The Possibility of Literature: The Novel and the Politics of Form

It has become fashionable as well as perhaps necessary of late to wonder if literature has reached the end of its usefulness. Such soul-searching finds us asking where literary production and literary criticism can go from here. We see the question in a variety of critical contexts, from Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), in which he asks why literature fails to incorporate and reflect on the climate crisis—which he determines to be a crisis of imagination as much as of human action—to the theoretical problem of where one might go after an era of “posts,” including postmodernism, postcolonialism, and posthumanism. This quandary is of course nothing new. John Barth addressed the question of the “used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities” in the 1960s, turning to the likes of Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges as an antidote, highlighting their paradoxical response to what Barth calls “felt ultimacies” while managing “nonetheless to speak eloquently and memorably to our human hearts and conditions” (1984: 67). In his recent book, The Possibility of Literature: The Novel and the Politics of Form, Peter Boxall takes on a similar set of questions in an era perhaps even more fraught with the potential for exhaustion and the dissolution of meaning. He asks, “What kind of critical imagination can address a world which appears no longer to conform to the forms with which it has been made legible to us? . . . How does one supersede the language of the post, a language that is already grounded in a logic of supersession, a logic of supersession that has failed?” (10–11).Rather than malign the state of affairs and complain that no one reads books anymore, as so often seems to be the argument in op-ed style commentaries, Boxall, like Barth, offers a fresh response with what he refers to as “the possibility of literature.” The introduction opens with the following explanation: The phrase “the possibility of literature” harbours two distinct forms of possibility. It refers in one of its senses to the conditions which make literature possible—the forces which dictate whether and in what ways literature can come into the world. And in the other it concerns the forms of possibility that literature itself creates, the possibility that it summons into being. (1)His interest lies in how literature might “critique or reimagine the world that it represents” despite the binding limits of that world's conditions, which are both cultural and ideological. The essays that follow assert in various ways that the forms of possibility that literature creates can be understood by looking at the interstices between form and language, and between the collapsing oppositions, shifting conditions, and contradictions that constitute living in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Thus, in the works he explores, negation opens up space for possibility, just as blindness can give us access to sight, and we might glimpse “a seam between the word and the thing” (183) that gives the word its power and people a sense of shared being. Citing Emily Dickinson, he proclaims on behalf of literature that “What I see not, I better see” (24).This collection brings together several previously published essays and a few new ones. As an ensemble, they lack a consistent argument, so one probably should not read them in search of a through line that might explain how each part fits into the whole. His essays, in his own words, “trace a selective and symptomatic history of the conditions of literary thinking” (1). While all of the essays consider broadly “the place of the human in the world, and the paradigms that have allowed us to conceive of it” (206), their means of getting there is idiosyncratic rather than programmatic. (Boxall acknowledges as much and refers to his essays as covering a “shifting terrain of critical possibility” in an interview that aired on the New Books Network 2025.) While this creates some difficulties in reading the text straight through, the benefits of the individual essays are clear: Boxall is a master of close reading and manages to find meaning in the connections between texts and ideas that are not often considered together.Readers encounter, for example, essays on a variety of works and themes, which are collected in three parts. “On Writers” discusses several authors, each in conversation with other works and authors, including Herman Melville, Samuel Beckett, Don DeLillo, Kazuo Ishiguro, James Kelman, Zadie Smith, and E. M. Forster. Part two, “On Literary History,” follows themes such as the animal gaze, realism and artificiality, thresholds and back roads, blind seeing, and mere being, as they appear in works by authors as wide-ranging as Cervantes, Dickinson, Beckett, and W. G. Sebald. Part three, “On the Contemporary,” defines “contemporary” in two ways, focusing first on recent works of literature (in one chapter on the future of the British novel at a time when futurity is in question and in another on how one might respond to the shallowness of neoliberalism) and then on his own recent encounters with works by Beckett and Marcel Proust. Boxall discusses their work in the last two chapters, emphasizing the meaning cocreated by the reader, as prompted by tracking themes and connections across a variety of texts and contexts. Thus it is not literary works alone that confront the limitations of and produce renewed possibility. As in reader-response criticism, meaning must be constructed in the interaction between author, text, and reader. Just as history is always about both the past and the present, as Boxall explains, informed critical reflection is always created in the present and bears meaning for us in that context. And he is a particularly well-read critic, keenly aware of the threats to and possibilities of the critical imagination.It is worth noting that the possibilities that Boxall discusses are no easy salve or panacea. He reiterates the inherent complexity of any response to our contemporary condition, and this includes responses from both literature and criticism. Answers can only be constructed if we put in the work to track paths of resistance throughout literary history. Each of his chapters compares several works, and it is in the process of making connections—between and within works—that we seem to gain some kind of reconciliation (with knowledge, with truth) that enables us to recognize the possibilities of meaning. This need for reconciliation is where the political framing of the introductory chapter fits in. Boxall discusses, for example, the problem of how we might rise above neoliberal conditions without the response being merely another symptom of those conditions. Likewise, he explores the shifting terrain of where one can go once the threat of the ideological supersessions of the twentieth century have failed. The hope for some new form of meaning yet to emerge in the late twentieth century would seem to have been crushed by the ironic flattening of possibility that comes from postmodern conceptions of being and contemporary material and political conditions of living. “It is a symptom of the post,” Boxall writes, “of postness as a cultural dominant, that such different thinkers should arrive at a condition that feels so much the same, a condition of frictionlessness, of historical vapidity, in which it is difficult to gain any material purchase” (5). Nonetheless, in the face of such an enmeshed and self-perpetuating condition of supersession, he seeks, and finds, spaces of possibility in the complex and even contradictory language and tensions in literary works.The complexities he tracks illustrate how literary texts might allow us to glimpse, as I noted before, “a seam between the word and the thing” that gives the word its power and people a sense of shared being. Likewise he demonstrates how a work of literature, like the boundary across which the act of looking takes place when a human looks into the eyes of a nonhuman being, might summon the “capacity to bring the space that intervenes between mind and mind to a kind of expression, to a kind of visibility and thinkability” (168). This act, Boxall claims, “takes on a particular ethical force” today when boundaries between the categories that used to make the world legible are becoming ever thinner.Given the range of the works Boxall examines and the shifting political, cultural, and historical terrain in which they are situated, it seems that the possibility of literature is grounded more in how we read than what we read. As noted above, the last chapter of The Possibility of Literature, “On Rereading Proust,” declares what Boxall has been illustrating less explicitly throughout: that reading is context-dependent and works can surpass their own contexts to elicit new meanings within readers’ own circumstances. “To read Dickens now,” Boxall contends, “is to read him under the conditions of fictional possibility that obtain now” (17). His close readings of Cervantes, Dickens, Ishiguro, Kelman, and Dickinson, among many others, and repeatedly of Beckett, allow him to make a broader point, one that he applies to Ishiguro's interest in painting and music in his novels more specifically: Ishiguro's fiction binds itself to other art forms in ways that distort and dismantle those forms, but he does so, always, in order to approach the difficult, vanishing space that underlies form itself, the space from which the possibility of the artwork arises, and into which it always threatens to disappear. (98)He discusses form, but it seems to me that it is words that most capture Boxall's attention as the space for negotiating the “shifting terms of our relations to ourselves and to others” (100). His close readings for intertextual connections serve as a means of tracking what is often hidden beneath the surface. Indeed, we might see these essays as providing lessons in the abundant payoff of close reading, organized according to varying themes, with the aim of reorienting our thinking about what literature can be and do.Perhaps the focus in the book is less on the possibility of literature in the contemporary age (though he does discuss several contemporary authors such as Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan, and Ali Smith) than on the power of human capacities to find meaning in the interstices of collapsed or conflated grand narratives and the binaries they fail to uphold. We do not get from these authors solutions to the climate crisis or the problems created by neoliberal legacies. It seems that the solutions we do get lie in words and forms but also in the mind of the beholder, the reader who must make connections between disparate sources to find the possibilities of meaning that literature makes available. Boxall himself realized this when reading Proust while undergoing a state of personal and scholarly transition, as his final essay describes. Some of the chapters in this collection, especially the last two (“To Carry Now Away” and “On Rereading Proust”) revolve around epiphanic moments he has experienced when engaging with specific literary works. It is this opportunity for renewed meaning, Boxall suggests, that allows Beckett, say, or Proust, to reanimate our own experiences and critical perplexities. Boxall explains that it is because ofHe discovers that Proust's work does not simply look back, as its thematic through line suggests, but instead “unfolds in the weather of today, in the atmosphere in which we—you, and I—are living now.”It is this kind of connection that is the true engine of literary possibility here. The works of course facilitate the understandings that Boxall traces throughout a somewhat idiosyncratic literary history, but it is the mind of the critic, of the reader and rereader, that brings them to life and that makes the insights relevant. As a whole, the book does not provide resolution to the void left by ecological crisis, political disruption, thinly held up and quickly dissolving binaries, or the vacuity of postness. But as an expert lesson in close reading and a proclamation of the continued possibilities of specific works of literature for rethinking the nature of our language and existence, this book is a worthwhile example. If Boxall is right, then literature can still provide us support and insight, even if ephemeral. In his closing words of his closing chapter, he proclaims, “that something can be new and old, lost and recovered, divided and joined, all at the same time and in the same breath; it is impossible, of course. . . . But it is also strangely, palpably possible. It is the possibility of literature itself.” This definition of possibility is intriguing, especially when the alternative is the continued vapidity and dissolution of meaning. And while the book does not provide a uniform argument about the politics of form, it does provide instances of resistance to that dissolution in closely examining the possibilities that can be found in language, form, ideas, and the connections we can make between and among them.