From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction (review)

Amanpal Garcha delights in paradoxes, ironies, displacements, and other counterintuitive moves in his book, From Sketch to Novel. Garcha argues that the Victorian novel, despite its famous plottedness, contains important moments of plotlessness and fragmentation that make it a precursor, rather than antithesis, to the modern novel. These discursive moments can be traced to the presence of the sketch form, which paradoxically records the temporal haste and fragmentation of modern life while depicting an aesthetic and ideology of stasis and atemporality. Thackeray, Dickens, and Gaskell each experimented with the sketch form as a way to "test the market" and "develop their brand," thus participating in the capitalist economy, yet each uses the genre to espouse conservative values antithetical to or critical of that selfsame economy.

Building on Franco Moretti's work on fictional sketches and novelistic form in Graphs, Maps, Trees, as well as Martina Lauster's recent study on nineteenthcentury European journalistic sketches, Garcha focuses on a narrow slice of time—the 1830s—as a period of intense "changefulness" in the political, economic, and social realms. This period coincided with Thackeray, Dickens, and Gaskell's adoption of the sketch form, a genre that allowed them "to register modernity's fragmented, hurried temporality but also to offer an alternative to such changefulness" (4) through an aesthetics and ideology of stasis. "Literary sketches," Garcha writes, "present time at once as fragmented, ever-changing, and thus best captured by a quick hand in nonlinear forms, and as non-changing, and thus best reproduced by static images and plotless analysis" (5). Sketches likewise allowed authors to "brand" themselves and to develop a distinctive style; Garcha links the aestheticized stasis of the sketches themselves to the unchanging, static style of the author. In the second part of the introduction, he places the literary sketch in historical and theoretical context. He traces the sketch's "emphasis on detailed description and its penchant for pure discursiveness" to the "advent of empiricism and the consequent growth and spread of periodical newspaper journalism" (27). He points to the theoretical oversight of phatic, plotless moments, which he argues are vestigial traces of the sketch, and theorizes more broadly on novelistic style, describing it as the "static screen through which we witness its narrative" (50). The sketch, precisely because it suspends the pressures of temporality and narrativity, allows authors to hone their style: narrative stasis thus allows stylistic innovation, consolidation, and maturation.

Garcha's first case study focuses on Thackeray, whose career in hack journalism offered firsthand exposure to the pressures of capitalist production. In The Paris Sketchbook (1840), Thackeray offers refuge from the clamor of the modern world through the narrative persona of Titmarsh, who becomes an avatar of stasis and tradition against a sordid background of capitalist getting and spending. Hastily written and depicting scenes of chaos and hurried temporality, The Paris Sketchbook nonetheless becomes a vehicle of conservative ideology. Its plotless form, Titmarsh's narrative voice, and even its use of folktale motifs such as devils signal a privileging of the pre-modern, and static over the modern and changeful. Garcha then turns to Pendennis (1850), a more coherently plotted kiüstleroman but one that retains a fantasy of stasis through the narrator's detached, ironic voice (a version of Titmarsh's gentlemanly affect) and sections of plotlessness. In the second half of this chapter, Garcha explores how literary labor is carefully concealed in the seemingly labor-less production of Walter Lorraine, which he argues reveals the novel's "conservative fantasy: that members of the middle class might achieve a social status that offers an exemption from modernity's relentless progress" (105).

Towards the end of this chapter, the connection to the sketch form becomes a bit attenuated, as do the ways in which Thackeray's suppression—or repression—of scenes of labor are displaced or transferred. For example, Garcha argues that towards the end of the novel, scenes of literary labor disappear almost entirely as Pen falls...