Conclusion

Abstract

This chapter looks at the advent of modernism — anticipated in Thomas Hardy's later novels — and how it marked a pivot point in the literary politics of the population at the end of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates how the biopolitical demand to regulate human numbers remained in force at the turn of the century. Modernism, to be sure, brings markedly different aesthetic and formal techniques to bear on the phenomena of mass life. The chapter suggests what happens to the concept of population and to the novel form at the century's end: both, in effect, are psychologized. And this psychological turn, oddly enough, makes the unconscious the site of political collectivity and of species-being. Ultimately, the chapter shows that the surplus of human material generated by fiction is never merely a tragic remnant of biological existence exiled from political space and bereft of meaning. The sheer excessiveness of the novel's subjects runs over the edges of any social body, state, empire, or valorizing structure that aims to encompass the species. In so doing, it makes the possibility of resistance immanent to fiction's biopolitical imagination.