Resisting Novels (Routledge Revivals)

Ideology and Fiction

Lennard J. Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317672227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

"By making friends with signs", Lennard Davis argues, "we are weakening the bond that anchors us to the social world, the world of action, and binding ourselves to the ideological." For the reader, this power of the novel needs to be resisted. But there is a double resistance at work: the novel is also a defensive structure positioning us against alienation and loneliness: the dehumanising symptoms of modern life.

While discussions surrounding ideology in novels traditionally concentrate on thematics, in this study – first published in 1987 - Davis approaches the subject through such structural features as location, character, dialogue and plot. Drawing on a wide range of novels from the seventeenth century to the present day, and on psychoanalysis as well as philosophy, Resisting Novels explores how fiction works subliminally to resist change and to detach the reader from the world of lived experience. This controversial critique will engage students and academics with a particular interest in literary theory.

1

Resisting the novel

_____________

The dutiful child of modern civilization is possessed by a fear of departing from the facts which, in the very act of perception, the dominant conventions of science, commerce, and politics – cliché-like – have already molded; his anxiety is none other than the fear of social deviation. The same conventions define the notion of linguistic and conceptual clarity which the art, literature and philosophy of the present have to satisfy.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment

As for the novelist, he is usually a dribbling liar.

D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine

I

Like many others, I am one who is enamored of fiction. My very sense of myself comes out of the pages of novels as much as it comes out of the working-class apartment in the Bronx where I attained consciousness. In that sense I am a partisan of and a fellow traveller with this literary form. My fantasies are novel fantasies. My conversations are shaped from dialogues in novels. My notions of beauty, truth, and reality peel off the pages of these works. I am the perfect prisoner of the novel. That is why I wrote this book.

I am attempting to explain and explore what novels do and have done to novel readers. Altough I am a partisan, I am also attempting to be an enemy to the pleasure of reading. Like the Greek or homeopathic concept of medicine, I want to be at once the poison and the cure.

What I am saying is that as much as we like reading novels, novels themselves have entered and changed our culture in ways that in fact may not be salutory. It is customary in university literature courses to talk about novels as triumphs of human achievement, as capsules of moral value, as the best and brightest that our society has to offer in the way of commentary on itself.

That may be. But I believe the time is approaching when we may also be allowed to detach ourselves from this rhetoric that protects literary forms and to see them as things that help the culture, or significant parts of the culture, to get by, to cope, to operate. In seeking resistance to the novel, I will be developing the idea that the novel is to culture as defenses are to individuals. Defenses make us who we are, they define us, and they are largely invisible to us – but if too powerful they also limit us, limit our freedom, and (in the extreme) make us neurotic. Novels have created or helped develop a mass neurosis. Look any day and in any place and you will see its victims, though they do not perhaps at first glance appear to be victims. Solitary people, often in the midst of hordes of strangers, sitting passive, silent, hunched almost fetally over a small, actually in ridiculously small, pack of papers. Most often their lips are still, their faces expressionless, their eyes fixed on some invisible moving point. In order to remain in this state, they must block outside stimuli, become virtually autistic – and what is it that they are doing? They are visualizing, analyzing, experiencing a fantasy not their own but which, in this autistic state, they believe in some provisional way to be true – true enough to draw conclusions, form moral opinions, and even shape their own lives to fit.

While I am clearly being facetious, I would ask you to imagine what anyone from another age who did not read novels might think of this phenomenon. Even someone as recently arrived as a Shakespearean contemporary might find such literary devotions strange and unusual. Novel reading is a relatively new phenomenon – as recently as 200 years ago some moralists and religious leaders were complaining about this developing habit. It is true that people of Shakespeare’s time might well enjoy the communal experience of attending the theater or listening to a ballad singer, but only the eccentric would spend several hours a day in reading. However, now when you ride on a subway in New York City, for example, the shocking thing is that so many people are lost in fiction. When we look at that activity with new eyes, the whole idea seems rather strange. I remember sitting with my 4-year old son Carlo in a local campus cafe opposite a woman who was reading a novel by Kurt Vonnegut, I believe. Now, recall that any child of a professor of English would surely have begun to realize quite early on that people read stories. After all, I had read him quite a few to satisfy his insistent demands. After a while, Carlo asked me ‘What is that lady doing?’ I said that she was reading a book. In surprise Carlo came back with ‘But why isn’t she moving her lips?’ What struck me immediately was that for the last four years my son had watched me engaged quite frequently in what must have been to him the mystic and bizarre behavior of silently contemplating an object for hours at a time and occasionally turning its pages. But between that activity and reading a story was a gap as great as that between an oral and a print culture. For my son the only reality of a story was one in which a human being spoke out loud. The social or asocial activity of novel-reading was so clearly a violation of all kinds of ‘natural’ behavior to him. Without placing greater emphasis on this anecdote than it deserves, I think that what frequently has been neglected in discussions of the novel as a form is the very context of reading as an historical and social phenomenon.

After all, the novel, as the first wave in the sweep of mass media and the entertainment industry, stands as an example of how large, controlled, cultural forms came to be used by large numbers of people who wished or were taught to have a different relation to reality than those who preceded them. As the first powerful, broad, and hegemonic literary form, the novel served to blur, in a way never before experienced, the distinction between illusion and reality, between fact and fiction, between symbol and what is represented.

In effect, the novel began a trend that culminated in the world described by Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism and The Minimal Self in which the self is so diminished as to make its highest priority survival. In the latter book, Lasch sees our contemporary period as one in which the goal is to get by on the bare bones of self-identity – as a ‘minimal self’ merely surviving. Lasch points to child-rearing practices in which parents are increasingly absent figures unable to ‘protect them from the devastating impact of the adult world’ (190). What results is narcissism – a condition in which people fail to make the distinction between the inner world and the outer world. This failure to distinguish between inner and outer, self and other, fact and fantasy is characteristic of our age, according to Lasch. While the novel did not bring about these conditions, Lasch does indict the rise of the mass media as a significant factor in this degeneration. Since novels are a strange combination of commodity and cognitive experience, they occupy a special role in the development of our culture. What Lasch says about commodities in general can also apply to the novel as a commodity. Noting Winnicott’s observation that culture ‘mediates between the inner world and the outer world’, Lasch says that ‘it is the intermediate realm of manmade objects, then, that threatens to disappear in societies based on mass production and mass consumption’. The novel is a particularly amphibious form, since it is both a human-made object and at the same time an object for mass consumption. It is Janus-faced in that sense, since it holds onto an earlier form related to craft and cottage industry for its creation, but it is reliant on technology and merchandizing for its distribution and effect. The effect of this Janus-like quality is that the home-made presence of the novel disguises the newer technology necessary to bring this form of homespun yarn to the reader. It is thus a duplicitous object. As Lasch continues:

We live surrounded by man-made objects, to be sure, but they no longer serve very effectively to mediate between the inner world and the outer world … the world of commodities takes the form of a dream world, a fabricated environment that appeals directly to our inner fantasies but seldom reassures us that we ourselves have had a hand in its creation … the commodity world stands as something completely separate from the self; yet it simultaneously takes on the appearance of a mirror of the self, a dazzling array of images in which we can see anything we wish to see. (195–6)

Looking at the novel as the first rearing of the mass media’s head, we can begin to understand how in the eighteenth century ideology in conjunction with human defenses began to operate. The novel presents itself as a mediator between the self and the world. As such it acts in defensive ways, as I will stress later. The argument can be made that novel reading began when the authority of religion began to wane. Where religion mediated between the self and the world, now the novel took up that role. But in substituting a traditional form for one that is based on the marketplace – on merchandizing and its ‘dream world’ or ‘fabricated environment’ – the distinction between fact and fiction, self and other, inner and outer began to collapse in an entirely new way and with significant consequences. As Lasch points out:

Reality itself is no longer real in the sense of arising from a people’s shared understanding, from a shared past, and from shared values. More and more, our impressions of the world derive not from the observations we make both as individuals and as members of a wider community but from elaborate systems of communication, which spew out information, much of it unbelievable, about events of which we seldom have any direct knowledge. (133)

Again, Lasch is speaking of the fully developed media of our own time, but the incipient news/novels discourse of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century with its pull in the direction of rapid information dispersal – whether in journalism or in fiction – was the beginning of this process. Of course, one could argue that an unmediated view of the world is impossible, so what difference would it make if we get that view from the novel or the newspaper or hearsay? This objection begs the question because the issue is precisely that different organizations of information carry with them different forms of meaning. Fictional narrative is defined by the fact that its referent is not the world but a particular sub-organization of the world pulled together under the rubric of the imaginary. Think, for example, of the meaning of the phrase ‘Your spouse is having an affair’ in the following presentations – novel, newspaper, hearsay, or toilet grafitti. Though the statement is only a collection of signs, it does matter terribly in what form of distribution those signs are presented to the effect and truth-value of the statement.

As I hope to show, we can no longer smugly think of the novel as the culmination of the human spirit or the height of mimetic accomplishment. It is after all a cultural phenomenon with certain overt aims and a hidden agenda. While few would praise the current state of our culture to the hilt, it is all too common to find warm, unreflective praise for the novel as a form – even among leftists who are quite critical of other aspects of society. A colder view might see the novel as part of the process that got us to the world of the ‘minimal self’ in the first place.

II

In an attempt to re-establish the self, before entering the sociological, I would like to present at least one reader’s seduction into the practice of novel reading by representing my own experience. If it seems odd to do so in a fairly academic book, let me cite the precedent of Rachel Brownstein’s Becoming a Heroine as a precedent for the need for a dialectic between subject and object.

My earliest recollections of stories were the ones my father told as he returned from work every day. He would stand in front of the door to our apartment and recount in incredible detail what he did at work as a sewing-machine operator in the garment district of New York City. We would get a close focus on the unwrapping of lunch-time sandwiches, troubles at work, and so on – all in American Sign Language since my parents were both profoundly deaf. What my father said was usually repetitive and uneventful, but he clearly was delighted to make it into a story. And we would stand and watch him, prisoners in our domestic routines of childhood, knowing that he had voyaged out into the world each day and returned, Odysseuslike, to tell us of the Scylla and Charybdis of the New York City subways and of the Circe of the coffee wagon. Like all pre-literates, I received my stories in oral form – or as oral as sign-language can be.

There were books in my house, painfully few when I think about it now. I was read to from what was scraped out of this Mother Hubbard-like bareness. I can only recall three books. One was about a little black lamb who was rejected because of his color until he fell into a bucket of white paint, and then I think when it rained the other lambs realized he was black but still liked him (or so I like to think). It was rather unlike my family to have had so consciously an anti-racist book in the house, so I assume it got in without pedagogical intent – probably because of the fuzzy lamb’s wool that you could rub in the hopes that your book was in some sense actually a lamb. I remember that no member of my immediate or extended family could enter the house without being forced by me to read this book at least five or six times. In keeping with pre-literate cultures, I liked repetition of stories.

The second book was one about five Chinese brothers who were to be executed and each one avoided his fate by using a single power they had – one to swallow huge amounts, the other by stretching very high, and so on. Recently I found this book at a sidewalk sale and reread it. It is extremely bloodthirsty and inherently racist. I think it was my favorite book as a child, but ironically I do not read it to my children.

The third book was Curious George Sails a Boat in which the instructions for making a paper boat out of newsprint were given at the end.

So in my own way I came to feel that stories came from books, that one could even feel a lamb in a book, learn to make things from books, and – if lucky and Chinese enough – even escape death.

My earliest recollections of actually reading a long work myself take place in third grade. I read The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. I remember quite well the illustrations, and the fantasy of being on an island, but I cannot recall the characters at all – except for Captain Nemo, whose name was more familiar to me from my Viewmaster stereo slides of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It is so appropriate that I and many others entered novel reading through the genre of adventure. There was a lot more happening on the Mysterious Island, I thought, than on the back lots of the Bronx. Actually, now that I have written some fiction about the Bronx, I realize the opposite might have been true.

In school we were encouraged to read novels and had to record our progress in a kind of double-entry book-keeping notebook every day. We logged in the number of pages we read, and what we thought that day. (‘Very exciting today.’) The message was clear – reading was a form of accruing valuable capital that would help in later life. Strangely, I remember more about what Valerie Groditski was reading – Greek mythology and the story of Bellerophone and Pegasus – than I remember about my book. But the point I want to make is that what I remembered was that I was reading a novel. I was impressed with myself for being able to do so. I do not think that I was ever able to comprehend The Mysterious Island fully since, like Tristram Shandy, my progress was so slow that I would forget previous chapters as I crawled through the succeeding ones. But I got the message – novels were not only worth reading but anyone who was anyone (and who hoped to get out of the Bronx) would surely be someone who read novels.

Reading novels was part of our education. I tended to think the better part, not being particularly good at mathematics, and fairly bored with the history of kings and wars. I took out a few books from the local library – things from the ‘Cowboy Sam’ series. Some girls read The Bobsy Twins and some of the fellows liked The Hardy Boys. But whatever I read between third and ninth grade I really do not recall except that I believe I devoured the ‘Lad: A Dog’ series by Albert Payson Terhune and read one strange book called Hello The Boat, about a family that lived on a houseboat. My parents were not big readers, being both deaf and under-educated, and so the only books we had were the ones my brother, ten years older, brought home. Those books tended to be acceptable works of literature that contained at least one or two sexy passages.

I discovered the dirty books – in this case Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County – and read them as carefully as I ever read any text. It was through these books that the distance between reality and fiction became dangerously narrow. I suppose that I followed along in the adventures of Cowboy Sam and Lassie, but with these books I experienced pleasure directly. My neurons were pulsing with actual synaptic messages inaugurated by simple words on a page. In discussing this subject with other male literary folk, I have found some kind of pressing connection between this erotic discovery of novels and the general pleasure of reading, but that is not the subject of this study.

In ninth grade my English teacher had us read Brave New World and 1984. We had to get written permission from our parents. I recall my mother signing the release form with some strange sense of her own powerlessness since she had to rely on me to tell her what the book was about and since she could not understand that school might be exposing us to something bad – that would have been a contradiction in terms. I think I told her that the books only had one little bit of sex in the middle. I think I was right. Those books entered directly into my bloodstream. I recently reread 1984 and was surprised by the fact that nothing in the book could surprise since I remembered all so vividly.

Beginning tenth grade I entered De Witt Clinton High School – a massive building in the Bronx whose architect had clearly designed all the major penitentiaries in New York State. Seven thousand boys, mostly of the dangerous persuasion, were marshaled in those walls and shepherded from one dull class to another. I was, however, safely ensconced in what was called ‘The Scholarship Program’ – a reference I always thought hopefully of, like Pip, in financial terms. The summer before entering this august institution, I was given a list of ‘classics’ – mostly novels – to read which, according to the regnant wisdom of the school fathers, might act as a kind of disinfectant to the odor of our slum-soaked minds.

I was required to read David Copperfield and about ten other such works. I brought the books to summer camp and became lost in their world. I myself was David – no question about it. I didn’t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Resisting the novel
• 2 The ideology of ideology
• 3 'Known unknown' locations: the ideology of place
• 4 Characters, narrators, and readers: making friends with signs
• 5 Conversation and dialogue
• 6 Thick plots: history and fiction
• 7 Conclusion: the political novel, or - what is to be done?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index