous eras this development was framed in debates over “form” and “life” (see Baldick, Chapter 17 in this Companion), the operative term in theory’s era is realism.
In tune with postmodern fiction, novel theory from the 1960s onwards reconsidered the genre’s relation to language and the world, in ways often opposed to so-called “naïve” theories of realism, by drawing upon structural linguistics, Russian formalism, and continental philosophy. In turn, certain critics, philosophers, and novelists sought to reconnect fiction to “real life” by theorizing the ethical nature of the novel’s form, especially point of view. This is a somewhat simplistic overview of a history that comes to complex life in English campus novels and the theories they reference and caricature. The chapter begins with David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975) and Small World (1984), which register the consolidation of theory in a transatlantic and increasingly global academic environment. At the same time, Lodge’s fiction displays ambivalence about theory’s conception of the novel, which on the one hand opens up the genre to play with its conventions and on the other seems to disconnect it from reality. Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel Atonement aims to correct the latter by displacing theory’s campus and setting the genre on the hard road to reconciliation with the real. This impetus is carried forward in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005), which in depicting theory’s reign at an American liberal arts college comes to instruct the reader in a post-theoretical way of reading. Finally, tracing something of a volte-face, Smith’s own recent novel criticism reimagines theory as a companion in the genre’s continued evolution. Ending this way, the chapter does not follow the usual narrative of theory’s rise and decline over the past 40 years, but instead is structured around parallel moments in 1968 and 2008 as points of departure for rethinking the novel as a historical form, with theory as one significant mode for such thought.
In Changing Places, the first installment of David Lodge’s campus trilogy, the American professor Morris Zapp, a playful parody of Stanley Fish, ponders his ongoing critical opus:
A series of commentaries on Jane Austen which would work through the whole canon, one novel at a time, saying absolutely everything that could possibly be said about them. The idea was to be absolutely exhaustive, to examine novels from every conceivable angle, historical, biographical, rhetorical, mythical, Freudian, Jungian, existentialist, Marxist, structuralist, Christian-allegorical, ethical, exponential, linguistic, phenomenological, archetypal, you name it; so that when each commentary was written there would be simply nothing further to say about the novel in question. (2011, 35)
Zapp’s project recalls more than a little the exegetical excess of “The Key to All Mythologies,” the failed masterwork of pedant Edward Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872). If the scope of Zapp’s project is just as ludicrous, its command of critical language is sophisticated. A catalog of approaches au courant in the late 1960s when the novel is set, Zapp’s project maps the terrain of novel criticism at a watershed moment. While his Jungian, existentialist, Christian-allegorical, and mythical “angles” look back to criticism from the 1940s and 50s, an era which reaches its apogee in Northrop Frye’s “archetypal” Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Zapp’s “structuralist” reading might still have been obscure for his colleagues at Euphoria State in the late 1960s, just as baffling as his, alas, unexplored “exponential” approach to Austen.
Indeed, a “structural” approach to the novel was barely on Lodge’s radar in the 1960s. Responding in 1967 to Malcolm Bradbury’s essay “Towards a Poetics of Fiction: An Approach through Structure,” Lodge handles the concept of “structure” with kidgloves and scarequotes, remaining “sceptical of the possibilities of formulating a poetics of the novel analogous to that which Aristotle formulated for the tragic drama of his time” (Lodge 1971, 64). Rather than finding something new in the language of structure, Lodge aligns the structural approach with Percy Lubbock’s rewriting of Jamesian poetics in The Craft of Fiction (1921) — a contextualizing move he will make again as editor of Longman’s 20th-Century Literary Criticism: A Reader (1972), when the term fits quite modestly in the hodge-podge subheading of “Formal Criticism – Structural and Rhetorical Analysis – ‘New Criticism’ – Literary Techniques and Conventions.” Yet by the novel’s appearance in 1975, Zapp’s “structural” approach to Austen has acquired a special aura in the American academy, endowed by Fredric Jameson’s The Prison-House of Language (1972), Robert Scholes’s Structuralism in Literature (1974), and Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics (1975). And by 1977, Lodge has overcome his skepticism, helped along by linguist Roman Jakobson’s famous distinction between metaphoric and metonymic discourse:
Jakobson’s brief comment on the metonymic character of realistic fiction particularly excited me … Jakobson’s article [“Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances”] proved to be the key that unlocked for me some of the sealed doors of structuralism. Pondering it, I began to grasp the principles of, and see the usefulness of, the binary model of language and communication that underlies the whole structuralist enterprise from de Saussure onwards; Roland Barthes’s criticism began to make more sense; and I was led back to investigate the nouvelle critique in the work of the Russian Formalists and the Czech Linguistic Circle, discovering the highly suggestive concepts of “defamiliarization” and “foregrounding” in the process. (1977, viii)
All of these concepts, movements, and names, save a minor entry from Barthes, are entirely absent from the anthology Lodge edited in 1972 – and all sound very un-English.
No longer a continuation of James’s and Lubbock’s ideas, structuralism in the above passage has a continental genealogy. And its interpreters – Jameson, Scholes, Culler – are American. This geographic shift in novel criticism is in part the premise of Changing Places: an academic exchange, in which Zapp, an Austen specialist who offers courses on the theory of fiction (2011, 53), replaces the English Phillip Swallow, a generalist who resembles Lodge save for his ignorance of theory. In temporarily taking up Swallow’s post at the fictional Rummidge, Zapp worries that crossing the pond will mire him in a pretheoretical state of being:
Once he sank into the bottomless morass of English manners, he would never be able to keep the mythic archetypes, the patterns of iterative imagery, the psychological motifs, clear and radiant in his mind. Jane Austen might turn realist on him. (37)
England is realist, it would seem, and realism muddles the theoretical mind by subordinating literature to life. Zapp muses:
The failure to keep the categories of life and literature distinct led to all kinds of heresy and nonsense: to “liking” and “not liking” books for instance … He felt a particularly pressing need to castigate naïve theories of realism because they threatened his masterwork: obviously, if you applied an open-ended system (life) to a closed one (literature) the possible permutations were endless and the definitive commentary became an impossibility. (38)
At first glance, Zapp’s thoughts seem to rehearse debates over literary form and formless life that earlier occupied writers such as James and Wells, Woolf and Forster. Yet a decisive shift has taken place. No longer is the tension between a novelistic form and the content or life it mediates. Instead, literature is now conceived of as a system, and this fundamentally structuralist insight, as Culler describes, makes meaning reside in systemic relations, not amorphous life: “if human actions or productions have a meaning there must be an underlying system of distinctions and conventions which makes this meaning possible” (1975, 4). What one needs, then, are the terms to describe how a cultural system such as literature works, and from anthropologists to psychoanalysts that “metalanguage” was provided by linguistics, specifically Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiology. Saussure posited fundamental distinctions between language as utterance (parole) and as system (langue), between its synchronic totality and diachronic evolution, between signifier and signified. Meaning is not simply given in the utterance, created by the speaker, or lodged in the world; rather, it emerges from the relations between signifiers within the system of language at a given moment.
This is the “binary model” to which Lodge refers in 1977, and which would in turn lead him back to the early-twentieth-century writings of the “Russian formalists,” such as Viktor Shklovksy, Boris Eichenbaum, and Vladimir Propp, who sought to account for the specificity of literature, and its genres, by describing their internally constitutive features. As we saw, Lodge was particularly inspired by Jakobson, the mediator between Slavic formalism and Francophone structuralism, and his description of realist fiction as metonymic. Jakobson’s (and Lodge’s) point is not that we recognize realism by tallying its metonyms against its metaphors; rather, realism for both is historically relative (Jakobson 1971; Lodge 1977, 22–27), and it is instantiated in the modern novel as a set of conventions, which linguistic principles allow us to discern. Conventionally produced, the “real” in realism might inhere in metonymic displacement (Jakobson) or a connotative “effect” (Barthes 1989), yet it is above all a matter of textual relations – not the “serious” imitation of everyday life (Auerbach 1953), a fraught historical relationship to totality (Lukács 1950), or an epistemological orientation to the particular (Watt 1957). For the structuralist, these accounts still derive realism from a text’s adequacy to a reality that is extratextual. And to imagine that the realist novel just plain gives us the world would seem, to borrow Zapp’s words, “naïve.”
Seeing the realist novel as a set of conventions allows Lodge to frustrate the reader’s expectations for a neat resolution to the romantic mix-ups in Changing Places: finding his plot too symmetrical he can sub in other “styles of discourse,” ultimately the “conventions of film” (2011, ix). Yet the structuralist Zapp is also the subject of gentle but serious satire, and his fear of a realist Austen is matched by the novelist’s fear of theory. The supposed liabilities of theory are felt in Zapp’s cordoning off of literature not only from “life,” but from our “liking” and “not liking.” And when Zapp becomes impatient with a squirming student’s paper on Austen’s “moral awareness,” which sounds vieux jeu to his American ears, Lodge lets us hear in Zapp’s internal musings all the fine awareness he has nevertheless gleaned from her works: “While the boy drawled on about Jane Austen’s moral awareness, Morris pondered the implications of Hilary’s surprising call. Could she possibly mean what he thought she meant?” (177). And then there is Zapp’s pipedream project. Its ambition to describe a closed Austenian system seems not only like a thinly veiled attempt to dominate Austen and her Austenites, but also a failure of conception: Lodge knows, and we know, that Zapp won’t write it.
And he doesn’t. As Zapp himself explains in Lodge’s sequel, Small World, his exhaustive project “couldn’t succeed because it isn’t possible, and it isn’t possible because of the nature of language itself, in which meaning is constantly transferred from one signifier to another and can never be absolutely possessed” (2011, 236). While there is more to be said about Zapp’s “poststructuralist” insight, the failure of his Austen commentary exemplifies in many ways the structuralist moment of novel theory, whose signal genres were the methodological essay and the explanatory monograph, and whose pleasures were not to be found in textual play or reading against the grain, but rather in the austere symmetries of the Saussurian binary and the Greimasian square. Yet structuralism’s legacy was immense. Institutionally, it gave theoretical seriousness to literary studies, while establishing literary analysis as essentially transdisciplinary – the fertile meeting ground of linguistics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. And structuralism’s effect on novel criticism was to make the rift between text and world, explored by novelists since Cervantes, the point of departure for the genre’s theory, and naïve realism its bête noire.
Suspicion of realism, of course, pre-dated theory’s advent. Already in 1969 Lodge would place the contemporary novelist “at the crossroads”: instead of marching confidently ahead on the high road of English realism, he must now consider the paths leading toward the “nonfiction novel” and postmodern “fabulation” (1971, 18–19). Lodge follows the latter road in Small World, in which he draws upon the conventions of romance, realism’s foil, in order to plot a “global campus” of questing scholars (2011, 255), whose lingua franca is theory, battleground is the conference, banner is the “school,” and grail is the UNESCO Chair of Literary Criticism. The narrative mode of romance, impelled by desire rather than mired in the “real,” corresponds to Zapp’s “poststructuralism,” in which:
to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of the text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of striving to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing. (238)
The critic cannot fully possess the meaning of, say, an Austen novel, since meaning making, as an irreducibly spatiotemporal process, is always a matter of delay and difference (or différance, as philosopher Jacques Derrida put it). Instead of trying to possess the closed work, then, the reader “should” subject herself to the play of the open text, whose reward is not knowledge but rather jouissance. This view is roughly Barthesian, as is Zapp’s persona in the above passage, strutting with cigar in hand. While Roland Barthes never went so far as to fully align the “readerly” work with realism, the gentle pejorative qualifies those “classics” of the nineteenth-century novel, which, unlike the “writerly” text, can only be consumed, not produced (1977, 163–164). The paradox of Barthes’s criticism, however, is that his greatest readings were arguably of Balzac and Flaubert, not Sollers and Camus.
The discrepancy between the postmodern écriture Barthes advocated and his preferred critical objects is representative of what was a golden age of novel theory. The great theoretical works that followed upon structuralism, and exfoliated its doxa by reconnecting the novel with the dynamics of history, desire, and power, almost invariably took the nineteenth-century realist novel as their object, while maintaining, even intensifying, the structuralist vigilance against “naïve” realism. Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1981) consolidated the canon of “structuralist” theory, from Frye to Lévi-Strauss, Greimas to Propp, through a reading of the rise and fall of nineteenth-century realism. Yet rather than consider realism a rhetorical feature of an essentially closed work, Jameson would influentially argue that every text is structured by an absent cause, the political unconscious of history, which, like the Lacanian Real, can only be discerned through its displacement into textual form. Psychoanalysis, with its model of a conscious and unconscious that are dynamically related, offered a way past the Saussurian dividing line between signifier and signified. And desire came to name those forces within or beyond the text that both crystallize and shatter the illusion of synchronic structure. No longer a closed set of malleable but mappable conventions, narrative, as Peter Brooks would write in Reading for the Plot (1984), is a force; and the realist text can thus be approached, in psychoanalytic terms, as “a system of internal energies and tensions, compulsions, resistances, and desires” (xiv).
This description also applies to the disciplinary landscape of “high” theory in Lodge’s novel, whose tensions culminate in a roundtable that pits deconstructionist against humanist, Marxist against formalist for the elusive UNESCO chair. As each of Lodge’s theorists competes for supremacy, a junior scholar from theory’s margins stumps them all: “What follows if everybody agrees with you?” Perse’s question is reinterpreted by the roundtable’s chair as the insight that “what matters in the field of critical practice is not truth but difference” (2011, 509). If the chair’s claim is roughly poststructuralist, the scene registers Lodge’s exhaustion with theoretical dispute. More importantly, Perse’s question points to a conception of discourse, and by extension the novel, as animated by fractious voices: “language not as system, but as social activity, ‘dialogue’” (Lodge 1990, 2). This paradigm shift from system to dialogue, described here in Lodge’s last collection of “academic” essays, was introduced by the Russian philosopher–critic Mikhail Bakhtin. If Perse’s question for the panel, then, is in some sense Lodge’s for theory, an answer that would both satisfy the formal rigor of the poststructuralist age and do justice to the novel as a social genre was provided by the rediscovery of Bakhtin’s work, whose major essays, written in the 1920s and 1930s, began to appear in English during the 1980s.
Bakhtin challenged the orthodoxies of his era by asserting that:
the study of verbal art can and must overcome the divorce between an abstract “formal” approach and an equally abstract “ideological” approach. Form and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenon. (1981, 259)
The rift between literary form and social reality that Bakthin addressed in the 1930s had opened again in the 1980s, giving new resonance to his theorization of the novel as essentially “dialogic”: that is, constituted by “social speech types” whose significance emerges from their interplay within a fluid whole (262–263); receptive of other discursive forms and genres, which the novel subjects to parody and hybridization. The “novelistic” could thus be found in Socratic dialogue and medieval carnival, and the antithesis of this dialogism was no longer “naïve” nineteenth-century realism, but rather monologic, authoritative discourse.
Positing the novel as the formally and historically dynamic genre – “a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice” (261), “a zone of contact with the present in all its open-endedness” (7) – Bakthin offered an alternative to accounts of the novel’s eclipse by écriture. For Lodge the critic this meant a “life after post-structuralism” (1990, 4), while the novelist was provided with “an ideological justification for the novel that will apply to its entire history” (21). Early structuralism had maintained a dynamic relationship with experimental fiction, Lodge contended, but a “scholastic, esoteric, and inward-looking” poststructuralism had lost touch with imaginative writing, just as postmodern fiction, it follows, had lost touch with “reality.” Thus Bakhtin allowed Lodge as novelist–critic to once again assert, pace Barthes, that his writing “is in some significant sense a representation of the real world” (15).
If Bakhtinian thought helped bring social life back within a largely formalist theory of the novel, by the end of the 1980s New Historicist criticism gained ascendance, influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, which approached the genre not as carnival, but rather as the very place where resistance is contained and power made manifest. Nancy Armstrong discovered in the history of female domestic fiction soft forms of discursive power that “constitute subjectivity” and “contain forms of political resistance within liberal discourse” (1987, 25–26). And D. A. Miller, in one of the bravura arguments of the decade, read the lack of police presence in the Victorian novel as the surest sign of the genre’s evolution into a complex form of social surveillance (1988). While these approaches drew upon the resources of the poststructuralist era, they did not wave the banner of a particular school. And as the days of “high” novel theory gave way to theoretically inflected historicism and cultural studies, it was a body of criticism that was in many ways reacting against Theory (now capitalized) and the “linguistic turn” that carried on the effort of theorizing the genre’s specificity and value.
Although an “ethical” approach figured in Zapp’s Austen project, in practice he had no patience for discussions of an author’s “moral awareness.” For in severing the connection between literature and life, structuralism cast doubt on the ethical valency of novels. And the theoretical age that emerged from structuralism, drawing upon Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the “masters of suspicion” in Paul Ricoeur’s words (1977), largely approached moral life as the sphere of ideology, ressentiment, and repression. Yet in the late 1980s a number of critics began to take up ethical concerns as a blindspot of previous theory and a central concern of the novel. While Ricoeur spearheaded the return to these aspects of narrative (1984–1988), what would later be called the “ethical turn” was largely torqued by theorists of fiction, in works such as J. Hillis Miller’s The Ethics of Reading (1989) and Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep (1988). While Hillis Miller reinterpreted deconstructive modes of reading as ethical, Booth combined an ethics of reading, which he located in literary theory from the political to the formalist (1988, 5), with a sense of the “ethical value of ‘works in themselves’” (10). Arguing that “ethical criticism attempts to describe the encounters of a storyteller’s ethos with that of the reader or listener” (8), Booth made Zapp’s Rummidge student suddenly appear much less naïve: “The reader – at least this reader – comes away from reading … Jane Austen … emulating that kind of moral sensitivity … that of the author who insists that I see what these people are doing to each other” (287).
For Booth, Northanger Abbey (1817) was arguably Austen’s “strongest piece of ethical criticism” (1988, 233), an appraisal which illuminates Ian McEwan’s use of Austen’s novel for the epigraph to Atonement (2001). Not technically a campus novel, Atonement displaces the subgenre. Central characters Cecilia and Robbie have just graduated from 1930s Cambridge and spend their time debating the merits of Fielding and Richardson and musing upon the ideas of F. R. Leavis. Robbie, however, wishes to leave the “parlor game” of literary criticism behind, while still carrying literature’s moral vision into his future vocation:
Rise and fall – this was the doctor’s business, and it was literature’s too. He was thinking of the nineteenth-century novel. Broad tolerance and the long view, an inconspicuously warm heart and cool judgment; his kind of doctor would be alive to the monstrous patterns of fate, and to the vain and comic denial of the inevitable. (2001a, 87)
In a similar manner, part of the atonement that gives the novel its title obtains in its protagonist–writer Briony’s decision, after falsely accusing Robbie of raping her cousin, to give up study at Cambridge, enrolling instead as a nurse in wartime London, where she learns the body’s lessons. Risking neologism, we might consider Atonement a “novel of graduation”: one that evokes the campus in order to step beyond it. This graduation, however, is not a simple progression, since it entails, plotwise, returning to England of the 1930s and 1940s and, for McEwan, writing what he called “my Jane Austen novel” (Kellaway 2001).
If ethics, in Booth’s words, played “at best a minor and often deplored role on the scene of theory” (1988, 25), the turn toward it would entail, in part, a return to another of theory’s deplored terms: nineteenth-century realism. We find a correlative to this return in Atonement, I am suggesting, which in McEwan’s words, “enter[s] into a conversation with modernism and its dereliction of duty in relation to … the backbone of the plot” (2002). “Backbone,” McEwan elaborates, is the moral courage to tell the story “actually as it happened,” unlike Briony, who attempts to “[bury] her conscience beneath a stream of consciousness” (2002). McEwan is referring to what is described in the novel as Briony’s “evasions”: elevating her interpretations of Robbie and Cecilia’s lovemaking and her cousin’s rape over the actual events; her decision during the war to rewrite the story of that day, leaving out Robbie’s arrest, in a style that “owed a little too much to the techniques of Mrs. Woolf” (2001a, 294); and, finally, concluding the story, when it is published in 1999, with her apology to Cecilia and Robbie after the war, now reunited back in London.1 This apparent acknowledgment is yet another evasion, we learn in Briony’s postscript, since Robbie and Cecilia are never “actually” reunited, both meeting violent ends on opposite sides of the Channel. Yet “who would want to believe that,” Briony offers as a final apology, “except in the service of the bleakest realism?” (2001a, 350). Might Briony have been better served, we are led to wonder, by reading Robbie’s paradigmatic nineteenth-century novel, which warns of “the monstrous patterns of fate, and the comic denial of the inevitable”? Is correcting “evasion” in the name of “plot,” “conscience,” and the “the bleakest realism” a return to Leavis – for whom Austen initiated the “Great Tradition” of English moral seriousness and who, in a wartime review of Between the Acts (1941), criticized Woolf’s lack of attention to the “world ‘out there’” (1968, 99)?
Not entirely. Robbie, for one, is not fully sold on Leavis’s lectures (2001a, 86), and if McEwan’s novel goes behind modernist fiction in the name of ethics, its ethics inhere not in the “author’s moral seriousness” but rather at the level of literary form. In short, Briony fails to apply the lesson of restricted point of view she learns in the morning, as writer, to her interpretation of events in the evening, as witness:
There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these other minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have. (38)
Briony’s atonement in the novel, McEwan comments, is in part “to enter the minds of those she’s wronged. And she knows, as I know, that the novel is our best art form for entering other people’s minds” (2002).
Novels, McEwan elaborates in another interview, are not about “teaching people how to live but about showing the possibility of what it is like to be someone else. It is the basis of all sympathy, empathy and compassion. Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination” (Kellaway 2001). And months after Atonement’s publication, McEwan would famously interpret the events of 9/11 through this novelistic dialectic between the limitations of point of view and the extensions of sympathy:
If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed … Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself … is the beginning of morality. (2001b)
McEwan’s claim rhymes with philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s roughly contemporaneous argument that the “narrative imagination is an essential preparation for moral interaction.” “This is so,” Nussbaum continues, because “literary imagining both inspires intense concern with the fate of characters and defines those characters as containing a rich inner life, not all of which is open to view” (1997, 90). The novel, for McEwan and Nussbaum, becomes an ethical form to the degree to which it presents characters as partially open yet largely opaque. If this idea seems to rehearse earlier debates about point of view, the re-evaluation of the novel’s form derives from the notion that it is, in a certain sense, formless: a limited point of view is not a convention of the novel so much as the condition of moral life. Grappling with the reality of others, then, is “the only moral a story need have.” Conceiving of the novel as a moral instruction in itself renders moot arguments against realism, taking us past that specter’s haunting of the genre to a notion of the novel as finely attuned to life.
Just as McEwan overcomes modernism by writing his “Austen novel,” Nussbaum overcomes formalism and identity politics – that is, theory – by going back to Lionel Trilling and his account of the Jamesian novel as “committed to liberalism in its very form, in the way in which it shows respect for the individuality and the privacy of each human mind” (1997, 105). And as Dorothy Hale has recently argued, this elevation of Jamesian form as the sine qua non of novelistic ethics is pursued not only by Nussbaum, but also by certain poststructuralist critics (2009). Arresting the development of the novel at a particular conception of Jamesian form protects the genre’s contract with the real from the excesses of Bloomsbury formalism (Nussbaum) and Woolfian technique (McEwan). In turn, McEwan’s novel of graduation revives Leavis’s sense of the genre’s moral seriousness, while rendering its “necessary priesthood” unnecessary (2001a, 86), since the novel’s ethics do not require specialist interpretation, but are rather intrinsic to its form.
Thus Briony’s atonement is not simply a personal act, but also a literary–historical performance that aims to atone for modernism’s “dereliction of duty” by placing the postmodernist novel in “the service of the bleakest realism.” This realism is that of other minds, the surface rendering of which attests to untold depth. In reorienting her fiction toward this “reality,” Briony recovers her “conscience,” and the genre’s. Yet she must also make amends in regard to the “plot.” Her “expiation,” McEwan states, consists in writing Robbie’s war experience in Part Two – specifically the way she writes it. McEwan says that he “was at some pains to provide her with the correct authorities” for such writing (2002), sending Briony to the war archive for sources and making her fall in love with the “pointillist approach to verisimilitude, the correction of detail” (339). Incorporating this new material requires her to “change her style” for “the battlefield,” finding a “starker, simpler, stripped down English prose” that will give a sense of “the drumbeat of the march, a retreat … a panicked flight to the coast” (2002). If this process helps explain why McEwan’s literary metaphors are martial – “dereliction of duty,” “in the service of” – we can also read the English military retreat from France in literary terms. The long march to Dunkirk might be seen as an allegory for the English novel, and its criticism, embarking on the road to reconciliation, at-one-ment, with the real.
As McEwan’s comments on 9/11 imply, a rapprochement with the “real” was felt to be all the more urgent in the first decade of the twenty-first century. And if the novel’s traditional virtues appeared once again lustrous, the line of New Historicist criticism that scrutinized bourgeois realism, and its liberal subject, now itself appeared suspect. McEwan describes the supposed inadequacy of such theory for the post-9/11 world in a 2005 interview: “When the Enlightenment was being sort of undermined by the theorists in the academies, that was being done with a general sense of security about the ultimate cultural victory of Enlightenment values, and now I think that victory is a lot less assured” (2010, 124). In response to McEwan’s description of a new “medieval” struggle between faiths, his interviewer offered a description of her own recent sojourn in the United States, in which “around all these classic left-wing intellectuals, the feeling was one of literal despair. They just run through the streets screaming. That’s basically their only reaction to the moment they’re in, as if this moment were unprecedented,” whereas “madness … in truth, has always accompanied progress” (132). McEwan’s interviewer was Zadie Smith, who in the same year would anatomize this milieu of malaise in On Beauty (2005), the most acclaimed campus novel of the decade.
Just as McEwan returns to Austen, Smith’s campus novel reworks Forster’s Howards End (1910), directing its imperative to “only connect …” at a Northeastern liberal arts college riven by culture wars. The main warriors are Monty Kipps, a black West-Indian conservative on a visiting appointment to Wellington, and Howard Belsey, a white professor of art history whose campaign against Kipps is part politics, part jealousy. As in Lodge’s campus fiction, the scholarly dispute in Smith’s novel refracts a personal one. This disconnect lies between Howard and his wife Kiki, a black Floridian who, after following Howard to Wellington, and living in its stilted milieu, is understandably upset at his infidelities. Howard’s excuse that men “respond to beauty” appears at odds with his intellectual investments (2005, 207). His lecture course asks students to “imagine prettiness as the mask that power wears. To recast Aesthetics as a rarified language of exclusion” (155) in order to “interrogate” Rembrandt’s art as “part of the seventeenth-century European movement to … invent the idea of the human” (117). In Wellington undergrad parlance, in which every subject is shorthanded as “tomato,” Howard’s class “is all about never ever saying I like the tomato,” the tomato being art generally and Rembrandt specifically (312). In this way, Howard resembles Zapp, who in separating literature from life aimed to bypass the nonsense of “liking” and “not liking” books. Yet Howard’s methods are not so much structuralist as New Historicist, directing a Foucauldian suspicion at Rembrandt’s art as the “clarion call of an Enlightenment not yet arrived” (144).
If Smith has learned the lesson that notions like beauty and the human are socially constructed, On Beauty, in Dorothy Hale’s words, “simply refuses to be scandalized by the knowledge that aesthetics and philosophy serve as ideological instruments through their discursive erasure of the social agents who produce them” (2012, 825). And “unlike Foucauldians and Marxists,” Hale continues, Smith “does not chastise the novel for its contribution to the social production of bad political formations like the liberal subject” (826). Smith, in other words, is a graduate of theory’s campus. And she frequently casts herself in the role. In an essay based on a lecture she gave while a Harvard fellow in 2002–2003, Smith describes how as a student at Cambridge she “fell for this ‘new’ French criticism,” Barthes in particular. Yet the thrust of the essay is to take distance from Barthesian claims about the reader as writer, and the “writerly” text, for a more Nabokovian sensibility:
It’s probably for the best that [Nabokov] didn’t live to see the kind of post-Barthes (and post-Foucault) campus criticism that flowered on both sides of the pond during the eighties and nineties. Wild analogy; aggressive reading against the grain and across codes and discourses; a fondness for cultural codes over textual particulars. You remember the sort of thing. (2009, 50)
Smith’s prompt is followed by parodic titles of theoretical “readings” of canonical texts, with her comic confession at the end: “I’ve written a lot of essays like this” (50). No longer the idiom of Lodge’s “small world,” theory had its place (the Anglo-American campus) and its period (the eighties and nineties), and one can now look back on it as infatuation or pensum.
The essays that Smith was then writing were quite different, and at one point she intended to collect them under the title “Fail Better” – with the remarkably un-Beckettian subtitle “The Morality of the Novel.” In her 2003 essay “Love, actually,” Smith again describes her disillusionment with theory, specifically its supposed rejection of ethical value. She now feels emboldened to speak up against theory’s doctrine, and for the novel’s ethical style, because Nussbaum has rather heroically “climbed the disputed mountain of literary theory and planted her philosophical flag firmly in the dirt” (2003). Smith joins the philosopher, although she admits that her “flag is rather weak in comparison. It says: ‘When we read with fine attention, we find ourselves caring about people who are various, muddled, uncertain and not quite like us (and this is good).’” Smith’s “muddle” recalls Forster, and the thrust of the essay is to argue for the distinctively ethical nature of his style, pitting it against Austen’s. Austen, in Smith’s words, is a moral “positivist,” and her comic novels merely ask readers to tolerate the foibles of characters. Forster’s ethical comedy, however, demands from the reader the “far stickier” emotion of love – a love for characters who find themselves “in a moral muddle; they don’t feel freely; they can’t seem to develop.” Expanding on Forster’s words, Smith diagnoses this predicament as “the undeveloped heart,” an affliction of characters who live by received ideas rather than their own feelings – whose moral certainties and “enthusiasms” render them “inflexible, one-dimensional, flat.” The innovation of Forster’s comic novel is to show us “how very difficult an educated heart is to achieve. It is Forster who shows us how hard it is to will oneself into a meaningful relationship with the world.”
To Hale’s crucial questions about the closing focalization of On Beauty – “Why does this fecundity [of narrative point of view] narrow down to the white, male academic’s perspective? Why does Smith rewrite Forster’s novel as Howard’s end?” (2012, 836) – one could respond that Howard bears what Smith calls “the undeveloped heart.” Howard as theorist is a figure rendered comic by his certainties. Following ideas not feelings, he is “flat” – in Hale’s words, “the Updikean-Bellowian-Rothian male” – but also disconnected from life: “Like many academics,” Smith informs us, “Howard was innocent of the world. He could identity thirty ideological trends in the social sciences, but did not really know what a software engineer was” (2005, 33). In this way, Smith’s campus novel inverts theory’s charge against the novel’s supposedly naïve realism. It is the theorist now who from a position of knowledge is actually “innocent of the world”; the theorist who in following intellectual conventions misses out on the messy reality of others. In Smith’s later essay “Fail Better” the very idea of the realist writer is saddled with scarequotes and set off with a “so-called” – not to suggest realism’s naïveté, but rather from incredulity that the category bears any meaning at all (2007). In realism’s place Smith substitutes terms such as authenticity and duty – the fidelity of the writer to her particular way of being in the world.
Yet realism is nevertheless the “style” at stake in Smith’s campus novel, although its discussion is displaced onto painting through Howard’s ban on “representational art” and his critique of Rembrandt. Howard’s “undeveloped heart” not only keeps him from seeing the human reality within Rembrandt’s works, but also from a “meaningful relationship” with “the real” as it exists around him. The privileged forms that the real takes on in Smith’s novel are the aging body of Howard’s wife Kiki and 9/11. The event that in Smith’s interview with McEwan marked her American sojourn is, on the surface, largely absent from her American novel. Yet this absence is constitutive – the conspicuously missing term on the charm bracelet of “international totems” that Kiki at one point ponders buying: “the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Statue of Liberty” (2005, 49). Thus a deep narrative logic is at play when at the book’s emotional climax Kiki equates Howard’s infidelity with his theoretically motivated denial of 9/11’s “reality”:
“Don’t do that!” screamed Kiki. “Don’t undermine me like that. God – it’s like … you can’t even … I don’t feel I even know you any more … it’s like after 9/11 when you sent that ridiculous email round to everybody about Baudry, Bodra–”
“Baudrillard. He’s a philosopher. His name is Baudrillard.”
“About simulated wars or whatever the fuck that was … And I was thinking: What is wrong with this man? … Howard,” she said, reaching out to him but not far enough to touch, “this is real. This life. We’re really here – this is really happening. Suffering is real. When you hurt people, it’s real. When you fuck one of our best friends, that’s a real thing and it hurts me.” (394)
While Howard’s and Kiki’s responses to the “reality” of 9/11 could be approached as divergent viewpoints in a multiperspectival fiction, it is not difficult to see that Smith’s sympathies here do not lie with Howard’s postmodern reading of the event.
This authorial sensibility is all the more apparent at the end of On Beauty, when Howard begins to “educate his heart” in a better appreciation for Kiki’s fleshy reality through Rembrandt’s art. In the closing scene, Kiki, having previously moved out of their home, shows up at Howard’s tenure-weighted lecture, the theory-drenched notes for which he has forgotten in his car. Discovering this mistake, and his wife in the audience, Howard flits to the last slide, “Hendrickje Bathing, 1654,” which depicts a “pretty, blousy Dutch woman” bathing in a “simple white smock”:
Howard made the picture larger … The woman’s fleshiness filled the wall. He looked out into the audience once more and saw Kiki only. He smiled at her. She smiled. She looked away, but she smiled. Howard looked back at the woman on the wall, Rembrandt’s love, Hendrickje. Though her hands were imprecise blurs, paint heaped on paint and roiled with the brush, the rest of her skin had been expertly rendered in all its variety – chalky whites and lively pinks, the underlying blue of her veins and the ever present human hint of yellow, intimation of what is to come. (443)
In the final lines the materiality of paint and color are transcended, offering a glimpse of the human through the aging body’s intimations. Thus the historical and ideological human that Rembrandt “constructs” comes to mediate Kiki and Howard’s reconciliation in the present. The sightlines in the penultimate sentence suggest that this “reading” of the painting is Howard’s, yet its aesthetic language does not register as free indirect discourse. Rather, the novel’s view, as it were, becomes Howard’s. And the novel’s view is surprisingly shaped by another perspective that is intimated here – indeed by the word “intimation.”
We encounter this perspective in a four-page passage in the middle of the novel, focalized through Katie Armstrong, a precocious undergrad in Howard’s Rembrandt course. Looking at the assigned images for class, Katie responds to Rembrandt’s “Seated Nude, 1631,” finding in it layer upon layer of “human information” about “what a woman is: unadorned, after children, and experience.” Overcoming the distance between the painting’s subject and herself, Katie “can even see her own body contained in this body,” and exclaims, by way of conclusion, “all these intimations of mortality from an inkpot!” (251–252). Her enthusiasm never finds expression, however, as it is dissipated by Howard’s lecture the next day, which aims to “interrogate … the mytheme of the artist as autonomous individual with privileged insight into the human” (252). Yet Howard and the novel end by adopting Katie’s view. In this way, the “education” of Howard’s “heart” is an unlearning of the lessons in his lectures. And the close of Smith’s campus novel restores its readers, through modulating the ethical form of point of view, to the pretheoretical “naïveté,” now presented as wisdom, of one who has not yet been to theory’s campus.
On Beauty’s concluding image of expansive human “fleshiness,” and Howard’s intimated reconciliation with Kiki and the real, could be described as a moment of “beautiful plenitude.” This phrase, however, does not issue from Katie Armstrong’s absorptive appreciation but rather from Zadie Smith’s critical irony. She employs it in a 2008 essay on Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, a novel which, in Smith’s largely suspicious appraisal, turns away from acknowledging the “tenuous nature of [the] self” and “the possibility that language may not precisely describe the world” in order to ultimately “assure us of our beautiful plenitude” (2009, 81–82). Smith’s essay is collected in the appropriately titled Changing My Mind, the foreword to which pitches the volume as a replacement to “a solemn, theoretical book about writing: Fail Better,” which has yet to appear. The title is appropriate, since the thrust of Smith’s essay is to diagnose O’Neill’s novel as a form of “lyrical realism,” which responds to 9/11 by anxiously searching for authenticity in ethnicity, world events, and, finally, subjectivity: “only the personal offers this possibility of transcendence,” writes Smith, “which is why personal things are so relentlessly aestheticized: this is how their importance is signified, and their depth” (79).
A similar critique, of course, could be lodged against On Beauty, which is arguably why in a telling moment, much like the comic confession in her Harvard lecture, Smith inserts her own fictional practice into the discussion: “I have written in this tradition myself and cautiously hope for its survival, but if it’s to survive, lyrical realists will have to push a little harder on their subject” (2009, 81). Pushing a little harder on her essay’s subject, Smith no longer cultivates Nussbaum’s “hard philosophical bent,” but instead quotes Slavoj Žižek, reads O’Neill’s novel “against its own grain,” and references Barthes on how “the random detail confers the authenticity of the Real” (82, 88, 81). Doing so allows the hidden wound of O’Neill’s novel, and the displaced aesthetic of Smith’s previous one, to suddenly appear: “[Netherland] is an anxious novel, unusually so. It is absolutely a post-catastrophe novel, but the catastrophe isn’t terror, it’s realism” (74). The upshot of Smith’s interpretation is thus a claim both literary- and world-historical: O’Neill’s novel sits at “an anxiety crossroads” where the crisis of post-9/11 liberalism meets the “long-term crisis” of the “nineteenth-century lyrical realism of Balzac and Flaubert.” Those postmodern writers who questioned it are now the “equivalent of the socialists in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man.” Realism, having weathered theory’s scrutiny, remains “the last-man standing” because of its “extraordinary persistence.” So if Smith says she “cautiously hopes” for lyrical realism’s “survival,” that hope, arguably more than Netherland, is beset by anxiety: “Is it really the closest model we have to our condition? Or simply the bedtime story that comforts us most?” (74).2
As a foil to this “model” of fiction, Smith’s essay offers Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005), which does not aim to transcend “catastrophe” through lyricism, but rather “works by accumulation and repetition, closing in on its subject in ever-decreasing revolutions, like a trauma victim circling the blank horror of the traumatic event” (2009, 84). So if lyrical realism imagines that literary language can render subjectivity and “the Real,” McCarthy’s work aims “to let matter matter” (91). Doing so makes the novel a record of failed attempts to speak about “the thing itself” – an attendance upon “the void that is not ours, the messy remainder” (92). This notion of failure differs from that in Smith’s earlier essay “Fail Better,” in which writing is “the attempted revelation of [an] elusive, multifaceted self” and the writer’s inability to do so is “a betrayal of one’s deepest, authentic self” (2007). Instead of depth, McCarthy’s fiction gives us surfaces, and “as surface alone,” Smith states, “Remainder is more than sufficient” (2009, 96). Smith’s analysis here bears affinities with recent theory that has moved away from debate over the subject’s presence to describe how the novel opens up ethical, subjective, or affective “events” (Attridge 2004; Bewes 2010; Ortiz-Robles 2010). And in finding surface “sufficient,” her essay could be aligned with broader materialist trends, which focus on things (Brown 2004) and whose realisms are “speculative” (Bryant et al. 2011).
Smith’s comment also indicates a turn in her own thought: from On Beauty’s ascent toward the human back down to the paint-heaped canvas. Remarking this trajectory is not to say that Smith abandons the novel’s ethics for its matter – as if these were necessarily opposed – or that she uncritically champions McCarthy’s work. Rather, her essay marks a moment when decades after the “traditional” novel’s knell was rung, its “lyrical realism” remains as the sole survivor. Smith’s analysis can be understood as a call for the novel to assume a new historicity, which explains, in part, her “wild analogy” comparing realism’s crisis-ridden persistence to Fukuyama’s “end of history.” Yet this new novel need not negate “realism” – a reaction perhaps best understood as autoimmune – so much as reimagine the logics of fictional worlds and their connections to our own. In doing so, it will struggle formally to address “our condition,” taking up the kinds of questions cataloged at the end of Smith’s essay: “How artificial is realism?” “Are we capable of genuine being?” “What’s left of the politics of identity?” “What, and whom, do we exclude, and why?” (2009, 96). These questions, which are theoretical in nature, do not simply emerge from the novel’s history, but also from the moment of global financial crisis when Smith’s essay appeared in November of 2008.
And the title of her essay, “Two Paths for the Novel” (2009) returns us to another moment in 1969 when Lodge imagined “The Novelist at the Crossroads.” At that time, Lodge saw realism at a dead end and the novel’s path forking into fabulation and nonfiction – a development that accompanied the emerging age of theory. In a later era of realism’s predominance, Smith’s essay argues that in “healthy times” the novel has “multiple roads” and looks to McCarthy’s Remainder as an opening off the main route: “It clears away a little of the deadwood, offering a glimpse of an alternate road down which the novel might, with difficulty, travel forward” (2009, 94). Taken as a whole, then, the essay suggests a surprising dialectic, whereby if the novel genre is to become once again historical our thinking must become newly theoretical. Theory, in this sense, is not the novel’s enemy, but rather a fellow traveler.