:Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age

Abstract

Next article FreeBook ReviewFree Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age. Timothy Bewes. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. Pp. xiii+315.David WylotDavid WylotUniversity of Leeds Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreWhat is the novel’s relation to thought? For Timothy Bewes’s Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age, the answer does not lie in the novel’s capacity to represent thought, nor in the novel’s capacity to communicate an authorial subjectivity. Rather, the answer involves comprehending a kind of thought that is intrinsic to the novel, which the novel is the subject of rather than vehicle for, and a kind of thought that is at odds with form or ideological claim. Drawing on the work of prominent contemporary novelists that include J. M. Coetzee, W. G. Sebald, Rachel Cusk, and Zadie Smith, Free Indirect argues that the contemporary novel stages this thought in the context of a period that has seen an erosion of the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, narrator and character, and novelist and critic. Bewes terms this work “postfiction” (9) and names its thought the “free indirect” (5). With these, Free Indirect offers an expansive account of the “enigma of the novelistic utterance” (83) that explores the novel’s potentiality and concludes at the limits of criticism.Free Indirect begins with discussion of a logic intrinsic to the novel’s form, that of “instantiation” (25). Holding a great deal of force in literary criticism, “instantiation” describes a connective logic “according to which an entity (a person, an object, a linguistic sign, an encounter, a fictional description, a character trait) is asserted as a case or instance of a larger category, property, or concept, to whose reality it attests” (188), and which provides the novel with a basic structural relation that connects the literary work to the social world. Bewes recruits Catherine Gallagher’s “The Rise of Fictionality” (2006) and its claim that fiction is founded on a nonreferentiality that paradoxically indicates a more generalized reference to argue that the “instantiation relation” (27) trains readers to infer a connective idea that underpins the novel’s communicative act. Literary criticism extracts an ethical or normative standpoint from this relation and judges the work’s “social significance” (25) accordingly. Yet, whether shaping accounts of the novel’s social form or its communicative purpose, this logic, Free Indirect argues, establishes a principle of relation that obscures the ways in which the contemporary novel seeks the dissolution of connection through a staging of thought “without a communicative function” (141).To define the “free indirect,” Bewes turns to free indirect discourse, the means through which a narrator renders a character’s thoughts available to the reader, to argue that this use of language challenges the certainty that aligns narrative utterances with an implied authorial or narratorial authority. Drawing on Ann Banfield’s Unspeakable Sentences (1982), Bewes argues that free indirect discourse, as “represented speech and thought” (5), renders that which it represents relative. With this principle’s “universalization” (77), the “free indirect” as a mode of thought describes a “nonanchored, noncentered perspective” (38) that is subjectively uninhabitable and that confounds efforts to consolidate an authoritative idea, sentiment, or critical position in the work. J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003) marks a crucial point for Bewes’s periodizing claims. The novel takes the problem of connection between the work and the world to be conditional and enacts this through narrative focalization that closes to “a point of indiscernibility” the distance between narration and “represented speech and thought” (111), even in moments that adopt a supposedly critical or authoritative register. In doing so, Elizabeth Costello performs a thought that undermines its own communication and that cannot be critically paraphrased outside of that performance.“Postfiction” for Bewes, then, denotes the collapse of the “ideological structure” (139) of the “instantiation relation” in contemporary aesthetics. Free Indirect is careful with its periodizing claims. Contemporary novelistic production equally, it claims, reflects back on the novel’s history, and in a study that takes the theorization of a mode of thought that resists positive expression to be its central problem, Free Indirect acknowledges that textual example “falls short of its realization to the very degree that it may be invoked in support of it” (155). With this awareness the study advances a series of intricate readings of contemporary writing, from parodic narration in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005) to coincidental and fragmentary connections in Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997). Nevertheless, the study’s care over critical and literary “exemplarity” (155) can also lead to an occasional grouping of literary claims that can leave the reader wishing for a greater sense of particularity. Of a brief concluding remark on the “subjectively uninhabitable” (260) perspectives of Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat (1970) and Rachel Cusk’s Outline (2015), for example, one also wonders about the divisions within this resemblance on the grounds of their respective constructions of narrative position, especially in the light of Bewes’s nongeneralizable claims.The challenge of the example runs into the conventions of criticism with which Free Indirect self-consciously wrestles at every turn. The ambivalence of the “free indirect” lies in its disruptive relation to form in any sense, not being “graspable as an object” (5). The novel, Bewes argues through development of an implication in Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel (1971), is “capable of a mode of thinking that we ourselves are not” (174). To critically paraphrase is to “exile” (71) oneself from the work. The book’s second section, then, considers how the corrosion of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction through “postfiction” implicates all language use. In a memorable demonstration, Bewes offers a “‘characterological’” (111) analysis of free indirect discourse in Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (2009) to unsettle its authorizing claims (although Bewes’s turn to the grammatical absence of contrary indicators does suggest the continuing value of a communicative model of fiction, which could account for information beyond text-internal features such as paratextual evidence to indicate the degree of a text’s fictionality). Free Indirect’s concluding section, by contrast, turns to the theoretical problem of expressing the “free indirect,” as developed through engagements with Gilles Deleuze’s claim for modern cinema’s break in perception and Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic theory. With the former, Bewes turns to Deleuze’s account of the interstitial quality of “cinematic thought” (214) to model the indeterminate relation between referential, perspectival, or narrative alternatives in the novel’s “free indirect.” Bewes then locates a novelistic sensibility in Rancière’s writing on aesthetics, which registers an internal, unspoken intuition that “the thought of the novel has no use whatsoever for theory” (251).This is not to say that the contemporary novel has little purchase on the world from which it posits disconnection—far from it. The study powerfully models a negation of the ideology of “instantiation,” and the principles of connection, categorization, and property that govern social phenomena, from the disciplinary logics of psychological and racial profiling (228–30) to the “identification of public discourse with economics” (167). In conceiving of the novel’s singular thought in excess of its form and theorization, Free Indirect posits the novel to enact a means of thinking that offers “a rediscovery of the possibility of thought in our time” (38). In this respect, Free Indirect is an illuminating work of novel theory that will stimulate and challenge the study of contemporary literature and of the novel alike. Next article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/727616 HistoryPublished online October 02, 2023 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.