How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900 (review)

Thinking is generally considered a useful ability. By "generally" I mean outside the limited circle of those who habitually write and read literary works. Even inside that circle, thinking is usually assumed to stand for mental processes that are not exclusively or characteristically literary. To assert that thinking is something novels do is therefore to make an intriguingly non-obvious claim for the novel's social value, a claim addressed both to insiders and to the non-specialist public. How Novels Think is both a historical analysis of the novel and an advertisement for it.

I risk saying the obvious so as to underline a complex and undervalued aspect of our critical rhetoric. (Note for example how Nancy Armstrong's impulse to legitimize our object of knowledge necessarily jeopardizes literature's uniqueness in order to push a separate claim for its more-than-literary significance.) But I also want to take a certain distance from the content of this book's largest and most speculative arguments. For example: "This book argues that the history of the novel and the history of the modern subject are, quite literally, one and the same" (3). Readers of Victorian Studies will, I think, be more engaged by moments of local insight that have less to do with Armstrong's celebrity, as well as by the profound reshuffling of critical priorities that accompanies her famous program of discursive holism or extreme constructionism but that can also be separated from it.

What counts as thinking in How Novels Think is problem-solving in the domain of ideological contradictions. More eager than Fredric Jameson to see the novel as an active social agent, Armstrong is also more content than Jameson to see the cultural work accomplished as merely satisfying society's desire for self-preservation, without utopian remainder. Looking "at the novel as a way of thinking in its own right," for Armstrong, means seeing it as "the culture's way of maintaining, upgrading, and perpetuating its most basic categories in the face of pressures that changing social conditions bring to bear on them" (83). In my view, this argument claims both too much ("the culture's way" suggests the only way) and too little. Armstrong makes the novel important by making it functional, but by making it functional she also makes it less deserving of admiration, at least if what we admire is throwing society's "basic categories" into question.

And yet in making this argument, Armstrong herself throws into question the basic categories of criticism. Consider her noncommittal play with criticism's praise-and-blame rhetoric. How much is worth admiring in the novel? It's hard to say. Armstrong has never made it clear whether the rise of inwardness and gender equality, which did throw society's basic categories into question, was in any sense what we call "a good thing."

In his Theory of the Novel (2000), Michael McKeon noted that Armstrong's (gender-centered) theory of subjecthood would have difficulty accommodating the Daniel Defoe of Robinson Crusoe (437n). Perhaps by coincidence, Robinson Crusoe is the first novel discussed at length in How Novels Think. The discussion of Robinson Crusoe does not address McKeon's (implicit) point, however, for it's not about gender at all. Though How Novels Think covers much of the same ground as Desire and Domestic Fiction (1990), the more recent volume doesn't give gender the same importance, at least in the most general of its assertions. Here gender is no longer constitutive of the "inward" subject as such. The claims made for it are more period-specific and to my mind more convincing. So for example, (contra Ian Watt) romance and gothic modes are cautiously celebrated for their gender-bending anti-individualism, while Victorian realism is accused of "transferring the competitive energy of the ruling-class male onto a female who could then be purged from...