Latest revision as of 19:48, 25 November 2017

Nancy Armstrong. How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism 1719-1900. Columbia UP, 2005.

Overall

• my sense of the book as a whole as having good local readings but that the global claim as not fully supported. Her conception of The Novel is too platonic or idealist, it loses the utility of thinking of the novel as a non-human actor in making claims for an idealized form that doesn't allow for novels like, say, Bleak House, or Cranford with its benign female collectivity
• Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872) contra her displacement narrative of female subjectivity in Ch. 3 - reincorporating bad subjectivity into the social fabric but with a difference, I'd argue.

Introduction

• 3 intervention/thesis: ```this book argues that the history of the novel and the history of the modern subject are, quite literally, one and the same.```
  • Taylor 2016 pushes back in this when the subject of the novel, as in bleak house, where the subject is not a character but a city
• To produce an individual, novels had to think as if there already were one, that such an individual was not only the narrating subject and source of writing but also the object of narration and referent of writing.
• 4 Novelists had to figure out the rhetorical means of generating dissatisfaction with the available social possibilities before they could create a human subject with the restlessness to grow - over time and in successive stages - both more complete as an individual and more worthy in social terms. Novels thus gave tangible form to a desire that set the body on a collision course with limits that the old society had placed on the individual's options for self-fulfillment, transforming the body from an indicator of rank to the container of a unique subjectivity.
• 6 Crusoe, Moll, Pamela, Great Expectations: is this argument really about first person narration in the novel form?
  • no: Waverley and Frankenstein (7)
• The first two decades of the C19 also saw the first attempts at canonizing a tradition of fiction, as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, William Mudford, and Sir Walter Scott went to work compiling editions of English novels and writing critical introductions to justify their selections.
• 8 Victorian novels made the turn against expressive individualism a mandatory component of the subject's growth and development. To create an individual, however, still requires the novel to offer an interiority in excess of the social position that novel is supposed to occupy. In the novels that appear during the second half of the C19, the desire to adjust the dynamic of the community to one's notion of it disrupts the community as a whole. Accordingly, signs of excess have to be disciplined, that is, observed, contained, sublimated, and redirected toward a socially acceptable goal. To become an individual under these circumstances, the subject must still surmount the limits of an assigned social position. This is only the first step on the path to individuality, however, and a false step at that. In a novel like Dickens's Great Expectations (1860), we find that individualism is by nature aggressive and expresses itself in cruelty toward the very people whom one should cherish.
• 21 ```look up Homer O Brown, Institutions of the Novel 52-82```
• 22 ...After Austen, no novel could claim to offer an accurate view of "nature as she actually exists in the common walks of life" without including gothic elements. Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre, Miss Havisham's house in Great Expectations, and the ghosts wandering in Wuthering Heights, Villette, and The Woman in White are obvious cases in point. These novels incorporate anti-individualistic elements of the gothic, as virtually every important Victorian novel does, only to naturalize those elements as components in an all-encompassing narrative of growth and development. If, as Freud claims, the appearance of the uncanny in literature represented the surfacing of so-called primitive thought modes in modern adults who believed they had outgrown them, then Victorian realism implied that one became a modern adult as he or she surmounted such magical thinking. The Victorian novel was in this sense dependent on disruptions of the normative reality. Whenever they recast the subject's accumulation of knowledge as a process of detection, such novels were acknowledging their ties not only to the Enlightenment subject but also to the gothic sensibility.

1

• 27 ...what I call bourgeois morality cannot be considered a value in and of itself so much as a way of reading, assessing, and revising both the prevailing categories of identity and whatever cultural apparatus may authorize them.
• 52 No other medium then available could have reconstituted the imagined relation between individual reader and national readership with the rhetorical dexterity of the novel.... In this way, British fiction replaced self-expression with self-government as the key to social success.

2

• interesting structure for readings: chiasmus of Waverley and Frankenstein, reading Waverley as gothic and Frankenstein as historical/political
• 55 [Etienne Balibar on the modern subject] "If freedom means freedom of the subject, or subjects, is it because there is, in 'subjectivity', an originary source of spontaneity and autonomy, something irreducible to objective constraints and determinations? Or is it not rather because 'freedom' can only be the result and counterpart of liberation, emancipation, becoming free: a trajectory inscribed in the very texture of the individual, with all its contradictions, which starts with subjection and always maintains an inner or outer relation with it?"
• 57 As my reading of Robinson Crusoe sought to demonstrate, the features that prevent an individual from fitting into the given social order are precisely what provide the narrative motor of the novel and the source of its appeal. That affective investment does not change as we move into the early C19. What does change is the moral investment that the novels asks its reader to make in figures of spontaneity and excess.
• 59 In reading Waverley as we would Frankenstein, in other words, I want to assume that the so-called external world serves as the medium of self-expression, so that the world reveals the currents of thought at work in reshaping it.
• 61 ... if C18 novels called the modern individual into being as an independent agent and measure of social change, then C19 novels succeeded in transforming that earlier way of formulating individualism into a force that threatened to disrupt a stable and internally coherent community. Writing at the precise moment of transition, Scott and Shelley demonstrate that what had been most individualistic about the individual was in fact simultaneously irresistible and loathsome: irresistible in that it expanded the range of human potential and loathsome in that those exceptional qualities necessarily destroyed what was mundane, necessary, normal, comfortable, and right.
• To become fully individuated the British subject had to possess some piece of presocial humanity in the form of desires that exceeded the limits of his or her social position, desires originating at the very core of himself that made it impossible for him to fit in. Moreover, this protagonist had to overcome the limits set by family, class, or nation without either destroying that collectivity or placing himself permanently outside it. Shelley and Scott perform this legerdemain by turning time into space. "Some favorable opportunities [for observing the] contrast [between premodern and modern] have been afforded me," Scott explains, "by the state of society in the northern part of the island at the period of my history, and may serve at once to vary and to illustrate the moral lessons which i would willingly consider as the most important part of my plan."
• 63 [Waverley's emotional register as gothic melancholia] The melancholic individual refuses either to make peace with or to relegate the lost object to the past [therefore Waverley in becoming hybrid incorporates some of that bad subjectivity into a newly expanded and socially legible British individuality]
• 72 [Frankenstein's monster is] at once too much and not enough of an individual to belong to a community that considers the individual its basic unity [he is made up of other individuals and lacks characteristics of individual subjectivity]
• 76 Shelley exposes the flaw in the logic of Kant's cosmopolitan community [in "Perpetual Peace," 1795]: it too depends on a foundational act of exclusion. To imagine a nation that rests on the toleration of difference, one must implicitly exclude those who lack a capacity for tolerance, the religiously committed, the racially prejudiced, anyone who defines him- or herself as pure in opposition to some pollutant.
  • To become fully oneself is to become something in excess of the human in this novel: in effect, a monster. Thus Shelley creates a difference that works within the individual to expose the limit past which he cannot extend itself without cancelling out his membership in the human community.
• 77 Scott extends Englishness into the lowlands of Scotland in order to formulate an imaginary Britishness that could include both nations - provided Highlight culture were eliminated. Shelley, on the other hand, sets out to exceed the limits of the human itself and in that way imagine a transnational republic where virtually any individual could be represented. If in the resolution to Waverley we encounter a community that simultaneously expands and contracts as it embraces modern Britishness and excludes what were the prevailing kinship systems, then we can say that Shelley's novel transforms a pan-European community from an organically coherent whole to one made of many hostile parts that become coherent only through some monstrous act of violence. Both authors nevertheless set the unexpressed elements of their hero's individuality in opposition to the social roles those heroes must perform. Both pushed the individual beyond the limits of collective identity in order to expand that collective beyond the limits of the historical moment, in the one case, and the species, in the other, so as to include members of another group.

3

• her reading of Vic fiction is overly Foucauldian, and rather selective
• 79 The Victorian novel not only portrayed all women who express extreme forms of individualism as extremely unattractive but punished them so harshly as to persuade a readership that the very excesses that once led to self-fulfillment and the illusion of a more flexible social order now yielded exactly the opposite results
• Elsewhere I have written extensively on the process by which Jane overcame the very qualities responsible for her survival and explain exactly how, in combination with her inheritance, such self-discipline empowered her to tell a story in which she alone set the standard for moral judgment and social behavior. Where C18 heroines from Moll to Elizabeth Bennet stretched the limits of self-expression, I am suggesting, their Victorian counterparts contracted those limits so as to transform individualistic energy into forms of self-management and containment. The question is, why?
• 80 Thus we find Vic fiction differentiating between what might be called femaleness (aggressive tendencies formerly celebrated as expressive of individualism) and femininity (the domestic virtues anchoring the new ruling-class home). Novelists use this dualism within the woman to avoid exposing the rather obvious contradiction within the ruling-class man between the qualities enabling socioeconomic success and those required for paternal authority.
• 83 Victorian fiction uses displacement to accomplish a very different purpose [than Freudian displacement].... Victorian fiction provides a purely symbolic means of resolving a conflict among cultural categories that might render their social experience incoherent were a mass readership to confront those conflicts head on. In using displacement to explain how Vic fiction shifts its initial emotional investment from one subject to another, I attribute this mechanism to the individual unconscious nor to some mass anxiety. I prefer to look at the novel as a way of thinking in its own right, the culture's way of maintaining, upgrading, and perpetuating its most basic categories in the face of pressures that changing social conditions bring to bear on them.
• 82-7 reading of Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847) emphasizing the metonymic chains of repression linking old Catherine to young and the eruption of violence when masculine identity (i.e., individuality) is achieved by dominating femininity
• 91 In her 1860 novel The Mill on the Floss (Eliot, 1860), George Eliot offers a significant variation on this displacement and transformation of antifamilial aggression. Eliot endows her heroine with the rationality and will to move out of a provincial town and into the mainstream of modern life. But Eliot puts that rationality and will in a sexually attractive body that compels men to compete for it. Try as she might to be loyal to her father and brother, Maggie Tulliver is inexorably drawn into a sexual relationship with their competitors, historically later versions of ruling-class men [Philip Wakem and Stephen Guest].
• 95-6 No major Victorian novel could allow Maggie and Stephen to elope together, as to do so would be to reward those who capitulate to the reproductive drive, which must, above all else, be regulated if it is to serve the community. But does this mean that Eliot is capitulating to the most puritanical convention of her day when she is so hard on Maggie? ... Such overkill is not about punishing Maggie, I must insist, so much as defending the liberal individual against a most devastating attack.
• 102: To conclude, let me rephrase my initial question in terms of ideology writ large: why do modern cultures feel compelled both to maintain and to displace the contradiction posed by man's inherent capacity for violence, on the one hand, and his capacity for self-restraint, on the other? Modern cultures must claim to be inclusionary. A lot rests on maintaining that virtually anyone with sufficient will and a modicum of education can belong to the respectable classes and enjoy full citizenship.
• My reading of Victorian fiction shows some of the most important novelists coming up with highly individuated ways to sustain a contradiction within masculinity. By doing so, paradoxically, thy almost always turn the cultural equivalences that would [103] be tolerated in Kant's cosmopolitan community into essential differences that require some definitive gesture of exclusion. This change is evident event in an early novel like Wuthering Heights. Bronte initially argues that what distinguishes Heathcliff from Earnshaw and Linton is his behavior, education, and treatment at the hands of others, but by novel's end she has turned those differences into nature and represents them as emanating from Heathcliff himself, whose lack of self restraint is so profound as to prevent him from breeding successfully with those who have it. If such polygenetic thinking [multiple origins rather than monogenesis, just one] became increasingly difficult for both novelists and even Darwin to resist, then we really ought to consider whether, by the end of the century, the contradiction within masculinity could have offered a solution to a problem rather than a problem to be solved.
• 103 I want to suggest that the imagined community produced by Victorian fiction is one that could be defined in terms of its limits, or which elements of humanity it had to exclude in order to remain what it was. None of the novels from this period that we still care about produces a synthesis of the forms of masculinity it sets in contradiction each to the other. I do not consider this a failure in either aesthetic or ideological terms. To formulate such an ideal image of middle-class man would, I suspect, have somehow damaged his claim to universality. Instead, Victorian fiction characteristically used gender - the illusion of sexual difference - to maintain the illusion of inclusiveness. Once a novel recast the inassimilible features of masculinity as a woman, it could then proceed to cast out those features without sacrificing either the fantasy of universal man or the belief that certain human qualities were by definition outside the limits of western culture and therefore less than human.

4

• 105: In the fiction I have in mind, what often begins as a traditional question of how to achieve individual fulfillment quickly evaporates. An imaginary social body composted of individuals positioned each according to his or her worth turns out to be a flimsy conceptual obstacle in the path of an alien form of energy that ripples through the human aggregate. In such novels as H Rider Haggard's She and Bram Stoker's Dracula, we are asked to imagine what happens when the boundaries distinguishing individuals no longer exist. Whether it was because of their anatomy, their emotional volatility, their isolation from the public sphere, or their penchant for reading romance, women were always considered porous in this respect, thus susceptible to desires that enter the mind from outside the body. In late C19 romance, men became equally susceptible. Where mainstream Victorian fiction concerned itself with the problem of how to harness the individual's energy for social purposes, I argue, this other kind of fiction explored the alternative possibility that we are nothing but points of intensification through which these desires circulate to form one all-encompassing and mindless mass of humanity.
• 120 It is common to read Stoker's Dracula as an expression of the anxiety experienced by middle-class Englishmen and women who found themselves in an economy flooded with goods and people from every corner of the globe. In recent years, Stoker's novel has generated a body of criticism that links it to other characteristically fin-de-siecle aberrations: fetishism (where objects take control of subjects), consumerism (where supply determines demand), hysteria (where infantile phobias overcome adult desire), degeneration (where inferior traits dominate superior ones), and decadence (where foreign fashion supplants the practical robustness associated with English food, dress, and fiction). These cultural readings of the novel are bolstered by historical readings that suggest such anxieties accompanied the increasing number of foreigners pouring into England and indications that the empire was no longer expanding but contracting. Suggestive as they are, however, each of these readings of Stoker's best-known novel steers clear of the very questions that it begs. If English readers were as anxiety ridden as scholars say, then why did they embrace a novel[121] so bent on intensifying that anxiety? If the Victorian readership favored domestic realism and colonial adventure stories, then why did romances that effectively killed off both genres flourish during the 1880s and 1890s? This much is clear: late Victorian romance marks one of those instances in the history of the novel where a residual form of thinking emerged and temporarily overwhelmed the conventions of the genre.
• 134 ...novels so different as She, Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Heart of Darkness, and The Turn of the Screw, to mention a few obvious cases in point, acknowledge the degree to which fiction had to imagine what was unnatural and aberrant in order to maintain the normative subject and make readers want to embody it. Fiction, I am suggesting, had to think beyond the envelope of individualism in order to pronounce certain of its excesses unthinkable. Late C19 romance did exactly that. It offered up the unthinkable, allowing its reader to pursue possibilities that did not originate within them, because those possibilities were only and explicitly literary.

5 The Necessary Gothic

• 137 Throughout this book, I have been interested in the question of when and by what cultural means people came to be softwired with this compulsion to imagine the future in terms of expanding possibilities for individual fulfillment, only, it would seem, so that those same people would fear such possibilities and slap limits on them.
• 139 The novel, I have argued, was born as authors gave narrative form to this wish for a social order sufficiently elastic to accommodate individualism.
• 142 Georg Lukacs identifies 1848 or thereabouts as the moment when the novel abandoned its attempts to imagine a more flexible and inclusive social order.
• In "the Affirmative Character of Culture," Marcuse describes the moment of the novel's inward turn as a rupture in modern culture that caused an ideal domain of the mental and spiritual to break off from the rest of culture. The decisive characteristic of this new domain is, he claims, "a universally obligatory, eternally better and more valuable world that must be unconditionally affirmed: a world essentially different from the factual world [143] of the daily struggle for existence, yet realizable by every individual for himself 'from within', without any transformation of the state of fact." Marcuse identifies this displacement of material gratification onto a purely cultural plane as the liberal solution to the problem of economic inequity.
• 146 This is indeed the job of the C19 Gothic: to turn any formation that challenges the nuclear family into a form of degeneracy so hostile to modern selfhood as to negate emphatically its very being. Where the great tradition of Victorian fiction saw modern consciousness as the means to resolve the widening gap between self-fulfillment and what was socially permissible, novels associated with the romance revival took an outward turn. [like Hyde taking over the body of Jekyll to embody their contradiction]
• 152 ...in contrast to theories that try to explain how what is outside, past, and dead gets inside our minds and determines what we desire [as in Freud, Levi-Strauss, Foucault], Stoker emphasizes the bone-chilling truth that to invite the past in the form of alternative kinship relations into our present may well mean our extinction as liberal individuals. ...There is something important to be gained from a positive reading of what the Victorian novel deliberately abjects as antagonistic to the very terms in which it negotiates the fraught relationship of self to society. To assume a positive form, a genuinely new way of conceptualizing this relationship will necessarily invalidate all the categories that support and lend their features to differences among classes, races, sexualities, and ethnicities.
• 153 As I have tried to show by pointing out the utopian potential in Dracula, the trick of formulating a more adequate notion of the human is to find a way of articulating what we lack in positive rather than negative terms: as the sameness we acquire by virtue of always and necessarily falling short of the cultural norms incorporated in the modern individual and reproduced by the nuclear family.

Glosses

• Andrew H. Miller's, Dec 07 MLQ Review
  • 582: How Novels Think, a polemic concerning modern liberal subjectivity, claims that the history it tells and the history of the novel are "one and the same": beginning in the early C18, the novel invalidated competing models of the subject and then developed an adaptive and generative set of rhetorical figures for individuality that reproduced itself across British culture. It is thanks to the novel that the individual became the "most basic unit" of modern knowledge formations and the ground of secular morality.
  • 583 The comparative claim that the novel, and no other discourse, "gave form to the modern individual and continues to defend and update it" goes unproved, because Armstrong's argument itself is not comparative; she does not engage religion or political economy (for instance)

to demonstrate the power and consequence of novelistic discourses[.] 

• • • in the way, for ex, that Devin Griffiths' later work would think about the novelistic in Darwin
  • 585 Victorian literary criticism has rested complacently with received models of historical change, as if the philosophy of history were irrelevant to its own day-to-day business. But these musing reflections, coming from such different scholars, suggest that in probing the nature of the new, Victorian literary history itself might look to discover it.

• Taylor 2016
  • 40 Anthropogenic climate change is produced by the aggregation of emissions rather than by the action of any one individual, making a model of ethics grounded in the responsibility of the individual an inadequate frame in which to address it. This in turn demands a reevaluation of one of the key strands in novel theory, namely, the ideal that the genre hinges on the conceptualization and development of the individual subject. As Nancy Armstrong puts it, "the history of the novel and the history of the modern subject are, quite literally, one and the same." Here, the individual subject is not a human being but the metropolis itself, interpolated into being in Bleak House's all-encompassing first sentence: "London."... London in effect becomes visible as a unified entity only from the imagined [41] vantage point provided by the novel.... My point is not htat the material reality of the city did not exist but that the material reality as encompassed in the name cannot exist without the ability to model it as such. [The city as the product of human artifice]