Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel

 [Notes for the speech I gave this afternoon launching Adam Grener's wonderful new book Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel. 

Writing as the triumph of fascism disfigured German society with shocking violence, brutality and seemingly irrational bursts of racist mysticism aggression and paranoia, a group of important critics – mostly Jewish, all in or around the Communist Party – tried to make sense of how literature could respond to a world so improbable, so nightmarish, and so uncertain. Brecht, Lukacs, Bloch, and Adorno were all as socialists, democrats, and Marxists, products of radical strains of Enlightenment thinking: how then could universalist, rational thought comprehend the grotesque passions of fascism?

 

It was in this crucible that the realism debate was forged and, almost a century on, it is on their terms that the debate still plays out. On realism’s vocation Lukacs and Brecht were largely in agreement. For Lukacs “the question of totality plays a decisive role” as the goal of realism is “to penetrate the laws governing objective reality and to uncover the deeper, hidden, mediated not immediately perceptible network of relationships that go to make up society.” Realism “captures tendencies of development that only exist incipiently and have not yet had the opportunity to unfold their entire human and social potential.” For Brecht, “realism means: discovering the causal complexes of society.” Where they differed – sharply, to be sure, polemically, certainly – is over questions of mediation, technique, approach. What representational tools, Brecht asks, are adequate to capturing the dynamic totality of fascism? That is a challenge with political and ethical, as well as aesthetic, implications and urgencies.

 

How that debate atrophies, over the next ninety years, into a just-so story about an allegedly ‘naïve’ realism seeking to fool its reader into imagining the text reproduces the world ‘as it is’ demands another setting than this one, but it matters for the book we’re launching today. Middlemarch, for Colin MacCabe, shows Eliot’s “conviction that the real can be displayed and examined through a perfectly transparent language”. For Peter Bürger realism treats “language [as] a tool for the unproblematic representation of reality.” In New Zealand literary studies, meanwhile, Erin Mercer’s Telling the Real Story is a book-length argument against what she sees as the dominance of “safe, middling, ‘beige’ realist fiction in local selective traditions. Just this month Kirsten McDougall criticised the “realist overlords” gatekeeping literary fiction.

 

Realism, on these accounts, is both wearingly dominant in its closed assumptions – there’s more to life than all that – and, somehow at the same time, insufficiently realist, insufficiently attuned to the variety and improbability of life itself. Realism, Fredric Jameson wrote at the start of this century, is “exhausted” in the face of globalisation.

 

Adam intervenes into this long-running but strangely stalled debate with Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel by taking up the challenge of improbability head-on. The improbable is, for Adam, not a bug in the realist novel but a feature: the improbable, he writes “is central to the representational aims and strategies of the nineteenth-century novel […] a realist mode that is fundamentally historicist in its commitments […] improbable events like chance and coincidence are integral to this project […] what is most important and interesting about realism is its capacity to represent a historical and contingent world, rather than its ability to occlude its status as fiction or to conjure a conventional (or convincing) depiction of the ordinary or everyday” (3)

 

This book’s great excitement, for me, lies in this opening move: instead of berating a realism that doesn’t exist (as in MacCabe’s misreading of Middlemarch) or setting realism up as, at best, the prophet of a Modernism to come, Adam attends to the actual dynamics and dilemmas of crucial nineteenth century texts to see what it is they confront and how they confront this. Improbable endings, wayward plots, and chance moments are, in this reading, ways of accounting for a world in tension rather than compromises from a realist ideal.

 

Adam is fascinating on the distinctions between chance, understandable in texts before the Industrial Revolution often as a sign of the workings of Providence, and probability, that rise in statistical thinking and abstraction that was part of the great cultural revolution of Industrial capitalism. Realism, on his reading, negotiates between these two ways of understanding the world. Chance, he argues, is Chance “a name for the tension between individual variation and aggregate order” (21), an aesthetic fix for the “The gulf that emerges between thinking about particularities and collectives, the individual and society. Chance provided novelists a narrative mechanism for thinking through and mediating the relationship between these scales of reality” (20) The determinist frame of probability and the statistical robs us of any sense of agency; the operations of chance rob of us any sense of causality. Realism navigates between the two. Think of Albert Wendt’s Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1980), one of the greatest realist novels of the last fifty years. Tauilopepe’s development in that novel is both the product of big, abstract forces of colonialism and capitalism reshaping Samoan society and, in crucial moments, a question of chance encounters, opportunities, risks. Wendt prompts us to think on their interrelationship.

 

 

Improbability, Chance, and the Realist Novel advances its case through close readings of important novels, these close readings being both bravura performances on their own terms and, cumulatively, a history of how realism faces an increasingly stark opposition between individual and abstraction across the century. The reader is treated to Dickensian coincidence, Trollopean statistics, chance in Hardy, with Adam all the while emphasizing how “it is precisely by drawing attention to the artificiality of their narratives that Austen and Scott cultivate modes of attention and cognition adequate to historical particularity.” Dickens’ oddball coincidences, in this reading, are a way of attending to a “world whose scale cannot be reconciled with individual experience”. Chance “figure[s] individual experience and agency in relation to the abstract scale of the social.” In a moment when the most fleeting chance encounter – a sneeze on a bus – could link an individual to a world-historical event in the COVID crisis these lines have special resonance.

 

Seventies aesthetic radicalism, its Althusserian varieties especially, can feel restrictive and suffocating, with their view of realism as “programming” determinate readers. Adam’s, by contrast, is a very American book, in the best traditions of that republic. The terms are often used as boo-words but, here, I mean them as words of praise: this book is liberal, democratic, humanist, and liberal humanist. The reader matters in this book: Austen’s very minor characters prompt “the reader to speculate on the contours of their unmapped futures”. Hardy’s doubled voices together give us “a considerably more complicated view” than either singly, and so on. This is very clearly a study written by a student of Harry Shaw and indebted, behind him, to Wayne Booth. If I dissent, finally, from the individualism and liberal hopes of that tradition, tonight I want to record my admiration for its ongoing, generous, generative capacities here.

 

A final comment on probability and politics. Adam opens his book with a remark from Amitav Ghosh to the effect that improbability is the reason that literary fiction has yet to integrate climate change into its representation of reality. Other traditions – Science Fiction, fantasy, fable – Ghosh suggest, may be needed for this outlandish catastrophe. Adam’s study is, among other things, a riposte to this claim, ending with a plea for us to “discover modes of rethinking individuality and collectivity” through the nineteenth-century realist novel’s work thinking through abstraction and particularity, scale and individuality. I started reading his book as the final death scenes of the Trump campaign played out, all ghoulish melodrama and melting hair dye. Trump’s improbability, and the ways his bizarre menagerie defy realist comprehension, have been a running theme of the past four years. Adam’s study suggests another way of thinking. We are, by coincidence, the same age, and so our adult lives have been determined by the War on Terror, a bipartisan assault on civil liberties domestically, the rise of the Tea Party, the radicalization of the Republican Party and the drawn-out social catastrophe of the Global Financial Crisis. Trump’s rise, for all that it was carried out in the garb of the country fair barker, is the result, in other words, of a complex pattern stretching back decades. His particular victory in 2016 relied on a series of lucky chances, to be sure, and was, on any sober reckoning improbable. But it happened, and those who hope that, with his exit, normal life will return to the republic are in for some unpleasant shocks. All this suggests that our moment demands, at the level of fiction, its realist.