Enchantment/Disenchantment; Closure/Narratability
Narrative is everywhere: and its pervasiveness makes it, in a sense, harder rather than easier to teach. Defamiliarizing what is so familiar, in studentsâ lives and in the texts theyâve consumed, all the way from bedtime infancy to âset textsâ for exams, can be an unsettling experience. In addition, for a lecturer to convey and gauge the power of narratives, especially over his studentsâ own lives (as well as his own: in teaching narrative, I make this very clear and personal) can seem intrusive. Fiction is fictive but narratives can occlude their own fictiveness so seductively as to seem true. This isnât just the trivial matter, say, of early readers of Gulliverâs Travels indignantly complaining that they didnât believe a word about those little and big people (presumably such readers gave up before they got to the talking horses); itâs serious.
Iâm writing this in July 2017 not long after a momentous general election in the UK in which, to everyoneâs astonishment, a narrative of hope, communality and desire for a fairer society was at least as much listened to and believed (especially by students and other young people) than the narrative of fear, cynical inequality and hatred of others, a narrative relentlessly elaborated by the âfreeâ worldâs most aggressively partisan newspapers, that have poisoned British politics for so long. Earlier we had Brexit and Trump. Narratives swung both those results. The coerciveness of narrativeâits power to lie, oppress and enslaveâis just as significant as its more widely acclaimed and more benevolent powers: narrative being (in H. Porter Abbottâs words) âthe principal way our species organises its understanding of timeâ (Abbott 2002: 3) and, through that, the way we come to terms with mortality; its power to make sense of our world, our lives and ourselves; and its power to give us an infinitely enriched understanding of alternative worlds and livesâand of a better future. Students can more readily accept the plausibility of the latter life-enhancing powers rather than the former coercive ones. Enchantment with narrative is more easily taught than disenchantment.
The balance between enchantment and disenchantment also operates differently across the studentâs educational experience. It may be one way of distinguishing what happens in university teaching from what comes before it that the balance there tips sharply towards the disenchantment pole, as we teach the application of critical literacy , with its attendant and necessary scepticisms, to the reading of narrative, whereas, at the other extreme, in childhood, enchantment with narrative very much has its âusesâ (Bettelheim 1976).
But students also come to see that what is involved in their later reading of narrative is an oscillation between enchantment and disenchantment, in their experience not just of different sorts or genres of texts, or as to the liberating or oppressive nature of the narrative, but even within the same text. The narrative enchants us and simultaneously we are aware of, and meant to be aware of and meant to resist, that enchantment. It would be conventional to map this process or oscillation, and to assess the balance between the two processes, on to and in terms of the differences, or alleged differences, between realist and modernist narratives, with their sharply divergent allegiances to notions of coherence, wholeness, plausibility, dimensionality and hierarchies of discourse.
Students of literature at university are encouraged to see those differences in terms of linear chronology as they move from the great nineteenth-century realist narratives of, say, Jane Austen, Dickens and George Eliot to the high modernist post-war experiments of, say, Joyce, Woolf and Ford. These would conventionally be taught on separate modules. But this cleanly demarcated linear development should be destabilized and I give some examples of that process in the last chapter of this book, in relation to âBartlebyâ and to the âAliceâ books in dialogue with Freudâs âDoraâ . And itâs very pertinent that D. A. Miller observes that the standard account of the realist novel serving âthe repressive order of the nineteenth century bourgeoisieâ whereas the modernist novel âregisters an implicit protest against this repressionâ (Miller 1981: 281) is too simple. He doesnât say it but one complicating point would be to note that when realism was being heralded as a new breed of narrative fiction, in the form of Madame Bovary, Flaubertâs novel and realism itself (though Flaubert hated and rejected the term) were being defined by reviewers as the politics of âdiscontented democracyâ and âimplacable equalityâ (Heath 1992: 51). Miller draws on Fredric Jameson to argue that modernist fiction can be âsuspiciously consonant, not to say complicitous, with aspects of the social order that provides its own contextâ (Miller 1981: 281).
Even more telling, however, is for students to come to see that single texts in the so-called realist or modernist traditions can be read as containing unstable compounds of the two traditionsâboth, in Barthesâ famous terms, âreaderly and âwriterlyâ (Barthes 1990: v), that reading them is a matter of negotiating between enchantment and disenchantment, and that itâs less a matter of modernism being a chronological development from and break with realism and more that the two represent a tension in narrative texts that has been with us from the start (from at least Cervantes) and is still with us today (see Josipovici 2010). The ârealist/modernistâ dynamic can be traced in manifold ways and places: students on a first-year âRe-Viewing Shakespeareâ module have been stimulated to notice the shifting proportions of ârealistâ and âmodernistâ narratives in the proto-realist Hamlet and the proto-modernist King Lear. As suggested above, itâs a tension thatâs inherent in the very fictiveness of narrative.
Teaching nineteenth-century ârealistâ novels to students who have been introduced to the critical approaches to narrative fiction pioneered by Peter Brooks and D. A. Miller has proved a very fruitful and bracing experience, whether working with second-year undergraduates on a 19th century module that takes in some of the usual landmarks or an MA module on rhetoric that pays close attention to Jane Austen (and, as weâll see, Mary Shelley). And we might relate the enchantment/disenchantment dynamic to the crucial feature that Miller (who is at his dazzling best on Jane Austen) identifies in narrative fiction as the permanent tension between closure and narratability: closure can only âworkâ by abolishing the possibilities of what can be narrated, a process that involves the âdiscontentsâ of Millerâs title (Miller 1981). For Miller closure depends on âa suppression, a simplification, a sort of blindnessâ (Miller: 89), and is âan act of âmake-believeâ, a postulation that closure is possibleâ, a postulation of âself-betraying inadequacyâ (267). There is, writes Miller, âno more fundamental assumption of the traditional novel than [the] opposition between the narratable and closureâ (267) and âwhat discontents the traditional novel is its own condition of possibilityâ (265).
To put it another way, closure is defined, only made possible, by the elements that refuse closure. When closure in narrative means happy love, that happy love may only be achieved because it chooses to forget the price of its happiness. That narrative closure is guiltily aware of exclusion (the coercions dictating who gets left out of the final happinesses, like Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede) accounts for the sense of exasperation that students can hear as accompanying closure itself. The narrator, in the very act of managing the married couples, can suddenly betray an exasperated note as if aware of what has to be left out in novelistic management or housekeeping. We can hear this with varying degrees of intensity in Jane Austen, notably so in the chillingly bitter treatment (which students are invariably shocked by) handed out to the adulterous Maria at the end of Mansfield Park, condemned to live in a purgatorial misery with Austenâs least âliveable withâ character, Mrs Norris:
In an equivalent way, students are taken aback by the implausible (exasperated?) ending of Bleak House, which they find difficult to take seriously. This only âworksâ by what Dickens himself must have realized was the staginess of superimposing an identikit new but happier Bleak House upon the old (bleak) one, so that Jarndyce can give Esther the appropriately grounded happiness. This is designed to justify the way Dickens simultaneously superimposes Woodcourt as Estherâs ânewâ husband (as-if her brother) upon the old one, Jarndyce himself (as-if her father).âŚwhere, shut up together with little society, on one side no affection, on the other no judgment, it may be reasonably supposed that their tempers became their mutual punishment. (Vol. 3, Ch. 17)
Teaching Conflicted Novels
Millerâs analysis of the dynamics of narrative in the realist novel is developed, in a more obviously Foucauldian direction, in his The Novel and the Police (Miller 1988). Here the narratives of Victorian realism are shown to be complicit in a process by which readers, deluded by the image of private power offered by the narrative, are blinded to the operation of more pressingly real social and public power in which they are caught up, the narratives âenlisting the consciousness of its subject in the work of supervisionâ. The effect is that the reader, the liberal subject, can only recognize himself fully âwhen he forgets or disavows his functional implicationâ in a system of ârestraints or disciplinary injunctionsâ (Miller 1988; Hale 2006: 554, 543). The enchantments of narrative, in this respect, are the necessary occlusions of disenchantment, precisely in not knowing that by reading you have become your own policeman.
David Musselwhite , in an often brilliant and under-rated book that anticipates Millerâs arguments, shows how in the classic realist novel, from Jane Austen to Dickens, the âexuberance and threatâ of revolutionary forces are âsteadily but ineluctably worked within a new axiomatic, a new set of rules and constraints, of prescribed places and possibilities that made them both manageable and self-monitoringâ, while at the same time âthe potential of desire , which should be social and productiveâ is âslowly asphyxiatedâ (Musselwhite 1987: 9).
These ideas have usefully informed discussions in university seminar classrooms during the MA rhetoric module when Iâve brought together two novels written within a few years of each otherâyears in the period between 1811 and 1819 when âthe possibility of a violent revolution in England was greater than at almost any other time and was contained, with ever increasing difficulty, by the resort to force aloneâ (Musselwhite 1987: 31). The two novels are startlingly different but share submerged structural anxieties : Emma and Frankenstein. (They also share an early recourse to doubling and othering, much more subtly so in Emma.) The asphyxiation of potentially social and productive desire is one way of describing what happens to Shelleyâs Creature, whose last words (deriving from Miltonâs Satan as he first observes the embracing Adam and Eve) register the agony of âwasting in impotent passionsâ and permanently unsatisfied desires (1818, ed., Vol. 3, Ch. 7). Musselwhite notes that in these last pages the Creature pointedly refers (twice, actually) to his life not as a narrative but as the âseries of my beingâ: as if he and he alone belongs to the non-narratable (despite his being the most eloquent narrator in the novel), with his plea to be âlinked to the chain of existence and eventsâ (Vol. 2, Ch. 9), as if in a narrative signifying system, so cruelly denied.
But students recognize something similar about the structure of Emma in which marriage brings an end, but in a sense an arbitrary (discontented) end, to what has characterized Emmaâs life hithertoâa âseries of beingâ lived as an arbitrarily strung together series of match-makings (driven in Harrietâs case by the displacements of narcissistic pseudo-homosexual desire ), a kind of anti-narrative or what Miller calls âradical picaresque: an endless flirtation with a potentially infinite parade of possibilitiesâ (Miller 1981: 15). And this match-making is like a âbadâ or âotheredâ version of the novelâs marriage-orientated dominant narrative: Emmaâs match-making (as âbad novelistâ) is in effect positioned to empty the master-narrative of its ideological purposes, to naturalize and legitimize it.
Emmaâs desire to live through and in that picaresque âseriesâ must be bound up (âcorrectedâ) in closure , in effect asphyxiated in hetero-normative marriage. Students regularly see the radical feminist potential in what Emma desires to be and to do, to assert and exercise control and power, in effect to usurp power in a patriarchal world, to be the subject of her sentence, and students connect that desire with Frank Churchillâs more obviously subversive undermining of social protocolâand they are very alive to the sharp irony of Emma discovering that itâs Frank of all people whose power games have exposed the weakness of her supposed autonomy, that sheâs all along been a pawn in his game, the object of his sentence, in a feigned relationship, and then of Mr Knightleyâs, in marriage.
And students are richly exercised when we come to discuss the multiple i...