In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust by Barry McCrea (review)

In the Company of Strangers is an excellent book, readable from beginning to end. Its theoretical framework complements and enhances its close readings; it is convincing in making its elegant and clearly stated argument; and it compels its reader to revisit familiar novels with refreshed, excited eyes. McCrea’s study is a must-read for those interested in narratology, Victorian and modernist prose fiction, queer theory, and the works of the novelists, including Joyce, under consideration, which are treated with sensitivity and intelligence.

McCrea sets out to answer the question: “Are there narrative forms of building, linking, opening, and closing—as opposed to deconstructing, undoing, deferring—that do not come back, one way or another, to genealogy and its rhythms?” (9). There are, and they rely on an affiliative, lateral network of queer relationality outside the filial, hierarchical paradigm of heterosexual family patterns created by genealogy and reproduction. These queered forms depend on the figure of the stranger to catalyze certain narrative functions relevant to time and continuity, characterized by the radical contingency, the sprawling expansiveness contained within cathedral-like structures we have come to associate with high modernist works like Ulysses and Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.¹

The continuities between nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels anchor In the Company of Strangers, following other recent critics, such as Tracey Teets Schwarze,² who claim (rightfully) that reports of rupture between the Victorians and the modernists have been greatly exaggerated. McCrea’s book is divided into two parts: the first is preoccupied with Charles Dickens—and his Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and Great Expectations³—and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the second focuses on Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s work. The split is more a convenience of chronology, however, and should not be taken as signifying some discontinuity between nineteenth- and twentieth-century prose fiction. McCrea takes great pains to weave the four authors together, especially Joyce and Dickens. The creation of a new understanding of affiliative networks has implications for current studies of narrative structure; rather than the closed system of the family novel and the marriage plot, modernist writers had an entirely new architectural model at their disposal with which to “build complex, structurally coherent narrative universes whose foundations are outside the genealogical family,” expanding fictional spaces traditionally concerned with closed-off, hermetically sealed familial universes (97).

Crucial to McCrea’s argument is the belief that a queer narratology does not depend on disruption and dissonance, nor does it require “individual moments, hints” of characters’ desires (103). Instead, he demonstrates that writers such as Joyce and Proust sought new models for storytelling outside the structures of heterosexual reproduction and continuity, shaping a new way of thinking about time and change, continuously looking not to the future but to the past. Without heterosexual reproduction, there can be no future, as queer theorists like Lee Edelman argue,⁴ but there can be infinite possibilities in retrospection. These are characterized by McCrea’s reading of Molly’s final “yes I will Yes” (U 18.1608-09), a gesture towards the future that is, via her final recollections in “Penelope,” always already happening in the past: “a prophecy in the past, a retrospective rearrangement encoding its own contingency” (155). Both Proust and Joyce constructed the beginnings and endings of their novels and then kept filling in the middle. These inner spaces continued to “bloom,” to accumulate more and greater significance, because the beginnings were fixed and the endings had nowhere to go (155).

This idea shapes McCrea’s reading of Ulysses. He focuses on the “Telemachiad,” “Eumaeus,” and “Ithaca” because, as he says, the “central concern … is with the structure,” and the main work at hand is to consider “where the family plots are set in motion and where they reach their end” (105). These stratagems include the...