A Probable State: The Novel, the Contract, and the Jews (review)

A Probable State offers readings of two well-known novels and of one brief novella that I think can safely be described as unfamiliar. The novels are George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) and Henry James's What Maisie Knew (1897). The novella, known to students of Hebrew literature but still unavailable in English except in translation from an earlier Yiddish version and not much taught outside Jewish studies, is S. Y. Abramovitch's The Travels of Benjamin the Third (1896).

What does Irene Tucker seek to accomplish by elbowing the diminutive but wonderfully funky Abramovitch text into this distinguished canonical company? One might speculate that her book is a brief for the minor and the marginal, displaying what a geographically de-centered literary criticism might look like. But this does not seem to be the point. Her goal, Tucker says, is to expose the logic behind the dissolution of "realism," and no critic who has been attentive to realism's many rebirths outside (and inside) Europe, magical or otherwise, could take for granted that by the end of the nineteenth century realism was no more. This book makes a case not for the margins but for the Jews, or more precisely for the unique and enormous importance of the Jews to Anglo-American liberalism. The debate over Jewish emancipation in England, Tucker claims, "transformed the very topic of government power" (59). "By inhabiting the space of England while participating neither in its political institutions nor entirely in the common language by which that space may be named, the Jews become the subjects around whom Eliot's new fictional authority becomes conceivable" (61). And it is not just Eliot but the genre itself that has gone through this paradigm shift in the nature of fictional authority, for Tucker advertises her three readings as nothing less than "a history of the novel" (23). It would seem to follow, then—though this is not spelled out—that for Tucker the Jew is the paradigmatic subject of the post-realist novel, and thus also the prototype of the modern subject.

The argument goes something like this: having to deal with the Jews, a people that neither spoke a common language nor occupied a common land, revealed realism's hidden nationalist assumptions, a land-based model of transparent face-to-face proximity or presence that would preclude it from encompassing (an urgent task for us all today) the distanced forms of transnational experience that have become increasingly exemplary. That is, the Jew stands for something like a theoretically correct, writing- rather than speech-based literariness. And as such, the Jew also stands for a more spacious or less confining form of political community. In other words, Tucker is giving a particular ethno-religious twist to an allegory of aesthetic vocation that literary criticism has frequently derived from Immanuel Kant: aesthetics as solution to the dilemmas of liberal political theory.

However pleasing to criticism's sense of disciplinary identity, this allegory is not very plausible either in its view of the Jews or in its view of realism. The end of the nineteenth century, Tucker argues, is "the moment in Anglo-American culture—and in Anglo-American realist fiction—when the liberal subject's capacity to know ceased to appear adequate to the task of allowing the subject to act freely" (25). But the preceding century hardly seems one in which the liberal subject's capacity to know was held to be adequate to free or appropriate action. Even a cursory reading of Bleak House (1852-53) or Middlemarch (1871-72) makes it hard to sustain the fantasy that realism recognized no problem in the fitting together of epistemology and agency. As for Tucker's portrait of Jewishness, the least one can say is that it is polemically idealized. Her...