Romantic Narrative: Shelley, Hays, Godwin, Wollstonecraft by Tilottama Rajan (review)

In Romantic Narrative, Tilottama Rajan has again demonstrated her status as one of our preeminent Romanticist literary scholars and theorists. Few critics can match her ability to work simultaneously on so many interpretive levels, to produce such resonantly polyphonic criticism. Few can match the ingenuity of her close readings of literary and theoretical texts alike. Few range as widely, read as deeply, or are more worth reading, rereading, absorbing. Despite its brevity, it is hard to conceive of a richer account of Romantic narrative or one that better places the particularities of Romantic narrative in historical perspective. Romantic Narrative will prove an indispensable supplement to such groundbreaking historical scholarship on the modern European narrative tradition as Watt’s, McKeon’s, and Armstrong’s and to fundamental debates about narrative theory.

Yet Romantic Narrative is hard to categorize. It would fit equally well into genre study, literary history, or critical theory, as well as critical reception of the individual Romantic authors with whom it engages. From one perspective, Rajan’s study is an argument not just for the distinctive character of the ‘genre’ of Romantic narrative, but for its underappreciated significance within European literary history. Rajan rewrites the rise of the novel as a study of the discontents of narrative, that is, of the possibilities for narrative forms to resist the ‘linear and logocentric’ impulses of the novel. She offers as well an innovative cross-genre theory of ‘autonarration,’ a mode that she places at the intersection of autobiography, memoir, and fiction.

From another perspective, Romantic Narrative targets ideological concerns, wrenching British Romantic narrative away from a conservative complicity often presumed by critics with the early nineteenth-century project of nation building and reification of gender roles, and detaching British Romanticism from any narrow identification with lyric poetry or ‘retroidentification’ with Victorian concerns. Methodologically, Romantic Narrative displays an unremitting attentiveness to the ‘texture’ of literary narrative, carefully distinguished by Rajan (à la Ransom) from narrative structure. Though many theorists come into play, Rajan’s key precursors are Agamben, whose definition of poetry lies behind a ‘poetics of narrative that unbinds the closure of plot and thus the ideologemes that plot as mimesis naturalizes,’ and Lyotard, whose concept of Begebenheit as ‘an opening within narrative – at once generous and traumatic – an event that gives itself to the future’ is crucial for Rajan’s emphasis on the ideologically progressive, ‘anarchic’ character of Romantic narratives. As always in her work, Rajan avoids the anachronistic hubris that can plague literary theorizing through her deep familiarity with Romantic/idealist literary theory and philosophy.

One might, with some justice, see Romantic Narrative ascribing a traditional social role to literature, stressing as it does the sociocultural powers of the imagination. Yet Rajan gives that account her particular deconstructive twist, crafting criticism that is ‘pathological’ in charting the perverse partial identifications Romantic narratives elicit from readers and ‘empirical’ in its ‘sensitivity to the minute particulars that disrupt our concepts.’ Literature, read rightly (i.e. sufficiently openly), ‘allows for an ongoing process of unmaking the codes reified by a culture [and] buried in its institutions so that we can reimagine those institutions.’

There is considerable poignancy to this project, for Romanticism in Rajan’s eyes is an unachieved and less than fully articulated aspiration, ‘a resistance between spirit and matter that cannot find adequate expression in the art produced in the chronological period of Romanticism.’ Throughout Romantic Narrative there echoes a Shelleyean, ‘orphic will to death, and an obsessive delving into the particularities of nature as a trope for seeking outside the social the texture of feelings occluded by a life with a more determinate and instituted structure.’

Individual chapters, all of them original and provocative, take up Shelley’s Alastor’s lyric undercutting of narrative pretensions to wholeness of the self, the unresolved tendencies of P. Shelley’s early prose narratives, Mary Hays’s Emma Courtney as feminist autonarration, Godwin’s Caleb Williams and St. Leon in relation to Kantian critique and judgment (‘a critique...