Ideas in and out of the Novel

This is a book that wants to argue with some big names. As the editors Rachel Potter and Matthew Taunton put it in the introduction, “James, Woolf, Leavis, Jameson, Adorno, Armstrong, Ngai: these are critics who would disagree on much else, but who all helped build a consensus around the rejection of the novel of ideas which The British Novel of Ideas hopes to dislodge” (11). That statement encapsulates the central intervention of the anthology, which is repeated by many (but not all) of the contributors: the novel of ideas is something sidelined, at odds with the mainstream of literary fiction. A story shared by many of these critics runs something like this: in the nineteenth century, ideas were perfectly at home in literature and novelists like George Eliot contemplated philosophical abstractions alongside realist depth psychology. But the advent of modernism banished ideas from the precincts of serious fiction. As the realist novel expanded its aesthetic ambition, it narrowed its terrain and excluded the explicit political and philosophical debates that had earlier animated the genre.There is some obvious truth to this. The catalog of writerly and critical voices Potter and Taunton mention suggests what this formulation makes visible: a persistent anxiety or discomfort around the explicit expression of ideas in fiction, shared across more than century and vast ideological gulfs. The editors’ diagnosis of this tendency and the blind spots it can produce is entirely compelling. I share, for instance, their skepticism about the ways Fredric Jameson's focus on the political unconscious leads him to ignore politics on the surface of the texts he analyzes, and I agree with their suggestion that we might follow Mikhail Bakhtin for a vision of fiction more natively at home with ideas than is allowed by Sianne Ngai's account of ideas as perpetual objects of suspicion. (Potter's solo-authored essay also offers a detailed account of the tensions between Bakhtin and a history of skepticism about ideas she associates with Woolf and Ngai.) It's refreshing to see this consensus articulated and swept aside. Figures like Jameson and Theodor Adorno remain methodologically foundational to our critical sense of the political stakes of literary studies, and clearing space for a politically engaged scholarship that does something different is a valuable service to the profession.Yet, as in many polemical interventions that offer a compelling account of the problems with a current consensus, the alternative sketched in this volume is a little hazier. What exactly counts as a “novel of ideas” is very much in question here—and a coherent response to this question seems lacking. For Amanda Anderson, for instance, the term indexes a thought/action distinction drawn from Hannah Arendt; Anderson's argument centers the representation of what she calls “rumination” (33). For her, Henry James is a central example. We might call the novel of ideas in her sense a novel of thinking. By contrast, in the introduction, and in several other essays, James—and T. S. Eliot's famous line about his “mind so fine that no idea could violate it”—plays a leading role in a contrasting tradition against another concept of the novel of ideas that the editors wish to promote. Specifically, James appears as part of the triumphant march of “psychological realism” that sidelined the prominence of ideas in the novel (1). For Potter and Taunton, the novel of ideas centers on scenes in which characters talk explicitly about differing positions on “philosophical, political, and religious ideas.” Many of the other contributors also cite James as antipathetic to the novel of ideas, one of the leading antagonists in a story about modernism as the moment when the novel started excluding ideas from its precincts. In this sense, for the editors and many of the contributors, the novel of ideas is the novel of ideology.Both positions—the novel of ideas as constituted by the representation of characters engaged in thought, and the novel of ideas as constituted by explicit discourse about political, historical, or philosophical ideas—seem obviously to have limits. Anderson's position does not capture the genuine tension between someone like James and someone like H. G. Wells, which the introduction and Suzanne Hobson's chapter on Wells ably trace. And yet the notion that the novel of ideas was somehow at odds with “psychological realism” would also be news to many of the more recent authors covered in this volume (Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan), as well as other figures from the modernist period. The gulf between, say, E. M. Forster and Wells yawns at least as broad as that between Forster and James. Another key difference among many of the contributors is whether the novel of ideas is implicitly a novel of politics. For some of the contributors (e.g., Glyn Salton-Cox on Katharine Burdekin or Katherine Cooper on Storm Jameson), discussing the novel of ideas means taking the novel's explicit politics seriously; for others, ideas can be abstractions like beauty (as in Peter Boxall's discussion of Smith). And then there are the differences about whether the political novel of ideas implicitly falls within the genre of committed literature or, more broadly, the degree to which the author's ideas and commitments are at play. (This is the ground upon which James criticized Wells; but as John Kucich's chapter on Samuel Butler demonstrates, authors’ own ideas can remain remarkably elusive even when novels put ideas explicitly into play.)My point in highlighting these divergent views of the novel of ideas is not to argue that it should be one thing but to point out that the repeated gesture of seeing the novel of ideas as the outside to some mainstream seems more consistent in this collection than any particular definition of what that outside might be. The importance of this gesture is real; critics today, as that inventory with which I began suggests, are still working on assumptions about ideas as alien to the novel form.With that in mind, I'll suggest a slightly different framing that helps me make sense of the contents of this volume. Perhaps genre isn't the best way to take hold of the literary history at stake—perhaps, indeed, “the novel of ideas” isn't the most useful framework after all. I would revise the description of the consensus that Potter and Taunton outline at the beginning: it's not that “the novel of ideas” has been “rejected,” but that explicit ideas in the novel, especially when expressed by characters, have been rejected or at the very least neglected as a subject of critical discourse. Such a revision might explain why many of the authors under discussion here are in fact extremely well established in the literary canon. After all, writers like Forster and Smith can hardly be described as perpetually sidelined, or as working in a marginalized genre. At the same time, figures who appear as antagonists for some of the critics—James and Virginia Woolf especially—would fit neatly as novelists of ideas as defined by Anderson.This approach returns us to one of the formulations Potter and Taunton work with in their introduction: Gillian Beer's suggestion that ideas seem to represent artistic risks for the novelist in that they place the form under a particular kind of strain. This is certainly in keeping with many of the essays in the collection—for instance, Benjamin Kohlmann's account of George Gissing as attempting to think through the limitations of the novel of ideas as a genre, or Allen Hepburn's account of Rebecca West as exploring the ways ideas can lead one astray both artistically and morally. For these critics and others, the very power of ideas in the novel is to explore certain kinds of tensions, for example, those between abstractions and concrete particulars (Christos Hadjiyiannis on G. K. Chesterton), or between ideas and people (Nathan Waddell on George Orwell and the chapter on George Lamming by Douglas Mao, who, I will disclose here, is my colleague at Johns Hopkins), or between ideas and history (James Purdon on Naomi Mitchison). In other words, the risk of ideas is part of the point: aesthetic tensions are central to the novel of ideas in the first place.But there is a different way of understanding the place of ideas in fiction, which seems equally present in this volume. That would be simply to say that the novel is a thing of ideas, that ideas have always been proper to its form. In this sense, there may be tension between ideas and something else, but the novel—capacious as ever—is precisely the right kind of form to capture that tension. So, for David Dwan, writing on Iris Murdoch, literature and ideas have in common the status of “a form of exile from the real” (323). Although ideas and reality are in tension, it would be an illusion to place literature exclusively on the side of reality: “All novels are condemned to be novels of ideas” (331). The most exciting work to emerge from this volume, in my view, restores ideas to our critical understanding of the novel by highlighting not simply the risks ideas bring but their embedded inescapability in literary history. The most compelling contributions here are those that do not seek to demarcate a separate tradition of a novel of ideas so much as to highlight the novel's strong and lasting relationship with ideas—essays that examine what ideas offer the novel and what the novel offers to ideas. Ideas, in all their abstraction, are strange things—but registering their strangeness is something British novels consistently do.So, for instance, Janice Ho's account of Forster focuses on two very different ways ideas are at play in Howards End: Helen Schlegel demonstrates through the “fixity of her adherence” to her liberal ideas a failure to practice the “range and flexibility that liberalism sees as its methodological procedure” (159). Thus, idea as content, as represented by Helen, is in tension with idea as practice, as figured by her sister Margaret. As Ho points out, this distinction maps onto multiple kinds of formal value in the novel—Helen is a “flat” character in Forsterian terms, while liberal proceduralism structures the plot movement of the novel, movement at odds with the comparative “stasis of the conceptual idea” (161). At the same time, the way in which the novel is brought to its conclusion shows that idea-as-content ultimately defeats idea-as-procedure.Ho's argument exemplifies how engagement with the subtle and complicated internal dynamics of ideas in fiction illuminates formal problems, such as characterization and plotting. These formal aspects of ideas in novels in turn bring to the surface the internal tensions within ideologies. Ideas can be perfectly at home within the concrete reality depicted in realist fiction, just as the forms of realist fiction are ways of grappling with ideas. Examples of this proposition can be found across the volume. To take another example, Anindya Raychaudhuri's analysis of Mulk Raj Anand places the novel of ideas at the center of an aesthetic spectrum that escapes the limitations of both socialist realism and modernist stream of consciousness.This formulation may seem at odds with the one highlighted at the beginning of this review, namely, the tendency to see ideas as the other of some novelistic norm or as a source of risk. But this volume demonstrates that ideas are a source of risk and of tension, and precisely for that reason they are as central to the novel as the other tensions identified in the classic accounts of the genre: the one versus the many, the individual and the collective, history and the everyday. And if ideas belong in the novel, it is precisely because—as Bakhtin, famously, points out—the novel is a space of unresolved conflicts, between languages, perspectives, genres, and more.1 As the contributors make clear, ideas stand in conflict not only with each other but also with a host of other factors (the real, the personal, etc.).Doing justice to those conflicts need not take the form of championing “the novel of ideas” as a genre. Rather, these essays exemplify the rewards of examining—of taking seriously—ideas in fiction. Indeed, the volume is most interesting when it is not so invested in the idea of critical disapproval of the materials it studies. While there may be some truth to the charge that British modernism has engaged in rhetorical posturing against the novel of ideas, a scan of the table of contents of this volume reveals some missing names that might complicate the story of modernism in Britain as irremediably opposed to the novel of ideas. While the collection makes room for some colonial subjects like Anand, Lamming, and Kamila Shamsie, it does not include Irish writers like Oscar Wilde or James Joyce who seem quite obviously to fit into the genre of the novel of ideas. Including them, however, might not accord well with the main story this volume wants to tell about the genre. The existence of playwright-novelist figures like Wilde would complicate this narrative, in part because the play of ideas is such a well-established genre: as Brigid Breidenback writes in the chapter on Shamsie's novelistic reimagining of Sophocles, there may be “a particular affinity between dramatic form and the novel of ideas” (413). Joyce, on the other hand, seems a particularly challenging example. His novels feature extended philosophical dialogues, but he appears in this volume primarily for contrast, lumped together with Woolf and Ford Madox Ford as an exemplar of a modernist suspicion of ideas, by Potter for instance (100–102). Other novelists such as D. H. Lawrence and Joseph Conrad would also certainly undermine the idea that there's some intrinsic conflict between the modernist representation of consciousness and the novel of ideas.In an odd way, the editors and some of the contributors to this volume share a story with one of their targets, Ngai, converging in agreement on the intensity of the critical and authorial scorn heaped upon novels of ideas. Yet this story, I've argued, tends to underplay the enormous proliferation of widely celebrated novels of ideas in Britain as well as abroad. At the same time, as I have tried to show, this volume equally testifies to the persistent presence of the novel of ideas in British literature. The collection thus reveals the rich rewards of considering the history of Anglophone fiction as constituted by its serious engagement with abstract ideas rather than its avoidance of them. At the same time, it's perhaps worth concluding by reiterating that there's some truth to that story of the opprobrium and disdain directed at the novel of ideas; this volume is full of examples of authors and novelists, including those who write ideas into their novels, expressing skepticism about the form or its reception. This leads to a final question: Given that, as we see here, the explicit expression of ideas is central to many of the most canonical figures in the British modernist novel, why do its authors and critics so persistently avoid acknowledging it?