The future of literary criticism

Much of online activity related to literature involves posting quotations from novels, invariably without commentary and attributed to the book's author with the implication that it is a statement of personal belief, sometimes as an authoritative comment on current affairs but mainly as a piquant insight into the human condition. That it is spoken in a specific context by a particular character, or by an anonymous narration protected by aura of the book, is tacitly ignored. This may be an innocent pursuit and not one to censure, but such innocence doesn't end there. Almost every discussion of a novel assumes the book under discussion offers access to something relatable and is the statement of the author enabled by free indirect discourse, the familiar mechanism unique to the novel in which the thoughts of a character are immediately available to third-person narration, comforting the reader like a safety blanket under which there is a secret to be found. Note how often reviews of literary fiction begin with the words About halfway through or Towards the end as if a chink in its book-armour has been discovered through which the secret can be disclosed. Genre fiction doesn't require such attention as the revelation of a secret defines it, which is why genre fiction should be read and not reviewed. Again, there is nothing to censure here. However, Timothy Bewes' Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age cites contemporary novelists for whom the lore of literary fiction has become a problem. He quotes an interview with Rachel Cusk in which she says she is not interested in character because she believes character no longer exists, and another with WG Sebald who found the "modes of certainty" in fiction tedious and unacceptable, and while he did not stop writing novels, his narrators do not indulge in omniscience, leading to a perpetual delay of generic revelation. The problem, Bewes says, is not biographical as problems are necessary to the novel, but with what he calls 'instantiation', that is, how ideas in works of fiction are instilled without being explicit:

Just as the color red or green, a quality or attribute, is not named but instantiated by the presence of an apple in a bowl…so ideas in novels have no need of being espoused by a speaker within the work to transport their normative power to the outside.

In order to work, such qualities and attributes must not be explicit ("show don't tell"). What concerns these authors then is the assumptions instantiation brings, assumptions considered necessary to the form but, as Sebald claims, become a self-deceiving knowledge, mere inventions of "a straight line of a trail to calm ourselves down". To seek a less assumptive mode, a withdrawal from the modes of certainty becomes necessary, hence critical doubts about whether certain writers' novels are really novels, with the common rebuke that they have removed fiction from the novel, are lightly disguised autobiograph, or the greatest blasphemy of "writing about writing". This is what Bewes means by "postfictional", not perhaps an end to the novel so much as a development in which the constraints on imagination have become more challenging. When the abstraction of instantiation breaks down and fails to correspond to something universal and thereby relatable, it leaves something Bewes defines as the "free indirect" element of a novel. The third author cited in the introduction provides a good example. As a writer and a visual artist, Renee Gladman found that her drawing has the same relation to thought as writing, except the thought of drawing is "conducted by the hand". She wrote but what was produced were drawings.

"I wasn't writing. I was decidedly not-writing; even as I held this pen in my hand, I swore I wouldn't write. I didn't." At the same time, the writing continues by means of a transformation in the relation between its material and immaterial aspects. 

(Trusting to the movement of the hand over the page is something Gabriel Josipovici says in his 1999 book On Trust that writers such as Beckett did when faced with doubts and suspicion about their work.) The product of the Gladman's hand provides the 'thought' of a novel that Bewes is concerned with. If there is "no more fundamental question in literary studies than what a work means, whose thought it is voicing, what it is really saying", what does it mean when "the thought of the work is seen as fundamentally eluding 'the straight line of a trail', how can it become the object of a critical study? How is literary exposition possible?". 

Towards an answer Free Indirect focuses on the work of Lukács and Bakhtin, and while close attention is given to JM Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, Deleuze's study of cinema provides the theoretical lead, with "free indirect" in cinema being what appears in the frame of the picture. With that comparison in mind, I have to say much of what I have written here gives only a pinhole view of the book. I cannot give an in-depth discussion of the book. Instead, I want to select elements of the book that relate to my concerns and respond to them in future posts. For instance, I wonder if there is confirmation of a crisis in the modes of certainty more generally in the recent proliferation of novels about novelists. I noticed it first when David Lodge and Colm Tóibín produced two novels with Henry James as their subjects. Before that, there were two novels with Dostoevsky as the central character: Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg and Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin. Lodge and Tóibín have since written biographical novels about HG Wells and Thomas Mann respectively. Indeed, just last month I read Paul Theroux's 2024 novel Burma Sahib following a young Eric Blair as a colonial policeman and the incipient novelist George Orwell. And not just novelists: there also many recent novels about artists, musicians and philosophers. I have written about one or two: Jean Echenoz's Ravel and Lars Iyer's philosophers trilogy featuring surrogates of Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Simone Weil, while the latter are not biographical they do seek to connect the thought of all three with life in the contemporary world. The turn, if it is one, may indicate awareness of an experience of art that floats free of exposition, something we experience when immersed in a work of art but troubles us because it enables only vague, unsatisfactory definition. As a result, we feel we must tether it to the ground, turning us into either potatoheaded booklovers, knowing reviewers or academics paring their fingernails. A purely fictional artist wouldn't do this because their reported work has only a reported aura. The trend continues accompanied by an increase in critical anxiety with the rise of autofiction in which a version of the living author replaces the biographical figure. If this indicates the future of the novel, what is the future if literary criticism? In the future, perhaps we can respond without reference to any novels or novelists and without any reference to theories or theorists. But perhaps that is exactly what a novel is.