Elegies for Theory

Because its paternity is disputed, every genealogy of theory becomes an assertion about its character. When traced to Nietzsche, theory is the exposure of self-interested ideologies masquerading as logical deductions, and the insistence on the historical, embodied communicative constraints on any such inferences—rhetoric over philosophy, Isocrates over Socrates. When traced to Russian formalism, Geneva semiotics and French Marxism, theory is, earlier, the positivist pretence to an empirical science of signs, and later, the refutation of those very pretensions—poststructuralism over structuralism, Derrida over Saussure. Neither of these rival pedigrees is extinct, and indeed the three elegies under review are bright wreaths heaped on theory’s catafalque by squabbling but thriving descendants.

Judith Ryan calls The Novel after Theory a set of “case studies” (17, 20) demonstrating the moral fitness of theory in contemporary fiction, while in Theory at Yale, Marc Redfield recounts “The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America,” according to the book’s Sherlock Holmesian subtitle. Elegy for Theory, D.N. Rodowick’s extensive survey of theory as erratic enabler of Cinema Studies, is explicitly undertaken in terms of particular Wittgensteinian “language games” within conceptual family resemblances (Rodowick xii).

In order to demonstrate “the moral implications of theory” (20) against the charge of obscurantist, relativistic play with emptied abstraction, Ryan broadly applies poststructuralism to more than a dozen novels apparently informed by it. She gives not only predictable examples, such as Marguerite Duras’s The Vice-Consul, Julia Kristeva’s Possessions, and Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, but also, for example, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, and Christa Wolf’s Cassandra.

Ryan contends that novelists are not simply exercised by poststructuralism but use their stories to refute its critics: “The novelists’ engagement with theory consists in part of an attempt to correct the erroneous impression that theory consists in a facile manipulation of unfamiliar terms” (20). However improbable this sounds as a novelist’s ambition, Ryan does lucidly reiterate, for instance, Duras’s engagement with Jacques Lacan in L’Amante anglaise, Graham Swift’s engagement with Hayden White’s metahistoriography in Waterland, Don Delillo’s with Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra in White Noise, and Thomas Pynchon’s with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s schizophrenia in Vineland.

Where the traces of such influence are light, her argument falters. Though she hedges her reading with qualifiers, Ryan imposes on The Rings of Saturn the rhizome of Deleuze and Guattari, whereas W.G. Sebald specifically invokes the quincunx of Thomas Browne: “The route the narrator takes on his walking tour through county Suffolk and the trajectory of his thoughts, readings, and investigations in the course of the journey might be said to be rhizomatic” (201). If there are parallels between the immanentist trope of Deleuze and Guattari that Sebald never invokes and the providential trope of Browne that explicitly organizes his book, Ryan should establish the parallel. If, like the rhizome, “the irregular and seemingly wayward arrangement of ideas in The Rings of Saturn has the effect of undoing logical hierarches” (201), how is Sebald’s alleged investment in A Thousand Plateaus consistent with the book’s sustained reference to Browne?

Cassandra is a yet more striking choice, since its narrative is the culminating section of a five-part sequence that provides an extensive account of the novel’s provenance. The preceding four parts were published separately as Aufsetzungen einer Erzählung (translated as Conditions of a Narrative in a single English volume), none of which supports Ryan’s contention of the influence of Kristeva’s posited “women’s time” on the novel. She speculates that the omission “may be an oversight” (113), even as she admits...