The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existentialist Philosophy by Yi-Ping Ong (review)

Elaine Scarry's Dreaming by the Book (1999), now twenty years old, has had a considerable afterlife as a looming critical spirit. Or, rather, as a looming uncritical spirit: for the great risk of Scarry's book, which won it as many detractors as proponents, was what the detractors described as its 'wide-eyed' quality. We know that characters are not real people, and books are not real worlds. But good novels—Scarry insisted—nevertheless feel real, more like an actual dream than like a daydream, even to people who read and analyze them as a profession. Instead of dispelling these experiences of credulousness, we ought better to understand them.

Yi-Ping Ong, a former graduate student of Scarry's, is one of the scholars to take up this challenge. Where Scarry focused on the sensory, Ong focuses on the ontological. In what ways, she wonders, do novels give us the impression, however fleeting, that its characters actually exist? Some answer to this question, she argues, is foundational to any definition of the novel that values it as something more than a social commentary or symptom: "in order for a novel to attain the condition of a work of art—to be a novel, as opposed to a theoretical analysis, a psychological portrait, a sociological account, or a subjective series of reflections—it must represent lives in such a compelling way that the reader may accept them as actually existing" (22).

The stakes are high; Ong raises them further by offering her reader a two-pronged answer. Through close readings of major novels from across the European realist canon, she establishes the formal features that contribute to this impression: an incompletely objective narrative viewpoint, character unpredictability, plot open-endedness. From these formal features, many of which will seem intuitive to a narratologist, Ong makes a daring philosophical leap. The ontology that underpins this collection of mimetic axioms, she claims, is an implicit but clear precursor of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century existentialism. Before Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Søren Kierkegaard, and Martin Heidegger theorized this philosophical standpoint, the realist novel as a genre embodied it as a necessary condition for its powerful aesthetic effects.

Many existentialists wrote novels of their own. These novels have conventionally been taken as illustrations of their principles; Ong sees them as these principles' enactments. She also argues, more broadly, that "[a]n existentialist poetics of realism makes it possible to discern and ascribe critical importance to various strategies for portraying characterological freedom, worldhood, and detotalized aesthetic form" (236). To recognize the novel as a fundamentally existentialist project—a form of art that immerses its reader in (and because of) its existentialist view of humanity—allows one better to appreciate both the ways in which it moves us, and the depth and complexity of the worldview into which we are thereby inducted. Sartre made a passing appearance in Dreaming by the Book as a theorist of the flimsiness of our untrained, undirected imaginations. Ong elevates him—with Beauvoir, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger—to the status of a theorist, at once, of persuasive novelistic character construction and human life itself.

The readings through which Ong establishes these parallels between literary realism and philosophical existentialism are masterful, wide-ranging, and compelling. To her great credit, she considers not only predictable examples—such as the fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky—but also counterintuitive ones. In an extended reading of Emma, she turns on its head the familiar dictum about the supposed detachment of Jane Austen's narrators, showing us that "in [Emma's] overt comparison between its own matchmaking plot and the machinations of Emma, what emerges is neither the mere erasure of authority nor its deflation, but rather its deliberate invocation for the purpose of parody" (212). In a spellbinding introductory chapter on Anna Karenina, she shows that Leo Tolstoy's theory of reading presumes...