When we were children, my brothers and I were electrified with excitement whenever an outsider—an aunt, a cousin, a friend of our parents—stayed the night in our house. Guests often brought us sweets or other presents, and in their presence the usual regulations about bedtimes, vegetables, or running down the stairs were relaxed. But it was not these small concessions and luxuries that made the presence of a guest so thrilling so much as a more abstract, elemental change in the air that they brought with them. The empty spare bedroom always had a faint air of dusty glamour, a feeling of being mysteriously linked to some foreign, slightly marvelous world beyond our household, and the presence of an overnight guest within the domestic walls activated this latent mystique. The routines and habits of our family household were new to a guest, who could not know that we went to bed at eight on a Saturday or whether we were allowed eat biscuits at breakfast or read comics in the bath. Through the gaze of an uninitiated viewer, the particularity of our family’s daily round became suddenly visible to us, and we would have a sudden, heady flash of insight that, far from being naturally occurring immutable laws, these customs and protocols were arbitrary conventions that might easily have been different.
We assumed the patterns of the world at large to be a simple extrapolation from the identities and interrelationships of our own nuclear family unit. But in the company of their siblings, cousins, or friends, our parents took on wholly new identities as actors in the world outside, individuals with a past that preceded and exceeded us, bound by interesting obligations and inscrutable solidarities with strangers alien to our little clan. From this, we also caught a dim first glimpse of the lonely but exhilarating truth that one day we, too, would have attachments binding us to the world of strangers that lay outside our family and, furthermore, that these ties would not only be different from the filial bonds holding the family unit together but would, in fact, replace them. A guest brought excitement and diversion but also something frightening and sinister: a first intimation of the death of our nuclear family itself, the stable center of our world. Visitors brought with them the first dark knowledge that the world beyond our family was not an unrelated, alien place but a near and looming reality that had claims over us, too, and to which we would one day have to, and, stranger still, want to belong. When the door opened to welcome a guest, it also let in a cold draught from this other world, a premonition of a day to come when our attachments to strangers would supersede and replace the overwhelming web of intimacy inside, bonds that then seemed not only to be permanent but to constitute the very essence of reality.
Swann’s Way, the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, really begins when Swann, a neighbor and friend of the narrator’s parents, comes to the family’s country home for dinner. Swann’s visits are a source of dread for the child because they interrupt the cherished family routine, and especially the sacred ritual of his mother’s goodnight kiss. On this occasion, the narrator recalls, the distress provoked by Swann’s visit renders him inconsolable, and he cannot be assuaged by any amount of parental affection and attention. The visit has planted in the narrator the half-conscious knowledge that his nuclear family, which had felt like a timeless, eternal world, will come to an end, that his birth family is not a permanent set of relationships but a temporary arrangement that will change, and from which he will one day have to depart. Swann’s first appearance in the Recherche is associated with grief, interruption, and fragmentation; his arrival shatters a safe, seemingly eternal system of identity and belonging.
Across the many later volumes of Proust’s novel, the search for time to which the title alludes becomes a search for a suitable narrative form, a fitting framework for the adult narrator to arrange the events of his own life and replace the lost sense of order and coherence once offered by his nuclear family. In the end, it is none other than Swann and the memory of his painful visit that become the key to this form. What was initially experienced as a degenerative interruption, as a destruction of attachments and coherence, has become by the end of the novel a vital source of continuity and connection, a way for the narrator to tell the story of his life, to articulate his vision of the world and understand the passage of time. The visiting neighbor ends up not only disrupting the routine of the narrator’s childhood family but ultimately usurping the whole narrative prerogative of the family to provide a meaningful sense of chronology, identity, and change.
This book argues that the formal innovations of the high-modernist novel are inseparable from a fundamental rethinking of how family ties are formed and sustained. Genealogy was thematically and structurally central to the English nineteenth-century novel. In the Company of Strangers shows how the formal strategies employed by Joyce and Proust grow out of an attempt to build a fully coherent narrative system that is not rooted in the genealogical family. Modernism’s rejection of the familiar and cultivation of the strange, in other words, are inseparable from its abandonment of the family and embrace of the bond with the stranger as an alternative to it.
In the Company of Strangers sets out to show how a fundamental rethinking of the family and its narrative role is, in fact, a good part of what is “modern” about Ulysses or the Recherche. At the same time, it offers a reassessment of the relationship between the modernists and their Victorian predecessors, suggesting that the key precursor to this queer model of narrative can be located, paradoxically, in the genealogical obsession of the English nineteenth-century novel. Far from representing a clean break with the Victorian family novel, the radical narrative formalism of high modernism exploits the potential of an alternative queer plot that was already present as a formal building block in the nineteenth-century novel.
This book consists of four chapters that trace an evolving rivalry between the genealogical plot and other forms of connection in a series of highly canonical English, Irish, and French texts that are particularly representative of this narratological process: the novels of Dickens, the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Joyce’s Bloom and Proust’s Swann are modernist alternatives to the father, and they come at the end of a lineage of figures—Balzac’s Vautrin, Dickens’s Fagin and Magwitch, Doyle’s Holmes—who plot against genealogy and mount a challenge to the family’s control of narrative rhythms and resolutions.
This sequence is not intended to suggest that the twentieth century was the first to produce novels without family plots or neat genealogical endings; there are any number of texts and indeed whole genres, such as the picaresque, that do not shape themselves around marriage, paternity, and reproduction. The question this book is concerned with is not how novels resist or avoid genealogical closure but, on the contrary, how Joyce and Proust look for what we might call queer closure, a nongenealogical narrative model that yet offers as much formal consonance and cohesion, as much of a sense of formally interrelated beginnings and endings, as much sense of a meaningful closure as genealogical family plots.
In Beginnings, Edward Said discusses modernism’s relationship to the family plot, noting that a key feature of modernism, as opposed to the nineteenth century, is a shift from hierarchical relationships, “filiation,” to adjacent ones, “affiliation.” Said does not deal with the question of actual alternatives to the family and how they might be involved in this fundamental reorientation of the approach to narrative.1 Queer theory has given some thought to distinctly gay ways of experiencing time. Often, this is connected with distinctive forms of feeling—melancholy, untimeliness, backwardness.2 In the Company of Strangers takes up this question of queer temporality from a narratological point of view, addressing the question of how nongenealogical experiences of kinship and time can be taken from the periphery and “centered” as an alternative underlying model for narrative itself. The book moves away from now common pieties about how queerness might disrupt, undermine, trouble, or lurk subversively within the dominant heterosexual discourse, and addresses instead the question of how narratives might be built, and how the world might be depicted, using a nongenealogical template.
The general tendency in modernist studies has been to associate homo-sexuality in Joyce and Proust with indeterminacy, the deferral of closure, the undermining of overarching structures and master narratives.3 This book suggests, on the contrary, that Ulysses and the Recherche, as they decouple continuity and connection from the idea of biological reproduction, employ queerness as a model of generativeness and connectivity, a template for mapping growth and maturation, and a way of achieving rather than avoiding closure. In this sense, In the Company of Strangers has some affinity with the feminist projects that have over the years addressed the question of a narrative mode that is not implicitly male.
The self-conscious obsession with finding a symbolic scaffolding for their own novels—correspondences with the Odyssey, comparisons to a Gothic cathedral, two great “ways” that come together, the confining of the action to a single day, and so on—is in itself a sign that Joyce and Proust are deliberately seeking a new model of building narratives. On a superficial level it may seem as though this is part of a modernist break with the regressive, heredity-fixated Victorian novel. The Victorian novel is indeed focused on family genealogy; its plots invariably involve wills, bequests, long-lost relatives, and, of course, marriage. Modernism has at times wrongly come to be seen by its proponents as a corrective to that reaction, an overcoming of fuddy-duddy conservative Victorian anxiety, a reconnection with a confident and sophisticated narrative strain or else, by its antagonists, as egg-headed, cold-hearted navel gazing that ignores the warm realities of family life altogether.4
But modernism remains deeply curious about the family; like their contemporaries Freud and Woolf, Joyce and Proust in fact intensify the focus on the life of the bourgeois nuclear family. What the modernists do break with, though, are the plots of marriage and paternity that had become almost standard in the English nineteenth-century novel. The peculiarity of these dynastic plots is emphasized by the fact that they are not a feature of the French novel of the same period in anything like the same way. On the contrary, as Tony Tanner points out, the French novel is already invested in what happens outside of marriage, or after it, rather than what leads up to it, and the family revelations that are so formally central to Dickens have no such role in Stendhal or Flaubert.5 But the Victorian novel, and perhaps Dickens most strikingly, derives a sense of narrative rhythm around promises that paternity will be revealed and courtships will end in weddings. We know that Oliver Twist and Esther Summerson will discover who their parents are; we know that Middlemarch, for all its unstinting investigation into life after and within marriages, will end, like Pride and Prejudice, with the wedding of its central female protagonist; Jane Eyre signals that the narrative is coming to a conclusion with the famous line “Reader, I married him” (a line that would come closer to the beginning than the end of Madame Bovary).
While Dickens is taking eighteenth-century foundling plots as his model, it is important to note that the novel before Dickens was by no means always structured according to the family plots of the romance or the new comedy. The most striking counterexample is the picaresque, in which the protagonist, usually orphaned or otherwise estranged from family life is forced by economic hardship to embark on a series of mostly solitary adventures in search of material wealth. In its original and most typical form, the content and events of the picaresque are not structured according to a family plot or by any other external system. Sometimes we know the parentage of the picaresque protagonist, sometimes we do not. But neither the known family background of the protagonist nor a mystery concerning these origins arranges the narrative time or gives meta-physical meaning to his adventures. The eponymous hero of Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) has a mother, a deceased father, and a current stepfather. But his narrative life begins when he is apprenticed away from his family to a blind man, and the rest of the narrative is an account of one employer after another, ordered simply in sequence, with only ironic symbolic echoes between them. Lazarillo leaves his family never to return (“I know I’ll never see you again,” are his mother’s parting words), but no alternative system of kinship ever comes to replace them. Family ties cannot stick to the pícaro, whose nature it is to move on (Defoe’s Moll Flanders moves easily through an alarming number of families; she is never defined by her role as a mother, daughter, or sister). The point of the picaresque is precisely that the hero is alienated from communal structures and adrift from social forms. Moll Flanders and Lazarillo de Tormes exist on the margins of worlds that are structured according to dynasty and kinship, but they are fundamentally lone agents, disconnected from these structures. Even when there is a retrospective revelation (e.g., the question of Tom Jones’s paternity), the narrative chronology is not arranged or given a final aesthetic symmetry (its energies are not “bound,” to use Peter Brooks’s term) by a formalized arrangement of repetitions and returns;6 the life of the pícaro is outside the family and therefore outside of structured, formally shaped time.
In Oliver Twist, Dickens imposes the frame of a paternity plot to give structure and legitimacy to his pícaro’s adventures. The serial narrative mode of Moll Flanders and Lazarillo de Tormes (or of Oliver Twist’s near contemporary, Barry Lyndon) is replaced with a family romance, which ties the beginning meaningfully to the end and has Oliver return to the family of his lost mother and father. Reading Oliver Twist back from Ulysses and the Recherche suggests that the emergence of the family-romance plot in the English nineteenth-century novel is provoked less by a sudden bout of enthusiasm for the family and more by a sense that, in a world now bursting with pícaros, the chaotic array of ad hoc attachments through which the picaresque hero passes is threatening to crystallize into something more permanent, that the other groupings may, in other words, be about to coalesce into genuine alternatives to the family.
The English nineteenth-century novel from Austen on seems, structurally at least, to be in the thrall of a sort of fertility cult, where all sense of beginnings and endings are predicated upon marriage and procreation. But in the genealogical plots of Dickens, which manage, against all the odds, and through extravagantly implausible coincidences, to work themselves out against the hostile background of the vast London crowds, we can identify the same narratological problem to which Joyce and Proust seek a queer structural solution: the competition for control of the narrative between the genealogical family and alternative forms of human connections.
The Victorian family plot does not blindly or naïvely insist on the primacy of the biological family as the guarantor of structure and meaning in the world but rather poses a question about how narrative and family are connected: can there be a way, other than the genealogical family, of giving a formal and symbolic frame to time and change, beginnings and endings? The family may come up trumps in Oliver Twist, but the suspense comes from the force of the challenge mounted by its rivals, led here by the arresting figure of Fagin. The narrative function of Fagin—a randomly encountered, surrogate father who threatens the biological family for control of the protagonist’s destiny—is the key starting point for this queer structuralist account of Joyce and Proust. As In the Company of Strangers follows the changing outcome of this competition for legitimacy between the genealogical plot and its queer competitors, it implicitly traces a sort of lineage of alternative fathers who rival the family plot for control of the narrative, from Fagin, Magwitch, and Balzac’s Vautrin, through Sherlock Holmes, to Leopold Bloom and Charles Swann.
The ideas of narrative and family are so closely interwoven that it is hard to separate them. Narrative and family both attempt to plot a relationship between what came before and what comes after;7 both organize the unknowable jumble of events and people who preceded us into a coherent array of precedence, sequence, and cause. They imagine continuity between different moments in time, and they draw affinities—“kinship”—between disparate or distant people and events.8 The rites and rituals of genealogy—marriage and paternity—are the basis for the classical frameworks of narrative. Marriage, first of all, is the narrative goal par excellence, the redeeming moment toward which we expect stories—from “Cinderella” to a Hollywood romantic comedy—to tend. With its implicit promise of biological reproduction, marriage is the embodiment of the happy end, i.e., an end that is also a beginning (in French, the equivalent formula for “they lived happily ever after” is “ils eurent beaucoup d’enfants”: “they had many children”). And if marriage is the end, paternity is the secret. The anthropologically inflected structuralist analysis of the mid-twentieth century, which sought to identify a transhistorical “deep structure” in narrative, suggested a basic connection between genealogy, especially the question of paternity, and the narrative impulse. For Barthes, as for Freud, the underlying question that provokes storytelling in the first place is that of our own paternity, the mystery of our origins: “If … every narrative … is a staging of the (absent, hidden, or hypostatized) father [it] would explain the solidarity of narrative forms [and] family structures.”9
Biology, of course, means that heterosexuality is the first and easiest account of these beginnings; my mother met my father, boy met girl, the primal scene. Marriage is the archetypal end of a narrative because it is also a symbolic return to these origins. Narrative may be about the creation of children, but it is also about the production of parents, whether old ones, through the revelation of secret paternity, or new ones, through the successful conclusion of a courtship. If we look at it this way, narrative, in its most basic, traditional form, appears to be almost mystically connected to genealogical origins and continuity, to the cyclical rhythm of childhood, marriage, and reproduction.10
The supposedly natural identification of narrative with this heterosexual life cycle raises several obvious questions: What narrative forms are on offer to those who, for whatever reason, lie outside the rites and rituals of heterosexual coupling? How does the deep genealogical structure upon which narrative appears to be founded deal with or account for homosexuality? As queer theory has brought nonheterosexual life experiences in from the margins and the shadows, this question, in different forms, has occupied a variety of scholars. Poststructuralism has shown how apparently universal discourses contain and are even built upon gaps, silences, and contradictions; by rehistoricizing the social discourses in which narratives are embedded, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick demonstrated how late-nineteenth-century European networks of power were founded upon a simultaneous fixation with and disavowal of homosexuality. Poststructuralist queer theory has had the exhilarating effect of suggesting that even if cultural master narratives appear to be heterosexual, they can nevertheless be shown to contain, and even to be undone by, other, unacknowledged forms of sexuality and desire.11
But if queerness is expanded, or reduced, to this subversive principle, a bug in the heterosexual machinery of narrative and signification, a mechanism of jamming, blocking, and unraveling, then we avoid the structural question that is the central subject of this book: how might the world at large be narrated—as opposed to undermined—from a non-straight perspective? Are there narrative forms of building, linking, opening, and closing—as opposed to deconstructing, undoing, deferring—that do not come back, one way or another, to genealogy and its rhythms? Or we might pose the question in another way: rather than seeing them as shattering or subverting or ironizing traditional norms, can we find a consistent model of kinship and family underlying nontraditional, experimental narrative forms?
Queerness already has a structural role in the genealogical narrative template, and it is not so hidden or subversive. Lévi-Strauss, for example, sees the Oedipus myth as, in the words of Philip Pettit, a “logical formulation of the problem of reconciling two conflicting views of man’s origin: the theory that he is born of the earth and the knowledge that he is born of man and woman.”12 The conflict between the nuclear family and attachments outside it is a more obviously essential structural element in the marriage plot. Because genealogical continuity relies on the destruction of the individual nuclear family unit and the incorporation of an outsider into the line, an element of queerness, in the sense of a rival to the family, is an inherent part of the process.
In describing the structure of Shakespearean comedy, Northrop Frye lays out a basic architecture that also holds for all sorts of marriage plots, from “Cinderella” to Pride and Prejudice.13 On one side, according to Frye’s model, stands the parental home, the enclosed family unit of parents and prepubescent children. On the other is the new household that will be formed by the grown child when she leaves her parents and marries an outsider. These two households, and the two generations, are separated by a magical “green world,” an in-between place where children go to form erotic ties outside the family, a place sometimes represented (in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example) as a literal forest. The green world stands between the breakdown of one family and the founding of another, between the arrival of the wicked stepmother and the marriage to the prince. It is free of parental supervision and social constraint, and it is characterized by unchecked erotic impulses, gender bending, and altered or mistaken identities.
Marriage is thus the ends of narrative, but it is also the end of narrative. The wedding may promise future renewal, but it also signals that the story, the excitement and intrigue of the green world, is over. It is the moment when struggle, wandering, and mystery give way to stability, home, and clarity, when “events” give way to stillness, when strangeness becomes familiarity. The immortality conferred on married heroes by the English formula “they lived happily ever after” is telling: just as Swann, the stranger who intrudes upon the family, incarnates the painful but unopposable forward movement of time, the family itself is a timeless sphere; time, action, and narrative all begin when the family is broken and interrupted. When it is restored, time stops again. The story itself is synonymous with the strange and difficult events that block and delay it. It is framed, structured, and legitimized by the heterosexual family cycle, but the story itself is over once the queer interlude has passed.14
As Freud intuits in his essay “Family Romances,” the rags-to-riches plotline of the fairytale is also the emotional story of how one nuclear family ends and another begins.15 The standard fairytale as it has established itself in the Disney West usually begins with a painful change in the family. “Cinderella” offers perhaps the classic pattern: the death of the saintly mother, her substitution by a malevolent new wife, and Cinderella’s consequent abandonment by her father and her mistreatment at the hands of her stepfamily. In this book about twentieth-century European fiction, I am referring in general terms to the version of the tale, loosely based on the literary versions by Perrault and the Grimms, that has come to dominate in the modern West; this version encodes twentieth-century Western attitudes to the psychology of family life that may be neither timeless nor universal. As Lawrence Stone suggests, the affective relationships between parents and children were radically different in the early modern era and before, when mortality rates—of both infants and parents—were far higher than they are now. This meant that parents, spouses, and siblings were simply not expected to clock very much time living together. The stabilizing of stories like “Cinderella” around the core Oedipal psychodrama of maturation, courtship, and marriage may well be a result of a longer, deeper, more stable family unit. Long life expectancies give this emotional unit a false sense of permanence, with the result that it is first broken apart by sexuality rather than by death.16 “Cinderella” is an emotional portrait of adolescence: the change in the family makeup is a literalized expression of changed childhood attitudes to parents. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It, it is the young lovers whose appearance is changed, but the basic principle remains constant.
The queer world that lies outside the family is a transitional zone; the hero or heroine passes out of that green world and into a new family. Cinderella leaves her father’s family and step-relatives for an interlude of balls and magical transformations, but her marriage brings her out of the green world and back to family again. She leaves the world of fairy godmothers and transmuted pumpkins, just as Snow White leaves behind her queer family of dwarfs and returns to the stable, bounded world of parents and children, fated now to live “happily ever after.” In the rags-to-riches genealogical plot, whether it is based on paternity—as in the case of Oliver Twist—or marriage—as in “Cinderella”—the “rags” part of the story corresponds to the queer interlude, when the failure of the family to provide material sustenance throws the protagonist onto the kindness of strangers—into the company of criminal, magical, or otherwise unfamiliar outsiders and often alternative forms of community (Fagin’s den, the house of the seven dwarfs).
The emotional force of “Cinderella,” like “Hansel and Gretel,” comes from the brutal ending of secure family life. These folktales are really about the painful discontinuities required by exogamy; the genealogical plot may be ultimately more interested in how one leaves the family rather than in how one creates a new one. We know nothing of Cinderella’s family before her mother died other than that it was “happy”; its presence in the tale is a static, timeless one. “Cinderella” subtly foretells the painful but also thrilling predicament of adolescence, a time as yet inconceivable to the child listener, when she will want to flee the security and affection of her childhood home for the sake of what, for a child, must be the most unimaginable and frightening of ideas, union with a stranger. The fairytale emphasizes this push-pull effect, turning the stranger into an irresistible aristocrat and the parents into violent villains. These narrative conventions represent the transformations required by exogamy: the birth family becomes hostile, oppressively familiar, and the world outside it becomes alluringly, magically strange. At the moment of erotic awakening, the child’s family members become transformed, in the child’s eyes, into malign figures, into what Northrop Frye calls “blocking” agents, while figures outside or opposed to the family are positively transformed in social and erotic terms: a benefactress next door with magical powers and an attractive, wealthy young man up the town.17 The marriage also reassures the listener that the anguish of the breakup of the childhood family will be handsomely compensated for by erotic fulfillment, material comfort, and social power. If the transition from the parental homestead were seamless, there would be no need for such fairytales (and the object of desire outside the family, some ordinary local boy, would not have to be rendered a prince).18
The idea of “Cinderella” as an account of exogamy, a promised “way out” of the imprisonment of childhood and the nuclear family, is given some force by the fact that in versions of the tale up to the eighteenth century, the heroine was as likely to flee home because of excessive paternal love, i.e., incestuous propositions by her father, as ill-treatment by a stepmother.19 The marriage plot, that is to say, may be about the happy renewal of the family, about its survival and return, but it also signposts a path for the individual protagonist out of the nightmare of childhood, out of the prison of powerlessness, dependence, passivity and subjection, and into a realm of autonomy and action.
No such automatic escape route exists for homosexual children. Queerness is essential to genealogical progress, but the narrative action—breaking out of one’s birth family—seems to be structurally connected to heterosexuality. Paradoxically, gays seem fated to be structurally chained to the birth family forever. In this paradox we can find a narratological link between the genealogical basis for narrative and the overwhelming sense of melancholy, pointed out by many, that pervades “gay time” and, indeed, gay culture.20 When applied to narrative, queer theory has tended to identify and exalt homosexuality as something that undermines structure and resists endings, as an agent of disruption and uncertainty that staves off maturity, age, adulthood, and, by extension, closure and death.21 While this idea is part of a radical political rhetoric, as a sort of opposition to a heterosexist, phallocentric teleological mode of narrative, it also chimes, oddly enough, with the traditional genealogical narrative of exogamy, whereby queerness is confined to what Peter Brooks terms the narrative “middle,” the unresolved adolescent tangle before the wedding.22 Biological reproduction—and, by extension, heterosexual marriage—is connected to the seasons, the weather, to bodily realities of life and death; it is the template for narrating time and change, for depicting the rhythm of our selves and bodies as we move toward death. As a means to endlessly stall closure, homosexuality becomes identified, narratively speaking, with permanent childhood, with Peter Pan rather than Cinderella, with fantasy rather than material reality.
In No Future, Lee Edelman suggests that this exclusion from “reproductive futurity” might have an autonomous, structural value of its own and that “queers” should embrace what they already incarnate for the culture at large—a refusal of future-oriented temporality.23 In the Company of Strangers takes up Edelman’s notion of “queer temporality” from a narratological point of view, addressing the question of how queer time might be taken from the periphery and “centered” as an alternative underlying model for narrative itself, how there might be a queer model of time that accounts for aging, closure, and death. The central argument of the book is not that such a model ought or could be developed but rather that it has been, that it is, in fact, the key question animating the formal narrative experiments of Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and, by extension, that it is central to modernism itself.
As the childhood memory I opened with underlines, the nuclear family is built upon an elemental distinction between insiders and outsiders, kin and strangers. The stranger is a figure of time itself, a harbinger of the terrible consequences (for the nuclear family) of maturation, the moment at which an attraction to an outsider will be a stronger draw than filial love; the stranger brings with them the past as well as the future—they are a reminder that the parents were once “strangers” to each other, too. In the heterosexual marriage plot, this arrival of a stranger heralds the demise of one family, but it also assures the beginning of a replacement: courtship and then marriage transform the threatening outsider into a husband or wife. For the child, the painful loss of the birth family will be compensated for by a new one. The child loses her parents but becomes a parent herself, and the stranger, by becoming her husband, is brought inside, transformed from outlaw to in-law.
If the stranger is necessary to solve the problem of the family, the marriage plot is also a way to deal with the problem of the stranger, with the troubling challenges of a figure who stands outside the family, who threatens familiarity and routine. The family needs the stranger, but it also neutralizes him, brings him in from the wilderness and assimilates him to the syntax of genealogy and kinship, rerouting his energies back into family life and, by extension, civilized society. But even if it is the most common story, “boy meets girl” is not a universal one; not all forms of erotic maturation can be incorporated into genealogy. Certain novels of Dickens, the Sherlock Holmes stories, and, on a grander scale, Ulysses and the Recherche experiment with the idea of a stranger who is not a transitional figure who interrupts and then becomes family, but one who is instead a rival to it, who offers a distinct, different kind of bond, a form of connection that cannot be subsumed into genealogy but might nonetheless offer a basis for a sense of time, change, and continuity.
In an essay on the role of the stranger in the context of economic life, the sociologist Georg Simmel defines him as someone whose position within a group is “determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it which do not and cannot stem from the group itself.”24 Simmel here is writing specifically about the figure of the trader, but his definition is strikingly applicable to exogamy and to the narrative figure in the marriage plot who must interrupt the family and break it apart to allow it to reconstitute itself healthily in another generation.25 In the marriage plot, this figure does not have to be literally unfamiliar—he may be the boy next door—but he is made strange, “queered,” if you like, by the transformations of the green world. (For Simmel, the classic example of what he calls the stranger is the European Jew: it is striking that all but one of the figures I will be examining—Fagin, Holmes, Bloom, Swann—who function as the “stranger” who usurps the regime of the family, are Jewish). The imposition of the family plot on picaresque content in nineteenth-century England, where this book begins its study, came at a time and place at which the presence of the stranger was becoming a more radical and urgent reality. The social upheavals and unprecedented mobility brought about by the Industrial Revolution were breaking apart traditional family networks of parishes and households, and turning London into an ever-vaster melting pot of unattached migrants utterly unknown to one another yet sharing the same limited physical space. The basic template for the family plot, the “green world” marriage-plot structure, corresponds to a village model of life and society, to what Raymond Williams calls a “knowable community,” a small world in which, if an individual’s family connections are not already known, then they are likely to be discoverable.26 In the preindustrial village, or at least in its imaginary archetype that underpins the basic shape of the marriage comedy, individuals are by and large recognizable, and their family connections are well known—their family connections, indeed, are how they are thought of and identified. Strangeness and outsiderhood in this hypothetical village are mostly psychological or magical rather than literal realities, and they are temporary. What is miraculous about the marriage plot, in fact, is the way it produces strangeness where once there was familiarity. The magic of the “forest” is this brief, thrilling window in the life of the villager when the dreary boys and girls of her childhood are transformed, for a short time, into beguiling strangers, before they become again the all-too-familiar faces of her neighbors, the bakers, fishwives, and cowherds of adult drudgery in a small community, identifiable once again as some seamstress’s son or some blacksmith’s daughter.
The stranger has a quite different function in the London of the 1840s and 1850s, when two out of three people living in the city had been born elsewhere.27 As these people pour into the city, they leave behind them not only the small villages where they grew up and their tight networks of family and acquaintance but also the whole idea of family and familiarity as a way to understand their relationship to the people around them. In the world of the village, people are understood and located in terms of kinship and known connections—even apparent strangers can usually be assigned to a place on a genealogical grid, someone’s cousin, sister, husband. In the new metropolis of the industrial nineteenth century, almost everyone is permanently a stranger.28 Dickens’s insistence on the family romance may be understood as a narrativizing of the nonstop series of encounters with strangers—permanently, untransformably strangers—that life in the new industrial metropolis throws up. The problem may be a sociopsychological one, as Simmel suggests, but it also has a narratological dimension and a narrative response: in Oliver Twist, Dickens treats London as one vast green world in which the dangerous and exciting encounters with random strangers must eventually be tied back into a genealogical array. In the dénouement—literally, unknotting—only those encounters that can be incorporated into genealogy can survive; those that cannot, such as the meeting of Oliver and the Artful Dodger, must be undone. In other words, what may look like an improbable, sentimental promotion of the endurance of blood family ties, may really be a curiosity about what lies beyond the reach of the family, encounters and relationships that can never be assimilated to its structures.29
The expansion of London in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thus forms a backdrop to this narrative development in the novel. And even though the French nineteenth-century novel is not characterized by the quasi-mystical genealogical structures of so many Victorian novels, we can identify echoes of a similar process in the Paris of Balzac. Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions), which begins with the problem of bequeathing a family business, plays out the competition between the family in the provinces and rival forms of association in Paris. In Le père Goriot, Eugène de Rastignac leaves his family behind in Angoulême for the alternative family of Madame Vauquer’s boarding house, where he comes under the tutelage of the homosexual criminal Vautrin. Vautrin is the key antifamily, city figure in both novels—he pulls the protagonist into the murky world outside the family. Vautrin’s homosexuality and his narrative function are thus vitally linked: like Fagin and Magwitch, Vautrin is irreducibly a stranger, not a stepping stone between a birth family and a marriage family but an agent wholly outside of family itself.
The narrative figure of a sexually ambiguous outsider who threatens the family plot is not restricted to depictions of metropolitan life, however. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), a rural novel by a rural writer, tells in the most dramatic and condensed form the story of a stranger who cannot be subsumed into a genealogical plot. The action takes place in an isolated preindustrial world, far away from the brothels and boarding-houses of Oliver Twist, Illusions perdues, or Le père Goriot. The physical geography of the novel is a graphic representation of Northrop Frye’s co-medic structure: on one side stands the Earnshaw family home, Wuthering Heights, and on the other, Thrushcross Grange, the house of the Lintons. Separating them is a stretch of savage natural wilderness. Everyone is transparently connected in some way to one or the other of the two great family homes, icons of civilization that face each other across untamed nature. According to Frye’s schema, the next stage in the narrative is clear: for the maintenance of this world, a child of Wuthering Heights must cross the green world represented by the wild moors and marry a child of Thrushcross Grange. This exogamic narrative setup, however, is irreparably interrupted by Heathcliff, who arrives in Wuthering Heights with no context, history, or connections and no knowable parentage. Like Oliver Twist among the thieves, Heathcliff among the Earnshaws is an orphan who can never be acclimatized to his adoptive family, and he remains forever an irreducible outsider to the Earnshaw family circle. Like Dickens’s Pip, he retains his singular name throughout the novel; like Pip, he can never bear a surname, a fact that reflects this narrative role—he is a green-world stranger who cannot be assimilated by the family plot.30
As Raymond Williams is careful to point out, the idea of the village, of a stable world of knowable communities that preceded the interruptions and complications of the big city, has been a fantasy for many centuries, each generation locating this lost knowable world at a different historical moment.31 Moreover, as the case of Wuthering Heights suggests, there are also some particular limits to the value of the growing industrial metropolis as a defining background to the queer narrative forms of Joyce and Proust.32 The London of Dickens or Conan Doyle and the Paris of Balzac may be characterized by vast, milling crowds and constant, unpredictable comings and goings, but Joyce’s Dublin—supposedly the epitome of the modernist urban experience—is strikingly static, an intimate, “knowable” community.33 Random encounters are key to the queer narrative tactics of Joyce and Proust, as they were for Dickens, but the city crowd does not overwhelm the reader or the protagonists of Ulysses or the Recherche the way it does in Dickens or in Balzac’s Comédie humaine. The Dublin of Joyce’s vision is still in many ways a “village,” and in Proust’s Paris, everyone seems either to know everyone else or to be at a few easy degrees of separation. The Recherche goes to some lengths, furthermore, to deconstruct the initial binary between Combray/family and Paris/queer. Just as Magwitch, the most powerful incarnation of the queer spirit of Dickens’s “London” is, in fact, encountered in the countryside, and the genealogical chaos unleashed by Brontë’s Heathcliff is confined to the moors, so the first revelation of homosexuality in the Recherche takes place not in Paris but in a rural neighborhood outside Combray, and the crucial encounter that destabilizes the whole family narrative is with a well-known neighbor in the village (and the queer stranger of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, is an acquaintance of Stephen’s father and has met Stephen a number of times before).34
When Joyce and Proust seek a solution to the stranger that does not rely on his transformation, by marriage, into family, they are addressing a “problem” more narrative than historical. The prospect of systems other than the family that might organize time and relationships may be raised in a particularly acute and concrete form by the modern metropolis, but it is not confined to it or produced by it. As in Dickens, London and its crowds are central to the Sherlock Holmes stories, but Conan Doyle also depicts a variety of other spaces—agricultural communities in the New World, rural wildernesses, tropical outposts—as places where the family is overwhelmed by other kinds of associations and ties.
Homosexuality in Joyce and Proust is not only a form of erotic desire or behavior that calls out for frank depiction (though in the case of Proust it is certainly that) but also a means of addressing a timeless narrative question, which we can connect to Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of the Oedipus myth: how can reality—time, change, transmission, relationships, beginnings, endings—be meaningfully shaped and narrated without using the genealogical family as an underlying template? Homosexuality, with the distinct, nonbiologically reproductive temporality that it implies, and the relationship to a stranger who cannot be assimilated into genealogy that it involves, is a key metaphorical model for their building of a full narrative system that is not founded on genealogical principles but that is yet generative, inclusive, structured, and comprehensive.
In the queer modernist narrative strategies of Ulysses and the Recherche, the stranger rivals and ultimately usurps the family plot. But he is also a reminder of what is inherently, necessarily queer within hetero-sexual genealogy itself. As Simmel puts it, the stranger is someone who is both near and far at the same time. In Dickens, Joyce, and Proust, the stranger who threatens the family is always encountered by accident; unlike the imaginary identifications of blood kinship, which are not spatially or temporally limited, his role and power derive from the fact of physical proximity. In Oliver Twist, Fagin and his gang represent the urgent reality of immediate circumstances; Oliver falls in with the Artful Dodger not because of a mystical, immanent connection—as with Mr. Brownlow—but because he is close by, a neighbor at hand in a moment of physical need. Similarly, Stephen Dedalus gets caught up with Leopold Bloom, first, because they physically run into each other on the street and, second, because Stephen is in immediate need of assistance. Contrary to what one might expect, the queer plot is associated with material as opposed to imagined reality; there is a vital connection between the queer family dynamics of modernism and their investment in material realism. In this sense also we can view queerness as a spatial concept. Sherlock Holmes’s genius comes, to no small degree, from his ability to see through unexamined assumptions about what ought to go together with what and to perceive instead what is actually nearby. Holmes differs from the aristocratic scions who employ him by his ability to understand the power of adjacency: noticing that a pawnshop abuts an exclusive bank or understanding that the neighbor or servant derives special knowledge from being close by is often decisive to Holmes’s solutions. The neighbor, in his guise of the stranger, is opposed to the family and is the key queer figure in the modernist reworking of narrative form.
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The first chapter of this book traces the evolution of this figure and its narrative role across the oeuvre of Dickens, locating the precursor for the queer narrative shift of Joyce and Proust in the criminal or ad hoc anti-families that cluster in the underworld of Dickens’s London. In Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and Great Expectations, the plot is animated by a competition between rival versions of the family, genealogical and queer, for control of the protagonists’ destinies and the form of the plot. The outcome of this competition shifts over the course of Dickens’s career; in Great Expectations, the various genealogical plots that try and fail to control the novel’s form are eventually overwhelmed by the force of a random encounter with a criminal stranger that no family dénouement can untie.
The competition between the genealogy and its queer rivals is also central to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, the subject of the second chapter. Whether or not we read Holmes as gay, his shared space with Watson and Mrs. Hudson at 221B Baker Street constitutes an alternative family, one incapable of genealogical reproduction. Holmes’s living arrangements set him starkly apart from the genealogical families whose interests he is employed to protect; in narrative terms, his bachelor household, the fruit of a random encounter in the city, is the structuring center of the stories, biologically sterile but narratively productive.
The third chapter is devoted to the question of family and form in Ulysses. The family dramas of Ulysses—the alternative paternity plot of Stephen and Bloom, and the day-long marriage plot of the Blooms—have been at the center of critical debate on the novel. While queer theory has opened up exciting avenues of exploration into Ulysses, it has avoided the question of its governing family plots, tacitly accepting that the family structure in the novel is a fundamentally “straight” one, seeking queerness instead in the gaps, silences, and elisions of the novel. This chapter makes a queer narratological case for Ulysses on the basis of its vision of the family. Queerness here is not by any means coterminous with homosexuality or sexual deviance. But the structural consequences of homosexuality in narrative terms are foundational to the form of Ulysses, to the communal and collective realities that provide the framework and scaffolding of the novel. The chapter shows how Ulysses is neither a rediscovery nor a wreckage of Victorian family values but a work and a world structured by an alternative ideology of kinship: a queer family epic.
The muted but distinct references to homosexuality in Ulysses are an important sign of the queer vision of human life that underpins its formalist strategies. The great project of Joyce’s family plots is the queering of heterosexual family life—as in Dickens and Holmes, homosexuality has a powerful metaphorical role in Ulysses but little concrete presence in the novel. À la recherche du temps perdu, to which the last chapter of In the Company of Strangers is devoted, is distinct from the other novels looked at in the book in its focus on literal homosexuality and the explicit link it makes between queer narrative strategies and the lives of actual gay characters. Proust’s novel is partly composed as a search for laws—a search, as with Ulysses, for its own form—and we can trace a clear arc of evolution from family life and childhood, from a failed but cherished system of genealogical laws, to homosexuality, adulthood, and an alternative set of laws to organize experience and articulate a vision of the world.