Secondary Utterances: A Response to Michael Lucey

I'm grateful to Michael Lucey, and to Genre, for his attentive and challenging, though skeptical, review of my book Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (2022). Thanks also to Genre for inviting me to respond. Having read (and taught) Lucey's own work on the novel, most recently in the context of a graduate seminar on Mikhail Bakhtin, I am interested to see what Lucey has made of my project, even as he is not quite, or not yet, convinced by its main claims or by the "model" of criticism my work puts forward. I welcome this chance to clarify my argument and to summarize one or two differences of approach with Lucey's own work that his review has revealed.I wish I could assuage Lucey's (2023: 257, 258) experience of "frustration" and "disgruntlement" with my book, but these are subjective responses and Lucey doesn't explain them. His review is punctuated by a number of assumptions about novelists whom I "wouldn't have much time for" (259), as well as a "taste profile" and "canon" that he finds implicitly present in Free Indirect. He does so through the figure of other "readers of Bewes" (259), addressed in the second person, whom he imagines trolling the author of Free Indirect by "calling out" names of writers who would "annoy" me. Lucey (2022: 127) himself studies modes of novelistic talk and the "social speech pathologies" that one finds represented in, say, Dostoevsky or Proust; surely this kind of telescopic argumentation is among them.The difficulty of responding to such "secondary" utterances (the designation is Bakhtin's, and I will come back to it) is that they are neither owned nor, therefore, properly advocated by the person who transmits them. I could better address these "absences" if I had a sense from Lucey, in his own words, of how the works of Knausgaard, Ferrante, Chamoiseau, Pynchon, Hollinghurst, Morrison, or Ghosh pose a challenge to my argument, or why my accounts of Bleak House or Dora Bruder might "frustrate" readers who have different critical commitments to those works, or how the figure of Roberto Bolaño complicates the status I attach to Sebald.Nevertheless, I don't think these speculative claims and assertions could be easily substantiated by anything found in my book. There is a principle of noncanonicity at the heart of my argument that Lucey overlooks but that I try to make clear when I say that the principles of novelistic thought I am concerned with pertain even to the "most pedestrian," "least interesting" works of fiction (Bewes 2022: 38); or that the "sense" of a literary work does not reside in the work irrespective of what happens to it in the world but rather inheres, inseparably from the reader's encounter with it (164); or that the "exemplary" text is never anything other than a problematic concept (53).This is why there is no claim of exceptionality to Coetzee, Sebald, Modiano, or Rachel Cusk in my work, nor any principle that would exclude Bolaño, Knausgaard, or Marie NDiaye from the novelistic logic as I have conceptualized it. Many writers inform my thinking despite not being named in Free Indirect. Those that are the subject of current reflection and writing include James Baldwin, Teju Cole, Percival Everett, Anne Garréta, Jean Genet, Renee Gladman, Kazuo Ishiguro, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Chris Kraus, Nella Larsen, Gerald Murnane, Domenico Starnone, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Colson Whitehead, Denis Williams, and Alejandro Zambra. That said, were these figures to have made it into my book there would still be any number of works from the "canons" of any number of other critics who had not.Lucey's case is more convincing (to me, at least) when he lists works from earlier periods that do fit my account of the novel, including by Proust, Gide, Balzac, Stendhal, and Diderot. In these bodies of work, he contends, we find the principle of dialogicality that is inherent to the novel radically extended to the narrative frame of the work. Here, the gripe seems to be that the formal phenomena I am identifying in the generation of writers since Elizabeth Costello, including Zadie Smith, are not unique to the twenty-first-century novel. Well yes, they certainly are not. Lucey's instances thus put pressure on moments when I appear to be making an argument for the singularity of the contemporary novel, even if—confusingly for Lucey—they support my insistence on the continuity and evolving nature of the novel tradition. Here I prefer to take Lucey's list as a recognition of the power and reach of my argument rather than its fatal challenge. If there is a premise to the "model" of criticism I am seeking to advance, it is that it is possible to overcome a relation to the novelistic work as a critical object. The novel asserts its subjectivity—or to use Bakhtin's word, its nonfinalizability—at the very moment one thinks one is done with it, critically or historically.Perhaps all this can be explained by a more fundamental difference between us, which is that Free Indirect is concerned not with a referential or "indexical" mode of criticism—with what it is possible to "say about" a work of fiction (Lucey 2023: 262)—but with what the work itself might be saying. And in order to access that, one must exit the mode of critical ventriloquy or paraphrase and pay attention to what Bakhtin (1981: 255) called the "representing time" of the narration itself, or what Deleuze (2000: 42) called the "absolute internal difference" at the heart of every subject and thus every point of view. For this reason, Lucey is right to say that there is no pragmatic basis for my work in Free Indirect. I am not a linguistic anthropologist, nor do I accept that Proust—or any other novelist—can be adequately read in such terms. Lucey's own work demonstrates the ways in which Proust is raptly attentive to language-in-use. However, that extraordinary representational facility in Proust coexists with his being as a novelist, his practice of a "foreign language within language," as Deleuze (1998: 5) glosses the famous line from Proust's Contre Sainte-Beuve.Near the beginning of his 2022 book What Proust Heard, Lucey quotes a sentence from Bakhtin's essay "The Problem of Speech Genres" in justification of his linguistic anthropological approach: "The novel as a whole is an utterance just as rejoinders in everyday dialogue or private letters are" (Bakhtin 1986: 62; quoted in Lucey 2022: 6). But he omits what Bakhtin says next: "Unlike these, the novel is a secondary (complex) utterance." Bakhtin (1986: 62) is alluding to the "special character" of novelistic discourse: that "rejoinders" and other linguistic matter one encounters in a novel "retain their form and their everyday significance only on the plane of the novel's content." Of course novelistic language is "indexical," in the way Lucey's work productively explores. However, everything that interests me about it (and I think the same is true for Bakhtin and Deleuze) is located at the terminal edges of that indexicality. We may read novels and other literary works for the quality of "cultural interactivity and change" they register, as Lucey puts it in a coauthored introduction to an edited issue of Representations (Lucey and McEnaney 2017: 17); but we also read them for that which survives any reduction of the work (or of any utterance within it) to an instance of something else.Toward the end of his review, Lucey offers an interesting distinction between "entailing" and "presupposing." The distinction comes from Michael Silverstein, and it is discussed more fully in What Proust Heard. For Lucey indexicality, in the two forms of presupposing and entailing, constitutes the limit and extent of novelistic meaning. Presupposing and entailing refer to the two directions in which a literary work (or any linguistic exchange) points at once: backward and forward. Thus, linguistic exchanges presuppose certain "bits of social information" that are brought to any dialogue, which would be impossible without them. On the other hand, every exchange also entails certain effects or meanings, the "illocutionary force" of an utterance (Lucey 2022: 26).In his review, Lucey introduces this distinction in the context of free indirect discourse, one of the novel's formal innovations. The "entailments" of free indirect discourse may be different in each use or instance of it, he observes. Absolutely. But at the end of the day, Lucey forgets that my primary interest is not free indirect discourse—a form of "represented speech and thought" (Banfield 1982: 12) that might indeed be considered for what it presupposes and entails. The concern of Free Indirect, and of the concept of "the free indirect" that I introduce there, is the enigma and power of the novel as a mode of thought. That question, I venture to suggest, must exceed the range of a critical approach that presupposes that the novel is an utterance like any other.