Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (review)

The delightful cover of Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (the jacket attributes its conception to the author) consists of a photograph entitled Acrobats Eat While Doing Handstands. The 1930s gymnasts depicted in black and white display the terrifically good form of their neat and compact bodies even as they misbehave at table by elevating their upside down selves above their meals. Lifting spic-and-span gym clothes and dirtied gym slippers above overloaded forks raised from a well-set table, they produce a spectacle, the merits and effects of which are dependent on the invocation of bad form. For Kent Puckett, the nineteenth-century novel is similarly dependent for its effects on the bad form of the "social mistake" (3), and in considering the uses of such mistakes for the creation of character and the coherence of narrative, Puckett's book lives up to the delights and stimulations promised by its cover.

Puckett's task in Bad Form is to articulate how the nineteenth-century novel's frequent reference to and commission of such errors highlights the relation between character and narration in the novel. The gaffe or faux pas, Puckett suggests, is useful to narration in rendering character credible and human because the mistake is so powerfully suggestive of interiority; the mistake "suggests the presence of an inside" (134), a consciousness in possession, perhaps, of an unconscious, a self. Acknowledging and taking off from Audrey Jaffe's recognition in Vanishing Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience (1991) that narrative omniscience is a fantasy and an effect demonstrated in part through its opposition to character, Puckett further and insistently disembodies "the narrator," rendering it as narration itself. Just as the self's coherence, Puckett suggests, is dependent on its distinction from sovereign wholeness and perfection (a distinction recognizable in the mistake), narration's coherence and its power are dependent on its separation from character. And nothing produces and demonstrates that separation better than narration's attentions to the social mistake, a pointing at character and away from its own labors. The discomforts and unease at play in narration's relation to character and in its attempts at coherence, Puckett argues, are visible in narration's own social mistakes, in its slips and excesses and in the bad form of its calling attention to bad form. This perception leads, in one of the book's most striking readings, to the surprising discovery that "in Middlemarch [1871-72] the always correct, always balanced voice that is narration, were it to appear among the citizen-characters of Middlemarch, might look more like Rosamond Vincy than Dorothea Brooke" (117).

Chapters of Bad Form focus on Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) and Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886), in addition to Middlemarch, but Puckett's lively intellect lights throughout on a wide range of texts and references. The clarity of Puckett's writing is notable, and his text seems (as it cannot in fact have been) effortlessly learned. The book's interest in sociability is reflected in the sociability of its relation to other critics, who are fully and respectfully engaged and appreciated even when their work is the object of disagreement. This scholarly sociability is notable not just for its generosity but for its opposition to the book's own nightmare: that of a decimating perfection, "a world without people and the games they play," which would be "a world without bad form" (162).

Though Puckett is often really smart and lively on the subject of etiquette (he is wonderful on the tradition of crisis around eating peas with one's knife, for example), for him the social error is finally a means of articulating the moods (mostly melancholy) and methods of form. Getting to form's motivations by way of the mistake, Puckett is at his best when articulating the problem of perfection for narrative and the ways error...