Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction (review)

. . . texts, whatever the topic, frequently end up being about nothing more compelling than their own twitchy verbiage.

(72)

But is it possible, one wonders, to put this more simply?

(55)

Challenging those who think that novels are made of characters, plots, or words, of images, passions, societies, or impersonal forces, along comes Garrett Stewart with the declaration that, at bottom, novels are made of letters and sounds. The raw materials of writing are his basis; as he puts it where he introduces the term he owes to the musicologist Lawrence Kramer, “Narratography without narratology may well be ‘mere’ stylistics, [but] narratology without narratography is barely reading at all” (Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema [2007], 26).

Stewart has been hearing voices in novels for nearly four decades now, and his uncanny gifts at thickening a scene will be familiar to most readers of this journal. After a preliminary example from Dombey and Son (1846–48) of “the microgrammar of death’s plotted arrival” when Jonathan Carker sees a train “close upon him” (threatening, adverbial /S/or cataclysmic, verbal /Z/?)(7), Stewart charges through Little Dorrit (1855–57), some Edgar Allan Poe tales, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), and The Mill on the Floss (1860), arriving at Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) as the grimmest of the grim—or, in one pun he manages not to make, as the ur-tesst of novel violence. No other critic, living or dead, can reap such wealth from the “off-echo” bracketing a phrase like Thomas Hardy’s “distance makes artistic virtue of their stains” (197, emphasis mine, following his frequent practice).

Such vintage virtuosity speckles the long chapters, without lying as thick on the ground as in Stewart’s earlier books. Rather, the special contribution here is the overlay of higher-level perspectives, theory, and cinematic technique. Along with many compelling elucidations of Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel (1920) there are particularly brilliant exfoliations—scattered and inadequately indexed, like riffs from a great lecturer—about the inserted letters and journals in Tenant, about temporality in Mill, about transference in Little Dorrit, about phases and stages and then about force and form in connection with Tess. Still, the book is even more of a struggle than Stewart’s previous work. Many sentences read like this: “Here lies the plot’s recuperation by genre at two strata of apprehension: first by the suspended interdict on invaded privacy, then by the troping of that condition as a parafamilial bond so genre-determined, we are now to see, that it replays the novel’s own emergence as domesticating operation from the cultural valence of those prenovelistltic [sic] ‘secret histories’ explored by McKeon” (119). However unintentional, Stewart’s type-tics (my favorite is “psycholoanlysis” [21]) belong to a pattern. The “twitchy verbiage” he predicates of Poe is not a bad label for his book’s twists and turns, self-reversing negatives, and continual reframing. The writing performatively echoes the book’s critical method, making it an instance as well as a study of narratography. Stewart’s most frequent label for the writing function is friction. Rooted in “the novel’s material base” and “wax[ing] almost erotic in its sufficiency, more than ‘enough’ in itself” (15, 115), “writing writhes with the violence it at once depicts and, by phrasing, half de-pictures into a more abstract meaning” (128). “The somatics of reading” is not a new topic for Stewart (201), who was writing twenty years ago that “silent reading . . . latently engages . . . somatic or muscular activity” (Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext [1990], 7). But it gets more insistent and more stressful here.

Yet one never quite knows how serious Stewart is about it, given that “the friction of prose itself (and again its fricative alliteration) can sound the phonetic intervals necessary for even an ironized harmonic pattern” (160). Does accumulated friction necessarily add up to violence? At the start of Stewart’s career...