Romanticism and Speculative Realism

Chris Washington, Anne C. McCarthy, Chris Washington, Anne C. McCarthy

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501336393
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria moderna

Romanticism and Speculative Realism features a range of scholars working at the intersection of literary poetics and philosophy. It considers how the writing of the Romantic era reconceptualizes the human imagination, the natural world, and the language that correlates them in radical ways that can advance current speculative debates concerning new ontologies and new materialisms. In their wide-ranging examinations of canonical and non-canonical romantic writers, the scholars gathered here rethink the connections between the human and non-human world to envision speculative modes of social being and ecological politics. Spanning historical and national frameworks-from historical romanticism to contemporary post-romantic ecology, and from British and German romanticism to global modernity-these essays examine life in all its varied forms in, and beyond, the Anthropocene.

1

Of Meillassoux’s contingencies and Scott’s plots: Rethinking probability in a world of unreason

Evan Gottlieb

Which is the more terrifying prospect: a universe without ultimate meaning, or a universe without infinite possibility? If you’re more alarmed by the former, you likely subscribe to some kind of metaphysics—the type of thinking, as Quentin Meillassoux puts it in After Finitude, “that claims to be able to access some form of absolute being, or access the absolute through the principle of sufficient reason.”¹ If the latter fills you with dread, you’re more likely to reject the existence of necessary beings, much less a necessary Being, and to embrace instead an ontology of immanent contingency and potentiality, which Meillassoux calls “Hyper-Chaos, for which nothing is[,]‌ or would seem to be, impossible, not even the unthinkable.”² Believing in a universe imbued with intrinsic meaning—an effectively closed universe, populated by necessary beings or at least governed by eternal natural laws—is in line with most forms of traditional thinking, whether explicitly religious or simply philosophically conservative. By contrast, accepting a universe that is fundamentally unfinished—governed by nothing but contingency, void of any intrinsic meaning, and open to radical change—is one of the ineluctable conclusions of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism.

Exploring Meillassoux’s unorthodox ideas regarding contingency, Hyper-Chaos, and related concepts is one of the goals of this chapter; the other is to explore what Hyper-Chaos and its many ramifications suggest about literary representations of probability. Here, my focus will be on the extraordinarily influential Waverley novels of Walter Scott. Granted, Scott initially seems like an odd pairing with Meillassoux: the nineteenth-century novelist with the twenty-first-century philosopher, the master storyteller with the apostle of contingency, the Presbyterian-turned-Anglican with the committed albeit highly unorthodox atheist. Beyond these superficial differences, however, lies a series of intellectual continuities regarding what counts as probable and believable that this chapter will seek to trace. Ultimately, putting Meillassoux in dialogue with Scott creates an opportunity not only to highlight what the French philosopher’s version of speculative realism says about narrative probability but also to shed new light on what Scott brings and bequeaths to the romantic-era novel, as well as to generic successors like science fiction. More specifically, Meillassoux’s radical reworking of concepts of necessity and probability allows us to rethink our assumptions about Scott’s supposed commitments to historical progress and narrative causality.

The most famous modern analysis of Scott’s narratives is still Georg Lukács’s in The Historical Novel. According to Lukács, the archetypal Waverley Novels plot embodies the dialectical core of a Marxist vision of history, in which the clash of socioeconomic structures – typically, the rising bourgeoisie versus the older feudal order – drives the engine of historical progress. As Lukács puts it,

if Scott’s main tendency in all his novels—and which forms of them in a sense a kind of cycle—is to represent and defend progress, then this progress is for him always a process full of contradictions, the driving force and material basis of which is the living contradiction between conflicting historical forces, the antagonisms of classes and nations.³

Lukács sees that Scott has great sympathy for the “losers” of history, especially those remnants of feudalism who by choice, chance, or clan find themselves bound to its increasingly outdated codes and structures. But the winners of most Waverley Novels are not those for whom Scott shows the greatest feeling—be they Highlanders, gypsies, Covenanters, or Jews—but rather those who prove themselves ethnically, ethically, or nationally flexible enough to navigate their way toward British modernity. In other words, Scott’s plots generally rehearse the Enlightenment logic of stadial history that Marx drew on for his own dialectical materialism.

This Lukácsian version of Scott has been highly influential—even if, as Fredric Jameson has observed, the historical novel as a vehicle for authentic (i.e., Marxian) historical consciousness is now mostly an “impossible form or genre . . . that is still assiduously practiced”⁴ —not least because it helped counter the Victorian and early Modernist disparagement of Scott as little more than an author of adventure stories fit for consumption only by boys and invalids. The great flowering of critical interest in Scott that has taken place in the past decades owes much to this paradigm, such that most of the major critical initiatives put forward continue to assume its basic functionality. The masculinizing of the novel genre described by Ina Ferris, the generic dialectic of romance and realism identified by Ian Duncan, the absorption and redeployment of Scottishness identified by Katie Trumpener, the zeitgeist-forming power of the historical novel identified by James Chandler, Caroline McCracken-Flesher’s deconstructive examination of Scott’s nation-building work, Alison Lumsden’s investigation of Scott’s surprisingly unorthodox language usage, and even my own study of multiple critical theorists’ applicability to the Waverley Novels—each of these modifies the terms of Lukács’s original paradigm, to be sure, but leaves its totalizing structure intact.⁵ The assumption is that, consciously or not, Scott’s novels represent history as a totality, one that can be apprehended as a whole—from the outside, as it were—such that its patterns can be recognized and regularized, even when fictional elements (e.g., invented characters and events) are introduced.

Recently, Matthew Wickman has employed a similar approach, taking Scott’s self-reflexive “Postscript which should have been a Preface” at the end of Waverley; Or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since as exemplary of the novelist’s claim “to be able to grasp these [historical] developments in their complexity.”⁶ But Wickman contrasts Scott’s methodology, which is both indexed and facilitated by “the narrative closure which Waverley . . . seems to provide,” with the more open-ended approach of Scott’s fellow countryman and sometime literary competitor, John Galt. Galt’s refusal to treat history as a totalizable entity, especially in his acknowledged masterpiece Annals of the Parish (1821), leads him away from Scott’s chosen genre of the historical novel and toward more experimental styles of writing; hence his insistence that Annals be received as a “theoretical history” or even a “fable” rather than as a historical novel. In Wickman’s analysis, Galt’s alternative vision of history can best be understood via the mathematical ontology of Alain Badiou, who has staked his career on the proposition that mathematics—especially set theory, more recently supplemented by topography—is first philosophy.⁷ According to Badiou, the radical ontological potential of number qua number has been stolen from us; he aims to restore it by showing how every set conceals the arbitrariness of its own “count as one” and represses the point of its own void: a point that, when discovered or manifested, can become the ground for a new count, or truth, to whose realization the newly formed subject must pledge itself. Galt, in Wickman’s analysis, is best understood as a novelist in this mold, one who bursts open the seemingly closed set of early modern Scottish and British history. The relation Wickman develops between Galt and Badiou provides a partial template for how in this chapter I want to reconsider Scott in light of Meillassoux’s theories. I say “partial,” however, because the relation between the latter couple will prove to be more fractious than Wickman’s ingenious Galt–Badiou pair, and also because Meillassoux’s ideas differ in some important respects from Badiou’s.

Like his mentor, Meillassoux accepts mathematics as first philosophy; unlike Badiou, he primarily uses set theory not to help describe the emergence of new truths but to indicate the limits of probabilistic thinking. Although the main target of After Finitude is Kant’s insistence that we can never have direct knowledge of the essence of things, Meillassoux frequently approaches this problem by returning to earlier questions raised by Kant’s great predecessor, David Hume. For Meillassoux, “Hume’s problem” names the difficulty of explaining causality. Famously, in section IV of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume uses the example of colliding billiard balls to highlight the extent to which our reason in fact depends on experience and cognitive habit; although we think we know what happens when one billiard ball strikes another, we only really know the surface effect—one ball strikes another and the latter moves—while the underlying cause is left obscure. Moreover, our so-called knowledge that the same effect will occur time and again under the same conditions is just a form of heavily vetted prediction: we “know” what will happen when one billiard ball strikes another because we’re in the habit of expecting that, in the arena of natural phenomena at least, the future will follow the same course as the past.

Rather than rehearse the entirety of Hume’s well-known thought experiment, let’s look, instead, at his subsequent deductive summary, which is worth quoting at length:

In a word, then, every effect is a distinct event from its cause. It could not, therefore, be discovered in the cause, and the first invention or conception of it, a priori, must be entirely arbitrary. And even after it is suggested, the conjunction of it with the cause must appear equally arbitrary, since there are always many other effects, which, to reason, must seem fully as consistent and natural. In vain, therefore, should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any cause or effect, without the assistance of observation and experience.

Hence we may discover the reason why no philosopher who is rational and modest, has ever pretended to assign the ultimate cause of any natural operation, or to show distinctly the action of that power, which produces any single effect in the universe. It is confessed, that the utmost effort of human reason is to reduce the principles, productive of natural phenomena, to a greater simplicity, and to resolve the many particular effects into a few general causes, by means of reasonings from analogy, experience, and observation. But as to the causes of these general causes, we should in vain attempt their discovery … These ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry.⁸

It was passages like this that famously interrupted Kant’s “dogmatic slumber,” prompting him to respond to Hume’s skepticism with a theory of transcendental idealism in which space and time become precisely those a priori forms ...