The Novel after Character

Rachel Cusk, Timothy Bewes, and the "dysfunctions" of fictionality

In a 2018 New Yorker interview, conducted during her victory-lap after completion of the Outline Trilogy, Rachel Cusk made an off-hand remark that has since been cited in nearly every review and examination of her work: “I’m not interested in character because I don’t think character exists anymore.” Alexandra Schwartz, the interviewer, smelled a headline and pushed Cusk to explain herself. What followed was not so much a systematic theory of fictionality, but a series of fragmentary and bracketed reflections on her own recent reading: “It seemed to me that these definitions of character and place in the Victorian novel—the village, the vicar, the woman—or in America—the small town, the woman, the man—those things that root to universality were done with. And saying ‘there’s this man here and you’re all going to identify with him’ didn’t seem right to me anymore. It didn’t seem real.”

For Cusk, character in the classical Victorian realist sense is dead because readers no longer experience themselves as characters, no longer spontaneously “identify” with or believe in the supposedly universal types that populate Austen’s villages or Updike’s towns. We can no longer comfortably and unthinkingly inhabit these social roles, and therefore we encounter them not as deeply felt forms-of-life but as so many costumes to be worn and removed as needed. If a man takes his social role too seriously—if a vicar really believes himself to be a vicar, all the way down, rather than simply a man in vicar’s clothes who does the work of a vicar and writes “vicar” on his census form—we sense something faintly ridiculous, even pathological, about him. He is out of place, out of time, unable to assimilate into a contemporary culture defined not by “real” differences but by a market-mediated principle of substitution and exchange. Cusk’s narrator, Faye, encounters any number of these sad figures across the Trilogy, meeting their stubborn sincerity with an understated blend of pity and envy. “Character” in this older and deeper sense thus indicates what Cusk calls a “dysfunction” of the individual and of the novel itself.

Cusk’s work registers a crisis of representation defined by a collective disbelief in exemplarity, in the belief that any fictional or real person can successfully operate as a type. The decline of typicality—the replacement of the concrete-universal representative of a class and subgroup in dynamic, allegorical relations with other such representatives, such as one finds in Balzac and Scott, with the figure of the “average man” who lacks all such substantial content and can in principle be reduced to a mere statistical figure on one hand and an abstract body on the other—was already diagnosed by Gyorgy Lukacs in his polemics against naturalism and modernism in the 1920s and ‘30s. For Lukacs, it is only through the dramatic interrelation of typical characters that the novel can perform its crucial function of mapping a total historical situation. Whereas certain modernists (one thinks of Joyce and Dos Passos first of all) may have maintained that they were in fact reaching after the representation of totality, only by other means than those prescribed by Lukacs, Cusk and her contemporaries seem to have entirely given up such grand claims to the Whole along with any prescribed strategies for that Whole’s representation.

The decline of belief in authentic exemplarity, the absence of any representational or analytic strategy that can assert a view of the totality, and the search for a narrative form capable of systematically bracketing, undermining, if not outright abandoning, all appeals to the logic of typicality are, I think, the three key developments shaping serious literary fiction today. Any attempt to understand the work of Cusk, W. G. Sebald, Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, J. M. Coetzee, and others must take these two intertwined processes into account, grasping them as collective responses to concrete historical processes. I share the broad strokes of this thesis with Timothy Bewes, author of the extraordinary book Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age, which I and several of my peers have come to believe is perhaps the single most important and clarifying work yet written on the current state of our global literary situation.

Free Indirect won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2022 and enjoys circulation among academics, but it has not yet made much impact on the “public” critical conversation in book reviews and blogs, or among writers themselves, despite having the full-throated endorsement of Merve Emre, middlebrow critic par excellence of the moment. There are obvious reasons for its muted reception. Bewes not only writes in a complex (and at times overwrought) style that’s been out-of-fashion since Derrida’s passing and the decline of High Theory, he also takes as his key interlocutors the reputed obscurantists Jacques Rancière and Gilles Deleuze, mobilizing concepts from their most difficult texts—Le partage du sensible, The Logic of Sense, Cinema I & II. He assumes familiarity with an idiosyncratic canon of authors from Cusk, Sebald, and Coetzee to Jesse Ball, Tao Lin, and Valeria Luiselli. He blackens pages mediating longstanding academic methodological debates without really clarifying their vital connection to the primary texts at hand. But Fredric Jameson was guilty of all these sins as well, and his books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies. So, I’m holding out hope for Bewes’s popular breakthrough.

In order to deal with the unruly texts of this 21st century canon-in-formation, Bewes proposes a criticism that would expose and move beyond three inseparable “aesthetic ideologies” of literary studies that have held sway at least since Lukacs: “the ideology of form (the existence of nameable ideas that are given legible or sensuous manifestation in art and literature), the ideology of the expressive subject (individuals as principal subjects or envelopes of thought), and the ideology of fiction (a fundamental separation between two registers of writing based on the writer’s intentions with regard to the real).” He goes a step further, arguing that the novels he cites are themselves already engaged in the process of “unthinking” those ideologies. The novels all “posit” an unbridgeable gap between any idea and its allegorical depiction in a work of art, between particular person and any universal type, between any given work and the social world in which it is produced. This absolute non-relation, because it amounts to the very impossibility of exemplarity as such, is itself untheorizable and unrepresentable; it cannot be spoken of in any general terms, but only “inhabited” by the novel itself, as the novel’s own impersonal and inhuman form of thought, distinct from the thought of any given author or reader.

Clearly, this is an esoteric and ambiguous discourse. And it must be so precisely because its “object” is not an “object” at all, but an absence. It is moreover an absence we never encounter directly, as in the case of an empty chair that signifies a missing guest. Most often, the only trace of this absence appears as the absence of an absence, the proliferation of details and digressions that dominate the pages of a Sebald novel, or the endless monologues whose function is not really to communicate, but merely to ward off terrifying silence in Cusk and Thomas Bernhard. Characters appear as heaps of commodities and words, obsessions and complexes, whose real function is to declare their own inadequacy to account for the person described or speaking, the impossibility to know or say “how should a person be” (to borrow from Sheila Heti, whose work also fits this mold). Under that mass of material, signifying, and psychological detail, each person seems to cry out, “But this is not all that I am! Beneath and within and across all this I am singular, utterly singular! There is something untouched and unknown and unknowable within me, a dark core of impossible me-ness which I could not give up even if I tried!” Isn’t it pretty to think so?

To paraphrase this claim to singularity, to relate one singularity to another, is of course to enact a certain reductive violence upon it. Singularity as such cannot collect itself into a statement, but is dispersed radically through the sentences of the novel just as subjectivity itself is dispersed through signifiers and signifiers only provisionally collected at the abstract point of the subject-in-some-singular-relation, a relation which by nature of being singular is therefore also a non-relation. Bewes does not cite him, but one cannot help but think at this moment of Heidegger’s figure of the Clearing of Being, in which particular beings appear and disclose themselves, but never do so fully. Likewise, in the contemporary novel, Being is never reducible to Appearing, but only shows itself as that irreducible and unthinkable “other” of Appearance, as that unspoken and unspeakable secret which each being bears within itself.

The refusal of paraphrase, the disavowal of exemplarity, the struggle with and against what Bewes calls the “instantiation relation” in all its nested forms—though he admits that this disavowal can never be complete, only more or less intensely and effectively implied—these are the bedrock ethical, epistemic, and aesthetic principles of the contemporary novel. I think this description holds water, and, since reading Free Indirect, I can’t help but bring its analytical frame to bear on every work of new fiction that crosses my desk. A friend pointed out Bewes’s obvious influence on my thinking after reading my last post on W. G. Sebald, and he was completely correct to do so.

At the same time, however, I think we need to subject Bewes’s analysis to one more dialectical turn of the screw. If the contemporary novel has gone to such great lengths to produce a non-relation between itself and history proper, we must recommit ourselves, as critics, to rigorously historicize that project itself. And we must perform this historicization of the emergence of the reputedly non-historical not as an attempt to reduce all these hugely accomplished works of fiction to a unified (reactionary) movement and a forsaking of the novel’s historical mission (as Lukacs infamously did to modernism in The Destruction of Reason), but rather to deepen our understanding of the texts and of the authors as properly historical subjects, even as they themselves run for the pseudo-cover of abstraction.

What Sartre once said of Paul Valéry in his late masterpiece Search for a Method, we might say of Sebald, Cusk, Coetzee, and others: “Valery is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valery.” Only once we grasp the singularity of the text through the total situation of its writing—of which the author as a personal, psychological subject is only one part—can the abstract singularity into which all of these writers attempt to retreat (each in their own way) be decisively transformed into a good universality, one that would not be a mere reification but a dynamic and collective project, perhaps even a project of liberation.