Novel Politics: Democratic Imaginations in Nineteenth-Century Fiction by Isobel Armstrong (review)
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Isobel Armstrong argues for a political power in nineteenth-century novels that grows from the intrinsic radical force of their narrative structures and constructions of identity. She sets herself in opposition to a Foucauldian tradition of reading the novel as a bourgeois device that props up the status quo, but also to Franco Moretti and other “distant” readers, whose methodology gives insufficient credit to the readerly experience of a novel in progress. It is this progress (or process) that matters most for Armstrong, rather than the conservative reaffirmations of marriage and property that tend to dominate final chapters. The novel, for her, is a thinking machine, grounded in the eighteenth-century tradition of the philosophical inquiry, as practiced by Hume or Burke (84).
Armstrong’s “radical reading” makes extensive use of the concept of illegitimacy, examined through “[t]hree novels of bearing illegitimate children and three novels of being one”: The Heart of Midlothian, Ruth, and Esther Waters; Emma, No Name, and Daniel Deronda (4). In fact, this becomes a model for most novels. Hardy, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, “makes the germ of tragedy lie in the obsession of certain forms of nineteenth-century historicism and linguistic research with ‘tracing back,’ with roots, and the model of the arboreal family tree. He exposes its essential illogic. If widely dispersed affiliations are eligible as ‘family,’ when do relations of affinity terminate? ... The brutal answer is, when poverty takes over” (9). Family trees are a mechanism for defining whom to care about, but the sense of inclusiveness that they offer is illusory. Armstrong relates this to broader currents of the period, including Darwin’s “bio-genealogy of the ‘family’ of man” (27). She has reservations about some of Darwin’s opinions, but his theory has its heart in the right place: it represents, “certainly not the production of a [End Page 379] democrat, but the intellectual conditions that fired a democratic imagination in his culture” (48). This is a main point throughout the book: the poetics of the novel, like Darwin’s theory, entail political development irrespective of the consciously espoused politics of the writer/thinker. It is not a case of hypocrisy; but rather that the thinking is better while the imagination is engaged, the theory evolving, the narrative in progress. Not just better, but more democratic: when thinking stops, artificially fixed genealogies take over, and people are put repressively in their places.
Apart from Darwin, Hegel is the most influential figure behind this project, providing a theory of the marginalization and disempowerment of the “deficit subject” (70 ff.), to be resisted through a “freedom-to-be-human” that “is only possible through the defining agency and creative recognition of the other” (74). This recognition is intellectual, but grounded in materiality, in the body. “Hegel’s reading of the body envisages an ongoing attempt to recognize the complexity of relations, a complexity that is always in danger of slipping out of the grasp of the understanding” (73). The literary text seems to function as a defender of the body (as well as of the human imagination), allowing the (gendered) corporeal to express itself in ways that may diverge from the text’s rational/realist narrative thread. This is the case, for example, with the “dreamwork narrative of female excess, rage, unbound fertility, and lyrical violence” in The Heart of Midlothian (111). The psychoanalytic paradigm assumed here and elsewhere may seem slightly dated (for some, the underlying truth; for others, an extra layer of metaphor), but the unruly textual elements that it points to are real enough.
The notion of the novel as inquiry is the first of four overlapping strategies that Armstrong deploys. The second involves a focus on “Poetics and the Real” (85–90), where the main theoretical inspirations are Paul Ricœur and Jacques Rancière, both of whom see “language as image working to couple and uncouple word and experience” (89). Thus, realism, in art, draws attention to its own artifice, and...
