Impure Worlds: The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel by Jonathan Arac (review)

The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that “the upshot of the theory movement, contrary to what many have understood, pointed toward finding what it will take to forge a new literary history” (34). Jonathan Arac makes this claim in the opening line of a chapter on “Hamlet, Little Dorrit, and the History of Character,” but its implications can be felt throughout the essays that compose Impure Worlds. To note that theory authorizes literary history is not exactly counterintuitive, but neither is it neatly intuitive. Scholars of literature continue to insist on their ability to distinguish theoretical from historicist contentions, readings, and methods. Even if we think of this insistence as more knee-jerk than well thought out, it still suggests the extent to which the field as a whole has yet to absorb what Arac contends ought to be taken as given. Arac is adamant that all we believe about the history of character, for instance, or the reception of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), depends on enabling theories. Collecting essays written from 1977 to 2006, Impure Worlds offers one scholar’s pointed survey of the ways in which debates about those theories have underwritten literary historical concerns in recent decades.

The analytic problem that draws Arac to particular objects of study is that of precedence. “I prefer Harold Bloom’s concern with precursors,” he explains, “to New Historicism’s tendency to flatten history into synchronicity, seeing connections transdiscursively but not across time” (x). Studying the impact, appropriation, and “refunctioning” of particular works and writers leads Arac in his first chapter to the uneven and discontinuous temporality that made Shakespeare “crucial in producing the modern conception of literature” at the start of the nineteenth century (48, 3). A later chapter considers Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837). That book, Arac argues, articulates “a mode of writing, a fusion of techniques and attitudes, that became dominant in early Victorian England” and thereby made it possible that “Charles Dickens at his best can feel like Thomas Carlyle” (79). In addition to chapters on Shakespeare’s impact (on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Herman Melville), Samuel Johnson and Charles Lamb, Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–57), and two essays on Huckleberry Finn, Impure Worlds includes analysis of Christina Stead’s refunctioning of Dickens and Mark Twain, tour de force treatments of realism in The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Madame Bovary (1857), as well as an essay on Charles Baudelaire’s “lexicon of impurity” (125).

Throughout, Arac studies the impact that earlier writing had on nineteenth-century literature, and the impact that nineteenth-century literature had on later texts. These later appropriations are satisfactorily complicated: Stead, for instance, retools “two cultural treasures of Popular Front leftist humanism, Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, and shatters them as false idols, even while finding within their works resources that make Stead’s own work possible” (48). Studying such dynamics of precedence, Arac finds in nineteenth-century writers salutary examples of what it means to be a responsible intellectual. “Like them,” he explains, “we are participating in a hegemonic practice...yet we also understand ourselves in our activities as teachers, scholars, and writers to be doing counterwork” (124). In making this comparison Arac does not collapse the distance between the twenty-first and nineteenth centuries; instead he thinks through what it means for us to remain, as Michel Foucault had it, “other Victorians” (The History of Sexuality Volume 1 [Vintage, 1990], 1).

For Arac, weighing Victorian precursors not only requires theory but also close reading. He makes two claims for his reading practice. First, he claims that it “does not demand unity as its goal” (x). Given the emphasis on impact and refunctioning, how could it? In Arac’s hands, texts do not fall apart, exactly, but become incomprehensible, understood as partial things, always part of a conversation rather than solid...