The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life by Peter Boxall (review)

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• The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life by Peter Boxall
• Zsófia Novák (bio)

Peter Boxall. The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. vii + 411 pages. ISBN 978-1-108-83648-7.

What does the “enworlding” power of the “novel imagination” consist in? How does the world-making capacity of fiction relate to the junction between the mind and the body, where consciousness makes itself manifest? How and why does the novel become the form that is particularly suited to the exploration of that shifting bridge between the self and the prostheses by which it extends itself into the world? These are some of the main questions addressed in The Prosthetic Imagination, Peter Boxall’s latest book, in which the University of Sussex academic and literary critic offers a highly original account of the novel genre, conceptualized as the site where the evolution of the prosthetic condition—developing in tandem with and captured by what Boxall calls the novel imagination—can be most clearly traced. Rereading the “history of the novel as a history of artificial life,” Boxall contends, can help us come to terms [End Page 381] with our current, “deeply estranged relation to life, in which the distinction between the real and the artificial becomes difficult or even impossible to maintain” (13). Thus, the author sets out to map the dynamics of the prosthetic imagination as it emerges throughout the novel’s progress, exploring the “unfolding processes by which mind has employed prosthetic and mimetic forms to extend itself into the world” (20) in a range of literary—predominantly Anglophone—fiction from the early modern period to the Anthropocene.

Casting the novel as the art form that is “driven and shaped by its capacity” (17) to access and articulate the elusive nexus between mind and matter, Boxall’s study aims to “articulate [the] relation between prose fiction and the technologies of embodiment as it develops through the course of modernity” (20) as well as to flesh out the intriguing contradictions that lie at the heart of the prosthetic logic, “the logic which suggests that the forms in which we know ourselves are always at a remove from us, that we are not identical with our manifestations” (14). The tensions that mobilize the prosthetic seam—as that “dissolving space” (17), that volatile ground “where consciousness comes into being through its encounter with its own apparatuses” (68)—run through the book’s chapters, which themselves become arenas for the movement from the mimetic to the prosthetic model “in which narrative, information, does not refer to the world but produces it” (11), and then on to the simulacral. The five parts (and nine chapters) of Boxall’s book are organized around the complex correlations between ostensibly opposed motifs—contraction and expansion, being and nonbeing, animate and inanimate, wholeness and fragmentation— revealed in the analyses as always already overlapping and intersecting. Such revelations expose the disappearing trick of the prosthetic imagination, manifested in fictional narrative which, by “joining consciousness to its prosthetic extensions, also, and at the same time, marks the distance that opens between them” (16).

Boxall’s chronologically structured volume, then, threads a history of the novel to delineate how the underlying fold “that intervenes between the living and the dead, between origin and copy, mimesis and prosthesis” (16) moves ever closer to the surface, investigating how the “work of fiction” (16), throughout the centuries of modernity, makes “of this amalgam of the living and the dead an integrated narrating agent” (16). Part 1, titled “The Body and the Early Modern State,” is concerned with the “earliest stirrings” (225) of the novel imagination, from More’s Utopia through Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World to Cervantes’s Don Quixote. According to Boxall, the increasing exposure and understanding of “the internal structures of the body granted by the new anatomical science” (17) leads, paradoxically, to a recognition that “the more forcefully the inside of being is brought into the domain of knowledge, and into the regime of the visible . . . the more insistently a certain unknowable junction between being and its extensions reveals itself” (40). These...