Among Other Things: A Description of the Novel by Terrence Doody (review)

Terrence Doody. Among Other Things:A Description ofthe Novel. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1998. 265p. Patricia Linton University of Alaska Anchorage One of the responses of contemporary theory to the question "What now?" is renewed attention to modes ofrealism. Among Other Things advances this discussion by redefining realism, grounding it not in mimesis but in materiality.Terrence Doody argues that, having gone about as far as we are inclined to go in the direction of reading novels and worlds as systems of language, we should reconsider the quiddity ofthe novel as an object in the world. It is, according to Doody, precisely the tension between the novel as Barthesian text and the novel as object, a book read in time under a particular set ofconditions, diat distinguishes the genre. Because a novel's materiality is inescapable, it keeps the novel — more than other literary forms — moored in the realm ofexperience, among other things. For Doody, a novel's treatment ofcharacter is the measure ofits commitment to lived experience. A character, he insists, is not a person, not a subject, but a discourse. To the extent that a novel mirrors in the relationships among its characters the multiplicity ofexperience, it approaches realism: "the ideal ofrealism is not in its mimetic fidelity but in its beliefin the world's, in being's recurrent abundance and in the matching plenitude of its human characterization" (184). Accordingly , Doody identifies as markers ofrealism a variety ofrhetorical objectives that have often been seen as antithetical to realism — or more precisely, divergent from the conventions ofthe classic realist novel. These include the challenging of privileged discourse, the distribution ofauthority, a suspicion ofwholes, and resistance to closure. Doody argues that it is only when characters are developed fully enough to contest one anodier's authority, to function as signs of discrete interpretations ofexperience, that a novel can be considered realistic. Doody's analysis is elegant and taxing. He ranges through a broad cross-section of classic and contemporary fiction and theories of fiction, demonstrating what they have contributed to his own conception ofthe novel or in what respects dieycontest it. He offers an extraordinary range ofexamples drawn from die works ofAusten, Barthes, Beckett, Bellow, Borges, Cervantes, Conrad, Derrida, Dickens, Eliot, Forster, García Márquez, Hemingway, James, Joyce, Kafka, Morrison, Nabokov, Pynchon, Robbe-Grillet, Rushdie, Updike, and Woolf. One ofthe pleasures his study generally withholds, however, is the sustained reading ofa particular novel. He is quite willing to let novels speak for themselves, incorporating full, well-chosen passages to illustrate his points, but his focus moves rapidly from one novel to the next. His preference for a sequence of examples, incisive but comFALL 1999 H- ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW H- 87 paratively brief, seems surprising in light ofthe cautionary comment in his introduction that the novel itself should come before theory. Even so, Doody's attention to the complexity of particular novels sometimes seems subordinated to the march ofargument. On the other hand, the reader is unlikely to lose herselfentirely in the by-ways of theory. In what may be a peculiarly fitting omission, the volume does not include a comprehensive bibliography. Although this lack ofscholarly apparatus is annoying, one is, as a result, never unaware of the materiality of Doody's own book. To locate a title or publication date, the reader must flip back page-by-page through a series ofchapter footnotes. That said, I come to the characteristic of Doody's work that I most enjoyed: his enthusiasm for, even devotion to, the genre he studies. Doody is convinced of the primacy and value ofthe novel: "The novel has been many things throughout its history, but it has never been just another literary type__ The novel has been, as Lionel Trilling said, the chief agent of our moral imagination, the form that more than any other has taught us the virtues ofunderstanding and forgiveness" (1). Among Other Things certainly does not lack rigor, but it avoids the kind of critical distance that too readily becomes aloofness or imperial command of the subject matter. I may have wanted more lingering and detailed discussions ofparticular instances, but Doody never fails to respectand honor the authors and novels...