Novel Violence a Narratography of Victorian Fiction Review
[Thanks to James Heffernan, founder and editor-in-chief of Review 19 for sharing this review with readers of the Victorian Spider web. Thackeray created the illuminated "One thousand" for Vanity Fair — George P. Landow.]
uch of this volume tries to ascertain and so redefine the new science of "narratography"--Stewart's bad-mannered if serviceable neologism, first used in his 2007 book on "postfilmic movie theater," Framed Time. Stewart repeatedly tries to say what narratography might expect like once it emerges, and how it might differ from older and improve-established disquisitional approaches. For Stewart, the latter includes especially the narratology of Tzvetan Todorov, Peter Brooks, Roland Barthes, and Gérard Genette (renamed "Girard Genette" in the index in a way that is both unnerving and somehow strangely apt, given the book's dual focus on violence and narrative). Just for Stewart, the problem with narrative theory is that it involves besides much abstraction and besides much "avoidance of surface texture": in narratology, "the grain of narration" is "dispensed with" (three). And it is here, in its ability to acknowledge the "drift of the signifier" (22), to attend to the "scriptive matter of narrative writing" (220), to the "thingness of linguistic communication" (211), that narratography can be said to intervene. It is here that it might be invented. In a demand that is not unreasonable if certainly somewhat unusual, Stewart calls for readings of narrative texts that continue, quite merely, "discussion by word" (220). In gild to get to this point of invention, nevertheless, Stewart produces many pages of definitional theorizing as he repeatedly returns to saying in one case once more and differently just what it is that makes "narratography" distinctive. And much of the strength of this original, penetrating and densely argued report, much of its involvement for a reader, is in what happens every bit Stewart worries abroad at the question of what exactly narratography might add together up to, how it might work, and how information technology tin be put to work. So in addition to a general Introduction, the book has a space-clearing "Prologue" likewise every bit a summarizing and forward-looking "Epilogue." Just almost every chapter also attempts to refine and redefine the critical soapbox of narratography. At i signal quite early, Stewart provides what he calls the "almost basic and uncontentious definition" of his approach, even italicizing it for skillful measure: "the anticipation of mediated narrative increments as traced out in prose or image past the analytic deed of reading" (9).
But perhaps his new critical enterprise is ameliorate, more clearly and less ambiguously summed-upward in the title to Chapter Ii, which is wittily and knowingly named (after a comment in Edgar Allan Poe'south story "Berenice") "Attention Surfeit Disorder." At that place is an ongoing dialogue, if not dispute, with other critical approaches to narrative prose in Novel Violence, including not least with diverse forms of historicism, from which the book borrows and which information technology develops, and with structuralism, to which the volume also owes much even while using it equally a point of deviation. While neither structuralist narratology nor new historicism can exactly be said to involve a class of critical ADHD, the gist of Stewart'southward book has to practise with the possibility that such conceptually and theoretically sophisticated meta-engagements with the nineteenth-century novel are simply non patient, not careful or not attentive plenty to the detailed and delicate micro-disturbances (even down to the audio-effects of individual phonemes) that go to make up narrative prose — to the way that nineteenth-century narrative fiction in particular involves what Stewart calls "distortions of plot past prose" (228). In this respect, Novel Violence might even be said to offering a kind of critical-theoretical Ritalin for twenty-first century literary studies — if information technology wasn't for the fact that for Garrett Stewart reading is, or should properly be, "a place of unrest" (228, 229), should itself involve a certain kind of disturbance. So instead of big-scale analyses of the structures of plotting and narrative phonation or perspective, and instead of explorations of the social, cultural, economic and political contexts of prose texts, Stewart's narratography pays careful, not to say obsessive attention (information technology is self-confessedly a disorder of reading that he seeks to clarify, after all, and sickness is never very far from the surface of Stewart's sense of what the nineteenth-century novel has to offer) to the graphemic, the written in, the writing of, narrative, even at the micro-level of syntax, of the word, and of the oral/aural slip and slide of phoneme.
Stewart sees his new book as a kind of summing-up or re-theorizing of the seemingly disparate set of studies that he has produced since his first book in 1974. Those familiar with his more recent books in item - peculiarly Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext (1990) and Love Reader: The Conscripted Audition in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (1996) — will not be surprised to learn that the attending to linguistic furnishings on a micro-calibration in Novel Violence is detailed, inventive, precise and extraordinarily alert to the play of words. Which is to say that there has never been anything quite like this book (since Stewart's last volume, at to the lowest degree) and that at that place may never be anything like information technology again (until he writes some other). There is a certain irony in this concerted critical singularity, though, since Stewart's declared intention is to found a new schoolhouse, or at least a new mode, of reading, a methodology of reading that would be based on paying attention to the means in which — to put it simply — narrative is a formation of language (not just a plot or the abstraction of narrative construction, and not merely a discursive reflection on its ain historical predicament). But Stewart'south fashion of reading, and writing indeed, is so singular, so idiosyncratically bound upwardly in the details of language, of the rich peculiarities of individual sentences, of the detailed effects of language-in-use, that it is difficult to see narratography ever becoming anything more than a one-man show, a remarkable and sometimes circus-like disquisitional acrobatics of reading. Not that Stewart is unrealistic about this: there is, as he somewhat wearily comments at the end of his book, rather a "short listing of subscribers" to the kind of "shut-grained assay of prose every bit medium" for which he is calling. Nevertheless, equally he decisively remarks, whether or not we have patience plenty to trace it "the inscribed evidence remains" (220).
But this is all perhaps merely as it should be. Because what Stewart evinces, in the end, at to the lowest degree every bit far equally this reviewer is concerned, is literary criticism at its most intellectually taut, most hermeneutically alert: Stewart reminds us that literary criticism is or should exist nothing other than an individual reader engaging with, being driven by, something like a surfeit of attention towards the intricacies and exigencies of language, of writing itself — too as ever with attention towards larger questions of theory, structure, genre, and history. In this respect, Stewart is something like a postmodern, hyper-theorized William Empson or indeed a rather different Christopher Ricks. He mentions both critics at to the lowest degree twice, in fact, and although he frames his book around and in dialogue with a number of other notable critics and theorists — especially Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit in their The Forms of Violence, Peter Brooks in Reading for the Plot, and Georg Lukács in Theory of the Novel (from which Stewart takes an epigraph for each of his capacity and with which he gradually builds upwards an argument) — information technology is to the kind of fine-grained, inventive, oft startling and sometimes infuriating attending to the shifting and oft slippery motion — the "drift," as he calls it — of words themselves that you find in Ricks and Empson, that Stewart perhaps owes nearly in terms of his sense of a critical tradition. In other words, what Stewart is most, what he is upward to, has to do with a particular kind of attention to what he calls "the sudden slippage, the give and concluding snap, of prose's ain tensile energy" - to "Empson'south 'play, in the technology sense'" (6).
In add-on to the plethora of cocky-definitions that stud and even in some ways construction Novel Violence, there are a series of chapters that play out the theory, that do or "experiment" with information technology (this is Stewart's give-and-take for what he's doing: meet 28, 34), while also always never departing very far from a (re-)theorization of it. These chapters develop the thought of narratography in the context of a series of nineteenth-century narrative texts, mainly but not all novels and mainly but not all, or at least not as, approved: Dickens's Footling Dorrit, Poe'south stories, Anne Brontë'south The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Eliot'south The Mill on the Floss, and Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbevilles (Stewart as well does extraordinary things with a passage from near the beginning of Conrad'due south Heart of Darkness in his epilogue, likewise as with various other texts in less concentrated means along the mode). And as his championship announces, Stewart is engaged in thinking about the violence in and of these examples of nineteenth-century writing, all of which, after all, engage with violence in a thematic sense, and engage it, oftentimes in extreme forms, including murder, to further their typically fervid plots. But while it is never entirely lost from critical view, a thematic reading is often the very final thing on Stewart's heed every bit he analyzes instead the extent to which violence is "endemic" to the power of nineteenth-century prose likewise as beingness "incumbent on certain of its representational tasks" (15). Pitting Roman Jakobson's understanding of the metaphorical "violence" of poetic language against, or mapping it onto, Bersani and Dutoit's recognition that English and European realist fiction is "driven," in a psychoanalytic sense, by real or representational violence, Stewart argues that in Victorian fiction "the violence of language, its drastic swerve from referential stability, is dispatched to formalize (and at times defuse) that more focused violence rendered in linguistic communication past the histrionic agonies that multiply across Victorian plots" (22). To put this into possibly less tortured, less indeed histrionic language than Stewart's own e'er tensile if not always entirely "readable" prose — prose that is almost hyper-alert to, and therefore sometimes non optimally constructive in, its own paronomastic and other aural/oral effects — 1 could say that the "poetic" deformations of prose both reflect and sometimes elide the often disturbing scenes of violence in your standard (if extraordinary) nineteenth-century plot. And although it is true that "violence and linguistic deviance are never equated" in Stewart's assay (25), nevertheless, equally he suggestively puts it, in Victorian fiction "violence repeatedly incites to style" (24).
In the end, this is a book virtually reading and nothing else, and the pleasance and interest one might take in reading it have to do with i's sense of catching someone — someone who might almost be said to be disordered past a surfeit of attention to a text's item way with words — in the deed of reading: it is in this as much as in the invention of a new disquisitional schoolhouse or theory that Novel Violence actually works. Along the way, information technology is true, nosotros become some incisive and sometimes clarifying commentary on the way narratives, particularly nineteenth-century narratives, piece of work — the idea, for instance, that the nineteenth-century novel involves "by definition" what Stewart characterizes as "a release and repeal of desire at once" so that it is, characteristically, "an arena of cleaved hope" (177). Or to take some other example, there is this dense and densely performative and somehow darkly illuminating sentence — illuminating despite its routed and warped phrasings — late on in the book, a judgement that sums up what Stewart has been saying again and over again and each time differently nigh the interaction of narrative line and linguistic form: "Graphing the progress of an inscribed narrative forth the phrasings routed and warped past its ain strength, rather than charting their schemata on a stable filigree of its inactivated formal construction: this is reading when given over to the moment-past-moment force of course and its constitutive solicitation...of response" (180). This is reading, so, under certain weather (conditions defined by and to a certain extent restricted to the work of Garrett Stewart). And in this "this" the performativity that marks the book as a whole is once again emphasized. What one witnesses in reading this volume is not and then much a theory as a reader — a master-reader, a reader mastering and beingness properly mastered by the piece of work — at work.
Bibliography
Garrett Stewart. The "Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction. Chicago, 2009) 268 pp.
Last modified 22 June 2014
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