Narrative and its nonevents: the unwritten plots that shaped Victorian realism

Abstract

Carra Glatt’s ebullient Narrative and its Nonevents announces through its rhyming title an affinity with D. A. Miller’s Narrative and its Discontents (1981). In that work one can find a description of nonnarratable events with no narrative future, incapable of generating story, and productively in tension with the narratable. While Miller famously investigated the traditional novel’s vexed relationship with its condition of possibilities and narratability, on the one hand, and the narrowing event of closure, on the other, Glatt plumbs the depths of the unrealized possibilities, deselected plotlines, and unwritten events of Victorian fiction. These nonexistent or counterfactual materials are not quite the absent presences of the deconstructive 1980s. They make up the ocean of story in which Victorian realist novels bob like icebergs, their relatively probable, nonidealized, verisimilar surfaces concealing vaster volumes of deselected genres, allegorical character types, implausible outcomes, and fantastical imaginary worlds that, though mainly unrepresented in the visible novels above, accrete below the waterline to preserve the buoyant powers of romance. Glatt discerns three major types of unwritten plot: shadow plots from the romance tradition that act as underplots to the main plots in works by Charles Dickens; proxy narratives (implied, unnarratable alternatives) to the main plots in sensation fiction by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins as well as in the psychological realism of late Henry James; and hypothetically realist unwritten plots in novels by Thomas Hardy and Elizabeth Gaskell— those that “expand the limits of narrative and social possibility... envision[ing] possibilities that are currently inaccessible but potentially attainable in an improved future” (Glatt 2022, 31). She illustrates the productive potentialities of her proposed categories of the unwritten plot in lively, extended interpretations of episodes from eleven Victorian novels and a recent Booker-prize winning novel, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2015). Briefer treatments of dozens of other (mostly English) novels from the eighteenth-century onwards convey both Glatt’s wide reading and her open-mindedness about the variety and worth of diverse fictions in many modes and genres. Though her subject is a phenomenon of Victorian realism, she has a capacious sense of works deserving of that label (by back-formation), and if her range of reference overlaps with a Leavisean Great Tradition, it extends that canon by eschewing snobby border-patrolling. To read Narrative and its Nonevents is to keep company with an enthusiastic novel-reader, informed but not limited by narratology and theories of the novel, acute in her judgments, occasionally hilarious, and possessed of a pungent prose style. Reading Victorian fiction over the shoulder of such an author invites critical conversation: indeed, Glatt addresses us genially as Dear Readers, the co-creators whose opinions and decisions will participate in imagining the future of both fiction and its interpretation. So here are my two cents. When Glatt writes of generic struggles between older narrative forms and the newly dominant realism, relegated to the unwritten as “relics of the past,”or of the incoming portents of the future that “demote” realism (Glatt 2022, 32), I think of Raymond Williams’ cultural theory of residual, dominant, and emergent forms (1977, 121– 127). Williams as much as Miller can be felt as a guiding spirit in Narrative and its Nonevents, as when Glatt writes: