Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels (review)

A book we have been waiting for—a serious, careful, and original study explaining how nineteenth-century British world hegemony shaped major Victorian novels—has finally appeared. James Buzard's Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels is not a survey of little-known fictional depictions of imperialism, nor is it yet another inquiry into the attenuation or complete absence of such depictions in canonical novels. Instead, it explores how well-known British novelists (Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and surprisingly, William Morris) adopted the perspective of outsiders in depicting their home cultures. The implied authors of Bleak House (1852–53) , Villette (1853) , and Middlemarch (1871–72) seem to have left home and returned; they evince a combination of intimacy with and estrangement from English culture, which figures itself in narrators resembling ethnographers and protagonists resembling native informants. Rather than being stuck in the evolutionary assumptions of Victorian ethnology, which allegedly turned spatial and cultural difference into a temporal continuum surveyed from its highest point of development, the novelists explored England through complex, doubled, and self-interrupting narrative modes. Indeed, Buzard demonstrates that nineteenth-century British novelists developed the ethnographic concept of culture as well as the procedures of the participant observer before anthropologists did and that both were used first at home rather than in some exotic locale.

And yet English presence in foreign lands was the condition that both enabled and required the novelists' autoethnographic labors. The formal features that Buzard identifies as belonging to this stage of the novel were first developed in the national tales of the Celtic fringe and brought to early maturity in Scott's novels. In his analysis of Waverly (1814), Buzard concedes that Scott gave his metropolitan English audience the thrill of penetrating into self-contained and otherwise inaccessible milieus. But Buzard demonstrates that the tendency to consolidate Britain through "touristification" of its alien enclaves was also a strategy by which an ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and politically various Scotland could become a cultural whole, for only efforts to create a supra-Caledonia could save the country from "becoming nothing or no place distinctive in accommodating itself to English ways and expectations" (101). The consolidation of Scottishness into a particular culture (rather than a collection of disparate factions) increasingly became Scott's aim, and the impression of giving complete surveys of all Scottish types in, for example, Heart of Midlothian (1818), set a representational pattern through which the wholeness of a culture was associated with the boundedness of the book describing it. Moreover, the characters who best personified the wholeness of the country in Scott's later novels were metropolitan persona with cosmopolitan experience, neither entirely limited to the local perspective nor completely deracinated from it. Thus another of the formal traits of what came to be (in Buzard's phrase) metropolitan autoethnography was a strong but elastic bond between an unplaced narrator outside the story world and a diegetic persona within—a form of narratorial doubling anticipating the pairing of the ethnographer and the native informant.

The transference of these national narrative strategies to the south of the island, even to the cosmopolitan center of London itself, served a similar purpose for the English, who feared that their specific culture was disappearing into a general "imperial statehood" (107). Both the expansiveness and the coherence of Bleak House arose from the need to proliferate "a series of discontinuous and seemingly irreconcilable spaces within Britain," to set in motion a narrative that not only connects them but also isolates "the single moral geography in which all these connections obtain against an expansive backdrop of other possible connections" (107). The seeming completeness and locality of the novel's world protects the metropolis against the very forces of global amalgamation it has set in motion. Moreover, Bleak House neatly illustrates the doubling of narrative responsibility between the nameless, detached third-person, present-tense narrator and...