Victorian Narrative Technologies in the Middle East (review)

Although New Formalists might predict that a study of Victorian fiction and the Suez Canal would be long on content and short on form, Cara Murray’s Victorian Narrative Technologies in the Middle East focuses on the formal features of the novel and the travel narrative as “technologies of development” (4). The novel in particular has been able to “shape space and organize peoples” (15), Murray argues, often in ways that more straightforward briefs for development have not been able to do. Specifically, Murray takes up the initial lack of British interest in the Suez Canal and the ways novels and travel narratives shifted popular opinion and collective affect about the Canal, Egypt, and empire after 1875. Her study suggests that the novel globalized Britain in the late Victorian period by making the home portable and domesticity a matter of individual will rather than national environment. Murray is a wonderful reader of form and a fine explicator of genre. Bringing together theorists as various as Mikhail Bakhtin, Franco Moretti, Benedict Anderson, and Amanda Anderson, Murray suggests the ways the novel, as a form that has been variously imagined as dialogic, provincial, disinterested, and inherently Creole, has performed massive cultural labor toward the global world order that we now take for granted—perhaps not least of all in its theoretical portability.

In the first chapter, Murray argues that the novel had to rehabilitate the character of the entrepreneur, and she focuses on two fictional and two historical entrepreneurs: Merdle and Daniel Doyce of Little Dorrit (1855–57) and the British George Hudson, a railroad projector, and Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French developer of the Suez Canal. This chapter is, paradoxically, an especially marvelous study of Merdle, the entrepreneur who cannot be rehabilitated. Bakhtin was quite taken with Merdle’s intensely dialogic construction (Merdle pops up extensively in his examples of heteroglossia). Murray argues that Charles Dickens, in speaking of Merdle in all voices except that of his own narrator, seems not to want to take responsibility for his execrable creation. Merdle’s activities, like those of the frequently inscrutable Hudson, are difficult to narrate: “Merdle’s character relies on a cultural moment of indecipherability of the Hudson type” (31). The British public has been unable and perhaps unwilling to understand what such men of business actually do. Doyce, like Lesseps, is more transparent, but Murray carefully nuances her comparison: “Doyce is no Ferdinand de Lesseps. Doyce uses his worldly knowledge to infuse the nation with new ideas . . . Lesseps enables Doyce, for without Lesseps’s righteous ideology and the international unity that it fosters the Doycian figure would be impotent” (53). The claim here is intriguing: a historical entrepreneur makes a fictional entrepreneur possible, and this fictional entrepreneur, because of his national vision can build a cultural infrastructure of approval for future international entrepreneurs.

The second chapter, on Benjamin Disraeli’s Tancred (1847), is a tour de force of reading genre in a dense historical and geographical context. Murray asks a series of questions that trace Tancred’s weird deployment of two forms, the bildungsroman and the romance. Anatomizing the “perplexing form” of this novel (59), Murray points out that it begins in the style of a silver fork novel, but then Tancred, and Tancred, are exported to the Middle East, and the novel’s genre shifts from silver fork to romance. Tancred, after falling asleep in a garden on his way to visit his banker, “awakens to his romance plot” (67). The predictable adventures ensue. After another momentous nap, Tancred awakens to a bildungsroman conclusion in which his dream of conquering Arabia is replaced with marriage and a home in Jerusalem. Fortunately, as Tancred tells his wife-to-be: “thou to me art Arabia” (qtd. in Murray 83). This is why Disraeli theorizes imperialism in this combination of genres: “The romance form provided Disraeli with a technology for divesting the British of their reticence about investing in the colonial project, while the novel...