The Comfort of Strangers: Social Life and Literary Form by Gage McWeeny (review)

Early on in Gage McWeeny's interesting new book, The Comfort of Strangers: Social Life and Literary Form, there is a surprising but fitting typo—I hope it is intentional. "Part of my hope for this book," he writes, "is to make the case not only for the distinctiveness of the literature of social density as a discrete thread running through nineteenth-century literature, one found even in the works most associated with the ethos of sympathy with which it is at an oblique angel" (22). Imagine, if you will, an "oblique angel": a figure of goodwill, certainly, but not someone on whom one could count directly or see clearly. Perhaps it would be a figure who can never be brought forward openly, since the angel would then cease to be oblique.

Something like such a figure is what McWeeny means in referring to "the comfort of strangers." Far from seeing strangers as a threatening Other, he is interested in the ways in which modern urban life depends on good relationships with strangers. When we ride a subway, for example, we do not come to know anyone individually, and yet the functioning of the process depends on us treating each other well. But the way we do so does not involve sympathy, since we do not get to know each other; instead, we have a "weak social tie" (15). As McWeeny goes on to argue, such ties form the background or "dark matter" of modern life, insofar as they are an almost omnipresent, but rarely confronted, foundation for more obvious forms of relationships (4).

The argument proceeds in particular by showing the ways in which the background of a society of strangers is a necessary assumption underlying many of the formal techniques of Victorian literature. George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72) offers a clear example of a tension in the realist novel: on the one hand, such novels seek to grasp a social whole; on the other hand, the only way they can do so is by including characters in particular narratives, giving them names and stories, turning them from strangers into acquaintances. Middlemarch engages the paradox by telling the stories of particular individuals while flagging the extent to which they are merely pieces of an undescribed whole. In perhaps the book's most distinctive close reading, McWeeny sees Eliot's famous question "Why always Dorothea?" as an interruption marking the limits of what he calls the "coherence-bestowing effects of plot or narration," and gesturing toward both the difficulty and importance of knowing the mass of undifferentiated strangers (qtd. in McWeeny 61, McWeeny 65). Pauses such as this in Eliot's narration are thus a specifically novelistic form of detachment and an indicator of Eliot's subtle attempt to understand society itself. But the combination of creative interpretation with theoretical insight here is not unique: McWeeny is a skilled close reader, one highly attuned to the complexities of literary form, and the book is full of moments that elicit nods of appreciation.

Yet there are other moments when the insistence on form obscures the nature of the claims. In particular, McWeeny seems torn on the extent to which the individual authors he considers are aware of the sophisticated theoretical analysis he finds in their formal innovations. On the one hand, he says openly that he wants to argue that they are "theorists of the social themselves," and is comfortable at moments of speaking in terms of Eliot's "account" and Oscar Wilde's "view" of the social (9, 64, 135). On the other hand, there are moments where it seems as if the form of the text itself has the crucial insight, without the author necessarily being aware of it at all; McWeeny admits that he is not engaged in tracing intellectual history and instead is engaged in "historical claims" of a "necessarily broad nature" (7). McWeeny's use of something like...