Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory (review)

Reviews Bernard Harrison. Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991. viii + 293pp. US$35.00. ISBN 0-300-05057-7. For most readers of eighteenth-century fiction, Bernard Harrison's new book will be of minor interest. Although the general topic engages those who wish to debate the nature of language and the significance of deconstructive theories, the application of these ideas to eighteenth-century subject matter is limited to only two chapters—one on Steme and his philosophical context and another on Jane Austen seen mainly as a dramatic foil to Muriel Spark. The central point of Inconvenient Fictions is that both the traditional humanists and the deconstructionists are wrong in their analysis of texts. In a chapter sensibly entitled "How to Reconcile Humanism and Deconstructionism," Harrison attempts the impossible . Paradoxically, Harrison puts a plague on both houses while attempting to spend the weekend at each. His claim is that humanists should really accept some of the arguments made by Derrida that literary language is not and cannot be "truth." Likewise, deconstructionists need to understand that language, although always part of an endlessly deferred chain of signification, can and does convey meaning. His proof for the latter is that we learn from language encounters, that we change and discover new ideas. In addition, he claims that although literary language cannot present truth or reality, it can model categories of knowing—like "parent-child-ness." The ability to create "new" ways of thinking about things like parent-child relationships gives literature a dangerous power to change the way we think about things. Literature's "mission is not to impart Great Truths but to unhinge and destabilize them" (p. 11). Harrison's road taken is a middle one in which the author steers between the Scylla of maniacal postmodems and the Charybdis of stuffy conservatives. This middle-of-theroad strategy is, however, a tactic always replete with mauvaise conscience, since the claimant constructs a too neatly divided highway and then proudly places himself along with the rest of the sensible world in the middle lane. But Harrison's middle-of-theroad stance fails to account for who is in the driver's seat. By attacking positions that EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 5, Number 2, January 1993 178 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:2 are essentially political with generalized, philosophical arguments about the nature of language, Harrison tries to avoid taking a political position—an avoidance that itself is a position. This putatively positionless authorial omnipotence then allows Harrison to make universal judgments. Harrison attacks the idea of ideology, for example, asserting flatly that "writers do not represent groups and attitudes within the community: they represent nothing but themselves " (p. 68). Relying on the echo of bravado in this statement, rather than any real proof, Harrison places himself in the midst of an inherently political discussion, but claims no position. It is this inability to account for the place of his own argument in the larger discussion that ultimately leaves much of his work toothless. By simply claiming an Aristotelian mean between two distorted positions, the book as a whole seems formless and self-righteous without the self. Thus the sections on Sterne and Austen seem disconnected from the rest of the work. Perhaps these were actually talks that were later hammered into shape to fit the larger thesis. Harrison aims to show that Sterne "is skeptical about Locke's theory of communication but not at all skeptical about the possibility of communication" (p. 76). So Sterne would in effect be supporting Harrison's larger thesis that literature does not convey truth per se, but can talk about general categories of experience. After some discussion of Steme's place in relation to Descartes, Hume, and Locke, Harrison concludes that Sterne believed we can get to know characters in novels even if the characters do not get to know each other, that Sterne asserts the primacy of the particular over the universal , and of reason over feeling. Somehow, all of these conclusions never fully add up to a thesis. Moreover, what is the point of proving that Steme agrees with you about language since Sterne...