Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature by Mitchum Huehls (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature by Mitchum Huehls Peter Sloane Art, Theory, Revolution: The Turn to Generality in Contemporary Literature. By Mitchum Huehls. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2022. 198 pp. $69.95. ISBN 978–0–8142–1524–1. Mitchum Huehls sets himself a difficult challenge in his deeply thoughtful and philosophically astute study of the relationship between literary form and politics in the contemporary period, more specifically the post-period following the various playful and often exaggerated nihilisms and endings attendant on the postmodern. On the one hand he makes a sophisticated series of claims about the ways in which current literary fiction continues to exploit forms' potential for various kinds of resistance (even to resistance itself) by engaging with what he describes as the 'form-politics homology' (p. 6); on the other, in a series of insightful close readings of the specifics of his chosen figures—including Chris Kraus, Percival Everett, Zadie Smith, and Rachel Kushner—he argues that some have instead 'turned to the single-general relationship' (p. 6). Either one of these might warrant a monograph, [End Page 598] but the point of Huehls's study is that these interrogations work together to give rise to a peculiarly post-postmodern set of entanglements between art, theory, and revolution. Intriguingly, as I suggest below, though this is not stated explicitly, the study is fundamentally interested in the work performed by the hyphen in these two conjunctions, the relationships, dependencies, and linkages implied by that, and by its possible erasure or refiguration. The Introduction is extensive, wide-ranging, and if at times hard to follow because it goes in at the deep end, worth reading closely because the theoretical framework is both rewarding in itself and vital if sense is to made of the following chapters. Much of the hard work takes place here, Huehls outlining the case that he will reinforce in his Conclusion, that his subjects 'develop generalized forms of value production irreducible' to the 'homological thought' of their predecessors in the modernist or pre-modernist periods (p. 153). Chapter 1 is concerned with 'Art, Life-Writing, and the Generic', focusing on Sheila Heti and Chris Kraus, arguing that they explore 'the problem of being a person in the world' and reconceive the 'nature of female selfhood' (p. 40). Chapter 2 turns to 'Theory, Metafiction, and Constructivism', asking the question that, if theory is 'supposedly dead', why is it still so 'alive and well in contemporary fiction?' (p. 75). Finally, Chapter 3 gets to grips with 'Revolution, Historical Fiction, and Gesture', to propose that Peter Carey, Viet Nguyen, Dana Spiotta, and other writers of recent historical fiction use 'their own forms of realism to think through the formal impasses that beset the various revolutionary activities that their content comprises' (p. 113). As I hinted above, what Huehls does, in a hopelessly but I think accurately reductive reading, is question the bond or the strength of the bond formed between two terms by their hyphenation. In other words, if the postmodern period promised, threatened, or teased a deconstruction of the art-politics homology, it did so by dissolving the connective tissue, as it were, the point of contact. And yet, Huehls argues, another form of looser relations was maintained, not by anything as vague as a 'trace', but simply by prior entanglement; in a sense, new forms of freedom—aesthetic, political, and aesthetico-political—arose in the space vacated: this form was the 'general'. The work is ambitious, but because it is grounded in close attention to textual examples the ideas are lucid and convincing (more so as the chapters get under way). Huehls concludes, compellingly, that the writers studied here start from 'the assumption that there is no necessary link between form and politics', and turn to a more general 'ad hoc approach to value' (human, political, aesthetic, etc.) (p. 153). In some ways, of course, this is simply a reformulation of the modernist or even the founding aestheticist concept of l'art pour l'art. In a series of exemplary texts, then, Huehls has composed a work of literary theory with broad appeal, and his insights...