Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel by David Kurnick (review)

A “hard teaser” refers to a thin strip hanging behind the proscenium of a theater to block an audience’s view of the fly space above the stage. In a way, you might consider the title, and particularly the photograph on the cover, of David Kurnick’s remarkable new book to be a sort of soft teaser. The cover shows row after curving row of empty theater seats. Taking title and image together, you could conclude that Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel is going to demonstrate how that Napoleon of genres, the nineteenth-century novel, won from the ancien regime of theatre its hitherto loyal audience. But you’d be wrong. The actual argument could not more entirely reverse such a claim.

Kurnick’s erudite, nuanced, and utterly convincing argument insists on nineteenth-century theatre’s sustained power to command the attention of all levels of the British public, including its most eminent novelists. Far from the novel celebrating its ability to render an increasingly more complex interiority—a narrative more or less standard at least since Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957)—Kurnick reveals a quite different genre, one that records “the discontents historically sedimented in interiority—less propaganda for the inwardly focused, socially atomized individual than a rigorous account book of interiority’s exclusions” (3). This thesis, so surprising that it might even appear, to use a word he favors, counterfactual, Kurnick supports through microscopically close readings of four iconic figures: William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, and James Joyce (with a very brief epilogue on James Baldwin).

Kurnick locates a key episode in each career, in which the novelist attempts, but fails, to write successfully for the theatre. That failure he treats as pivotal. It literally reshapes all of their subsequent fiction as each finds a way to “retroactively repurpose” the script into “significant and productive fictional experimentation” (25). As a result, in all four novelists, though in intriguingly different ways, much that is most noteworthy in both formal invention and in thematic preoccupation emerges from this blockage. Driven by “a frustrated will to performative exteriority and collectivity,” the novelists trace in the later fiction “the subdivision of ever more particularized realms of privacy,” building “a correspondingly explosive pressure toward exteriority, so that even as these texts push inward they fantasize about collective responses to the isolations of privacy.” The empty houses of the title thus turn out to be not the playhouses of the West End but their fictionalized alternatives, private spaces, both physical and psychological, emptied of any access to the connected, the communal, the public, the expressive—“containers [they] appear to encourage readers to desert” (4).

This reading identifies theatre as the public space par excellence, not only the container for, but also the iconic instance of the social, the collective, even of the political—at least until the final decade of the nineteenth century which saw the twinned triumph of Henrik Ibsen and the box set, an emergent realist theatre bowing to an all-conquering realist novel. Kurnick amply convinces us that this is indeed the way in which theatre registered for the novelists he scrutinizes so incisively. But it is also worth noting that’s not the only way to recount theatre, even in the nineteenth century. The drama of interiority, the theatre of psychological realism, has been around, and acclaimed, at least since Jean Racine. It is no stretch to claim as Phedre’s daughters not only distinguished protagonists like Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary but even their lesser sisters who succeeded on the stage, Lady Audley and the second Mrs. Tanqueray. We might even contend that Ibsen was simply showing a provincial, hyperborean theatre what French audiences had been celebrating at the Comédie and on the Boulevards for decades. For most of its long history the longing to escape a stifling private space was as much a theatrical as it was a...