Inhuman Character

Two new books have promised to revise our understanding of character in fiction: S. Pearl Brilmyer's The Science of Character and Robert Higney's Institutional Character. Brilmyer's is an ambitious study of character formation in a range of English novels published from 1870 to 1920. Through five case studies—two major novels by George Eliot, Thomas Hardy's The Well-Beloved, the reception of Schopenhauer among New Woman novelists, and Olive Schreiner's From Man to Man—Brilmyer argues that the practitioners of "New Realism" theorize and construct character less by probing into the human psyche than through an effort to map the complex interplay of material forces that shape subjective experience. Yet rather than ascribe agency to objects, as some scholars have done, Brilmyer shows how the novelists in question seek to objectify humans. By "transforming character from the hidden kernel of an individual personality into an impersonal phenomenon that formed through corporeal interactions" (6), New Realist writers decenter the human subject and instead embrace "human objecthood—physical and determined aspects of existence that humans share with nonhuman animals and things" (12).Robert Higney's study turns to a later generation of writers—Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, Mulk Raj Anand, and Elizabeth Bowen—to argue that they conceive of character as "an attribute not so much of the unique individual as of the institutions of the state, international trade and finance, communication and media, labor, education, public health, the military, the law and more" (2). The title of his book names a set of formal strategies employed by modernist writers to narrate the shifting relationships between individuals and institutions. Higney shares with Brilmyer an emphasis on habit formation. While Brilmyer focuses on bodily impulses and patterns, Higney attends to institutionalized habits, the "accumulation and repetition" of which give rise to institutional character (8). Yet in their materialist accounts of character, both of them join a growing number of scholars—most recently Marta Figlerowicz, Emily Steinlight, and Aaron Kunin—to pivot away from a series of terms and categories that have long been associated with the novel: interiority, inwardness, self, consciousness, intention, individuality, psychological depth, and the subject.The Science of Character and Institutional Character complement each other not only in period coverage but also in generating fresh approaches to character theory and literary history. Brilmyer offers a vivid illustration of human objecthood in her virtuosic reading of Impressions of Theophrastus Such. She finds in Eliot's final work a full-fledged theory of realism that disproves the long-held assumption about the novelist's investment in the rich inner lives of unique individuals. Fundamental to Eliot's realism, she explains, is the notion of impressibility—that character is both the product and source of impressions. Impressions, as she puts it, "are physical marks, inscriptions that signify meaning to those who encounter them, catapulting persons and things into sign systems that are used to interpret their bodies and histories" (76). Belonging to the genre of the character sketch, Impressions favors the description of observable behavior over the exploration of inner subjectivity. Putting Eliot's book in dialogue with Schopenhauer's philosophy, Brilmyer demonstrates that "in Impressions, persons are not presented as uniquely conscious or intentional subjects but rather as dynamic material formations with 'objective' qualities similar to those of nonhuman organisms" (78). Theophrastus sees himself not as a privileged knower but rather as an object of knowledge, going so far as to desire an experience of the world from a nonhuman perspective (which, as Brilmyer stresses, is distinct from godlike omniscience) (83). Eliot's questioning of "human exceptionalism" (Brilmyer 77) culminates in arguably the most radical chapter of Impressions: "Shadows of the Coming Race." Here, Eliot imagines mechanical automata that supersede human consciousness and even human language. In this "posthuman" world, communication "involves metamorphic, material processes" free of the limits of human perception (Brilmyer 99). This portrayal of a posthuman Eliot is a forceful rebuttal of the presumed centrality of humanist sympathy to her work.Impressions also highlights an important aspect of Eliot that has been overlooked by critics who emphasize her interest in particularity—namely, her aesthetic of "typological systematicity" (90). Since the type, as Brilmyer suggests, is "neither too specific nor too general," it allows Eliot to explore the tension between individual particularity and external circumstantiality in character formation (91). Eliot's typological characterology provides a surprising connection to Joseph Conrad. Relegating human subjectivity to the margins, Impressions might be read as a precursor to Conrad's Nostromo, a novel in which, as Higney observes, characters "become occasions for the proliferation of type-phrases rather than the conveyance of developing subjectivity or psychological depth" (47). These type-phrases are often ironic and contradictory: Charles Gould, for instance, is referred to as "a true Englishman," "El Rey de Sulaco," and "Monsieur l'Administrateur," among other designations. If typology in Impressions has the effect of downplaying individual uniqueness, the agglomerate type-phrases in Nostromo result in an ambiguous impersonality, a "radically dispersed sense of identity" (50). In Conrad's novel, everything is determined by deindividualized institutions. This may run counter to the common perception of Conrad as a writer who distrusts institutions. Yet, as Higney argues, despite Conrad's skepticism about collective action, he reveals the ideal of detachment from institutional life to be an impossibility. In an instructive contrast between Nostromo and Lord Jim, Higney demonstrates that, while in the earlier novel Conrad attempts to safeguard the meaningfulness of individual action by placing the protagonist outside civilization, he banishes the heroic individual from the later work: here, imperial institutions become an end in themselves. Conrad's pessimism should thus be understood in the context of pervasive institutionalization, which renders individual agency insignificant: "Acts are performed by individuals, but it would be more accurate to say that agency in the world of Nostromo has moved to the 'inhuman' institutions outside of which those actions would be meaningless" (44).While Higney and Brilmyer often reach similar conclusions, Higney's account of character is arguably more historically informed and geopolitically attentive. A universalizing impulse underlies Brilmyer's argumentation. For instance, in her illustration of the plasticity of character in Middlemarch, she concludes that Eliot "reveals something about the nature of literary character, an inorganic yet still plastic material formation that, irrespective of time and place, attains form in and through its relations" (73, my emphasis). One might say that this level of generalization is inevitable and even necessary: after all, the title of her book is The Science of Character, not A History of Character. And yet, given her emphasis on circumstantiality, one might wonder about the actual, historical environment in which encounters and interactions took place and provided the empirical basis for character theory. What's more, despite her continuous caution against reading fictional characters as thinking subjects, Brilmyer nevertheless presents their authors as highly sophisticated thinkers. Her detailed exploration of their knowledge of contemporary scientific and philosophical discourses far outweighs her attention to their embeddedness in larger historical realities. How might the character theory she traces be circumstantially linked to the historical period that frames her book: 1870–1920?One such opportunity presents itself in her final chapter on Schreiner. Here, she reads From Man to Man as a work of "ethological realism" that privileges "the interconnected nature of reality" over the "separatist ontology" of social Darwinism (202–3). Schreiner, as Brilmyer points out early on, was a "colonial writer" (185). In response to Anne McClintock's dismissal of Schreiner's pantheism as a colonial fantasy, Brilmyer highlights the importance of relationality in Schreiner's vision. Schreiner understands totality not as static but as mobile and inclusive; her novel "advocates for the fundamental equality and right to flourishing of all people and traits," echoing the work of "later anticolonial thinkers such as Édouard Glissant and Léopold Sédar Senghor" (196). Schreiner's involvement in British imperialism, Brilmyer suggests, "should not prevent us from appreciating her novel's challenge to scientific justifications of imperial rule—no small feat for a work composed during the height of England's colonial reign" (186).Brilmyer thus treats Schreiner's relation to imperialism as a primarily ethical question—not surprising given her emphasis on ethics in that chapter. This approach, however, forecloses a fuller exploration of the geopolitical situatedness of Schreiner's realism. Higney's book might offer a methodological corrective: Conrad, as Higney maintains from the outset, engages "with imperialism not as an ethical question but as a set of institutions" (32). This premise enables a more thoroughgoing materialist method that is more effective in showing how imperialism was truly inhuman—that is, how it operated as a complex of impersonal institutions beyond any single individual's grasp. Higney's persistent materialism also allows him to cast new light on the relationship between imperialism and modernism. Reviewing recent scholarship on this subject, he makes a powerful critique of the "critical overinvestment in the bildungsroman" (41). By correlating imperial history with the development of a single genre, scholars risk simplifying, on one hand, the pluralistic forms of imperialism and their divergent temporalities, and, on the other hand, the multiple and complex plots of novels like Nostromo, which are "not bounded by the lifetime and development of the individual, but by the longer and less teleological arcs of collectivities and institutions" (42). Returning to Schreiner, we might ask: Can Schreiner's vision of interconnectivity be neatly separated from a history of forced connection? Might her relational ontology be shaped by the material processes through which distant peoples and things are brought in relation to each other? Might her aesthetic of "internetting lines of action and reaction" be a product—or by-product—of empire (205)?Nevertheless, Brilmyer contributes to our understanding of literary history. In her introduction, she offers a useful distinction between "naturalism" and "New Realism," thereby distancing her study from Lukács-inspired models of periodization. As she traces New Realism's legacy in modernism, she chooses to end, not with Virginia Woolf, but with Gertrude Stein, who shares Eliot's typological interest in continuity and variation. In contrast, Woolf, according to Brilmyer, exemplifies the "inward turn" of modernism (226). She even cautions against reading Schreiner as a precursor to Woolf or other "psychological modernists focused on the representation of 'consciousness'" (218). This characterization of Woolf as a writer of interiority, however, has been increasingly questioned by scholars of modernism, as amply demonstrated by Higney's Woolf chapter. Here, we find an institutional Woolf. He shows that in her essays "Modern Fiction" and "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," Woolf, contrary to popular belief, in fact expresses a "suspicion that fidelity to consciousness in itself is not a meaningful goal" (67–68). The bulk of the chapter is an extended and incisive analysis of The Years, a novel that is of particular interest here because its setting, spanning from the 1880s to the 1930s, overlaps with the historical period to which Brilmyer dates New Realism. Higney's reading follows from his central claim that character is not shaped by consciousness but by institutions. Male characters in The Years, he observes, are "granted almost their very existence by the institutions of the British Empire" (79), while female characters are defined by their exclusion from those institutions. Woolf thus renders her vision of gender equality institutionally: "Only by entering professional institutions, The Years suggests, can women and men be written as equals" (80). For Woolf, the possibility of genuine social change resides in institutions and in individuals formed by institutions. While Higney's account may have undermined Brilmyer's assumption about Woolf's fixation on consciousness, it reinforces her larger point about the circumstantiality of character formation. The Years, often considered Woolf's most "realist" novel, can be read as a culmination of New Realists' effort to liberate character from the prison of consciousness. Brilmyer and Higney should also prompt us to cast further doubt on the putative break between realism and modernism—a narrative that is still dominant in literary studies. Instead, as Higney writes, "Modernism might constitute an amplification of realist concerns with the social and representative aspects of character rather than their undoing" (4). Higney and Brimyer have opened up alternative models of literary history grounded in entities that are not primarily literary, such as institutions and technology.The Science of Character and Institutional Character have made a compelling case for not only dissociating character from interiority and subjectivity but also challenging the long-standing view of the novel as a genre of the individual. I want to end by asking how questions of individuality and subjectivity might still be posited in light of Brilmyer's and Higney's studies. "To what extent are we shaped by our institutions, and to what extent do we shape them?" asks Higney (1). While his book leans heavily toward the first question, the chapter on Anand is an exception. Higney's argument is twofold. First, he contends that Anand does not so much reject imperial institutions as regard them as "circumscribed forms of accountability and fairness" (112). In Coolie, Anand offers "an ideal account of how institutions might function and how public goods might be turned from a technology of imperial rule to a means of liberation" (129). The novel does this by placing its protagonist, Munoo, in a series of picaresque situations, throwing into relief his entanglement in the institutions of British India rather than exploring his internal subjectivity or biographical trajectory. This reading, consistent with the overarching theme of the book, is accompanied by another argument concerning Anand's institutional self-fashioning—that is, the ways he capitalized on his colonial background to secure a place in Bloomsbury and the postwar literary scene. We learn that, near the beginning of his career, Anand contributed a story to the magazine New Writing because they "badly needed an Indian writer" (102), and that toward the end of his life he wrote a "Self-Obituary" to consolidate his persona as a rogue and outsider. His Conversations in Bloomsbury, Higney suggests, is more a work of autofiction than a memoir. Anand's career thus took shape through his strategic "creation of an authorial persona" (103). This fact does not contradict Higney's central thesis, for Anand's persona was forged within and in response to literary institutions. Yet it does beg the question of how individuality and institutions might be mutually constitutive. Even though Anand's fiction repeatedly eschews "'native' identitarianism" (22), the extent to which his literary career depended on an identitarian logic reveals how individuality can be institutionalized. Or, conversely, it points to the possibility that institutions, despite their impersonal nature, cannot remain entirely impersonal; they need individual personality—however fictive—to create authority.In the coda to her book, Brilmyer returns to a famous question in Middlemarch: "But why always Dorothea?" The frequency with which we visit this question attests to our enduring fascination with the individual. Brilmyer frames her answer in a discussion of vitality versus mechanicity in Victorian conception of character. Eliot uses mechanical characters for plot progression, but Middlemarch shows a heightened awareness that the imbalance between mechanical characters like Joshua Rigg and lively characters like Dorothea Brooke would not be necessary were it not for the novel's dependence on plot. Indeed, "why always Dorothea," when all characters would have a chance to appear as lively if they found themselves in another genre or medium? Eliot thus "envisions the possibility of disarticulating character from plot" (Brilmyer 240). This is no doubt a remarkable insight. In the intermediate context of that question, however, Eliot's narrator seems to have a different concern. The narrator protests against all the attention given to "the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble," urging us to look beneath the surface: "In spite of the blinking eyes and white moles objectionable to Celia, and the want of muscular curve which was morally painful to Sir James, Mr Casaubon had an intense consciousness within him, and was spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us" (Eliot 175). The narrator thus reverses Brilmyer's central argument, regarding external traits as an unreliable source of value and directing our attention instead to internal consciousness. This should not discredit Brilmyer's thesis: on the contrary, she has offered abundant reasons for why we need not follow Eliot's narrator's advice. But passages like this abound in Victorian and modernist novels. Why do writers like Eliot keep alluding to individual consciousness even though, as we have learned from Brilmyer and Higney, it does not form the basis of character? What structural, affective, and performative role do invocations of consciousness play in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction? Might Brilmyer's and Higney's reading methods allow for an equally rigorous materialist investigation of consciousness as a literary phenomenon? The separation of character from consciousness is a major step in literary criticism, paving the way for more important work to come.