The Story of Fictional Truth: Realism from the Death to the Rise of the Novel 0814215475, 9780814215470

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THE STORY OF FIC TIONAL TRUTH

T H E O R Y A N D I N T E R P R E TAT I O N O F N A R R AT I V E

James Phelan, Katra Byram, and Faye Halpern, Series Editors

THE STORY OF FIC TIONAL TRUTH REALISM FROM THE DEATH TO THE RISE OF THE NOVEL

Paul Dawson

T H E O H I O S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S C O LUM BU S

Copyright © 2023 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dawson, Paul, 1972– author. Title: The story of fictional truth : realism from the death to the rise of the novel / Paul Dawson. Other titles: Theory and interpretation of narrative series. Description: Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, [2023] | Series: Theory and interpretation of narrative | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Challenges prevailing accounts of the novel’s rise to reveal how changing concepts of fictionality have shaped the realist novel from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022042509 | ISBN 9780814215470 (cloth) | ISBN 0814215475 (cloth) | ISBN 9780814282731 (ebook) | ISBN 0814282733 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Fiction—History and criticism—Theory, etc. | Realism in literature. | Postmodernism (Literature) | Narration (Rhetoric) Classification: LCC PN3331 .D39 2023 | DDC 808.3—dc23/eng/20221011 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042509 Other identifiers: ISBN 9780814258644 (paper) | ISBN 0814258646 (paper) Cover design by Larry Nozik Text composition by Stuart Rodriguez Type set in Minion Pro

For Vanessa, Max, and Milly

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

INTRODUC TION

Literary History and the Theory of Reflexive Realism

CHAPTER 1

From Digressions to Intrusions: The Historical Paradox of Authorial Commentary

29

Against Sympathy: The Self-Examining Heroine and the Origins of Free Indirect Discourse

71

CHAPTER 2

1

Interiority and the End of Consciousness: From the Conduct Scene to the Sex Scene

108

Dying to Tell About It: The Autothanatographic Impulse of First-Person Narration

139

CHAPTER 5

Beyond the Threshold: Accounting for the Self as Other

176

CONCLUSION

The Exhaustion of Fictionality: Metamodernism and the (Auto)Fictional Pact

218

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

Works Cited

229

Index

241

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the following colleagues and past students who have helped shape this book: Dorothy Hale, whose ongoing interest and support has been the height of collegiality, and whose rigor, insight, and generosity I am grateful for; Maria Mäkelä, my first, best, and only collaborator who offers a model of ambition and clarity; Elizabeth King, with whom I debate all the things, who introduced me to a great deal of valuable material, and who has the final word on what metafiction is, really; Julia Robinson, whose interest and work on the same topics have sharpened my own thoughts; and Lucy Li, with whom I shared many productive discussions about autofiction. Reports from the anonymous reviewer and from the series editors, Jim Phelan and Faye Halpern, provided invaluable direction in strengthening the final manuscript and bringing its argument to the fore. Jim Phelan’s ongoing support for a wide range of scholarship continues to be instrumental to the field. I am also grateful for Elizabeth Zaleski’s excellent guidance with the copyediting process, which helped to add the final polish. Maximillian and Amelia Dawson make it seem cool to be an academic parent, which means they must be very open-minded; I offer this book to them as a model of perseverance. Vanessa Dawson’s support and belief is as constant as the rising sun, even when suffering through daily monologues about work-in-progress that carries really quite little interest. Hers has been the best advice: to write the book I want to write. It is the case that I love her. ix

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Early versions of some of the material in this book have appeared in “Fictional Minds and Female Sexuality: The Consciousness Scene from Pamela to Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” ELH 86.1 (2019); and “From Digressions to Intrusions: Authorial Commentary in the Novel,” Studies in the Novel 48.2 (2016).

INTRODUCTION

Literary History and the Theory of Reflexive Realism

“It is so difficult to mark out the precise stages by which the modern novel came into being,” George Saintsbury wrote in A Short History of English Literature (1907), “that the wisest critics have abstained from attempting it” (598). A modern scholar coming across this line in Saintsbury’s book must surely be tempted to write in the margins: you wouldn’t believe the lack of abstinence over the past century. Particularly since the middle of the twentieth, when the novel became entrenched as an object of study in the academy, some of the wisest critics have sought not only to define the precise stages of the genre’s origins but to determine its causes, correlating the emergence of modern realist fiction with the rise of the middle-class reading public, the scientific revolution, the individual, the gendered domestic sphere, capitalism, modernity itself. Since World War II, this scholarly activity has been shaped, I contend, by a sense that the modern novel is in decline and that a historical stock-­ taking is required to determine the nature and significance of the form. If literary genres are in some way symptomatic of larger social and intellectual currents, so too is literary theory, and the point of departure for this book is the shift in theoretical emphasis that took place between Ian Watt’s pithily titled, field-defining work, The Rise of the Novel (1957), and Catherine Gallagher’s revisionist response, “The Rise of Fictionality” (2006). The line of scholarship that Gallagher exemplifies is characterized by a critical anxiety of influence, offering a misprision, or creative misreading of Watt’s thesis, 1

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reimagining realism by foregrounding its ostensible antithesis: fictionality. According to Gallagher, “what Ian Watt called ‘formal realism’ was not a way of trying to hide or disguise fictionality; realism was, rather, understood to be fiction’s formal sign” (1994, xvii). This claim marks a shift in novel theory from formal realism to what I will dub reflexive realism. How did a definition of the novel as the authentic representation of individual experience rendered in referential language become inverted such that the novel is understood as an inherently self-reflexive genre openly trading on the fictive status of its characters—and how do we approach novelistic form as a result? If the formal features of the realist novel overtly signal its fictionality, we need a view of literary history that can account not only for the “rise” of realist fiction in the eighteenth century but for its development in the ensuing centuries in order to explain why, at this juncture, the novel’s self-reflexive origins needed to be revealed. In his study of the dynamic forms of plotting in narrative fiction, Peter Brooks invokes the Freudian death drive to argue that the “strange logic” of narrative is constituted by the anticipation of retrospection: a desire to reach the end of a story we know to have already been completed, upon which final meaning can be conferred. My argument is that scholarship on the much-debated rise of the novel must be understood alongside another persistent and perpetually contested trope: the death of the novel. The two are mutually constitutive, emerging at the same time to shape our understanding of novelistic history, for, as I will demonstrate, canonical histories of the novel’s origins implant a death drive in its form, one conditioned by an awareness of the ostensible exhaustion of realism in twentiethcentury literature. The theory of reflexive realism, as I will call it, takes shape in the 1980s in the work of scholars such as Michael McKeon (1987) and John Bender (1987), framing the novel as a paradoxical reflection on the artifice of its own mimetic enterprise that emerged in the eighteenth century alongside a new conceptual category of fictionality. This approach to the origins of the realist novel, I contend, was anticipated and made possible by the self-reflexive exposure of fictionality that characterizes postmodern metafiction, prompting scholars to assert that reflexivity is a condition of all fiction. Wenche Ommundsen (1993), for instance, argues that “metafiction is the product of a certain practice of reading, a particular kind of attention brought to bear on the fictional text” (29). Reflexive realism is the result of this practice of reading brought to bear on the history of the novel: it reads backward from its own historical moment to recast the origins of the novel in terms legible to contemporary theory, rescuing realism from enforced naïvety by revealing that its emergence depended upon an awareness rather than a suppression of its own fictional

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status. McKeon (2017), for example, has come to describe formal features of the novel, such as narratorial intrusions and Free Indirect Discourse (FID), as “expressions of realist reflexivity” (71). In this light, the narrative methods of “formal realism” established in this self-consciously new species of writing can be seen as embedded signposts of fictionality carrying a latent challenge to their own promise of representational correspondence. The historical logic of such a premise is that the novel proleptically establishes the conditions for its own death, the moment at which the paradox of realism can no longer be sustained, and is stripped bare by postmodern artifice. The trope of the death of the novel that shapes metafictional responses to the exhaustion of realism thus provides the impetus not only for reconsidering the origins of the form but for revealing that its origins lie in its own end point. To follow this logic is to tell the story of fictional truth: the historical unraveling of the paradox that sustains readers’ investment in characters they know not to be real, that licenses a search for knowledge in nonreferential narratives. The critical practice of reflexive realism seeks to explain how plausible stories came to be accepted as verisimilar fictions in the eighteenth-­century novel, but it cannot tell the full story of the realist novel’s “rise” without also addressing the mutability of verisimilitude itself in the ensuing centuries. Bringing the insights of literary historians such as Gallagher, McKeon, and Nancy Armstrong into greater dialogue with narratological scholarship by theorists such as Dorrit Cohn and Gerard Genette, this book extends the historical range of reflexive realism beyond the eighteenth century to investigate how the novel adapts to changing concepts of verisimilitude. It further demonstrates how the logic of reflexive realism demands a critical awareness that contemporary scholarship on the history of novelistic fictionality is tethered to and conditioned by the sense of an ending that prompted and framed postmodern metafiction. In “The Death and Rebirths of the Novel” (1981), for instance, Leslie Fiedler argued that the chief characteristic of writers identified as postmodern, from John Barth to Robert Coover, was their “consciousness of writing posthumous novels” (144), with many building their awareness of the novel’s decline into their own works. The various cultural, political, and social contexts in which the novel circulates must ultimately be rendered legible in its form, and my intention is to interrogate the assumptions about novelistic form embedded in scholarly histories of the genre to consider what light can be shed if we subject the historical development of formal elements to the pressure of reflexive realism: that is, reading key features of the novel as inherently reflexive manifestations of the paradoxical enterprise of realism itself. As I will elaborate later in this introduction, histories of the novel since World War II tend to frame their

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object of study as the product of a tension between larger animating forces, from a dialectic between empiricism and skepticism (McKeon, 1987) to the self-destructive impulses of narrative and affect (Jameson, 2013). I think these oppositions can profitably be addressed by approaching the genre of the novel as a dynamic structural relationship between the dyad of narrator and character, and in this book I intend to investigate how the tensions inherent in this relationship have provided the impetus for the development of the genre by motivating formal change throughout literary history from the eighteenth century to the present. However, I want to resist the enduring claim that the novel moves toward some kind of dialectical synthesis of competing methods in which one is replaced by or absorbed into the other to achieve a greater sense of verisimilitude until resolution or dissolution. Instead my focus will be on the cycle of exchange between the narrative postures of first- and thirdperson voice to trace how new concepts of realism are both enacted through historical shifts in the use of conventionally accepted signposts of fictionality and registered in their evolving critical reception. Two assumptions about twentieth-century fiction in particular have underpinned histories of the novel: what Joseph Warren Beach (1932) called “the disappearance of the author” and what Leon Edel (1955) called “the inward turning” of the novel. These aesthetico-historical coordinates inform Watt’s account of the rise of the novel and continue to exert an influence on theories of fictionality. Their assumptions about the progress of the novel are the product of modern aesthetic principles that have taken the form of theoretical tenets. To interrogate their limitations, I will focus my study on how three key features of realism—authorial commentary, representation of consciousness, and first-person character narration—came to be seen as signposts of fictionality. In the chapters that follow I will tell the story of fictional truth—of the realist novel’s anticipation of its own death, which retrospectively confers meaning on its origins—by orienting the development of these features to the fate of three novelistic figures stretching from the eighteenth-century novel to contemporary fiction: the intrusive authorial narrator (a textual barometer for changing concepts of aesthetic illusion), the self-examining heroine (originating subjectivity of the consciousness scene from which the signature novelistic technique of FID develops), and the autothanatographic first-person narrator (the unrealized goal of autobiography that surfaces in fiction as a will to death generated by a character’s dual role of experiencing and narrating). These three recurring figures, as I will demonstrate over the course of this book, afford a formal locus for testing the dialectic of the novel’s death embedded in literary histories. Their early formation establishes subject positions that become both exhausted and reconfigured in the twentieth century: the

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garrulous authorial figure of eighteenth-century fiction returning as a metaleptic novelist frustrated with the artifice of realism, the gendered self-scrutiny of early heroines yielding to a search for selfhood through escape from consciousness in the modernist sex scene, and the dying epistolary correspondent echoed in the proliferation of posthumous narrators upon the cusp of the new millennium. These are textual sites for a dynamic exchange between representing narrator and represented character, enabling us to ground the fictive character, or “fictional nobody” in Gallagher’s parlance, in a structure that lends itself to diachronic analysis of signposts of fictionality. Most importantly, they will yield throughout the following chapters a new history of the novel that challenges long-standing critical assumptions about realist methods informing the interrelated tropes of the disappearing author and an inward turn, tropes fostered by modernism and perpetuated in different ways by reflexive realism: the ostensible illusion-breaking quality of authorial intrusions, the emergence of FID out of the decline of epistolarity as a formal instantiation of the sympathetic imagination, and the default mode of autobiography as a measure for the verisimilitude of first-person narration. Contesting these assumptions drives the momentum of my argument throughout this book in the service of connecting atomized periods of literary scholarship (eighteenth century, Victorian, modernism, postmodernism, metamodernism) without collapsing them. The concept of fictionality is central to the critical paradigm of reflexive realism, which redirects philosophical debates about the ontology of fictive entities and the propositional value of fictional statements to a study of the historically conditioned distinctiveness of the novel as a self-conscious mode of nonreferential discourse. In this book I argue that the constitutive fictionality of the realist novel is best understood as the formal means for advertising the cultural value of the genre in relation to the changing measures by which the aesthetic illusion of fictional truth has been held to account. Observing critical commentary over the past three hundred years, we can identify shifting emphases in the grounds on which the literary value of novels has been judged. If the prevailing concern, or generic dominant, of the eighteenthcentury novel was its probability, and the extent to which this was put in the service of moral guidance, the nineteenth century came to be dominated by the question of sympathy and its capacity to influence concern for others. This saw a concomitant rise in importance of debates about authorial commentary and psychological analysis rather than plot-related questions about probability. Emerging alongside this dominant, under the influence of French realism and German theories of objectivity, and finding greater purchase in the twentieth century, was the doctrine of impersonality as an ethical impera-

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tive accompanied by an aesthetic of authorial effacement. From the middle of the twentieth century, criticism becomes focused on reflexivity, first in relation to metafiction, and then the generic blurring of factual and fictional genres resulting in contemporary autofiction. This reflexivity itself occupies a complicated relationship to today’s overwhelming emphasis on empathy as the chief function of storytelling and justification for the social importance of the novel. If we follow debates about novelistic form alongside these shifts, we see how they concern the relative merits of different methods for representing character, from eighteenth-century arguments that the dramatic immediacy of epistolary fiction combines the subjective intimacy of memoir novels with the authorial freedom of epic narration, to twentieth-century assertions that “limited” third-person narration from the point of view of a character erases the need for either characters or the author to tell the story, to contemporary claims that adopting the perspective or voice of another identity is to court inauthenticity and exploitation. The larger argument to emerge from tracing shifting historical assumptions about what constitutes verisimilitude is that our current understanding of novelistic fictionality is not the same as that informing the eighteenth century, that the early novel’s “overt” fictionality is a necessary construction of contemporary theory. This is not a criticism so much as an observation that the critical practice of reflexive realism exemplifies a fundamental shift in the concept of fictional truth itself that I will elaborate over the course of this book. If the rise of the novel did signal a new concept of fictionality associated with verisimilitude, then the logic of reflexive realism is also that the novel’s “death” signals the exhaustion of that fictionality. Crucial to my overarching argument is that the key dominant of reflexivity in postmodern metafiction and late twentieth-century literary-critical discussions of novelistic fictionality manifests a new relationship to philosophical discourse. The passage from the “rise” to the “death” of the novel can broadly be understood as a shift from staking the novel’s claim as a nonreferential supplement to empirical truth to a self-reflexive critique of this position that aligns the novel with the antipositivism of postmodern theory and the subsequent narrative turn. Contrary to claims by Gallagher in particular that fictionality is an invention of the eighteenth century, I premise my argument on scholarship that links its conceptual emergence to successive periods of literacy since antiquity: theories of probability attached to classical Greek drama, the emergence of a textually bound speaker distinct from its author in the twelfth-century vernacular romance, and the establishment of verisimilitude in the eighteenth-century novel. The development of new technology to challenge the representational primacy of print is one of the anxieties associated with the

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death of the novel, and the latest articulation of this anxiety is concerned with the rise of the internet (Bikerts, 1996; Self, 2014). Although much of this discourse is alarmist, it is certainly the case that we occupy a new age of literacy: the “secondary orality” fostered by the digital revolution and exemplified by the widespread influence of social media platforms on contemporary modes of communication. Postmodern fiction aligned its rejection of naïve realism with a broader epistemological critique of history and science, leading to theoretical and artistic attempts to blur the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction in favor of a concept of textuality that challenges the status of nonfiction, which Marie-Laure Ryan in 1997 labeled the doctrine of panfictionality. What comes after the “death” of the novel that exposes its inherent reflexivity? The most significant trend in contemporary fiction in the wake of postmodernism is a purported dissatisfaction with invented characters, a sense that acknowledging their fictional status is simultaneously necessary and redundant. This is a typical stance of autofictional authors in particular, and it accompanies a broader cultural indifference to referentiality in the posttruth, networked public sphere. This referential indifference to, rather than collapse of, boundaries between fictional and nonfictional discourse in the age of digital literacy constitutes what I will call a fourth age of fictionality. In the context of the novel, there is a difference between a signpost of fictionality (a convention specific to or typical of fiction) and the signaling of fictionality (deliberate self-reference as an aesthetic strategy). Whether or not a signpost of fictionality is considered to facilitate or disrupt the illusion of truth is contingent upon historically variable expectations for verisimilitude. Furthermore, fictionality itself, as both a theoretical concept and a cultural category, is subject to historical change. These are necessary coordinates for approaching realism as a reflexive form. In what follows I will elaborate on how the theory of reflexive realism as a practice of literary history developed from the trope of the novel’s death, before developing the larger conceptual framework and analytic method required to trace the history of novelistic fictionality I have laid out.

FROM FORMAL REALISM TO REFLEXIVE REALISM According to Ian Watt, while Defoe and Richardson built on the isolated achievements of their forebears, they nonetheless ushered in with great suddenness and completeness “that mutation of prose fiction which we call the novel” (37). They achieved this through the practice of what Watt dubs formal realism: the literary counterpart of philosophical realism concerned with the

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particulars of individual existence rather than abstract universal truths. Formal realism is “the narrative embodiment of a premise” that defines the novel itself: the premise, or primary convention, that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience, and is therefore under an obligation to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms. (35)

Realism, then, is constituted by a set of narrative methods: nontraditional plot structures that follow the natural pattern of a life rather than predetermined histories, detailed chronological time sequences, concrete description of characters’ physical and social environment, and stylistic emphasis on referential language rather than ornamental rhetoric. The challenges to Watt’s work have been many, including its sociological link between the rise of the novel and the rise of the middle class (McKeon), its Anglocentric lacunae in relation to the French novel (Stewart) and its orientalist underpinnings (Aravamudan), its dismissal of the much longer history of prose fiction (Doody), its failure to explain the significance of women writers (Armstrong), and its neglect of the influence of the romance on the novel (McKeon). However, the strand of novel studies that interrogates his definition of formal realism is the most relevant here. This strand includes Leonard Davis’s (1983) study of the unstable generic relation between fact and fiction that preceded the rise of the novel, McKeon’s (1987) claim that the emergence of the novel was made possible by an epistemological shift that expanded the notion of factual truth to include verisimilitude, Robert Newsom’s (1988) account of what he calls the “antinomy of fictional probability” in which readers bring two frames of reference to the form of the realist novel (the probability of the real world and the probability of the fictional world), Bender’s (1998) argument for the emergence of “manifest fictionality” as a necessary counterpart to the rise of factuality in post-Enlightenment science, and Gallagher’s (1994; 2006) theory of a “discourse of fictionality” that developed in the eighteenth century as the novel sought to distinguish itself from both the incredibility of the romance 1 and the referentiality of factual discourse. 1. Other scholars in this tradition include Barbara Foley (1986), Lillian Furst (1995), Clara Tuite (2002), Ian Duncan (2003), and Gabrielle Starr (2004). More recent scholars who take the “rise of fictionality” for granted and seek to refine or extend its insights include Jesse Molesworth (2010), Katherine Ding (2013), Sarah Tindall Kareem (2014), and Heidi Pennington (2018). By contrast, Nicholas Paige (2011, 2017) offers a data driven, artifactual approach to novelistic fictionality that dismisses symptomatic histories of a cultural “rise” in favor of literary practices as inventions that fall in and out of favor.

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These scholars exemplify the attempt within novel studies to historicize the genre in relation to the paradox of fictional truth first explored in semantics and philosophy of language. In his book Fictional Truth (1990), Michael Riffaterre argues that verisimilitude holds the key to understanding fictionality, not so much in terms of a likeness to truth that must be understood in relation to the question of referentiality than as a truth that conforms to a semiotic code. Hence, for Riffaterre, “verisimilitude is an artifact, since it is a verbal representation of reality rather than reality itself: verisimilitude itself, therefore, entails fictionality” (xv). Riffaterre’s account of the ostensible dichotomy yet fundamentally symbiotic nature of the relation between fictionality and verisimilitude is given historical shape by Gallagher when she argues, pace Barthes, that realism is the code of fiction.2 These revisionist approaches to formal realism largely shift the emphasis of Watt’s argument rather than undermine it. For McKeon (2017), Watt is only half right, for “the practice to which ‘realism’ refers is not simply an illusory imitation of an external reality that conceals its motivating artifice. In Cervantes, and continuously from Fielding onward, what we now call realism is the technique of combining the representation of the real with a more or less explicit reflection on its status as a representation” (53). How did this reappraisal come about? Have we developed more sophisticated conceptual apparatuses and methods that helped uncover the “truth” of the novel’s origins and determine its distinctive nature? Or is this view of realism a product of the spirit of the age that reflects our understanding of the contemporary postmodern novel? What seems important is that revisionist scholarship on the much-debated rise of the novel coincided with the oft-proclaimed and much exaggerated death of the novel. In one sense, then, the story of the rise of the novel is legible only in the context of the story of its demise. If Watt’s thesis of formal realism coincided with modernist criticism, inevitably causing him to privilege Richardson’s psychological depth in the development of the genre, the current reappraisal of the history of the novel coincided with the particular type of fiction that flourished alongside the trope of the novel’s death and was situated as a product of this trope’s logic: postmodern metafiction. The phrase “the death of the novel” signals anxiety about the aesthetic progress and cultural relevance of the novel. The anxieties represented by the trope tend to surface and to be articulated when: (1) new forms of fiction 2. Roland Barthes’s “The Reality Effect” (1968) provides vital inspiration and theoretical ballast for reflexive realism. Barthes argues that concrete description in fiction is a “useless detail” that serves no structural purpose, but is nonetheless the key signifier of realism that characterizes modern verisimilitude. Unlike ancient verisimilitude, its function is not primarily aesthetic; instead, it is to signal that novels connote rather than denote the real.

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emerge that, for their proponents, signal the redundancy of certain accepted conventions and, for their detractors, are symptomatic of a dearth of creativity; (2) new technology emerges to challenge the representational primacy and cultural influence of literature; or (3) social and cultural change appear to have diminished the capacity of the novel to provide insight into the human experience of the period. While these anxieties can be traced to the late nineteenth century, the trope became prominent in the wake of modernist experimentation of the early twentieth (see Trilling, 1948; Rubin, 1966; Fiedler, 1981). Whither the novel after Joyce, Proust, and Woolf? Regularly met with skepticism and already registered as a cliché by the 1960s, recurring commentary about the novel’s death nonetheless provided the context for a new type of literary history, one that not only is resolutely sociological and contextual but that provides a view of the novel as constituted by an inbuilt tension. This is the context in which Watt’s Rise of the Novel was published, which we can read as an attempt both to clarify the unique historical circumstances that enabled the form to emerge and to tell the story of its development as a struggle to resolve internal and external views of the world in narrative form. Equally as important for the argument I am making here is that in the decades after Watt’s book the death of the novel has come to operate not so much as a jeremiad for critics to lament the status and fate of the novel, as a generative trope for writers to reimagine its form and social purpose, a challenge to ensure that their artform remains “novel” in the face of ongoing threats (see Greif, Vermeulen). An important document here is David Lodge’s 1969 essay, “The Novelist at the Crossroads,” which argues that the serious contemporary novelist is faced with the seeming decline of realism as a viable option. The general critical climate that Lodge inherited was not one of philosophical realism but antihumanist continental philosophy and a concomitant loss of faith in the capacity of language to adequately represent the real world. The social climate was not characterized by a rise of the reading public but concern about the decline of such a public under the pressure of other forms of popular cultural entertainment afforded by new technology, from radio to cinema to television. The immediate cause of this anxiety was the apparent exhaustion of the possibilities of the novel, which John Barth had articulated two years earlier in “The Literature of Exhaustion,” the defining manifesto of postmodern fiction. In response, Lodge suggested, novelists were using the techniques of realism to write nonfiction (with claims for actual referentiality in works such as In Cold Blood, as opposed to pseudofactual referentiality in a work such as Robinson Crusoe), or they were pushing the boundaries of the form beyond referentiality toward fabulism (a kind of revival of the romance). The third option, Lodge observed, was to self-reflexively interrogate

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the project of realism itself by building the problem of writing a novel into the novel itself (with the intrusive interchapters of The French Lieutenant’s Woman [1969] echoing Tom Jones). The emergence of metafiction was thus bound up in debates about the death of the novel, but this was ultimately a debate about the redundancy of realist fiction, and the characteristic technique of metafictional self-reflexivity came to be theorized by critics as an overt manifestation of the inherent artifice of all fiction. For instance, in Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (1980), Linda Hutcheon draws upon semantic and pragmatic theories of fictionality to argue that metafiction challenges prevailing concepts of realism that tend to cancel out the linguistic importance of the signified by assuming a sign has a real, rather than fictive, referent. According to Hutcheon, novels such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman that “acknowledge their fictiveness textually and thematically do not represent the death of the genre. Rather, like fantasy fiction, they become emblematic of what is a literary reality of the novelistic form” (97). Hutcheon’s claim is that while the form of the novel has continued to develop, theories of the novel froze in the previous century, and that metafictions “bare the conventions, disrupt the codes that now have to be acknowledged” (39). Patricia Waugh (1984) argues that for metafictional writers “the traditional fictional quest has thus been transformed into a quest for fictionality” (10), and that such writers share with philosophers an exploration of the paradoxical identity of fictional entities and the referential status of literary-fictional discourse. However, Waugh claims that “although the term ‘metafiction’ might be new, the practice is as old (if not older) than the novel itself ” (5). To distinguish contemporary practice, she argues that metafiction can be defined by its systematic interrogation of the nature of literary representation, and suggests that its insights can also be applied to “all fiction and the literary history of the novel as a genre” (5). This critical interest in the fictionality of postmodern fiction in response to anxieties about the death of the novel coincided with a reexamination of the rise of the realist novel in terms of what Gallagher calls its “overt fictionality.” Like narrative in general, the story of the novel needs an end point for it to have retrospective meaning, and reaching a point of cultural and formal “exhaustion” in which the genre self-reflexively folds back on itself to reveal the fictionality inherent in its originary realist impulse provides this meaning. The result is a practice of critical reading in the form of reflexive realism. The influence of this practice on novel studies can be registered in Lilian R. Furst’s All Is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction (1995), which argues: “Openly to confront and to take into account this paradox between the sonorous proclamation ‘All is true’ and the hushed admission that it is an

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illusion suggests a new approach to realist fiction” (2). Furst’s “new approach” to the realist novel is one designed to engage with the paradox of fictional truth in order to reconcile conventional sociological criticism with poststructuralist theory.3 This approach is also evident in McKeon’s assertion that the eighteenth-century realist novel emerges with an acute reflexive awareness of its own attempt at empirical representation. This assertion dovetails nicely with contemporary claims that postmodern metafiction emerges from an acute awareness of the impossibility of the realist project, and his definition of eighteenth-century realism as “the technique of combining the representation of the real with a more or less explicit reflection on its status as a representation” (2017, 53) becomes virtually the same as Waugh’s definition of twentieth-century metafiction. “Metafictional novels,” Waugh writes, “tend to be constructed on the principle of a fundamental and sustained opposition: the construction of a fictional illusion (as in traditional realism) and the laying bare of that illusion. In other words, the lowest common denominator of metafiction is simultaneously to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction” (6). By criticizing Watt’s naïve correspondence theory of language, McKeon creates a continuity between postmodern metafiction and conventional realism, thus developing a theory of novelistic reflexivity that reads the novel’s rise in the light of its ostensible death. In an essay titled “Watt’s Rise of the Novel within the Tradition of the Rise of the Novel” (2000), McKeon writes: “The idea of ‘formal realism,’ a technique for propounding an empirical objectivity divorced from its dialectical twin, self-conscious reflexivity, feeds the still current belief that it is only since the 1960s that the novel—and modern culture as such—have learned to think beyond a crudely naive empiricism” (276). At the same time, McKeon’s dialectic is only the latest iteration of a trend from Watt

3. An antecedent to this approach can be found in Robert Alter’s Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (1975), which sketches out a countertradition of the novel that emphasizes playfulness over seriousness, from Cervantes, to Fielding and Sterne, to Diderot, through its decline in the age of nineteenth-century realism, and then its modernist revival in Nabokov and its exemplification in John Fowles’s postmodern classic, The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Alter’s argument is that throughout this history “the realistic enterprise has been enormously complicated and qualified by the writer’s awareness that fictions are never real things, that literary realism is a tantalizing contradiction in terms” (x). Any work that directly explores this paradox of fictional truth Alter labels the self-conscious novel: “a novel that systematically flaunts its own condition of artifice and that by so doing probes into the problematic relationship between real-seeming artifice and reality” (x). While Alter highlights the cultural importance of novels that thematize the “fictionality of fictions” (3), he posits the self-conscious novel as a separate tradition from the mainstream realist novel. Later scholars, such as McKeon, Bender, and Gallagher also emphasize the significance of Fielding, but only to demonstrate his work exemplifies the nature of all realist fiction.

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onward of establishing the novel as the product of competing formal tensions that must be resolved or destroyed.

FROM THE DEATH TO THE RISE OF THE NOVEL: THE LATENT DEATH DRIVE IN CANONICAL HISTORIES Debates about the death of the novel may be preoccupied with the current state of fiction, pessimistically projecting a future, but they are essentially operable only with an assumption of what the novel once was. The prominence of the trope since the mid-twentieth century seems to have offered a script for reading the rise of the novel, for a sense that the novel was born anticipating its own demise is embedded in histories of the novel’s emergence: the story of a development and progression impelled by a latent death drive, a formal and cultural impulse towards termination, a compulsion to repeat its internal conflicts through experimentation until the point of resolution and dissipation, a point which becomes apparent and fully understood only in retrospect. For Watt, this drive would be the “general narrative problem” of reconciling a conflict between “realism of presentation and realism of assessment, of the internal and of the external approaches to character” (338). This tension has been characterized in different ways by subsequent scholars: for Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg (1966), the novel emerges as a literary form by synthesizing competing empirical and fictional impulses that have driven a “grand dialectic” in the history of narrative literature since antiquity (15); for McKeon (1987; 2000), as we have seen, it is comprised of a dialectical relationship between naïve empiricism and extreme skepticism, later glossed as “empirical objectivity” and “self-conscious reflexivity”; for Gallagher (2006) the novel is defined by a paradoxical relationship between verisimilitude and fictionality; and for Thomas Pavel (2013) it evolves out of a tension between idealizing and censuring human behavior. This scholarly trend is exemplified most recently and explicitly by Fredric Jameson, who argues in The Antinomies of Realism (2013) that the genre of realism is constituted by a self-­destructive clash of the twin incompatible impulses of narrative and affect. For Jameson the narrative impulse is what realism inherits from and shares with other narrative forms, that is, the storytelling function, and it operates with a familiar structure of past-present-future predicated on the irrevocable pastness of the events being related. Within the novel, however, the temporality of the narrative preterite works alongside an impulse for a perpetual present. This opposing impulse can be found in the static nature of scenic description and reaches its end point in the literary representation of affect that unravels the whole realist enterprise:

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What we call realism will thus come into being in the symbiosis of this pure form of storytelling with impulses of scenic elaboration, description, and above all affective investment, which allows it to develop towards a scenic present which in reality, but secretly, abhors the other temporalities which constitute the force of the tale or récit in the first place. (11)

With such language, Jameson is offering us a melodramatic psychodrama where these almost anthropomorphized elements of narrative fiction battle each other until they ruin the very genre that enabled their union. For Jameson, the constitutive antinomies of the realist novel can never be resolved, for realism is “a historical and even evolutionary process in which the negative and the positive are inextricably combined, and whose emergence and development at one and the same time constitute its own inevitable undoing, its own decay and dissolution” (6). In construing the novel as a historically specific confluence of formal narrative features in the genre of realism that inevitably unravel, Jameson is also making visible and dramatizing a dialectic embedded in scholarly histories of the form since Percy Lubbock’s (1921) account of how novelistic method grapples with the competing demands of showing and telling. For Watt, harmonious reconciliation of dualist extremes is possible in modernist fiction, while for Jameson the dissolution of realism is unavoidable. Either way, both are animated by the sense of an ending, and Jameson’s history encapsulates and exemplifies the mutually informing tropes of the rise and the death of the novel. I turn now to demonstrating how the dialectic embedded in histories of the novel can best be reframed as a dynamic and cyclical relationship between narrator and character.

NARRATOR VERSUS CHARACTER Despite Watt’s emphasis on the “narrative methods” (34) constituting formal realism, he does not engage with the Anglo-American tradition of formalist criticism, most notably the neo-Jamesian work of critics such as Lubbock and Beach, who approach novelistic history in terms of the development of point of view and the “disappearance” of the author. Indeed, Watt’s account anticipated the shift away from interest in a poetics of the novel. Nonetheless, his sociological history remains influenced by the prevailing aesthetic of this poetics, specifically in his characterization of the development of the English novel as an ongoing reconciliation of Richardson’s “reality of presentation” with Fielding’s “reality of assessment,” first with Sterne’s experiments

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with associative writing in autobiographical form, then, decisively, with Austen’s refinement of character perspective. In this story of a gradual absorption of the subjectivity of character narration into the objective third-person voice, Watt displays the same aesthetic principles that underpin formalist histories such as Lubbock’s, which sees the development of the novel as a gradual march toward showing rather than telling, the effacement of authorial presence, the dramatization of consciousness. As Daniel R. Schwarz wrote in 1983 of Watt’s book: “It was viewed as a response to the New Critical Orthodoxy of the day, although we now see that it was more of a modification than a refutation of formalism” (59). Watt provided the sociological and philosophical context for the emergence of formal realism, but he did not disturb the aesthetic assumptions of formalism. However, once the modernist aesthetic of impersonality that informs this view of novelistic history is subjected to the challenge of metafiction, how do we reconsider the trajectory of the narrative methods of realism? As we have seen, in line with contemporaneous scholarship on metafiction, the inversion of Watt’s thesis reconceptualizes the novel as a genre produced and determined by a paradoxical relation between verisimilitude and fictionality, an impulse toward referentiality that reflects upon its own fictional status. In The Origins of the English Novel, McKeon neatly demonstrates this tension by showing how Richardson initially defended his work on the grounds of its empirical validity (i.e., found documents) before shifting his line of argument to focus on its dramatic capacity to render the truth of the interior self. In this sense, narrative authority oscillates between the third-person editorial voice, which vouches for the truth of the correspondence, and the subjective truth afforded by the first-person letters themselves. Hence, the epistemological problem that the eighteenth-century novel grapples with is latent in the authorial choice of narrative voice. And here I turn to the crux of this book. To tell the story of fictional truth, the enterprise of novel studies can profitably attune its historical framework to analysis of the narrative methods of the realist novel with more precision and rigor than has been typical. And to achieve this we can turn to the taxonomy of narrative elements developed by narratology, which revised much of the neo-Jamesian tradition under the influence of Russian Formalism, German narrative theory exemplified by Franz Stanzel’s Theory of Narrative, and particularly French structuralist narratology exemplified by Gerard Genette’s Narrative Discourse. At the same time, we need to reconsider the ahistorical taxonomies of narratology in order to press them into the service of tracing these conventions beyond their origins in the eighteenth-century novel,

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and thus to determine how changing assumptions about realism accompany formal changes in ensuing centuries. In doing so, I hope to effect a stronger methodological exchange between narrative theory and novel studies. My starting point is the standard narratological distinctions that inhere in definitions of narrative voice: third-person narrators defined as such not by their grammatical postures but by virtue of being absent from the story (heterodiegetic)—with first-person narrators defined by their simultaneous function as characters within the story (homodiegetic)—and the further distinction between the narrating and experiencing selves of a homodiegetic narrator. Exploring the dynamic exchange between narrator and character in diachronic fashion requires approaching structural and stylistic features of narrative—such as authorial intrusions, FID, and first-person narration—not as static formal elements, but as historically mutable techniques of writing that develop according to changing concepts of what constitutes the novel as an art form and what defines its role in public discourse. In a bracing critique of the limitations of narrative theory and its relation to novel studies, “The Eighteenth-Century Challenge to Narrative Theory” (2017), McKeon argues that structuralist narratology aspired to identify the universal features of the narrative mode but was compromised by taking the genre of the novel as the basis for this goal. At the same time, its inattention to the historical context of the eighteenth-century novel demonstrates its inability to shed light on the genre itself. While noting the various postclassical expansions beyond the limitations of structuralism, McKeon argues: “What nonetheless isn’t likely to be thrown into relief is the generic and historical specificity of FID, like narratorial intrusion and other expressions of realist reflexivity, as a novelistic technique” (71). Here we can see that McKeon is at pains to characterize not just the novel but specific conventions of realism as fundamentally reflexive and to stress that these conventions make sense only in relation to their historical context and their generic function. The techniques he mentions as “expressions of realist reflexivity”—FID and narratorial intrusions—have typically been defined in narrative theory as signposts of fictionality. However, the narratological scholarship that explores these signposts has been less concerned with the historical development of such techniques than with determining the theoretical basis on which they can be said to be necessary or sufficient indices of the status of fiction, to comprise the differentia specifica of fiction (see Cohn, 1990; Genette, 1990). Most narratologists would accept that there are no exclusive textual features of fiction. If pragmatic approaches to the question of fictionality emphasize the contextual framework of authorial intention and readerly reception, the logical extension of such an approach is to address the historical contingency of the concept itself. When it comes to the genre

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of the novel, it becomes necessary to investigate how these signposts perform different functions in the service of realism after the eighteenth century and hence how the project of realism has developed and changed in relation to the paradox of fictional truth. If we accept McKeon’s claim that realist techniques are accompanied by a “more or less explicit reflection” on the status of realism, the only way to demonstrate the historical specificity of these techniques is to distinguish the nature and purpose of this reflection across time. Doing so highlights the simple observation that while authors such as Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, and Jane Austen wrote novels that drew attention to their own status as fiction, they did so to establish the verisimilar conventions of the novel in opposition to the romance and not, as was the case with twentiethcentury authors such as John Fowles and John Barth, to expose and critique the artifice of realism. In which case while a formal feature of realism may be reflexive in the sense that it refers back to its own function, that does not necessarily mean its various uses express the same understanding of fictionality. A historically sensitive approach to the interaction of formal features of the novel with broader conceptions of fictionality is necessary to track how “overt” fictionality becomes metafictionality, or rather, how metafictionality reframed our historical sense of fictionality.

HISTORICIZING FICTIONALITY The most significant, and controversial, historical claim of reflexive realism is not so much that the novel was always a self-reflexive genre as that the novel “discovered” the concept of fiction itself. This point is made most forcibly by Gallagher. While recognizing the prior existence of fictional works that did not intend to deceive, articulated in Sidney’s “Apology for Poetrie” (1595), she argues that what distinguishes “novelistic fictionality” is its use of plausible rather than incredible stories that also proclaimed their distinction from fact. For Gallagher, this is the product of a conceptual category of fiction that did not exist prior to the eighteenth century and which can only retrospectively be applied to earlier forms. The ingenuity of this inversion is to deny the transhistorical universality of fiction to which the novel adds realism and instead assert that fiction as we know it is synonymous with the realist novel, demanding a sophisticated engagement with nonreferentiality fostered by the modern emergence of a credit economy. How valid is this claim? The question of whether fictionality is a transhistorical phenomenon or a concept emerging at a particular point in history is a clear counterpart to debates about the rise of the novel, about whether the novel is a form of narrative fiction dating back to antiquity, or a new genre

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emerging in the eighteenth century that forces us to view earlier prose fiction in its light.4 Here, the problematic relationship between realism and the novel that Gallagher sought to solve has been recast as one between the novel and fictionality, serving only to transfer the problem: is it a new “modern” form of fictionality or simply fictionality? By tethering fictionality to its ostensible opposite of verisimilitude Gallagher resists universalist claims about the perennial and ubiquitous nature of fiction, but also seeks to inoculate herself from scholarship outside novel studies, which has identified the emergence of the concept of fictionality as a discourse between lying and truth in classical Greece and medieval literature, particularly the twelfth-century vernacular romance.5 Recent compelling critiques of the critical prejudices that inform 4. The challenge of postmodern metafiction, I suggest, is responsible not only for the surge of interest in the essential reflexivity of novelistic realism I have charted here, but for the desire to expand historical accounts of the novel beyond a restricted focus on realist fiction. This countertradition to the rise of the novel, from Margaret Ann Doody’s The True Story of the Novel (1996) to Steven Moore’s The Novel: An Alternative History (2010) and Pavel’s Lives of the Novel (2013), typically offers a continuous history from ancient Greek prose fictions to the modern novel as a corrective to the temporally bound Anglocentric approach that conflates the novel with realism. In this sense, they revive early histories such as Clara Reeves’s The Progress of Romance (1785) and John Dunlop’s The History of Fiction; being a critical account of the most celebrated prose works of Fiction, from the earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Day (1814), which sought to provide a respectable lineage for a critically maligned, though popular form of fiction. However, what remains distinct is the occasion for this revival. In criticizing the Watt school of scholarship for erasing the “continuous history” of the novel, Doody argues that “the waning of the Age of Realism allows us to see this now,” pointing to the heteroglot cosmopolitanism of the “Post-Modern” as evidence of this waning (xviii). In this, she echoes Scholes and Kellogg’s reason for putting “the novel in its place” as only one form of narrative literature since antiquity: the dissolution of the synthesis between competing elements of narrative that the novel had effected from Cervantes onward. “Specifically,” Scholes and Kellogg argued, “twentieth century narrative has begun to break away from the aims, attitudes, and techniques of realism” (5). In other words, the death of the realist novel reveals its origins, and these origins reveal a dialectic leading to its inevitable death. 5. In The Birth of Literary Fiction in Ancient Greece (1998), Margalit Finkelberg bases her approach to fiction on theories of its genesis, observing a distinction in Ancient Greece between a “poetics of truth” derived from divine inspiration and “a poetics of fiction” derived from art. In Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction (2007), Mark Payne’s focus is on the creation of alternative fictional worlds, arguing that Theocritus’s bucolic poems are the first example of this. Payne even goes so far as to label Theocritus’s poem Idyll a metafiction on account of “the triangulation of the relationship between author, narrator, and fictional character that is staged in this poem” (21). Monika Otter argues, in Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-Century English Historical Writing (1996), that while it is common to attribute fictionality to the convergence of secularism and literacy that produced vernacular romances in the twelfth century, literary reflexivity can also be found in Latin historical narratives of the period. In The Beginnings of Medieval Romance (2002), Dennis Green sets out to develop a specific definition of “twelfth century fictionality” by demonstrating how the classical rhetorical distinction between historia, fabula, and argumentum was absorbed into a medieval poetics, suggesting that argumentum operates between the two poles as “both fictional and also plausibly true in being verisimilar” (16).

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Gallagher’s thesis include Gregory Currie’s (2014) argument for fiction as a transcultural and transhistorical phenomenon; Monika Fludernik’s (2018) account of the various rises of fictionality throughout history linked to the emergence of literacy in different periods, which ties modern novelistic fictionality to the rise of factuality; and Julie Orlemanski’s (2019) rejection of the thesis of secular disenchantment that links fictionality to modernity. Orlemanski’s test case is fiction of the middle ages, and scholarship in this field has been as insistent in its claims as Gallagher, from Walter Haug’s (1985) attribution of the “discovery” of fictionality to Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian romance to Laura Ashe’s (2015) claim that fiction was “invented in England in the 12th century.”6 Given the weight of historical scholarship outside novel studies, it is hard to accept what Orlemanski calls “the terminological fiat” (146) by which Gallagher excludes all fantastic elements in order to confine fictionality to the eighteenth-century realist novel. Co-­opting the term fictionality to shore up the distinctiveness of the realist novel is as unproductive as extending the term novel to all narrative fiction since antiquity. However, this does not diminish Gallagher’s central claim that novelistic fictionality is signaled by the proper name of a character that refers to a nonexistent entity rather than a historical person. Her theory of fictional characters as “nobodies” to whom we can extend sympathy because they are simultaneously real-seeming and ontologically distinct from ourselves affords the clearest theoretical distinction between formal realism and reflexive realism. In observing the new practice of assigning characters ordinary sounding Christian names and surnames, Ian Watt argues that “the primary function of the name” in formal realism “is to symbolize the fact that the character is to be regarded as though he were a particular person and not a type” (21). In response, Gallagher argues that ascribing characters ordinary names in fact signals the fictionality of the realist novel precisely because their lack of a referent establishes them as a type. The prime evidence for this assertion is Fielding’s famous comment in Joseph Andrews (1742) that he is describing “not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species” (180). In Nobody’s Story, Gallagher extrapolates from this comment to argue, “Typification as a sign of fictionality is thus the specific formal trait upon which the novel supported its claim to be a benign instrument of self-discipline, at once regulating, normalizing and individuating its readers” (284, original emphasis). That Fielding’s remarks were important to 6. Gallagher’s phrase itself was first used by Ursula Schaeffer in 1991, when discussing the shift from oral to print poetry. For Schaeffer, print culture separates the moment of performance from the moment of composition, giving rise to a “vicarious voice,” a narrator or poetic “I” separate from the author, while also replicating formulaic features of orality, producing what she calls “conditional fictionality.”

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establishing a conceptual space for fictional characters to be accepted as plausible yet nonreferential can be determined by prefatory remarks over the next decade. Sarah Fielding makes the same claim as Fielding in the preface to The Countess of Dellwyn (1759). Here she states, “And tho’ it is hoped the Characters are really to be found in human Nature, otherwise they would indeed deserve no other Appellation than Chimeras, yet are they universal, and not pointed at Individuals” (iv). That she spends so much time excoriating readers who search for correspondence between real individuals and characters of invented histories indicates that readers needed to be trained out of this habit: “The narrow-minded and illiberal Peruser of Books, who searches only for pointed Satire, and can relish no Character, but such as he finds, or imagines he finds, to partake of the Nature of an abusive Libel on some particular Person, is incapable of being pleased with general Pictures of Nature” (xviii). By 1821, in a review of Austen’s novels, Richard Whately captures the paradox of typification when he argues that the novel offers moral instruction not through “general declamation, on classes of men, but on individuals representing those classes, who are so clearly delineated and brought into action before us, that we seem to be acquainted with them, and feel an interest in their fate” (357). These comments lend support to Gallagher’s claim that for the realist novel to operate readers had to learn to accept that proper names of characters referred to fictional nobodies rather than real people. However, they also demonstrate that it is not the name of characters per se that signals their fictionality, but the rhetorical insistence on their typicality in various prefatory and digressive remarks and extrafictional commentary. To what extent, then, can the name of a character be considered a “formal trait”? As can be derived from the above quotes, the question of a character’s typicality was framed by both moral and aesthetic standards for their representation. Our sense of a character, though, is derived from and shaped by the devices employed to narrate them. Hence, if a proper name signals a fictive entity, its function in the history of the realist novel is best approached by tracing the formal features that produce the illusion of subjectivity and enable our affective engagement with and judgement of character. In particular, investigating how the dynamic structural tension between narrator and character manifests in various signposts of fictionality will test the formal clarity and historical durability of a central plank of the theory of reflexive realism: Gallagher’s assertion that “the key mode of nonreferentiality in the novel was, and still is, that of proper names” (341). As such, I will approach the fictional nobody less as the textual site for a reader’s affective encounter with the paradox of fictional truth, than as a zone around which specific techniques of narrative fiction develop to dramatize the constitutive narrator-character relationship.

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According to the theory of reflexive realism, fictionality is not the antithesis of realism but its paradoxical synonym. What, then, is the opposite of fictionality? In logical terms this would be referential language, and indeed Jameson posits the “the category of the factual” as the “opposite number” of fictionality (190). In historical terms, both Bender and Fludernik argue that the necessary precondition for the emergence of novelistic fictionality is the rise of factuality. However, if fictionality is a contingent historical concept it must also have many and variable Others, as Orlemanski suggests. Fiction, she argues, is a form of “unearnest reference” that depends upon an interpretive community recognizing its “distinction from one or another idiom of actuality—from history, philosophy, factuality, religious doctrine, a sacrament’s performative efficacy, or everyday speech. These changeable regimes of truth then are a primary vector of fiction’s historical variability and determination; when they change, fictionality changes too” (147). My approach to the novel focuses on how the horizons of aesthetic illusion are established by the relationship between formal features of novelistic fictionality and the historically contingent nature of this fictionality itself. In the eighteenth century, debates about the narrative methods of the realist novel were framed by the language of the unnatural (from fantastic and impossible events to characters acting against their nature) and the improbable (from unlikely actions and behavior to overly neat plot resolution). These terms were invoked as elements to be ostentatiously guarded against, first to demarcate the verisimilitude of the novel from its fictional forebears, and then to police the efficacy of this verisimilitude to ensure it could compete with the moral instruction offered by religious doctrine, conduct literature, commonplace books, periodical essays, history, and so forth. At this point the category of the fictive (nonexistent characters as well as events that did not or could not happen) was associated with the unnatural and the improbable in negative terms, but by the end of the century the category of the fictional (the modes of telling that comprise the genre of fiction) could be considered unnatural without contravening generic expectations for realism. For instance, in 1748 William Warburton reserves the term unnatural for “the Fairy Walks of Monsters and Chimeras” to be found in romances or “the stiff unnatural state” of humanity depicted in earlier Spanish novels dominated by intrigue rather than everyday life. By 1821, however, Richard Whately could praise Austen’s ability to “give fiction the perfect appearance of reality” while pointing out that her description of the minds of her characters is “perfectly unnatural,” thus clearly distinguishing the novel from history (360). He goes on to describe the paradox of realism in terms of a disjunction between content and form: “Let the events, therefore, which are detailed, and the characters described, be ever so natural, the way in which they are presented to us is of a kind of supernatural cast,

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perfectly unlike any real history that ever was or can be written, and thus requiring a greater stretch of imagination in the reader” (361). Whately’s claim that third-person omniscient narration is superior to the first-person epistolary or memoir novel, despite its “unnatural” qualities signaling the least convincing appearance of historical truth, marks a key moment in the story of fictional truth: the point at which the category of the unnatural as a signpost of fictionality becomes dissociated from the fictive qualities of the romance, and linked to the fictional conventions of the novel. What these conventions actually signal, then, is not simply the invented nature of individual novels, but a particular way of conceiving the novel as a genre, and a culturally framed valuation of fictionality in relation to what constitutes the actual. Probability is the broad concept invoked by the early novel to establish its own type of nonreferentiality, but to trace the historically contingent reflexivity of literary practice requires mapping debates about methods of narration onto changing regimes of truth, from the novel’s emergence alongside modern empiricism to its ostensible death in an age of postmodern antipositivism.

REFLEXIVE REALISM AND THE NARRATIVE TURN: THE FOURTH AGE OF FICTIONALITY The central claims made by scholars of reflexive realism are that realism draws attention to its fictionality in the very act of disavowing that fictionality, of establishing its verisimilitude; and that this is a modern and historically specific form of fictionality. The premise of this book is that reflexive realism itself is a historically specific practice of reading that seeks to find in the novel’s origins the germs of its own demise, the death that makes its rise visible. This is because the theory of reflexive realism is a product of the metafictional critique of realism and overt thematization of fictional truth characteristic of postmodern fiction. It recasts the origins of the novel from a new form of fiction that embodies in its methods the principles of philosophical realism to a new form of narrative characterized by a self-reflexive awareness of its own nonreferentiality, emerging in a broader climate that promotes the moral utility of imaginative speculation. Recognizing and extending the logic of reflexive realism enables us to chart the historically shifting views of the novel’s relation to the real that manifest in formal features advertising the value of fiction to readers. If we accept a base definition of fictionality as a discourse between truth and lies, its historical variability in the context of the novel is dependent on its func-

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tion or justification. The theory of reflexive realism itself demonstrates that what Orlemanski calls “regimes of truth” have changed in relation to the realist novel from its rise in the eighteenth century to its death in the twentieth century. In the broadest terms, if novelistic verisimilitude is established as a corollary to philosophical realism and operates as a supplement to empiricist knowledge (nonreferential narrative based on faithful observation of the particularities of human experience and bound by laws of probability), the exposure of realist fictionality in twentieth-century metafiction and literary criticism offers the novel as an exemplar of antipositivist critiques of scientific knowledge (a reflexive model for the narrativized construction of subjectivity and history). In Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Brian McHale observes that “the postmodernists fictionalize history, but by doing so they imply that history itself may be a form of fiction” (96). In this, postmodern fiction participated in a general intellectual climate that recognized the epistemological implications of shared narrative techniques across the genres of history and fiction. What this means is that the definition of fictionality that animates the critical practice of reflexive realism is different from the definition of fictionality it sought to foreground in the eighteenth-century novel. Indeed one can see contemporary theories of fictionality and their emphasis on reflexivity as an attempt to differentiate the paradox of fictional truth from the parallel concept of narrative truth that emerges from the narrative turn across the humanities and social sciences, particularly in psychology, history, and sociolinguistics. Given Jerome Bruner’s argument in “The Narrative Construction of Reality” (1991) that because narratives cannot be falsified they rely upon verisimilitude to offer versions of reality, one can see why literary scholars would have recourse to reflexivity to help distinguish the verisimilitude of fictional truth from the truth claims of other narrative modes: it is not nonreferentiality per se that characterizes narrative fiction, but an overt signaling and self-reflexive interrogation of its inherent artifice. Scholars not wedded to the claim that fiction is a product of modernity link the changing nature of fictionality to successive periods of literacy, from its “discovery” in the Aristotelian probability of ancient Greece, to its disappearance in the Dark Ages resulting from the Christian conflation of fiction with lying in the classical Platonic strain of thought, its reinvention in the Latin histories and vernacular romances of the High Middle Ages, and then its flourishing in the novel from Don Quixote to eighteenth-century realism (see Green, 2002). If the rise of the novel is coterminous with a particular concept of fictionality associated with probability, empiricism, and the credit economy, then anxiety about the formal exhaustion and cultural decline of the genre that characterizes the trope of the death of the novel is founded on a

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rejection of this concept. The critical practice of reflexive realism is the product of a postmodern intellectual climate that ushered in a different concept of fictionality, one reflexively attuned to a particular type of representational skepticism (in which language loses its privilege as a transparent medium of expression while simultaneously being granted extensive discursive power) that relies upon aggrandizing the regimes of truth that constitute its Other: history, science, nonfictional discourse. What comes after this humblebrag of the category of the “literary” is the exhaustion, or rather irrelevance, of reflexivity as a self-conscious stance. This conclusion forms the agonistic premise of David Foster Wallace’s post-metafictional short story, “Octet” (1999) as it grapples with the fact that self-reflexivity can now seem “lame and tired and facile” given that “metafictional self-reference” has become co-opted by popular culture (124). Both Wallace’s critique of the corrosive power of irony that attends selfreferentiality in postmodern culture and his own reflexive appeal to sincere self-exposure as an antidote anticipate one of the burgeoning political concerns of the contemporary digital environment. In a world characterized by a surfeit of information that no individual can assimilate, the incompleteness of any individual account becomes apparent. Mark Andrejevic (2013) argues this “information glut” has produced an “era of media reflexivity,” a generalized awareness and skeptical savviness amongst the populace about the constructed nature of media representation and the arbitrariness of truth claims attached to competing narratives (14). Andrejevic dubs this stance “vernacular postmodernism,” from which emerges “not so much a convergence upon a shared version of the facts, but the multiplication of divergent narratives tied to affective facts” (60). The result is a political climate that seeks the certainty of big data or the uncontestability of affect. The technological changes that have produced a new age of digital literacy have, I suggest, also created the conditions for a fourth age of fictionality in literary culture. Under these conditions, contemporary autofiction has captured critical attention for blurring generic boundaries between fact and fiction but could better be approached as exemplifying an indifference toward referentiality in a post-truth digital public sphere: if everything we read is a textual construct or subjective narrative circulating online without verification, then the referential status of discourse gives way to its affective power and capacity to mobilize sentiment. In this larger historical context, I will elaborate the story of fictional truth: the unfolding structural tension between narrator and character through which the novel registers and negotiates changing cultural conceptions of fiction.

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The following chapters pursue this approach to novelistic history by charting the circular development and uncanny recurrence of the three literary figures I outlined earlier. Chapter 1 questions the ahistorical characterization of authorial intrusions as self-reflexive disruptions of the illusion of reality. In formal realism they are an element of the novel that must eventually be excised in order to achieve the goal of impersonality. For reflexive realism they signal the overt fictionality that trains readers of novels to accept verisimilar events and characters as nonreferential. Both stances strike me as retrospective mischaracterizations of the early function and reception of authorial commentary. Through a study of the evolving critical reception of Tom Jones (1749), the chapter demonstrates that authorial commentary was originally understood in the context of the rhetorical practice of digression, or a turning away from the narrative, and was not considered to be an intrusion into the narrative until the nineteenth century. This lexical shift from digression to intrusion was the product of a conceptual shift in the function of novelistic illusion, from the moral dangers of immersion to the ethical benefits of sympathetic engagement. When the virtue of immersion is linked to the aesthetic and ethical imperative for authorial objectivity, commentary comes to seem antithetical to the realist enterprise, indicating a fundamental change in expectations for the novelistic construction of fictional worlds. By tracing the changing types and function of authorial commentary across three centuries, I demonstrate how a device used to establish the conventions of the novel could also become a weapon for the metafictional critique of realism. The chapter also demonstrates how the affective encounter between readers and fictional characters that forms the basis of Gallagher’s theory of novelistic fictionality is modeled in postmodern novels by authors such as Muriel Spark, John Fowles, and B. S. Johnson, who stage agonistic encounters between intrusive authors and their own fictional creations to interrogate contemporary theories of empathy. The next two chapters interrogate how scholarly attempts to incorporate modernist innovations in stream of consciousness into the tradition of realist fiction have constructed a lineage from Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novels to the “inward turning” of twentieth-century fiction exemplified by Joyce’s Ulysses. In doing so, they create a trajectory for the novel that anticipates the exhaustion of interiority in the path from Pamela’s self-narrated monitoring of her conscience to Molly Bloom’s associative reflections on her adulterous behavior. In this context I seek to address why the majority of significant innovations in thought representation have occurred through depicting the consciousness of female characters. Chapter 2 reconsiders the origins of the

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signature feature of novelistic realism—Free Indirect Discourse—by situating it as one device in the historical development of the consciousness scene, or characters thinking in time. The key claim of this chapter is that the “impartial spectator” of Adam Smith’s theory of sympathy, which retains a central place in both historical and theoretical accounts of FID, provides an insufficient framework for understanding the development of this technique. Smithian sympathy itself is an abstraction from the practice of self-examination encouraged by earlier conduct books for women. At the same time, I argue that scholarship on conduct literature by critics such as Nancy Armstrong has neglected its influence on the formal development of thought representation. This conduct literature, with its key trope of turning from the looking glass to scrutinize one’s interior, provided the structural frame and cultural impetus for a particular type of novelistic subjectivity—the self-examining heroine—which enabled the development of the consciousness scene in the realist novel. By tracing scenes of women reviewing their conduct from early novels such as The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) to Camilla (1796), I further show how the assumption that epistolary explorations of the interior are “replaced” by FID is a retrospective misreading fostered by the modernist trope of an inward turn. Chapter 3 investigates how innovations in thought representation continued to be linked to the figure of the self-examining heroine, tracing its lineage through the psychological analysis of nineteenth-century novels such as Middlemarch (1871) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881) to the historical moment where self-discovery through reflection becomes yoked to sexual awakening. The epiphanic moment of a consciousness scene is no longer a sudden awareness of sexual impropriety, as it is with the early self-examining heroine, but the petite mort of orgasm. Of course, as post-Foucauldian scholars have pointed out, this is not a trajectory toward the emancipation of women so much as a product of the modern discourse of sexuality. Vital to this chapter is demonstrating how the conduct scene reaches its terminus in the twentieth century when it becomes embedded in the sex scene, from Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1927) to Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2013): an innovation in thought representation that perpetuates established patterns of self-examination even at it seeks the “death” of self-conscious subjectivity. If the most prominent paradox of the realist novel is a verisimilitude founded on impossible access to the interior life of characters, the history of this paradox is not of a simple progression toward unmediated consciousness, but of ongoing explorations of the tension between narrator and character with a specifically gendered mode of subjectivity as the site of contestation.

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Chapters 4 and 5 ask what role first-person narration plays in the history of reflexive realism, which defines the overt fictionality of the novel in opposition to the claims for documentary truth attached to early epistolary and memoir novels. The significance afforded to the role of FID in literary history tends to privilege the development of third-person narration as the exemplary form of novelistic realism. In doing so it neglects the innovations of first-­person narration that resulted when authors dropped the pseudofactual pretense that they were editors of a found manuscript. I argue that this narrative voice is transformed when it begins to model itself on the genre of the novel rather than autobiography. By exploiting their dual role as narrator and protagonist, characters become aware of themselves as characters in the act of narration, appropriating the role of authorial narrator to explore the latent impulse of all autobiographical writing: the desire to give an account of oneself, in Judith Butler’s terms. Drawing on Butler’s relational theory of subjectivity as both constituted and stymied by the demands of narrative, I approach this desire as a latent autothanatographic impulse to account for one’s life that can be realized only in fiction. Accordingly, the final two chapters trace the different ways that novelists have approached the formal problem of narrating one’s own death, from characters writing to the threshold of death in sentimental epistolary fiction to the proliferation of posthumous narrators in contemporary fiction, to offer a history of first-person narration that reimagines its autobiographical origins as a will to death in order to complete a life story that can take place only from the third-person stance of the Other. I posit Clarissa (1740) as the prototype of different autothanatographic possibilities that unfold across three centuries in novels from Victor Hugo’s The Last Days of a Condemned Man (1829) and Arthur Schnitzler’s Fraulein Else (1924) to Susanna Moore’s In the Cut (1995) and Neil Jordan’s Shade (2004). We can read these recurring examples of dying in the first person as fictional autothanatographical experiments that draw attention to the formal tensions and historical impulse of first-person narration itself, offering a counterpoint to the classical autobiographical model. Taken together, this diachronic investigation of the narrative methods of formal realism that have come to be seen as signposts of fictionality provides a structure for engaging with the historical and theoretical problem of reflexive realism and for connecting debates about the origins of the English novel with contemporary debates about novelistic fictionality in the wake of postmodernism. In an age of what David Shields has called “reality hunger,” in which the memoir has accrued the same literary capital as the novel, and the prominent genre of autofiction has become the locus of debate about the fate

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of the novel, it seems important to take stock. In “Reality Beckons: Metamodernist Depthiness beyond Panfictionality” (2019), Gibbons, Vermeulen, and van der Akker argue that autofiction exemplifies a broader trend in which postmodern conventions such as metafiction and ontological blurring are deployed in the service of a reality effect, an assertion of the truth of the material despite the overt fictionality of its rendering, signaling a new cultural logic of metamodernism. This is the contemporary version of reflexive realism: a critical practice that looks forward from postmodernism rather than back to the eighteenth century in order to clarify the historically contingent relationship between fictionality and the novel. The conclusion takes up this issue by addressing a persistent sentiment articulated by writers since the turn of the millennium, from David Markson to Rachel Cusk, that invented characters seem tiresome and fake. This sentiment is the common thread of what literary critic James Wood (2012) calls a “contemporary literary movement that is impatient with conventional fictionmaking.” According to Gallagher, the paradox of the emergent realist novel is that eighteenth-century readers became attached to fictional characters not despite their fictionality but because of it. However, this representative figure of reflexive realism—the fictional nobody—is complicated by contemporary autofictional work that explicitly signals an identity between author and character-narrator. Through analysis of the work of “alt.lit” writers such as Megan Boyle and Darcie Wilder, and the viral circulation of Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” (2017), the conclusion ties the question of novelistic fictionality to a post-truth culture fostered by the secondary orality of social media platforms in the digital age in which the referential status of narrative matters less than its affective appeal to users.

CHAPTER 1

From Digressions to Intrusions The Historical Paradox of Authorial Commentary Be it known, then, that the human species are divided into two sorts of people, to wit, high people and low people. —Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1742)

And so we need not trouble ourselves any more either about the insertions or about the exordiums. They both please me; the second class has pleased persons much better worth pleasing than I can pretend to be. —George Saintsbury, introduction to Joseph Andrews (1910)

There are two types of people in the world: those who like authorial intrusions, and those who don’t. And just as these preferences tell us much about the people who hold them, the critical reception of authorial intrusions reveals much about our theories of the novel. Authorial intrusions are typically characterized, and criticized, as interruptions to a narrative that disrupt the illusion of fictional truth to varying degrees. In this way, intrusions highlight by contrast our sense of two formative elements of the genre: its narrative structure, and its referential status. Gerard Genette (1997) tells us that the authorial preface is a paratextual frame in the service of ensuring that the text is read properly: explaining to readers why and how they should read it. It is clear from even a cursory survey of eighteenth-century fiction that the abundant number of prefaces were designed not only to explain the individual work at hand, but to justify the genre of the novel as a whole. I think we can profitably approach authorial commentary as an intratextual continuation of this rhetorical enterprise, and this is one reason why intrusions have been condemned. As a result we can also approach them as barometers for historical shifts in concepts of the novel because of the various ways they both evoke and respond to critical reception. My aim in this chapter is to investigate the reasons why authorial commentary is considered intrusive and whether these reasons have been constant throughout the history of the novel. Central to this investigation will be trac29

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ing the significance of a broad terminological shift, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, in which the common rhetorical practice of digression, or turning away from a narrative, came to be characterized as an intrusion into a narrative. Answering these questions will help address the paradoxical role authorial commentary has played in both establishing and challenging the conventions of realist fiction in relation to changing measures of fictional truth. Commentary is a means by which authorial narrators overtly mediate a reader’s access to the fictional world, but it also foregrounds the relationship between these narrators and their characters. I will demonstrate how a shift in understanding from commentary as digressive to commentary as intrusive facilitates not only changing critical perceptions of novelistic illusion but a new ethics of character representation. These changes can be traced in the recurring practice of authorial narrators discussing the fate of their characters in order to frame the ontology of fiction in the context of their own creative power.

AUTHORIAL INTRUSIONS AND THE REALIST NOVEL Perhaps the most famous expression of distaste for authorial intrusions can be found in Henry James’s 1884 essay, “The Art of Fiction,” in which he excoriated his fellow author, Anthony Trollope, for betraying the “sacred office” of the novelist by admitting through digressive commentary that his stories were only make-believe (71). This lament provided the touchstone for modern criticism. When formalist theories of the novel took shape in the twentieth century, they enshrined all forms of intrusion, self-reflexive or otherwise, as an interference to the aesthetic ideal of the genre itself: the verisimilar effacement of the medium of narration. This was also the central tenet of modernist novelists themselves, best expressed by Ford Madox Ford’s assertion in The English Novel (1929) that it is “an obvious and unchanging fact that if an author intrudes his comments into the middle of his story he will endanger the illusion conveyed by that story” (148). This belief about the “unchanging” problem of intrusive commentary had already taken shape in scholarly histories of the novel. For instance, in The Advance of the English Novel (1916), William Lyon Phelps argued that Fielding “established a bad precedent in English fiction” by giving himself license to intrude upon his story to comment freely on characters, events, and life in general, influencing succeeding novelists to interrupt their narratives and condescend their readers, “both of which habits aid in destroying the illusion and lead to downright insincerity” (47–48). In crediting Fielding with establishing the practice of authorial intrusion, Phelps also clearly asserts that this

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practice had to be given up for the art form to “advance.” His claim is echoed by Watt who, in discussing Fielding’s essayistic musings in Tom Jones, asserts that “such authorial intrusions, of course, tend to diminish the authenticity of his narrative” and “break the spell of the imaginary world represented in the novel,” preventing readers from being “fully immersed in the lives of the characters” (285). We can determine much about the historically contingent nature of this assumption by testing contemporaneous responses to Tom Jones, something I will venture later in this chapter. According to Joseph Bartomeleo, “commentary within novels—which was necessary to establish the legitimacy of the form and the authority of its practitioners—predictably diminished after the middle of the eighteenth century with the popular success of the genre and the critical success of individual authors and texts” (11). In suggesting that review journals took up the critical slack in the wake of this diminishment, Bartomeleo is offering a pragmatic rationale for the existence of commentary that nonetheless lends weight to the aesthetic critique of its function: it is a form of extraneous advertisement. But did this commentary diminish, or did it alter in both function and type? For if it was no longer required to establish the legitimacy of the form, why was authorial commentary used so extensively in the nineteenth-century novel? If the intrusive narrator of the Victorian realist novel gave way to the more impersonal voice championed by modernist criticism, by the late twentieth century the self-reflexive authorial intrusion became the weapon of the metafictional critique of realism in postmodern fiction. It is not surprising, in the critical climate fostered by postmodernism, that revisions of novelistic history would shift attention to the significance of Fielding over the other two of Watt’s inaugurating triumvirate of authors. While Watt tended to favor Defoe and Richardson for their significance in developing formal realism, later scholars have inverted this emphasis, with Defoe in particular relegated to the status of the pseudofactual and the novel said to have come into its own with Fielding’s overt fictionality. In this context, the chapter of Joseph Andrews (1742) titled “Matter Prefatory in Praise of Biography” has become one of the most important passages of eighteenth-century fiction for historians of the novel. Anticipating that readers may feel they recognize the various characters that populate his novel, Fielding takes pains to “declare here, once for all, I describe not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species,” arguing that this distinction renders his work a form of satire rather than libel (180). This claim to be writing a true history in which individual characters are not to be mistaken for real people is said to articulate the new type of fictionality that distinguished the realist novel. For McKeon, in The Secret History of Domesticity (2005), “the idea of concrete virtuality” con-

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tained in this passage articulates the emergence of a doctrine of realism that “amounts to the emergence, not of fiction, but of our kind of fiction, which openly proclaims its fictionality against the backdrop of its apparently factuality” (109). While for Gallagher, Fielding’s claim to be representing nobody in particular is the basis of her assertion that the “founding claim of the form, therefore, was a nonreferentiality that could be seen as a greater referentiality” (2006, 342). The implication of this thesis is that, given Fielding’s assertion is an interruption to the narrative that addresses readers directly, the intrusive authorial comment was the most significant formal device for distinguishing the realist novel, something that could not be admitted to Watt’s methods of formal realism. McKeon (2017) argues that because Watt “promotes a straightforward and non-reflexive view of realism as a formal technique” he must inevitably consider Fielding’s illusion-destroying intrusions to undermine that realism. “So in this respect, The Rise of the Novel played a major role in detouring Anglo-American novel criticism to an extent from which it has not yet recovered” (54). McKeon is keen to recuperate authorial intrusions from their bad press, but less in terms of their aesthetic value than of their significance to the theory of reflexive realism. John Bender (1998) also emphasizes Fielding’s intrusive voice when asserting that the publication of Tom Jones coincides with and embodies “a realignment that occurred around 1750, when the guarantee of factuality in science increasingly required the presence of its opposite, a manifest yet verisimilar fictionality in the novel” (6). Bender argues that Fielding is “poised strangely between the old world of the novel as fact and the new world of the novel as fiction,” for, despite elaborating in Tom Jones a theory of novelistic verisimilitude with reference to the common argument for probability, “he was already of the avant-garde in relation to his wholesale abandonment, in the actual telling of the story by an intrusive narrator, of the apparatus of apparent factuality that surrounds Defoe’s and Richardson’s novels” (16). Whereas Phelps had argued that Fielding “established a bad precedent in English fiction” through the didacticism and illusion-destroying nature of his intrusive presence, and Watt had built this assumption into his account of the origins of formal realism, Bender argues that these intrusions helped usher in the modern realist novel. These differences are not just the result of different aesthetic views on intrusive commentary, or even different conclusions about the historical significance of Fielding’s work; they are the product of historically distinct theories of realism: one in which impersonality is the generic dominant and the other in which reflexivity is to the fore. At the same time, it is crucial to note, both theories accept the overt fictionality of authorial commentary.

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If it is the case, as Gallagher claims, that Fielding’s disclaimer about the referentiality of his characters was no longer necessary once readers were trained to accept novels as probable stories about imaginary people, it remains to be answered why novelists continued to draw attention to the fictional status of their characters throughout the age of realism in the nineteenth century (and why the legal disclaimer became a common feature in the next century). If we skip forward to the twentieth century, we can find another well-known authorial intrusion that admits the fictional status of characters: John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman: I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and “voice” of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word. (85)

The admission of fictionality here is surely designed less to disclaim the referentiality of its characters than to point out the historical variability of novelistic form. Neither does Fowles claim a greater truth for his fictional characters; instead, he reveals a parodic anxiety about this very posture of authority assumed by the Victorian novelist. He goes on to claim that he cannot control his characters because they possess their own freedom in the world he has created. At the same time, in classic postmodern fashion, he tells readers that their own lives are no more real than his characters: “You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it . . . fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf—your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality” (87, original ellipsis). We can see that the formal device of intrusive commentary plays a vital role in the paradoxical relationship between “overt fictionality” and realism, for it has been used by eighteenth-century novelists to specify the distinctive “truth” of their genre and guide readers on how to receive their characters, while twentieth-century novelists have used the same device to undermine conventions of realism inherited from the nineteenth century. While reflexive realism recuperates authorial intrusions as vital to the origins of the novel and to a definition of realism itself, rather than an impediment, it nonetheless retains the assumption that intrusions by definition are signposts of fictional-

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ity. To understand the contingent relation of authorial intrusions to fictional truth, then, we require a more precise understanding of the different types and functions of these intrusions and how they are deployed in different periods.

AN ANATOMY OF AUTHORIAL INTRUSIONS: NARRATIVE INTERRUPTIONS AND THE ILLUSION OF TRUTH “Authorial intrusion” is a loose umbrella term encompassing any type of narratorial statement that foregrounds the storyteller and appears supplementary to the report of the story. However, such statements are not homogenous in either form or function and can be classified into several discrete, although sometimes overlapping, categories: (1) direct addresses to the reader, (2) gnomic statements that establish correlations between the fictional world and the actual world, (3) evaluative assessment of characters and their actions, (4) selfconscious statements about the narrative act, (5) metafictional commentary on the work itself and its generic form, and (6) metaleptic insertions of the author as a character. While always drawing attention to the act of narrating, these features also sometimes draw attention to the fictionality of a work. But what makes them intrusions? If authorial commentary is considered to interrupt a narrative, then we must have a sense of what constitutes a narrative. Genette’s (1980) account of commentary under the narratological categories of both tense (duration) and voice (function) provides a point of departure. Defining the constitutive features of narrative in simple terms as a story to tell and someone to tell it, Genette considers intrusions, or “commentarial excursuses in the present tense,” along with description, to be a pause in the time of the narrative (94). Such an understanding is not uncommon, but Genette’s contribution has been to demonstrate that this pause constitutes one “movement” in the overall rhythm of narrative time. The function of such pauses—whether they be to engage and direct the reader or provide ideological commentary—is extra-narrative in the sense that they do not directly contribute to the main function of the narrator, which is to report the events of the story. This account offers a formal description of the relationship of commentary to the novel as a narrative form, explaining why its synonyms have been digressions, interruptions, and interventions, but it does not explain its relationship to novelistic fictionality. This relationship, I suggest, is more labile and historically contingent. The challenge is to have a reliable method for formally identifying commentary that remains attuned to its variable functions and critical responses across time. The relative concept of authorial presence

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provides a test case, particularly given that Anglo-American novel theory has typically approached intrusions as an aesthetic and ethical question of this presence. Introducing readers to structuralist narratology in his 1978 book, Story and Discourse, Seymour Chatman classifies intrusions as elements of overt, as opposed to covert, narration by virtue of manifesting the presence of the narrator, on a scale from description through to temporal summary to commentary. The relation between narrative time and authorial presence is clear enough: an author pauses the narrative to comment in his or her own voice. But it is precisely when authorial presence is invoked that the boundaries between an intrusion and narration become blurred: When does narration stop and commentary commence? When does description become evaluation? It is pointless to label any evidence of authorial presence an intrusion. The term intrusion must be limited to a statement that deliberately demarcates itself from the rest of the narrative. Furthermore, when the temporal elements of summary and scene become framed by a hierarchical aesthetic of telling versus showing, this cements the assumption that the more authorial presence is effaced the more verisimilar a work becomes. In this view, an authorial intrusion becomes an interruption to the verisimilitude of a work itself, from which there is an easy slide into considerations of all intrusions as self-reflexive. I now want to address two conventional assumptions about the nature of authorial intrusions. First, the idea that intrusions interrupt a narrative: just say the opening line of a novel is a gnomic statement such as, “It is a truth universally acknowledged . . .” Can this be considered an intrusion when there is nothing to intrude upon? What is the difference between a novel in which these intrusions occur regularly, and one in which there are only isolated instances? Genette’s taxonomy of narrative movements would allow us to chart the rhythm of narrative time in individual novels and locate any intrusion within their temporal structure. This taxonomy relies upon a distinction between story time (the chronological events of the fictional world) and narrative time (the time it takes to relate these events), and on this basis Genette proposes that scene approximates story time, summary speeds up narrative time, ellipsis speeds up time until events are skipped over, and pause halts the narrative. He calls this “pseudo-time” because it is a metonymic substitute for the time it takes to read, and it relies upon a spatio-temporal measurement: the amount of words or sentences devoted to a section of story time. This approach to duration is important not so much because it offers a formal method for measuring the role of authorial intrusions in the rhythm of a narrative, but because it clarifies the asymmetrical relationship between the materiality of narrative time and the subjective temporality of reading. While

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authorial intrusions invoke the tradition of the oral storyteller in their address to readers, they also often highlight the textual materiality of this pseudotime when referring readers to previous chapters or earlier sections. Fielding provides an early account of the importance of narrative rhythm to the novel when explaining why the chapters in Tom Jones are of different lengths and cover varying stretches of time: When any extraordinary scene presents itself (as we trust will often be the case), we shall spare no pains nor paper to open it at large to our reader; but if whole years should pass without producing anything worthy his notice, we shall not be afraid of a chasm in our history; but shall hasten on to matters of consequence, and leave such periods of time totally unobserved. (74)

Here we can see Fielding self-reflexively distinguishing his new species of writing from that of history by pointing out that he will devote much paper to elaborating a scene, but employ ellipsis (“leave such periods of time totally unobserved”) to facilitate the transition between scenes. His comment is itself a pause in the spatio-temporal rhythm he describes, explaining not only how he intends to structure his narrative but how he intends to manage readers’ experience of narrative time. A century later, in his 1863 novel Hard Cash, Charles Reade berates readers who criticize novels for presenting only extraordinary events and skipping over the small matters of life. In contrast to Fielding, however, Reade’s response is that such a practice is not “distinctive of fiction” but common to all narratives: “And, therefore, I throw myself on the intelligence of my readers; and ask them to realize, that henceforth pages are no measure of time, and that to a year big with strange events, on which I therefore dilated in this story, succeeded a year in which few brilliant things happened to the personages of this tale” (183). In these instances, the authors are drawing the reader’s attention to their manipulation of the relation between narrative time and story time. In doing so they are also perpetuating the fiction that a story exists to be reported and that they can select which events to narrate. To understand the effects of these and other types of authorial commentary upon a reader’s engagement with narrative rhythm, however, frame theory provides the most productive approach. According to Manfred Jahn (1997), a frame is a cognitive model that readers select and use in the process of reading a narrative until they are forced to select a new one. If intrusions are built into a novel from the beginning, such as in Tom Jones, where the narrator informs readers that “I intend to digress, through this whole History, as often as I see Occasion” (39), this establishes a frame and a recurring pattern. When they appear sporadically,

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such as the chapter in Adam Bede titled “In which the story pauses a little,” or John Fowles’s metafictional intrusion in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, they break a frame. This leads to the next assumption: that intrusions disrupt verisimilitude. “I have disgracefully broken the illusion?” Fowles asks in a rhetorical anticipation of readers’ response to this intrusion. “No. My characters still exist, and in a reality no less, or no more, real than the one I have just broken” (86). It is clear that a self-reflexive admission of fictionality is a deliberate strategy for undermining the illusion of truth in a novel. But if all other types of intrusion, such as an assessment of a character, can be considered to interfere with verisimilitude then this must be a result of conventional expectations of narrative fiction that require not so much a probable story as a sense of unmediated access to that story. Here the emphasis must shift from narrative time to reading time, to the sense that not only is the progression of the plot retarded by a discursive pause but the projection of a fictional world is suspended. In “The Position of the Present in Fiction” (1967), A. A. Mendilow articulates the relation of intrusions to the temporality of reading in this way: Many modern readers find themselves distracted by the way certain novelists, particularly the earlier novelists, jolt them out of the fictive present into their actual present. By stepping out from behind the imaginary frame of the novel to address the reader in person, they recall him from the “Relative Now” of the characters to his own “Absolute Now.” . . . There is a breaking of his suspension of disbelief to which he must be induced to yield if he is to abandon himself to the illusion of reality. (268)

The argument here is that a direct address shifts the deictic orientation of readers from the fictional world to their own, although one could argue that readers are only shifted to the time of narrating, itself an illusion of communication. It is important to note that Mendilow does not universalize this experience of distraction produced by a textual feature, instead linking it to “modern readers.” When it comes to explaining this experience, scholars of the novel draw most readily on the concept of immersion, whether that be from the perspective of cognitive psychology (Gerrig, 1993), possible worlds theory (Ryan, 2001), or neuroscience (Miall, 2009). Werner Wolf employs the term “aesthetic illusion” to bring an affective dimension to the paradox of fictional truth, arguing that this illusion “consists primarily of a feeling, with variable intensity, of being imaginatively and emotionally immersed in a represented world and of experiencing this world in a way similar (but not identical) to real life” (144). At the same time, because readers are aware of the

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difference between representation and reality, their immersive experience “can be suspended or undermined at any given moment by the actualization of the latent consciousness of representationality” (145). According to Wolf, this “can be triggered not only by the recipient, but also by the work itself, thanks to metalepsis and to other illusion-breaking devices employed by metafictionality, or due to interference by contextual factors” (145). Although pointing out that it need not apply solely to realism, Wolf argues that the nineteenthcentury realist novel is one of the most developed forms of aesthetic illusion. The automatic correlation between authorial intrusion and the rupturing of realist illusion has been challenged by several scholars. In his correction to both Watt’s theory of realism and the dogma of neo-Jamesian poetics, Wayne Booth argues that there “is probably no inherent reason why a realistic structure should require any particular form of realistic narrative technique” (57), concluding, sensibly, that what seems natural in one period of history or to one critical school seems artificial in others. Critics such as Robyn Warhol and Harry Shaw argue that, in the Victorian realist novel, direct addresses to the reader and authorial generalizations reinforce the veracity of a narrative by fostering the reader’s belief in the consonance between the represented world and the world of the reader. In theoretical terms, Ansgar Nünning makes an important conceptual distinction between metanarrative expressions, “the narrator’s commenting on the process of narration” (12), and metafiction, arguing that metanarration can support aesthetic illusion via claims for the truth of a narrative. These various claims provide a valuable corrective to common assumptions about authorial intrusion, but they do not necessarily explain why such views are held in the first place. It is important to understand these views in their historical context and what they reveal about shifting concepts of novelistic realism. My broad claim here is that authorial commentary was not considered to disrupt the illusion of truth, and hence foreground the fictionality of a work, until theories of immersion became prevalent in novelistic criticism. In fact, apart from sporadic appearances, the word “intrusive” was not commonly used to describe commentary until the late nineteenth century, and the term “authorial intrusion” became an established part of the critical lexicon only in the twentieth. Prior to this, the more common word was “digression,” which framed commentary in relation to narrative, rather than to fiction.

FROM DIGRESSIONS TO INTRUSIONS In her 1755 novel, The Invisible Spy, Eliza Haywood includes the following ironic exchange between the first-person narrator and another character:

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AUTHOR: Digressions, miss, when they contain fine sentiments and judi-

cious remarks, are certainly the most valuable part of that sort of writing. MISS: I cannot think so, and I could wish the authors would keep their sen-

timents and remarks to themselves, or else have them printed in a different letter, that one might know when to begin, and when to leave off. (123–24)

In this dialogue, “Miss” represents the impatient reader who rails against novelists “breaking off in the middle of their stories,” while the learned author seeks to point out the moral value of authorial commentary. The framework for such commentary in the eighteenth century was the classical rhetorical practice of digression, understood as a turning away from the main topic of an argument. Debates within rhetoric concerned the purpose of digressions (ornamental distraction or circumlocutive approach to the argument) and whether they warrant a separate category alongside other regular parts of oration (see John Quincy Adam’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory). Such a practice is evident in William Congreve’s Incognita; Or, Love and Duty Reconcil’d (1692), the preface to which makes a famous early distinction between the novel and the romance. According to Charlotte E. Morgan, Congreve “was by no means the first to make use of the digression” in the novel but he “was the first to employ it so largely and so consciously” (68). Here is one such digression: Now the Reader I suppose to be upon Thorns at this and the like impertinent Digressions, but let him alone and he’ll come to himself; at which time I think fit to acquaint him, that when I digress, I am at that time writing to please my self, when I continue the Thread of the Story, I write to please him; supposing him a reasonable Man, I conclude him satisfied to allow me this liberty, and so I proceed. (14)

We can note, first, that Congreve clearly establishes digressions as interruptions to “the Thread of the Story,” and secondly that he finds it necessary to playfully apologize for his digressions and explain their presence due to a sense of their being a form of authorial indulgence. This practice continues throughout the eighteenth century, with “impertinent digression” being a common phrase in works of both history and fiction when an author offers an expositional summary. Fielding offered a variety of reasons for including his “digressive essays” in Tom Jones. For instance, in book 5, chapter 1, he invokes the principle of contrast that constitutes the idea of beauty by offering its reverse, suggesting this makes his prefatory chapters essential to the work, yet able to be passed over

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if they are considered too dull. In book 9, chapter 1, he proclaims that they offer “a Kind of Mark or Stamp” that will distinguish his genuine history from the “Swarm of foolish Novels, and monstrous Romances” that are increasingly imposed upon the public (428). These introductory remarks, Fielding explains, display the “Learning and Knowledge” that is far more difficult to imitate than “mere Narrative only” (429). Digressions, in this formulation, constitute a generic feature of the new novel, guaranteeing its distinctive qualities. In The History of Charlotte Summers (1770), Sarah Fielding’s authorial narrator playfully invokes this precedent established by Fielding to assert an author’s “extensive Privilege” and “absolute Right to digress when and where he pleases” and on any subject, regardless of its relevance (23). A survey of contemporaneous responses to Tom Jones indicates that digressive commentary was considered to be a distraction to readers, and perhaps to lessen the dramatic force of a narrative, but not necessarily to undermine its status as fiction. For instance, in Peregrine Pickle (1751) Smollett includes a digression parodying Fielding’s digressions, claiming that I might here, in imitation of some celebrated writers, furnish out a page or two, with the reflections he made upon the instability of human affairs, the treachery of the world, and the temerity of youth; and endeavour to decoy the reader into a smile, by some quaint observation of my own, touching the sagacious moraliser: but, besides that I look upon this practice as an impertinent anticipation of the peruser’s thoughts, I have too much matter of importance upon my hands, to give the reader the least reason to believe that I am driven to such paltry shifts, in order to eke out the volume. (568)

Here the critique is twofold: assuming the reader’s agreement with the author’s moralizing opinion and unnecessarily extending the duration of the narrative. Digressions were not a major concern in eighteenth-century discussions of the relation of the novel to truth or history because the question of fiction was largely a question of the moral responsibility of the author to ensure the probability of events, hence the overwhelming attention paid to plot. The “paltry shifts” of Fielding’s digressions were not considered disruptions to the verisimilitude of the novel because they were not seen to work against its probability. In Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1776), James Burnett does offer a criticism of the probability of Tom Jones on stylistic grounds: the use of the mock-heroic style to describe a squabble in a churchyard. Apart from this being “too great a change of style,” Burnett argues that such a description “destroys the probability of the narrative, which ought to be carefully studied in all works, that, like Mr. Fielding’s, are imitations of real life and manners” (194). Burnett goes on to suggest one other blemish

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on the perfection of the novel, “namely, the author’s appearing too much in it himself, who had nothing to do in it at all. By this the reader will understand that I mean his reflections, with which he begins his books, and sometimes his chapters” (194). Again it can noted that while Fielding’s commentary was considered extraneous, it was not charged with destroying probability. This is not surprising given that there was little discussion in eighteenth century criticism of the methods of narration, beyond comparison of Fielding’s epic or narrative form with Richardson’s epistolary form. In 1786 Richard Cumberland wrote that, in contrast to Richardson, Fielding “pursued the more natural mode of a continued narration, with an exception however of certain miscellaneous chapters, one of which he prefixed to each book in the nature of a prologue, in which the author speaks in person: He has executed this so pleasantly, that we are reconciled to the interruption in this instance; but I should doubt if it is a practice in which an imitator would be wise to follow” (332). It is clear that the chief criticism of digressions in the eighteenth century was that they performed a retardatory function, preventing the flow of the narrative. Of course, they were also condemned for their moralizing nature, although they obviously performed other functions, chiefly to comment on the genre of the novel itself, and to enable novelists to refer to the work of other novelists. At the same time, digressions were clearly an accepted convention of the novel, even though ostentatiously apologizing for their presence seems to be the standard rhetorical practice (the most famous unapologetic use of digression in the eighteenth century being Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, although this employed a first-person character-narrator). The grounds on which they were acceptable depended on the moral usefulness of the comment and its “timing” or placement within the narrative (see Moody, 1790; Cumberland, 1795, 201–2). The earliest argument that Fielding’s commentary self-consciously parades the fictionality of the novel can be found in Walter Scott’s Lives of the Novelists (1825). In his life of Fielding, Scott makes the standard observation of Tom Jones that the introductory chapters of each book, “which rather interrupt the course of the story and the flow of the interest at the first perusal,” are upon subsequent readings the most entertaining (30). He also argues that the “attention of the reader is never diverted or puzzled by unnecessary digressions, or recalled to the main story by abrupt and startling recurrences,” except for the story of the Old Man of the Hill (25). However, in his life of Smollet, Scott compares the two writers and offers this assessment: Fielding pauses to explain the principles of his art, and to congratulate himself and his readers on the felicity, with which he constructs his narrative, or makes his characters evolve themselves in the progress. These appeals to the

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reader’s judgment, admirable as they are, have sometimes the fault of being diffuse, and always the great disadvantage, that they remind us we are perusing a work of fiction, and that the beings with whom we have been conversant during the perusal, are but a set of evanescent phantoms, conjured up by a magician for our amusement. (138)

Scott’s first assessment appears well in keeping with eighteenth-century views of Fielding’s digressions as narrative interruptions, but the comparison with Smollet provides a new understanding of their fictionality. Eighteenthcentury readers were of course aware of the fictional status of Tom Jones, but the self-reflexivity of the introductory chapters was not noted or complained about, presumably because being reminded of the artifice of the work was not considered any kind of violation. Scott’s observation heralds a major shift in the way authorial commentary was received and theorized. Digressions retain a link to the oral tradition of rhetoric, but it may be surmised that as the consumption of novels became a private experience, accompanied by the widespread practice of silent reading, the “voice” of the author came under more scrutiny. According to Richard Stang, “there was no extensive discussion of the position of the novelist in his books until the 1850’s when the subject became one of the most important points in the criticism of fiction” (92–93). From this time, Stang notes, the emphasis on objectivity assumes greater moral significance, and it becomes a commonly held view that authorial commentary works against the dramatic potential of the novel. It is around this time, I would add, that we can find, in discussions of novelists such as Thackeray, Trollope, and Eliot, the word “intrusion” being used more often in annoyed references to commentary, on the grounds that such commentary breaks the dramatic illusion of a novel. For instance, an anonymous review of The Warden in 1855 offers a critical view of Trollope’s writing shared by both critics and the general public: “Mr. Trollope speaks far too much in his own person in the course of his narrative. It is always the reader’s business, never the author’s, to apostrophize characters. The ‘illusion of the scene’ is invariably perilled, or lost altogether, when the writer harangues in his own person on the behaviour of his characters, or gives us, with an intrusive ‘I,’ his own experiences of the house in which he describes those characters living” (“Unsigned,” 37). The most important thing to note in this, and many other assertions like it over the ensuing decades, is that commentary is not being condemned for interrupting the narrative and retarding the flow of the story; it is being criticized for destroying the illusion of fiction, and hence, for working against the impulse of the novel to present readers with a picture of life (see Greg, 1858; Holt, 1876). By the end of the

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century, H. G. Wells (1896) was compelled to lament “that the mere fact of a digression condemns a novel to many a respectable young critic. It is an antiquated device, say these stripling moderns, worthy only of the rude untutored minds of Sterne or Thackeray” (268). An increasing emphasis on the reader’s immersive experience in the illusion of fiction underpins this dissatisfaction with authorial commentary from the mid-nineteenth century. In a book review of Margaret Oliphant’s The Story of Valentine and his Brother, John Dennis (1875) writes: “Too fond also is she of writing of her characters as if she stood apart from them and was criticizing their motives, a defect which is also conspicuous in Mr. Trollope. When the reader is absorbed in a story, the obtrusion of the author’s comments destroys something of the illusion” (408–9). The key concept here is that of “absorption,” a term that resonates with what Nicholas Dames (2004) has called a “wave theory of novelistic affect” (214): the forgotten tradition of Victorian novel theory concerned with neither the object nor the compositional practice of the novel, but rather its physiological and affective consumption. This is not to say that the immersive allure of fiction was not noted in the eighteenth century. However, it was not upheld as vital to the function of the novel itself because there was an ambivalence about its effects. In fact, a major criticism of the novel centered on the moral and physiological effects of its immersive allure: its capacity to act as a model for licentious behavior or to render the reader inert and lazy. Defenses of the novel sought to distance its effects from those of the romance. In a 1751 review of Peregrine Pickle, John Cleland invokes the Horatian formula of instruction and delight to assert that amongst the surfeit of “useless books” (44) the new species of fictional biographies perform a “public benefit” by virtue of serving as “pilot’s charts, or maps of those parts of the world, which every one may chance to travel through” (45). On the other hand, romances and novels that cleave to “the marvellous absurd” rather than nature or probability “transport the reader unprofitably into the clouds” (45). At the same time, Samuel Johnson’s famous Rambler essay of 1750 points to the more pernicious potential of realist fiction to encourage, by the example of its characters, a moral failure in readers. This quote from Sylph no. 5, October 1796, indicates a hyperbolic concern for the misdirected sympathies that immersion in “foolish, yet dangerous” novels can generate: “I have actually seen mothers, in miserable garrets, crying for the imaginary distress of an heroine, while their children were crying for bread” (original emphasis; qtd in Taylor, 53). There were positive views of this effect at the time, but they were not necessarily applied to the novel. For instance, in a section of Elements of Criticism (1762) titled “Emotions Caused by Fiction,” Lord Kames describes as

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a “waking dream” the impression of immediate involvement that a narrative creates in readers and spectators, enabling them to be moved by things that either don’t exist or no longer exist. Kames makes no mention of the novel or the romance, however, and his discussion of the sympathetic benefits of fiction revolves mainly around the epic poem and the tragedy. When novelistic illusion was painted in a positive light it was not necessarily related to fictionality. The author of a 1770 article in Gentleman’s Magazine writes of Richardson’s Clarissa: “The illusion is lasting, and complete: What art he must have had to produce it!” (274). He goes on to say, “No Author, I believe, ever metamorphosed himself into his characters so perfectly as Richardson; we forget, we no longer see, the hand which puts so many secret springs in motion; sometimes we are tempted to suspect that the letters were intercepted” (in I. Williams, 274). Here we can see Richardson praised for creating an illusion in which his authorial hand is invisible, although this, of course, relates to the epistolary form rather than the narrative form in which authorial commentary functions. Furthermore the illusion praised here is not just one of verisimilitude but one that creates a sense of documentary truth, a sense that the letters were “intercepted” rather than invented by the author. The illusion of this pseudofactual premise is fundamentally different from the illusion of fiction that becomes praised in the nineteenth century. In his article, “Moving Worlds: Fictionality and Illusion after Coleridge,” Peter Garratt points out that theories of transport or illusion become prominent in the nineteenth century through the work of John Stuart Mill, George Henry Lewes, and James Sully. In this context, Garratt argues, the paradox of fictional truth—how we can become emotionally and affectively engaged in something we know not to be true—comes to be considered in a positive light: “The tendency to ‘lose ourselves,’ as Sully puts it, unites fictionality and sociability through the term sympathy. Their trance-like state of psychological (in)attention entails a type of illusion, yet one with ethical potential” (759–60). Garratt here is drawing upon Sully’s work on the psychology of illusion. It is worth briefly attending to Sully’s 1881 essay “George Eliot’s Art” to see his thoughts on authorial commentary. In this essay Sully writes: “To say that the characters of fiction are real, is to say that they are understood. Now a character is only understood when the spectator is able, in a measure, to make it his own by assimilating himself to it at the moment in active sympathy” (384). He goes on to explain that a writer “who is content to depict simple actions” and offer obvious relations between cause and effect “can count on the rapid apprehension of the sequences by the unaided imagination of the reader” without any conscious reflection (388). But for a reader to grasp the complex inner action that concerns Eliot’s novels, help is required from

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the author. “Our author comes to his aid by supplying the general truth, the fruit of numerous observations” (389). Sully points out that offering general truths has a long history in drama and in the novel, but two things distinguish Eliot’s commentary from previous writers: the penetration and scientific precision of her psychological analysis, and the fact that her “thoughts on man and life are much more closely interwoven with the narrative than those of earlier novelists of whom Fielding may be taken as a type” (389). In other words, what Sully calls “the distinguishing function of the modern art of fiction” (378) and its capacity to produce sympathy, requires more than simple immersion in action; it requires the intellectual stimulation offered by Eliot’s authorial insight. At the same time, the integrated nature of her commentary ensures more focused attention. The valorization of sympathy affords a more nuanced understanding of the ambivalence toward authorial commentary in this period. On the one hand, commentary is necessary to both guide the reader’s sympathy and maintain a certain distance from the characters; on the other hand, this works against the impulse toward objectivity that requires a formal effacement of authorial presence. For instance, in “The Uses of Fiction” (1870), an anonymous article in Tinsley’s Magazine, the author claims: “Without that constant communion with other natures which enlarges the sympathy and widens the understanding, men are apt to settle down into a sordid selfishness. Fiction steps in and shows the beauty of a healthier, more active and beneficial life” (181). After discussing the wisdom of George Eliot, the author goes on to assert: “But everything depends on the manner in which the novelist introduces these glimpses of thought, or erudition, or wit. They must not be obtruded, or the illusion of the story is destroyed” (185). Here we can see the confluence of two imperatives—the importance of sympathy, and the necessity of illusion— which authorial commentary must negotiate by facilitating the former while guarding against intrusion into the latter. According to Suzanne Keen, in Empathy and the Novel (2007), the Victorian period is responsible for reinventing the novel “as a form that might do something positive in the world by swaying readers’ minds rather than activating their passions” (38), but the twentieth-century coinage of “empathy” was the key term for transforming “novel-reading from a morally suspect waste of time to an activity cultivating the role-taking imagination” (39). The influence of this paradigm shift from “feeling for” to “feeling with” characters on formalist theories of fiction can be found in Joseph Warren Beach’s The Twentieth-Century Novel (1932), in which the author claims that the “great outstanding feature of technique since the time of Henry James” is that “the story shall tell itself, being conducted through the impression of the characters” (16).

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The formal technique of point of view that dramatizes consciousness, Beach argues, is what “finally differentiates fiction from history and philosophy and science” (16). To achieve this, authors had to give up their tendency to indulge in moral philosophy through intrusive commentary. While Fielding had the sense to confine most of his “sundry speculations and reflections” to the introductory essays of his novels, “with Scott and Thackeray, with Trollope and Meredith, this essay matter is scattered through the narrative, where it tends to reduce greatly the dramatic tension, the illusion of life” (16). Although these writers possessed great wisdom, Beach claims, “for better or for worse, the fashion has changed; we like fiction unadulterated; we like the sense of taking part in an actual, a present experience, without the interference of an authorial guide” (16). What is significant about this argument is the definition of fiction itself: an illusion of life filtered through the consciousness of characters. By definition, then, authorial commentary works not only against realism, but against fiction itself. And hence the nineteenth-century realist novel was not real enough because it was not wholly fictional. We can conclude that when a focus on the ethical benefit—rather than the moral danger—of the illusions of novel reading came to the fore in nineteenth-­century criticism, digressive commentary, considered to stray from the narrative and display the writer’s own moral interests, also came to be considered an intrusion into the reader’s experience of the fictional world produced by the narrative discourse. In turn, the lexical shift from digression to intrusion may indicate the point at which authorial commentary, first used to self-­consciously distinguish the realist novel, was understood not just as an interruption to the narrative but as a violation of the conventions of realism. This may also indicate that expectations for the novel changed from a true report of the world in the form of a fictitious history, to a true experience of a fictional world. There are a number of points arising from this historical account. Authorial commentary is not a singular nor a static formal convention but a varied practice with a historically shifting relation to realism: if novels are judged by the probability of their plots, then digressions may stall the narrative, but they do not disrupt verisimilitude and are acceptable if they inculcate valuable moral lessons; if novels are judged by their capacity to generate sympathy by immersing readers in an illusion of life, then authorial intrusions are troublesome if they break the spell of this illusion, but nonetheless allow sagacious authors to provide psychological insight; and if novels are judged according to a principle of objectivity in which the unmediated perspective of characters is paramount, then any reminder of authorial presence is both an ethical failure and a violation of the art form itself.

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Both the range of authorial intrusions I have identified, and the critical responses they invoke, indicate that it is too reductive to characterize all intrusions, by definition, as illusion-breaking or metafictional. While a formalist designation of intrusions in relation to narrative time and voice is necessary for analytic precision, what counts as intrusive is both subjective and dependent on prevailing aesthetic assumptions. For instance, in his 1881 defense of intrusive commentary, Leslie Stephen observed that Walter Scott “never reminds you obtrusively of the presence of the author” (34). Yet in his 1932 critique of such commentary, Joseph Warren Beach includes Scott in a list of the usual suspects in whose novels “the author is everywhere present in person to see that you are properly informed on all the circumstances of the action” (14), further arguing that “there is too little form and far too much history in Scott, to make his novels effectively dramatic” (178). The correlation between realism and immersion becomes complicated when we consider the protean nature and reception of authorial intrusions. This can be seen in claims that the nineteenth-century realist novel is both the exemplar of immersive fiction (Wolf; Ryan, 2001), and the high point of the intrusive omniscient narrator (Beach; Miller).

EMPATHY, IMMERSION, AND FICTIONAL CHARACTERS Understanding the historical function of authorial intrusions becomes important when we consider the influence that theories of empathy have assumed in both scholarly and public accounts of the value of fiction. A prominent strain of empirical research on the relation between immersion and empathy takes as its premise the claim that reading fiction stimulates Theory of Mind, or our evolved cognitive capacity for attributing thoughts to others, thus improving social cognition and promoting prosocial behavior. While many studies note a correlation between readers’ self-reporting accounts of immersion in a story and subsequent increases in empathy tests, most scholars are cautious about asserting a direct causal relationship between the two (see Johnson, 2012; Bal and Veltkamp, 2013; Stansfield and Bunce, 2014). However, the very fact that the relationship continues to be tested demonstrates how engrained the link between immersion and empathy has become in literary criticism, psychology, and cognitive science. In her account of the field in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, Suzanne Keen points out that empirical studies of altruistic or prosocial behavior stemming from narrative empathy are rudimentary, but she does not question the relation between immersion and empathy: “We may hypothesize that the deeper the immersion and the stron-

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ger the empathetic connection, the greater the chance of prosocial responding. Or we may predict the opposite” (354). From this we can gather that while the empathy-altruism nexus is up for grabs, the immersion-empathy nexus appears not to be. The assumption that immersion is required for empathy to develop clearly has consequences for the characterization of authorial intrusions. The larger issue here is the governing assumption from cognitive psychology to literary Darwinism that the evolutionary function of fiction is to create empathetic responses to characters in order to help people adapt to their social environment (see Mar and Oatley, 2008; Boyd, 2009; Gottschall, 2012). Such scholarship should be seen as part of a longer history of attempts to locate the distinctive quality and function of fiction in its moral use-value, and even the utilitarian value of its study. In doing so, this scholarship draws attention to the question of fictionality by asserting that fiction, more so than nonfiction, and even “literary” fiction more so than popular fiction, has the capacity to stimulate our Theory of Mind (see Zunshine, 2013; Kidd and Castano, 2013). In Empathy and the Novel (2007), Keen points out that the “most commonly nominated feature of narrative fiction to be associated with empathy is character identification” (93) and argues that “readers’ perception of a text’s fictionality plays a role in subsequent empathetic response, by releasing readers from the obligations of self-protection through skepticism and suspicion” (88). In highlighting the vital role that the paratextual frame of fiction plays in allowing readers to engage emotionally with literary characters, Keen articulates what Gallagher claims was a new view of fiction self-consciously developed in the eighteenth-century British novel. Gallagher invokes the writings of Coleridge to explain the view that a novel reader “had the enjoyment of deep immersion in illusion because she was protected from delusion by the voluntary framework of disbelief ” (349). While Gallagher’s theory of readerly engagement with fictional nobodies is more sophisticated than the views articulated here (as I will discuss at the end of this chapter), the theory of reflexive realism can nonetheless be seen as a literary-historical counterpart of contemporary approaches to empathy in narrative studies and cognitive psychology. The formula of these approaches is: Fictionality + immersion = character identification > empathy

As empathy became the central justification for the social value of the novel in the twentieth century, this relied upon readers’ immersion in a fictional world and emotional engagement with its characters, perpetuating an inherited aesthetic principle of impersonality that assumed all authorial intru-

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sions impede this engagement. The reason for such an impediment, however, cannot simply be that intrusions draw attention to a work’s fictionality, given that awareness of a character’s fictional status is precisely what allows us to develop our empathy. The methods of formal realism, or “expressions of realist reflexivity,” clearly have an uneven and complicated relationship with empathy when framed by the paradox of fictional truth: we must be aware of a work’s fictional status in order to empathize with its characters, but we must not be reminded of this status while reading. In this light, paratextual signals of fictionality play an essential role by framing our global approach to a novel, enabling readers to “unleash their emotional responsiveness” (98) as Keen says. Some textual signposts such as access to consciousness facilitate our involvement with characters, but others, such as self-reflexive authorial intrusions, work against our capacity to feel for characters we know not to be real. I suggest this is not so much because intrusions are incompatible with verisimilitude, given their historical role in the development of the realist novel, nor because verisimilitude is required for empathy (since, as Keen points out, we can feel empathy for cartoon animals and require only rudimentary features to identify with a character, such as their name and a recognizable situation). Rather, admissions of fictionality highlight not only the nonreferential status of characters, but their provisionality or arbitrariness as subjects invented by the author, depriving our sense of characters as autonomous individuals. The ethical imperative for a fictional character to appear independent of their creator is the final measure of success in a cultural regime that affords greatest value to the development of empathy in readers. In what follows I will address the relationship between postmodern selfreflexivity and the dominant ethos of empathy by analyzing the agonistic relationship between authorial narrator and invented character in a clutch of Anglo-American metafictional novels by Muriel Spark, John Fowles, B. S. Johnson, and Gilbert Sorrentino from the mid to late twentieth century. What emerges from these novels is an emphasis less on facilitating readers’ empathetic investment in characters than on a particular ethos of authorial creativity that has two prominent preoccupations: parading the author’s capacity to invent characters while dilating upon the limits of their knowledge about these creations, and highlighting the challenge of creating convincing characters when the conventions of realism appear stale and artificial. The writers I will be looking at build upon a novelistic tradition stretching back to Tom Jones and Jacques the Fataliste of commenting upon the extent to which they possess authorial control over their characters. This brings me to consider authorial intrusion not only in the rhetorical sense, but in the pseudo-­ ontological sense of a metaleptic rupture between author and fictional world.

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THE REFLEXIVE TURN: POSTMODERN METALEPSIS AND AUTHORIAL CREATIVITY My approach thus far has been to highlight the role of authorial intrusions in ongoing debates about the generic status and cultural authority of the novel, and especially its vexed relationship to realism. My argument has been that, despite conventional wisdom about the antimimetic nature of authorial intrusions, commentary that refers to the work itself—its progress, its aims, its various formal features, its generic status—played an important role in establishing the formal methods and critical expectations of realist fiction. Although we have inherited an aesthetics of impersonality that condemned commentary for parading the mediating presence of the author, commentary on the structure and form of a novel is not necessarily designed to undermine verisimilitude. According to Ansgar Nünning, the intrusive voices of postmodern metafiction mark the historical point at which metanarrative commentary comes to serve a predominantly illusion-breaking purpose. How do we account for this apparent quantitative shift in the function of authorial commentary? The ironic, self-reflexive voices of many metafictional novels are clearly a reaction against the poetics of impersonality championed by Ford Madox Ford and articulated by critics such as Lubbock and Beach. The 1960s see a critical reappraisal of the neo-Jamesian injunction against authorial intrusions, as emblematized by Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction. This leads to various reevaluations of the novelistic tradition, restoring the reputation of Trollope for instance (see Arthur, 1971; Pickering, 1973). This reevaluation coincides with the postmodern use of authorial intrusions to self-reflexively expose the ossified conventions of realism and its claims for representational correspondence. At the same time as they highlighted the artifice of realist fiction, metafictional novels circulated alongside and often contributed to what MarieLaure Ryan (1997) has called the doctrine of panfictionality, a collapse of the dichotomy between fiction and nonfiction into the larger category of textuality, which is “due to the expansion of fiction at the expense of nonfiction” (165). Here we have an intellectual milieu akin to that of the eighteenth century, where ontological boundaries between genres were equally porous, but which inverts the hierarchy of this period. Eighteenth-century novelists were compelled to invoke the cultural authority of other narrative genres, such as history, biography, the travelogue, and the memoir, while simultaneously specifying what distinguished novelistic “truth” from these genres. By contrast, postmodern metafiction undermines the verisimilar posture of realism as part of a broader challenge to the referential status of nonfictional genres.

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Based on the premise that authorial intrusions project a historically specific figure of authorship, my aim in what follows is to shift the focus of novelistic fictionality from the question of referentiality to the issue of authorial creativity. The most extreme form of authorial intrusion is not the direct address to readers that disrupts their immersion in the fictional world but the transgression of diegetic levels in which author and character occupy the same fictional world. For Genette, narrators pausing to digress while a character carries out an action, or inviting us to leave a character and shift to another scene is “an ordinary and innocent” form of metalepsis, a rhetorical feature that plays “on the double temporality of the story and the narrating” (1980, 235). When authorial narrators playfully discuss what they could do with their characters they are demonstrating a more extreme form of metalepsis in which they intrude into the diegetic universe of the story. The transgression here, for Genette, would be one that disregards the separation of powers between author (invention) and narrator (knowledge). In this context he invokes Sterne and Diderot as canonical examples, along with the classical figure of speech that attributes the cause of events to the author, “as when we say that Virgil ‘has Dido die’” (234). Why would an author introduce into a narrative the knowledge that they could have a character die, or otherwise tell us that events are being made up? We could say that it is to expose the inherent fictionality of a work, but that would be, I think, to interpret an effect as the cause. If we listen to narrators, it tends to be in order to discuss their labor of composition, the aesthetic and ethical choices informing their creative process, with the aim of promoting a certain figure of authorship. The centripetal force of the trope of the death of the novel in various iterations since the mid-twentieth century has become a source for artistic inspiration as much as it is expressive of a general cultural anxiety about the status of literary fiction. The intrusive narrative voices of postmodern fiction that play on this trope grapple, I argue, with a self-­conscious clash between the ethical imperative for autonomous character and the apparent exhaustion of techniques for rendering character. To address this, I will focus on a particular type of authorial narrator: the narrator who overtly attests to being a novelist in order to discuss their relationship to their own characters. In Tom Jones, Fielding’s narrator likes to call himself a historian, but he also lets us know that he is writing a novel. Toward the end of the novel, he dilates on the difference between comic and tragic writing, arguing that because his work is of the former variety the resolution of his plot will be far more difficult given the precarious situation of his characters: “But to bring

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our Favourites out of their present Anguish and Distress, and to land them at last on the shore of Happiness, seems a much harder Task: a Task indeed so hard that we do not undertake to execute it” (776). The task is the difficulty of plausibly adhering to generic demands, and Fielding hints playfully that while “it is more than probable” he will be able to furnish Sophia with a husband, he despairs at the likelihood of preventing Tom Jones from being hanged, suggesting that the reader who enjoys executions “ought not to lose any Time in taking a first row at Tyburn” (776). In this passage, Fielding approaches his characters less as occupying an autonomous fictional world over which he has no control and must simply report on, than as a world of his own invention, modeled on his own observations of human nature. However, what prevents him from deciding the fate of his characters as he sees fit is both a moral adherence to a concept of verisimilitude and a particular view of the nature of the creative process. He goes on to say: This I faithfully promise, that notwithstanding any Affection, which we may be supposed to have for this Rogue, whom we have unfortunately made our Heroe, we will lend him none of that supernatural Assistance with which we are entrusted, upon condition that we use it only on very important Occasions. If he doth not therefore find some natural Means of fairly extricating himself from all his Distresses, we shall do no Violence to the Truth and Dignity of History for his Sake; for we had rather relate that he was hanged at Tyburn (which may very probably be the Case) than forfeit our Integrity, or shock the Faith of the Reader. (777)

According to Fielding, the Ancients and Eastern writers have the advantage of these supernatural means because of their belief in such possibilities, means which are denied by the laws of probability that derive from a rational conception of the world founded on empirical philosophy. Fielding, of course, does not disavow the supernatural concept of a Christian God, whose divine Providence offers the ultimate model for the resolution of his plot. What is important to note in the present context, however, is that while Fielding acknowledges the omnipotence that derives from his role as creator of fictional characters, he cannot indulge this fancy for fear of stretching the measure of fictional truth that defines the realist novel: probability. Of course, we can never be in doubt that Jones will be rescued from the noose, but we can be confident that it will not defy nature. He goes on to assert that the “distempered brains” of romance writers are unfit for this task because for them invention is a creative faculty, whereas Fielding is at pains to emphasize the

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classical rhetorical concept of invention as the discovery of a topic, making the novelist’s learning the defining feature of his new species of writing. In the opening chapter to Henry (1795), titled “The High Dignity, Powers, and Prerogatives of the Novel Writer,” Richard Cumberland’s novelistnarrator points out that if fiction alone were enough to distinguish a novel, then most histories and biographies would be such, for they contain invented dialogue and scenes despite their claims to truth. However, he claims, “it is only in the professed department of the novel that true and absolute liberty is enjoyed” (3). In other words, because the novel owns and advertises its fictionality it is not a compromised genre. Cumberland proceeds to draw attention to the omnipotence of the novelist, the privilege to invent whatever he fancies, unlike the historian: “With the hero of my novel it is otherwise: over him I have despotic power; his fate and fortune, life or death, depend on my will . . . and though I must account to nature and probability for the regularity of my proceedings, no appeal lies to truth and matter of fact against my positive decision in the case” (3). The choice of the word “despotic” to describe the author’s relationship to his characters is not insignificant. While Cumberland is at pains to emphasize the responsibility of the novelist to ensure this inventive power cleaves to the natural and the probable, he also ostentatiously acknowledges the need to avoid abusing such power: “I know that I could play my puppets after my own fancy, for the wires are in my hand . . . but I have lived long enough to see wonderful revolutions effected by an intemperate abuse of power, and shall be cautious how I risque privileges so precious upon experiments so trivial” (5). The novelist’s restraint distinguishes him from what George Canning called in 1787 the “lawless imagination” of the romance writer, and models authority in the wake of the French revolution. The playfulness of such assertions, however, indicate that for Cumberland the moral authority of the novel resides in the fact that of all genres it has the license to invent, not that it affords a truthful account of nature per se. In the attempt of novelists from Fielding to Cumberland to articulate and justify a new type of fiction as verisimilitude, they place primary focus on the novelist’s creative powers rather than the referential status of the work. But, in terms that echo the neoclassical dictum for poets to balance the heat of the imagination with cool reason, they stress that probability constrains those powers. By contrast, the self-reflexive commentary by narrator-novelists in the late twentieth century centers around and interrogates the relationship between authors and their fictional characters, but this relationship is understood less in terms of the probability of a plot than in terms of the author’s own process of writing.

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It is appropriate here to return to the opening paragraph of Chapter Thirteen in The French Lieutenant’s Woman: “I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind” (85). With this admission, Fowles is rhetorically constructing the act of narration as an event with its own duration in which the time of narrating becomes collapsed into the time of writing. The narrator is not outside the fictional world, commenting on the characters, because the fictional world is inside the author’s mind and the author is entertaining a dialogue with readers as he writes, sharing his decisions about what to write. The extended authorial intrusion in this chapter becomes a dramatization of the creative process in a way that differs from Tom Jones, precisely because, as the narrator tells us, “if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word” (85). Fowles proceeds to address the reader directly to dilate upon inherited assumptions about novel writing: Perhaps you suppose that a novelist has only to pull the right strings and his puppets will behave in a lifelike manner; and produce on request a thorough analysis of their motives and intentions. Certainly I intended at this stage (Chap. Thirteen—unfolding of Sarah’s true state of mind) to tell all—or all that matters. But I find myself suddenly like a man in the sharp spring night, watching from the lawn beneath that dim upper window in Marlborough House; I know in the context of my book’s reality that Sarah would never have brushed away her tears and leant down and delivered a chapter of revelation. (85)

Fowles recalls and rejects the figure of the author as puppet-master, which we can trace back to Cumberland’s novel, via Thackeray’s famous use of the metaphor in the preface to Vanity Fair. Instead, Fowles compares his knowledge of his own titular character to the limited knowledge that another character would have of her in what is ostensibly and performatively a sudden moment of anxiety in the act of writing, as if this were the spontaneous prompt for the existence of the intrusive chapter. “But I am a novelist,” he continues, playing devil’s advocate, “not a man in a garden—I can follow her where I like? But possibility is not permissibility” (85). Why is it not permissible to enter his protagonist’s thoughts at this moment? This leads to a discussion of the creative process itself: “You may think that novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen” (86). Fowles goes on to point out the many different motivations for writing that novelists have before claiming that “only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create

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worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. That is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator” (86). That is, we can’t just have Dido die. However, the reason for this is not to do with a moral obligation to adhere to the principles of probability in order to distinguish the novel from the incredible inventions of the romance. The reason is to do with the ethical principle of aesthetic freedom: In other words, to be free myself, I must give him, and Tina, and Sarah, even the abominable Mrs Poulteney, their freedoms as well. There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist. And I must conform to that definition. The novelist is still a god since he creates . . . ; what has changed is that we are no longer the gods of the Victorian image, omniscient and decreeing, but in the new theological image, with freedom our first principle, not authority. (86)

This principle is not necessarily theological for it accords with what Dorothy Hale calls the aesthetics of alterity, a tradition of novel theory from Henry James to the contemporary moral philosophy of Martha Nussbaum, which holds that “the ethical value of literature lies in the felt encounter with alterity that it brings to its reader” (899). For the affective experience of alterity to function, a vital feature is the autonomy of characters. In this context, postmodern authors seem to perpetuate the idea of an ethical responsibility to the freedom of their characters while recognizing the artificiality of form associated with this aesthetics, especially the dogmatic requirement to efface authorial presence. Of course, Fowles’s narrator is also a fictive entity, one capable of entering the fictional world to address his own character, but he is a clear proxy for the author and gives us little reason to suspect an ironic distance between he and the flesh-and-blood author. Why tell us we are reading a novel, though? I mean, we know that already. Fowles here is building the anxiety of authorship into the novel and making it part of the plot, a story of composition on the extradiegetic level with its own form of duration that ultimately influences the plot with the final series of alternative endings. I say “anxiety” because unlike the displays of omnipotence in the eighteenth century, which are designed to highlight how the new species of composition differs from the romance by virtue of cleaving to probability, these intrusions are designed to reflect upon the conventions of realism inherited from the classic novel. If the author has the power to freely invent nonreferential characters but is not necessarily beholden to probability, the

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measure of verisimilitude is internal to the fictional world—to an ethical obligation to respect the autonomy of characters—rather than external, and this autonomy must be guided by the integrity of the creative process instead of a pressure to rein in creativity by adhering to empirically based norms of observation. To demonstrate this, then, novelist-narrators must share their creative decisions, which leads to metafictional reflection on the formal features of fiction itself, such as thought representation, description, and dialogue. To pursue this line of investigation into authorial commentary on the role of fictional characters, I will address in more detail two examples of postmodern metalepsis preceding and succeeding Fowles’s novel: Muriel Spark’s The Comforters (1957) and B. S. Johnson’s Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry (1973). Both of these novels are clearly designed to question the conventionality of realism, offering parodic critiques of omniscient narration even as they claim omniscient authority. Both also offer meditations on the concept of fictional character. The question they pose for the theory of reflexive realism is: if we identify with characters because we know they are fictional, what happens when the characters themselves know they are fictional?

MADNESS OR METALEPSIS IN MURIEL SPARK’S THE COMFORTERS (1957) The Comforters was published in the same year as Watt’s The Rise of the Novel. There is an ironic symmetry here in the sense that while Watt sought to clarify the methods of formal realism and provide a plausible sociological and philosophical context for its historical emergence, Spark builds her novel around the problem of realism in the twentieth century, and particularly the relationship between creating author and fictional character. The protagonist of this novel, Caroline Rose, is a literary critic writing a book about form in the twentieth-century novel who admits she is struggling with the chapter on realism, while simultaneously discovering that she is a character in a novel herself. The comparison pursued throughout this book is one between an intrusive authorial narrator and an interventionist God, and Caroline’s religious skepticism is established early when she questions the pious Mrs. Hogg over whether she actually hears the voice of “Our Lady.” In the following chapter, Caroline is alone and thinking to herself about her partner Laurence and his mother Helena. The account of her reflection ends with: “On the whole she did not think there would be any difficulty with Helena” (34). Immediately following this line, the next paragraph opens:

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Just then she heard the sound of a typewriter. It seemed to come through the wall on her left. It stopped, and was immediately followed by a voice remarking her own thoughts. It said: On the whole she did not think there would be any difficulty with Helena. (34–35)

This intrusion into Caroline’s mind will continue throughout the book: the sound of a typewriter followed by a strange chorus of voices reporting her thoughts back to her. The line repeated here could be a free indirect rendering of her internal utterance or a narratorial summary of her thoughts. In a state of confusion, Caroline searches her apartment for the source of the voices, thinking it may be her neighbors: “What on earth are they up to at this time of night? Caroline wondered. But what worried her were the words they had used, coinciding so exactly with her own thoughts” (35). This passage of thought representation is duly overheard by Caroline, causing even greater consternation: “It was the phrase ‘Caroline wondered’ which arrested her” (36)—the significance of the tag clause being that it signals the presence of another entity capable of directly quoting her thoughts. This scenario establishes the link between the omniscient narrator and God, invoked by Caroline’s fear of the existence of spirits “who had read her thoughts, perhaps who could read her very heart” (36). As Caroline struggles over whether the source recording her “feelings and reflections” is real or imaginary, and thus whether her sanity is at stake, readers must question whether or not this is a metaleptic authorial intrusion in which the narrator speaks directly to the character, making her both protagonist and reader. The scene continues: Meantime, she was trembling, frightened out of her wits, although her fear was not altogether blind. Tap-click-tap. The voices again: Meantime, she was trembling, frightened out of her wits, although her fear was not altogether blind. (36–37)

In this passage it is not only Caroline’s thoughts being repeated back to her but a summary and evaluation of her state of mind. Her frantic searching through her apartment for the origin of the voice resembles a scene from a Radcliffean terror novel, and throughout the book we are presented with two options for the “explained supernatural” of what Caroline comes to call the “Typing Ghost”: her own delusion or authorial metalepsis. To escape the torment of these voices, Caroline stays overnight with her friend Willi Stock, known as the Baron. Here she tells him that her thoughts are always preceded

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by the sound of the typewriter and are always relayed in the past tense with “mocking voices”: “And you say this chorus comments on your thoughts and actions?” “Not always,” said Caroline, “that’s the strange thing. It says ‘Caroline was thinking or doing this or that’—then sometimes it adds a remark of its own.” (45)

Caroline’s response to this external voice encourages us to consider the extent to which the passages of thought representation we have read thus far are entirely her words, drawing attention to how narratorial commentary and character thought become blurred in the transition between psychonarration and Free Indirect Discourse (FID). It is during this conversation with the Baron that Caroline reveals she is writing a book on modern novelistic form and mentions her difficulties with the chapter on realism. This gives readers interpretive license to read her story as an enactment of this conceptual and compositional struggle. In fact, Caroline’s plight dramatizes the critique of realism that will take shape in histories of the novel. Caroline later describes her experience as “this invisible person tuning in to your life” (84), with the narrator eventually reporting that she “was now fully conscious that she was under observation intermittently by an intruder” (89). This sense of being observed by an “intruder,” and of eventually being trapped in a novel, anticipates John Bender’s argument in Imagining the Penitentiary (1987), for instance, that FID provides the illusion of transparency while functioning as kind of panoptic surveillance by an omniscient narrator, modeling a practice of self-scrutiny that characters internalize. In this novel, what the narrator describes as Caroline’s “customary habit of self-observation” (38) becomes reflected back to her in the voice of another. The story takes shape as a conflict between narrator and character when Caroline visits her friend, the priest Father Jerome, to tell him about the voices, describing the experience as like having someone watching her and reading her thoughts, “waiting to pounce on some insignificant thought or action, in order to make it signify in a strange distorted way” (53). She goes on to say: “‘But the typewriter and the voices—it is as if a writer on another plane of existence was writing a story about us.’ As soon as she had said these words, Caroline knew she had hit on the truth” (53). With this epiphany Caroline becomes reassured of the external existence of the typewriter and disembodied voice and sets out to discover as much as she can about the author. While Laurence encourages her to use a tape recorder to capture the sound, in the hopes of puncturing her delusion, she tells him she knows nothing will

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record, but: “This sound might have another sort of existence and still be real” (54). This existence, in formal terms, would be that of a heterodiegetic narrator absent from the fictional world and occupying an extradiegetic level of the narrative discourse. When Caroline falls asleep, we have the first direct authorial intrusion, a pause in the narrative to inform us that the “truth” Caroline has discovered is her own fictional status: “At this point in the narrative, it might be as well to state that the characters in this novel are all fictitious, and do not refer to any living persons whatsoever” (59). This comment embeds the paratextual language of the legal disclaimer in the fiction itself, a twentieth-century echo of Fielding’s claim in Joseph Andrews that he describes not men but manners. Caroline wakes to this utterance and scrambles to record and transcribe the voice, but it does not appear when the dictaphone is played back. Caroline’s reply is recorded, however: “That’s a damned lie. You’re getting scared, I think. Why are you suddenly taking cover under that protestation?” (66). In a bid to protest her own ontological existence, Caroline has recourse to criticize the basis of realist fiction: that its plausible characters are types without referents. And yet if it is true that she is being fictionalized she must accept her own nonreferential status. After she explains to Laurence “her theory about the author making a book out of their lives” (83), the following dialogue ensues: “How do you know it’s a novel?” “‘The characters in this novel are all fictitious’” she quoted with a truly mad sort of laugh. “In fact,” she continued, “I’ve begun to study the experience objectively. That’s a sign, isn’t it, that I’m well again?” He thought not. He went so far to suggest, “Your work on the novel form—isn’t it possible that your mind—” “It’s convenient that I know something of the novel form,” Caroline said. “Yes,” he said. (83)

Caroline’s triumphantly presented evidence for the fictionality of their existence is a self-reflexive authorial intrusion in the form of a direct address to readers that she has overheard. Given that Laurence is not privy to this authorial voice, the inference is that her professional interest in the novel form is what enables her to see this essentially realist novel she inhabits as a form of metafiction, an inference, I suggest, which anticipates the theory of reflexive realism. With an awareness of her own status as a fictional nobody or nonreferential entity, Caroline becomes increasingly concerned with her free will, accusing Laurence of getting ideas about his grandmother “through the

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influence of a novelist who is contriving some phoney plot” (91) and seeking to resist authorial control by defying a proleptic narratorial observation that she and Laurence will travel the next day by car rather than by train. As it transpires, though, despite her attempts to spoil “the fictional plot” she is embroiled in by holding up the action, Caroline and Laurence end up having to travel by car, resulting in a crash that hospitalizes her. From her hospital bed, Caroline’s understanding of the narrative expands from her own thoughts to the thoughts of other characters, affording her a kind paraleptic knowledge: On that day Caroline Rose in hospital heard the click of a typewriter, she heard those voices, He was acquainted with the place, Georgina’s habitual residence when in London. He had been to the place before and he did not like it. It is not easy to dispense with Caroline Rose. At this point in the tale she is confined in a hospital bed, and no experience of hers ought to be allowed to intrude. Unfortunately she slept restlessly. (123)

It is clear that while initially experiencing the sensation of an intrusive narrator eavesdropping on her thoughts, Caroline increasingly tunes into the narration of the larger novel in which she is a central character. The more aware she becomes of this situation, the more agitated and intrusive the authorial narrator becomes. The self-reflexive comment above indicates that the narrator feels Caroline is herself intruding upon the story, restricting the range of focalization because the narration must attend to her thoughts whenever she is not sleeping. We are told that as she lies awake in her hospital bed, “Caroline among the sleepers turned her mind to the art of the novel, wondering and cogitating, those long hours, and exerting an undue, unreckoned, influence on the narrative from which she is supposed to be absent for a time” (124). The narrative becomes a competition between novelist and character, with the novelist almost petulantly eschewing traditional authorial power over her character by intimating that the novel itself is dictated by Caroline’s thoughts. Caroline’s awareness of her own fictional status takes the shape of literarycritical observations on the book itself, and is presented as a challenge to that authority: One day she informed him, “The Typing Ghost has not recorded any lively details about this hospital ward. The reason is that the author doesn’t know how to describe a hospital ward. This interlude in my life is not part of the

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book in consequence.” It was by making exasperating remarks like this that Caroline Rose continued to interfere with the book. (146–47)

The intrusive character evaluation in this last sentence is a metaleptic deflection of typical critical responses to authorial commentary—that it “interferes” with the progress of the narrative. The autonomous character’s internal commentary, rather than the author’s digressiveness or self-reflexivity, becomes responsible for the book’s problems—in this case a lack of description, and the narrative’s inability to progress “while she lay criticizing the book in the eight-bed ward” (147). Caroline’s critical study of the structure of the modern novel and her own involvement in a modern novel become intertwined. She tells Laurence that her work is nearing its end while the narrator tells readers, “She was aware that the book in which she was involved was still in progress” (165). She begins to study her part in a larger fictional narrative in the way she would presumably study a novel, transcribing and analyzing the narrative voice, speculating on the passage of the story: Her sense of being written into the novel was painful. Of her constant influence on its course she remained unaware and now she was impatient for the story to come to an end, knowing that the narrative could never become coherent to her until she was at last outside it, and at the same time consummately inside it. (165–66)

The division between narrator and character is made clear in the second sentence, which offers an example of psychonarration—saying more than the character knows—to reveal that Caroline’s function as a character is to drive the plot even as her self-awareness impedes its progress. Caroline’s impatience to reach the end is a dramatization of the anticipation of retrospection, simultaneously reflecting readers’ desires for final meaning to be conferred and her desire to become a reader of her own life, in this instance by acquiring a knowledge only possible through a metaleptic ascent to the level of narrative discourse, told in the past tense. With this awareness of her own status as a character, Caroline models the autothanatographic desire of all first-person narrators: to experience their lives in the moment and to narrate it from its end. As with many metafictional works, The Comforters ultimately becomes a novel about the creative process. The final twist occurs when Caroline completes her book on novelistic form and turns to fiction herself, deciding to write a novel based on the “voices” she hears. When Helena, Laurence’s mother, asks what the novel is to be about, she answers: “Characters in a

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novel” (186). In the final scene of the book, we are told that “the character called Laurence Manders was snooping around in Caroline Rose’s flat” (187). While collecting books Caroline had asked him to send to her while she is away writing, Laurence finds an extensive amount of notes for her novel. After perusing these notes, he sits down to write Caroline a letter, asserting that she misrepresents everyone and making the point that “I dislike being a character in your novel. How is it all going to end?” (187) before slipping his letter in with her notes. The last line of the novel is an authorial intrusion in the form of a prolepsis: “And he did not then foresee his later wonder, with a curious rejoicing, how the letter had got into the book” (188). As it turns out, then, Caroline is herself the authorial narrator of the book we have read, a book which both thematizes and formally enacts the dynamic tension between narrator and character that drives the history of the novel. Whether or not she is a character who becomes aware of her own fictionality through a metaleptic authorial intrusion into her world becomes no longer relevant, or at best, a question of faith. While the comparison with Catholicism and religious faith is obvious, the book is also a self-reflexive exploration of the nature of authorial creativity and the role of character in the process of creation. On each occasion that Caroline’s thoughts are revealed to her, we read the passage before she hears it, suggesting that perhaps she does not think them until they are narrated. This is a view of authorial omnipotence resulting from the creative act of invention and a view that supports most theories of fictionality: that fictive utterances create the characters to which they refer. Yet at the same time, the authorial narrator is at pains to point out that the novel is dictated by the characters themselves. Caroline’s own awareness of her fictional status becomes evidence for this, with Caroline claiming that the pain of her broken leg means “I’m not wholly a fictional character. I have independent life” (146). The view of literary creation here supports a theological view of individual free will that requires a noninterventionist God. However, it is also an extension of the paradox of fictional truth: that our awareness of a character’s fictional status is what enables us to identify with them. The twentieth-century approach to this paradox is that characters must appear autonomous in order for empathy to operate. The authorial intrusion that models this approach involves both a metaleptic rupture of the fictional world—Caroline tells Laurence that “the author obviously exists in a different dimension from ours” (84)—and the deployment of more common conventions of omniscient narration, from gnomic statements to character evaluation to self-reflexive commentary. That it turns out be a literary critic who discovers her own fictional status and writes a novel suggests a kind of self-discovery that mirrors the

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genre of the novel itself in this period. This paradox, this symbiotic relationship between inventing author and invented character is a thread that runs through postmodern metafiction as it grapples with the apparent exhaustion of the conventions of formal realism. The self-reflexive interrogation of authorial creativity becomes prevalent in the metafictional novels that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s to establish a postmodern view of reflexive realism that reorients the concept of fictionality itself.

THE FICTIONAL CREDIT OF B. S. JOHNSON’S CHRISTIE MALRY’S OWN DOUBLE-ENTRY B.  S. Johnson’s Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry (1973) is another highly metafictional novel that involves the novelist-narrator commenting on the fictional status of his characters, drawing attention to the artificiality of conventions of realist fiction and highlighting the materiality of the novel through persistent references to narrative time in the course of presenting it as a work being made up as he goes along. The plot is insubstantial and unconvincing, revolving around the titular character’s change from humble invoice clerk to terrorist out of some warped sense of personal justice based on the principle of double-entry bookkeeping. Every perceived slight against his person becomes a debit that must be balanced by an act that credits him with his social due, eventually leading him to become a notorious bomber. There is no attempt at psychological plausibility or at authentic detail; the narrator freely admits he doesn’t know how bombs work, for instance: “And he had contrived a method of throwing these switches by remote control, so to speak, in an unusual way which I am not going to bother to invent on this occasion” (101). The plot, essentially, is a prop for the real story: the novelist-narrator’s metaleptic negotiations with his own characters. Throughout the novel, the characters themselves self-reflexively articulate their own function as literary devices alongside conventions such as description and dialogue. Early in the novel, Christie’s mother tells him: “My son, I have for the purposes of this novel been your mother for the past eighteen years and five months to the day if I assume your conception to have taken place after midnight” (27). After providing an expositional history of his life, Christie’s mother proceeds to say, “It was I who first told you the comic story of God, remember, which will no doubt be passed on to readers in due course” (29). Her final advice to Christie before dying and leaving him her house and money is for him to accept that, despite the promise of the Bible, there will be no day of reckoning when all injustices are evened out.

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Christie’s mother seems entirely unsurprised that her dialogue serves an expositional purpose as part of her function as a minor character. Nor does Christie himself seem concerned, unlike Caroline in The Comforters. At one point, Christie even demonstrates in a line of dialogue his awareness of the pseudo-time that dictates his existence: “There isn’t anymore time, it’s a short novel” (40). Minor characters demonstrate the same unruffled knowledge of their nonreferential status, with an office colleague, Headlam, uttering this line: “Parsons looks like being indisposed for the rest of this novel” (95). Apart from their actantial function—“I seem to be the comic relief in this novel” (103), Headlam points out—the characters facilitate the novel at the level of discourse, with the narrator telling us: “Headlam paused to provide a paragraph break for resting the reader’s eye in what otherwise might have been a daunting mass of type” (100). The characters also seem to be aware of what is being written about them. For instance, in the opening to one of the chapters the narrator tells us: “Meanwhile, they were both perfectly happy. Well, this is fiction, is it not? Isn’t it?” (137). Two pages later, Christie’s girlfriend, Shrike, utters in dialogue: “But how can we be said to be perfectly happy a few lines back, and now be complaining about the monotony of the diet?” (139). The explanation, if there is one, is that narrator and character occupy the same diegetic level, for in the following chapter the narrator writes: “‘I was not breaking Principle Eleven again,’ Christie told me later, ‘since this was a cause, not an effect.’ How could I disagree with him?” (146). This is reminiscent of early attempts at verisimilitude in novels such as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), which explain the narrator’s knowledge by recourse to the testimony of others, except in this instance the character has clearly been marked as a fictional construct. Rather than a descending ontological metalepsis in which the heterodiegetic narrator has transgressed narrative levels by breaching the membrane between discourse and story, this interaction is more readily understood as the narrator-novelist entertaining a dialogue with the constructs of his imagination. That the fictional world is not independent of its creator is established early in the novel when the narrator tells us: “For the following passage it seems to me necessary to attempt transcursion into Christie’s mind; an illusion of transcursion, that is, of course, since you know only too well in whose mind it all really takes place” (23). Like Fowles’s narrator, Johnson refers to the privilege of omniscient access to consciousness as one byproduct of the novelist’s creative power. The analogy with God is pursued in chapter 9 in an agonistic parody of omniscient psychological analysis. The chapter opens with a reference to the prolepsis embedded in Christie’s dialogue with his mother earlier in the novel: “Here is the story promised you on page 29, as told to Christie on his Catholic moth-

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er’s shapely knee” (79). The story is that of God creating the world and populating it with Adam and Eve before the fall: “It turns out that God knew this was going to happen, because He is omniscient. It also turns out that He could have stopped it too, because He is omnipotent” (79). Johnson’s novelist-­ narrator goes on to say, “But no, God has been making it all up as He goes along, like certain kinds of novelist” (79–80). His point is that the story of Genesis is a fiction, or “lying tale-telling” (80) that Christie believed when his mother told him, but that it ultimately cannot be the source of his motivation as a character because it is a story told to everyone: “I’m going to pack this in soon: both everything and nothing in a person’s past and background may be significant” (81). Johnson’s atheistic narrator is also clearly making up the book as he goes along, and while he may employ the same analogy with God that Fielding does, the difference from Fielding’s appeal to divine Providence to resolve the plot could not be clearer. If metafictional novels such as the ones discussed here parade their own fictionality in the service of self-reflexively interrogating the stale and ostensibly exhausted assumptions about realist fiction, this interrogation stems from the stake that novelists have in the genre, and their authorial commentary tells us not only about the state of the novel in this period but about the status of novelists themselves. The image they promote is that of the contemporary novelist sitting at his or her desk, wrangling with the fate of their characters and pondering what structural and stylistic choices to make in representing them and narrating the events of the story. The figure of authorship modeled by these novelist-narrators is not that of original geniuses wielding god-like authority over their own creations, but writers struggling with the act of writing itself and taking readers into their confidence as they do so. At the same time this becomes a valorization of their own creativity. At the end of Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, the narrator visits Christie in his hospital bed. After an exchange with his character, he tells us, “The nurses then suggested I leave, not knowing who I was, that he could not die without me” (180). The use of the preterite in this sentence indicates that the narrator has undergone a metaleptic transition into the fictional world of his protagonist, but, as he has already noted, we know only too well in whose mind this is taking place, which is why only the author can have Dido die. These self-reflexive meditations on fictional character may be read as experimental challenges to the inherited traditions of the realist novel, but they are also a challenge to the assumptions that readers hold about the nature of fiction. They furthermore operate as a defense of the craft and of the medium in which writers work. While reference to the pseudo-time of narrative discourse is a recurrent feature throughout the history of the novel,

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the emphasis in metafictional novels on the materiality of the text, in which the story unfolds as it is being invented, has an additional function of highlighting the print form of codex. By foregrounding the author as the source of the words on the page—and invoking the tactile experience of reading with recurring references to page numbers and chapters—these narrator-novelists may stymie our immersion in their fictional worlds, but they seek to immerse us instead in their own creative minds in order to address the challenge of the novel’s apparent decline in relevance. In a metaleptic dialogue between the novelist-narrator of Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry and his invented character, we have this exchange: “Christie,” I warned him, “it does not seem to me possible to take this novel much further. I’m sorry.” “Don’t be sorry,” said Christie, in a kindly manner, “don’t be sorry. We don’t equate length with importance, do we? And who wants long novels anyway? Why spend all your spare time for a month reading a thousandpage novel when you can have a comparable aesthetic experience in the theatre or cinema in only one evening? The writing of a long novel is in itself an anachronistic act: it was relevant only to a society and a set of social conditions which no longer exist.” (165)

Again, the problem of the novel itself becomes one of duration. In the novel, time equals pages, and pages are written. If there can be no equivalence between narrative time and reading time, the pseudo-time of discourse can be infinitely extended. The very materiality of the novel becomes its problem in the age of cinema, but also its point of distinction. Gilbert Sorrentino’s novelist-narrator addresses this issue in Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971). In constructing a scene where his character Sheila walks along the beach the morning after her wedding, Sorrentino offers a series of sketchy sentence fragments relaying her thoughts, before opining that: “Television and the film are by some thought to be more subtle and sophisticated than prose because they can register this cliché in one swift image, that is, the cliché is somehow ameliorated because it passes swiftly. One bad still worth a bad short story” (12). The problem is that these forms have already reconfigured our concept of thought representation because his characters themselves think in movie shots. For Sorrentino and Johnson, new media forms such as cinema and television lurk in the background as the novel’s competitor, forms that purport a greater capacity for verisimilitude based on the apparent indexical nature of their mode of representation.

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FICTIONALITY AND THE SELF-AWARE CHARACTER The concept of credit is both a plot device and a metaphor for subjectivity in B.  S. Johnson’s novel. Christie’s desire to balance acts of perceived injustice against him is articulated within the paradigm of double-entry bookkeeping. Hewing to the principle that every debit must have its credit, Christie draws up a series of accounts under the heading “CHRISTIE MALRY in account with THEM.” A debit is considered an aggravation that requires recompense, starting with slights from coworkers and ranging through to “socialism not given a chance” (151); a credit ranges from stealing stationery to blowing up the House of Lords. Christie sees double-entry as a means for expressing himself and conducting his life according to an individualistic moral code. One can see double-entry as not only the modern form of accounting that underpins the capitalist system but as a mode of thinking that enables the modern subject to narrativize their lives in this system, to account for themselves by casting the logic of cause and effect in economic terms. Here I return to Gallagher’s concept of fictional nobodies as the key mode of nonreferentiality that defines the realist novel. In making a case for the link between modernity and fictionality, Gallagher draws attention to a broad culture of imaginative speculation resulting from the development of a credit economy. “Indeed,” she writes, “almost all of the developments we associate with modernity—from greater religious toleration to scientific discovery— required the kind of cognitive provisionality one practices in reading fiction, a competence in investing contingent and temporary credit” (347). That is, the realist novel invites readers to put aside the literal truth of its represented world in order to appreciate its likeness to reality, extending credit to the work in order to be able to “take the reality of the story itself as a kind of suppositional speculation” (346). This extension of affective credit to credible but nonreferential characters differs from other forms of investment because the speculation associated with novel reading has no practical end beyond pleasure, and hence encourages a free play of the imagination or “risk-free emotional investment” (351). One could argue that if this investment is encouraged at the paratextual level, authorial admission of a character’s fictional status within the text must necessarily disrupt the balance that the paradox of fictional truth requires. This might suggest that a reader’s suspension of disbelief then becomes a failed investment in the novel’s fictional world. However, that would be to assume that character is the only aspect of a novel we extend credit to. Perhaps characters are more like the paper money that Gallagher claims was a

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part of the larger credit economy in the modernity-fictionality nexus: they have no value in and of themselves for they are ultimately currency in a larger exchange between author and reader. Metafictional works that interrogate the fictional contract on which realism is based ask us not so much to reject our attachment to fictional characters, as to share with the authorial narrator the contradictory impulses that fashion our response to them. In contrast to conventional wisdom that readers establish an empathetic identification with characters, Gallagher argues that the appeal of fictional nobodies is their status as entities defined by their ontological difference from us. First, their very knowability signals their nonexistence because our intimate familiarity with them contrasts with our restricted knowledge of real people. Secondly, they are “utterly finished and also necessarily incomplete” (358) because they are bound by the text that represents them: characters are paper beings about whom nothing more can be known beyond the sentences that construct them. Our emotional investment derives from this very lack, not so much in terms of a desire to co-create characters by filling in the gaps of their subjectivity, or to become the characters themselves, but in experiencing the slippage between an assumption of unity and depth that a proper name confers on a character and the linguistic discontinuity that denies such a possibility. For Gallagher, the realist character’s oscillation between typicality and individuality produces a distance between our own embodied selves and these real-seeming textual beings that affords us a greater sense of ontological surety. This is because we are able to imagine the absence of this embodiment and to desire it from the perspective of the character who is “tethered to the abstraction of type” and yearning for “the immanence the reader possesses” (361). If such a conception of character is implicit in the way we read, this is precisely what the novels under scrutiny here interrogate. Their authorial narrators may invite us to reject our sense of the plenitude of characters by emphasizing their textuality (which Gallagher argues defines the postmodern stance on character), but in doing so they model our own affective encounters with fictional nobodies through a metaleptic exchange with their own inventions. There are various ways in which these novels invite us to consider what Gallagher calls the “peculiar affective force” of fictional characters, all stemming from the idea of the author as first reader of their own work and hence as a surrogate for all readers: (1) How do we feel when authors tell us they are struggling to create characters? By self-reflexively sharing the difficulties of their creative process, authors are not, of course, admitting a lack of talent, but questioning our expectations of literary characters. For Fowles, to successfully create an independent being means to no longer know them as creations; his characters

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become uncanny to him not because they are knowable (as is the case for readers) but because their autonomy renders them opaque. This explains his claim that “to be free myself, I must give him, and Tina, and Sarah, even the abominable Mrs Poulteney, their freedoms as well” (86). In this way, authors both know and do not know their own characters. The uncanny experience of readers who respond emotionally to fictional characters as if they were real is replicated in the authorial experience of being invested in their own fictive creations, the author displaying a kind of familiarity readers cannot have yet experiencing their own characters as incomplete because no matter how much they write, they will never produce a fully realized being. “Oh I could go on for pages and pages about Christie’s young life,” writes Johnson’s narrator, “inventing and observing, remembering and borrowing. But why?” (82). Sorrentino’s narrator echoes this frustration at the endless possibilities yet infinite deferral of meaning that text enables when describing the act of creation: “Prose is endless. It strikes me that I could go on and on, into a thousand pages, about this poor man” (47). In this way, characters have an inexhaustible plenitude because knowledge of their lives can be continually invented, but the proliferation of detail has diminishing returns because they can never be anchored by a referent (which differs from the generative lament of Tristram Shandy: the impossibility of writing everything about one’s own life). (2) How do we feel when authors interact with their characters? If the experience of immersion involves a deictic relocation in which readers feel transported into a fictional world, the metaleptic intrusion of authors enacts our impossible desire to engage with characters on the same ontological level. At the same time there is a doubling of the experience in which characters are addressed by the author in the same way readers are, while remaining characters inside the narrative. When Johnson’s narrator writes, “‘Christie,’ I warned him, ‘it does not seem to me possible to take this novel much further. I’m sorry,’” this echoes a direct address to readers, such as Trollope’s self-reflexive discussion of the endings to three-volume novels in Barchester Towers: “We must now take leave of Mr. Slope, and of the bishop also, and of Mrs. Proudie” (481). (3) How do we feel when characters become aware of their own fictional status? If the metalepsis prevents readers from identifying with characters as autonomous selves, it nonetheless brings the characters closer to our experience of them, for they internalize the reader’s awareness of their nonreferential status, appearing real even as they know they do not exist, such as Shrike’s observation in Christie Malry, “But how can we be said to be perfectly happy a few lines back, and now be complaining about the monotony of the diet?” (139), or Caroline’s assertion in The Comforters, “I’m not wholly a fictional

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character. I have independent life” (146). If the appeal of fictional character for Gallagher is their intimate familiarity yet incompleteness, which shores up our own sense of a unified subjectivity, the self-aware fictional character becomes emblematic of that contradictory appeal as they grapple with both their ontological uncertainty and their self-knowledge, functioning as surrogate readers of their own character. By this I mean they allow us to experience being a character in order to project what Gallagher calls “the imagined desire of the character, for the immanence the reader possesses” (361). This certainly is how Caroline Rose functions in The Comforters, for, like the reader who is simultaneously immersed in the fictional world and aware of its nonreferential status, she knows “that the narrative could never become coherent to her until she was at last outside it, and at the same time consummately inside it” (166). At the same time, by seeing herself as a fictional character she becomes both reader and author of her own life, able to write it in the form of a novel. In B. S. Johnson’s novel, on the other hand, Christie Malry becomes the author’s interlocutor and a willing participant in the novel’s construction, accepting, like all the other characters, his own incompleteness, his brief sketchy life in the age of cinema. In these various ways, the intrusive narrators of postmodern metafiction enact the theory of reflexive realism by drawing out and dramatizing the paradox of fictional truth in narrative form, modeling the experience of reading as an agonistic encounter between creating author and invented character. Gallagher points out that the nonreferentiality that both signals a character’s fictionality and invites us to know them is what enables us to “enter represented subjectivity while subliminally understanding that we are, as readers, its actualizers, its conditions of being, the only minds who undergo these experiences” (357). As Johnson’s narrator tells us, though, we know only all too well in whose mind this interiority takes place. In this way they appropriate the reader, deflecting the question of fictional status to the question of creativity. Gallagher’s eighteenth-century fictional nobodies, then, can be read through the practice of reflexive realism as characters anticipating their own deconstruction when they internalize readers’ responses to them. If these nonreferential entities are the realist novel’s formal sign of fictionality that marks the rise of the genre, then the story of fictional truth revealed by the critical practice of reflexive realism is that they were born awaiting their own death in the postmodern novel.

CHAPTER 2

Against Sympathy The Self-Examining Heroine and the Origins of Free Indirect Discourse

I have argued that scholarship on the rise of the novel since World War II has tended to structure the history of the genre as a tension between competing impulses (showing and telling, assessment and presentation, fictional and empirical, narrative and affect) that has reached some kind of dialectical resolution or unraveling from the vantage point of a particular moment in history, figured not as “the present moment” but as the moment of realism’s decline. For the theory of the novel I have labeled “reflexive realism,” this dialectic is presented as a revelation: fictionality as we know it emerged alongside and within the realist novel not as something to be hidden but as an overt and paradoxical feature of verisimilitude. The logic of this approach to literary history, I have argued, was derived from postmodern metafiction, which worked to expose the “illusion of truth” central to the realist enterprise, establishing the novel’s death as simultaneously as its origin. In this context I have demonstrated that while authorial commentary was employed to establish the conventions of the early novel, it was not until the nineteenth century that it came to be seen as undermining the delicate balance of verisimilitude, characterized no longer as a digression from a narrative but as an intrusion upon readers’ immersion in a fictional world. The chief criticism of authorial intrusions is that they interfere with our affective investment in fictional characters, which is why “the disappearance of the author” became hailed as an achievement that enabled the “inward turning” 71

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of modernist fiction. This also explains why authorial commentary has been considered a problematic signpost of fictionality that compromises verisimilitude, while access to the consciousness of characters has been considered a signpost of fictionality vital to the aesthetic illusion of realism. If laying bare the thoughts of another is the privilege of fiction, it is not surprising that the historical development of the novel is typically construed in terms of its increasingly sophisticated capacity to reveal without mediation the dynamic interior lives of fictional characters. The standard trajectory established in the 1950s is of a lineage from Richardson’s epistolary fiction to Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness novels. For Leon Edel (1955), Richardson “accidentally founded” the modern psychological novel (39), and for Watt, Ulysses is “the supreme culmination of the formal trend that Richardson initiated” (234). Watt further argues that Ulysses is also “in many ways the climax of the novel’s development” (336), a final resolution of the formal challenge to reconcile the dualism of philosophical realism. In this history, the rise of the novel is both commenced and completed by the inward turn that reaches its apotheosis with Joyce. In other words, post–World War II literary history finds the origins of the novel in the resolution and exhaustion of interiority. While reflexive realism foregrounds the dialectical Other of character depth—the epistemological skepticism apparent in an overt narrative voice such as Fielding’s—critical attention paid to thought representation as the key mode of novelistic fictionality betrays the continued influence of the historical trope of the “inward turn.” This influence informs standard claims that the epistolary novel was “replaced” by the advent of FID in the third-person novel as a more sophisticated way to render the interior life of characters and that FID became the main technique for representing and evoking the moral capacity for sympathy. In this chapter I argue that such a view is a misreading of the origins of FID and an insufficient framework for understanding the development of thought representation. In Transparent Minds (1978), her magisterial study of the formal history of rendering characters’ thoughts, Dorrit Cohn writes that chapter 42 of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (what James called in his preface “my young woman’s extraordinary meditative vigil”) is “a supreme illustration of the paradox that narrative fiction attains its greatest ‘air of reality’ in the representation of a lone figure thinking thoughts she will never communicate to anyone” (7). In this passage, the pronoun “she,” while referring specifically to Isabel Archer, also functions to denote in general terms the gender of that lone figure. Cohn’s observation provides the point of departure for this chapter: why have all the major technical innovations in novelistic thought representation occurred

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through depicting the consciousness of female characters? From Richardson’s Clarissa scribbling her “instantaneous Descriptions and Reflections” in epistolary form, to Isabella’s flight through the catacombs in Walpole’s inaugural gothic novel, to Austen’s refinement of FID to render Emma Woodhouse or Anne Elliot’s thoughts, to the interior monologue of Isabel Archer’s “meditative vigil,” the musings of Dorothy Richardson’s Miriam Henderson, and Molly Bloom’s stream-of-consciousness soliloquy, it seems that what women think, and the way they think, have been a major impetus in developing the paradox of narrative fiction. The majority of these examples, and many others like them, especially in the early novel, involve heroines sitting down to scrutinize and judge their own motivations and behavior, or spending a sleepless night assailed by guilty thoughts, or reacting epiphanically to a letter they have received. In these scenes we can trace the broad historical trajectory of the novel from authorial to figural narration and the accompanying shift from narratorial summary of characters’ minds to dramatized rendering of their thought processes through the development of FID (see Cohn, 1978; Moretti, 2005). These scenes also lend weight to the argument not only that the novel participates in the discursive construction of the modern individual but that this individual, as Nancy Armstrong claims, “was first and foremost a woman” (8). The trailing off of Molly Bloom’s monologue with the little death of an autoerotic orgasm—“and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes” (933)—returns us to the grief-induced death of Clarissa whose last words are “come—Oh come— blessed Lord—JESUS,” providing us with a framework for approaching the inward turn as ultimately an exhaustion and expulsion of consciousness in overtly gendered terms. The central premise of this chapter is that conventional critical framing of FID as the formal novelistic instantiation of Adam Smith’s philosophy of sympathy advanced in A Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) has occluded the more direct formative influence of eighteenth-century conduct books for women on the development not just of FID but of the consciousness scene itself, that most privileged signpost of fictionality and site of novelistic subjectivity. At the same time, while there has been significant scholarship on the influence of conduct books on the domestic novel, and the female subject this novel revolves around, this scholarship has not investigated the importance of conduct literature to the formal history of thought representation. In her groundbreaking work, Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), Armstrong examines how the “passive virtue of the unmarried woman” (66) and the figure of the “efficient housewife” (67) were inculcated in conduct books as ideals to aspire to and to be achieved by a programmatic development of literacy.

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She then demonstrates how eighteenth-century authors from Richardson to Austen “domesticate” the novel by attaching their principal characters to this middle-class ideal woman. While Armstrong argues that conduct books produced a self-regulating gendered subject, she emphasizes their advice to cultivate reading habits and conversational skills. Equally important for the novel, and particularly for its formalist development, I would argue, is the advice for women to regularly review their conduct, a practice derived from more general Christian guides (see Hunter, 1990). This practice, I suggest, provided both the cultural impetus and the structural frame for the development of the consciousness scene—characters thinking in time—and for the figure of what I will call the self-examining heroine whose scenes of thinking are dominated by an imperative to guard against sexual impropriety by searching her conscience. This occurs both at the microlevel of the sentence with “reviewed her conduct,” a common inquit phrase preceding scenes of thinking, and at the broader thematic level through a dramatization of a recurring trope of conduct book literature: the looking glass that ought to be eschewed in order to look within. If this is the case, the emphasis that scholars from John Bender (1987) to Rae Greiner (2012) place on Adam Smith’s concept of sympathy as the key philosophical and discursive framework for the development of FID is, if not misplaced, at least more of a mode of interpretation than an explanation for the provenance of FID. Furthermore, while it was women writers who pioneered FID as a novelistic technique in the eighteenth century, the more important point is that it was the female character from Richardson’s Pamela onward who dictated the need for this technique. To follow through with this line of argumentation, it is necessary to consider how eighteenthcentury debates about the relative merits of external and internal methods for rendering character are connected to the discursive relationship between the emerging genre of the novel and the contemporaneous proliferation of conduct books for women. At the same time that novelists were experimenting with methods for revealing the secret recesses of the soul in their fiction, conduct books elaborated strictures on what constituted the “natural” state of female consciousness, setting up a tension between examining the heart and regulating one’s conduct in order to achieve this natural state. As John Gregory wrote, in A Father’s Legacy to His Daughter (1774): “I do not want to make you any thing; I want to know what Nature has made you, and to perfect you on her plan” (32). The technology of the self encouraged by conduct books, I argue, is the underlying model for the formal method of rendering characters’ interiority, establishing the generic scene of heroines reviewing their conduct as a convention that persists into the present day.

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If, as Monika Fludernik suggests, “the invention of the consciousness scene marks a crucial step in the shift from ‘early narrative’ to ‘the novel’” (1996, 158), the development of this scene in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constructed a particular type of novelistic subjectivity that facilitated the extended use of FID. This subjectivity—the self-examining heroine—is so pervasive that the consciousness scene is, for all intents and purposes, the conduct scene. The interrogatives and expletives so commonly seen as indices of FID lend themselves to the gendered practice of self-scrutiny encouraged by conduct books. For instance, here is a piece of advice from Arthur Freeling’s The Young Bride’s Book: Being Hints for Regulating the Conduct of Married Women (1839): “Imagine yourself once more in the presence of your lover, before marriage; and ask yourself, ‘Would he not have been displeased by this conduct?’—if your judgment answers in the affirmative, depend upon it you have passed the bounds of propriety” (64). And here is a passage from Charles Reade’s sensationalist novel, Griffith Gaunt (1866), giving us the thoughts of Mrs. Gaunt: She sat down again, and put her head in her hand to think it all over, and a chill thought ran through her. Was her conduct wise? What would Griffith think at her employing his rival? Would he not infer Neville had entered her service in more senses than one? Perhaps he would throw the letter in the dirt in a rage, and never read it. (13–14)

The replication of both the type of self-interrogation and the pattern of questioning indicates that the origins of the vital novelistic feature of FID must be understood in more specific terms than a broad tension between “social doxa and the individual voice” (Moretti, 82), and in more specifically gendered terms than the absorption of first-person subjectivity into the grammar of objective third-person narration (Cohn 1978, 100). Tracing the development of the consciousness scene reveals how the practice of self-scrutiny is first gendered in different ways: epistolary self-disclosure in Samuel Richardson’s novels and authorial eavesdropping on internal soliloquy in Henry Fielding’s. At the same time, the emergence of FID cannot neatly be understood as a formal combination of these two methods, because such a claim assumes epistolary fiction died out because its capacity to reveal interiority was usurped by third-person narration and elides the ongoing development of thought representation in first-person narration. In this chapter I will locate the development of FID in the eighteenth-century lineage of the self-examining heroine in three key moments: internalizing the authorial voice in Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, spatializing the conduct scene in Ann

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Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, and competing with the internal soliloquy in Fanny Burney’s Camilla. The contribution of the last two authors in particular to the development of FID is well known; my aim is to demonstrate how closely this formal technique cleaves to the structural rhythms and thematic imperatives of the conduct scene. The self-examining heroine is not a simple dramatized extrapolation of the ideal woman constructed by conduct literature, but a fictional character who struggles with the psychological constraints of this ideal. This analysis will set up the next chapter in which I trace the increasing schism between sexualized self and chaste ideal as the impetus for further experimentations with the consciousness scene, from the psychological analysis of nineteenth-century fiction to the sex scene of the twentieth. Before undertaking this analysis, however, it is necessary to examine why FID has come to assume such prominence in studies of the novel and to establish its historical and formal relation to conduct literature.

FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE, SYMPATHY, AND FICTIONALITY Although it is only one technique amongst others for rendering the interior lives of fictional characters, FID has been freighted with critical significance because it sits at the juncture of formalist theories of novelistic fictionality and historical accounts of sympathy, dramatized as the textual site for a struggle between authorial and characterological voice. Our understanding of thought representation in the novel is structured by its oblique, but decisive, treatment in the Anglo-American study of point of view, which takes a neo-Jamesian restricted focus on the dramatized consciousness of characters as the aesthetic goal and historical trajectory of the novel. There is a direct lineage from this tradition to early studies of FID, such as Roy Pascal’s The Dual Voice (1977), which demonstrates how the structural element of point of view is reinforced by the stylistic device of free indirect speech, highlighting the capacity of this device to enable a narrator to align ironically or sympathetically with a character’s perspective. In her 1980 discussion of style indirect libre, Doody argues that “its development is of the highest importance in the history of the novel” (287), linking it to Watt’s formal realism by presenting FID as the solution to the problem of uniting Richardson’s internal view of characters with Fielding’s objective one. One reason for the pronounced interest in FID over the ensuing decades is its treatment as a signpost of fictionality in a period when the theory of reflexive realism takes shape. Cohn’s Transparent Minds (1978) provides a

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bridge between linguistic and literary-critical approaches to FID, positioning what she calls narrated monologue between quoted monologue (the internal soliloquy) and psychonarration (authorial summary of a character’s mental state) on a spectrum of techniques for presenting consciousness. Her larger argument is that these techniques are the formal manifestation of the “paradox that lies at the very heart of narrative realism” (7): its unnatural capacity to portray the unspoken thoughts of another person. Cohn’s decisive linking of thought representation to novelistic fictionality is taken further by Ann Banfield’s Unspeakable Sentences (1982), notorious for arguing, via generative grammar, that in a sentence of FID there can be only one subjectivity, that of the character, because of the cotemporality of the character’s deictic center with the past tense of narration. Ultimately Banfield’s thesis is an updated version of the modernist ideal of impersonality and the neo-Jamesian theory of point of view, but it aligns the “unspeakable” nature of represented thought and speech with the emergence of modern literacy and connects literacy with the simultaneous appearance of fictionality: “By separating SELF from SPEAKER this style reveals the essential fictionality of any representation of consciousness, of any approximation of word to thought, even of our own” (260). Banfield positions FID as a key sign of fictionality, not only because it is one technique for providing unnatural access to transparent minds, but because it is inseparable from the materiality of writing. Another crucial reason for its prominence in historical accounts of the novel’s development is that, for many, this device facilitates the realist novel’s cultivation of the sympathetic imagination (see Doody, 1980; Choi; Greiner). Clara Tuite makes this point overtly in Romantic Austen (2002), where she claims that FID “can be seen to be the novelistic technique that enables the development of sympathy as a formal strategy” (68). Tuite follows the postmetafictional construction of reflexive realism in arguing that FID in the hands of Austen is “a highly self-conscious strategy” (68) and that, as a result of the undecidability of voice it promotes, it “dramatizes the paradox of the realist aesthetic, which is that it achieves verisimilitude through the disavowal of its own fictionality, that the narrative is the most self-referential when it is the most invisible” (69–70). Sympathy and fictionality, then: the two key reasons for claiming FID as the jewel in the crown of the novel and for making it the only formal feature literary historians pay much attention to. Indeed, Frances Ferguson asserts, in an oft-quoted claim quoted here again, that “free indirect style is the novel’s one and only formal contribution to literature” (159). Historical studies of the origins of FID have also emphasized its development in the hands of women writers. Deidre Lynch argues in The Economy of Character (1998) that women novelists were “pioneers of one the novel’s chief

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resources for depth effects, the free indirect discourse that seems to voice the character’s mental life” (151). We can all agree that despite isolated examples of FID in earlier fiction, the late eighteenth century marks its prominent use in novels by Burney, Radcliffe, and then Austen before becoming widespread throughout the nineteenth. As a result, a substantial amount of work has been conducted linking its emergence to the narrative authority of women writers. Both Doody and Choi have argued that the development of FID in the work of Burney and her contemporaries demonstrates their search for an authoritative voice. In Fictions of Authority (1992) Susan Lanser provides an excellent account of Jane Austen’s use of FID, based on the premise that it was an attempt to embed her authorial comments in the perspective of characters after the failure of her overtly authorial voice in Northanger Abbey to find a publisher. Tuite develops these ideas further by arguing that in the hands of Austen “free indirect discourse inscribes within the novel genre a new model both of feminine authorship and feminine authority in the exercise and refinement of feeling and discretion” (71). Gender plays a vital role in the emergence of FID to facilitate sympathy within a new regime of fictionality, but to understand its formal origins I think we must locate that role not only in the construction of authority for female novelists but in the construction of female characters. At the same time, we also need a clear understanding of FID itself as a technique. FID can be defined, simply, as the unattributed report of a character’s thoughts in the grammatical form of the narrator’s voice, yet scholarly histories have found themselves dramatizing this feature as a struggle between narrator and character for control of the “voice” of the novel. Franco Moretti describes FID as “truly a peculiar mix” that operates by “leaving the individual voice a certain amount of freedom, while permeating it with the impersonal stance of the narrator” (2005, 82). This “certain amount of freedom” is a formal, indeed grammatical, feature that has become the locus of an enduring assumption, commencing with Spielhagen’s theory of narrative objectivity, that novelists have an aesthetic and ethical imperative to grant autonomy to the “individual voice” of characters as agents within a narrative. For instance, Kathy Mezei invites us to “imagine FID as an expression of the character’s bid for freedom from the controlling narrator” (68). This is why we see words such as “emancipation” and “liberation” used to describe the technique, along with a variety of dramatized theoretical accounts of its operation. One of the most striking of these accounts is provided by John Bender in Imagining the Penitentiary (1987). Bender argues that the “convention of transparency that distinguishes the realist novel” is exemplified by the technique of FID that fosters the illusion of direct access to character consciousness (177).

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Observing that FID develops in the eighteenth-century novel in parallel with the institution of the penitentiary, and particularly Bentham’s panopticon, Bender argues that this technique encodes the same principles of surveillance and inspection, such that the ostensible autonomy of characters is always subject to the presence of the impersonal third-person narrator. For Blakey Vermeule, in Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (2010), FID “holds the narrative voice somewhere in between the first and the third person. But it is not benign. Writers use it to slice the head off their characters” (72). This melodramatic phrase continues the idea that fiction constitutes some kind of competition between narrator and character for the control of a narrative. However, in line with the cognitive focus on reception, Vermeule claims a character “should realize that free indirect discourse isn’t really about him; it is about us. Free indirect discourse is one of the major literary techniques that writers use to put pressure on our mind-reading capacities” (72–73). This claim articulates another approach to FID in relation to fictionality, for it ties the device to one of the common arguments of cognitive literary studies and literary Darwinism: that the specificity of fiction and its evolutionary function lies in its contribution to developing our capacity for inferring the thoughts of others (see Zunshine, 2006; Boyd, 2009). The prominence afforded to FID in facilitating the illusion of transparency means that the term can sometimes become virtually synonymous with internal focalization and be used to denote any stylistic evocation of a character’s perspective, rather than a specific device with its own formal, grammatical integrity. To understand its stylistic origins, and its structural and ideological function in the consciousness scene, FID must be both separated from, and analyzed in relation to, other modes of thought representation. Alongside the quoted internal soliloquy, these modes would include consonant psychonarration (in which there is a summary of thoughts but no commentary on or analysis of the consciousness being reported), narrated perception (concerned with recording a character’s sensory experience rather than mental reflection), and stylistic contagion (in which a narrator absorbs a character’s idiom into a descriptive account). Once identified, FID must be understood as operating along a continuum, not so much a shuttling back and forth between narratorial and characterological voices, as McKeon (2017) argues, but as the product of a perspectival manipulation from gnomic statement to psychonarration to quoted monologue in which FID is often the transitional means. This general structure of oscillation between techniques is in fact common to the consciousness scene, as Cohn has so ably demonstrated. While FID can be used in isolated fashion in summaries of mental states, blurring into stylistic contagion where character idiom is absorbed into the narrator’s discourse, its

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sustained use is in the consciousness scene, particularly in moments of interrogation and revelation, which is why Cohn dubs it “narrated monologue.” Carol Mackay describes FID as “mediated soliloquy” and argues that “of all the autodictive modes, the unspoken soliloquy is the most likely candidate for being rendered in free indirect speech” (141). To explain its emergence as a specific technique of focalization, then, we need to trace the development of FID in the consciousness scene alongside other modes of thought representation and to see the particular pattern of these scenes as the key to its history. Here the discursive relationship of the novel to contemporaneous conduct books is vital, for if FID emerges out of a collocation of sympathy, gender, and overt fictionality, the impetus for this lies most directly in the guide book tradition. In what follows I will examine how the impartial spectator of Adam Smith’s theory of sympathy, which retains a central place in both historical and theoretical accounts of FID, is an abstraction from the practice of self-examination encouraged by conduct books, a practice operationalized in the consciousness scene of female characters.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF FID: THE IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR OR THE LADIES’ LOOKING GLASS? Although finding no place in Watt’s account of the novel’s emergence alongside British empiricism, Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments has become one of the philosophical touchstones for historians of the novel since the 1980s. For Bender, the “impartial spectator” central to Smith’s discussion of sympathy models a normative and punitive impersonal presence akin to Bentham’s panopticon and operationalized in FID as the epitome of the illusion of transparency in the realist novel. While Bender seeks to account for the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, Rae Greiner argues that this century is chiefly characterized by it-narratives and sentimental fiction, with the nineteenthcentury realist novel instead distinguished by being modeled on Smith’s meditation on the nature of “fellow-feeling.” In Sympathetic Realism (2012), Greiner identifies FID as one of the novelistic techniques for facilitating the formal instantiation of Smith’s impartial spectator. However, she is at pains to distinguish this function from common claims for the effaced rendering of a transparent mind, as well as from claims for the normative surveillance that Bender makes. Smithian sympathy is a thoroughly social transaction, not a private affair, on account of the individual need for approbation, Greiner points out, and FID models the social relations required for its effect: “Shuttling between

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a generalizing, impersonal standard of judgment and individual perspectives that revise and refute it, FID reproduces the sympathetic circuit between collective and particular stances” (37). These accounts of the formal relationship between FID and the cultivation of sympathy are instructive to the extent that they position the authorial narrator as the stand-in for the impartial spectator, replicating the dynamic between self and impersonal norm in order to model such a transaction for readers. But the sympathetic imagination alone cannot account for the functional emergence of FID as a novelistic technique. There is no need to rehearse Smith’s well-known formulation in great detail, but I will address its consonance with the conduct book tradition as a model for self-scrutiny. Smith’s philosophical speculation centers around why we feel pain at the sight of another person’s suffering (“the brother on the rack”). The answer is not a simple identification with the other, and his focus is primarily on how the concept of “fellow-feeling” shapes the moral capacity of the person suffering. For Smith, this person must imagine what it would be like to be a spectator observing and attempting to imagine their suffering. Although knowing there is an epistemological divide that prevents the spectator from sharing their pain with the same intensity, the sufferer still yearns for a complete breaching of distance: “He longs for that relief which nothing can afford him but the entire concord of the affections of the spectators with his own” (28). To achieve this, the sufferer must strive to attain the relatively cool distance of the spectator. The social function of sympathy, then, is that we must moderate our passions to help breach the distance between us and those watching us. From this specular scene of intersubjectivity surrounding the brother on the rack, Smith elaborates a broader framework for how we judge ourselves and others. As such, while Smith’s famous account of sympathy is certainly social and normative, it is most importantly founded on the practice of self-examination in which we adopt the perspective of the other to judge our own behavior: “We endeavour to examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it. If, upon placing ourselves in his situation, we thoroughly enter into all the passions and motives which influenced it, we approve of it, by sympathy with the approbation of this supposed equitable judge. If otherwise, we enter into his disapprobation, and condemn it” (133). For Smith, “the impartial spectator,” the “man within the breast,” is what enables us to be morally conscious, to judge our own conduct and character as a means to guard against self-love, and this morality arises from our desire for the approbation of others, for their positive regard in the form of sympathy. The key passage for theories of fictional character is this:

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When I endeavour to examine my own conduct, when I endeavour to pass sentence upon it, and either to approve or condemn it, it is evident that, in all such cases, I divide myself, as it were, into two persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that other I, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of. (135–36)

Representing this bifurcated model of subjectivity in the novel involves attaching a self-examining character’s internalized judge to a narrative voice. What we find in the epistolary novel is that the judge is both the correspondent and the narrating character who must focalize her experiencing self, while the conduct being judged belongs to this experiencing self. In the thirdperson novel, the impartial spectator becomes the omniscient narrator who speaks both for the agent embedded within the breast and the collective community being appealed to. Smith’s account of the mental operation of sympathy may be viewed as a correction of Hume’s earlier theory with its emphasis on the affective transfer of feelings, but it is also a philosophical abstraction from established guides and exhortations to the practice of self-examination. If Smith’s theory percolates through the novel as a kind of moral justification for its function, the powerful social force of the conduct book outlined by Armstrong in Desire and Domestic Fiction ensures that in the newly emergent genre the impartial observer becomes embedded in the fictional minds of female characters. And yet, neither sympathy nor Adam Smith figure in Armstrong’s history. This is likely because they cannot account for the specifically gendered nature of eighteenth-century self-regulating characters. According to David Marshall (1984), the moral of Smith’s book is “that one should not display one’s sentiments unless one is sure of eliciting sympathy; indeed, it would be best not to display oneself at all, given the small likelihood of attaining fellow-feeling. This ethic of self-command (one might say self-concealment) helps explain the almost total absence of women from the world of The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (152). For Marshall, the conventional association of women with both sympathy and sentiment is precisely and paradoxically what excludes them from Smith’s book. Certainly we can see how the impartial spectator works when Smith talks of judging one’s own conduct, but my point is that the novelistic subjectivity who internalizes this figure is already gendered by virtue of the novel’s agonistic relationship with the conduct book. The moral compulsion to embed an impartial spectator in the breast in fact comes from conduct books, and I suggest this had far more direct influence on novelistic form than Smith’s moral philosophy. One such conduct book, published at the same time as Smith’s treatise, The Polite Lady: Or, a Course of Female Education (1760),

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seems to traffic in the same language. Its author, Charles Allen, offers a definition of good sense as “the art of behaving, on all occasions, with such decency and prudence, as to obtain the approbation of every candid and impartial judge” (56), later characterizing this imagined figure as God, “the impartial Judge of the universe” (286). At the same time, it harkens back to Richard Allestree’s The Ladies Calling (1673) in a section on piety: “When she has attentively examin’d her Conscience, that impartial mirror, and there discern’d all the blemishes of her noble part, she will sure, with somewhat a more cold concern, consult her looking-glass” (143). In other words, the advice for women to search their soul under the imagined gaze of an internalized impartial judge was established as a model for novelistic subjectivity and its elaboration in the consciousness scene before more general theories of sympathy were developed by Hume and Smith. Indeed, Smith himself employs the analogy of the looking glass when explaining how we imagine being the spectator of our own behavior: “This is the only looking-glass by which we can, in some measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct” (135). I now turn to conduct book scholarship in order to link its insights more directly to the history of thought representation in the novel.

CONDUCT BOOKS AND THE SELF-EXAMINING SUBJECT We know from historians that while conduct books had chiefly been written for aristocratic men, those for women proliferated in the early eighteenth century; that they differed from those of the previous century by promoting a view of women as naturally chaste, modest, and virtuous rather than as possessing a dangerous sexual appetite; and that their central paradox was that they professed to guide women in cultivating modes of behavior that were meant to come naturally to them. As Ingrid Tague writes, in Women of Quality: “The conduct books themselves embodied this basic contradiction; writers insisted on innate female characteristics within the format of an overly prescriptive genre which would appear to demand a recognition that behavior was learned. If feminine behavior was natural, why would women need to be instructed in it at all?” (32). A good example of this paradox is A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774) in which John Gregory writes: “From the view I have given of your natural character and place in society, there arises a certain propriety of conduct peculiar to your sex” (5). Upon outlining a system of conduct to be followed, he notes: “Now I do not wish you to affect delicacy; I wish you to possess it” (21). As a result, conduct books encouraged a habitual practice of

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self-­surveillance to ensure conformity to an ideal of the natural woman. In this practice we can see the influence of Christian thought and the genre of the spiritual autobiography. Marjorie Morgan (1994) emphasizes the importance of evangelicism to eighteenth-century conduct literature, and this is exemplified by Hester Chapone’s 1773 Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady: “Watch then, my dear child, and observe every evil propensity of your heart, that you may in time correct it, with the assistance of that grace which alone can conquer the evils of our nature, and which you must constantly and earnestly implore” (53). Along with Armstrong, literary scholars such as Joyce Hemlow, Mary Poovey, and Jane Spencer have argued compellingly for the influence of conduct literature on the emergent domestic fiction of the eighteenth century, demonstrating how novels by women in particular, legitimized by the success of Richardson’s epistolary fiction, participated in the construction of this bourgeois ideal of feminine nature. As Armstrong points out, the figure of the woman that emerges from these conduct books is a projection, an ideal set in place before a middle class even existed. The discursive subject they create marks the development of a new bourgeois ideology of femininity in which women are considered naturally different from men by virtue of their modesty, delicacy, and chaste sexuality, and hence best suited for managing the economy of the domestic sphere. Armstrong writes: “A figure of female subjectivity, a grammar really, awaited the substance that the novel and its readers, as well as the countless individuals educated according to the model of the new woman, would eventually provide” (60). Throughout her book Armstrong refers to “highly individual styles of writing” that emerged “through new and ever more sophisticated representations of female subjectivity,” but she conducts no study of the representation of fictional minds and makes no reference to the development of FID. This is because her method is Foucauldian, addressing how the novel participates in the broader “discourse of sexuality” that produces a particular subject position: “I regard fiction, in other words, both as the document and as the agency of cultural history” (31). Furthermore, while observing that conduct books “set out to produce a self-regulating individual” (98), she pays most attention to claims that this self-regulation can be achieved by literacy: reading habits and conversational skills. What I want to highlight here, though, is the emphasis that such books placed on the Christian practice of self-­examination. The “desirable” woman produced by this literature, “the female character under its customary form” (31), as Thomas Gisborne wrote in An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797), provided the site for developing the distinguishing feature of the novel. For Gisborne, “the failings and temptations to which the female mind is particularly exposed by its native structure and dis-

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positions” can be addressed by education, but it furthermore requires “the most vigilant labours of conscience” (33). In particular the hypervigilance of conscience for women as objects of desire was necessary to ensure they have not been responsible for inflaming the passions of men. Advising how a wife is to deal with her husband’s “causeless jealousy,” Richard Allestree observes that God always has a wise design, so “it becomes every woman in that condition, to examine strictly was she has done to provoke so severe a Scourge” (2:27). Representing the secret recesses of the soul became the princpal domain of the novel, and, I argue, this was prompted or at least facilitated by the impetus for self-examination. Certainly the novel would have developed without conduct books, but its discursive relationship to conduct literature has surely shaped its preoccupations and its form. This is obvious from the fact that Richardson’s Pamela developed from his “Familiar Letters on Important Occasions,” and that Fielding worked on his “Essay on Conversation” at the same time he was writing Joseph Andrews. Tim McLoughlin suggests that the period of 1740–41 could be marked “as a moment in English literature when two major fiction writers realized in different ways that the moral purpose of the conduct-book might be more pleasantly and extensively served by the novel” (93). This is not to suggest, simplistically, that novels disseminated the ideology of conduct books in a more palatable narrative form. Conduct literature regularly warned readers against the dangers of fiction, and the emergent genre of the novel was in competition with these books. In asserting its cultural legitimacy, the novel shared some of the same rhetoric—providing moral guidance for young readers—while showing how its generic form (perhaps, we might say, its fictionality) was superior in achieving this. But along with such rhetorical posturing, novels demonstrated their capacity to interrogate the way characters engaged with a gendered model of conduct, most particularly in the consciousness scene that renders legible a habitual practice of self-surveillance. The elements of this model of conduct can be found in A Letter of Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young Lady, published in 1741, the year between Pamela and Joseph Andrews. According to its author, Reverend Wentenhall Wilkes: A Lady is never so sure of her Conduct, as when the Verdict she passes upon her own Behaviour is confirmed by the Opinion of all, that know her. By an Observation of these Rules, you will come to a Discovery of all the Foibles, that lurk in the secret Corners of your Soul; and will soon arrive at a true, and impartial Knowledge of yourself. (72–73)

Here we find the claim that rigorous judgement of one’s own conduct will lead to knowledge of one’s inner self. However, a lady arrives at this knowledge

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by matching her own judgement to the judgement others make of her conduct. Wilkes goes on to advise that each night a young lady ought to consider that she may never wake again until the resurrection and judgement, and hence should “impregnate this with your Belief, and then sum up your Accompts, and examine your Conduct in the foregoing Day” (76). Two key elements of prescribed Christian practice—discovering the secrets of one’s soul and regularly examining one’s conduct—become gendered in this conduct book via its address to a young lady and eventually become secularized in the generic structure of the novel. Formally speaking, this occurs when the injunction to “examine your Conduct” becomes rephrased as a common descriptive inquit phrase, a mental verb signaling the commencement of a consciousness scene. Furthermore, when internal soliloquy is presented alongside authorial commentary, the omniscient narrator adopts the role of ultimate judge assumed by God to become, in the words of the narrator of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (as he peeps into Becky Sharp’s bedroom at the beginning of a consciousness scene), the “master of her secrets, and seal-keeper of that young woman’s conscience” (171). This establishes a relation between authorial narrator and character that readers oscillate between, both judging the character’s action and imitating the character’s self-examination. This mode of readerly engagement is inadvertently, or perhaps obliquely, referenced in Mary Hay’s defensive statement about her own character in the preface to Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796): “Let those readers, who feel inclined to judge with severity the extravagance and eccentricity of her conduct, look into their own hearts” (123). If anything, framing this practice with the Smithian concept of sympathy further demonstrates the formative role of conduct literature on fictional nobodies and their readers.

EXAMINING THE HEART AND REPRESENTING CHARACTER Eighteenth-century novelists self-consciously distinguished their work from earlier romances by virtue of their probability and their focus on everyday life, and from history by virtue of offering accounts of the private life of characters. In a 1779 article encompassing both fiction and history, William Craig argues that a character may be delineated by two methods: describing “the internal feelings of the mind” or providing an account of “external conduct.” The former, Craig suggests, operates by offering the general qualities that a character possesses, but this can be too general, while giving information about external conduct can be too particular. Novelists, he argued, typically erred by attend-

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ing “more to the story and the circumstances they relate, than to giving new and just views of the character of the person they present” (196). Missing from this account is a sense that “internal feelings” do not have to be static qualities, but a dynamic process of thought that can be as particular as actions. This was the purpose of the emergent consciousness scene, and discussions about the representation of character were framed by debates about the relative merits of epistolary, memoir, and narrative methods of storytelling. The development of these methods, and the exchanges between them, parallel and mobilize the tension that emerges from eighteenth-century conduct literature: the injunction to internalize codes of external conduct in order to realize a “natural” state. Samuel Richardson had, earlier in the century, offered his epistolary method as the best means for revealing the secret recesses of the heart. Richardson’s justification for the “naturalness” of his method lies foremost in the issue of temporality: only by having a character write a letter can authors represent their immediate, untempered emotions and thoughts, unlike the retrospective nature of narrative modes. The same argument for dramatic immediacy and access to the interior was made in the preface to The Cry (1754) by Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier. In this preface, the authors inform readers that their intention “is not to amuse them with a number of surprising incidents and adventures, but rather to paint the inward mind” (7). However, they seek to justify a fantastic departure from the pseudofactual replication of letters or memoirs by asserting that “in order to dive into those recesses, and lay them open to the reader in a striking and intelligible manner, it is necessary to assume a certain freedom in writing, not strictly perhaps within the limits prescribed by rules” (9). The liberty they take in this novel is to have their characters, Portia and Cylinda, appear before an “allegorical assembly” known as THE CRY, in order to relate their past lives and defend themselves against the judgement of this disembodied voice. Fielding and Collier point out that they have borrowed the convention of the stage in presenting scenes, but have maintained “the privilege of being our own chorus” in order to relay information “or, according to the author of Tom Jones, to tell what we cannot prevail on any of our actors to tell our readers for us” (10–11). The significance of this early work is its attempt to retain the intimate access to the interior afforded by character narration, yet liberate the method from the burden of exposition that stretches the probability of its representation. Furthermore, their formal experiment takes shape in a story of women reflecting upon and attempting to justify their conduct. The privileged chorus they refer to is the countermethod of authorial narration. A common rhetorical strategy for third-person narrators was either to

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refuse to divulge the contents of a mind, or to claim that it was impossible to describe the range of emotions a character experienced in a moment of anxiety (something shared by first-person narrators). These statements, of course, were often followed by attempts to do so, either through a general summation of their emotional state or through the device of the soliloquy. Tom Jones is a classic example of an omniscient narrator who oscillates between revealing thoughts, withholding them, or affecting not to know them, with the express motivation of challenging readers’ assumptions about the characters. The character of Sophia is a case in point. At one stage Fielding indulges the curiosity of readers by “disclosing what passed in the mind of Sophia” (177) and describing in general terms the affliction of her love for Tom Jones. At another he writes: “As to the present situation of her mind, I shall adhere to a rule of Horace, by not attempting to describe it, from despair of success” (186). When we do get something resembling a consciousness scene, it is one that will become very familiar: As for Sophia, her mind was not perfectly easy under this first practice of deceit; upon which, when she retired to her chamber, she reflected with the highest uneasiness and conscious shame. Nor could the peculiar hardship of her situation, and the necessity of the case, at all reconcile her mind to her conduct; for the frame of her mind was too delicate to bear the thought of having been guilty of a falsehood, however qualified by circumstances. Nor did this thought once suffer her to close her eyes during the whole succeeding night. (648)

The key feature of this brief scene is the struggle to “reconcile her mind to her conduct,” and the chief emotion is that of shame. Sophia had felt compelled to pretend that she did not know her visitor was Tom Jones, a mild deceit that the narrator informs us was the consequence of the “Necessity of Custom” by which all women in love “are restrained, not from submitting to the honest Impulses of Nature (for that would be a foolish Prohibition), but from owning them” (646). Yet the shame Sophia experiences is also evidence of her natural delicacy, meaning that internal conflict is the expected state of a well-regulated mind. If we ask not only how, but why third-person narration from this point began to develop more intricate forms of interiority, I would venture that it is precisely the struggle of female characters to reconcile their private desires with expectations of their external conduct that necessitated a rendering of their internal scrutiny, and hence the gradual merger of psychonarration

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and the soliloquy in the grammar of third-person narration. The mutually reinforcing relationship between conduct literature and the novel in this endeavor is clear. Thomas Marriot’s Female Conduct (1759), written in verse and designed to provided religious and moral precepts as well as practical rules of conduct, contains this advice: Search the Recesses of the human Soul, Mark there, what secret Springs her Acts control, What Near Resemblance, Vice to Virtue bears, How deep Ambition, mask’d in patriot Cares, Of public Spirit, the Appearance wears. (84–85)

As we have seen, the genre of the novel asserts its cultural authority by arguing that its form can provide access to these recesses of the human soul. At the time of Marriot’s book, this is argued most forcefully in regards to the epistolary method because it involves characters writing to the moment in their present state of distress. In the introductory material to the second edition of Pamela, Richardson includes a letter from Aaron Hill, which says of the author: “All the Passions are His, in their most close and abstracted Recesses; and by selecting the most delicate, and yet, at the same time, most powerful, of their Springs, thereby to act, wind, and manage, the Heart, He moves us, every where, with the Force of a TRAGEDY” (qtd. in Williams 1970, 103). A similar privileged access to the depths of a character is asserted by the authorial narrator of The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751), who chooses an opportune time in the narrative to reveal the motivations of one of the characters, Miss Flora: “But it is now high time to let the reader see into the secret springs, which set her wicket wit in motion, and induced her to act in the manner she had done” (219). By the turn of the century the “narrative” method of third-person narration had assumed a quantitative majority, and in describing this method Anna Laetitia Barbauld argued in 1804: “The author, like the muse, is supposed to know everything; he can reveal the secret springs of actions, and let us into events in his own time and manner” (xxiii). The replication of the phrase “secret springs” in these passages of both fiction and criticism demonstrates the collusion of the authorial narrator with the endeavor of female characters to search their soul. We are now in a position to trace how the movement from authorial to figural narration from the eighteenth century is accompanied by developing the consciousness scene as a site for narrativizing the grammar of conduct literature and embedding the language of this literature in the minds of self-communing characters.

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FEMALE CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE CONDUCT SCENE According to Monika Fludernik, Aphra Behn is not only the inventor of the consciousness scene, but “the first English writer to employ free indirect discourse for the representation of consciousness,” albeit sparingly in larger passages of psychonarration (1996, 155). As evidence, Fludernik cites a passage from Behn’s “The History of the Nun” (1689) in which the character, Isabella, struggles to reconcile her individual desire with her religious duty. The scene of internal conflict is set up this way: As soon as she was laid, without discoursing (as she us’d to do) to Katteriena, after they were in Bed, she pretended to be sleepy, and turning from her settled her self to profound Thinking, and was resolv’d to conclude the Matter, between her Heart, and her Vow of Devotion, that Night. (qtd. in Fludernik, 1996, 154)

Here Isabella’s self-examination results from the fact that she cannot speak to her friend and must thus commune with herself. The pattern of her thoughts that follow consists of attempts to justify breaking her vow of chastity in the name of love and is represented with mental verbs couched in the historical present tense as well as a line of FID: “What had she to do with the World, or car’d to behold any other?” (qtd. in Fludernik, 1996, 154). According to Fludernik, “the consciousness scene develops from what could structurally have been a soliloquy; it is therefore initially a dramatic feature rather than a narrative one,” but Behn’s invention differs from the extensively used soliloquy in the Renaissance by virtue of the fact that her scenes “integrate the mental subject matter with the narrative discourse rather than framing it as an inset in the form of a soliloquy. Behn therefore anticipates the later novel of consciousness with its increasing deployment of free indirect discourse” (118). In tracing this scene from the eighteenth-century novel of probability to the twentieth-century novel of impersonal consciousness, I will emphasize how FID develops to formally parallel the struggle of the self-examining heroine between internal desire and external conduct. I will not approach this trajectory as solely a shift from the dramatic soliloquy to the narrative interior monologue, however, since the modern consciousness novel in fact revives the soliloquy in the form of the stream-of-consciousness autonomous monologue. I begin with Richardson’s epistolary novels, which provide a scenario in which characters can relate their thoughts to a confidante while remaining in solitude. Armstrong pays particular attention to how Pamela narrates her own story, discursively circumscribing the aristocratic male. The reason why

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Pamela embarks upon her correspondence, the novel’s “editor” explains, is to read over it after having escaped her present dangers, “that then she might examine, and either approve or repent of her own conduct in them” (129–30). In recording her thoughts for her family, Pamela is also providing a record of her conduct, one which will better help her regulate it when she sees her thoughts laid out on the page. Pamela herself observes to her parents that a reason for writing is that she may read her letters when she visits them, the knowledge of which, “I hope, will further strengthen my good resolutions, that I may not hereafter, from my bad conduct, have reason to condemn myself from my own hand as it were” (75). Turning to Richardson’s later novel, Clarissa, we can see in a letter from the eponymous heroine to her friend Anne Howe the means by which reflection upon conduct was made immediate, in the process of writing to the moment: But let me examine myself: Is not vanity or secret love of praise a principal motive with me at the bottom?—Ought I not to suspect my own heart? If I set up for myself, puffed up with every one’s good opinion, may I not be left to myself?—Everyone’s eyes are upon the conduct, upon the visits, upon the visit-ors of a young creature of our sex made independent; and are not such, moreover, the subjects of the attempts of the worst of the other?— And then, left to myself, should I take a wrong step, though with ever so good an intention, how many should I have to triumph over me, how few to pity?—the more of the one, and the fewer of the other, for having aimed at excelling. (104)

The phrase “let me examine myself ” is the cue for a scene of self-­scrutiny that takes place simultaneously with the act of narration, and it will later become a common inquit phrase for sections of thought representation. Clarissa is in fact recalling her earlier thoughts—“These were some of my reflections at the time” (104), she goes on to write—but reporting them in the present tense, as if quoting her own internal monologue. Yet she is also retracing and reprising the pattern of her thoughts to confirm to herself that she would act the same way again. The effect is of the consciousness scene happening as she writes “to the moment.” In opening up the recesses of her heart to her interlocutor, Clarissa examines the motivations for her conduct through a series of interrogatives that establishes a syntactic pattern of thought representation that could be transferred to the “narrative” method of third person, enabling the internal soliloquy to be grammatically transformed into FID. Joe Bray has argued that the epistolary novel in fact provides the “generic source” of dramatized consciousness in the third-person novel, pointing to

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how Harriet Byron in Sir Charles Grandison reflects on her past thoughts in free indirect style. In another letter to Miss Howe, Clarissa undertakes to describe an argument she has just had with her sister. “Everything she said against me, which carried force with it,” Clarissa writes, “I will do justice to. As I ask for your approbation or disapprobation of my conduct, upon the facts I lay before you, I should think it the sign of a very bad cause, if I endeavoured to mislead my judge” (192). This passage is crucial for highlighting the function of Clarissa’s interlocuter in her practice of self-scrutiny. If the advice of conduct literature is to examine the heart with reference to how others might judge one’s actions, the epistolary novel not only enables the transcription of this practice but provides that other voice by embedding the “impartial judge” in the addressee who is also the character herself, not only herself at the time of writing, but her later self to whom she writes her journal. If we turn to a contemporaneous third-person novel, Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), the eponymous character—a parodic transfictional brother of Pamela who zealously guards his virtue—does not soliloquize or review his conduct, demonstrating that a reversal of gender roles does not lead to the same sort of self-scrutiny. There is very little access to the interior in this novel. However, a consciousness scene is included for Lady Booby, a figure of fun who is rapaciously enamored of Joseph: No sooner had Joseph left the room in the manner we have before related, than the lady, enraged at her disappointment, began to reflect with severity on her conduct. Her love was now changed to disdain, which pride assisted to torment her. She despised herself for the meanness of her passion, and Joseph for its ill success. However, she had now got the better of it in her own opinion, and determined to dismiss the object. After much tossing and turning in her bed, and many soliloquies, which if we had no better matter for our reader, we would give him; she at last rung the bell as abovementioned, and was presently attended by Mrs Slipslop, who was not much better pleased with Joseph than the lady herself. (18–19)

We have here the inquit phrase of “reflect on her conduct” as a cue for a consciousness scene that will become common throughout the century, followed by a brief summary of Lady Booby’s reflection in a series of abstract nouns, and then the common rhetorical strategy of refusing to divulge the full extent of her self-communion because it is not considered important. However, the narrator does give us a full soliloquy toward the end of the novel, and it is one in which Lady Booby comes to a false and ephemeral resolution:

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Slipslop went away; and her mistress began to arraign her own conduct in the following manner:—“What am I doing? How do I suffer this passion to creep imperceptibly upon me? How many days are past since I could have submitted to ask myself the question?—Marry a footman! Distraction! Can I afterwards bear the eyes of my acquaintance?” (327)

The soliloquy continues at length until Mrs. Slipsop interrupts to provide new information that causes Lady Booby to cast off her resolution to be done with Joseph. So in the two dominant authors of the eighteenth century, we see how their differing methods of “writing to the moment” and “continued narration” establish the parameters of consciousness representation in scenes of women reviewing their conduct. Citing Fielding’s later novel, Tom Jones, and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Dorrit Cohn suggests that overtly authorial narrators tend to use characters as the sounding board for general statements about human nature: “The more conspicuous and idiosyncratic the narrator, the less apt he is to reveal the depth of his characters’ psyches or, for that matter, to create psyches that have depth to reveal” (1978, 25). This reluctance to explore the heart may also be a result of the gender of the narrator, though, for Eliza Haywood’s 1751 novel, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, has a highly intrusive narrator modelled on Fielding’s, yet represents an important moment in the development of fictional consciousness.

Betsy Thoughtless and the Love of Coquetry: Internalizing Authorial Voice I pointed out earlier the common practice of conduct books to warn against vanity by admonishing a preoccupation with the looking glass and advising instead to turn one’s gaze within. In a section on meekness as a “necessary feminine virtue” in The Ladies Calling, Richard Allestree writes: ’Tis therefore to be wished they would take the admonition, and whilst they consult their glasses, whether to applaud or improve their outward form, they would cast one look inwards, and examine what symmetry there is held with a fair out-side whether any storm of passion darken and overcast their interior beauty, and use at least an equal diligence to rescue that, as they would to clear their face from any stain or blemish. (57)

The eighteenth-century consciousness scene developed in large part as a way to follow characters as they cast their own look inward and measure the

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extent to which they match the subject of the ideal woman. The opening to Betsy Thoughtless establishes the authorial narrator as a source of wisdom for young ladies very much in the vein of conduct literature: “It was always my opinion, that fewer women were undone by love than vanity; and that those mistakes the sex are sometimes guilty of, proceed, for the most part, rather from inadvertency, than a vicious inclination” (27). The narrator goes on to point out that “the ladies” are too willing to censure the conduct of others rather than reflect upon their own failings, suggesting there would be far less guilt and scandal “were some part of that time which is wasted at the toilette, in consulting what dress is most becoming to the face, employed in examining the heart, and what actions are most becoming of the character” (27). The novel revolves around its protagonist attaining the same wisdom that infuses the gnomic statements outlined in the opening paragraph, and this wisdom, of course, can be attained only by examining the heart. Accordingly, its pages contain more scenes of private reflection and cogitation than any previous work of fiction. The main thread of these scenes is Betsy’s constant struggle between her natural virtue and good sense and a streak of vanity that compels her to seek the attention of multiple men with no intention of marrying any. Here is a scene similar to the one involving Lady Booby in Joseph Andrews, except Betsy is not dealing with a rebuff but with an overly familiar letter from a suitor: Impossible it is to express the mingled emotions of shame, surprize, and indignation, which filled the breast of Miss Betsy, on reading this bold invitation; she threw the letter on the ground, she stamped upon it, she spurned it, and would have treated the author in the same manner, had he been present; but the first transports of so just a resentment being over, a consciousness of having, by a too free behaviour towards him, emboldened him to take this liberty, involved her in the utmost confusion, and she was little less enraged with herself, than she had reason to be with him. (42)

This passage begins with the common trope of inexpressible emotion, before indexing this emotion via description of Betsy’s observable action: stamping on the letter. However, the passage continues to chart her thoughts, particularly the shift that occurs when she realizes her own culpability. From this point the psychonarration starts to offer a more detailed and dynamic account of her consciousness. At first, this account is conventional—“She could have tore out her very eyes for having affected to look kindly upon a wretch”—a response the narrator seems to mock with the line “she spared those pretty twinklers that violence” (43). However, this leads to a consciousness scene in which Betsy’s self-scrutiny introduces greater complexity to her

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thoughts. “Never was a night passed in more cruel anxieties than what she sustained; both from the affront she had received, and the reflection that it was chiefly the folly of her own conduct which had brought it on her; and what greatly added to her vexation, was the uncertainty how it would best become her to act on an occasion which appeared so extraordinary to her” (43). Here is a standard dramatization of self-scrutiny. However, what follows is a long, paratactic sentence that seems to hew to the rhythm of her thoughts and which begins: “She had no friend whom she thought it proper to consult; she was ashamed to relate the story to any of the discreet and serious part of her acquaintance; she feared their reproofs for having counterfeited a tenderness for a man, which she was now sensible she ought, if it had been real, rather to have concealed with the utmost care both from him and all the world” (43). Unlike Richardson’s Clarissa, who reveals her heart to her correspondent, Betsy feels unable to share her thoughts with anyone and internalizes her self-examination because she is sure that the opinion of all, reflected in her conscience, would judge her conduct. The psychonarration becomes more empathetic and consonant from the point of the deictic marker “which she was now sensible she ought,” as the narrator seeks to trace her thoughts rather than summarize them, for the act of her reviewing her conduct requires a representational mode that reveals her thoughts “in the moment.” Such a reflection has no lasting effect, however, for Betsy resolves nothing. It is not until toward the end of the novel, by which time she has been forced by family pressure into a disastrous marriage with a “domestic tyrant” and suffered her fourth rape attempt, this time by a rapacious nobleman, that she is finally made conscious of her own complicity in her misfortune: “In fine, she now saw herself, and the errors of her past conduct, in their true light:—‘How strange a creature have I been!’ cried she, ‘how inconsistent with myself! I knew the character of a coquet both silly and insignificant, yet did everything in my power to acquire it” (557–58). The soliloquy continues at length until the narrator tells us: “In summing up this charge against herself, she found that all her faults and her misfortunes had been owing either to an excess of vanity;— a mistaken pride,—or a false delicacy” (558). Here Betsy comes to realize what the narrator has already informed us in the gnomic statement that opens the novel, or rather, she has internalized the voice of this public narrator. After this she is a changed woman, and having demonstrated her worth for having “fully corrected” the follies that stained her virtue, she is rewarded, through a series of plot contrivances, with a miraculous reunification with Mr. Trueworth, a lover she had lost through her earlier vanity. The authorial voice that guides us through Betsy’s “correction” is so heavyhanded that if it is not ironic it likely operates on an axiological horizon distinct from that of the author. At the very least it points to the contradictions

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of internalizing the precepts of conduct literature. One clue resides in the liberal use of the word “natural.” When referring to Betsy’s faults, the narrator generalizes them, such as “that vanity so natural to a youthful mind” (37) and “that love of pleasure so natural to youth” (56). When referring to her individual character, however, there are descriptions of her “natural vivacity” (50) and “natural cheerfulness” (51). These individual qualities are in fact what lead her into the general faults of youth (and make her a compelling fictional character), and thus there is an internal clash over which “natural” aspects of her character ought to be cultivated. Betsy does not read conduct books and so must learn from experience to discover what the narrator refers to as her “natural delicacy” (430) and to draw upon the “natural goodness of her disposition” (479) to guide her. The plot may be resolved with a happy marriage, but at the expense, it would seem, of having to tamp down her “natural sprightliness” (303). So while the novel may read as an exaggerated cautionary tale against vanity, it also reveals the toll that the burden of virtue places on the inner life if women are to internalize the moralizing voice that the narrator channels. Betsy Thoughtless has been called the first domestic novel in English and an early example of the female bildungsroman. The scholarly consensus today is that it represents Haywood’s deliberate attempt to curb the salaciousness of her fiction and offer a more conservative domestic novel to attain commercial success. Its central importance to novelistic history, I suggest, was to build a melodramatic plot not just around a series of incidents (mistaken assumptions, courtships, seduction attempts, etc.) but around a series of consciousness scenes, and this was the result of Haywood’s overt invocation and subversion of the imperatives of conduct book literature. This is why Jane Spencer affords it such significance in The Rise of the Woman Novelist (1986). Spencer argues that the epiphanic interior monologue I quoted above demonstrates a “concern with the inner self not found in Fielding’s portrayal of Tom Jones, and an interest in the thoughtless young girl’s moment of self-­ knowledge not paralleled even in Richardson’s work” (152). Spencer locates Haywood’s novel in a genre of the “reformed coquette,” a genre with which women novelists found literary acceptance by engaging with the model of femininity found in conduct literature and creating characters who could exercise their desire through coquetry before succumbing to marriage. The significance of Betsy Thoughtless and others like it is that they “brought about a crucial shift in the novel’s presentation of women, from the stasis of perfection or villainy to the dynamics of character change” (141). I pause here to compare the formal rendering of Betsy’s epiphany with a more famous consciousness scene from Jane Austen’s Emma (1815):

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Emma’s eyes were instantly withdrawn; and she sat silently meditating, in a fixed attitude, for a few minutes. . . . Her own conduct, as well as her own heart, was before her in the same few minutes. She saw it all with a clearness which had never blessed her before. How improperly had she been acting by Harriet! How inconsiderate, how indelicate, how irrational, how unfeeling had been her conduct! What blindness, what madness, had led her on! (382)

Like Betsy, the heroine pauses to review her conduct before realizing the folly of her behavior. The difference from Haywood’s novel, of course, is that Emma’s character-changing realization is rendered not as a soliloquy but as a passage of free indirect thought, with the characteristic grammatical transformation of the epiphanic ejaculations into third person. The shared language of conduct literature is clear, though, from Betsy’s “false delicacy” to Emma’s “indelicate” conduct, recalling John Gregory’s advice: “Now I do not wish you to affect delicacy; I wish you to possess it” (21). The narrative voice may be muted in comparison to earlier novels, but it is vitally present in the sentence that bridges the shift from thought report to FID (“She saw it all . . .”): a sentence that demonstrates the narrator is repeating the soliloquy in a voice already blessed with the clearness that Emma had hitherto lacked. The relation between Emma’s conduct and her own heart is the key here. Without proper awareness of her heart, she cannot properly regulate her conduct, and hence the importance of the internal method for narrating this awareness. This passage is an oft-quoted, canonical example of FID, particularly the sentence that embeds Emma’s indirectly reported epiphanic thought in an authorial metaphor: “It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!” (382). If the arrow carries Emma’s recognition of her own heart, the conduct scene carries the formal technique by which this is conveyed to readers.

Emily St. Aubert and “Imaginary Terrors”: Spatializing the Conduct Scene Histories of thought representation typically reserve for special mention the genre of the Gothic that emerged in the period between Haywood’s novel and Austen’s, in which the mental states of extreme anxiety and distress lend themselves to psychological exploration. The inaugurating example is Isabella’s flight from Manfred in The Castle of Otranto (1764), in which the prose matches the rhythms of her agitation and, for John Bender, “arguably contains the first sustained use of free indirect discourse in English fiction” (2012,

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106). Again, a female character becomes the site for innovation in techniques of thought representation, this time in a moment of physical danger, rather than a moment of reflection. Although gothic fiction emerged as a reaction against the modern realist novel, and tended to be ignored by most histories of the genre, it has been recuperated by the theory of reflexive realism by virtue of its self-conscious reworking of the concept of probability, steering it away from the plausibility of events to the plausibility of character motivation. In his preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto, Walpole argued that “the great resources of fancy have been damned up, by a strict adherence to common life” (9), pitching his work as a blend of ancient and modern romances in which the reaction of characters to extraordinary incidents remains within the realms of probability. For Bender (1987) this preface is a key document in the development of reflexive realism because it “formalize[s] the turn toward manifest fictionality” in its aspiration for “a kind of novel unmistakably fictional in its premises yet tethered to experienced reality by psychological realism and by the canons of probability” (17). By the end of the century Ann Radcliffe’s enormously popular “terror” novels tethered the Gothic exploration of the sublime, and its detailed spatial descriptions, to the conduct scene that had been developing over the previous decades. For instance, in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) we have this passage: Emily . . . walked in the garden; tried to compose her spirits, and, at length, arrived at her favourite pavilion at the end of the terrace, where, seating herself at one of the embowered windows, that opened upon a balcony, the stillness and seclusion of the scene allowed her to recollect her thoughts, and to arrange them so as to form a clearer judgment of her former conduct. (121)

Time is spent here not only describing the scenery, but noting its influence on Emily’s capacity for meaningful reflection. This has the effect of “spatializing” the virtually textbook conduct literature behavior to follow, by which I mean the scene of thinking in time is facilitated, generated, or redirected by the particular space to which it is bound: She endeavoured to review with exactness all the particulars of her conversation with Valancourt at La Vallee, had the satisfaction to observe nothing, that could alarm her delicate pride, and thus to be confirmed in the selfesteem, which was so necessary to her peace. (121)

The mental verbs of “recollect” and “review” are the cue for a consciousness scene in which her desire for Valancourt is balanced against her need

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to be satisfied with her well-regulated conduct. What follows reads like a straightforward example of psychonarration, summarizing the general tenor of Emily’s thoughts with phrases such as “her mind then became tranquil” and “all this was mingled with a degree of delight” before concluding with this passage: She determined, however, that no consideration should induce her to permit a clandestine correspondence, and to observe in her conversation with Valancourt, should they ever meet again, the same nicety of reserve, which had hitherto marked her conduct. As she repeated the words—“should we ever meet again!” she shrunk as if this was a circumstance, which had never before occurred to her, and tears came to her eyes. (121)

The mental verb “she determined” in the first sentence reports Emily’s resolve to maintain reserve in her conduct with Valancourt in the event of a future meeting. The next sentence, however, opens with a remarkable repetition of the narrator’s phrase in the quoted language of the character: “should we ever meet again!” This repurposing of the narrator’s utterance in the voice of the character suggests that the previous sentence had in fact been an indirect rendering of Emily’s internal soliloquy, complete with the characteristic pronominal shift. It seems, then, that the mental verb “she determined” marks a shift in the passage from psychonarration to FID, which we are cued to read only by the following direct quotation. At the same time, we could read it as Emily overhearing and repeating the thought report of her own impartial judge. Radcliffe’s contribution to the novel was to domesticate the gothic through her use of “the explained supernatural,” following a pattern of the mistaken heroine that would provide an anxiety of influence for Austen’s own novels. In Radcliffe’s Gothic fiction, the consciousness scene also becomes an occasion for working up terror, with scenes of reflection firmly embedded in the physical environment of the characters. Her heroines tend to find themselves locked in a room, afraid for their fate, with their thoughts oscillating between reviewing their moral conduct and surveying their surroundings. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily’s agitated state makes her susceptible to imaginary terrors around her, and often she seeks to explore these surroundings as a distraction from her moral quandaries. She examines doors, passageways, and chambers in the same way she examines her heart, and Radcliffe tracks her thoughts as she moves through various locations. At one point in the novel we are told that Emily “was left once more to her own sad reflections” in her bedroom, the conventional cue for a consciousness scene, but one which cannot be narrated

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without focalized description of her environment: “For some time she sat so lost in thought, as to be wholly unconscious where she was; at length, raising her head, and looking round the room, its gloom and profound stillness awed her” (211). The stillness of her locked room at night, however, has a different effect on her reflections than the stillness of the scene opening out from the embowered windows that had allowed her to judge her conduct. Instead: Her mind, long harassed by distress, now yielded to imaginary terrors; she trembled to look into the obscurity of her spacious chamber, and feared she knew not what; a state of mind, which continued so long, that she would have called up Annette, her aunt’s woman, had her fears permitted her to rise from her chair, and to cross the apartment. (211)

Here we see that when Emily turns her thoughts from herself to her surroundings she transfers the anxiety of her emotions to her perception of the room. She is unaware of this, of course, for it requires the omniscient narrator to report that her terrors are imaginary. The analogy being pursued here is that if she is wrong about the dangers of her surroundings, she may be wrong about the workings of her own heart. This ironic distance between narrator and character is what enables the genre of the explained supernatural to function, and it is founded on the self-examining heroine of the conduct scene. On another occasion we are given the stock introduction to Emily’s “own sad reflections” and granted an account of her thoughts before this passage: To call off her attention from subjects, that pressed heavily on her spirits, she rose and again examined her room and its furniture. As she walked round it, she passed a door, that was not quite shut, and, perceiving, that it was not the one, through which she entered, she brought the light forward to discover whither it led. (224)

This time, Emily deliberately turns from her thoughts to her surroundings. Behind the door is a “steep, narrow stair-case” that winds down into the house but “in the present state of her spirits” she is too anxious to explore it. In true Gothic fashion, we can read the house full of “imaginary terrors” as a metaphorical embodiment of Emily’s mind, the mysterious staircase and passageways the secret recesses of her heart. This is reinforced by the language, with the verb “to examine” used twice in the passage, as if extending the practice of self-reflection to her surroundings: “Closing the door, therefore, she endeavored to fasten it, but, upon further examination, perceived, that it had no bolts on the chamber side, though it had two on the other” (224). This of

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course, is one of Emily’s faults, in the same way that examining one’s external appearance in the looking glass is considered a fault. Another consciousness scene commences: “To withdraw her thoughts, however, from the subject of her misfortunes, she attempted to read, but her attention wandered from the page, and, at length, she threw aside the book, and determined to explore the adjoining chambers of the castle” (235–36). The rejection of her book in favor of exploring the castle signals Emily’s folly, for the right sort of reading is designed to assist in knowledge of the self, whereas the externalization of the practice of examination leads to imaginary terrors, in this case, the notorious black veil. The lineage from Radcliffe to Burney to Austen is well established, with Tuite, for instance, arguing that Radcliffe’s use of FID is a defining feature of her pioneering form of female Gothic that Austen inherited and further developed. To this it should be added that Radcliffe’s contribution was to mobilize and externalize the conduct scene. The connections between Burney’s fiction and contemporaneous conduct literature have been amply demonstrated by Joyce Hemlow, largely in relation to plot structure and the function of characters. There are many consciousness scenes in Burney’s work, though, and it is in these scenes that we see the particular self-examining subject of conduct book literature.

Camilla Tyrold and the “Finely Scrutinizing Monitor”: Intruding the Soliloquy It is common to see Burney’s shift from epistolary fiction in her first novel, Evelina (1778), to third-person omniscience in Cecelia (1782) as emblematic of the decline of the letter novel as female authors in particular sought new ways to render the interior life of characters. However, Burney’s contribution to the development of FID, I suggest, lies less in combining the subjective voice of epistolary fiction with that of an authorial narrator, than in effecting a shift from the dramatic convention of the quoted internal soliloquy, such as those by Betsy Thoughtless, to the indirect narratorial performance of the thoughts of a character such as Emma Woodhouse. This transition can be seen especially in Burney’s third novel, Camilla (1796), which includes consciousness scenes rendered both in traditional quoted soliloquies and in FID. It is instructive to compare examples of these two modes of thought representation in the novel. In the passage below, Camilla is reflecting on a conversation with Edgar, from whom she has just departed, concerned by his apparent lack of romantic interest in her:

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Camilla went on to Etherington in deep distress; every ray of hope was chaced from her prospects, with a certainty more cruel, though less offensive, to her feelings, than the crush given them by Miss Margland. He cares not for me! she cried; he even destines me for another! He is the willing agent of the Major; he would portion me, I suppose, for him, to accelerate the impossibility of ever thinking of me! And I imagined he loved me! what a dream!—what a dream!—how has he deceived me!—or, alas I how have I deceived myself. (299)

Here is a standard soliloquy, rendered in the first person, with the conventional dramatic inquit phrase “she cried” serving to mark it as a quotation, even though Camilla is riding in her coach without company and is presumably thinking rather than talking to herself. We can compare this consciousness scene with another one later in the novel where, upon receiving an invitation to a ball at which she knows Edgar will be in attendance, Camilla is discomposed and must repair to her room: There, however, though she gained time for reflection, she gathered not the resolution she sought. The stay at Southampton, by the desire of Lynmere, had been lengthened; yet only a week remained, before she must return to her father and her Uncle . . . but how return? separated from Edgar? Edgar whom she still believed she had only to see again in some more auspicious moment to re-conquer and fix for life! But when and where might that auspicious moment be looked for? (690–91, original ellipsis)

Here the consciousness scene is established by Camilla gaining “time for reflection,” which means, although there is no tag clause, the following passage can anaphorically be related to her perspective. The statement leading into this passage, though, which points out that Camilla achieved no resolution from her reflection, suggests the account of her thoughts that follows is in fact an analeptic expansion of the moment between the two clauses of the first sentence, between the reflection and the lack of resolution. The ellipsis marks the point at which narration yields to FID and the interrogatives and ejaculations must be attributed to the character rather than the narrator. The phrase embedded in this stretch of FID, however—“whom she still believed”—is enough to establish an ironic narratorial distance from the character, a distance that is followed up by a gnomic statement in the next paragraph: “When our wishes can only be gratified with difficulty, we conclude, in the ardour of combating their obstacle, that to lose them, is to lose everything, to obtain them is to ensure all good” (91).

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If we compare this passage to the earlier quoted soliloquy, we can see they have the same syntactic pattern—a series of first-person ejaculations compared to a series of third-person interrogatives—both of which could be translated into the opposing narrative voice via a tense and pronoun shift. This lends weight to the linguistic theory of FID as the grammatical transformation of an originary utterance, but also to my historical claim that the consciousness scene is the textual site where FID is developed to replace the internal soliloquy inherited from the drama rather than the epistolary novel. The question that remains is why some scenes in this book are rendered as quoted soliloquies, while others are performed indirectly by the narrator? Can we witness in this book a moment of historical transition, where Burney is testing the effect of different modes of thought representation? One thing to observe is that the more melodramatic moments in Camilla tend to be presented as conventional dramatic soliloquies, whereas general reflections, and particularly reflections upon conduct, tend to be narrated via a shuttling between psychonarration and FID. Here is a conduct scene so conventional as surely to have become a cliché by the end of the century: Camilla now perceived her own error: the perseverance of young Westwyn not merely startled, but appalled her. His character, unassuming, though spirited, was marked by a general decency and propriety of demeanour, that would not presumptuously brave distancing; and awakened her, therefore, to a review of her own conduct, as it related or as it might seem, to himself. (679)

Concerned by the apparent forwardness of a suitor, the heroine conducts a review of her behavior to determine her own culpability. She does so because her assessment of Westwyn’s generally upright character compels her to imagine his perception of her conduct on this occasion: And here, not all the guiltlessness of her intentions could exonerate her from blame with that finely scrutinizing monitor to which Heaven, in pity to those evil propensities that law cannot touch, nor society reclaim, has devolved its earthly jurisdiction in the human breast. With her hopes she could play, with her wishes she could trifle, her intentions she could defend, her designs she could relinquish—but with her conscience she could not combat. (679–80)

We may recall here the advice of Reverend Wetenhall Wilkes in A Letter of Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young Lady: “A Lady is never so sure of her Conduct, as when the Verdict she passes upon her own Behaviour is

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confirmed by the Opinion of all, that know her” (72). In assuming Westwyn’s opinion of her behavior, Camilla takes up Wilkes’s injunction to discover the foibles of her own soul and is forced by her conscience to admit that she may partially be to blame. This conscience, “that finely scrutinizing monitor” that God has embedded in the heart (we might also say, that impartial spectator), is also subject to the scrutinizing monitor of the authorial narrator who reveals the soul in consciousness scenes and retains the ability to comment and generalize. In a later scene, a more syntactically playful passage of psychonarration seeks to capture the rush of thoughts that forces Camilla to review her conduct yet again as she is riding in a carriage: To leave thus a spot where she had experienced such felicity; to see it naked and forlorn, despoiled of its hospitality, bereft of its master,—all its faithful old servants unrewarded dismissed; in disgrace to have re-entered its pales, and in terrour to quit them;—to fly even the indulgent Father, whose tenderness had withstood every evil with which errour and imprudence could assail him, set her now all at war with herself, and gave her sensations almost maddening. She reviewed her own conduct without mercy; and though misery after misery had followed every failing, all her sufferings appeared light to her repentant sense of her criminality; for as criminal alone, she could consider what had inflicted misfortunes upon persons so exemplary. (855–56)

Here we see the consciousness scene, revolving around the gendered practice of self-examination, provides the textual site for experimenting with thought representation that leads to the development of FID. In the first sentence, the paratactic concatenation of clauses rhythmically echoes Camilla’s discombobulated recollection of events. The series of semi-colons continues in the next sentence, but one which settles into a more formally conventional summary of her thoughts as she passes sober judgement on herself. The following scene of internal judgement further demonstrates the perspectival flexibility that enables FID to emerge out of the shading between narratorial report and character thought. First there is a general summary of Camilla’s sense of shame over taking the advice of Mrs. Arlbery and encouraging the devoirs of a suitor in order to gauge Edgar’s response and determine the extent of his affection for her: “Coquetry was as foreign to the ingenuousness of her nature, as to the dignity of all her early maternal precepts. She had hastily encouraged the devoirs of the Baronet, upon the recommendation of a woman she loved and admired; but now that the failure of her aim brought her to reflexion, she felt penitent and ashamed” (488–89). She becomes con-

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vinced that this coquetry has only estranged Edgar from her. The use of the epic preterite (“now .  .  . she felt”) grounds the past tense of the passage in Camilla’s subjective present as the general summary of her thoughts continues. The next paragraph reads: What repentance ensued! what severity of regret! how did she canvass her conduct, how lament she had ever formed that fatal acquaintance with Mrs. Arlbery, which he had so early opposed, and which seemed eternally destined to lead her into measures and conduct most foreign to his approbation! (488–89)

Here the outbreak of ejaculations suggests less that the narrator is indirectly reporting Camilla’s thoughts than adopting the fervor of her reaction into the syntactic pattern of the narration. For it is narration: repentance ensues, conduct is canvassed, these cannot be Camilla’s thoughts, or the rendition of her thoughts as she might have uttered them if asked. That is, until the phrase “which seemed” embeds us in Camilla’s perspective. Here the narrator is both relaying the shift in her thoughts and performing it ironically to the extent that we are meant to realize that of course she would do this, given her nature. The preface to Camilla opens with the typical distinction between the historian and the novelist, yet appears to refine this to one between the recorder of incidents and the explorer of the interior: “The historian of human life finds less of difficulty and of intricacy to develop in its accidents and adventures, than the investigator of the human heart in its feelings and its changes” (7). For Burney, the vicissitudes, horrors, eccentricities, and more of Fortune compare not to “the wilder wonders of the Heart of man; that amazing assemblage of all possible contrarieties, in which one thing alone is steady—the perverseness of spirit which grafts desire on what is denied” (7). The constant feature of the heart described here, the perverse desire for what one cannot have, is consonant with the tension that informs the self-examining heroine: a tension between internal desire and external conduct. The heart is here described as hidden to others: its “qualities are indefinable, its resources unfathomable,” and “in our neighbours we cannot judge, in ourselves we dare not judge it” (7). Significantly, though, the epistolary form is not presented as the best means for exploring the secret recesses of the self, for Burney had turned to thirdperson narration after her first novel, Evelina. The preface concludes with what appears to be an account of what this voice can achieve: “In one grand and general view, who can display such a portrait? Fairly, however faintly, to delineate some of its features, is the sole and discriminate province of the pen which would trace nature, yet blot out personality” (7). The broad view and

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the exclusive capacity to trace the interior appear to be descriptions of authorial narration, and for Julie Choi this marks the point at which the impersonal omniscient narrator takes over in the history of the novel. Impersonality is relative, though. The novel is rife with gnomic statements, but devoid of direct addresses, which lends some support to the erasure of the author as an individual narrator in favor of a communal voice (or common sense), but at the same time the very phrase “the investigator of the human heart” attributes this voice to a specific agent. The final paragraph of the novel returns us to the opening preface. In describing the resolutions and fortunes of each character, the narrator ends with Dr. Marchmont, who had throughout the novel cautioned Edgar to be wary in his plans to court Camilla, finding in Camilla’s heart and her qualities a “PICTURE OF YOUTH,” establishing a discursive link to the paratextual frame of the title. The last lines of the book, aptly enough, could be read as free indirect renderings of Marchmont’s realization, or as the final word of the narrator: “What, at last, so diversified as man? what so little to be judged by his fellow?” (913) These lines recall the “amazing assemblage of all possible contrarieties” that comprise the heart, as well as the observation that “in our neighbours we cannot judge” it. While Camilla has been viewed in conservative fashion as largely a dramatized conduct book, Vivien Jones writes that “Burney’s narrative method invites a very different response. The effect of her mimetic representation of Camilla’s mental anguish is to undermine rather than endorse her heroine’s internalization of male precepts which demand such a sacrifice of self ” (94). By the close of the eighteenth century, then, it is apparent that the consciousness scene, increasing in number throughout the developing genre of the novel, has served especially as a device for articulating the character of the self-examining heroine, in which desire exists in tension with the social expectations fostered by conduct literature. It is also apparent that the crucial device of FID, specific to the novel and increasingly important throughout the next century as a means for encouraging sympathy, emerges most prominently as a means to establish narrator-character relations in the conduct scene. The key novels in the development of FID all revolve around female protagonists looking inward to review their conduct. Histories of FID as a signpost of fictionality are incomplete without recognizing this; but so are histories of the novel that focus on Smithian sympathy as the inaugurating frame of FID and novelistic subjectivity. Tracing the history of the conduct scene, we can see that the burden of avaricious male desire is placed on women: they must internalize the effects of this desire and question their own complicity and hence their own sense

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of self. Part of this self-scrutiny involves reflecting on their vanity and pride, and the effect of this on their relationships with other women. It remains to ask: what did male characters think about in the eighteenth-century novel? As it turns out, many of them also reflected on the conduct of female characters. The plot of many novels in this period revolves around miscommunication between potential lovers, with each misreading the other party’s motivations. Scenes of private reflection follow the same process of self-debate, or the narrative pattern of the “regret-to resolution formula” (43) as Carol Mackay describes it—but those involving male characters do not have the same type of self-scrutiny, the same policing of selfish motivations, and certainly not the same sense of shame over sexually coded behavior. In fact, it is common to see scenes in which men reflect on the unfortunate coquetry of female characters, thereby rendering them unfit as potential wives. These range from Mr. Trueworth experiencing a sleepless night of anxiety about Betsy Thoughtless’s friendship with a prostitute, in which “his good understanding, and jealousy of honour, convinced him, there could be no lasting happiness with a person of Miss Betsy’s temper” (Haywood, 229); to the eponymous David Simple, heartbroken by the interest of Miss Nanny Johnson in a marriage proposal from his friend, driving off in a coach where “sometimes he would weep, to think that Vanity should prevent such a Creature from being perfect” (S. Fielding, 73); to Edgar Mandlebert who suddenly realizes, through a jealous response to Camilla’s flirtation with another man, that he is fond of her, but determining that “it is not alone even her heart that can fully satisfy me; its delicacy must be mine as well as its preference” (Burney, 292). Male characters do reflect on their behavior and attempt to resolve internal struggles, but the crucial practice of self-examination and self-monitoring is absent, for their subjectivities are not constructed around a need to protect the sexual propriety that defines their sex. It is instructive that while the trope of the looking glass is prominent in Richard Allestree’s The Ladies Calling, it is absent from The Whole Duty of Man (1658), the more general Christian guide he had earlier penned. This gendered practice of looking within is what drives the need for more complex modes of thought representation and what ensures that innovative, and increasingly extended, consciousness scenes will center around female fictional minds.

CHAPTER 3

Interiority and the End of Consciousness From the Conduct Scene to the Sex Scene

In the previous chapter I argued that the signature feature of novelistic fictionality—FID—emerged as a prominent mode of thought representation in the eighteenth-century novel, not as a general means for cultivating sympathy, and not as a technical replacement for the epistolary method, but as a refinement of the consciousness scene that had developed to structure characterological interiority in response to the imperatives of conduct books for women. Clearly in the ensuing centuries the consciousness scene in general and the technique of FID in particular became elements of the general economy of novelistic form, available to render the thoughts of any character with motivations to ponder and decisions to make. However, the specific nature of the conduct scene—the self-examining heroine who monitors her sexual propriety through regular self-scrutiny—continued to offer a template for innovations in thought representation. While the “passive virtue of the unmarried woman” (66)—to recall Armstrong’s phrase—dominated the consciousness scene in eighteenth-century fiction, by the late nineteenth, one could posit the “disillusioned married woman” as a central animating figure for formal experimentation, from the psychological analysis of Victorian realism to the twentieth-century stream-of-consciousness novel, exemplified by characters such as Dorothea Baird, Isabel Archer, Molly Bloom, and Constance Chatterley.

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In the passage from the Victorian realist novel to the modernist, one can see a broad shift away from the marriage plot as a resolution to the “problem” of female desire and toward narratives structured around self-discovery through sexual expression. A significant body of scholarship has been dedicated to charting the decisive role of sexology and psychoanalysis in figuring modern subjectivity around sexuality, and articulating the competition of pornography in the literary marketplace alongside censorship and obscenity laws as a framework for the modernist preoccupation with sex (see Boone, 1998; Pease, 2000; Seelow, 2005; Krouse, 2009). In this context the sex scene developed as a recognizable narrative scenario in modernist literature. My argument in this chapter is that the sex scene is also the diegetic site for the twentieth century’s most consequential innovation in thought representation: a reconfiguration of the conduct scene in which the pioneering novelistic subjectivity of the self-examining heroine is simultaneously erased and reinforced in the act of sex. Given that Watt positions Ulysses as the “climax” of the impulse of formal realism toward the internal view of characters, it could be argued that the rise of the novel is inscribed in the final Yes of Molly Bloom’s somnolent autoerotic orgasm, the little death that winds down what is probably the longest consciousness scene in literary history. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is the central document of this demise, however, where the typical epiphanic moment of self-realization becomes a momentary escape from consciousness and an evacuation of subjectivity during the act of sex, ostensibly a liberation from shame but also a reduction of selfhood to the body. In one sense this thwarts the unspoken imperative of the conduct scene—to avoid sex—but in another sense it is an extension of the practice of self-scrutiny. Even as the sex scene offers an opportunity for the self-examining heroine to no longer “think,” it retains the grammatical patterns, cognitive rhythms, and gendered preoccupations laid down by countless scenes of women reviewing their motivations and behavior. From Betsy Thoughtless spending an entire novel both courting and avoiding sexual scenarios before her coquetry is reformed in time for marriage, to Constance Chatterley seeking out extramarital sexual encounters to reconnect with life, the formal history of thought representation is not simply a path toward increasingly unmediated access to fictional minds, but the ongoing negotiation of a recurring center of subjectivity. In what follows I will trace the lineage of this subjectivity to its afterlife in Eimear McBride’s twenty-first-century novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, demonstrating the legacy of both Joyce and Lawrence on the self-examining heroine after postmodernism.

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NINETEENTH-CENTURY PSYCHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS AND THE NEW FICTION In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the work of George Eliot and Henry James became lightning rods for debates about the representation of fictional minds. These two authors represent the predilection for the minute psychological analysis of character that was considered by many critics to be coldly scientific and intellectual, dissecting characters rather than presenting living accounts of them, thus neglecting both the emotional involvement of readers and the importance of narrative progression. Debates about the relative merits of representing the internal qualities or external conduct of a character that preoccupied the eighteenth century had become more sharply framed as a distinction between plot-based and character-based fiction. In an 1873 article in the London Quarterly, the author writes that novels of the day could be divided into two classes: the popular novels that eschew psychological analysis and seek to amuse with “skilfully conceived plots,” and the work of a “more limited school of novelists” who “delight to dwell upon the inner mystery of each man’s individual consciousness” and “attempt to trace these hidden springs of action in the soul” (344). Whereas these “hidden springs” had previously been considered the general province of the novel and debated in terms of narrative method, here the term refers to a particular authorial preoccupation with the internal struggle of characters that underpins and colors a certain type of novel. “Around 1880,” Kenneth Graham notes, “the plot-character controversy enters quite dramatically into a new phase, when the technique of ‘analysis’ (simply, any detailed examination of personality and motive) comes under violent attack” (102). Up until then, Graham argues, analysis was largely in favor, before the novels and proclamations of the American novelists Henry James and William Dean Howells provided the catalyst for a backlash. This can be seen in Arthur Tilley’s review of The Portrait of a Lady in “The New School of Fiction” (1883). Tilley nominates George Eliot as the chief forebear of this school and James as its exemplar, noting the unfortunate influence of the French Realists to provide the context for his diagnosis that James’s novel suffers from the “absence of plot, over-analysis, and laboured realism” (264). Amy Levy goes further, in “The New School of American Fiction” (1884), by proclaiming that “when analysis supersedes narration; when the artist turns aside from the universal and simple to the particular and rococo; when he stands by us throughout to point out the mysteries of his work; then indeed, however good in its way that work may be, it inevitably contains within itself the germs of decay” (389). The significance of this assessment is that analysis comes to figure in the same light as intrusion: it denotes the unfortunate presence of

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the narrator over that of the characters. It also contains the seeds of the trope of the death of the novel, with Levy’s “germs of decay” anticipating Jameson’s argument in The Antinomies of Realism that the novel’s competing impulses contain “its own inevitable undoing, its own decay and dissolution” (6). In this context, the tradition of the conduct scene is pressed into new service, becoming the anchor for innovations in novelistic thought representation that recalibrate the relation between narrator and character. The psychological insight afforded by George Eliot’s “analytic omniscience” (in James’s words) provides one of the most celebrated articulations of female consciousness, and for Margaret Ann Doody, Eliot is the inheritor of the stylistic innovations of the eighteenth-century novel in the hands of Fanny Burney. It is important to recall Doody’s emphasis on the search of women writers for an authoritative omniscient voice capable of social commentary, for, despite growing distaste for authorial intrusions in the latter part of the nineteenth century, Eliot’s consciousness scenes rely upon the insightful presence of the narrator, as James Sully was at pains to point out in his discussion of the relation between fiction and sympathy in “George Eliot’s Art” (1881), and which I addressed in chapter 1. This authority, however, relies less on a narrator’s staunch upholding of virtue as the standard a self-examining heroine must come to accept and more on their capacity to “unravel certain human lots” with an analytic insight unavailable to the characters. In his book chapter, “The Network of Nerves,” Nicholas Dames argues that the self-aware introspection of characters fostered by FID becomes less prominent in the midnineteenth-century novel as a result of the pervasive influence of physiological psychology. In this model of the human mind, Dames explains, “the springs of action for physiologically grounded consciousness are neural combinations and recombinations—bodily inputs morphed, in an impossibly complicated process, into ideas and movements that can never be entirely retraced to their source” (227). As a result the garrulous voice of the Victorian narrator is necessary to reveal what characters don’t know about themselves because they are constitutionally unable to divine their own motives. We can see this dynamic played out in Middlemarch (1872), where the most significant aspect of Eliot’s psychological analysis is its exploration of the limits of the self-examining heroine’s knowledge of her interior.

Dorothea Brooke and the “Secret Motion of a Watch-Hand” In the prelude to Middlemarch, the authorial narrator establishes her concern with “the natures of women” (4), developing the conceit of women as modern-­ day Saint Theresas who must struggle to reconcile thought and deed, and

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whose “ardour alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse” (3). Dorothea is heir to Betsy Thoughtless or Camilla in the sense that she has an innate sense of right, and the plot revolves around testing this. The difference in the consciousness scenes lies less in the character or her pattern of thoughts, than in the narrative voice. Eliot’s narrator is highly intrusive, not an impersonal voice supposedly established by Burney, but less overt than Haywood’s narrator in her moral guidance. Not content to represent thoughts, or even comment generally, Eliot’s narrator goes into detail about the makeup of Dorothea’s identity, and employs the key feature of omniscience that underpins the technique of psychonarration: telling us what the character does not know about herself. I will dwell here upon an early consciousness scene in which this analysis is foregrounded. The scene begins with Dorothea seated in the boudoir of an apartment, with the narrator addressing us directly to state: “I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly, with such abandonment to this relief of an oppressed heart as a woman habitually controlled by pride on her own account and thoughtfulness for others will sometimes allow herself when she feels securely alone” (192). Already Dorothea is established as the representative of a type, and the chief focus of the pages to follow is what makes her cry when she is only just newly married. Rather than launching into a report of her thoughts, though, the narrator tells us that “Dorothea had no distinctly shapen grievance that she could state even to herself; and in the midst of her confused thought and passion, the mental act that was struggling forth into clearness was a self-accusing cry that her feeling of desolation was the fault of her own spiritual poverty” (192). Again, we have a female character attributing her emotional grief to her own failings, but what is important here is that because Dorothea is unsure herself of her state of mind, we require an omniscient narrator to provide a sense of this. We are given a summary of her marriage to Casaubon, an evaluation of her experience of Rome where she and her husband have visited, and a series of general observations on “mankind” and “ordinary human life.” As the scene continues in its attempt to explain Dorothea’s mental state, we have this passage: However, Dorothea was crying, and if she had been required to state the cause, she could only have done so in some such general words as I have already used: to have been driven to be more particular would have been like trying to give a history of the lights and shadows, for that new real future which was replacing the imaginary drew its material from the endless minutiae by which her view of Mr. Casaubon and her wifely relation, now that

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she was married to him, was gradually changing with the secret motion of a watch-hand from what it had been in her maiden dream. (194)

The passage begins with a self-reflexive observation about the nature of thought representation, anticipating the theory of FID as the hypothetical postulation of what a character might say were they asked. However, in this instance the character’s lexicon could not operate as an index of alterity because it would not differ from the narrator’s “general words.” Hence Eliot makes clear that for the psychological analysis of the nineteenth-century realist novel, the signature technique of FID simply won’t cut it when trying to dissect and make sense of a fictional mind. The metaphor used to describe the gradually changing view that Dorothea is yet unaware of seems to combine the conventional novelistic trope of the “secret springs” of characters with the watchmaker analogy of intelligent design in the natural world. This analogy links back to the novel’s prelude, with its reference to “the Supreme Power” who “has fashioned the natures of women” (4). The prelude establishes a preoccupation with how humans behave “under the various experiments of Time” (3), and here the authorial narrator is able to divine the secret motion of the watch-hand that animates Dorothea before the character herself can, with the passage continuing: “It was too early yet for her fully to recognize or at least admit the change, still more for her to have readjusted that devotedness which was so necessary a part of her mental life that she was almost sure sooner or later to recover it” (194). The narrator continues relentlessly to probe the circumstances of Dorothea’s emotional malaise concerning her relationship with her new husband: But was not Mr. Casaubon just as learned as before? Had his forms of expression changed, or his sentiments become less laudable? Oh waywardness of womanhood! did his chronology fail him, or his ability to state not only a theory but the names of those who held it; or his provision for giving the heads of any subject on demand? And was not Rome the place in all the world to give free play to such accomplishments? Besides, had not Dorothea’s enthusiasm especially dwelt on the prospect of relieving the weight and perhaps the sadness with which great tasks lie on him who has to achieve them? (195)

The series of interrogatives invite us to read them as examples of FID, but the interpolated ejaculation “Oh waywardness of womanhood!” and the phrase “had not Dorothea’s enthusiasm” give us pause, the first because the narrator has established in the prelude to the novel that womanhood is the cen-

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tral topic, and the second because of the distance established by the proper name Dorothea rather than a pronoun. These provide a kind of ironic filter for Dorothea’s confused musings, to which the narrator responds in the following paragraph: All these are crushing questions; but whatever else remained the same, the light had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday. The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same. (195)

One gets the sense here that the narrator is both presenting us with a general account of Dorothea’s slowly forming thoughts and judging them at the same time, to determine whether the fault lies with her or with her husband. The use of the second-person pronoun as an informal variant of “one” to facilitate a gnomic observation indicates that Dorothea’s situation is being assessed as typical of womanhood, carrying the echoes of conduct book wisdom about the nature of marriage. The interrogation continues in a more overt authorial voice: How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither? I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. (195–96)

Here we can see that the questions are not posed by Dorothea in her reflection and rendered in the form of FID. They are posed of her by the narrator, doubling as rhetorical questions to the reader, whose response is provided in the form of an intrusive comment. The narrator goes on to explain that the austerity of Casaubon’s behavior, his inability to share her excitement and receive her affections, provide some explanation: “Poor Dorothea! she was certainly troublesome—to herself chiefly; but this morning for the first time she had been troublesome to Mr. Casaubon” (198).

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A more conventional conduct scene, with its pattern of self-reflection and epiphanic insight, takes place toward the end of the novel, though, when Dorothea spends a night sobbing in anger over Will Ladislaw’s perceived betrayal before crying herself to sleep. She wakes to what the narrator calls a “new condition,” one in which she can use her grief to help her think more clearly: She began now to live through that yesterday morning deliberately again, forcing herself to dwell on every detail and its possible meaning. Was she alone in that scene? Was it her event only? She forced herself to think of it as bound up with another woman’s life—a woman towards whom she had set out with a longing to carry some clearness and comfort into her beclouded youth. In her first outleap of jealous indignation and disgust, when quitting the hateful room, she had flung away all the mercy with which she had undertaken that visit. She had enveloped both Will and Rosamond in her burning scorn, and it seemed to her as if Rosamond were burned out of her sight forever. (788)

In this passage, the narrator sets up the consciousness scene by relating Dorothea’s deliberate attempt to recall and scrutinize the events of the previous day and embeds us in her perspective with two lines of FID in the form of interrogatives, but then proceeds largely to retain an analytic distance, summarizing Dorothea’s own reflections on her earlier behaviour. The melodramatic phrase “she had flung away all the mercy” reads like a metaphorical approximation of Betsy Thoughtless stamping on and spurning her letter. The narrator then offers a general account of Dorothea’s character, framed by a gnomic statement similar to those that form the opening to Betsy Thoughtless: “But that base prompting which makes a woman more cruel to a rival than to a faithless lover, could have no strength of recurrence in Dorothea when the dominant spirit of justice within her had once overcome the tumult and had once shown her the truer measure of things” (788). This statement functions as a volta, as the narrator proceeds to narrate how Dorothea’s natural character reasserts itself after her initial tumult: All the active thought with which she had before been representing to herself the trials of Lydgate’s lot, and this young marriage union which, like her own, seemed to have its hidden as well as evident troubles—all this vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power: it asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance. She said to her own irremediable grief, that it should make her more helpful, instead of driving her back from effort. (788)

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Dorothea overcomes a gendered fault—blaming her rival rather than her lover—in the act of self-communion, upon which returns “all this vivid sympathetic experience” that the narrator has asserted she possesses. Here Dorothea’s review of her own conduct enables her to develop what Eliot considered the vital element of the genre of the novel: the sympathetic imagination. Whereas Betsy had to turn her scorn of others onto herself, Dorothea must go further and think not only of herself, but of extending her insight to others. The passage continues to describe Dorothea’s character and her desire to internalize “the perfect Right,” leading to this line of internal soliloquy: “What should I do—how should I act now, this very day, if I could clutch my own pain, and compel it to silence, and think of those three?” (788). Again the structure and syntactic pattern of the consciousness scene: a summary of thought, framed by gnomic wisdom (“it asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself ”) and concluded with a quoted internal soliloquy. The significance of Eliot’s interrogation of character consciousness was recognized at the time. In an 1873 review in Academy, H. Lawrenny writes: “Middlemarch marks an epoch in the history of fiction in so far as its incidents are taken from the inner life” with external circumstances functioning as a backdrop to its character study (1). It is no coincidence that the backlash against authorial commentary that I outlined in chapter 1, where such commentary comes to be seen as intrusive rather than digressive, occurs at the same time that psychological analysis occasions anxiety. For Lawrenny, the author’s sympathetic insight into characters is achieved by an invasive knowledge that readers would feel uncomfortable to possess: “It is not natural to most men to know so much of their fellow-creatures as George Eliot shows them, to penetrate behind the scenes in so many homes, to understand the motives of ambiguous conduct” (2). Authorial intrusions become condemned for destroying the illusion of truth necessary for sympathy to operate, and the dissection of a character’s unformed thoughts become condemned for hampering our view of the world the book purports to represent. The most famous consciousness scene of nineteenth-century fiction is surely chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Isabel Archer’s interior monologue, which constitutes the entirety of this chapter, is lauded for the intensity of its rendering of psychological complexity as she ruminates upon first the chemistry she shares with Lord Warburton and then her unhappy marriage to Gilbert Osmond. For Michael Gorra, while Henry James may have extended the experiments of earlier writers such as Eliot, his sustained account of “the inconclusive and associative flow of Isabel’s thoughts” in this chapter is different not simply in degree, but in kind from his predecessors: “No writer in English had yet offered so full an account of the inner life”

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(236). Again, however, it must be noted that James’s innovation rests upon the familiar template of the self-examining heroine reviewing her conduct. James’s authorial narrator, presenting himself as Isabel’s “biographer,” sets her up from the start as a character whose inner life requires analysis: “She would be an easy victim of scientific criticism if she were not intended to awaken on the reader’s part an impulse more tender and more purely expectant” (65). Isabel’s chief characteristic, we are told, is a sense of intellectual superiority, and a desire for an independent life, eager for personal improvement but insensible to her own contradictions and hypocrisies. Although she stakes her sense of self on her independence, the omniscient knowledge of her “biographer” reveals that “deep in her soul—it was the deepest thing there—lay a belief that if a certain light should dawn she could give herself completely; but this image, on the whole, was too formidable to be attractive” (66–67). Isabel’s pride and lack of insight into her own soul thus cause her to reject two marriage proposals before choosing the wrong husband. Recognizing this constitutes the epiphany of the consciousness scene. The opening to the chapter sets up the scene in typical fashion: “After he had gone she leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes; and for a long time, far into the night and still further, she sat in the still drawing-room, given up to her meditation” (442). The bulk of this meditation is given over to the question of why her marriage to Gilbert has so quickly become suffocating. In keeping with the advice of conduct book literature that wives consult their own conscience when confronted with their husband’s discontent, Isabel asks herself: “Was the fault in himself, or only in the deep mistrust she had conceived for him?” (444). The answer, she realizes, is the former. Formally speaking, this extended interior monologue is rendered through an oscillation between psychonarration and FID. What most distinguishes it as a mode of thought representation is the abundance of metaphors used to describe mental activity, such as: “But she had seen only half his nature then, as one saw the disk of the moon when it was partly masked by the shadow of the earth. She saw the full moon now—she saw the whole man” (445). Despite a clear authorial presence, it is not clear whether the recurring metaphors in this chapter constitute the narrator’s figurative approximation of Isabel’s general sentiments or her own way of making sense of her feelings. What is certain is that these metaphors carry the weight of the most important realizations: She could live it over again, the incredulous terror with which she had taken the measure of her dwelling. Between those four walls she had lived ever since; they were to surround her for the rest of her life. It was the house of

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darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation. Osmond’s beautiful mind gave it neither light nor air; Osmond’s beautiful mind indeed seemed to peep down from a small high window and mock at her. (448)

The image of Osmond peeping down from a window conjures James’s famous metaphor of the house of fiction, elaborated in the preface to this novel. To what extent does Osmond’s suffocating mind replicate what James called “the posted presence of the watcher,” which is “the consciousness of the artist” (8), as Alice Gavin suggests? Osmond does not know Isabel’s mind, and crucially does not care to know, whereas the narrator knows both her mind and Osmond’s. In fact, following this passage is Isabel’s lengthy dissection of Osmond’s “beautiful mind,” as if she has borrowed the author’s analytic omniscience, culminating in the epiphany of the scene: “The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his—attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer park” (451). The overt presence of the authorial narrator lends authority to this assessment, aligning Isabel’s recognition of Gilbert’s shortcomings with the same omniscient insight capable of revealing her own mind. The difference from earlier self-examining heroines is that, while she acknowledges to herself her mistake in marrying Osmond, Isabel does not accept culpability. Eliot’s and James’s novels are similar to the extent that they focus on unhappy marriages—Dorothea to Casaubon, Isabel to Gilbert Osmond— rather than using a happy marriage as the end point of the plot. Middlemarch more resembles Betsy Thoughtless in that Betsy feels compelled to marriage, the union is disastrous, but she is rewarded for her change of behavior by remarrying Trueworth. Isabel Archer is different. She cannot break the bonds with Osmond. Both novels, however, center around the struggle between individual desire and marital duty, which both requires and enables extended scenes of reflection on the nature of femininity. They represent more than just heroines thinking, though, for their detailed scrutiny of character came to symbolize the type of realist fiction that caused a backlash in the 1880s centered around a supposed imbalance in the structural dyad of narrator and character. James’s chapter-length scene of Isabel’s internal struggle was preceded by chapter 21 of George Meredith’s The Egoist (1879), titled “Clara’s meditations.” These meditations constitute a long consciousness scene in which the character Clara is deciding whether to marry, occasioning overt narratorial commentary on the divided nature of women. Another chapter-length consciousness scene following James’s novel is “Emily’s decision” in George Gissing’s A Life’s Morning (1888). In this chapter, Emily is in turmoil over having

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to marry to secure her parents a dowry. It’s not just that she wants to marry someone else: she considers her very soul and sense of piety to be at stake. That all these female characters deliberate over the perils of marriage indicates how the conduct scene was deployed to negotiate cultural shifts arising from legal changes to the institution of marriage from the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, in which a wife’s adultery (but not a husband’s) could be cause for divorce, to the 1882 Married Woman’s Property Act, which allowed married women to keep their earnings from employment. Married women, and their adulterous behavior, would constitute the basis for more radical innovations in the consciousness scene in the next century.

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CONSCIOUSNESS: FROM THE CONDUCT SCENE TO THE SEX SCENE If the consciousness scene of the eighteenth-century novel typically revolved around the thinking heroine’s scrutiny of her sexual conduct, and particularly the extent to which her behavior may have been construed as vain or coquettish, the twentieth century witnesses two major innovations in modes of thought representation in two books charged with obscenity for the frankness and apparent licentiousness of their descriptions of sex: James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and D.  H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). In these books, scenes of Molly Bloom and Constance Chatterley thinking are concerned primarily with the body, in a way that is only hinted at in earlier fiction. The typical conduct scene compels the heroine both to acknowledge that her sexual charms have aroused attention from men and to disavow her own desires if her conscience is to be satisfied. By contrast, these two characters have their own bodies and sexual desire front and center in their thoughts, even as they must negotiate the social and individual consequences of their interactions with men. Both are in sexless marriages (although for Molly it is only intercourse that is lacking, whereas for Connie her husband is crippled), and this becomes the catalyst for their respective affairs with Boylan and Mellors. The phallocentrism of each character is clear. “O thanks be to the great God I got somebody to give me what I badly wanted to put some heart up into me” (899) thinks Molly to herself, recalling the size of Boylan’s penis and the piston-pumping action that made her orgasm. Connie notoriously worships Mellors’s penis, also reaching orgasm through his actions, something she had not achieved before. Both characters spend much time considering the differences between men and women, but the narrative strategies for representing their consciousness are vastly different, recalling the distinctions of the eigh-

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teenth century: Molly’s thoughts are rendered in a quoted internal soliloquy, Connie’s in third-person FID heavily framed by and conflated with the authorial narrator.

Molly Bloom’s Gendered Plural Pronouns Molly Bloom’s section at the end of Ulysses is notable for reintroducing the internal soliloquy in the form of an extended stream-of-consciousness quotation of her thoughts over the extent of a night. If Isabella in Aphra Behn’s “The History of the Nun,” provides us with an early consciousness scene, lying in bed next to Katterina and thinking, we have a parallel in Molly Bloom lying in bed next to her husband and thinking, not about a struggle between duty and desire, but about her and Bloom’s infidelities. Despite the striking quality of her “voice,” Molly is not a first-person narrator, for there is no interlocutor to address and no events to relay, beyond those we can infer from her thoughts, such as Bloom moving in the bed beside her, or her beginning to menstruate—“O Jesus wait yes that thing has come on me yes now” (914). We have only a verbal transcript of the random flow of her thoughts as she tries to fall asleep. The most striking formal feature of the soliloquy is what Dorrit Cohn calls the “referential instability” of Molly’s pronouns where “he” in particular can shift its reference in the space of a line between Bloom, Boylan, Mulvey, and several others with only the context of the previous chapters to help us parse the syntax. However, the most important pronouns, I argue, are the plural ones. Throughout her monologue, thoughts or memories of specific characters lead Molly to generalizations about types of people, and these pronouns are always gendered. Sometimes “they” refers to a specific group of individuals, such as Bloom’s friends, or to social types, such as soldiers, priests, atheists, and poets—“they all write about some woman in their poetry” (922). Most often, though, they refer to men in general. In each of the eight “sentences” that comprise the “Penelope” episode, there is an average of five passages that include the plural pronoun “they” referring to men as a collective group. By contrast, the plural pronouns of “we” and “us” always refer to Molly’s sense of identification with the collective gender of women. If we trace these pronouns, they are almost all concerned with male sexual desire, particularly the fascination of men with breasts and their urgent need for penetrative sex: “theyre all mad to get in there where they come out of youd think they could never get far enough up and then theyre done with you in a way until the next time” (902).

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Objective plural pronouns are also used when Molly’s thoughts turn from her particular experience to general sentiments about the limitations of men, their idiocy, selfishness, or weakness: “and now she’s going such as she was on account of her paralysed husband getting worse theres always something wrong with them disease or they have to go under an operation or if its not that its drink and he beats her” (913). On occasion “they” seems to refer to the architects of women’s lot in society: “they ought to make chambers a natural size so that a woman could sit on it properly he kneels down to do it” (917). This reference to “making” recurs throughout, conflating Molly’s complaints about items manufactured by men—“clothes we have to wear whoever invented them” (917)—with her lament that women seem to have been created for men: “whats the idea of making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us like a Stallion driving it up into you” (877). When she is cursing the inconvenience of her menstrual cycle, the plural pronoun “they” conflates the anonymous collective gender of men with the ultimate Maker: “O this nuisance of a thing I hope theyll have something better for us in the other world tying ourselves up God help us thats all right for tonight” (917). The following passage includes the famous metaleptic apostrophe to Joyce, a rare form of authorial intrusion in which the direct address is from character to author, rather than from authorial narrator to reader: we too much blood up in us or what O patience above its pouring out of me like the sea anyhow he didn’t make me pregnant as big as he is I dont want to ruin the clean sheets the clean linen I wore brought it on too damn it damn it and they always want to see a stain on the bed to know youre a virgin for them all thats troubling them theyre such fools too you could be a widow or divorced 40 times over a daub of red ink would do or blackberry juice no thats too purply O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh sweets of sin whoever suggested that business for women what between clothes and cooking and children this damned old bed too jingling (914)

In this section the first-person plural pronouns serve to connect Molly’s annoyance at her menstruation with the shared biological experience of women in general, and the third-person plural pronouns connect her affirmation that Boylan both brought on the menstrual flow and did not get her pregnant with a general reflection on the collective male fantasy of a virginal woman. Her desire not to stain the sheets with her menstrual blood is juxtaposed with the foolishness of men who want to see them stained with hymenal blood. Traditionally cast as a source of shame for women, menstruation here is closely associated with her adulterous afternoon with Boylan. Shame is the

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key emotion experienced by female characters in the conduct scene, but this soliloquy seems to recuperate female sexuality by virtue of Molly being devoid of such an emotion, at least at the conscious level of her thoughts. For Molly, adultery is common and has already been perpetrated by her husband, and her period is only an inconvenience because it is messy and may prevent her having sex with Boylan again a few days later, “unless he likes it some men do” (914). The reference to “patience above” with its connotations of the virtue that leads to God, seems to connect to the appeal to Jamesy to “let me up out of this pooh.” The placement of this apostrophe indicates Molly’s desire to be raised out of the burden of her body and the expectations of men, and her query about “whoever suggested that business for women” appears to be another critique of a society based on the naturalizing assumptions of religion. Man, God, author. A classic triumvirate that in the plural form constitute “they.” Yet neither Jamesy nor God can be said to perform the role of impartial spectator compelling Molly to search her conscience. She does not review her conduct in the sense of scrutinizing her behavior and judging its propriety and certainly does not censure her own pride, vanity, or coquetry. There is no resolve to reform, even though the central preoccupation of her meandering thoughts is her affair with Boylan and her marriage to Bloom, which triggers various sexual memories and fantasies. Instead there is a flattening out of the dual subjectivities of examiner and judge where desire for approbation competes with a constant meditation on conventional gender roles, which is why the gendered plural pronouns carry the weight of this reconfiguration of the conduct scene. Throughout, Molly reflects upon and rationalizes her infidelity by comparing it to Bloom’s and noting his distrustful jealousy. Each time this leads to a generalization about men registered in the shift from singular to plural pronoun: “what was he doing there where hed no business they can go and get whatever they like from anything at all with a skirt on it and were not to ask any questions but they want to know where were you where are you going” (882). These different pronouns create, of course, an “us” versus “them” mentality in which Molly reflects upon the larger problem of patriarchy. At the same time, her sense of rivalry with other women for the sexual attention of men leads to a consideration of women’s contribution to their own fate: “either he wants what he wont get or its some woman ready to stick her knife in you I hate that in women no wonder they treat us the way they do we are a dreadful lot of bitches I suppose its all the troubles we have makes us so snappy Im not like that” (927). Molly’s generalizations about male desire are uniformly negative, but they are not couched as a danger to virtue as in previous conduct scenes, for Molly actively seeks and courts the sexual attention of men

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without shame and furthermore rails against a system in which male desire is considered natural but women’s desire is constrained: “men again all over they can pick and choose what they please a married woman or a fast widow or a girl for their different tastes like those houses round behind Irish street no but were to be always chained up theyre not going to be chaining me up no damn fear” (924). While Joyce had said there is no beginning, middle, and end to the soliloquy it nonetheless culminates in Molly’s memory of Bloom’s proposal: “yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is” (932). This is the last use of the plural pronoun to generalize about gender (“yes so we are flowers”), and the generalization is a conventional and traditional association of women’s bodies with nature. The chain of associations leading up to this includes Molly thinking “God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves” (931). Considering she had earlier lamented her menstrual blood “pouring out of me like the sea,” we could potentially take this as a more positive account of women’s bodies than the traditional sense of shame that has been enforced, or we could take it as a kind of taming of Molly’s sexual spirit. The soliloquy winds to its somnolent termination, possibly on the wings of an orgasm, and probably with Molly reaffirming her commitment to marriage, even as she recalls her first kiss with Mulvey, the final “Yes” her answer to Bloom’s proposal returning us to the first yes with its suspicion of his infidelity. This is a radically innovative consciousness scene at the level of form, with its approximation of random thought facilitated by the floating signifiers of Molly’s pronouns. However, tracing the gendered nature of these pronouns, and the faint shape of the traditional internal debate and resolution structure, as if stamped invisibly in lemon juice beneath the verbal stream, we can see that the soliloquy continues in the lineage of the eighteenth-century conduct scene, revamped for modernist concerns with interiority and modern views of sexuality. Debate over Molly Bloom’s soliloquy ranges from seeing it as a genuine example of ecriture feminine with its language firmly linked with the body, to a misogynist depiction of what men think women think. It is surely both. Molly is given sexual agency, but she can conceive of desire only within a heterosexual frame determined by the male gaze. Given its status as the exemplar of the modernist stream of consciousness, and the culmination of the inward turn, paradoxically demonstrating the stale artifice of realism by outstripping the realist capacity for the verisimilar rendering of fictional minds, Molly’s

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soliloquy is both the death that confers final meaning on the rise of the novel and a triumph of the empirical impulse that must be exposed as a signpost of fictionality by the postmodern rejection of character.

Constance Chatterley and the “Tormented Modern Woman’s Brain” If sexual propriety lies at the heart of the self-scrutiny of female characters in the conduct scene, the end point of the tradition I have been tracing can be found in Lady Chatterley’s Lover in which the consciousness scene is refigured as a sex scene. This book is largely focalized through Constance Chatterley, with some excursions into the thoughts of Mellors, the gameskeeper with whom she has an affair, and is formally striking both for its preponderance of FID and the intrusive presence of the author. This presence makes itself felt most keenly in narratorial incursions into the characters’ thoughts, rather than intrusive commentary in the narration. The conflation of authorial and character view is present from the start as the book opens with a gnomic statement—“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically” (5)— which is elaborated over the course of a paragraph before the next paragraph begins: “This was more or less Constance Chatterley’s position” (5). The sense we get throughout this book is of never quite knowing which sentiments are more or less Connie’s and which are more or less the narrator’s as it shuttles between long sections of FID and overtly didactic anti-industrial statements. In fact, this perspective, for Kate Millett, is what accounts for the insidious nature of the novel, embedding Lawrence’s phallocentric view of female sexuality in the consciousness of the protagonist. The book’s notoriety and significance results from it being the first work of serious literature to include graphic depictions of sex, but the sex scenes are structured as a progression toward Connie’s awakening to the passion of life and the self-knowledge that comes with this awakening, and hence can be read equally as consciousness scenes. Each scene involves her thinking during the act of copulation, and each scene brings her closer to a knowledge of herself, one that requires her in fact to transcend consciousness. For instance, in the passage quoted below, Connie is too self-conscious, too aware of her situation, to give herself up to pleasure: And when he came into her, with an intensification of relief and consummation that was pure peace to him, still she was waiting. She felt herself a little left out. And she knew, partly it was her own fault. She willed herself

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into this separateness. Now perhaps she was condemned to it. She lay still, feeling his motion within her, his deep-sunk-intentness, the sudden quiver of him at the springing of his seed, then the slow-subsiding thrust. That thrust of the buttocks, surely it was a little ridiculous! If you were a woman, and apart in all the business, surely that thrusting of the man’s buttocks was supremely ridiculous. Surely the man was intensely ridiculous in this posture and this act! (126)

Like a typical self-examining heroine, Connie ponders her own culpability for her predicament, but the scenario is inverted: it is her chaste disengagement rather than her active coquetry that is to blame. Notable in this passage is the curious conflation of author and character in the passage of FID that captures Connie’s sense of the ridiculousness of the scene. The grammar of the phrase “if you were a woman” suggests narratorial speculation about a different gendered perspective when we are cued to read this as Connie’s thoughts. Tracing the progression of scenes, we see that Connie cannot be free while still she remains aware of her own activity. The more she gives herself up to Mellors, the more her thoughts and sensations are rendered in increasingly florid language that seeks to exceed consciousness in order to restore her to her body, resulting in mutual orgasm: And she felt the soft bud of him within her stirring and in strange rhythms flushing up into her, with a strange, rhythmic growing motion, swelling and swelling till it filled all her cleaving consciousness. And then began again the unspeakable motion that was not really motion, but pure deepening whirlpools of sensation, swirling deeper and deeper through all her tissue and consciousness, till she was one perfect concentric fluid of feeling. And she lay there crying in unconscious, inarticulate cries, the voice out of the uttermost night, the life-exclamation. (134)

The importance of this moment of orgasm is the collapse of thought into sensation so that Connie’s consciousness becomes expanded and unshackled in a moment that cannot be rendered in FID because it is a moment that is both unconscious and inarticulate. The secret motion of a watch-hand becomes the “unspeakable motion” of orgasm. In situating these sex scenes as twentieth-century versions of the conduct scene, it is important to consider how they relate to Lawrence’s view of the novel as a vehicle for moral instruction. One key passage in the book describes how Connie listens regularly to the nurse Mrs. Bolton gossiping to her husband Clifford about Tevershall village. “It was more than gossip,” we

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are told. “It was Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot and Miss Mitford all rolled in one, with a great deal more, that these women left out” (100). The section outlines Connie’s continual wonder at the amount of intimate knowledge of people Mrs. Bolton possesses, before we have what can only be an incursion into her thoughts that becomes a point of departure for a defense of the novel: Connie was fascinated, listening to her. But afterwards, always a little ashamed. She ought not to listen with this queer rabid curiosity. After all, one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening. (101)

Here we have an embedded authorial comment launching out from Connie’s thoughts about gossip and outlining the value of the novel in what at first seems the familiar terms of the sympathetic imagination. The key phrase here is “secret places of life.” Lawrence is not invoking the eighteenth-century “secret springs” that typically refers to the inner workings of the mind or sometimes the machinations of a plot. He is referring to a general buried passion for life and the capacity of the novel to cleanse and renew this passion. What is remarkable about the language of this version of the sympathetic imagination is that it is not reliant on psychological analysis in the tradition of George Eliot (dismissed here as gossip); it is very much connected with the sort of raw consciousness of life that Connie experiences during sex (in “Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover” Lawrence describes this as “blood-sympathy”). This becomes clear when we see the phrase “secret places” later used in this book to refer to Connie’s orifices. In one scene with Mellors we have the line “his finger-tips touched the two secret openings to her body, time after time, with a soft little brush of fire,” followed up by “he laid his hand close and firm over her secret places” (223). The scene of anal sex that culminates in Connie’s liberation as a woman begins as “a night of sensual passion” (246), and the connection with the earlier authorial comment about the value of the novel is made clear in this passage: “Burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places. It cost her an effort to let him have his way and his will of her. She had

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to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave. Yet the passion licked round her, consuming, and when the sensual flame of it passed through her bowels and breast, she really thought she was dying: yet a poignant, marvellous death” (247). If the novel can cleanse and freshen the passional secret places of life, sex can burn out shame in the secret places of the body. The whole section in fact reads less as a description of the sex act itself, and more as a summary of Connie’s state of mind during the act, perhaps even of her thoughts lying next to Mellors after the event. The pattern of her thoughts is typical of the conduct scene: acknowledgement of her own shortcomings followed by self-revelation: In this short summer night she learnt so much. She would have thought a woman would have died of shame. Instead of which, the shame died. Shame, which is fear: the deep organic shame, the old, old physical fear which crouches in the bodily roots of us, and can only be chased away by the sensual fire, at last it was roused up and routed by the phallic hunt of the man, and she came to the very heart of the jungle of herself. She felt, now, she had come to the real bed-rock of her nature, and was essentially shameless. She was her sensual self, naked and unashamed. She felt a triumph, almost a vainglory. So! That was how it was! That was life! That was how oneself really was! (247)

The syntactic pattern of Connie’s thoughts also remains typical of the conduct scene: a summation of her thoughts over the course of a night, framed by a gnomic statement (“the old, old physical fear that crouches in the bodily roots of us”) and culminating in a revelatory passage of FID (“That was life!”). Here is the end point of the conduct scene. The self-revelation comes not from examining her heart and judging her own desires, but in having her body burnt of the sexual shame that has accumulated in industrialized society, the shame encoded in conduct books themselves that promote the natural chastity of women. The problem, of course, is that Connie’s “liberation” must come at the expense of being passive and giving up her own “selfish” active desire to achieve orgasm of her own volition in order to participate in the democracy of touch that only the phallus can achieve. For we are told early in the novel that as a teenager Connie and her sister Hilda were primarily interested in talking with men, agreeing to have sex with them only as a kind of reward: “But a woman could yield to a man without yielding her inner, free self. That the poets and talkers about sex did not seem to have taken sufficiently into account” (7). Connie retained this inner self by withholding her orgasm during intercourse until after the man has ejaculated, and then bringing herself

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off against him. The outcome of her sexual and individual awakening, then, reveals that the free indirect report of these early thoughts was rendered ironically, for she realizes after her encounters with Mellors that it was a false freedom, that yielding to a man sexually yields the greatest pleasure and the greatest release from her sense of malaise. We realize that this early view was more Connie’s position than the narrator’s, and that Connie’s development as a character depends on her position becoming conflated with the narrator’s, more or less. After the first sexual encounter with Mellors in the hut where she had lain down with queer obedience and in a sort of dream as he penetrated her, Connie wonders why this act has given her peace, and whether it is real. “Her tormented modern-woman’s brain still had no rest,” we are told, as she realizes that “if she kept herself for herself it was nothing” (117). She must give herself to the man, to be had for the taking. We have a passage of FID that draws attention to the privileged access to consciousness of the narrator by demonstrating its lack in the character: “The man lay in a mysterious stillness. What was he feeling? What was he thinking? She did not know” (117). This is followed by a more conventional consciousness scene, later in the evening: Linley stayed to dinner, and Connie was the hostess men liked so much, so modest, yet so attentive and aware, with big, wide blue eyes and a soft repose that sufficiently hid what she was really thinking. Connie had played this woman so much, it was almost second nature to her; but still, decidedly second. Yet it was curious how everything disappeared from her consciousness while she played it. She waited patiently till she could go upstairs and think her own thoughts. She was always waiting, it seemed to be her forte. Once in her room, however, she felt still vague and confused. She didn’t know what to think. What sort of a man was he, really? Did he really like her? (121)

Here Connie is playing the role of the modest wife, which is “almost second nature to her,” exposing to readers the divided feminine self familiar to the one cultivated by the novelistic encounter with conduct literature: a habitual and therefore “natural” mode of behavior based on social expectation and an interior life that resists yet is governed by this expectation. She proceeds to worry about whether Mellors’s kindness toward her was not individual, that it could be extended to any woman, that she is just a female to him. The resolution to this internal debate is to turn her anonymity, her representative status, into a positive thing, into a kind of escape from herself:

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But perhaps that was better. And after all, he was kind to the female in her, which no man had ever been. Men were very kind to the person she was, but rather cruel to the female, despising her or ignoring her altogether. Men were awfully kind to Constance Reid or to Lady Chatterley; but not to her womb they weren’t kind. And he took no notice of Constance or of Lady Chatterley; he just softly stroked her loins or her breasts. (121)

In this scene we can see Connie wishing to be a nobody, desiring the typicality of the female rather than the individuality of the proper name. If constant self-examination was the injunction of conduct literature and the activity of so many eighteenth-century heroines, if reflection was the vital activity for virtue and happiness as Camilla’s father intoned, Constance Chatterley’s problem, it would appear, was that she thought too much. For Tommy Dukes, the voice of wisdom in Clifford Chatterley’s group: “Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of the consciousness; out of your belly and your penis as much as out of your brain and mind. The mind can only analyse and rationalize” (37). The “secret recesses of the heart,” which women were encouraged to discover through self-examination each night and which became the goal of the novelist to unlock, become in this book the secret places of the body (to feel with the womb and the bowels is the sign of authenticity in this book) and the tension between internal desire and external conduct becomes a disjunction between thought and the body that separates the self from life. Of course, if Connie’s awakening is achieved through sexual pleasure unburdened by shame, how does this position the reader? How does this demonstrate the importance of the novel, “properly handled”? While Lawrence was mocked for claiming that England could be regenerated by sex, in fact he was arguing that England could be regenerated by the novel, or more precisely, the novelistic representation of sex. In “Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Lawrence writes: “And this is the real point of this book. I want men and women to be able to think sex, fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly. Even if we can’t act sexually to our complete satisfaction, let us at least think sexually, complete and clean” (308). In seeking to model a certain type of thinking, Lawrence reconfigures the consciousness scene as a sex scene, during which the self-examining heroine replaces reflection with orgasm. Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues that Connie represents the problem of the New Woman with her active, clitoral sexuality, which is addressed by a New Man who can bring her back to the phallic order. The function of the sex scenes, then, is to make “each orgasm a station of a sexual via sacra and a political affirmation not only of heterosexuality but of certain kinds of female orgasm,” although the novel

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“does not really have a final discharge because it wants to make a comforting case for monogamy and marital chastity” (205). This reinforcement of monogamy was in fact the case made by the defense in the 1960 trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover where Penguin Books, and by extension Lawrence, had to answer the charge of obscenity. In response to the prosecutorial claim that the book lacks literary merit (this merit being an escape clause built into the Obscene Publications Act of 1959) because it is merely a collection of sex scenes in which nothing varies but the time and place, and the claim that the book puts sensuality and adultery on a pedestal, the defense resorted to a conservative argument based on authorial intention. But more than Penguin Books, on trial for disseminating an obscene work at a price that anyone could afford, or Lawrence, on trial for aesthetic failings as much as anything, Constance Chatterley was put on trial for infidelity, for fucking the hired help and enjoying it. This nonreferential character, this fictional nobody in Gallagher’s parlance, was taken as a type, for she emblematized a figure of female sexuality that the Crown sought to guard against. Here all the arguments used against eighteenth-century fiction were revived, especially in the notorious opening address by the prosecution, asking jury members whether they would be happy to leave Lawrence’s novel lying around for their wives or daughters or servants to read. The defense won, but as Alvin Kernan has argued, in The Death of Literature (1990), the inability of literary critics called in as expert witnesses to mount a satisfactory justification for literature beyond the tired moral one, was symptomatic of the crisis that would grip the discipline of English studies. Lawrence offered his own early contribution to discourse on the death of the novel, in “Surgery for the Novel—or a Bomb” (1923), a critique of the serious novel dying at the hands of writers such as Joyce and Dorothy Richardson with their self-conscious renderings of the minute preoccupations of characters. However, his own experimentation with the consciousness scene has been far reaching. Stephen Heath (1982) argues convincingly that Lawrence’s work represents “a decisive moment in the shift from the Victorian medicalization to the more general representation of sex as the basic fact of experience and identity,” with “love-making scenes” supporting what Heath calls the sexual fix: the myth that talking freely about sex is a liberatory expression of the authentic self (126). According to Heath, the sex scenes of Lady Chatterley’s Lover provide the template for moments of ostensible sexual freedom in contemporary fiction: man and woman coming together; woman finding her identity through the phallic order. This passage from Erica Jong’s How to Save your Own Life (1977) demonstrates the portability of such a template: “He turned her over roughly but tenderly and began fucking her from above. And

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she thought, feeling that cock slide in and out of her as if it owned her soul, that if she died then, if she died that very minute, it would be all right, she would have known most of it, have lived, have felt it” (qtd. in Heath, 129–30). The central moment in this scene is not the orgasm, in which “the whole world went out except for the throbbing in her cunt,” but Isadora Wing’s conscious thought during the act of sex that she has attained self-knowledge and so could die. I have demonstrated in this chapter that the structure of Lawrence’s template—the pattern of thought, the syntactic shifts between psychonarration and quoted internal monologue—is itself built on the history of the conduct scene: the self-examining heroine reaching epiphanic knowledge by searching her conscience to guard against sexual impropriety. Both Molly Bloom and Constance Chatterley are versions of the New Woman, the sexually aware and adventurous figure that populated so many novels of the late nineteenth century. Molly herself mocks the fear of this figure: “that old Bishop that spoke off the altar his long preach about womans higher functions about girls now riding the bicycle and wearing peak caps and the new woman bloomers God send him sense and me more money” (903). Another New Woman is Miriam Henderson, the protagonist of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, including Dawn’s Left Hand (1931), the tenth book of this decades-long series, which offers a clear counterpoint to Chatterley’s Lover: first, in a formalist sense, with its rigorous fixed internal focalization devoid of authorial commentary as it charts Miriam’s ongoing awareness and cultivation of the depths of her interior—“There’s more space within than without” (168)—which she feels distinguishes her and is vital for her development as a person, and second, in a political sense, with its rejection of the phallocentric order. Richardson’s experiments with the psychological novel are rooted in the perspective of a self-examining heroine, but one that deliberately disrupts the patterns of thought that had been laid down in previous centuries (although there are echoes of these patterns, such as a scene when Miriam feels guilt about leading on Densley with an overly familiar letter). Furthermore, the sex scene, newly established as a site for both self-discovery and escape from consciousness, is parodied and deflated. Miram’s affair with the married Hypo Wilson is unsuccessful, ending in miscarriage, and, most importantly, lacking in sexual fulfilment. The shell of a sex scene takes place in chapter 9, the opening to which establishes Miriam’s “conflict” over her motivations as she meets Hypo at a place of “harpy disreputability,” a “shamefaced room” (218). This apparently conventional conduct scene is not simply an indication of her awareness of social mores or of her individual prudishness, however. What is most important to Miriam is her freedom, and as she contemplates her surroundings she resolves that

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“tonight . . . she would reach that central peace, go further and further into the heart of her being and be there, as if alone, tranquilly, until fully possessed by that something within her that was more than herself ” (219). Unlike Constance Chatterley, enlightenment and reconnection with her body will not take place through giving up her consciousness to heterosexual orgasm. Instead, freedom will come from being alone with her thoughts in Hypo’s presence, her essential individuality rather than his abstract sense of her as a type and of her role in his life. While sitting silently at the table with Hypo, Miriam has this epiphany: “With a flash of insight that freed her forever, she felt, of jealousy of his relationships past, present, and future, she saw how very slight, how restricted and perpetually baffled must always be the communication between him and anything that bore the name of woman” (223). The congress to follow is simply confirmation of this insight. Indeed two obtuse paragraphs containing phrases such as “surprised and not able with sufficient swiftness to contract her expanded being that still seemed to encompass him, rocked unsatisfactorily to and fro” (232) stymie readers’ narrative expectations of an adulterous sex scene, leaving us uncertain as to whether they describe an embrace or intercourse. To the extent that the “stream of consciousness” is still regarded as a modernist technique, while FID has largely become an ahistorical convention of realist fiction, the latter has been a more successful and durable mode of thought representation. The former remains too vague a concept to function as a distinct formal feature, despite taxonomic efforts during the 1950s. We would be hard pressed to name any universally recognized formal innovations in thought representation since the modernist novel, but to conclude this chapter I will demonstrate how the legacy of modernist revisions to the figure of the self-examining heroine can be found in a novel of the twenty-first century: Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2013).

“MY NAME IS GONE”: THE “PRECONSCIOUS” CONDUCT SCENE In this novel, McBride presents the first-person interior monologue of a nameless, troubled, and traumatized girl, narrated in half-formed and truncated sentences from her birth until the moment of her suicide by drowning at the age of twenty. With Joyce as the acknowledged inspiration, this book has been received as a startling contemporary revival of the stream-of-consciousness novel. For instance, Gina Wisker argues that it “builds on the expression of Joyce’s sexually aware Molly Bloom in Ulysses (1922), without the male sexual

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perspective,” reclaiming stream of consciousness in the framework of a female bildungsroman (61). The stylistic and structural feature that binds the narrative voice is the second-person address to the protagonist’s brother, who serves as a kind of constant silent interlocutor throughout her life and thus as an internal echo of the epistolary correspondent. The narrative begins just before the girl is born, when her brother undergoes an operation and chemotherapy for a brain tumor discovered when he is three. During this period, the father leaves, causing the mother to withdraw her emotional life. The mother’s increasingly harsh and pious behavior is furthermore the consequence of her own bullying, tyrannical father, who disowns the family over what he feels is his daughter’s neglect as a religious parent. The mother refuses to believe her son is mentally damaged by the tumor, asserting that he simply needs to work harder at school, and when the cancer resurfaces, she will not accept his inevitable death, believing that constant prayer will save him. The girl’s response to this situation is to construct for herself a rebellious secret life that takes the shape of self-destructive promiscuity as the result of being raped by her adult uncle at age thirteen: “I am. Going to the bad. To the somewhere new” (51). Her attitude to self is utterly self-abnegating, seeking out increasingly dangerous sexual encounters and entering into an illicit affair with her uncle, exhorting him to be violent toward her during sex. Through it all is her brother’s brain tumor, waiting to reemerge, which shapes her whole life, for she wants to escape from her responsibility to him, while always returning to him as the only person with whom she shares genuine love. According to Robert Humphrey, in his book Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel, this exemplary modernist form is “a type of fiction in which the basic emphasis is placed on exploration of the prespeech levels of consciousness for the purpose, primarily, of revealing the psychic being of the characters” (4). The challenge for writers, Humphrey points out, is “to capture the irrational and incoherent quality of private unuttered consciousness and in doing so still to communicate to his readers” (62). There is a difference between “prespeech” and “unuttered,” but critics and reviewers of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing universally focus on the “preconscious” nature of the protagonist’s thoughts, rendered in a “poetic” style devoid of commas and relying on periods to split the flow of the narrative voice rather than to a establish a continuity of thought. Here is a representative passage: Blank my eyes the dazzle. Huge shatter. Me who is just new. Fallen out of the sky. What. Is lust it? That’s it. The first splinter. I. Give in scared. If I would. Stop. Him. Oh God. Is a mortal mortal sin. (51)

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According to Susan Cahill (2017), “the stream of consciousness style of the novel immerses the reader in a space of language formation that seems to exist before articulation” (159). And for Kerryn Goldsworthy, “McBride takes the reader back, in this process, to the moment of the half-formed sentence, where language is still trying, and often failing, to wrestle sensation and emotion to the deck.” McBride herself, in an interview with David Collard, describes her language as “a rickety immersive style” that would more accurately be called a “stream of existence.” With this evocation of visceral, embodied sensation, McBride’s aim was “to tell a story from a point so far back in the mind that it is completely experiential, completely gut-reactive and balancing on the moment just before language becomes formatted thought” (Collard, 2014). Although the whole narrative is embedded in and presented from the perspective of the protagonist’s interior world, “preconscious” strikes me as a little misleading, for the girl is not unreflective. She consciously dwells upon her actions and motivations, oscillating between shame and defiance in particular over her sexual behavior. Indeed, the narrative is punctuated by distinct and recognizable consciousness scenes that have a clear lineage in the tradition I have been tracing. Unsurprisingly, these scenes are largely related to her sexual identity, and they trace her wranglings with her conscience as she attempts to overcome the shame and guilt associated with her promiscuity while simultaneously courting this as a marker of her rebellion, her maturity, and her independent internal life, the only form of escape she knows. Emphasizing the liminality of the girl’s half-formed subjectivity, these scenes of thinking tend to take place in two key locations: on recurring train trips from London, where she has moved to eke out her own independent life, back to her family home to visit her brother—“It’s the train again. That train again and I am in. Safe. See that. Me. Me. Me (149)”—and in the lake near the family home where she escapes at traumatic moments to immerse herself in the water as a kind of baptism, both to cleanse herself and to escape from herself: “I baptise. Baptise me. That I take. For I can’t complain it’s wrong. Free me clean me and save me from. My brother from this” (129). The lake, ultimately, is the liminal zone between existence and death, for early in the novel she dreams of death by drowning, and in the end she returns there for a final time to drown herself. What’s important to note is that these scenes have an established pattern: despite their representation of fragmented thought, they involve her scrutinizing herself, struggling with her conscience, and seeking to arrive at some kind of resolution. In an early scene at age thirteen she runs to the lake, having kissed her uncle, tried to take it further, and been rebuffed. While wading in the water she thinks: “Ah. You are not here. In this world deep and brown. Filled with

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rattle gushing noises. Sounds. Unearthly water bubbles rise the top. You are not here. I am free from love and that cold pain shooting through my forehead. That’s a good thing. It’s a fine and right thing. True to what it is” (55). In this momentary escape from the love binding her to her brother, she seeks her own sense of self: “Let it all begin again. My body cold reflected back to my face as I stand there. Look down. I see my sorry self. That girl. My wicked” (56). This moment of reflection emblematizes the opacity of her own mind, or rather, the reduction of her mind to her body, the lake a looking glass that confirms an empty interiority, leading to a decision to pursue a sexual encounter with her uncle: “I don’t think I will be clean now. Think instead I’ll have revenge for lots of all kinds of things. The start is. That is love” (56). The subsequent brutal intercourse with her uncle and his departure marks for her an emotional separation from her brother, after which she refuses to sit with him on the school bus and wants to be left alone to ponder her new interior life: “You and me were never this. This boy and girl that do not speak. But somehow I’ve left you behind and you’re just looking on” (61). By the time the girl is fifteen she regularly ventures to the lake and lets the boys who congregate there have sex with her. First she sits and drinks with them, feeling more mature and complex because of her sexual encounter with her adult uncle: “How could they ever understand my life is more than cider? Complex than that. Fuller deeper richer. Irritation that. Something. Not as good as me in the back of my head. In my silent they’re not so clever not so quick and rule the world anyway as if it’s fair” (68). There are echoes of Molly Bloom’s gendered plural pronouns in this passage, but despite this sense of intellectual superiority, the girl feels that the best way to exert her power is to allow access to her body: “Offer up to me and disconcerted by my lack of saying no. Saying yes is the best of powers. It’s no big thing the things they do” (71). For the girl, though, this act is also a revolt from religion—“There is no Jesus here these days just Come all you fucking lads. I’ll have you every one any day”—as well as the only pathway she knows to adulthood: “For I am a woman now” (72). After a one-night stand not long after moving to London, the girl wakes to realize that she has no idea what happened or how she got there. This occasions a moment of self-examination in which her initial reaction is framed by her Catholic upbringing: “The sharp light. Picking at my eyes. Needle shafts of. What have I begun or ended? What I’ve done. Sex as. Go to mass. Confession” (88). Instead, though, the girl wanders the streets to contemplate her actions: What if. I could. I could make. A whole other world a whole civilisation in this city that is not home? The heresy of it. But I can. And I can choose this.

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Shafts of sun. Life that is this. And I can. Laugh at it because the world goes no. And no one cares. And no one’s falling into hell. I can do. Puke the whole lot up. Wash my body on or off and think I’ll be some new a disgrace. Slap in this alley with no doubt rats I am leaving. Epiphany. I am leaving home. I’ve picked up and left. Fresh. I’m already gone. (88)

The epiphany that she can act how she wants in her new life in London demonstrates that her interior struggle is not between desire and religious duty, or between coquettish vanity and virtuous conduct, for she has no coordinates to guide her. She has no real sense of her “natural” self and no commitment to a model of socialized behavior, only a yearning desire to unshackle herself from fear and find some sense of worth. Religious faith provides the only moral framework she knows, but it is an oppressive framework, meaning that God cannot act as the “impartial spectator” to govern her conscience and nor can the approbation of others. Instead her brother becomes her imagined interlocuter, but only as an echo of her own doubts, leaving the “sin” of promiscuity as the only solace from oppression. This pattern of thinking is rehearsed throughout in consciousness scenes that both revive and reject the original religious frame of the conduct book injunction to examine one’s own heart. When the girl sees her uncle again, after many years, at her grand­ father’s funeral, she decides to pursue an illicit relationship with him. “I want us to sin so I may survive this, so I may hold onto my bandage of self if I can if I need” (128). This sin takes the form of a self-destructive desire where she asks her uncle to hurt her: “Throw me. Smash that all up. Do whatever you want. The answer to every single question is Fuck. Stitching up my eyes and sewing up my lips” (131). The reason why she remains “half-formed” is that neither option available to her—living freely in London and conducting an affair with her uncle, or living at home with her piously deluded mother and increasingly weak and distanced brother—offers any hope for her sense of self. This explains why the vacillations of her “pre-conscious” thoughts take more concrete shape in train journeys between her two lives. In this passage, reference to the train serves as the cue for a scene of reflection: “These journeys. These train journeys they are always going on. What I. Am I doing? Rolling over the country. I’ll give up going soon. Where? Here or back or. Enough. Thankless pointless things I’ll learn. To” (143). From this pondering over why she keeps returning home and what keeps her in London, her thoughts drift to her affair: “Give it up, uncle up, that’s the way. No. And it sounds easy. It sounds not. But what I want. Not to be this. Ripped. Ah I see. Not. To. Do. This. Any. More. What. Nothing I don’t do a thing. Few fucks here and then and who’s that to do with? No one

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but myself ” (143). Clearly this is not simply the linguistic approximation of preconscious sensations. It is a deliberate reflection on her part, a dialogue with herself, no matter how fractured the language. It is also a conduct scene in which she scrutinizes her behavior, trying to resolve her actions and justify her behavior. However, she can come to no resolution: “See. See. In the future I’ll decide. If I must go home. For good. If I. But now. But now. I’m doing fine. Like you. I’m. Doing. Fine” (143). The frequent addresses to her brother (“I’m doing fine. Like you”) serve to conflate him with her own internal voice, yet offer no guidance for her conduct. Like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the sex scenes in this book also function as consciousness scenes, registering the girl’s thoughts in the moment of congress, but the violence and shock of the scenes mean that they cannot function as moments of revelation or self-development. This is a section from her first encounter with her uncle: Alright now? Yes. He ram that. Oh God. It hurts me take it out. It. My heart thump on top of him and feel it shaking through his back. No. Take me. Take me down under. He is goding goding goding. In his breath. Like a great surprise has taken place. My legs and thighs and ankles. He will have them all of me in this. Done and done to. Doing. I’ll do all of this. . . . Up inside that will not fit in time. Expand and let him lurch there. I want. And this is what it’s like after all. After all I’ve heard. It hurts me. And kissing choking me. . . . He is coming. Off inside me. I think and I think of painting houses. Streets with. Painting the town red. I must be almost I am dying when he does it. With the pain. Suffocating. (58)

This scene registers the girl’s visceral response, yet is not simply concerned with the preconscious, for it traces her own reflection on the act (“And this is what it’s like after all”) as well as her willed attempt to dissociate in order to cope with the pain (“I think and I think of painting houses”). The dying she refers to is not orgasm or liberation, it is only suffocating pain. In a later sex scene with her uncle, the girl’s sense of shame exists in tension with an impulse to push the limits of transgression: “Such a mess of blood and shame. I’ll be killed by this. Perhaps not struck down. Don’t believe don’t believe with him inside me. . . . Please don’t stop I say and again. Til I am hurt or I am sick. Keep going until I. Then you can let me die” (132). The outcome is not escape from shame, however. It is simply annihilation of the self. If for Constance Chatterley illicit sex with Mellors stems from a yearning to revive life in the connection of bodies, for this girl the sexual act is a self-abnegating escape from life. This does not lead to a reaffirmation of chaste virtue, however. The

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difference in the plot structure of this novel from those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is that the “heroine” undergoes no reform, no revelatory rejection of her promiscuity, even as she constantly promises herself to refrain for her brother’s sake, for this reform would ultimately be a defeat. McBride makes clear in her interview with Collard that she views her novel as a feminist work. Of her protagonist, McBride says: “She is not someone enjoying the hard won fruits of sexual liberation, she is almost the opposite. The product of a system that could offer nothing to women but sexual shame, ignorance and servitude.” The girl’s transformation into destructive promiscuity is willed, it is a conscious escape from her life. In this sense, the death scene that concludes the novel is the revelation, the reformation. While Molly Bloom drifts off to sleep with her final declamatory “yes,” this narrator surrenders to the sleep of death with her very identity erased. Her last thought and the last line of the novel is: “My name is gone.” The final consciousness scene is the extinguishing of her consciousness, of her self. Hence, one of the most recent examples of the self-examining heroine, the nameless protagonist of McBride’s novel, suffers the same fate as one of the earliest, Clarissa Harlowe: they both die from grief. Both of these characters are first-person narrators (if we accept that epistolary correspondents and interior monologists can be classified as narrators): one writing to the threshold of her death—“I write this, and write it I believe with my last pen” (1339)—and whose death is reported by another; the other narrating the moment of her own dying. I will return to both of these characters in the following chapters where I discuss the history of first-person narration as an attempt to overcome the key limitation of the form, its ostensible retrospectivity, by enabling the narrator to cross the threshold from experiencing to narrating and thus to achieve the status of heterodiegesis, a status that can be achieved only by their death.

CHAPTER 4

Dying to Tell About It The Autothanatographic Impulse of First-Person Narration

In the previous chapters, I have addressed the relation between authorial narrator and character in the form of intrusive commentary that clearly demarcates one subjectivity from another and in the practice of representing character consciousness, particularly in the form of FID that conflates the two at the level of voice. These two features figure prominently in histories of reflexive realism because their development tells a story of the novel as a third-person form emerging alongside letter and memoir novels in the eighteenth century and achieving cultural dominance and aesthetic coherence in the nineteenth by simultaneously rejecting the pseudofactual frames of first-person narration and absorbing the dramatic subjectivity of character-­ narrators into a third-person grammar that parades its own fictionality. In this historical narrative, the dialectical process of realism is both completed and exhausted when the interfering authorial voice erases its presence in the form of an impersonal exposure of characters’ interior lives. What this narrative neglects, however, is the fate of first-person narration after the decline of epistolary fiction and the subsequent dominance of omniscient narration. How does narration by characters figure in the novel’s ongoing negotiation of the paradox of fictional truth? My starting point is a quote from Dorrit Cohn: “Life tells us that we cannot tell it while we live it or live it while we tell it. Live now, tell later” (1999, 96). On this basis Cohn proceeds to discuss what she calls the “deviance” of 139

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contemporary first-person simultaneous narration in the present tense: deviant because it cannot happen in life, but also because it deviates from previous uses of first-person narration. The characteristic feature of classic first-person narration is that the narrative begins when the story ends, that is, when the character sits down to write. This feature draws attention to the temporal relations between story and discourse, hence Genette’s observation that the “final convergence” of story time and narrative time is the rule of first-person narration. It also draws attention to the great limitation of this device of narrative “person”: how to tell one’s story to the very end, that is to one’s death? For if one cannot live and tell at the same time, one certainly cannot die and tell at the same time. Daniel Defoe provides an early articulation of this problem for first-person narration in his preface to Moll Flanders: “We cannot say, indeed, that this history is carried on quite to the end of the life of the famous Moll Flanders, for nobody can write their life to the full end of it, unless they can write it after they are dead” (xix). As late as 1894 Walter Raleigh noted in The English Novel, when comparing omniscient narration to first-person and epistolary methods, the problem of having characters tell their own story is that “although the single point of view is valuable to evoke sympathy, it takes from the novelist the privilege of killing his hero, who may be condemned to death without awakening in the reader the slightest anxiety as to his safety in the event” (148). William Lyon Phelps followed up on Raleigh’s discussion in The Advance of the English Novel, arguing that telling a story in the first person “restricts the range while heightening vividness; the great difficulty being that we know the narrator bears a charmed life” (45). In making these observations, both Raleigh and Phelps refer to the restrictions of focalization that accompany realist modes of first-person narration. As Franz Stanzel has pointed out, though, this fact has not prevented authors from devising ways for their characters to die in the first person. Some of these ways include the frame narrative, in which an editor reveals the death of the protagonist; the diary, in which the diarist announces their imminent demise, or in which the last entry is abruptly ended; the truncated interior monologue that signals the cessation of consciousness; and narrating from the grave. These are all theoretical possibilities derived from the temporal logic of the narrating instance and embedded in the grammatical structure of our language, from present tense to future perfect, and the historical manifestation of these tensual possibilities can be charted in roughly chronological order from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Why have writers persistently sought new ways to render the death of first-person narrators? Or rather, what can this persistence tell us about this narrative voice and its relation to the thirdperson narrative forms I have been tracing in the previous chapters?

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I return again to Peter Brook’s reference to the death drive as the master plot of narrative to explain the appeal of fiction. Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, Brooks writes that “what we seek in narrative fictions is that knowledge of death which is denied to us in our own lives: the death that writes finis to the life and therefore confers on it a meaning” (22). First-person narration, it can be argued, seeks the knowledge of fiction by virtue of characters becoming their own first readers through the act of narration, and it does so, I suggest, by striving to reach a narrative position beyond death, when the subjective narrator can become an objective third person in order to bring his or her story to its end. My argument is that we can read examples of dying in the first person as fictional autothanatographical experiments that draw attention to the formal tensions and historical impulse of first-person narration itself, offering a counterpoint to the classical autobiographical model established by the pseudofactual genres of the memoir novel and epistolary novel. This latent autothanatographic drive informs the larger dynamic of novelistic experimentation when first-person narration ceases to imitate autobiographical nonfictional genres and uses the third-person novel itself as its model with two related results: (1) sloughing off the documentary claims of the pseudofactual posture and (2) reconfiguring the conventional narrating instance to enable characters to tell their stories without writing. In what follows, I will trace the different ways of dying in the first person to demonstrate how a seemingly minor formal preoccupation yields fundamental insight into the historical development of this mode of narrative voice and of the novel itself. But first we need a clear understanding of the theoretical distinctions between first- and third-person narration. In classical narratology, the theory of first-person narration is characterized by three distinctions: (1) homodiegetic narrators are distinct from heterodiegetic ones not by virtue of grammatical person, but because they are also characters in the diegesis; (2) at the same time, the act of narration separates homodiegetic narrators from their role as characters, placing them at an extradiegetic level by virtue of a division between their experience as a character and their telling of that experience; and (3) the nonidentity of narrator and author distinguishes fictional homodiegetic narratives from nonfictional ones. What underlies these three distinctions is an enduring conception of first-person narratives as imitation autobiography. Given the early history of the novel, this conception is valid; but given the development of the form since then, it is not. Yet we continue to employ the autobiographical mode as a default model against which to measure a range of fictional narrative acts, from the “deviance” of present-tense simultaneous narration to the “unnatural” quality of first-person omniscience. One

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reason for this is a persistent desire to explain the difference between first- and third-person narration in ontological terms. While in previous centuries, critics were concerned with the relative merits of first- and third-person narration as different methods for telling a story, various theoretical and historical approaches in the twentieth century have endeavored to use their difference as the basis for a philosophy of fictionality. The most notorious example is Kate Hamburger’s 1957 The Logic of Literature, which excommunicates first-person narration from the status of fiction on the grounds that it is a feigned reality statement, whereas the nonreality of third-person narration is defined by its lack of a statement-subject. Cohn (1990), on the other hand, argues that if third-person fiction is distinguished by its unnatural access to consciousness, first-person fiction is distinguished by the imaginary status of the narrator, a status we recognize through the nonidentity of narrator and author. If this defines the conventional fictionality of the first-person novel, Cohn also explores how innovations in modes of telling signal the fictionality of this narrative voice in different ways. Discussing how contemporary novels written in first-person present tense, such as J.  M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, deviate from the retrospective narrative situation of classical fictional autobiographies, Cohn argues that the innovation of simultaneous narration, or characters living and telling, was to “emancipate first-person fictional narration from the dictates of formal mimetics, granting it the same degree (though not the same kind) of discursive freedom that we take for granted in third-person fiction: the license to tell a story in an idiom that corresponds to no manner of real-world, natural discourse” (1999, 104–5). Cohn’s account provides a model for arguing that the corollary to the history of the novel from authorial to figural narration is the incorporation of heterodiegetic elements into first-person narration (also see Doležel, 1980). While it is possible for fiction to adopt these forms, the question is when and how was first-person narration granted the license to deviate from the imitation of natural discourse?

FIRST-PERSON NARRATION AND THE HISTORY OF THE NOVEL Despite the prior existence of fictional first-person narrators, the emergence of the memoir-novel and the letter-novel in seventeenth-century France and England mark the most significant instances of the form, typically framed as true accounts presented to the public by an “editor.” Scholars tend to agree that in the eighteenth century these first-person novels contributed greatly to

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the popularity of the genre and constituted at least half of all fiction published, although it is impossible to know how many memoirs and private histories were themselves fictional. The two main arguments advanced to explain the prominence of first-person narration in eighteenth-century fiction are that it exploited an unprecedented interest in subjectivity and that it operated as an authenticating device for establishing the authority of the novel (see Mylne, 1965; Konisberg, 1985; Laden, 1987; Stewart, 2001). Scholars also agree that by the end of the eighteenth century there was a general shift from first to third person in which omniscient narration became the dominant form of the nineteenth-century novel in both England and France. But this omniscience was less an extension of previous third-person techniques, Vivienne Mylne argues, “than an extension of the methods of character-revelation practiced in memoir-novels and letter-novels” (267). In one sense this promotes the importance of first person in paving the way for omniscience, but in other sense it suggests first person had served its purpose in doing so. The apparent quantitative decline of the first-person novel has informed or perhaps been used to justify aesthetic theories about the evolution of the genre. A particularly blatant example can be found in this claim by F. W. J. Hemmings in The Age of Realism (1974): Perhaps the most important respect in which the vogue of the pseudo-­ memoir interfered with the normal development of the realist novel was that it necessarily implied a first-person narrative technique. Now, in what we are calling the “age of realism,” fictitious autobiographies account for a very small minority of the novels written, since by the beginning of the nineteenth century the convention of the “omniscient narrator” had been firmly established. (24)

This positioning of first-person narration as an impediment to “the normal development of the realist novel” is also embedded in formalist theory. In surveying scholarship on the concept of point of view, Norman Friedman (1955) suggested the achievement of the modernist novel was to have found a way “to have the story told as if by a character in the story, but told in the third person” (1164). Narratological approaches that explain this as the incorporation of the perspectival intimacy of first-person narration into third-person narratives via such modes as FID and the interior monologue only contribute to the sense that the real history of the novel is the refinement of third-­person narration. At the same time, however, the incorporation of heterodiegetic elements (internal focalization and simultaneous narration) into first-person narration have been construed as aberrations to be explained.

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The revisionist theory of reflexive realism that emphasizes the novel’s fictionality tends to shore up this assumption, inverting Watt’s emphasis on Defoe and Richardson as pioneers of the rise of formal realism by denying epistolary and memoir novels the status of realist fiction. For instance, in Before Fiction (2011) Nicholas Paige proposes “three historical regimes of literary invention” (x), which he dubs the Aristotelian (narratives based on real historical personages or figures of legend), the pseudofactual (narratives of the late seventeenth and most of the eighteenth centuries that profess to be true documents), and the fictional (narratives since the turn of the nineteenth century that openly proclaim their fictional status). Paige claims that pseudofactual novels are pretended assertions, examples of “natural discourse” that “mimic the real-world forms of the letter, the report, the memoir” (199), whereas fictional novels ask readers “to accept the writer’s invention as a kind of model of reality” (x). Hence, in order to reconfigure novelistic history around the question of fictionality rather than realism, Paige replicates the ontological distinction between first- and third-person narration both to highlight what is historically distinct about the eighteenth-century documentary novel and to explain why it cannot be considered fiction. For Paige, firstperson narration does not become part of the fictional regime until after 1800 when novelists abandoned the pseudofactual pretense, opening the door for new unnatural modes of narration to be developed, from unquoted interior monologues to present-tense narration. He is pains to emphasize that for novels in the regime of fiction “their first-person narrators often recount without actually writing” (199). This movement away from writing as the typical narrating instance of the documentary novel strikes me as the most significant consequence of abandoning a pseudofactual stance. Rather than being memoirists addressing an extradiegetic reader or correspondents addressing an intradiegetic interlocutor, first-person narrators can tell their stories in ways that are clearly oral, or appear to be interior thoughts, or in ways that defy and don’t even require a clear narrating instance, or an addressee. No longer being required to imitate “real world” discourse, these narrators begin to imitate third-person fictional narrators in the act of narration, taking the genre of the novel itself as their model. At the same time, the structure of the memoir or epistolary form often remains (e.g., the multiple focalization of epistolary correspondents carried through in the embedded oral narratives of Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, the stream-of-consciousness of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and the eclectic narrating instances of Bret Easton Ellis’s Less than Zero). This is important to note because despite Paige’s assertion that, in entering the regime of fiction, first-person narration becomes a different form of artifact than its documen-

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tary forebear, the narrative posture itself retains the central impetus: to give an account of oneself, in Judith Butler’s phrase. In fact, I will argue in this chapter that moving away from conventional autobiographical forms moves first-person narrators closer to the goal of self-narration that the genre of autobiography simultaneously invokes and constrains. This shift takes place in the latter part of the eighteenth century when, rather than posing as editors of found documents, authors freely presented themselves as writers and inventors of the narrating characters. The preface to Evelina (1778) demonstrates this shift, with Burney presenting the collection of letters as a novel whose aim was to “draw characters from nature, though not from life,” even as she calls herself the editor (7). By this time the memoir novel had also sloughed off the pretense of truth by openly proclaiming a difference between the author and the first-person narrator who relates the story. For instance new editions of The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) dropped the subtitle “Supposed to have been written by himself ” as it was promoted as a novel by Dr. Goldsmith. If third-person narrators by convention were seen as proxies for their authors, the fictional status of first-person novels relies on their narrator’s onomastic and hence ontological difference from their authors because they share instead the name of the fictional protagonist. Inherent to this mode of narrative voice, however, is a further division from their experiencing selves arising from their dual status as narrators and characters. Early criticism of the fictional autobiography had in fact addressed this split subjectivity of character narration as one of its drawbacks. Anna Laetitia Barbauld claimed that authors had to manage two characters: the hero at the time he experiences events and the hero again at the time he is relating them. Richard Whately goes further in arguing that first-person novels have no hero because the character must instead adopt the role of narrator and “cannot so describe his own conduct and character as to make the reader thoroughly acquainted with him” (361). As I pointed out in chapter 1, Gallagher argues that the appeal of fictional characters lies less in our identification with a real-seeming person, than in the “ontological contrast” that a character provides (357). Given that impossible access to a character’s interior is a vital element of this quality, Gallagher must necessarily privilege third-person narration, while also explaining how the overt nonreferentiality of fictional characters operates in first-person novels. To do this, she highlights the role of characters as narrators: All of this pertains most fully, but not exclusively, to novels with third-­person omniscient narrators in the realist mode. Novels with first-person narrators reveal their fictionality primarily through the techniques that indicate the

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difference between the narrator and an implied author, their manifestation of what Dorrit Cohn calls “the duplicate vocal origin of fiction” (Cohn 1999: 125). Homodiegetic and intradiegetic narrators, however, must sustain the illusion of the opacity of the characters surrounding them, and such narrators are consequently excellent vehicles for the epistemological uncertainty that modernists were anxious to produce. (357)

First, the proper name of a character-narrator signals its fictionality by virtue of differing from that of the author. Secondly, because character-­narrators cannot fully know the characters they depict and desire (i.e., Marcel and Albertine), this highlights by contrast the fictionality of characters described from the inside by omniscient narrators, although Gallagher is at pains to point out that all characters “are at once utterly finished and also necessarily incomplete” (358). Again the ontological distinction between first- and thirdperson narration renders the latter the true representative of reflexive realism. One could also add that homodiegetic narrators do not know themselves in the same way that an omniscient narrator knows them. The first-person narrator of David Copperfield (1850) registers his awareness of this lack of omniscience when he writes: “I cannot so completely penetrate the mystery of my own heart, as to know when I began to think that I might have set its earliest and brightest hopes on Agnes” (ch. 58). This epistemological alienation from the character with whom they share a proper name rather than from other characters, I would argue, is the basis of first-person narration.

FICTIONALITY, DEATH, AND THE PROPER NAME Given Gallagher’s recourse to poststructuralist theories of subjectivity to explain the encounter between readers and fictional characters that defines the nonreferentiality of realist fiction, it is worth thinking about how the textual slippage she describes might condition the relationship between first-person narrators and their own sense of themselves as characters that emerges in the act of narration, a relationship I will characterize as the desire for the thirdperson posture of the Other. To elaborate the nature of this desire, I turn to Judith Butler who has offered an approach to subject formation in specifically narrative terms that provides a point of departure for considering the relationship of alterity that first-person narrators have to their own characterological selves. In “Giving an Account of Oneself ” (2001), Butler responds to arguments that a groundless subjectivity posited by poststructuralist philosophy can have no personal responsibility. She counters by suggesting that

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in acknowledging the limits of self-knowledge, and precisely in being aware of its own opacity to itself, a subject can develop an ethics of responsibility based on recognizing the same limits in others. Butler’s argument hinges upon the relationship between two meanings of “account”: the narrative, as in to provide an account of one’s life, and the ethical, as in to be held to account for one’s actions. When we demand that someone give an account of themselves, we are asking them to provide a narrative account that is not possible from a first-person perspective, or at least one that will lack any authority. As Butler writes: “The ‘I’ cannot tell the story of its own emergence, and the conditions of its own possibility, without in some sense bearing witness to a state of affairs to which one could not have been present, prior to one’s own becoming, and so narrating that which one cannot know” (26). In narratological terms, this would be called paralepsis, narrators saying more than they know, or transgressing the dominant code of focalization. The very fact that this paraleptic knowledge is considered transgressive in the novel demonstrates that fictional first-person narrators tend to be held to account on the same terms that Butler elaborates, even though narrative fiction is a mode of discourse in which such extended knowledge is nonetheless possible. Indeed, as Butler says, to provide a full narrative account of oneself is necessarily to move toward fiction. To provide narrative coherence requires not only telling what a subject cannot know about its emergence as a subject, but fashioning a sequential account from a body and a life, a temporality and a spatiality that ultimately eludes sequencing. Narrative can give only “provisional and fictive sequence” to a subject that is both the precondition of narrative and the source of its epistemological failure (7). To disavow the promise of narrative coherence, to accept our inability to fully give account of our historically located and embodied subjectivity, is to acknowledge the limits of our own knowability to ourselves. This acknowledgement becomes an ethical resource because it allows us to accept that we cannot hold others to account for something that no individual subject, no “I,” can achieve. The reason we cannot give full account of ourselves is that subjectivity is relational: the self is constituted not just by its encounter with the Other as individual, as another self that can be reduced to sameness (i.e., recognizing oneself in the other), but with an impersonal set of norms: “I find that the only way to know myself is precisely through a mediation that takes place outside of me, exterior to me, in a convention or a norm that I did not make, in which I cannot discern myself as an author or an agent of its making” (23). The relevance of Butler’s argument to the history of the novel is how firstperson narration both struggles with and exploits the fictive potential of nar-

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rative. Her account of the limits of narration, of one’s narrative necessarily beginning in media res because one cannot be witness to all the elements that produced one’s emergence as a subject, is surely the challenge Tristram Shandy sought to undertake in Sterne’s parody of the conventional fictional autobiography. First-person narrative fiction operates with the knowledge that to account for oneself is to recognize the limit of subjectivity. Its function is not so much to expose the fictive impulse of all autobiography as it is to employ the license of fiction to move beyond the referential constraints of the form. If we accept Butler’s claim that “at the moment when we narrate we become speculative philosophers or fiction writers” (37), that the referent of our “self ” is paradoxically both the condition for a narrative and a threat to narrative authority, then the nonreferentiality of fictional entities offers a license to bypass this paradox. Departures from the referential conventions of autobiography are self-conscious manifestations of this fictive impulse, a formal recognition of the limits of self-knowledge in which narrators seek the license of fiction to fully account for themselves by narrating what they could not know as a character. Paraleptic narration of the thoughts of others doubles as an expression of a desire to narrate one’s own thoughts with the same insight and certainty of an authorial narrator. Narrating events both preceding and succeeding one’s own life reveals a similar desire for an omnitemporality that can explain the conditions that enable individual subjectivity. Attempts to narrate one’s own death represent the clearest articulation of the desire to provide an authoritative narrative account of the self, to know oneself in a way that only fictional characters can be known. In this way homodiegetic narrators approach their own experiencing selves as fictional characters. As the first reader of their own narrative, they experience the anticipation of retrospection in the act of narration. This is a death drive to the extent that they seek what only fiction can provide: a heterodiegetic stance beyond the threshold of their own narrative act. This stance is the perspective of a third-person Other: the impersonal norm that Butler argues constitutes the external encounter with alterity that mediates our own self-knowledge as a subject. First-person narration is structurally determined by the autothanatographic impulse, an impulse whose terminus is the capacity to be simultaneously self (character) and Other (narrator) and utter one’s proper name from the perspective of another, such as the posthumous narrator of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002), who opens with the sentence: “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie” (5). Uttering the name Susie Salmon immediately separates the narrator from the author named Alice Sebold, but it also separates the narrator from her own self as character. If the paratextual distinction between author and narrator came to differentiate the first-person novel from the memoirs it originally imitated, it

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also became the pragmatic basis on which autobiography was defined in the twentieth century: autobiography is determined by the consonance of author-­ narrator-protagonist who all share the same proper name (Lejeune, 1975). What I am concerned with here, however, is the differentiation between characters and their own proper name as the basis of first-person narration, as evidenced by the full title of David Copperfield: The Personal History and Experience of David Copperfield the Younger. This denomination foregrounds the temporally distinct entities of narrator and character who nonetheless share the same name. The autothanatographic impulse of the fictional autobiography is toward an existential severance of the narrator from their own name. For instance, in the opening chapter of Amy Tan’s Saving Fish from Drowning (2006), titled “A Brief History of My Shortened Life,” the posthumous narrator first reveals her name to readers through her own act of reading about her murdered self in a newspaper article: “The report was a terrible thing to read: ‘The body of Bibi Chen, 63, retail maven, socialite, and board member of the Asian Art Museum, was found yesterday in the display window of her Union Square store’” (2). While the term autothanatography is often used to refer to a genre of life writing in which the author writes in the shadow of terminal illness that brings their current existence into sharp relief, the term derives from the neologistic impulse that accompanies Derrida’s philosophical interrogation of language. In “Otobiographies” (1988), his reading of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, Derrida claims that autobiography is constituted by the self addressing the self as Other; it is a pact with the self rather than with the reader where auto becomes oto: “That is: I am telling myself my story, as Nietzsche said, here is the story that I am telling myself; and that means I hear myself speak” (49). At the same time, Derrida argues that it is only when the reader aligns himself with this ear that the book is signed, for the proper name of Nietzsche’s signature does not take place when he writes, but posthumously: “It is the ear of the other that signs. The ear of the other says me to me and constitutes the autos of my autobiography” (51). For Derrida, this is the structure of textuality in general: the author’s empirical self cannot stand outside the self of the text by virtue of the fact that the proper name assigned to the autobiography marks the eternal return, a posthumous signature designated by the reader that survives the author’s death but can never be restored to the person it denotes. Depending on where one stands, a third-person omniscient narrator can be said to share the proper name of the novel’s author, or it is a nameless entity, perhaps even a nonexistent one. If the name of a first-person narrator differs from that of the author it facilitates the paratextual apparatus that signals fictionality. And in sharing the same name as the narrator, the protagonist of a first-person novel shares its fictive status. However, if as poststructuralists

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tell us, the I who writes is never the same as the I written about, if authors enter their own death at the moment of writing, then the experiencing character can be seen as an entity different from the narrating character, not only because of the threshold that designates extradiegetic status, but by virtue of the function of language itself.

DYING IN THE FIRST PERSON My argument, then, is that we can approach the historical development of first-person narration less in terms of unnatural deviations from the autobiographical model, than as a history of fictional autothanatographical experiments, the aporic goal of which is to narrate one’s own death, to solve the problem of uttering “I am dead” by uttering “(s)he is dead.” This goal exemplifies the nature of first-person narration itself: the “death” of the subject in the act of writing as a linguistic observance; the existential cleavage between experiencing and narrating in pseudo-temporal terms; and the construction of the self as other, realized as the attempt to achieve a heterodiegetic stance in the act of narration. Autobiography is the default model of first-person narrative fiction, not because it is a form of natural language that claims a privileged referential status, but because its central impulse—to account for oneself—is ultimately an autothanatographic drive that can be realized only in fiction: it is the ghost of first-person narration that drives its formal innovations throughout literary history. This impulse can be seen in David Copperfield (1850), one of the canonical examples of homodiegetic narration and of the fictional autobiography. Dickens’s novel follows the classic structure of a character sitting down toward the end of his life to record his memories from birth, charting the movement from naïve experiencing character to mature and reflective narrating character. The opening chapter, “I am born,” begins this way: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show” (ch. 1). Here the narrator notes the distinction between narrating and experiencing character, or between hero and narrator, which establishes the existential cleavage necessary to account for oneself. There are several chapters throughout the book, titled “retrospects,” in which Copperfield begs leave to pause the narrative and indulge in various memories, proceeding to narrate these memories in the present tense. The final chapter is titled “A Last Retrospect” and begins: “And now my written story ends. I look back, once more—for the last time—before I close these leaves” (ch. 64). As with all classic first-person narration, the time of the story

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catches up with the time of narrating, but can go no further than “the written story.” After flitting through the various people who populate his memory, Copperfield concludes with these lines: And now, as I close my task, subduing my desire to linger yet, these faces fade away. But one face, shining on me like a Heavenly light by which I see all other objects, is above them and beyond them all. And that remains. I turn my head, and see it, in its beautiful serenity, beside me. My lamp burns low, and I have written far into the night; but the dear presence, without which I were nothing, bears me company. O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!

Copperfield can narrate only up until the point he stops writing, but he concludes with his yearning desire that the story will continue to the end of his life, at which point his lifelong friend and now wife of ten years, Agnes, will still be with him. The final phrase “pointing upward” refers to his longheld wish that she will also be with him beyond life in heaven, “where, in the mystery to come, I might yet love her with a love unknown on earth” (ch. 60). That final closure cannot be attained. Autothanatography represents the aporic goal of completing one’s life story that is denied the experiencing self. First-person narration in fiction seeks this aporic state by striving for heterodiegesis, the position of the other in the form of a narrator who is absent from the story. In what follows I will analyze a range of different ways that writers have experimented with this challenge, demonstrating the historical progression of the autothanatographic impulse. The different modes of dying in the first-person can be charted as shown in figure 1. Rather than charting these modes as a progression along a continuum from the most natural to the most unnatural, I have presented them as a cycle of possibilities. This is because both theoretically and historically, these modes strike out from the autobiographical model and return to it in autothanatographical form, in an arc that first seeks to collapse the experiencing and narrating character in simultaneous narration, and then move beyond the threshold of narrating to achieve the retrospection of a narrator who is no longer the character because they have become othered from themselves through death. In the third-party frame the narrator’s death is reported by an editor or another character. Writing to the threshold involves the protagonist narrating up to the moment of death. In dying and telling, the protagonist

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FIGURE 1. Autothanatographic voices

narrates the moment of dying itself. Projected death involves narrating one’s demise in future tense, and posthumous narration involves narrating one’s death in retrospect, from beyond the grave. These modes exploit the narrative potential of grammatical tense structures from the present to the future perfect, a potential generated by the relation between the narrating instance and the story. Each mode thus matches Genette’s four categories for the time of narrating: interpolated, simultaneous, prior, and retrospective narration. However, they are also crucially bound up in the question of person, for a final variation on these modes involves dying in the third person, whereby the firstperson narration undergoes a grammatical shift to a heterodiegetic stance in the act of dying. Posthumous narration requires the narrator separating themselves from their existential body and in the process attaining the same status as a third party who reports the death of another, thus coming full circle.

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A rough sketch of the historical trajectory of these different modes would start with eighteenth-century sentimental fiction presenting us with first-­ person correspondents and memoirists whose death is reported by other characters (Clarissa) or by an editor (Werther). The nineteenth century sees a continuation of this third-party frame via Gothic experiments that present dead or soon-to-be-dead narrators as sublime, uncanny, or ghostly presences in the narrative, their voices embedded in multiple frames that require a complicated chain of transmission in order to be heard: Victor Frankenstein’s oral tale and that of his monster, preserved in the letters of Walton who narrates Victor’s death in Frankenstein (1818); the confession and last words of the just deceased Henry Jekyll comprising the end of its third-person frame narrative in Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (1886); and the written account of the dead governess in the Turn of the Screw (1898) read out by a character as a ghost story around a fire, which is then transcribed by an anonymous first-person narrator. The nineteenth century also witnesses experiments with writing to the threshold, beginning with Victor Hugo’s The Last Days of a Condemned Man, and the trope of a narrator writing to their last moment in the shadow of imminent death is developed in Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man and many of Edgar Allen Poe’s stories. The central preoccupation with death in these works sits alongside canonical works such as The Vicar of Wakefield, David Copperfield, and Jane Eyre as a challenge to the final threshold that is the convergence of narrating and experiencing. Early twentieth-century examples of dying in the first person are notable for eschewing a written narrating instance and partaking of the modernist experimentation with the interior monologue. In the same decade as Joyce’s and Woolf ’s stream-of-consciousness novels, All Quiet on the Western Front presents a soldier’s simultaneously narrated thoughts framed by a third-party report of his death, Fraulein Else provides the first example of dying and telling, and As I Lay Dying one of the earliest examples of posthumous narration. The proliferation of dead narrators throughout the century in their various incarnations are historically and metaphorically calibrated to the tropes of the death of omniscience (uncannily resurfacing as paraleptic first-person narration), the death of the novel in the face of the new media ecology, and the death of the author. From the late twentieth century there is a surge in posthumous narrators in literary fiction, from Gilbert Adair’s satirical The Death of the Author (1992) to Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002) narrated from heaven, to Mike McCormack’s self-described “stream of post-consciousness” novel The Solar Bones (2016), and George Saunders’s Booker Prize–winning Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) narrated by multiple ghosts from their “sick-boxes.” The

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detective story and the ghost story, as Alice Bennett (2012) points out, furnish generic frames for many posthumous narrators, and postmodernism provides the larger context. A brief glance at the examples for this historical sketch shows that several belong to more than one category, and that there are early precursors to the various trends. In what follows I will trace the autothanatographic impulse of first-person narration through various formal experiments with dying in the first person.

THE THIRD-PARTY FRAME The simplest way to narrate the death of a first-person narrator is to have another, frame narrator, inform us. This can be a character within an epistolary narrative reporting the death of another character, or an editor or thirdperson narrator whose commentary frames the written or oral narrative of the dead character. The difference often lies in whether readers are presented with the story of someone they already know to be dead (Humbert Humbert in Lolita, for instance), or whether the character-narrator’s death comes as a revelation at the end (All Quiet on the Western Front). The third-party frame begins with the eighteenth-century letter novel. We may recall here the various defenses of epistolary fiction in terms of its advantages over the narrative method. Epistolary narration promised a solution to the problem of retrospectivity by having characters record their own thoughts and emotions as they are happening. As Barbauld wrote, “it gives the feelings of the moment as the writers felt them at the moment” (xxvi). Nonetheless, the very act of writing means there remains a gap between the experience and the record of the experience, between living and telling, which maintains the distinction between experiencing and narrating character. Furthermore, the fact that characters must continually write in order to service the narrative is of course the grounds on which critics often condemned the improbability of epistolary fiction. The narrating instance of epistolary fiction is neither retrospective nor simultaneous, as Genette points out, but interpolated, taking place between the events of the story (although the act of writing is itself part of the action of the story). If epistolarity can close the gap as much as possible between living and telling by removing the temporal distance that the memoir novel relies upon, it falters when it comes to the time to tell of one’s own death. It seems fitting that Clarissa (1748), one of the earliest models for the self-examining heroine that enabled the development of the consciousness scene, should also be one of the earliest examples of dying in the first person.

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Epistolarity, Sentimentality, and the Anticipation of Posterity The pathos of Clarissa’s situation derives from the fact that her desire to reform a rake leads to her own demise, the descent into a long decline from a vague malaise induced by her grief. In “Courting Death: Necrophilia in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa” (2013), Jolene Zigarovich points out that “eighteenth-­ century literary heroines who either willingly or unwillingly discover sexual knowledge must often pay for this knowledge with their lives” (84). Clarissa’s serene acceptance of her impending death toward the end of the novel becomes the ultimate sign of her own impossible virtue as she reconciles herself with God—the impartial judge in her breast—although it is a death that she cannot bear final witness to. Clarissa’s death is stretched out over scores of letters, as we read of her preparing to die as she becomes increasingly ill, even ordering her coffin in advance to be delivered to her bed chamber. “As a good eighteenth-century heroine should,” Zigarovich notes, “Clarissa plans a marriage with death to redeem her virtue” (85). This awareness of her mortality informs the valedictory tenor of all her letters, providing further reason to continue writing. As she declines, Clarissa writes to her confidante, Miss Howe, imploring her not to be concerned that she is “in this, my last stage” and reflecting on her conduct by accepting her own pride and naïvety as contributing factors to her ruination. “But we women are too often to blame on this head,” Clarissa insists, “since the most virtuous among us seldom make virtue the test of their approbation of the other” (1319). In other words, they fail to hold libertines to the standards by which women themselves are judged and judge themselves. “May my story be a warning to all” (1319), she writes. With this statement Clarissa completes her story and the point of that story, meaning there is nothing left to narrate but her own death. Demonstrating the increasing difficulty of writing to the moment, her sentences begin to stop midstream throughout this letter. “I must lay down my pen,” she writes. “I am very ill. I believe I shall be better by and by. The bad writing would betray me, although I had a mind to keep from you what the event must soon—” (1318). The gap between this truncated sentence and the following line, “Now I resume my trembling pen” (1318), indicates that her letters are becoming an increasingly unreliable source of transmission for her own thoughts. Belford keeps readers informed of these thoughts and her actions in the periods that she is not writing. In his correspondence with Lovelace, he narrates Clarissa’s response to a just-received letter from Mrs. Norton, a letter she cannot reply to herself on account of her unsteady fingers and misty eyesight.

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In this scene, she gives Belford her will and a parcel of letters to be opened “as soon as I am certainly dead” (1329). Not long after this, Belford reports Clarissa’s conversation in which she discusses how her dying has been strung out, from first losing the power of walking to her failing eyesight and then not being able to hold a pen. This inability to write, to narrate her own thoughts, to account for herself, is the final harbinger of her death. The last letter she writes is a valedictory response to Mrs. Norton, a letter replete with ellipses as her eyes deteriorate and her sentences continually break up: “I write this, and write it as I believe with my last pen” (1339). She refuses to send the letter, and in relaying this information to Lovelace, Belford exclaims his fear that “she has written and read her last!” (1341) Her final letter to Ann Harlowe is not written by her but dictated to Mrs. Lovick (1349). All of this dramatically highlights the obvious fact that Clarissa can be spiritually prepared for and accepting of her death, but she cannot narrate her own death. When she can no longer write, Clarissa must speak, but in the epistolary novel a voice is not enough to narrate—it must be quoted as dialogue and hence transcribed into written text as an event to be narrated. Eventually, even her voice fails her. It falls to Belford as the third party to inform readers that Clarissa has died. In a letter to Lovelace, Belford narrates in great detail “the woeful scene” of Clarissa’s death. Her last words are “come—Oh come—blessed Lord—JESUS,” Belford writes: And with these words, the last but half-pronounced, expired: such a smile, such a charming serenity over-spreading her sweet face at the instant as seemed to manifest her eternal happiness already begun. Oh Lovelace!—but I can write no more! (1362)

Belford then breaks the seal on the parcel Clarissa had entrusted to him, along with her will. The parcel includes a letter requesting that he distribute to various correspondents “copies of my ten posthumous letters” (1368), including her will, a letter to Lovelace forgiving him, and a letter to her cousin, William Morden, urging him not to seek revenge upon Lovelace. Some of these letters are presented in a cluster, and the rest are dispersed throughout the final pages of the novel for dramatic effect as Lovelace meets his own death in a duel with Morden. Coming so soon after her death, and almost immediately after Belford has described her “lovely corpse” and her “easy slumber” (1367), these letters restore her voice to the narrative as if she had never departed. Although I have included Clarissa as an early example of the third-party frame, the novel contains prototypes of the other modes of dying in the first person that will be developed over the ensuing centuries. Clarissa continues to write throughout her protracted period of dying and up until she is physically

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unable to. In this way, writing to the moment becomes writing to the threshold, for the moment at which Clarissa can no longer write is the moment at which her story—her account of herself—catches up with her narrating for the final time but cannot go beyond it. The points at which her letters cut off midsentence as she becomes too weary to wield her “trembling pen” foreshadow the mode of dying and telling that will be developed in the truncated interior monologue. For instance, “I’m very glad you gave my cous—” creates an ellipsis, followed up by, “Hither I had written, and was forced to quit my pen” (1319). And of course her “posthumous letters,” which are circulated and provided to readers after Belford’s declaration, grant her a voice after death, a verisimilar means for posthumous narration that anticipates the “unnatural” examples that proliferate in the late twentieth century. These letters, written in the shadow of death, are nothing if not exercises in the anticipation of retrospection, and hence of projected death. In this way, Clarissa embodies all the latent possibilities of first-person narration itself, carrying the germ of different modes of dying in the first person that require historical extrapolation. The third-party frame is used to report the death of letter writing characters in sentimental fiction throughout the eighteenth century, including two early American novels: The Coquette (1797) by Hannah More Foster and The Power of Sympathy (1789) by William Hill Brown. In the latter novel, one of the epistolary correspondents, Thomas Harrington, is found dead at his desk, along with a pistol, an unsealed final letter, and a copy of The Sorrows of Werther. This scenario of course is evidence of the popular influence of another contemporaneous example of dying in the first person, which I will discuss briefly here. Johann Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) is comprised of short letters that Werther writes to his friend Wilhelm, letters that more resemble a series of diary entries. Werther’s broken-hearted suicide is vital to the melodramatic drive of this novel, and hence a way must be found to narrate his death even though the only letters presented to us are those of Werther himself. The novel concludes with a section titled “The Editor to the Reader” that begins: “It is a matter of extreme regret that we want original evidence of the last remarkable days of our friend; and we are, therefore, obliged to interrupt the progress of his correspondence, and to supply the deficiency by a connected narration” (book 2). This editorial figure hovers between that of another character reconstructing the narrative from remaining correspondence and that of an authorial proxy who invokes the pseudofactual posture even as it leans toward omniscience in its third-person narration of Werther’s thoughts derived from his letters. Quotations from these letters serve to maintain a semblance of grounding in the genre of the documentary novel while performing the function of what would be quoted internal soliloquy in standard third-person narration. Werther’s last written words before he shoots

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himself are quoted, “They are loaded—the clock strikes twelve. I say amen. Charlotte, Charlotte! farewell, farewell!,” and remain as an imperfect substitute for his final unnarratable thoughts and actions that take place in the ellipsis between this found document and the editor’s retrospective account of Werther being found by his servant. The reason this curious editor figure, rather than another character, is required to report Werther’s death is that, unlike the typical epistolary novel, this one includes no other correspondents. In Goethe and the Novel, Eric Blackall describes Werther’s voice as a soliloquy in the epistolary mode, which is a useful way to consider the technical significance of the novel. One can see that the interpolated narrating instance of the epistolary mode enables the soliloquy to be extended across a novel, punctuated by ellipses. That is, the soliloquy can tell us a character’s thoughts in the moment, without the need even to write them down, while the epistolary mode enables those moments to be distributed across a longer time frame for narrative purposes. This narrative frame, structuring what is essentially an interior monologue around the patterns of a written mode (the letter, the diary), provides a fragile yet lasting link between autobiographical modes for accounting for oneself, and autothanatographic experiments with thought representation, yet by virtue of this link remains unable to move beyond the need for a third party to confer final meaning on the protagonist’s life. This narrative frame is both further developed and stretched to its limits in another German novel, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929).

All Quiet in Bäumer’s Mind: The Absence of Writing Like Goethe’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front concludes with a third person entering suddenly to inform us that the soliloquist has died. What is different about this novel is that it does not present the narrative as a found document; and indeed it cannot, for the novel is narrated in the present tense, making it unfit to be presented as a written memoir or diary. Instead it reads as simultaneous narration, or living and telling, especially when the standard present tense shifts into the continuous present with lines such as: “I’m sitting by Kemmerich’s bed. He is failing more and more visibly. There’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing around us” (19). At the same time, the elliptical structure echoes the diary form with a series of interpolated narrating instances throughout the novel. According to Christine R. Barker and R. W. Last, “Baumer’s account is very much like a diary, consisting in the main of either description of a sequence

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of events or internal monologue, without linking passages of any kind” (19). This supports my point that while the eighteenth-century document novel may have given way to a range of unnatural modes of narration, as Nicholas Paige argues, the structure has endured, along with the basic impulse to give an account of oneself. Nonetheless, while All Quiet on the Western Front does read like an internal soliloquy in diary form, it also reads like a novel, with the narrator introducing characters, offering exposition, and employing liberal amounts of summary, such as: “The months drag on. This Summer of 1918 is the bloodiest and the hardest” (200). The opening line of the novel establishes an in media res scene: “We are in camp five miles behind the line. Yesterday our relief arrived; now our bellies are full of bully beef and beans, we’ve had enough to eat and we’re well satisfied” (1). However, this scene shifts into an expositional analepsis that introduces all the characters with lines such as “little Albert Kropp, who is the cleverest of us, and was the first one to make it to acting lance-corporal,” and even introduces the narrator himself: “And fourthly me, Paul Bäumer” (2). This self-introduction in particular is something we would expect from a memoirist addressing a reader, rather than an internal monologue. One could instead surmise that the global tensual frame is the historic present, particularly given that toward the end, while reflecting on how the soldiers’ dammed-up feelings can suddenly escape, Bäumer says, “It’s worth reporting how Berger met his end, for example” (195), before proceeding to narrate Berger’s death in the present tense. There are also moments that complicate our sense of a narrating subject, such as this scene of hand-to-hand combat: It’s got a bit lighter. Footsteps hurry by me. The first few. Past me. Then some more. The rattle of the machine-guns becomes continuous. I am just about to turn round a bit when suddenly there is a noise and a body falls on to me in the shell hole, heavily and with a splash, then slips and lands on top me—I don’t think at all, I make no decision—I just stab wildly and feel only how the body jerks, then goes limp and collapses. When I come to myself again, my hand is sticky and wet. (153)

The statement “I do not think” cannot be simultaneously narrated or even consciously thought, of course, and so can be only a verbal approximation of Bäumer’s instinctive action before “I come to myself again.” This sentence is precisely one of those instances of first-person present-tense narration that Dorrit Cohn argues cannot fit into standard categories of narrative voice. In fact Cohn points to Remarque’s novel as a predecessor to the narrative (rather than monologic) use of contemporary first-person present

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tense, which is simultaneously narrated but is neither a quoted soliloquy nor a global use of the historic present but a mode of narration modeled on the third-person novel. Another distinctive feature of the novel is the narrator’s oscillation between singular and plural pronouns. On occasion, some of Bäumer’s “impossible” statements can be said to be narrating a collective experience of the soldiers: “The night is unbearable. We can’t sleep. We just stare in front of us and doze” (77). As Remarque notes in his preface, the novel is “an attempt to give an account of a generation that was destroyed by the war.” Bäumer’s liberal use of the first-person plural indicates an awareness not that he is speaking on behalf of others, but that his experience is a loss of individual subjectivity, a reduction to an anonymous collective: “We are soldiers, and only as an afterthought and in a strange and shamefaced way are we still individual human beings” (191). The overwhelming preoccupation of Bäumer’s moments of reflection is that he belongs to a generation that knows only killing and the constant threat of death as its defining experience. There can be no self-examining subject in this environment. While on guard duty over a group of captured Russians, Bäumer contemplates how his main goal as a soldier is to carry out acts that would be considered murder in everyday life. However, in wanting to avoid a moral abyss, he chooses to keep his thoughts at bay until after the war, leading to a kind of fleeting epiphany in this moment: My heart is pounding: could this be the goal, the greatness, the unique experience that I thought about in the trenches, that I was seeking as a reason for going on living after this universal catastrophe is over? Is this the task we must dedicate our lives to after the war, so that all the years of horror will have been worthwhile? (138)

There is a shift in these two sentences from the singular to the plural pronoun, and the questions posed indicate the dynamics of the anticipation of retrospection: that his life may have some meaning if linked to a collective responsibility to narrate the experience of war to others. Toward the end of the novel, while recovering from a wound in a military hospital crowded with soldiers on the edge of dying, Bäumer thinks: “I am young. I am twenty years of age; but I know nothing of life except despair, death, fear, and the combination of completely mindless superficiality with an abyss of suffering” (186). In realizing he is one of a generation whose lives have been ruined by war, he is also recognizing both his limitations as a potential narrator and the political potential of narrative: “What would our fathers do if one day we rose up and confronted them, and called them to account?” (186). There is a kind of

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exhausted passivity about these thoughts, though, and a dawning recognition that there will be no place in society for his generation after the war: “For years our occupation has been killing—that was the first experience we had. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what can possibly become of us?” (186). The inability to imagine a future is also an inability to establish a distance between a narrating and an experiencing self in order to give an account of himself, for he has no interlocutor to address: only his own thoughts. The final chapter has a kind of hopeful projection of the future from the narrator during a brief period of rest as he contemplates how he and his generation of broken men will cope when they return from the war: I am very calm. Let the months come, and the years, they’ll take nothing more from me, they can take nothing more from me. I am so alone and so devoid of any hope that I can confront them without fear. Life, which carried me through these years, is there in my hands and in my eyes. Whether or not I have mastered it, I do not know. But as long as life is there it will make its own way, whether my conscious self likes it or not. (207)

These are Bäumer’s last words. Rather than offering any real insight from a mature narrating self typical of a memoir novel, they project a future in which life continues but there is little to live for. There is a “conscious self ” but no meaning, no end point from which he can make sense of his life. The novel concludes with a brief shift into an anonymous third-person voice: He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so still and quiet along the entire front line that the army despatches restricted themselves to the single sentence: that there was nothing new to report on the western front. He had sunk forwards and was lying on the ground as if asleep. When they turned him over, you could see that he could not have suffered long— his face wore an expression that was so composed that it looked as if he were almost happy that it had turned out that way. (207)

There is no attempt to present Bäumer’s account as a found document, or the frame narrative as an editorial insert. Instead, there is simply a shift in the narrative voice, along with a shift to past-tense narration to indicate finality. If Bäumer’s narrative were written, it could be presented as a posthumous document by an editor. However, the lack of a clear narrating instance makes this untenable. Neither a diary nor an interior monologue, it employs the simultaneous present tense of the latter and the basic structure of the former in con-

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junction with the expositional and narrative features of the novel. Despite this departure from convention, All Quiet on the Western Front does not extend Bäumer’s narration to the moment of death, and nor does the anonymous third party provide any psychological insight into his final moments, offering only a speculative physiognomic reading of his corpse. Bäumer does not write, or even consciously narrate, and so the structural drive to give an account of oneself is missing. In the first chapter, he makes clear that writing is for the authority figures, the older generation who led him and his colleagues into war: “While they went on writing and making speeches, we saw field hospitals and men dying” (9). Words have lost their authority and value in the face of the lived experience of war. The irony is that before the war he did see himself as a writer: “I find it strange to think that at home in a drawer there is the first part of a play I once started to write called ‘Saul,’ and a stack of poems as well. I spent so many evenings on them—we all did things like that—but it has all become so unreal to me that I can’t even imagine it anymore” (14). When he is back home on leave, he realizes how detached from civilian life he has become, how trivial and empty it seems. He tries reading through the books on his shelves, the works of literature he used to love, hoping they will take him back to his old life. This proves fruitless: “Words, words, words—they can’t reach me” (124). Later when informing the mother of a dead colleague that her son has been killed, her emotional response prompts Bäumer to think: “It would be impossible to put it down on paper” (128). This sentiment recalls the standard trope of inexpressible emotion in eighteenth-century fiction, but it also strikes me as a self-reflexive statement, alluding to the fact that this is not a written memoir and that the novel seeks to capture the thoughts of someone who has grown distrustful of words and cannot imagine a readership for them. In Media, Memory, and the First World War, David Williams writes: What do we read, then, if he does not write? An interior monologue, perhaps, “told principally in the historic present” (Barker and Last 46)? If it is an interior monologue, it suffers nevertheless from a disastrous rupture in form. The subject dies, and yet the story, carried until now in the first person, continues for another page in the third-person voice of an unnamed narrator. (125)

This awkward unnatural conclusion with the intervention of an “authorgod” makes no sense to Williams, who proceeds to argue that the novel can more productively be approached in cinematic terms. The internal focalization of the novel, for Williams, becomes the eye of a camera presenting us

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with the immediate perceptions of the narrator, the continuous present-tense narration like a rolling motion picture. The abrupt shift in perception at the end can then be seen as akin to a camera that has been left running after Bäumer has died, turned to focus on the protagonist rather than through him. This strikes me as no more satisfying a “naturalization” than any other, given the last section is in the past tense and particularly given the sharp distinction between internal and external focalization in the two voices, although it does point to a connection between cinema and modernist experimentation that I will discuss later in relation to posthumous narration. Given that the entire novel is permeated by the narrator’s awareness that he and his fellow soldiers could die at any moment, the sudden clumsy revelation of his death appears not to be thematically unwarranted. Furthermore, the third-party frame operates as first an obituary and then a deictic center from which readers can witness his death (“you could see that he could not have suffered long”). This witnessing becomes the signature that confers final meaning on Bäumer’s life, turning the continuous present-tense account of his experience at war into a narrative that can hold his superiors to account. As an early example of the late twentieth-century proliferation of present-tense narration, the novel indicates again the significance of experiments with dying in the first person to the overall development of the form.

WRITING TO THE THRESHOLD How close to death can one write? To the very threshold at which story time catches up with narrative time and the retrospective narration of the extradiegetic narrator becomes simultaneous with the act of writing. This is what I call writing to the threshold, and it begins within the third-party frame of the eighteenth-century sentimental novel where epistolary characters continue to write until they die either by grief-induced illness (female characters such as Clarissa Harlowe, Harriot Fawcett, and Eliza Wharton) or by suicide (male characters such as Werther and Thomas Harrington), and their final letter furnishes us with posthumous documentary proof of their reflections on imminent death. The difference from these sentimental correspondents and diarists is that narrators in the mode of writing to the threshold typically undertake a conscious autothanatographic experiment to write in the shadow of death, either because they have been condemned to death, they are terminally ill, or they are planning suicide. Death does not come upon them while they are writing; they write because they are dying. Furthermore, they do not always have a

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third-party reporting their death. The first example is Victor Hugo’s appropriately titled The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829). This novel was originally published anonymously with a short preface asserting that readers may decide for themselves whether it is a found manuscript or a work of fiction. The narrative begins in media res, prompted and shaped by the singular thought of the condemned man’s impending execution: Condemned to Death! It is now five weeks that I dwell with this thought—alone with it—always frozen by its presence, always bowed down under its weight. (133)

This opening sets up the work as an autothanatographic mirror of the traditional memoir novel, for it is concerned largely with depicting his dying rather than with recounting his life. After describing his trial and sentencing, and then his routine in jail, the narrator writes: “I said to myself,—Since I have the means of writing, why should I not write? But write what? . . . Can I have anything to say—I, who have no more anything to do in this world? And what can I find in this empty and shattered brain which is worth while recording?” (150). The impetus to write is death itself, with his inner turmoil providing the rationale but also constraining what is possible: “Why should I not attempt to say to myself all that I experience of the violent and the unknown in the abandoned situation in which I am placed?” (151). In deciding to record his thoughts of mortality in the moment, he also attempts to assuage his despair by virtue of the distance required to describe it: “Besides, in this anguish, the only means to suffer less from it is to observe it. To paint it will prevent me from feeling it” (151). Ultimately, though, to write is to provide himself with a reader, first his own narrating self and then, hopefully the wider public: And then what I write will not, perhaps, be useless. This journal of my sufferings, hour after hour, minute after minute, torture after torture,—if I have the strength to carry it out up to the moment when it will be physically impossible to continue it,—this history, necessarily unfinished, but as complete as possible, of my sensations, will it not bear with it a great and profound teaching? Would there not be, in this indisputable record of the dying thought, in this always-increasing progression of griefs—in this sort of intellectual autopsy of a condemned criminal—more than one lesson for those who condemn? (151)

This is an autothanatographic exercise in writing to the threshold, a deliberate attempt to write until it is no longer possible, until the narrator is unable

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to hold a pen, while acknowledging that his act of narration cannot cross the final threshold in which the story exceeds the discourse, and hence his account of his life will be “necessarily unfinished.” If Clarissa Harlowe aimed to minutely scrutinize and judge her moral behavior, and Tristram Shandy embarked on a doomed, digressive attempt to record every moment of his life, this unnamed narrator sets himself the task of recording in intimate detail, “hour after hour, minute after minute,” his tortured dying thoughts. In the second preface to the novel (1832), Hugo comes clean about his authorship to declare, or rather to acknowledge frankly, that he wrote it specifically as a critique of the death sentence and a plea for its abolition. The passage above makes clear that the narrator shares the same objective, with his “indisputable record of the dying thought” the means of persuasion. He goes on to describe a hope that what he calls his memoirs will be published and contribute to the overhaul of capital punishment if the pages he is writing do not rot or get blown away once he is taken to his execution. Having his final words, his attempt to give an account of himself, read by others will confer meaning on his narrative, but only by signing his death. In this way the structure of the narrating instance exemplifies the strange logic of narrative: the narrator anticipating retrospection as he writes while simultaneously writing to keep this final meaning at bay. If Clarissa’s death is strung out over the last part of Richardson’s novel, this narrator’s death is heralded from the beginning, and its conclusion is both inevitable and interminable, the moment of death continually deferred by final thoughts and contrived occasions to write. Toward the end of the novel, Hugo’s narrator describes the final visit of a priest, his transfer from his cell in a carriage to the Concierge, and then to a cell where “I asked for a table, a chair, and writing materials” (215). We are thus kept as up-to-date as possible as the narrator continues to write in the final hours leading up to his death, elaborating his fear of the guillotine, wondering if he will receive a pardon, reflecting upon his life, and counting down the hours in each section: “Only two hours and forty-five minutes more” (244). As part of these reflections he projects what lies beyond the threshold of narration, employing the future tense to narrate in advance the moment of his own death by the guillotine— “Ah, my hair will turn white before my head falls” (219)—and to imagine what comes after: “It seems to me that as soon as my eyes shall be closed, I shall see a great lightness and abysses of light in which my spirit shall roll forever. . . . Or, perhaps, wretch that I am, there will be a hideous, deep gulf, the sides of which will be hung with darkness and shadow” (248). What galls him most, is the callous reception his execution will receive from the crowds, which also forces the reader to imagine their own response as witnesses to this projected

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death: “All these people will laugh, will clap their hands, will applaud” (261). Indeed, following this part of his diary is a blank section titled “my story,” including only an inserted publisher’s note saying, “The leaves of this chapter have never been found” (263). This brief intrusion provides a third-party frame that enables readers to join the narrative audience, and thus, evidence that his manuscript did survive to be read. However, the story does not end there, for Hugo strives to find ways to keep the narrator writing until the final moment: riding in a cart through the crowds gathering to witness the execution. Improbably, just as he reaches the guillotine, he tells the priest he has a last declaration to make: “I asked them to let me write my last wishes. They untied my hands; but the rope is here all ready, and the rest is below” (273). In order to fulfill the promise of the narrative, to take us to the final threshold of the story and reveal the horror of execution, Hugo must manufacture a scenario where the narrator can reach the guillotine, yet still be able to narrate the experience. To do so, he must retreat from that threshold. The final lines of the novel are: The judge and the executioner are gone. I am alone. Alone with two guards. Oh, the horrible people, with their hyena yells. Who knows if I will not escape them? If I will not be saved? If my pardon? It is impossible that I am not reprieved! Ah, the wicked wretches! They are coming up the stairs! Four o’clock! (275)

Here the story cuts off at the point the narrator can no longer write, and hence cannot report his final walk to the executioner, let alone his own death. By writing to the threshold of his death, however, he is also writing to the threshold that separates his narrating from his experiencing self. If the act of taking up his pen marked the point at which the character became an extradiegetic narrator, closing the gap between the story and the discourse takes him back to that threshold, but not beyond. Implicit in the premise of writing to the moment that characterizes epistolary fiction is the promise that it can take writer and reader to the final moment and offer instantaneous descriptions and reflections on death itself. The aim is to provide documentary proof of the first-person narrator’s death without the need for a third party, but the act of writing itself means the end of the story must always be perpetually deferred beyond the end of the narrative. The significance of Hugo’s story to reflexive realism is that its formal preoccupation with the problem of dying in the first person reveals the latent impulse of this narrative voice. It also inaugurates the tradition of the con-

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demned narrator reflecting upon the final moments of their life, exploited by Edgar Allen Poe in stories such as “The Black Cat” (1843) and “The Imp and the Perverse” (1850). The trope is updated in Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1942) with two differences: the narrative is not written, and the narrator accepts the benign indifference of the universe as he actively hopes for a baying crowd to witness his execution. A variant of writing to the threshold is the narrator with a terminal illness writing until the point of death, beginning with Ivan Turgenev’s 1850 novella, The Diary of a Superfluous Man. Like Hugo’s novel, the first line establishes the impending death of the narrator: “The doctor has just left me. . . . Yes, I shall die soon, very soon” (3). Burdened with the news of an undisclosed terminal illness, the narrator, Tchulkaturin, sits down to write, estimating that he has “perhaps a fortnight” left to live (3). He ponders, in the same way that Hugo’s narrator does, what he could possibly write, before deciding: “I will narrate to myself the story of my own life. A capital idea! When death is approaching it is proper, and can offend no one” (3–4). While noting the impropriety of discussing illness, he ultimately appeals to his impending death as license to write the story of his life, exemplifying the autothanatographic impulse behind autobiographical writing. Furthermore, by addressing himself as the sole narratee, he invokes the distinction between narrating and experiencing self that enables the creation of himself as a fictional character. Tchulkaturin struggles to narrate the story of his life, however, due to his realization that “I have been an utterly superfluous man in this world” (13) with no achievements of any merit or experiences worthy of recording. He is largely preoccupied with recalling how he met and fell in love with Elizaveta Kirrilovna, daughter of a wealthy landowner, who is neither aware of nor returns his affections. The fact that the woman he loves marries another man while his private turmoil passes unnoticed is what renders him superfluous, a bit part in another person’s life story. Tchulkaturin parodies his own excesses with this line: “Farewell, Liza! I have written these two words—and have almost laughed. That exclamation seems bookish. I seem to be composing a sentimental novel, and ending up a despairing letter . . . Tomorrow is the first of April. Can it be that I shall die tomorrow?” (90)

In noting the irony that in tone and plot structure this is very much like a sentimental novel, Tchulkaturin draws attention to the parallels between his autothanatographic diary and Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, a sentimental epistolary novel focused on the writer’s unrequited love. Of course,

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while the similarities with Werther are many, they only highlight the difference between the two endings: rather than the rebellious suicide of a tragic figure, we are left with the sputtering life of a superfluous man humiliated by his unrequited love. Only by dying will he cease to be superfluous, and in this way Tchulkaturin welcomes his own death. Unable to wring any real pathos or significance out of the defining moment of his life, this superfluous man with his petty existence is a stand-in for the impotent Russian intelligentsia and the outmoded model of Romanticism represented by Werther. As the novel nears its end and Tchulkaturin reaches the threshold of his narrative act, the point at which story time converges with narrative time but cannot exceed it, the pages become laden with constant references to his declining health. Like Clarissa’s dying correspondence, his capacity to narrate is gradually reduced by his inability to hold a pen: “It is difficult for me to write. . . . I drop my pen. . . . ’T is time! Death is already drawing near with increasing rumble” (90). There is also an echo of Hugo’s novel here, with the metaphor of the rumbling tumbrils taking him to his death. Although framed as an address to himself, Tchulkaturin’s narration sometimes invokes an interlocutor, with phrases such as, “You can imagine how Liza took it” (68) and “But let us return to the story” (71). This indicates a yearning for another to witness and sign his death in order to impart some kind of meaning on his life. In the closing pages he writes: “If at least now, before my death—and death, nevertheless, is a sacred thing, for it elevates every being—if some charming, sad, friendly voice were to sing over me the parting song of my own woe, perhaps I might become reconciled to it. But to die is stupid, stupid . . .” (89, original ellipsis). One can see the diary itself as an attempt to supply that friendly voice by exploiting the division between narrating and experiencing. His last statement is: “I am dying .  .  . Live on, ye living” (91, original ellipsis), followed by the final stanza from Pushkin’s “Death-Thoughts,” which becomes the parting song of his own woe. Tchulkaturin seems closer to actual death, by virtue of his illness claiming him, than Hugo’s condemned man who must put down his pen and walk to his execution. However, while the narrator writes “I am dying,” he is nonetheless unable to write “I die” or “I am dead.” This task is left to “A Note by the Editor,” which confirms his death via a third party—“Mr Tchulkaturin really did die on the night of April 1–2, 18” (91)—implicitly providing the reader he clearly wanted and whom he tried to supply himself through the act of narration. The truncated entry of the dying diarist is a recurring symbol of the tension between the fictive and empirical impulses of first-person narration: the

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autobiographical urge to account for oneself stretching the limits of probability as it strives for the heterodiegetic stance afforded by the novel. This trope continues into the twentieth century, with French novels such as George Duhamil’s Salavin’s Diary (1931) and Francois Mauriac’s The Knot of Vipers (1932). As well as the condemned man and the terminally ill man, writing to the threshold includes the narrator who writes to the point of suicide (a la Werther), often in crime novels such as Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity (1936), where the first-person narrators complete their confessions before going off to kill themselves. I will focus in detail here on a Victorian Gothic version of this trope in which the third-party frame and writing to the threshold converge in a found document at the end of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).

Suicidal Narration: Writing toward Death Narrated in the third person, this novella is focalized primarily through the lawyer, Mr. Utterson, and concludes with him breaking down the door to Jekyll’s lab to find the corpse of Edward Hyde, “the body of a self-destroyer” who had clearly imbibed poison to avoid imminent capture (33). However, the narrative does not end there, for we do not know whether Henry Jekyll has disappeared or is dead himself, and readers, along with Utterson, must find out what has happened. Rather than being reported analeptically by the third-person narrator, these circumstances are revealed in written documents found alongside Hyde’s corpse. First, Utterson finds a note addressed to him in which Jekyll says he will have disappeared or probably died, asking Utterson to “go then and first read the narrative Lanyon had warned me he was to place in your hands” and then to read his own confession (35). Utterson thus ceases to be a character and becomes a surrogate reader as he returns to his office “to read the two narratives in which this mystery was now to be explained” (35). Once readers are presented with the found documents of “Dr Lanyon’s Narrative” and then “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case,” Utterson is no longer required, and the book never returns to the frame narrative. Utterson has taken us to the chronological end of the story, and the two narratives that follow reveal the secret of this strange case, filling in the gaps which had deliberately been left in the preceding third-person narrative. There is no narrative suspense after Lanyon reveals in his letter what he could not tell Utterson ear-

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lier: that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person. This solves the mystery of the relationship between the two, but it introduces an element of the fantastic to this “strange case” that needs to be explained. Mark Currie provides an excellent analysis in this regard in Postmodern Narrative Theory (1998). Currie points out that the suspense generated by Jekyll’s statement is based around the question of when exactly Jekyll transforms into Hyde before Hyde is found dead by his lawyer, Utterson, and his butler, Poole. For Currie, there is an irresolvable gap in the narrative between when Jekyll finishes writing his final letter to Utterson and when Hyde’s corpse is discovered. “The real excitement of the ending,” then, “is not waiting for him to croak: the open question, up to the last line of the confession, is ‘at what point does he become Hyde?’” (123). This is part of the story that Jekyll cannot account for because it takes place beyond the threshold of his narrative, and it is something that the third-person narrator never returns to report. To address the mystery, Currie argues, we ought to attend to the constant shifting between first- and third-person narration in Jekyll’s confession. Here is one example: Jekyll had more than a father’s interest; Hyde had more than a son’s indifference. To cast in my lot with Jekyll was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations. (48)

In this passage, both Jekyll and Hyde are referred to in the third person, which begs the question of who is the “I” who is narrating? In the act of writing, by taking on the role of a narrator, Jekyll is distancing himself from both Hyde, the embodied form of his Id, and his own experiencing self. This is a linguistic feature of the act of narration itself. But the pronominal slippages also show us that the coherence of Jekyll’s identity is struggling to maintain itself. We know that he is writing this confession as he is warding off the increasingly involuntary transformations into Hyde, from which only the potion will save him, but only temporarily. He no longer drinks to become Hyde, but to stop becoming him. Jekyll’s narrative takes the shape of a classic autobiography, recounting his life story from when he first embarked upon his scientific attempts to separate the “primitive duality of man” up until the very moment that he is writing. As we read, the temporal distance between the events being narrated and the moment of narration is closing, and this is dramatized as the gap between Jekyll’s coherent narrative authority and his final transformation into Hyde, which will spell his death. We can speculate, then, that Jekyll’s struggle with

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his own sense of a dual identity has been taking place throughout the writing of his confession. And while the act of writing itself is an attempt to gain distance from this struggle, to reassert his identity by giving an account of himself, it in fact takes him closer to his own dissolution through the imminent permanent transformation back into Hyde. As Currie writes: “The gap between Jekyll and Hyde is reducing at the same speed as the gap between narrated time and the moment of the narration” (123). The last paragraph of Jekyll’s account shifts into the present tense, indicating that narrated time has caught up and collided with the act of writing: “About a week has passed, and I am now finishing this statement under the influence of the last of the old powers” (54). The effects of his restorative potion have waned, and he is aware that “the throes of change” may take him “in the act of writing.” Here is the very last passage of the book: Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? or will he find the courage to release himself at the last moment? God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself. Here, then, as I lay down the pen, and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end. (54)

There is no narration of events in this concluding paragraph, except of the act of writing itself, but one which must necessarily be proleptic, for “as I lay down the pen” is impossible to write and perform at the same time. The sentence itself projects Jekyll’s existence beyond the end of the narrative, so that he may “proceed to seal up my confession.” However, this last sentence also shifts from first person to third person, beginning with the personal pronoun and concluding with a reference to his proper name. The sentence encapsulates the narratorial distance Jekyll has achieved from his experiencing self in order to write this confession, in the hope that he will be able to explain and exculpate his actions. It is also an autothanatographic act, an impossible utterance of his own death. This is what prompts Currie to ask: “Is it possible that Edward Hyde is doing the narrating? We know the death of Jekyll is to be brought about by his final transformation into Hyde. Wouldn’t it make perfect sense for the ‘I’ here to be the ‘I’ of Hyde the murderer of Jekyll?” (124). If it is the case that Hyde writes the last sentence then we can see how writing to the threshold becomes a form of dying and telling, in which Jekyll is able to narrate his own death from the perspective of a third person: his alter ego, Hyde. The “I” who brings to a close the life of Henry Jekyll with a performative speech act is both himself and Hyde, and neither of them. Toward the end of his confession, Jekyll expresses fear for the preservation of

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his narrative, for he is sure that “half an hour from now” as he writes, “I shall again and forever reindue that hated personality” (54). If he changes into Hyde before he finishes writing, he is sure that Hyde will tear it up, but if some time has elapsed it might survive. We know that the confession is sealed up, because Utterson finds it, plus his will, along with a note from Jekyll saying he will “have disappeared under what circumstances I have not the penetration to foresee; but my instincts and all the circumstances of my nameless situation tell me that the end is sure and must be early” (35). This nameless situation I take to mean his inability to name himself as either Jekyll or Hyde. Currie’s point, however, is that if Jekyll actually transforms permanently into Hyde in the last sentence of his confession, then Hyde must have sealed up the confession and written the note asking Utterson to read Lanyon’s narrative and then Jekyll’s memoir. Currie argues that this is possible because Hyde has already forged Jekyll’s handwriting throughout the narrative and that a letter he had earlier written to Dr. Lanyon demonstrates “that he is just as capable of imitating Jekyll’s moral personality as he is of imitating his hand-writing” (125). The question arising from Currie’s brilliant analysis is why would Hyde complete Jekyll’s confession and seal it up? However Currie declines to furnish an answer, preferring to leave the undecidability of the ending as an example of unreliability that exemplifies the schizophrenic fictionality of all self-narration. I am compelled to answer the question, however, in order to highlight the particular type of writing to the threshold that ends with self-slaughter. The answer, I believe, is prompted by the question posed in the final paragraph of the novel: will Hyde die upon the scaffold or find the courage to release himself? A little earlier in his narrative Jekyll had noted of Hyde: “Had it not been for his fear of death, he would long ago have ruined himself in order to involve me in the ruin” (54). He also asserted that “when I know how he fears my power to cut him off by suicide, I find it in my heart to pity him” (54). There is a two-way threat here: Hyde would kill himself to ruin Jekyll, but loves life too much; Jekyll would kill himself to destroy Hyde, but out of compassion for Hyde he is unable to do so. Jekyll is claiming the moral high ground when in fact his decision not to commit suicide strikes me as a sign of moral weakness, given his awareness that if Hyde lives on after him he could well continue to commit murder. So the question Jekyll poses in the final paragraph is clearly a challenge to Hyde’s moral courage for he will not kill himself. Instead, he writes himself out of existence, leaving the decision up to Hyde: “This is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself ” (54). As the last sentence suggests, he is writing to the threshold, laying down his pen, and allowing Hyde to narrate his death.

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Has Jekyll afforded a sufficient account of himself, though? Throughout his confession he talks of his “moral weakness” in succumbing to the temptation of a double life: Hyde was pure evil, but his own character was still a composite of good and evil qualities. In this sense, then, Hyde is free of hypocrisy. Jekyll is not and his narrative is an exercise in self-justification, especially when absolving himself of responsibility for the vicious murder of Carew at the hands of his alter ego. What takes place at Lanyon’s office is the crux of the moral dilemma of the novel. Jekyll’s account contains an ellipsis between Hyde fleeing the scene of the murder, and waking up as himself under Lanyon’s watchful eye. However, if we return to Lanyon’s written narrative, we see that it reveals to us the scene that Jekyll elided in his own narrative: held at gunpoint by Lanyon, Hyde has no choice but to take the potion that will restore Jekyll and thus reveal himself. Just before doing so, Hyde says: “And now, you who have so long been bound to the most narrow and material views, you who have denied the virtue of transcendental medicine, you who have derided your superiors—behold!” (41). Now Hyde is not a scientist, yet in his guise Jekyll is able to celebrate his greatest triumph: proving Lanyon wrong. We are reminded here of the disagreement between the two men about the limits of scientific experimentation, which has been alluded to throughout the novel. “As for the moral turpitude that man unveiled to me, even with tears of penitence,” Lanyon writes, “I cannot, even in memory, dwell on without a start of horror” (41). We can then surmise that Hyde did preserve Jekyll’s confession and forge the final letter because he wanted Utterson to read about Jekyll’s great discovery, of which he was the proof; but also that he wanted Utterson to read Lanyon’s narrative first in order to see Jekyll’s own statement as vindication of his hubristic pride. While Jekyll’s narrative concludes with him saying he has brought to an end his own life, Lanyon’s narrative ends with confirmation that Jekyll was the murderer of Carew. This, in a sense, is Hyde’s own revenge upon Jekyll. Jekyll writes to the threshold; Hyde signs his death, preserving his proper name in the documents that condemn him. Jekyll’s fear that his manuscript will be destroyed is common to narrators writing to the threshold, for their very reason to write is to preserve their thoughts for posterity. A more recent example of narrating to the point of one’s own self-destruction is Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor (1999), which takes advantage of new technology to establish the innovative narrating instance of a hijacker telling his story to the black box of a plane before it crashes, with the chapters counting down to one, and the pages in reverse order. The narrator’s aim from the start is to use the remaining six or seven hours of fuel, while the plane is on autopilot, to tell his life story, with the aim of preserving it and ensuring an audience: “The flight recorder will record my every word

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in the cockpit. And my story won’t get bashed into a zillion bloody shreds and then burned with a thousand tons of burning jet. And after the plane wrecks, people will hunt down the flight recorder. And my story will survive” (285). This novel is an update of the tradition of the found manuscript, with the technology of the black box providing a solution to the anxiety of previous autothanatographic scribblers, from Hugo’s condemned man who fears his diary will rot and fall apart in his cell, to the narrator of Poe’s “Ms. Found in Bottle” (1883), a sailor on a floundering ship who keeps a journal to the point of shipwreck with the aim of enclosing the manuscript in a bottle “at the last moment” and casting it out into the sea in the hopes of “transmitting it to the world.” There is no third-party frame for Poe’s story beyond the title itself, and similarly we must assume that we have posthumous access to the narrator’s story in Survivor because it is embedded in the indestructible casing of the black box. What the narrator must remember, though, is that given the limited fuel remaining, as the pilot had told him before parachuting from the plane, “you could die right in the middle of your life story” (285). The last chapter of Survivor opens with “And so here is my confession” (3), as the plane sinks into a nose-dive, ready to crash into the Australian outback. This narrator gets closer to the moment of death than Victor Hugo’s, by virtue of the fact that he is able to speak rather than write, and is similar to the narrator of Mauriac’s Knot of Vipers who dies of a heart attack midsentence during his written epistolary confession. The last lines of Survivor are: It’s all done. It’s all just a story now. Here’s the life and death of Tender Branson, and I can just walk away from it. And the sky is blue and righteous in every direction. The sun is total and burning and just right there, and today is a beautiful day. Testing, testing, one, two— (1)

By turning his life into “just a story,” the narrator seeks to separate himself from that story, reducing himself to the status of a third-person character and stepping away from his proper name. The only way to achieve this, however, is through death, which comes just before he can repeat the refrain with which the book opened: a test to ensure his voice will be recorded for another to hear and to sign his name, as Derrida would say. The recurring line of testing, testing one, two, three, is testament to his desire to preserve this account of his life, for without the black box his story will not survive: “Hear me. See me. Remember me” (1). While Branson is aware of the instant of his impending

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death, he cannot narrate the moment of the crash itself. To move beyond the threshold requires what Doležel calls the “unmotivated Ich form,” or impossible narrative acts by characters that are “not restricted to models of speaking, writing and thinking” (20). In other words, the desire to account for oneself that drives experiments in dying in the first person ultimately reveals a fictive impulse that the autobiographical model rooted in pseudofactual claims cannot accommodate and that leads to new forms of overt fictionality. This fictive impulse is the desire to narrate one’s own death: the story of one’s life that only another can tell, and hence a story of fictional truth.

CHAPTER 5

Beyond the Threshold Accounting for the Self as Other

To write beyond the threshold that separates living and telling, and narrate the experience of death, is an existential yearning of characters that becomes a structural problem of narration. It is a paradoxical desire to suture a subject split by the act of self-narration, a recovery of the self that can be completed only through an erasure of selfhood: to make a narrating subject entirely independent from the experience it narrates. This is the direction of twentieth-­ century experiments with dying in the first person. In his 1966 essay, “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?,” Roland Barthes offers a critique of literary discourse as the expression of an interior self prior to and outside language, a critique that he argues derives from the convergence of literary experiments by modernist writers (such as Mallarme, Proust, and Joyce) with the insights of structuralist criticism. Barthes draws on “the linguistic definition of the first person (I is the one who says I in the present instance of discourse)” to argue that once a person begins to narrate, the first-person pronoun refers no longer to themselves as a subject, but to the instance of narrating itself (16–17). It follows that “contrary to the current illusion of autobiographies and traditional novels, the subject of the speech-act can never be the same as the one who acted yesterday: the I of the discourse can no longer be the site where a previously stored-up person is innocently restored” (17). This central insight is preserved in Butler’s theory of the subject’s relationship to the Other. “I am, as it were, always other to myself,” Butler writes, “and there is no final moment 176

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in which my return to myself takes place” (23). If the act of writing, or the narrating instance, is the threshold at which a character becomes an extradiegetic narrator, the “final convergence” of these two selves when story time catches up with discourse time should effect their reunion, but this convergence only confirms the primacy of discourse. In this chapter I will trace the historical trajectory of modes of dying in the first person that seek to narrate beyond the threshold.

DYING AND TELLING: A NEW NARRATING INSTANCE According to Trevor Field, there are many “novelists who end their fictional diaries with death—and it must be said that an alarming number of diarists are brought to book in this way” (97). The fact that these characters keep writing to their last breath is a problem of verisimilitude, as we have seen in The Last Days of a Condemned Man, a problem not fully solved by a book such as Mauriac’s Knot of Vipers in which the diarist expires suddenly in midsentence. The solution is to unburden characters from the materiality of writing and have them narrate without mediation. Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies (1951) self-consciously interrogates this problem as it highlights the gap between a thought and its expression and creates hesitation over whether we are reading a written manuscript or overhearing the thoughts of a diarist. The narrator, Malone, finds himself in some kind of institution, semi-paralyzed, strapped to a bed, able to use only his hands. Malone is old, nearly a century, and senses he will soon die. To occupy himself as he awaits his death he decides to tell himself stories, and then, at the last moment, to take an inventory of his meagre possessions, which are stuffed in a cupboard he can reach with a stick by his side. In one sense, the novel is virtually plotless, for nothing happens. At the same time, it exemplifies the death drive that is the logic of narrative: we the reader, like Malone the narrator, are waiting for him to die in order to confer final meaning on the narrative, but the act of narrating itself forestalls this conclusion. The anticipation of retrospection is established with the opening line of the novel: “I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all. Perhaps next month” (173). Malone aims to tell himself stories to relieve the tedium of waiting for his own death, but from the start the stories themselves are tedious to him. Furthermore, while he invents a character, Saposcat, in order to avoid talking about himself, it becomes clear that the stories are fictionalized versions of his own life. Increasingly he begins to reflect more broadly on mortality and on the nature of consciousness, ultimately castigating himself for “launching forth on all this ballsaching poppycock about life

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and death,” which he indicates may have been his reason for commencing his narrative (218). This shift in focus coincides with the revelation that he spends his time writing in an exercise book with a lead pencil. Throughout Malone’s narrative his chosen verbs of communication are oral—telling stories, speaking of things—and it is not until a quarter of the way through the novel that we have the first reference to writing. The ambiguous relation between thinking and writing is registered in this passage, which marks an ellipsis in the narrative: “I fear I must have fallen asleep again. In vain I grope. I cannot find my exercisebook. But I still have the pencil in my hand. I shall have to wait for day to break. God knows what I am going to do till then” (202). At this point we must assume that he is not writing but thinking, for without paper he cannot transfer his thoughts into writing. However, the next sentence reads: “I have just written, I fear I must have fallen, etc. I hope this is not too great a distortion of the truth. I now add these few lines, before departing from myself again” (202). The “I” of “I have just written” is different from the “I” who fell asleep. The difference is one of narrator to character, who departs from himself in the act of writing. But is the line “I have just written” a thought, or a line of writing? It is irresolvable, and Malone appears not so much to write until his death as to write his own death as a fictional character: “I mean / never there he will never / never anything / there / anymore” (281). In “The Harpooned Notebook” (1983) Porter Abbott locates Malone Dies squarely in the tradition of the threatened manuscript found in epistolary and diary fiction, written often by dying narrators from Clarissa onward. At the same time, along with the other novels in Beckett’s trilogy—Molloy (1950) and The Unnamable (1955)—it is considered by many to be an exemplar of the modernist stream of consciousness. There is a contradiction at play in linking Beckett’s novels to a tradition of revealing the private, unuttered preconscious thoughts of a character when they are so preoccupied with writing. However, this contradiction is fostered by Beckett’s work, which extends the streamof-consciousness mode to a reflection on its limitations in the sense that it is possible only in writing, yet impossible to write: “Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly” (192). Furthermore, the novels are relentlessly self-conscious about their own evacuation of the remembering, experiencing self of the stream-of-consciousness protagonist and thus are also seen by many as postmodern deconstructions of the unified self that lies at the heart of this psychologized subject. What is clear is that Malone Dies is a fictional autothanatography: an experiment with living and telling on the threshold of death that interrogates and parodies the function of autobiographical writing and its classic model of

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a mature narrating self reflecting upon a younger experiencing self in order to provide closure to a life. It is also a self-reflexive example of the death drive inherent in first-person narration that yearns toward a heterodiegetic stance. If much of Beckett’s work is concerned with the inexpressibility of language, the incoherence of the Cartesian self, this is brought into relief by its exploration of mortality, formally realized by experiments with how to narrate one’s own death. The impossible act of dying and telling was made possible by the development of the interior monologue toward the end of the nineteenth century, pioneered by Russian, French, and German experiments. The origins of this mode can be found in the narrating instance created by Fyodor Dostoyevsky for his 1876 short story, “A Gentle Creature: A Fantastic Story,” itself inspired by Hugo’s experiment with writing to the threshold. In the preface to this story Dostoyevsky explains that while he considers it to be “extremely realistic,” its fantastic element is “embodied in the form of the narrative itself ” (59). The narrative is concerned with a man in a state of anxiety attempting to gather and make sense of his thoughts after discovering his wife has committed suicide. In explaining how these thoughts are represented, Dostoyevsky writes: Of course, the narrative takes place over a number of hours, by fits and starts, no consistency of form: at times he talks to himself, at times he addresses an unseen auditor, a sort of judge. That’s how it always is in real life. If a stenographer could have overheard him and taken notes as he spoke, the result might have been somewhat rougher and less polished than I have here presented it, but I do believe that the psychological sequence would remain one and the same. It is this notion of a supposed stenographer noting everything down (to be subsequently polished by me), that I term fantastic in this tale. (60)

Based on these comments, the narrator could be speaking out loud or he could be thinking, recalling the same opaqueness surrounding the status of the internal soliloquy in the eighteenth-century novel. Furthermore, there is an alternating double address between himself and a kind of impartial spectator (“an unseen auditor”) in which he recognizes himself as an Other. Most important is the fact that Dostoyevsky posits a hypothetical fictional entity who overhears and records this soliloquy that he the author edits and presents to readers. In this configuration, the distinction between experiencing and narrating character becomes dispersed across multiple subjectivities: character, internal auditor, overhearing stenographer, and editorial author. Significantly for the trajectory I am tracing, Dostoyevsky points out that in The Last

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Days of a Condemned Man Hugo “employed virtually the same device, and although he did not use a stenographer to be sure, he allowed himself a still greater implausibility in assuming that a condemned man would be able (and have the time) to make notes, not only on his last day, but even during his last hour and quite literally his final moment” (60). This “flight of fancy” though, does not prevent Hugo’s story being “the most realistic and truthful of any he wrote” (60). Here Dostoyevsky is echoing criticisms of the probability of Richardson’s epistolary novels, indicating that releasing the protagonist from the narrating instance of writing in fact enables greater verisimilitude despite its clearly fantastic nature. Although he tells us that what we are about to read are not diary jottings, the narrative clearly has the structure of a diary, with interpolated instances in which the protagonist seems to return to his thoughts as he tries to order them, offering instantaneous descriptions and feelings. In The Distinction of Fiction, Cohn argues that Dostoyevsky’s experiment facilitated the emancipation of first-person narration from formal mimetics, or the imitation of natural discourse in the form of autobiography, an emancipation from which sprang “the so-called interior monologue novel” (36). I would emphasize here Dostoyevsky’s nod to Hugo’s attempt to narrate up to the moment of death as direct inspiration for his own attempt to liberate first-person narration from writing in the form of an invisible stenographer. This lineage establishes the autothanatographic impulse of first-person narration as one of the major drivers in the development of the novel. Edouard Dujardin’s Les lauriers sont coupés (1887) is the early canonical example of the interior monologue, with its first-person present-tense narration enabling simultaneous narration: “So time and place come to a point; it is the Now and Here, this hour that is striking, and all around me life; the time and place, an April evening, Paris” (5). The 1920s, arguably the height of the modernist novel, present us with two examples of interior monologues in which the narrators die: All Quiet on the Western Front, which I have already discussed, and Fraulein Else (1924) by the Austrian author, Arthur Schnitz­ ler, one of the first novelists to employ stream-of-consciousness narration in Leutnant Gutl (1900), stemming from the inspiration of Dujardin.

THE DEATH DRIVE OF THE SELF-EXAMINING HEROINE: FRAULEIN ELSE (1924) AND A GIRL IS A HALF-FORMED THING (2013) The interior mode of the narrating instance for Fraulein Else is made clear in this reflexive moment early in the novel: “No, that was nothing. Why am I

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reminiscing like this? I’m not writing my memoirs. I don’t even keep a diary like Bertha” (9). This passage clearly seeks to establish a generic difference from the memoir and epistolary form of classic first-person narration. Like Dujardin’s novel, Fraulein Else is pure simultaneous narration with no ellipses or summaries, covering the period of one evening (four hours to be precise). For Cohn, this novel, like the Penelope section in Ulysses, is an “autonomous interior monologue” in which the use of present tense “functions as a nonnarrative tense” (1999, 99). It thus differs from Remarque’s novel, which Cohn classifies as a predecessor to contemporary first-person narrative (as opposed to monologic) fiction with a global present tense. Another vital difference is that there is no frame narrator reporting the character’s death. The stream of consciousness continues until it is truncated by Else’s last breath. The plot is simple. The nineteen-year-old daughter of a lawyer with a gambling problem, Else is holidaying in a resort when she receives a telegram from her mother, imploring her to help clear her father’s debt before he is sent to prison. Else must ask Herr Von Dorsday, a wealthy art dealer and friend of her father, who is also at the resort, for a large sum of money. Von Dorsday imposes a condition: to be able to see her naked. What follows is her moral struggle over this predicament that leads to a crisis of identity, culminating in her flashing her body in public rather than giving Dorsday the pleasure of seeing her in his private room, before fainting from a panic attack and being carried upstairs to her bed, in which she dies by suicide when she drinks Veronal. Throughout this short novel Else is preoccupied with two things: her sexual identity and the possibility of death. She dreams of dying, she imagines her funeral, and when the burden of her responsibility to her father and the humiliation of her exposure become too great, she not only wants to die, she goes through with it. The scenario established by her mother’s telegram is that to be a good daughter she must do what good daughters ought not do. This presents her with an opportunity to escape the bourgeois lifestyle she detests, while simultaneously causing her to resent the situation her family has put her in. Alongside this she oscillates between a desire for sexual admiration and a series of lovers, and a principled and visceral distaste for Von Dorsday: “No, I won’t sell myself. Never. I’ll never sell myself. I’ll give myself. Yes, if once I find the right man, I’ll give myself. But I won’t sell myself. I’ll be a hussy, but not a prostitute” (53). Else’s pattern of thoughts conforms to the subjectivity of the self-examining heroine, and her conduct scene behavior is recognizable in how she measures her worth only in terms of men’s desire: “What have my beautiful shoulders and my pretty slender legs been given me for? Why do I exist at all? And it would serve them right, all of them, they’ve brought me up to sell myself in one way or another” (62). Her decision to walk downstairs naked except for her overcoat, and expose herself to Dorsday in front of the

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hotel patrons, is based as much on a desire to overcome shame about her sexuality as it is to thwart Dorsday: “But you musn’t think me mad. You must only think me shameless” (79). Threaded through these moments in which Else examines her motivations, the inner recesses of her soul that she feels her bourgeois family is unaware of, are persistent thoughts of death. Early in the novel these thoughts register as an expression of her sense of youthful ennui: “The Marchesa. How young she looks in the half-light. I’m sure she’s forty-five. Where shall I be at forty-five? Dead, perhaps. I hope so” (14). When faced with the shame of being forced to approach Dorsday for money, Else hyperbolically invokes death as a preferable option: “It’s nearly dark now. Night. The dead of night. I wish I was dead. . . . It simply isn’t true” (23). And once exposed to the humiliation of Dorsday’s demand, Else melodramatically contemplates death as the only escape from her predicament: “I won’t be treated like this. Let Father kill himself. I’ll kill myself too. This life is a degradation. It would be best to jump over that cliff and have done with it. Serve you all right” (44). In larger historical terms, the novel revolves around the same trope identified in Clarissa: the virtuous woman who discovers sexual knowledge and who must court death as a result. The impossible narration of this novel’s interior monologue is highlighted by a dream sequence where Else cannot even be said to be talking to herself because she is asleep. The dream is of her own funeral. “Oh, how lovely it would be to be dead! I lie on a bier in the drawing room, with candles burning. Long candles. Twelve long candles. The hearse is at the door already. People are standing outside. How old was she? Only nineteen” (58). The appeal of death is an escape from her own existence in order to see herself as the Other, from a third-person perspective, where some kind of final knowledge can be achieved. The aporic goal of the autobiography is clear in this dream, and it influences her waking life. While acknowledging to herself that she would be too cowardly to end her life, she nonetheless has ten packets of Veronal ready to take so that “at any moment I can be where there are no aunts and no Dorsday and no father who misappropriates trust money” (77). Else’s persistent invocation of death becomes a metaphorical shedding of her current life after she decides to go downstairs and flash her body, with the knowledge that this will be a form of social suicide that will cast her out from her family, yet one that will also release her from shame: “Oh I’m not at all mad. I’m only a little excited. That’s quite natural when one is just going to come into the world for a second time. For the old Else is dead already. Yes, most certainly I’m dead. There’s no veronal needed” (80). In the final scene, after fainting and being carried to her room where her Aunt Emma, her cousin Paul, and his girlfriend Cissy fuss over her, Else begins to dissoci-

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ate from her body: “I hear, but I say nothing. I’m unconscious. I can’t talk” (103). In this line of impossible narration, she is unconscious to others but able to hear and observe them. They call her name repeatedly, but she cannot respond, indicating a severing of her “narrating” self from the proper name of her mute experiencing self: “I can’t move. What’s the matter with me? Am I dead? Am I pretending to be dead? Am I dreaming? Where’s the veronal? I want to drink my veronal” (103). Else drinks the glass, at first happy that it will hasten her escape—“I’ve taken veronal. Good. I’m going to die. Thank God” (105)—and then panicking: “Paul! Paul! I want you to hear me. I’ve taken veronal, Paul, ten powders, a hundred. I didn’t want to do it. I was mad. I don’t want to die. You must save me, Paul!” (106). The novel ends with this passage: “Else! Else!” They’re calling me from so far away. What do you all want? Don’t wake me. I’m sleeping so well. Tomorrow morning. I’m dreaming and flying. I’m flying . . . flying . . . flying . . . asleep and dreaming . . . and flying . . . don’t wake me . . . tomorrow morning . . . “El . . .” I’m flying . . . I’m dreaming . . . I’m asleep . . . I’m drea . . . drea—I’m . . . fly . . . (109, original ellipses)

It appears significant that the final word she hears is an uncompleted calling of her name, that which can never be returned to her. Like the letter writer cut off midsentence but this time not communicating to anyone, thinking only to herself, Else cannot even be said to be narrating. She is merely experiencing, and we witness her final thoughts until she loses consciousness. In this way she is one step closer to simultaneously dying and telling than the letter writer or diarist. Nonetheless, the truncated interior monologue deprives the subject of any knowledge that death might confer. I turn now to Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing as a twenty-first-century example of the autonomous interior monologue that attempts to narrate the moment of death itself, but which manages retrospection because the protagonist is looking back on her life in the moment of dying, and the narrative unfolds as her life flashes before her in the dilated moment of death. In what follows I will discuss how McBride’s stylistic and structural innovations in thought representation function to extend the consciousness scene of the self-examining heroine into a critique of this novelistic subjectivity through the mode of dying and telling. Like Fraulein Else, McBride’s novel is the stream-of-consciousness interior monologue of a teenage girl that concludes at the point of her death. However, unlike Else’s or Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, narrating time and story time

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are not simultaneous over a defined number of hours, or over the course of an evening; this novel covers the protagonist’s entire life from birth to death, with periods of the story skipped over through ellipses marked by chapter breaks, and compressed in retrospective summaries. In the previous chapter I discussed the unnamed narrator’s fragmented, introspective voice in the context of the tradition of the self-examining heroine. While full of praise for the novel, Anne Enright suggests, “There are moments when you long for the style to settle down, or evolve,” and James Woods argues that the style “seems an imperfect or even an affected mode for the narration of an entire novel” (2014), with both pointing out that the prose and the narrative voice remain the same at age eighteen as it was when the girl was five. These comments are predicated on the assumption that the narrator is living and telling up until the moment of death, and hence that her language ought to be maturing as she ages. However, it seems clear to me that we do not follow the girl throughout her life in the form of simultaneous narration; instead, we witness a fragmented but nonetheless chronological series of recollections taking place at the moment of her death. In other words, she does not narrate up to the moment of her death; she narrates her life from the moment of death. The opening chapter surely establishes the retrospective nature of the narration by virtue of the fact that it takes place before the protagonist is born, revealing her brother’s early operation and subsequent chemotherapy for a brain tumor when he is just a small child. Now we could simply accept that somehow the narrator possesses the unnatural ability to perceive and hear from the womb, and the capacity to understand these things. Why not? It’s fiction. Or we could grant artistic license to the author who establishes the context into which the narrator is born. It seems more productive, however, to see the opening chapter as a reconstruction and the whole narrative as a series of memories, in particular because of the frequent shifts into the past tense, and the framing of the narrative as a kind of confession to her brother. The disorienting opening paragraph establishes the brother as the narratee: For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then lay you down. They cut you round. Wait and hour and day. (3)

The confusion lies in the fact that we are given no easy clues as to the referent of each pronoun. However it appears that in the first few lines the mother is giving her three year old son the privilege of naming her unborn child (“You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say”),

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and in his excitement the young boy bounces on the bed, hurts his head, and is taken to hospital, where they discover his brain tumor. The second-person address of the first few lines appear to be lyrical approximations of the mother’s dialogue to her son, referring to the unborn and unnamed narrator. The line “Bounce the bed, I’d say” registers the first-person voice of this narrator and indicates retrospective speculation about how the brother came to the hospital during which they discovered his tumor: “I’d say that’s what you did.” This oscillation between voices will make sense only upon the conclusion. What follows is an account of the brother’s diagnosis—“Its all through his brain like the roots of trees” (3)—and subsequent treatment with chemotherapy. The account includes lines of summary such as “Weeks for you. Weeks it. Scared and bald and wet the bed. Dark trees outside for me when it weather rains. She praying in a coat until I am froze” (4). There is speculation about where the father was during this time, with the suggestion that he leaves because he cannot handle waiting for the tumor to resurface, leaving the mother to declare, “I’ll board my body up. I’m not for loving. Anymore” (4). This sets up the strong bond between the protagonist and her brother that will develop in the wake of their father’s absence and their mother’s disaffection. And yet where she is narrating from is hard to discern when we realize the protagonist is yet to be born during this time: “But didn’t time continue still. Where’s Daddy? Gone. Why’s that? Just is. And yelp she at the strength growing to your tips. Poke belly of baby that’s kicking is me. Full in myself. Bustling hatchery. And I loved swimming to your touch” (7). This scene indicates dialogue between the mother and her son, him poking her pregnant belly and the protagonist responding to his touch from the womb. In a remarkable passage, we then have a first-person account of the narrator’s birth: Mucus stogging up my nose. Scream to rupture day. Fatty snorting like a creature. A vinegar world I smelled. There now a girleen isn’t she great. Bawling. Oh Ho. Now you’re safe. But I saw less with these flesh eyes. Almost outside without sight. She, asking after and I’m all fine. Hand on my head. Her hand on my back. Dividing from the sweet of mother flesh that could not take me in again. I curled there learning limb from limb. Curdled under hot lamps. Sorrow lapped. I’m so glad your brother’s lived. That he’ll see you. It’ll all be. (5)

This passage is replete with linguistic approximations of preconscious sensation (“scream to rupture day”) mixed with snatches of dialogue (“There now a girleen isn’t she great”), straightforward narration (“Her hand on my back”), and more general observations (“Dividing from the sweet of mother flesh”).

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As I hope to have demonstrated, the tense structure of the whole opening chapter seems to be a chronologically confused reconstruction of the protagonist’s past, rather than the unfolding narration of events in the form of a stream-of-consciousness monologue. And if she is not living and telling, it begs the question of the narrating instance. Subsequent chapters whiz through the protagonist’s early life, signaled by the ages of her and her brother: “Two me. Four you five or so” (7); and then, “We’re living in the country cold and wet with slugs going across the carpet every night. Now when you are seven eight. Me five” (9). The phrase “every night” indicates iterative summary rather than scenic construction, and this compression of time continues throughout the novel, with frequent phrases such as, “Some days weeks time go by” (117). In other words, rather than the nonnarrative tense of the autonomous interior monologue, this reads more like the “deviant” narrative tense of contemporary first-person simultaneous narration. Nonetheless, at key moments we have retrospective narration indicated by shifts to the past tense. After an early consciousness scene in the lake, the girl returns to the kitchen wet and sees her uncle, his desire obvious: “How strange my baptise renders me. His want me. Fuck me if he could and I and I and I and I. I have that. And I do not. Do not need” (57). She walks past him: “I left him dripping on the floor. Ha. He did not get me after all” (57). But in the next paragraph: “Oh but he did. I’m lying. I am not I am. By the cold range in my white drip shirt. Caught me. Went about me tooth and claw that I wanted” (57). At what point is she narrating from? After the scene of rape the girl feels as though she has entered a new adult life, separating herself from her brother. This key moment is rendered with a shift from past tense to historic present with the flavor of a memory and the sense of a conversational address: We were moving off now. From each other. As cannot be. Helped. I didn’t help it from that time on. You know. All that. When you said sit with me on the school bus. I said no. That inside world had caught alight and what I wanted. To be left alone. . . . You and me were never this. This boy and girl that do not speak. But somehow I’ve left you behind and you’re just looking on. (61)

While we could read this as an ongoing internal address to her brother throughout her life, the whole book reads more like a retrospective confession to him. At one point she responds to the fact that her brother began to deposit money in her bank account: “I saw that then. It happened a lot. You putting money in. Here for you. Little bit. I but I never say thanks. I never said. Sorry

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for that now. I don’t really know what I was up to” (97). The question arising from this passage is: when is “now”? This structure suggests to me that the whole novel can in fact be read as a single consciousness scene, to the extent that it involves the narrator reflecting upon her past and confessing to her brother in the moment of dying. For instance, toward the end of the novel when her brother is sick, there is a long passage of her tortured desire for him to love her and forgive her, conflated with religious penance. “Do you love me? Can you love me even after that? Even now. I won’t ask and I won’t say that inside myself or ever out again. Forgive me brother. I know not what I do. Forgive me brother for I have sinned. We are all the things we will ever be” (152). Ultimately the monologue is an attempt to account for herself, with the brother the internalized Other she confesses to in lieu of the impersonalized social norms she savagely rejects. The end is like a tragic parody of baptism. The protagonist returns to the lake where she has so often let men have her body, and where she was last violently taken and assaulted, in an attempt to cleanse herself, to wash away the pain of her experience and the grief, but this final baptism is a suicide, as she follows her brother into death: “And I know what you say. Come on you say. Come with. Come down” (202). The concluding lines are: And under water lungs grow. Flowing in. Like fire torch. Like air is. That choke of. Eyes and nose and throat. Where uncle did. No. Gone away. Where mother speak. Is deaf my ears. Hold tight to me. I. Will I say? For you to hear? Alone. My name is. Water. All alone. My name. The plunge is faster. The deeper cold is coming in. What’s left? What’s left behind? What’s it? It is. My name for me. My I. Turn. Look up. Bubble from my mouth drift high. Blue tinge lips. Floating hair. Air famished eyes. Brown water turning into light. There now. There now. That just was life. And now. What? My name is gone. (203)

We can see here the protagonist escaping both her uncle and her mother, wishing to return to her brother. This is coupled with a desire to say her name, the name we do not know, as some kind of act of self-definition (“My name for me. My I”) while knowing her name is all that will remain of her. The description that follows is of her looking up, seeing a bubble from her mouth, seeing the light, but it is also a description of her from above, for how else could she

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see her blue tinged lips? I read this as her departing her body and arriving at death: “There now.” With the lines “That just was life. And now,” I suggest the entire preceding narrative is contained between these two sentences as a series of memories. In doing so she seeks to confer final meaning on both her life and the narrative as she departs from her name into the grammatical othering as a third-person character with which the book opens. The last line that narrates her death “My name is gone” returns us to the opening lines of the book: “For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name.” When this cycle has been completed, we can now read these opening lines not as a lyric approximation of the mother’s dialogue to her son, but as the protagonist’s address to her brother in which she refers to herself in the third person: as the dead other. Fraulein Else is an example of dying and telling that relies upon the erasure of the temporal gap between narrating and experiencing enabled by the abandonment of writing. Else can “narrate” her moment of dying because she does not need to write. There is no need for an editorial frame to explain the provenance of a written document, only an absent unnatural third party “quoting” the interior monologue. However, McBride further extends the experiment of Schnitzler by taking the character beyond the threshold even as she narrates her own death. If the modes of writing to the threshold and dying and telling dispense with the third-party frame in a historical trajectory toward simultaneous narration culminating in the modernist interior monologue, McBride’s book seeks a way to retain this immersive immediacy while still grappling with the anticipation of retrospection that marks the death drive of autobiographical narrative, a retrospection only possible through a posthumous othering of the self. According to Genette, “contrary to simultaneous or interpolated narrating, which exist through their duration and the relations between that duration and the story’s, subsequent narrating exists through this paradox: it possesses at the same time a temporal situation (with respect to the past story) and an atemporal essence (since it has no duration proper)” (1980, 223). This paradox is what McBride’s book exploits: in the atemporal moment of dying, the narrator can recall the entire duration of her life as if present.

THE IRONY OF ANTICIPATION: FROM “I” TO “SHE” IN SUSANNA MOORE’S IN THE CUT (1995) My final example of dying and telling is Susanna Moore’s 1995 novel In the Cut, a highly self-conscious erotic literary crime thriller narrated by the protagonist, Frannie, who teaches Creative Writing at New York University, lives in Washington Square, and collects examples of local slang for a book she is

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writing on regional dialects. Frannie becomes embroiled in an intense sexual relationship with Detective Malloy, who is investigating a murder that took place in her neighborhood. The suspense revolves around their mutual implication in a cascading series of events that may mark her as the next victim of a serial killer. Formally speaking, I read this book as a contemporary response to Sir Walter Raleigh’s assertion that first-person narration “takes from the novelist the privilege of killing his hero” (148). Narrated in the past tense, the ostensible retrospective time of narrating gives us precisely this impression, but the increasingly complex nature of the narrating instance enables Moore to utilize the genre of detective fiction to explore the formal possibilities of dying in the first person. The novel opens: I don’t usually go to a bar with one of my students. It is almost always a mistake. But Cornelius was having trouble with irony. The whole class was having trouble with irony. They do much better with realism. Realism, they think, is simply a matter of imitating Ernest Hemingway. Short flat sentences, an adjective before every noun. (3)

The narrator does not open with action, but with a general statement in the gnomic present about her own habits. We are in the unspecified temporality of the narrative present: the moment in time that she is narrating the story. Of course, this opening foreshadows the events to be relayed, which she does by shifting into the past tense to explain why she went to a bar with one of her students. The question is: what is the length of time between the act of narration and the story to follow, which these two lines draw attention to? Her playful report of her students’ view of realism invites us to consider what does constitute realist fiction, thus setting up an ironic relationship with the reader, inviting our collusion in the form of dramatic irony, but also foreshadowing the irony of fate that will drive the narrative. The story proper begins with this line: “Cornelius raised his hand last Tuesday” (5). The crucial deictic marker of “last Tuesday” establishes a temporal gap of less than a week between the time of narrating and the story being narrated. What follows is an account of what happened at the bar that sets up the whole novel, where Frannie goes to find a toilet and stumbles across a darkened back room to witness a man, whom she later believes was Detective Malloy, receiving oral sex from what will turn out to be the murder victim. “That was my second mistake” (7), says the narrator, indicating the tightly controlled nature of the narrative, the withholding of information typical to the genre.

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The following pages establish a closing of the temporal gap from this point with a series of implicit and explicit ellipses opening most new section breaks. First, the narrator tells us: “It was a few days before I began to wonder why I kept forgetting to take my gray skirt to the tailor” (10), and then, “I went to the movies with my friend John Graham” (14), before telling us that Detective Malloy “knocked on my door two days later” (15). The potential murder suspects have all been established, and we must assume that the visit from Detective Malloy brings story time in line with narrative time, given that Malloy points out the murder took place last Tuesday. This chronological mapping is facilitated by temporally indeterminate present tense iterative statements such as, “The bars in my neighbourhood fill me with dread” (5), and “I live in two rooms on the third floor of a brownstone on Washington Square” (11). Of course, the story does not end with Detective Malloy’s visit a week after she went to a bar with one of her students. While the past-tense narration continues, it is punctuated by both deictic references to events earlier in the day—“This morning when I left the house” (21); “We struggled in class this afternoon with the polemical style” (26)—and present-tense iterative sections, establishing the narrating instance as interpolated, the classic structure of epistolary fiction or diary fiction. At the same time, there is never any suggestion that the narrator is writing. This temporal structure is what establishes the potential for dying and telling, rather than a retrospective posthumous narration, even though events are narrated in the past tense. The last deictic location of the narrating instance in reference to the chronology of the story is: “Malloy asked me to come downtown again today to look at more photographs” (149). From this point, events happen in a rush, until, convinced that Malloy is the murderer, Frannie rushes out of her apartment and stumbles across his partner Detective Rodriguez, who turns out to be the man she saw receiving oral sex in the bar, and the serial killer. In the final scenes of the novel, Rodriguez leaves her alone in a lighthouse, bleeding to death from multiple wounds inflicted with a razor as she tried to escape. The final lines are: He lifted himself from me. I heard him unlock the door. For a moment, I felt the cool air from the river, smelling of fish. Smelling of Eve. It made me shudder. I was cold. There is an essay on the language of the dying. The dying sometimes speak of themselves in the third person. I was not speaking that way. I said: I am bleeding. I am going to bleed to death. And I will be lucky if I die before he returns. Give me my scallop shell of quiet.

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You know, they did not print the whole of the Indian song in the subway. Only a few lines. But I know the poem. “It’s off in the distance. It came into the room. It’s here in the circle.” I know the poem. She knows the poem. (180)

Here Frannie is narrating her impending death in the past tense, but from what point? Not retrospectively from some safe point in the future, but simultaneously in the moment of dying itself, made possible by the shifting narrating instance. Most importantly, she narrates in the first person but dies in the third person. She resists the language of the dying by talking to herself in the continuous present tense (“I am bleeding”) and the future tense (“I am going to bleed to death”). At the same time she reports this insistence in the past tense (“I said”). Given the interpolated narrating instance throughout the novel, we must see this as the final point at which events are narrated from. And here she slips into the present tense as she recalls the lines from the Indian song, couched in a curious direct address, perhaps to her own self (“you know”). In the final two lines the “threshold” of narrating in fact effects the shift to heterodiegesis, in which death is both narrated and enacted. For in speaking of herself in the third person, she has achieved the language of dying and narrated her own death: “She knows the poem.” The poem that she completes with her final thoughts is one in a series of Poetry in Motion placards that appear in the subway station, and which the narrator draws attention to throughout the novel. The first one she mentions is an unnamed poem by Lorca. On another occasion, while being followed by Cornelius, “I noticed that the poetry in motion poem was new. An excerpt from The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage. Walter Ralegh. ‘Give me my Scallop shell of quiet’” (35). This reference works as an example of intertextual foreshadowing, for the prefatory remark of Ralegh’s poem, after the title, is “[Supposed to be written by one at the point of death].” The poem, then, is an early verse example of writing to the threshold, and the scallop shell is the opening metaphor of a stanza seeking the faith of salvation before embarking upon a pilgrimage to death. Recalling the line at the point of her death is in fact an apostrophe to death. Indeed, the changing verses on the Poetry in Motion placard come to serve the purpose of foreshadowing to the protagonist herself. “As I walked home, I thought about the new poem in the Number Four subway. I have become so paranoid in the last month that I believe that the Poetry in Motion placards are messages for me” (103). Frannie’s final dying reference to the Indian song in the subway harkens back to an earlier moment in the narrative where

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she felt that she had managed to overcome her paranoia: “I do not think the new poem in the subway is meant for me. It is a Seneca Indian song. ‘It’s off in the distance. It came into the room.’ Clearly not for me” (134). Completing the lines of the song (“It’s here in the circle”) in the moment of her death is another ironic reference, for the poetry placard did not forewarn her that the danger resided in her circle, that the killer was known to her. If we return to the start of the book, we see the irony that she has been trying to teach her students: “It’s not easy to explain irony. Either you get it or you don’t” (4). If she had not gone to the bar with Cornelius in order to help him understand the concept of irony, she would not have committed the first mistake that lead to her death. The full knowledge of this act, however, does not come to her until the end of the book, at the moment of her death: the final act in a series of interpolated narrative acts where, to employ the cliché, the narrator’s life flashes before her eyes in between the two sentences that signify her death, between “I know the poem” and “She knows the poem.” In this sense In the Cut is an example of dying and telling, but it is not a streamof-consciousness interior monologue; it has the structure and style of a conventional first-person retrospective narrative. The impossibility of narrating one’s own death has been a constant challenge for writers, one that requires exceeding the boundaries of realism while nonetheless retaining verisimilitude. In this novel, Frannie’s narrative cannot survive as a testament to her life, as the evidence to condemn her murderer, for it is not written. The only record she leaves will be the slash marks on her arms, a semaphore to Malloy: “My face. My throat. My breasts. Malloy would know when he saw my hands. My arms. He would know. How I fought” (179). Earlier in the novel Frannie shares her thoughts on the nature of fiction: Andrea, one of the more opinionated and thus more interesting students in class, once asked me why I had corrected the phrase “listened out of the corner of her ear” in one of her stories, and I had struggled for a few minutes, citing the mixed metaphor rule and other stylistic rigors, all the while thinking to myself that of course she was right to object. Fiction is just that. Well, I’d said, teasing her a little, if you can make it a magical ear, a Borges ear, perhaps you will convince me. (71)

While the narrator knows that fiction ought not be bound by stylistic limitations, she can license a mixed metaphor only in the context of magic realism, which produces impossible fictional worlds by literalizing the nonreference of metaphorical language. The magical Borges ear that enables fic-

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tion to be “just that” recalls Nietzsche’s image of the tremendous ear attached to the thin stalk of a human being, the ear with which Derrida reconfigures autobiography as otobiography, the ear of the writer hearing himself speak, the writer whose proper name can be signed only by the reader. Only we who overhear Frannie’s narrative can sign her death and give meaning to her life by recognizing the irony that accompanies her death, and only in fiction can she fulfill the autothanatographic impulse that informs the writing of the self. Moore’s book effects a grammatical shift into the third person in order to both narrate the moment of dying and complete the story. The next two modes I will discuss are attempts to move toward a more overt first-person heterodiegetic stance that internalizes the third-party frame.

PROJECTED DEATH If we cannot die and tell, we can certainly imagine our own death, something that Fraulein Else does regularly throughout her four-hour interior monologue, and something that the nameless girl dreams in McBride’s novel. This imagined projection of death is the basis of attempts by first-person narrators to attain a paraleptic authority by employing the zero focalization of thirdperson omniscience. In George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil (1859), the narrator, Latimer, is endowed with clairvoyant powers enabling him to narrate his own death in future tense with the certainty of an authorial narrator. Latimer opens his tale this way: The time of my end approaches. I have lately been subject to attacks of angina pectoris; and in the ordinary course of things, my physician tells me, I may fairly hope that my life will not be protracted many months. Unless, then, I am cursed with an exceptional physical constitution, as I am cursed with an exceptional mental character, I shall not much longer groan under the wearisome burthen of this earthly existence. .  .  . For I foresee when I shall die, and everything that will happen in my last moments. (7–8)

This story follows in the tradition of the terminally ill narrator writing to the point of death, with its opening lines echoing those of Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man. However, this narrator welcomes his impending death and yearns for it as an escape from the burden of his existence resulting from his “exceptional mental character.” The nature of this mental character, as we discover, is the faculty of telepathy and precognition, fantastic elements at the

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level of the story that enable him both to narrate the thoughts of those around him and to proleptically narrate his own death. This takes place in the very next paragraph, which begins: Just a month from this day, on September 20, 1850, I shall be sitting in this chair, in this study, at ten o’clock at night, longing to die, weary of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without hope. Just as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire, and my lamp is burning low, the horrible contraction will begin at my chest. I shall only have time to reach the bell, and pull it violently, before the sense of suffocation will come. No one will answer my bell. I know why. (8)

What follows is a lengthy, detailed description of the circumstances of his death, derived from his telepathic knowledge of his servants, as he tells of the quarrel between two of them, who are lovers, that will take them out of the house, leaving only the scullery-maid who will be asleep and not hear him ring the bell. The future tense of this narration shifts into the present tense as he details his dying: “The sense of suffocation increases: my lamp goes out with a horrible stench: I make a great effort, and snatch at the bell again. I long for life, and there is no help. I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with the known, and be weary of it: I am content” (9). The paragraph begins to approximate an interior monologue as he records what his final thoughts will be: “Darkness—darkness—no pain—nothing but darkness: but I am passing on and on through the darkness: my thought stays in the darkness, but always with a sense of moving onward .  .  .” (9, original ellipsis). The narrator’s death is thus staged as a prolepsis in the second paragraph of the story, shadowing and framing the fantastic autobiography he seeks to relate: “Before that time comes, I wish to use my last hours of ease and strength in telling the strange story of my experience” (10). He is thus writing to a threshold he has already reached through the clairvoyant projection of the fatal conclusion to his story. The central concern of Latimer’s tale is how he grapples with the strange powers he acquired after an illness in his youth: intermittent visions of the future and access to thoughts of others. The description of his telepathic insight resembles that of an omniscient narrator’s variable internal focalization: “the obtrusion in my mind of the mental process going forward in first one person, then another, with whom I happened to be in contact” (39). However, his experience of the consciousness of others is more like that of a reader, given its involuntary nature. If access to the fictional minds of characters has typically been the means by which the realist novel can foster sympathy, Lat-

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imer’s telepathic insight only cements his misanthropy. He finds it wearying and annoying to have the trivial thoughts of strangers foisted upon him and disturbing to have revealed to him the emptiness and egoism behind the conversation of his friends and family. “I always shrank from the sight of a new person,” he explains, “and all the more when it was a person whose mental life was likely to weary my reluctant insight with worldly ignorant trivialities” (101). As several critics have pointed out, Latimer’s narrative reads like a rejection of the sympathetic imagination that Eliot so assiduously championed in her writing and modeled in the rest of her fiction. Latimer appears not only as a failed reader but as a sceptic of the moral power that knowledge of the plight of others can produce: But this is one of the vain thoughts with which we men flatter ourselves. We try to believe that the egoism within us would have easily been melted, and that it was only the narrowness of our knowledge which hemmed in our generosity, our awe, our human piety, and hindered them from submerging our hard indifference to the sensations and emotions of our fellows. (63–64)

From the time he acquires his diseased “double consciousness,” Latimer has interest in only one person. That is Bertha, the object of one his first previsions, to whom he is introduced by his father. Bertha’s chief appeal is that she is the only person whose mind is not transparent to him. “The weariness and disgust of this involuntary intrusion into other souls,” Latimer explains, “was counteracted only by ignorance of Bertha, and my growing passion for her; a passion enormously stimulated, if not produced, by that ignorance. She was my oasis of mystery in the dreary desert of knowledge” (52). He describes himself as a fragile youth with “a morbidly sensitive nature perpetually craving sympathy and support” (45), and the very opacity of Bertha’s mind represented the possibility that his emotions might yet be reflected in hers. In other words, her Otherness is the source of attraction. Even though he has a prevision of them being married and Bertha revealing a loathing of him so great that she urges him to kill himself, Latimer is discombobulated but unfazed, because the vision seems to be proof that he will succeed in winning her hand. The titular veil of Eliot’s novella is a metaphor for the boundaries of nature that prevent us from knowing the thoughts of others. The gendered nature of the metaphor is unavoidable, though, given the metaphorical lifting of the veil refers to the exposure and confirmation of Bertha’s true self once they are married. This occurs on the evening of his father’s death. “On that evening,” Latimer recounts, “the veil which had shrouded Bertha’s soul from me—had made me find in her alone among my fellow-beings the blessed possibility of

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mystery, and doubt, and expectation—was first withdrawn” (91). Upon entering Bertha’s room, Latimer shares an epiphanic silent exchange with her in which, he writes, “I know how I looked at that moment, for I saw myself in Bertha’s thought as she lifted her cutting grey eyes, and looked at me” (92). Latimer sees how he is seen by the Other, which is pathetic and loathed. Lifting the veil on Bertha’s thoughts, however, suggests to Latimer that the problem lies with her: “The terrible moment of complete illumination had come to me, and I saw the darkness had hidden no landscape from me, but only a blank prosaic wall” (93). The dashing of any further connection between them in this scene affords a stark contrast with his last encounter with his father. It was witnessing his father’s death, peering into his forlorn soul, that first roused in him feelings of pity and compassion, and stirred thoughts of common humanity: “In the first moments when we come away from the presence of death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny” (91). Clearly this feeling is what Latimer’s experiencing self did not receive from Bertha and what his narrating self seeks to arouse in readers. In his article, “Sympathy and Telepathy: The Problem of Ethics in George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’” (2006), Thomas Albrecht emphasizes that “Latimer’s conversion to sympathy at his father’s death leads directly to his first clairvoyant insight into Bertha’s mind,” in order to argue that the lifting of the veil transfers Latimer’s antipathy to Bertha (441). The exchange of looks between them, in which he realizes that Bertha perceives him the way he had perceived others, effects this transference: “Eliot’s purpose in exposing Bertha as Latimer’s double is to protect her ethics of sympathy from the implications of Latimer’s antipathy” (442). Bertha, as stereotypical femme fatale whom Latimer later discovers has plotted to poison him, thus shoulders the burden of the ethical challenge of Latimer’s own misanthropic disregard for others. “Ultimately,” Albrecht argues, “the more disturbing ethical conflict in The Lifted Veil is not between antipathy and sympathy but between an ethics based on similarity and one based on difference” (443). For implicit in the concept of sympathy is a narcissistic referral of the Other back to the self on the grounds of similarity, whereas Eliot’s exploration of telepathy, Albrecht argues, intimates a recognition of the irreducible difference of the Other. Eliot’s curious gothic tale has thus come to assume significance for scholars as a reflexive interrogation of the moral philosophy of sympathy informing the realist novel, as well as further evidence of the active engagement of Victorian fiction with the Spiritualist movement, pseudo-sciences such as mesmerism, and early neurological research. The Lifted Veil was also Eliot’s only work written in the first person. This scholarly interest demonstrates again how

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formal experiments with dying in the first person afford vital insight into the historical development of the novel. What is the significance of Latimer’s projected death, though? The answer lies in the rhetorical purpose of his narrative. Latimer is transparent in his reasons for writing: “I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow-men. But we all have a chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead” (10). Only in death, he realizes, can he gain the sympathy that he withheld from others whose souls were unwittingly unbosomed to him by his cursed insight. No ordinary confession on the eve of his death, then, Latimer’s account of himself is designed as an autothanatographic performance, a staging of his own death in the act of narration. Latimer admits that none shall remember or mourn him, and so “it is only the story of my life that will perhaps win a little more sympathy from strangers when I am dead, than I ever believed it would obtain from my friends while I was living” (12). Given that the only time Latimer experienced sympathy for another was in the moments of his father’s death, it can be argued that he seeks to replicate this experience for readers, in the hope that rendering his own death in this narrative act will bring about the sympathy from readers that was denied his experiencing self. There is even an attempt to establish common ground with readers in order to engage their sympathetic imagination: “Are you unable to give me your sympathy—you who read this? Are you unable to imagine this double consciousness at work within me, flowing on like two parallel streams which never mingle their waters and blend into a common hue?” (62). This direct appeal to readers occurs in the context of explaining his prevision of Bertha turning from an enthralling girl into a horrid and hateful wife, no longer a source of delightful mystery but “a barren selfish soul laid bare” (62). Latimer’s supernatural insight appears not to be accompanied by any moral insight, for he seems unconscious of the irony of his stance. After a bizarre reanimation scene reveals that Bertha was conspiring with their maid to poison him, Latimer flees from their marriage to become a solitary wanderer, moving from place to place out of fear that his insight, which had become dimmed, will return to plague him with the thoughts of others. As he puts it, he was “driven away to live continually with the one Unknown Presence revealed and yet hidden by the moving curtain of the earth and sky” (124). This unknown presence veiled by the physical world appears not to be God so much as all the mysteries of the world hinted at by his visions (and which both Spiritualism and science sought to uncover). Earlier he had written that in all his visions of strange cities and sublime landscapes there was “the presence of something unknown and pitiless” (104), and beyond them the

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recurring vision of his own death. The cessation of consciousness that signals death is both the ultimate knowledge he craves and the end of knowledge that terrifies him. Although Latimer points out that his suffering had “annihilated religious faith within me” (105), we must recall the proleptic death scene at the beginning of his narrative in which we find the apostrophe: “Oh God let me stay with the known.” Eventually Latimer is forced to settle in one place when his heart disease renders him dependent on his servants: “And then the curse of insight—of my double consciousness, came again, and has never left me. I know all their narrow thoughts, their feeble regard, their half-wearied pity” (124). This passage is followed by a section break and then the final paragraph of the story: It is the 20th of September, 1850. I know these figures I have just written, as if they were a long familiar inscription. I have seen them on this page in my desk unnumbered times, when the scene of my dying struggle has opened upon me . . . (124, original ellipsis)

The date indicates an ellipsis, in which the narrating instance appears to have skipped forward a month from the opening section to the projected date of the narrator’s death where he is reading over what he has written. The elliptical fade out of the final sentence takes us back to the beginning with the future-tense prior narration of his death, now performing the end that cannot be written. The Lifted Veil, then, seeks a fantastic solution to the problem of writing to the threshold through a clairvoyant projection of dying and telling, which fittingly anticipates the mode itself made possible by the development of the interior monologue. Its difference from the hypothetical projections of other dying narrators, however, such as Hugo’s condemned man imagining his execution at the guillotine, is that this is a paraleptic account of the narrator’s own death: for the curse of his “insight” gifts him knowledge that characternarrators cannot realistically possess, knowledge conventionally possessed only by third-person omniscient narrators. In his 2003 essay, “The Telepathy Effect: Notes Towards a Reconsideration of Narrative Fiction,” Nicholas Royle refers to Latimer’s telepathic powers when arguing that omniscience is a theoretically limited and historically inaccurate term for denoting the “uncanny knowledge” required to tell what someone else is thinking or feeling, even when they themselves are unaware of it (256). In offering a “tentative historical sketch of the disappearance of omniscience and the case for a rethinking of the role and effects of telepathy in an understanding of modern narrative fiction” (269), Royle commences with Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, passes through Dickens’s Edwin Drood and Woolf ’s

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Mrs. Dalloway, to end with Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Rushdie’s novel, for Royle, “demonstrates in a new, even unprecedented way the fundamentally telepathic (rather than omniscient) structure of fictional narration more generally” (269). This is quite a burden of responsibility for Rushdie’s book, the Booker of Bookers, which Royle argues is “strikingly consonant” with Eliot’s in the way the narrators’ minds are invaded by voices that they claim as their own. Both are concerned with a conservative understanding of telepathy founded on a unified identity but also haunted by a more radical understanding that dissolves this unity. The status of Midnight’s Children as a postcolonial novel self-consciously written in the tradition of the English fictional autobiography is well known. The narrator, Saleem Sinai, invokes Tristram Shandy’s garrulous, digressive attempt to narrate all the circumstances leading up to his birth: “There have been thirty-two years, in this story, during which I remained unborn; soon, I may complete thirty-one years of my own” (465). And like David Copperfield he was born on the stroke of midnight on a Friday; specifically, August 15, 1947, the day that India became independent of the British Empire. What Royle’s comparison of Rushdie’s novel with Eliot’s The Lifted Veil draws attention to, though, is that Midnight’s Children is simultaneously a fictional autothanatography, a postmodern update of the terminally ill narrator writing to the threshold. Like the narrator of The Lifted Veil, Sinai has foreknowledge of the day he will die and narrates in advance his own death. The opening pages of the novel establish its autothanatographic drive. “Now, however,” Sinai writes, “time (having no further use for me) is running out. I will soon be thirty-one years old. Perhaps. If my crumbling, over-used body permits. But I have no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights and a night. I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning—yes, meaning—something” (3–4). The narrating instance is as much an event in this story as the events narrated, for Sinai is in a race against time to tell his own story before his body collapses. Like Turgenev’s narrator who refers to his ailing body—“I am very ill, I feel that I am breaking up”—Sinai is falling apart, but he is not dying of an illness, he is fracturing under the weight of history, for his life mirrors the story of India, and his autobiography doubles as the nation’s history—from independence to the state of emergency in 1975. Furthermore, his body is a metonym for the population of India, and just as his telepathic powers enable him to listen in on its teeming millions, he knows that at age 31 his body will disintegrate into dust particles as numerous as its citizens. “I shall eventually crumble,” Sinai writes, “into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, particles of dust. This is

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why I have resolved to confide in paper, before I forget. (We are a nation of forgetters)” (36). Memory is, accordingly, a preoccupation of this novel. Whereas David Copperfield acknowledges he has no first-hand knowledge of the circumstances of his birth, which he narrates in detail—“I can make no claim therefore to have known, at that time, how matters stood; or to have any remembrance, founded on the evidence of my own senses, of what follows”— Sinai claims paraleptic knowledge of events before his birth and the necessity of this knowledge to fully account for himself: “Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence: but I seem to have found from somewhere the trick of filling in the gaps in my knowledge, so that everything is in my head, down to the last detail” (15). And while Copperfield informs us that he was an observant child and possesses a strong memory, Sinai claims to have acquired, as a child, “my new, all-knowing memory, which encompasses most of the lives of mother father grandfather grandmother and everyone else” (97). As he explains, Sinai magically discovers the ability to hear the thoughts of his mother and others around him, which goes some way to explaining this omniscient knowledge of his family history. This ability is the product of his status as one of Midnight’s Children, born on the stroke of Independence, endowed with powers, and intertwined with national developments. He recounts that “at a crucial point in the history of our child-nation, at a time when Five Year Plans were being drawn up and elections were approaching and language marchers were fighting over Bombay, a nine-year-old boy named Saleem Sinai acquired a miraculous gift” (196). This gift makes him “a sort of radio” (189), able to tune into the thoughts of the entire citizenry of the nation, which he describes as “telepathy, then: the inner monologues of all the so-called teeming millions, of masses and classes alike, jostled for space within my head” (192). Like a Victorian Asmodean narrator he can “rove freely around the city,” but rather than peering into homes and seeing hearts and minds this movement is characterized as eavesdropping on internal voices with his “newly-awakened inner ear” (197). This echoes the experience of Latimer, the narrator of The Lifted Veil who describes his cursed power as “like a preternaturally heightened sense of hearing” where he is continually assailed by “other people’s consciousness,” whose “stream of thought rushed upon me like a ringing in the ears not to be got rid of.” Sinai’s powers change, though. After an operation to clear his sinuses “no voices spoke in my head, and never would again” (350), but he proceeds to acquire a preternatural sense of smell, not just literal but the “perfumes of emotions and ideas, the odor of how-things-were” (488), an insight into events and their

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significance. At one point he temporarily loses his memory, and eventually is rounded up along with the other Midnight’s Children and sterilized, destroying their powers. As a result, Sinai’s narrative act on the eve of his death produces a flawed document, one in which he continually draws attention to his own unreliability. This document is ultimately an attempt to unify the severance between narrator and character, entities who share the same proper name but are separated by discourse itself. Sinai refers to the distinction between himself as narrator now and “young-Saleem-then,” writing, “He and I, I and he . . . I no longer have his gift; he never had mine” (190, original ellipses). While David Copperfield refers to his narrative as “my written memory,” in Rushdie’s magic realist novel, Sinai not only writes, but pickles his memories and keeps them in jars in an attempt to preserve the lives of India’s entire population. Every pickle jar contains “the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time! I, however, have, pickled chapters” (529). Hence he shares the goal of all first-person narrators, to account for himself at the point story time catches up with narrative time: “I reach the end of my long-winded autobiography; in word and pickles, I have immortalized my memories” (529). But memories, as Sinai makes clear, concern his younger self: one cannot have memories of one’s present self. To pickle his narrating self would be like embalming his own dead body. In the final pages, Sinai contemplates how to finish his story, how to fill the last empty jar, recalling a dream from the previous evening in which he, “floating outside my body, looked down on the foreshortened image of myself ” (532). This is a dream of posthumous narration, but not one he can finish with. “No, that won’t do, I shall have to write the future as I have written the past, to set it down with the absolute certainty of a prophet. But the future cannot be preserved in a jar; one jar must remain empty. . . . What cannot be pickled, because it has not taken place, is that I shall reach my birthday, thirty-one today” (532). Here he points to the fact that he cannot narrate anything beyond the convergence of story time and narrating time, and so cannot record his own death, except through prior narration. This death, however, will be the confirmation of a prophecy made by Ramram Seth to his mother upon his birth: that he “will never be older than his motherland—neither older nor younger,” that “he will be old before he is old! And he will die . . . before he is dead” (96). Sinai’s final trick is to narrate his own death in the future tense, with the certainty of a prophet, describing how he becomes lost in the crowd in Bombay and explodes like a bomb. “Yes, they will trample me underfoot . . . sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the

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multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace” (533). Whether we believe this to be truth is less important than the fact of his death itself and his desire to project his experiencing self beyond the act of narration. Eliot’s and Rushdie’s works are fictional autothanatographies, taking us from the Victorian novel to the postmodern. They include narrators whose bodies are failing them and who wish to set straight their lives. They are both writing to the threshold of death, but also projecting beyond the threshold of narrating to a point in the story that would be beyond the conclusion of the narrative itself, available only to a heterodiegetic stance. Their significance lies not only in their use of prior narration to project their own death, but in their deployment of techniques of third-person omniscience: prolepsis and access to the thoughts of others. These works carry the burden of a new concept of the strangest aspect of literature, one in which, as Royle says, first-person omniscience is the result. As I have discussed elsewhere (Dawson, 2013), Midnight’s Children is the modern beginning of this mode, and it is no coincidence that the examples of Eliot and Rushdie are concerned with the aporia of dying in the first person. They solve it partially by invoking the omniscience of the heterodiegetic stance to offer a clairvoyant staging of their own deaths.

POSTHUMOUS NARRATION If we have seen frame narratives in which third parties report the death of the first-person narrator, as well as narrators writing to the moment of death, then speaking or thinking at the moment of death, another mode is, naturally enough, narrating after death. These works all struggle with the referential impossibility of the utterance “I am dead.” The genre of posthumous narration simply takes this for granted. It is possible because it is fiction. Quantitatively speaking, posthumous narration is the most common form of dying in the first person, however, it does not fully develop until late in the twentieth century. There are some precursors. Henry Fielding’s A Journey from This World to the Next (1743) invokes the genre of the travelogue for a picaresque satire in which the unnamed frame narrator recalls his death (“On the first day of December 1741 I departed this life at my lodgings in Cheapside”) and journey to the underworld where he meets Julian the Apostate who proceeds to narrate, in character, the multiple lives he had previously lived in different incarnated selves. Alice Bennett denotes Epitaph of a Small Winner, published in 1880 by the Brazilian author Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, as the first

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example of a posthumous narrator in fiction. The narrator of this book, Braz Cubas, begins his memoir with his own death, self-consciously inverting the traditional chronology of autobiography: “I hesitated some time, not knowing whether to open these memoirs at the beginning or at the end, i.e., whether to start with my birth or with my death” (5). The logic of adopting the latter— that he is already dead and hence is “a writer for whom the grave was really a new cradle” (5)—is also the logic of the story of fictional truth, that the death of the novel is the occasion for writing its rise. The first flourish of dead narrators in the twentieth century configures this impossible narrating instance, this voice from the dead, to the disembodied voices of new technology, such as the telegraph, the gramophone, and the radio, invoking their uncanny association with telepathy and seances. Grace Duffie Boylan’s Thy Son Liveth: Messages from a Soldier to His Mother (1918), has a frame narrator, the mother, who transcribes missives from her son who died in the war, received first in the form of wireless telegraphs in morse code from heaven and then in the form of a direct telepathic communion, or “automatic writing.” The most well-known posthumous voice in the modernist period is Addie Bundren’s in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930). Although she is granted only a single monologue amongst the recurring voices of her family, Addie’s section is the formal and ideological centerpiece of the novel, the plot of which revolves around the struggle of her family to transport her corpse to her final resting place in Jefferson. Depending on how we might wish to naturalize the novel, Addie’s section could be a deathbed monologue presented out of order in an anachronous narrative discourse. If it were, it would nonetheless function as a posthumous voice by virtue of its placement long after her death scene. However, its revelation of her secret affair with Reverend Whitfield, and the telepathic attunement of her son Darl to this revelation, make it clear that Addie’s is a voice from beyond life: a posthumous confession to God that Darl receives with his ear pressed to her coffin. Addie’s monologue takes the form of a consciousness scene as she reflects upon her life as a reluctant mother and dissatisfied wife. At one point she imagines “the shape of my body where I used to be a virgin is in the shape of a” (161)—but instead of a word there is a white space on the page that stands in for the unnamed shape that renders her body nothing but a vessel for children, in the same way that she sees words such as love as “a shape to fill a lack” (160). In this sense her living body reflects the same status as her corpse contained within a coffin built by her son Cash. As her other son, Tull, narrates: “They had laid her in it reversed. Cash made it clock-shape, like this”

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(79–80)—with a crudely sketched image of the coffin’s shape standing in for the words that might describe it. The coffin becomes not only a vessel for her voice but a receptacle that contains and conveys her self in a way that her body and name cannot. This coffin carries the symbolic weight of the “inward turn”: an uncanny return to Clarissa’s posthumous voice, not through the medium of her letters written upon the coffin in her chambers and opened by a third party, but through a wooden box that transmits telepathic signals to Addie’s son, Darl, who listens as “she talks in little trickling bursts of secret and murmurous bubbling” (198). Her monologue is strange because it reconfigures the internal soliloquy as a disembodied voice that connects the spiritualist séance to the new audio technology of the radio, but it is also familiar because, despite Addie’s defiance in the face of social expectation, it replicates the shape of the conduct scene while reinforcing the trope of the woman punished for sexual transgression. While As I Lay Dying is commonly described as a stream-of-consciousness novel, Julian Murphet (2017) approaches it as “radio play for voices” (144) and argues that it “works to rethink and reformulate the emergent threats of mechanically reproduced ‘disembodied voices’ to the novelist’s art” (181). In the Kittlerian moment of discourse networks that Murphet invokes, Faulkner’s involvement with Hollywood as a screen writer is the basis for reevaluating modernist literature less as the culmination of linguistic devices developed in the novel, and more as the interpenetration of literature with new technologies and their remediation in narrative fiction. Addie’s monologue also anticipates the device of posthumous narration in film, which in turn employs dead narrators decades before they become prominent in narrative fiction. In Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling (2017), David Bordwell addresses two strategies from 1940s films that emphasize the narrator as an artificial figure: the direct address to camera by a character and the “even more frankly contrived” device of the dead narrator, in particular those “who recount the entire film in voice-over, aiming their account not at other characters in the story, but at us” (252). Sunset Boulevard is the exemplar of this form of posthumous narration, which Bordwell notes could also be found in early to mid-twentieth-century poetry and radio drama, as well as Faulkner’s novel. Other examples of posthumous narration can be found throughout the century, such as Beckett’s “The Calmative” (1955), Bohumil Hrabal’s Closely Watched Trains (1965), and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman (1967). The last decade of the century, however, saw a surge of dead narrators. The year 1991 alone saw novels by Gilbert Adair, Robertson Davies, Martin Amis, and

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Cees Nootebom, and many more followed from the new millennium onward.1 The prominence and popularity of posthumous narrators was enough for Alice Bennett to write a monograph on the topic. In Afterlife and Narrative in Contemporary Fiction (2012) Bennett argues that posthumous narration becomes the fictional realization of the goal of autobiography, and it does so by developing a series of creative responses to the narratological cataloguing of formal elements, challenging the binaries between first- and third-person narration, along with conventional temporal structures. As I have been arguing, it is also the culmination of the historical trajectory of first-person narration that returns us to the original third-party frame, but in the uncanny form of the narrator’s own voice. One might venture that these dead narrators collectively strive to outlive the death of the novel while also conferring final meaning on the rise of the novel by giving characters the posthumous voice that previously had to be facilitated by a third party, such as Belford’s release of Clarissa’s final letters after her death. Given the proliferation of dead narrators in the 1990s, the same decade in which claims for the death of postmodernism became common, it is no surprise that this posthumous life would be self-reflexively positioned against the death of the author.

POSTSTRUCTURALISM AND THE DEATH OF THE SUBJECT: FROM THE PARODIC TO THE AGONISTIC Like Epitaph of a Small Winner, Gilbert Adair’s The Death of the Author (1991) self-consciously plays with the autobiographical form: the former is written in the playful shade of Sterne, the latter in the satirical shade of Paul de Man. The first chapter of Epitaph of a Small Winner is titled the “The Death of the Author” in order to highlight its contrast to the conventional autobiography that begins with birth. This phrase takes on a different resonance in the late-twentieth century, of course, and Adair’s campus novel satirizes poststructuralism by taking literally Barthes’s famous phrase. This conceit 1. Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow (1991); Robertson Davies, Murther and Walking Spirits (1991); Cees Nooteboom, The Following Story (1991); Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma (1998); Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red (1999); Will Self, How the Dead Live (2000); Ali Smith, Hotel World (2001); Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones (2002); Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002); Suzan-Lori Parks, Getting Mother’s Body (2003); Neil Jordan, Shade (2004); David Foster Wallace, “Good Old Neon” (2004); Amy Tan, Saving Fish from Drowning (2005); Carlos Fuente, Destiny and Desire (2011); Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (2011); Sheila Heti, “My Life Is a Joke” (2015); Mike McCormack, Solar Bones (2016); George Saunders, Lincoln at the Bardo (2017).

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captures the common dismissive claim of writers: that the anti-humanist, anti-­intentionalist, intertextual stance denoted by the phrase is tantamount to saying that the flesh-and-blood author does not exist. However, Adair’s real target in The Death of the Author is less Barthes’s theory of intertextuality and critique of authorial intention, than the influence of deconstruction on literary criticism. This fictional memoir is clearly modeled on the life of Paul de Man. Its narrator is Leopold Sfax, famous Ivy League university professor and inventor of “the Theory,” which criticizes the metaphysics of presence and valorizes the indeterminancy of meaning characterized as an aporia. Sfax is prompted to write his own story when an ex-graduate student of his, Astrid Hunneker, informs him that she intends to write his biography. The opening pages describe his meeting with Astrid and explain that his lack of faith in her project was the impetus for him to sit down at his computer and write “the four pages you have just been reading” (4). Sfax proceeds briefly to detail his life from a child in Paris to the present, including the moment he writes a book titled The Vicious Spiral, “a collection of essays that made me by far the most celebrated critic in the United States” (24). The Theory that emerges from this collection embodies the bugbear of novelists: “So it was, with the advent of Theory, that the Author was to find Himself declared well and truly dead” (27). That his university, the fictional New Harbor, is modeled on the Yale school of deconstruction is evident from the fact that Sfax mentions his friend Harold Bloom. And that he is a fictional version of Paul de Man is made clear by the appropriation of a phrase from de Man’s “Autobiography as De-facement” (1984) as he talks of the violent exception taken “to my perhaps after all ill-judged pronouncement that ‘death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament’” (29). This reference sets up a creative, and reductive, misreading of de Man’s tropological claim as part of a broader parody of the surprising popularity of poststructuralism: “Now, such was my frighteningly sudden fame, even the dead seemed to be whispering of it to one another, to be debating the Theory and its potential applicability to their condition” (30–31). Sfax brings his story up to the point that Astrid becomes a disciple of his and announces her decision to write his biography, and this brings him back to the narrating instance where he replicates word for word the first four pages of the novel, with the difference that he now sat down to write “the fortyfive pages that you have just been reading” (45). At this point, Sfax offers a revision of the earlier pages in which he details the sordid past he initially skipped over. And this return to the narrating instance becomes a pattern as we are continually introduced to successive drafts that extend the length of the manuscript and provide a fictionalized version of Paul de Man’s controversial

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flirtation with fascism in his youthful journalism. In “Terrible Beauty: Paul de Man’s Retreat from the Aesthetic” (1993), Ian Mackenzie points out that it is commonplace to argue that de Man’s denouncement of the ideology of the aesthetic was an attempt to exorcise his previous fascist ideologies, and this novel gives voice to such a theory by doubling as a fictional autobiography that de Man himself may have written. Sfax reveals that, in seeking to make a name for himself in occupied France, he had found himself writing articles about art and culture that reinforced Nazi ideology. Denounced by the Resistance after the war as a collaborator, he emigrates to America and pursues an academic career. The more celebrated he becomes for his work, the more he fears that his past will be revealed: “As I advanced towards my apotheosis so also was I advancing towards my extinction, my utter destruction” (73). Despite the fervor with which his work is adopted, Sfax himself has no conviction of its merit, modeling it on theories “currently in vogue in Paris” (78) to ensure it is not translated back into France, where he might be discovered, and characterizing his followers as religious converts. The magnum opus he eventually writes, an articulation of the Theory that achieves a cult following in the academy, is designed as a kind of intellectual alibi. For by demonstrating that the author does not exist—“With the ruthless dazzling irrefutable logic of which I had become the master I would deny not merely the primacy but the very existence of the Author” (89)—and that any text reveals its reliance on the very thing it opposes or suppresses, he hopes to escape culpability for his wartime journalism. In describing how he had unwittingly come to adopt the language of the oppressors during occupied France, he writes, “There, for the Theory’s unbelievers, is a classic instance of how a text, alas, may write its author” (62). The satire comes more thickly as Sfax writes, “And one not unexpected effect of my first book was the paradox of its having repudiated the primacy of the Author in order to establish its own author’s name” (88). After condemning both his own academic integrity and the “lemming-like” nature of his scholarly disciples, Sfax once again repeats the opening paragraph with the exception of that he is now sitting down to write “the ninety-nine pages that you have just been reading” (99). There is an ellipsis of two months after which Sfax hears that Astrid has secured interest in his biography from a publisher. The novel then turns into a murder mystery, in which one of Sfax’s professorial colleagues—an old school dilletante named Herbert Gillingwater—is murdered, for no discernible motive, followed by Astrid herself who had apparently discovered a clue to his murder. Sfax is eventually confronted in his office by Astrid’s lover Ralph, who accuses him of murdering them both. Ralph’s claim is that Sfax murdered

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Astrid to prevent her revealing his sordid history, but that he first murdered Gillingwater for no other reason than to divert suspicion from himself. The solution to the mystery, Ralph intimates, is The Theory itself, for “maybe the absence of a motive in murdering Gillingwater was in actual fact the presence of a motive” (126). In this way, Astrid’s murder is the first, even though it comes after Gillingwater’s. The central conceit of deconstruction—the presence of absence—becomes parodied once again by providing the logic for a double murder. If Ralph is correct, Sfax has misled us throughout the book, and if not, the true murderer is never revealed, for Sfax proceeds to narrate his own death at the hands of his accuser: I forced my mouth open. With an energy I could not have predicted from his habitually lumbering gait he leaped up from the chair, leaned over my desk, and inserted the pistol’s barrel into my throat. So close was his face to mine I could smell the bright white peppermint aroma of his toothpaste. Then he pulled the trigger. (131)

After this, however, he continues to narrate: “Ralph’s apprehension and arrest followed my death by no more than a matter of days” (131). His murderer had tried to make Sfax’s death look like a suicide, by typing a confession into his computer. His mistake, however, was that the style was clearly not Sfax’s, and he is arrested. The manuscript we are reading is published as The Death of the Author, and despite its blow to Sfax’s reputation defenders begin to argue that there can be nothing outside this text. The very fact that he is supposed to have typed the “Apple Mac texts” renders them impossible: “Did Sfax somehow manage to keep typing right up to the moment when the trigger was pulled?” (134) The impossibility of dying in the first person, of saying “I am dead,” of course, is beside the point, for the parodic conceit of the novel is that if death is nothing more than a textual condition, then of course the memoirist can narrate his death. If that is the case, however, the contract between author and reader is destroyed, as the last line suggests: Have I any posthumous last words? Not really. As I have discovered to my disappointment, death is merely the displaced name for a linguistic predicament, and I rather feel like asking for my money back—as perhaps you do too, Reader, on closing this mendacious and mischievous and meaningless book. (135)

Sfax turns out to be an undead narrator who, in crossing the final threshold, reveals the arbitrariness of that threshold. He may be narrating past

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the moment at which story time catches up with discourse time, and past the moment of his own death, but it means little when textuality erases the pseudo-ontological distinction between experiencing and narrating. Rather than an autothanatographical innovation, this novel highlights by its parody the fact that in the wake of postmodern theory, novelists do not need a naturalizing alibi to die in the first person. In doing so, however, it undermines its own satirical enterprise by in fact dramatizing de Man’s argument that the tropological nature of autobiography exemplifies the condition of all writing. De Man’s notorious phrase, “death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament,” comes in the final paragraph of his essay “Autobiography as De-­facement” (1984) and points to the fact that because we cannot possess advance knowledge of death, we are always unable to name or describe it, except figuratively. Starting from the premise that language signifies through the endless deferral of meaning, de Man argues that “language, as trope, is always privative” (80). In its essential figurative function, language can only ever represent and hence is mute. Autobiographical writing, for de Man, operates in the same way. It is “a discourse of self-restoration” (925), an attempt to restore a sense of self that it cannot achieve and so disfigures that life, for we can only ever make sense of our lives as a privation. Through a reading of Wordsworth’s “Essays upon Epitaphs,” de Man makes the case that the key trope of autobiography is “the figure of prosopopeia: the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech” (926). In this context, de Man’s claim that “death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament” is a way to dramatize the trope of prosopopeia. For by giving a voice to another, giving it a face and a language, we render our own selves mute, evoking “the latent threat that inhabits prosopopoeia, namely that by making the dead speak, the symmetrical structure of the trope implies, by the same token, that the living are struck dumb, frozen in their own death” (928). By suggesting that the actual physical condition of death is nothing more than a linguistic predicament, Sfax’s posthumous narration is a form of prosopopeia: an apostrophe to an absent reader by a dead voice representing his own empty subjectivity. Sfax’s last words constitute a parodic self-reflexive performance of the predicament de Man names: death does not confer final meaning on a life; it merely reveals the impossibility of representing that life or of inhabiting one’s own proper name. De Man’s account of the defaced subject, never able to articulate itself except as an apostrophe to an absent self, is precisely the kind of poststructuralist denial of subjectivity that Judith Butler seeks to reclaim as the basis for an ethical account of the subject in “Giving an Account of Oneself.” When De

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Man writes “autobiography veils a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause,” Butler’s article is an attempt to take this insight and give it ethical weight by considering how we might construct a self out of an awareness of this very problem. The ethical turn in critical theory that this enterprise represents has its parallel in the literary sensibility labeled “the New Sincerity,” of which David Foster Wallace is the exemplar. If Adair’s book is a crude satire of poststructuralist theory, particularly in its parody of de Man’s deconstruction, Foster Wallace’s short story “Good Old Neon” (2004) can be read as an agonistic exploration of autothanatography alongside Butler’s revival of poststructuralist theories of subjectivity. Butler’s argument is that to give an account of ourselves we must always be accountable to the Other, and so it is only through this external recognition that our selves can be constituted. In Wallace’s story, the narrator, Neal, seeks to explain to us why he has always felt like a fraudulent person without a true inner self. He reveals early on that he is dead, seeking to keep us interested in his story by promising to explain what it is like to die: “I know this part is boring and probably boring you, by the way, but it gets more interesting when I get to the part where I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person dies” (143). We come to realize, however, that Neal is not addressing readers but instead is visiting his living self from beyond the grave in the moment that he commits suicide by driving his car at speed into an abutment, thus engaging in a metaleptic dialogue across the threshold that divides narrating and experiencing. The duration of the narrating instance is contained in this moment of death. In ruminating upon the cliché of a life flashing before one’s eyes, the narrator observes: “It’s not really like that. The best I can think of to try to say it is that it all happens at once, but that at once doesn’t really mean a finite moment of sequential time the way we think of time while we’re alive, plus that what turns out to be the meaning of the term my life isn’t even close to what we think we’re talking about when we say ‘my life’” (151). By virtue of the collapse of linear time in the moment of death, “Good Old Neon” ultimately frustrates the very possibility of retrospection that might provide a sense of an ending. Neal’s observation that words and chronological time are unable to capture experience and yet are all we have in order to make sense of that experience can be read as a kind of posthumous confirmation of Butler’s argument that we cannot give an account of ourselves without turning to fiction in order to provide sequential order to lived experience and to narrate what we cannot know. The death scene itself is relegated to a footnote that can be read out of sequential order, an account of the narrator’s own death framed as a hypothetical projection of the narratee’s death, the fate he is about to experience

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yet which has already occurred because the movement from one instant of time to another cannot be measured: “So that not only your whole life but every single humanly conceivable way to describe and account for that life has time to flash like neon . . . through your mind all at once in the literally immeasurable instant between impact and death, just as you start forward to meet the wheel at a rate no belt ever made could restrain—THE END” (179). Only at the moment of death do the possibilities of fully accounting for one’s life become apparent, but the limits of language and chronological time make Neal’s narrative act a failed attempt to convey to the living the insights that death affords. Hence this moment is separated from the rest of Neal’s account in a footnote tethered only loosely to the temporal structure of the narrative in which Neal continues to narrate. What his posthumous address to his dying self tries to convey in “this whole seemingly endless back and forth between us” (180) is that his sense of a fraudulent interiority is the product of the impossible expectation to account for oneself.

MURDERED NARRATORS AND THE UNCANNY RETURN OF THE THIRD-PARTY FRAME As well as terminally ill, condemned, and suicidal narrators, the narrative mode of dying in the first person includes murdered characters telling their own story. This is a twentieth-century phenomenon, as we have seen with examples such as In the Cut and The Death of the Author. Posthumous narration, naturally enough, is the most common form for murdered characters, and Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002) is the most well-known example. I have already quoted the opening lines: “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973” (5). An assertion of the protagonist’s proper name is the first gesture, only for the narrator to be severed from this name by virtue of her existential separation from her experiencing self. This is an immediate signpost of fictionality, the impossible retrospective narrative act doubling the nonreferentiality of the character’s name. At the same time this enables her to write her own epitaph, recognizing and thus signing her name in the way only a reader can. Susie was murdered by a serial rapist as she walked across an empty field to her home. The Lovely Bones can thus be placed in a long line of female characters dying as the result of perceived sexual transgression, from Clarissa to Fraulein Else to the unnamed narrator of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. Neil Jordan’s Shade (2004), published two years after The Lovely Bones, has a very similar premise. The narrator, Nina Hardy, opens the novel with the

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line, “I know exactly when I died. It was twenty past three on the fourteenth of January of the year nineteen fifty” (3). She proceeds to describe her brutal and clumsy murder with a pair of garden shears at age fifty-three by her childhood friend George, who had been released into her care from an asylum. “Time ended for me then,” the narrator explains, “but nothing else did. I can’t explain that fact, merely marvel at the narrative that unravels, the most impossible and yet the commonest in the books I read in that house as a child. The narrator for whom past, present and to some extent the future are the same, who flips between them with inhuman ease” (4). Tellingly, her point of reference for this impossible scenario is a literary one, for only in fiction can it take place. The description of her posthumous omnitemporality is one we would typically ascribe to a third-person omniscient narrator. Yet she also refers to her experience as a reader, able only to marvel at what unfolds before her. This combination of all-knowing narrator and enthralled reader of her life frames the relationship between herself now as a powerless but observant shade and herself then as a child growing up in Ireland at the turn of the century. The relationship is also a metaleptic one, for death reveals to Nina that she visited herself as young girl in this guise, as her own ghost, and became a familiar presence throughout her childhood. The first glimpse of the past she shares with readers is herself as a seven-year-old child rocking in a swing “staring at the tall, sad woman who is staring back at me” (4). This line is focalized through her younger experiencing self. The woman she stares at is her ghostly self, wearing the gardening clothes in which she was murdered. “This woman is me,” the narrator explains (4), thus switching the first-person pronoun “me” to refer to her posthumous narrating self. In this scene, the two are caught in a specular relationship across time, and across the extradiegetic threshold that constitutes the narrative act, but with an uneven possession of knowledge: “I am smiling, despite the air of angular sadness, and I am my own ghost. I am glad I didn’t know that then” (5). There is a doubling and a merging of perspective in these two lines. Seeing her ghostly self reflected in the young Nina’s eyes becomes a moment of recognition as she is granted selfhood through the gaze of the Other: “I am seen and therefore am” (6). She proceeds to narrate, in the third person, the story of “her, or is it me” (6). The significance of this grammatical choice is that it cements the heterodiegetic stance she adopts in order to give an account of herself: “So her narrative begins, as it will end, with a ghost” (6). Set on the River Boyne at the turn of the twentieth century, the narrative follows the fortunes of four childhood friends growing up together before separating to go to war or move to another country: Nina Hardy, her half-brother Gregory, her friend Janie Conway, and Janie’s slow-witted brother George, who

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burns with unrequited love for her. Their lives are narrated in the third-person past tense with an omniscient perspective and occasional intrusive comments, such as this line as the narrator’s ghost watches Nina through a window: “So I am beyond her and she is here, she is me, of course, and over the gap of years I am amazed by her patience, her presentness, and her calm acceptance of the fact that she is observed” (33). This evaluation of character reads like a mature narrating self, looking back on her life in the act of narration, but it is also equally the reported thoughts of herself as a ghost in the diegesis. If readers are regularly reminded of the narrator’s presence through comments such as this, they are also reminded of her role as a disembodied character. In the story she is called Hester, named by Nina after her doll that was destroyed when accidentally caught up with a tractor. Dotted throughout are metaleptic encounters such as this: “And behind him another figure, motionless, staring blind, dressed in an old fur coat, wellington boots and a black hat. Hello there, she thought, you again, Hester” (127). Like a metafictional novel that stages a dialogue between authorial narrator and invented character, Nina addresses her narrator, but without knowing they are one and the same person. At times the narration merges observation and memory: “Under the piano, her lips touching his, I remember the boyish tautness of the mouth and the smell of surprise” (109). Yet this only confirms for Nina her existential severing from her experiencing self, her now disembodied status as an Other to herself. This is why she takes solace in the fact that her childhood self sees her, and confers on her a kind of subjectivity. “So she looks at me again, her only true familiar, and I realize again what a comfort it is, to be perceived” (79). The third-person sections bring Nina’s past up to the moment of her death, at times including scenes that Nina did not witness as a character, such as the drowning of her governess when she is a child and her father’s death after she is secretly banished by her stepmother for having an abortion and escapes as a stowaway to London where she pursues an acting career. Throughout the duration of her narrative act, Nina’s body remains hidden in a septic tank: “George, in fact, left me undiscovered in that undiscovered country, never to reach that sea or glimpse that shore beyond which there is no other shore” (5). However, her posthumous consciousness roams through and around her childhood home in both the past and the present, interspersing narration of her past with prolepetic narration of what occurs after her death, mainly her observation of Gregory and Janie returning to the house upon news of her murder. These sections are in the first-person present tense, as she listens to the two of them sharing their memories: Gregory of his time at war with George, and Janie continuing her life at home. Their reported dialogue takes the form of alternating monologues to the extent that they can be classed as

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intradiegetic first-person narrators. Nina’s ghostly self participates in this multivocal sharing of memories, unheard by them as she recalls in first-person her time as an actress in London, where Gregory joins her after the war to act as her agent. Throughout the novel Nina intrudes to muse upon her ontological status as both posthumous narrator and passive observer of events. “How I am everywhere and nowhere?” she asks, in words that recall Flaubert’s famous assertion that an author ought to be like God in his work: everywhere present but nowhere visible. “The moments I have lived unwind before with the moments unlived, both numbered by the same clock. I am your perfect narrator, inhabit then and now, dance between both, am nothing but my story and my story seems already endless” (97). Nina’s status as a “perfect narrator” is the result of a merger of first- and third-person narration: granted the omnitemporality of omniscience and the emotional authenticity of a character. The narrative is focalized largely through her experiencing self, but also at times through herself as ghostly narrator-focalizer, reminiscent of the posted watcher in Henry James’s house of fiction, “standing now by the upper window, observing, since observation is all I am” (64). She emphasizes throughout, though, that she cannot change what has already happened. Staring at her childhood self she says, “The girl that I was will follow her course and nothing I, her familiar, could do would prevent it” (6). Rather than modeling the narratological distinction between author who invents and narrator who reports, she in fact models a kind of reader: Now that time has stopped do I remember, no, I read, as if within these frozen spines, the book whose ending I didn’t write, written for me by one who hardly learned to write. I give it chapter headings, turn the non-existent pages, inhabit the story, delight in it, weep in it, die in it. But can I change the conclusion? Not a whit. The end began it and beginning ended it. (75)

Her experience as observer of her own life is like that of a reader immersed in a fictional world, identifying with the protagonist and anticipating retrospection: knowing the end is already complete and seeking to reach that moment in the future in order for final meaning to be conferred. However, as narrator, she is also privy to knowledge that we, as actual readers, do not possess. We do not know what has led up to her murder and why it took place. We are, however, complicit with the dramatic irony that her character does not know she is staring at her own dead future self. As narrator, Nina seeks forlornly to address her experiencing self with a prolepsis:

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Come Nina, I wanted to say, mind how you go, walk out of here and change what will be your history, choose, don’t enter that turd-ridden megalithic tomb, treasure your virginity, avoid those phosphorous-odoured lights, see your father before he dies, love well but too much, take heed of Rosalind. Don’t take that boat to Liverpool, that train to Brighton, beware those little accidents that will lead you to what you will inevitably become, to me. (127–28)

These are references to events that have already taken place for Nina, but have yet to be narrated and will not make sense to us until we reach the end of the novel. The conclusion reveals the reason for Nina’s murder. By this time George, already slow-witted, had suffered further cognitive impairment resulting from the time he and Nina fell from the top of an abandoned tower, shattering his body. In the war he suffered burns so severe they disfigured his face, and upon return he was beaten almost to death by local villagers and is ultimately committed to an asylum. Working in the garden of the family home Nina has returned to, George discovers, buried and wrapped in the shawl of her doll Hester, the remains of an aborted fetus, which he knows was the result of the one time they had sex before he went to war. This proves to be the catalyst, and in the final pages Nina repeats the scene of her murder at George’s hands, this time narrating it in the third person, from his perspective: He realized she was still living while lowering her into the septic tank, then spent one energetic minute severing the head from the body that he had known, in one way or another, since his early childhood. And so her last sight was not of sky, sea or river, but of his blood-spattered watch on his jagging wrist and the time on that watch read twenty past three. (310)

The prose in this passage is virtually identical to the opening description, with only the pronouns shifted from the original first-person account. In this way, Nina adopts the role of third-party frame to narrate her own death, bringing the mode of posthumous narration full circle to the first mode of dying in the first person. In a 2004 review in the Guardian, Alan Wall relates Shade to the movie Sunset Boulevard, rather than literary antecedents, on the basis of Jordan’s status as a film director. For Wall, the regular references to the posthumous nature of the narrative voice undermine the efficacy of the narrative: “But the real problem is that Jordan elects to make our dead narrator omniscient, and an all-knowing narrator is in structural conflict with the first person singular.

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It’s hard to be both the fictional deity of classical fiction and an individual human corpse at the same time.” Obviously for this critic, the structural conflict of two narrative modalities is a flaw, yet it is of course precisely their combination that posthumous narration seeks. In other words, it is not an idiosyncratic fault of this novel, but a structural thread and end point of all experiments with dying in the first person. It is no coincidence that the emergence of first-person omniscience as a distinct mode of narration in the latter part of the twentieth century, with Midnight’s Children, also dovetails with the proliferation of dead narrators who seek the scope of third-person omniscience to make sense of their own lives. In this context, posthumous narration is the culmination of a history of autothanatographic experiments since the rise of the novel.

DYING INTO THE THIRD PERSON One of the methodological problems of narratology is the relationship between the sum of all possible narratives that constitute the underlying grammar of narrative, and existing narratives that provide the data from which theories can be extrapolated. All the modes of dying in the first person that I have identified exist as logical extensions of the possibilities of the narrating instance, encoded in the grammatical variations of the tense structure of the sentence “I die.” At the same time, these possibilities are only realized as concrete historical examples when writers can identify and exploit the underlying grammar for narrative purposes. In this chapter I have argued that the autothanatographic experiments that culminate in the modes of dying and telling and posthumous narration are attempts to complete the impossible goal of first-person narration that Clarissa Harlowe embarks upon with her epistolary correspondence: to give an account of oneself. In his brief account of dying in the first person, Franz Stanzel discusses, as I have done, the strategy of employing a third party to relay the death of the protagonist; in particular an authorial narrator. He proceeds to set up an opposition between the interior monologue and third-person figural narration to discuss the most effective and convincing method for portraying the perspective of a character at the moment of death. For Stanzel, the interior monologue can be too artificial and limiting (citing Fraulein Else as an example), and he comes down in favor of a more flexible mode that can figurally narrate the character’s death while also inserting lines of interior monologue. This, of course, is no longer first-person narration, and Stanzel’s preference betrays the common belief that third-person narration is the height of novel-

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istic form by virtue of absorbing first-person perspective into the grammar of a third-person voice. I have demonstrated throughout this chapter the opposite process: first-person narration seeking a third-person perspective in order to push this voice not to an unnatural departure from the default model of autobiographical fiction but to the logical conclusion of the autobiographical mode itself—the desire to account for oneself by conferring final meaning on a life. In the long historical cycle from the third-party frame to posthumous narration, where characters narrate their own death from the perspective of the Other, thus revealing the autothanatographic drive behind all autobiographical writing, dying in the first person enacts the story of fictional truth itself: that the novel is born anticipating its own death through exposure of the very features that constitute its origin. Like the concept of reflexive realism, whose “rise” can be fully understood only at the point of its “death,” the autothanatographic impulse can be seen fulfilled only in the posthumous narration of twenty-first-century fiction.

CONCLUSION

The Exhaustion of Fictionality Metamodernism and the (Auto)Fictional Pact

Reflexive realism is a practice of historical reading that recasts the rise of the novel as the rise of fictionality by asking, as Gallagher does, “not why the novel became the preferred form of fiction, but why fiction became a preferred form of narrative” (1994, 164). I have argued that this approach to the origins of realist fiction is underpinned by a theory of literary reflexivity given impetus by postmodern metafiction and framed by the trope of the death of the novel. On this basis, histories of the realist novel as a reflexive genre are emblematic of the “anticipation of retrospection”: a reader’s desire to reach in the future the end of a story that has already been completed, in order to confer final meaning on the narrative. To recast the methods of “formal realism” established in the eighteenth-century novel as inherently and overtly reflexive is to approach them as latent signposts of fictionality that proleptically establish their own undoing in the twentieth century, as symptomatic of a death drive that exhausts attempts by realism to suppress the artifice that produced it. The “strange logic” of this story of fictional truth, I have demonstrated, is best approached as a series of ongoing formal experiments with the dynamic structural relationship between narrator and character that unfolds throughout novelistic history. I have also argued that the changing nature of novelistic verisimilitude is determined by and measured against historically contingent concepts of fictional truth, observing that reflexive realism as a practice of reading is itself 218

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the product of a new epistemological framework for fictionality that formed in the postmodern age. The painstaking scholarly reconstructions of the historical context and epistemological assumptions that enabled the rise of the novel have thus been concurrent with and shadowed by a sense that the genre has reached its terminus. By reorienting novelistic history around the emergence of fictionality, reflexive realism invites us to ask: what is the fate of fictional truth in what Ronald Sukenick called “the world of post-realism”? This phrase is from Sukenick’s 1969 short story, “The Death of the Novel,” and the question can be addressed by considering how this ostensible death has been historicized. In the same year that Gallagher’s “The Rise of Fictionality” provided a pithy and influential description of the reflexive realist approach to novelistic history, Alan Kirby asserted in “The Death of Postmodernism” (2006) that “somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.” If Gallagher located the rise of fictionality in a new credit economy that enabled authors to claim their fictional creations as property, Kirby locates the death of postmodernism in a post-9/11 world dominated by internet technology and market economics, and a shift in emphasis from the author to the recipient of a text. Also in the same year, Sven Bikerts penned a preface to the second edition of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (first published in 1994, the year of Gallagher’s Nobody’s Story) in which he argued that “the decade of the 1990s was a classic historical watershed,” an epochal shift “from an unwired to a wired world” that has fundamentally changed human relationships and literary culture (xi). As Dorothee Birke points out in Writing the Reader, if there was a moral panic about novel reading in the eighteenth century, the lament of the twenty-first century is that people are not reading enough literary fiction.

POSTHUMOUS REALISM In this period of cultural change, scholars have continued to wrangle over how best to characterize the novel after postmodernism (see Dawson, 2013). One approach has been to assert a new vigor for realism, or a new awareness of the capacity of realist methods to engage with the contemporary world. This stance can be found in a 2016 special issue of Novel: A Forum on Fiction titled “Worlding Realisms.” The general aim of this issue is to complicate a narrow modernist view of realism as a redundant and ideologically compromised bourgeois European genre. Instead, Lauren Goodlad argues in her introduc-

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tion to the issue, the realist novel “which responds to capitalist permutations across space and time, is a transnational medium shot through with aesthetic possibility” (183). Jed Esty argues, in his contribution, that we are witnessing an uncoupling of progressive politics from formal experimentation in literary fiction, such that marginalized writers can now employ “a realist aesthetic” without being considered naïve or provincial. This shift has allowed a contemporary “neo-realist canon” to form around a writer such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie rather than a postmodern exemplar such as Salman Rushdie. In the same issue, Ulka Anjara makes a case for a “realist impulse” in contemporary Indian and Third World fiction since the turn of the millennium. This impulse is characterized by a rejection of self-conscious modernist or avantgarde postcolonial fiction associated with Rushdie, preferring direct political engagement with the contemporary world. By and large, and perhaps instructively considering their rejection of postmodernism, these attempts to revive realism as a valid and relevant field of study eschew the question of fictionality that has been central to the critical practice of reflexive realism. One relevant point Esty makes, however, is that from the literary memoir to reality TV, “new kinds of reality-based forms have challenged the social and entertainment value of fiction,” meaning that “the problem of contemporary realism begins with the pressure of the recirculated, mediated, and curated ‘real’ bearing down even on traditional realisms” (318). This observation resonates with scholars who, by contrast, have considered how literary reflexivity engages with the contemporary “realist impulse,” arguing that metafictional techniques have ironically been pressed into the service of realism in the digital age. Since 2010 Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker have promoted what they call “metamodernism” as the dominant cultural logic after postmodernism. In a recent collaboration with Alison Gibbons, “Reality Beckons: Metamodernist Depthiness Beyond Panfictionality” (2019), they bring this periodizing claim to bear on questions about the nature of fictionality. First, prompted by the material conditions of “the socio-­cultural reconsiderations necessitated by the financial and ecological crises, the possibilities offered by web 2.0, and the demands and desires of generation Y” (173), Gibbons, Vermeulen, and van den Akker claim we are witnessing a new cultural style that mixes postmodern and modernist techniques with modes of realism and romanticism. These developments, they argue, can no longer profitably be framed by Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodern depthlessness or Marie-Laure Ryan’s concept of panfictionality: Just as postmodernism has been replaced by a new cultural logic, so too has panfictionality been superseded. Metamodernist texts instead produce

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a “reality effect”—a performance of, or insistence on, reality—and ironically they create this effect by using many of the same postmodernist devices Ryan identifies as panfictionalising techniques. (174)

This description strikes me as new iteration of reflexive realism, seeking to bring the story of fictional truth up to date by inverting the overt fictionality of the “reality effect”: rather than the methods of formal realism signaling a code of verisimilitude while proclaiming the truth of a narrative, metamodern narratives self-reflexively court the “real” by fictionalizing it. This effect, the authors argue, cannot productively be understood with a concept of fictionality that collapses all discursive forms into a generalized textuality and privileges fiction over nonfiction. Instead, they focus on “how the typically postmodernist strategies of metatextuality and ontological collapse are recycled or upcycled, as it were, in order to re-engage with the possibilities of representing reality in the twenty-first century” (174). One of their key examples of metamodernism is the genre of autofiction, where the uncertain ontological status of such works both draws attention to their fictionality and invites readers “to reconceive of the fictional storyworlds as embedded within their own felt sense of reality” (175). Hence, “the ontological collapse of fact and fiction” rehearsed by autofiction seeks to emphasize a shared reality between authors and readers that can be negotiated through the work of fiction. The onomastic relationship between author, narrator, and character typical of autofiction is vital to the metamodernist claim that the genre seeks to connect the fictional world of the book to the world readers share with the author. In this way, one could argue, an author’s appearance as character in their own fiction operates in similar fashion to the intrusive gnomic statements of Victorian omniscient narrators. A classic example is Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Death in the Family (2009). This novel opens with a gnomic statement: “For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can” (3). What follows is a lengthy meditation on death that segues into a childhood memory of the firstperson narrator who then returns us to the narrating instance: “Today is 27 February. The time is 11.43 p.m. I, Karl Ove Knausgaard, was born in December 1968, and at the time of writing I am thirty-nine years old” (27). Sheila Heti is more playful in How Should a Person Be?, deploying her name at the paratextual level in multiple chapter headings such as “Sheila can’t finish her play” and “Sheila goes to the salon,” while at the level of discourse her firstperson narrator renders herself a character by including emails and transcripts of recorded conversations in a play script format. The transcript of her first recorded conversation with her friend Margaux concludes with: “Sheila sighs deeply and looks out the window. Margaux looks out the window, too. They do

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not talk for several minutes. Sheila brushes some sand from the tabletop onto the floor” (60). This is followed by the narrator’s reclamation of her proper name: “As Margaux and I sat there, I tried to be compassionate” (60). Not only does this challenge the conventional distinction between narrator and author as a signpost of fictionality that distinguishes the novel from autobiography, it flouts the realist insistence on the typicality of characters derived from observation of actual people, an insistence that underpins legal disclaimers in many works of fiction. The shared proper name across different subject positions in the narrative communication model (author-narratorcharacter) both reinforces and reconfigures the concept of fictional character that forms the basis of reflexive realism. One could argue that fictional character remains the key mode of nonreferentiality in the novel, particularly given the continued emphasis on the empathetic value of storytelling in contemporary literary discourse. At the same time, there has clearly been a reevaluation amongst many writers regarding the status and function of character.

FICTIONAL SOMEBODIES If a feature of postmodern fiction was its rhetorical insistence on the fictionality of characters—marked most extremely by characters aware of their own fictional status—the turn of the millennium has witnessed recurring declarations of an impatience with the artifice this reveals and the creative power it asserts. The opening lines of David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel (2001) are: Writer is pretty much tempted to quit writing. Writer is weary unto death of making up stories. (1)

The aim, we are told, is to write a novel with no story and no characters, essentially eschewing the two constitutive features of the genre: its narrativity and its fictionality. The term “Writer” doubles as a third-person reference to Markson himself and a general anonymized reference to the cultural figure of the author. Real-seeming nonreferential characters, or plausible fictional nobodies, may have been vital to the novel’s rise as a genre, but in the wake of its ostensible death, a number of writers have evinced their lack of interest in invented selves. The admission in Markson’s book that “Writer is equally tired of inventing characters” (1) appears now as a kind of rallying call to writers in the new millennium, with prominent autofictional writers making

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various such claims in interviews, from Sheila Heti explaining that “it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person” to Rachel Cusk observing that “I’m not interested in character because I don’t think character exists anymore” (Schwartz 2018). A similar frustration with the artificiality of fiction is apparent in Knausgaard’s My Struggle series. In the second volume, A Man in Love (2009), his first-person narrator, Karl, writes that “just the thought of fiction, just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me feel nauseous” (446). Knausgaard describes his loss of faith in literature as a perpetual awareness of the saturation of public discourse with fiction: Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories. It had got out of hand. Wherever you turned you saw fiction. All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs and TV series, they were all about madeup people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not. (496)

This registers for Knausgaard as a crisis stemming from the observation that verisimilitude rather than factual truth has become the measure of all public discourse. His response to this crisis, which we might want to call the problem of a “post-truth” world in which narrative dominates regardless of its truth status, was not to revel in the license for invention afforded the genre of fiction but to seek a grounding in the voice of the self that the nonnarrative forms of diaries and essays allowed. The sensibility that Knausgaard articulates is captured by David Shields in his 2010 manifesto, Reality Hunger, in which he claims that “the creators of characters, in the traditional sense, no longer manage to offer us anything more than puppets in which they themselves have ceased to believe” (21). This recalls the puppet-master metaphor I traced in chapter 2, from Fielding to Fowles, a metaphor that, supposedly, can no longer sustain the novelist. Instead, Shields claims, the energy of contemporary art lies in the autobiographical, and particularly what he calls the lyric essay, generically unconstrained and unhampered by “a fiction writer’s burden of unreality, the nasty fact that none of this ever really happened—which a fiction writer daily wakes to” (27). Shields stops short of proclaiming the novel’s death, instead noting that it is no longer central to culture. He does argue, though, that this disavowal of fictionality is vitally connected to the new digital age where books

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can retain their waning cultural authority only by engaging with the universal library of the internet and its “more technologically sophisticated and more visceral narrative forms” (31). To grasp the convergence of reality hunger with new media, I will briefly discuss two autofictional works associated with the alt-lit movement: a loose collection of writers concerned with producing work that records how the internet, social media, and digital technology are embedded in their everyday lives, and using the internet as the medium for circulating this work. Megan Boyle’s LiveBlog: A Novel (2018) is a repurposed and edited collation of the Tumblr updates she blogged throughout the year 2013, and Darcie Wilder’s literally show me a healthy person (2017) includes passages that originally appeared as tweets on Wilder’s Twitter account. Alt-lit has been dismissed as autofiction for the Xanax-popping, narcissistic, Instagram generation, but it captures the aesthetic sensibilities that Shields describes, including deliberate unartiness, the autobiographical blurring of the real and the fictional, and the encounter with new technology that challenges the cultural authority of literature. Boyle and Wilder remediate social media platforms to narrate their lives, but their narratives are also extensions of earlier literary forms: the epistolary novel in LiveBlog and the stream of consciousness in literally show me a healthy person. In a traditional print-based paradigm, literally show me a healthy person reads as a discontinuous stream of memories, observations, and thoughts, a bricolage of snippets from an ongoing interior monologue that together present an account of the life of the protagonist, Darcie. The opening paragraph begins with this line: “in third grade when everyone cool had glasses like arthur from arthur I faked having bad eyesight at the eye doctor’s” (1). Memories such as this are dotted throughout and constitute the longest passages in the book. They are interspersed with pithy gnomic observations such as, “if we all meet up in the afterlife aren’t murder-suicides more like a life sentence?” (15) and “rejection is just like any other drug in that they won’t tell you what it’s cut with” (53); lines of singulative and iterative narration such as, “I tried to invite geoff to pinterest but it didn’t let me because he blocked me on facebook” (12) and “dad keeps handing me printed copies of his will when we meet for dinner” (8); and thoughts such as “Friday night imagining everyone I know dying” (2). When approached as a remediation of online communication, however, the book reads as an asynchronous paratactic Twitter feed, particularly with lines that suggest a readership, such as, “grammar question: do you wake up ‘with terror’ or ‘in terror’?” (1). Many of the lines could easily be both fragments of an interior monologue and transcripts of online communication, such as this one, represented as a hastily typed text message or drunken social

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media post: “starring at the wall that’s fucking my wall im starring at my wal” (2). In fact the conflation of both is indicative of how social media functions to share private thoughts as they are happening. Wilder presents an increasing awareness of the role of digital technology at the level of story—“how do i destroy phone and everything ive ever done?” (52)—and at the level of discourse: “how long does it take to write a text, five hours? six?” (52). There’s also a level of stylistic self-reflexivity at play in the narration of thoughts via a medium that employs the secondary orality of text-speak: “trying to calm down after receiving a text ending with a period. does a phone know it’s going to die?” (53). Like the autofictional protagonist of Wilder’s novel, Megan Boyle’s character-narrator is a contemporary version of—or reaction against—the novelistic figure of the self-examining heroine: painfully ruminative, open about her sexuality, but never coming to any sort of epiphany. LiveBlog opens with the line: “Starting today, March 17, 2013, I will be liveblogging everything I do, think, feel, and say, to the best of my ability” (5). The legacy of Pamela, who sought to record her thoughts in letters to her parents in order to be able to regulate her conduct, continues with Boyle’s aim for blogging: “REMINDER OF MY GOAL: TO LIVEBLOG DAILY ACTIVITIES WITHOUT PRIVACY AS A FORM OF NEGATIVE REINFORCEMENT, TO ‘ACT BETTER’” (23). Her addressee is not another private epistolary correspondent, but a vast online public on Tumblr. The impartial judge of the eighteenth-century novel here becomes represented by the World Wide Web, and Boyle internalizes its judgements as she broadcasts her act of self-scrutiny. Even though Boyle’s live updates are often narrated simultaneously— “6:37am: still sitting here. Getting colder. Headlights car has ‘finally’ gone. Afraid to go inside for some reason” (16)—she acknowledges the distinction between experiencing and narrating self produced by the act of writing: “Typing is making me equally more attentive and detached about what I’m doing/thinking, like I’m narrating myself from a distance” (10). Like the epistolary novel, LiveBlog is premised on the dramatic potential of “writing to the moment” as both contemporaneous documentary record and immediate self-revelation. At one point, Boyle muses that her blog is “the closest thing to telepathy i can think of,” while acknowledging the limitations of the medium itself: “this is as much of me i can transport into a document at the speed of typing. i am limited to how fast i can type (and the availability of typingreading situations)” (162). The fact that Boyle’s book began as a series of Tumblr updates suggests that LiveBlog is essentially a nonfiction memoir, but the label “novel” frames it as a pseudofactual document in which the referential status of the character becomes a site of negotiation. Rather than the onomastic relationship

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confirming a rigid designator across fictional and actual worlds, it creates an ontological discontinuity between author and character mediated by the narrator. The paratextual designation of Megan Boyle as author creates a shared identity between narrator and author typical of third-person authorial narration, but the label “a novel” gives the narrator the same name as a fictional character who is distinct from the author. Hence despite sharing the name of the author, the narrator creates herself as a fictional character: “It’s a different ‘me’ who types than the ‘me’ sort of talking in the car right now.” In this way autofiction reinforces the nonreferentiality of the proper name while demonstrating that typicality is not essential to the paradox of fictional truth. In Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), the first-person narrator in fact remains unnamed. However, one of Lerner’s short stories, “The Golden Vanity,” originally published in the New Yorker, is reproduced as the work of this narrator, inviting us to fill the onomastic void with the rigid designator of the author’s name. The “ontological collapse” modeled by these onomastic games may be a deliberate strategy of autofictional narratives, but it has also become a general condition of the contemporary networked public sphere: an economy of visibility in which the currency of any discourse is determined by its affective quality or narrative truth rather than its referential status (Papaacharisi, 2015; Dawson, 2020). If we accept that, in the long view of history, the emergence of fictionality as a discursive category is coterminous with renewed periods of literacy, then the epochal shift to digital literacy has ushered in a new framework for its ontology. The contemporary “idiom of actuality” against which fictionality is now defined has of course been framed as a “post-truth” crisis of reference. Fiction must be recognized as nonreferential for it to work as fiction, but in this environment even conventional fiction can perform the same function as a serious speech act, and vice versa, because the verisimilitude of narrative truth is not subject to the test of verifiability. The public circulation and reception of Kristen Roupenian’s New Yorker short story, “Cat Person” (2017), provides a salient example of how realist fiction can function according to the cultural logic of metamodernism in the digital sphere. This story went viral in December 2017 as a fictional exemplar of the #MeToo movement, made possible by the fact that it was freely accessible online, rather than available in print form only to subscribers. By virtue of its iterative spread throughout social media platforms, the act of sharing reframed this work of realist fiction as grist for the mill in an urgent social debate about the concept of consent. In an online article in the Village Voice, Larissa Pham (2017) laments the number of readers who read the story as a feature article or personal essay or think piece, arguing that “‘Cat Person’ seems to have transcended its form as a short story—or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the discourse around it reflects how the distinction

T he E x haustion of F ictionality  •  227

between fiction and nonfiction has collapsed in recent years.” For Pham this is a failure of readership produced by the click-bait culture of social media, reducing a complex work of fiction to a simple moral guide alongside the popcultural policing of progressive liberal ideology. Due to its recirculation as a shared story on social media, and subsequent recontextualization within the viral event of the #MeToo movement, many readers supposedly overlooked the paratextual frame of fiction attached to the story’s original publication in the New Yorker. Kelly Walsh and Terry Murphy (2019) point out that readers who received “Cat Person” as nonfiction would also have overlooked the story’s clear signposts of fictionality (it is a third-person internally focalized narrative that employs FID to represent the consciousness of its protagonist). I would suggest, however, that this generic “misreading” only confirms that the viral spreading of the story is indicative of the larger structures of social media that foster an indifference toward referentiality: when narratives are shared online their referential status is less important than their affective capacity to confirm the truth of individual experience or to affirm the ideological stance of homophilic clusters. One of the key functions of the #MeToo hashtag was to challenge the culturally engrained skepticism that accompanies the nonverifiability of many stories of sexual harassment and assault, and shift emphasis to the experiential truth of the individual. The sheer scale of #MeToo stories emphasized a shared experience that rendered obsolete the question of verifiability. It also produced a cultural script in which a work of realist fiction can be read in the same way as the hashtagged micronarrative of a private citizen, despite their differing relationships to referential truth (Dawson, 2020). In this context, the ontology of “Cat Person” is inconsequential: whether it is a work of fiction or nonfiction, it performs the same function. The relevance of the story to social debate resides in its ending: a final text message from the man Margot “ghosted,” calling her a whore. While this scenario sparked a debate along gender lines about who was the most sympathetic figure, it is worth pointing out that “Cat Person” also updates the self-examining heroine for the digital age. The story is replete with consciousness scenes such as this: It wasn’t that she was scared he would try to force her to do something against her will but that insisting that they stop now, after everything she’d done to push this forward, would make her seem spoiled and capricious, as if she’d ordered something at a restaurant and then, once the food arrived, had changed her mind and sent it back.

In this scene Margot feels compelled to go ahead with a sexual act because of her concern that she is responsible for the situation she finds herself in. The

228  •  Conclusion

same anxiety is replicated in many tweets attached to the #MeToo hashtag, such as this one, which contains a first-person report of the same internalization of culpability in relation to sexual assault: “#metoo and I never told anyone because I thought it was my fault for sending the wrong signals . . .” (@ samandea; October 21, 2017). The discursive conflation of nonverifiable tweet and nonreferential narrative in a digital culture oriented around viral storytelling is indicative of a new form of literacy that comprises the fourth age of fictionality. In 2021 Slate published a personal narrative essay by Alex Nowicki (“‘Cat Person’ and Me”), revealing that “Cat Person” is loosely based on a relationship she shared with Roupenian’s ex-boyfriend, the details of which Roupenian gleaned from social media. The essay revolves around Nowicki’s shock at discovering aspects of her life paraded in a viral narrative, with one of her motivations for writing the essay, she claims, being to restore the reputation of the man on whom the fictional character was based. The public debate that ensued about the ethics of fictionalizing real people, and particularly about the ethics of appropriating other people’s stories, is symptomatic of the issue Pham raised upon the story’s initial publication. Nowicki’s essay succeeds in further tethering Roupenian’s fictional narrative to the real, such that her own autobiographical account becomes a “competing narrative” with a work of third-person fiction in the networked public sphere. The essay has currency precisely because it responded to a milieu that treated “Cat Person” as a viral narrative rather than a work of fiction and because it circulates in a culture of personal storytelling that subscribes to an identity politics in which one’s selfhood is taken as encoded in a “story” that belongs to them. The deliberate blurring of ontological boundaries in autofictional narratives thus accompanies not so much an inability of readers to recognize the distinction between fact and fiction, but their readiness to accept the experiential truth of a narrative regardless of its referential status. The self-reflexive appeal to the real that characterizes the logic of metamodernism is thus ironically symptomatic of the evacuation of referentiality in the public sphere. The story of fictional truth in the wake of the novel’s “death” has collided with a prevailing cultural logic in which the fictive is everywhere and narrative is ubiquitous, forcing narrative fiction to reassess the reflexivity that conditions its existence.

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INDEX

in The Comforters, 57–62; critical reception of, 30–33, 42–46; defined, 34–35, 47; in Middlemarch, 111, 112, 114, 116; as signposts of fictionality, 3, 16, 32–33, 37. See also authorial commentary; digressions

aesthetic illusion, 5, 12, 21, 25, 30, 37–38, 50, 71–72; and authorial intrusions, 5, 21, 29–32, 42–47, 116; and free indirect discourse, 78–80 All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque), 153, 154, 158–63

authorial presence, 32, 45–47, 50, 55, 79–80, 110–11, 117–18, 124, 139; defined, 34–35

alt.lit movement, 28, 224

authority: cultural (of novels), 50, 53, 89, 143, 223–24; narrative, 15, 56, 78, 118, 148, 170, 193; of novelists, 31, 33, 60, 65, 78, 111

anticipation of retrospection, 2, 61, 148, 157, 160, 177, 188, 218 Armstrong, Nancy, 26, 73–74, 82, 84, 90, 108

autobiography, 4, 5, 15, 84, 145, 148–50, 158, 167, 168–69, 176, 178, 182, 188, 193, 203, 205–6, 209–10, 222, 223–24; as default model of first-person, 27, 141–42, 150–51, 175, 180, 217; defined, 148–49; fictional, 142–43, 145, 149, 150, 194, 199, 207. See also autothanatographic impulse; autothanatography; first-person narration

As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), 153, 203–4 Austen, Jane, 20–21, 73–74, 77–78, 99, 10; and Emma, 96–97 author: disappearance of, 4–5, 14, 71; distinguished from narrator, 6, 18n5, 19n6, 28, 55, 95, 141–42, 145–46, 148–50, 214, 221– 22, 226; relationship to character, 51–53, 56, 60–63, 65, 67–70, 86, 116, 139

autofiction, 7, 24, 27–28, 221–28

authorial commentary, 26, 29–47, 50, 56, 58, 61, 111, 116, 118, 139; on character, 30, 33, 34; defined, 34–35; self-reflexive, 32–34, 53, 65; as signpost of fictionality, 4, 41–42, 71–72; and sympathy, 44–45. See also authorial intrusions; digressions

autothanatographic impulse, 27, 61, 141, 148– 51, 167, 180, 193, 199, 217 autothanatographic narrator, 4, 152–54, 163–64, 171, 174, 197, 209, 216–17. See also first-person narration; posthumous narration

authorial intrusions, 4–5, 25, 29–38, 42–51, 54–55, 69–70, 71, 110–11, 121, 124, 139, 221;

autothanatography, 149, 151, 171, 210 241

242  •  I nde x

Banfield, Ann, 77 Barthes, Roland, 9n2, 176, 205–6 Beckett, Samuel, 204; and Malone Dies, 177–79 Bender, John, 2, 8, 12n3, 21, 32, 58, 74, 78–80, 97–98 Brooks, Peter, 2, 141. See also anticipation of retrospection

consciousness scene, 4, 26, 73, 75–76, 86–87, 88, 90–93, 99–102, 107, 108–9, 111–12, 115–19, 120, 123, 134, 154, 186–87, 203–4, 227–28; and conduct books, 83, 85, 89, 136; defined, 74; and free indirect discourse, 79, 80, 90, 96–97, 102–4; and selfexamining heroine, 74–76, 183; as sex scene, 109, 124–31, 137–38

Burney, Fanny, 76, 78, 101–7, 111, 112, 145. See also Camilla

Death of the Author, The (Adair), 204–10

Butler, Judith, 27, 145, 146–48, 176–77, 209–10

deMan, Paul, 205–7, 209

Camilla (Burney), 26, 76, 101–7, 112, 129 “Cat Person” (Roupenian), 28, 226–28 character, 6, 25, 37, 82–83, 90–91, 106–7, 124, 163, 216–17; autonomy of, 49, 51–52, 55–56, 61–62, 69, 78–79; consciousness/ interiority, 72–80, 87–89, 98, 101, 108–10, 112–13, 116–18, 194; experiencing vs. narrating, 4, 16, 27, 140–41, 145–46, 148–51, 154, 166–67, 174, 176–79, 188, 198, 201, 213, 226; fictive status of, 2, 7, 19–21, 33, 49, 59–66, 222–23; internal vs. external view, 13, 86–87; and narrator, 5, 14–17, 18n4, 20, 30, 34, 41–43, 49–62, 78–79, 86, 93, 100, 102, 104, 110–11, 125, 128, 139, 218, 221–22; reader investment in, 3, 28, 47–49, 67–70, 71; self-aware, 67–70. See also first-person narration Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry (Johnson), 25, 49, 56, 63–67, 69–70 Clarissa (Richardson), 44, 73, 165, 168, 178, 182, 211; and autothanatography, 27, 153, 154–57, 204, 205, 216; and self-examining heroine, 91–92, 138 Cohn, Dorrit, 3, 72–73, 93, 120; and consciousness scene, 79, 181; and first-person narration, 139–40, 142, 159–60, 180; and free indirect discourse, 75, 76–77, 79–80 Comforters, The (Spark), 56–63, 69–70 conduct books, 87, 92, 93–94, 101, 114, 127–29, 136; and free indirect discourse, 26, 73–76, 80–81, 106, 108; history of, 83–86; and impartial spectator, 81–83; and the novel, 84–86, 89, 96–97, 106 conduct scene, 26, 74–76, 88, 90–107, 108–9, 111, 115–17, 119, 122–24, 127, 137, 181, 204, 225; defined, 74–75, 108, 131

Defoe, Daniel, 31, 140 Derrida, Jacques, 149, 174, 193 dialectic, 4, 13–14, 71 digressions, 25, 30, 34, 38–43, 46, 51, 71, 116. See also authorial commentary; authorial intrusions documentary novel, 15, 27, 44, 141, 144–45, 157–59, 161, 163, 166, 169, 225 domestic fiction, 73–74, 84, 96 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 179–80 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson), 153, 169–73 Edel, Leon, 4, 72 eighteenth century, 2–6, 15–23, 29–31, 50, 55, 70, 110, 111, 126, 130, 138, 153–54, 157, 162, 163, 179, 218–19, 225; conduct books, 73–74, 82–84, 86–87; consciousness scene, 89–90, 93, 106–7, 119, 123, 129; and digressions, 39–43; and fictionality, 2, 6, 8, 12, 16–19, 21, 23, 28, 31–33, 42, 48; firstperson novels, 142–45, 159; and free indirect discourse, 74–75, 78–80, 108 Eliot, George, 118, 126; and authorial intrusions, 42, 44–45, 112; and The Lifted Veil, 193–99, 202; and Middlemarch, 111–16; and psychological analysis, 110–11, 113 empathy, 6, 25, 45, 222; and fictionality, 49, 62, 68; and immersion, 47–48 empiricism, 4, 6, 12–13, 15, 22, 23, 52, 56, 80 epistolary fiction, 5, 6, 22, 25–26, 27, 41, 44, 105, 133, 144, 180, 181, 225; and autothanatography, 154–58, 163, 166, 174, 178, 216; and conduct books, 84, 92; and consciousness scene, 75, 82, 87, 89–92; and first-person narration, 139–41; and free indirect discourse, 72, 75, 91–92, 101, 103, 108; and inward turn, 72

I nde x   •  243

fictional nobodies, 5, 19–20, 28, 32, 48, 59, 67–70, 86, 129, 130, 222. See also Gallagher, Catherine

Fowles, John, 17, 25, 49, 64, 223; and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 12n3, 33, 37, 54–56, 68–69

fictional truth, 3, 5, 6, 9, 12, 17, 20, 22–23, 29–30, 33–34, 37, 52, 67, 70, 139, 218–19, 226, 228; defined, 3, 44, 49, 62; vs. narrative truth, 23, 226; story of, 3–4, 15, 22, 24, 175, 203, 217–18, 221

Fraulein Else (Schnitzler), 27, 153, 180–83, 188, 193, 211, 216

fictionality, 5–7, 44, 48–49, 175, 223; and character, 19–20, 48–49, 68–70, 146; and first-person narration, 142, 144–46, 149; fourth age of, 7, 24, 226–28; and free indirect discourse, 16, 76–80, 139; historicizing, 17–24; and intrusions, 31–38, 41–42, 49, 51, 62, 65, 72; and postmodernism, 24, 27–28, 63, 70, 124, 219; and reflexive realism, 2–3, 5–6, 11–12, 17, 21–25, 27, 71, 220–21, 98; rise of, 1–3, 6, 8, 11, 17–22, 31–32, 70, 218–19, 226; signpost of, 3–5, 7, 16–17, 22, 27, 33, 49, 72–73, 76, 106, 124, 211, 218, 222, 227; and sympathy, 44, 76–78, 80. See also authorial commentary; authorial intrusions; character, free indirect discourse; metafiction; postmodernism; reflexive realism; sympathy Fielding, Henry, 9, 12n3, 14, 17, 30–33, 45, 46, 72, 75, 76, 202, 223; and Joseph Andrews, 19–20, 29, 31–32, 59, 92–93; and Tom Jones, 31, 36, 39–42, 51–53, 65, 96

free indirect discourse (FID), 3, 4–5, 16, 26, 27, 57, 58, 84, 90–91, 97, 99, 108, 111, 117, 132, 139, 143; in Camilla, 101–6; in “Cat Person,” 227; critical history of, 72–81; defined, 78; and the gothic, 97; and Jane Austen, 97; in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 120, 124–25, 127–28; in Middlemarch, 113–16; in Mysteries of Udolpho, 99, 101. See also consciousness scene; epistolary fiction; focalization; interior monologue; narrative voice; reflexive realism; sympathy Gallagher, Catherine, 3; and character, 5, 19–20, 25, 26, 28, 32, 33, 48, 67–70, 130, 145–46; and fictionality, 6, 8–9, 11, 13, 17–20; and reflexive realism, 1–2, 218–19 Genette, Gerard, 3, 15–16, 29, 34–35, 51, 140, 152, 154, 188 Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, A, (McBride), 26, 109, 132–38, 183–88, 193 gothic novel, 73, 97–101, 153, 169, 196

Fielding, Sarah, 20, 87–88, 107

Hamburger, Kate, 142

first-person narration, 15, 22, 61, 75, 88, 139– 54, 157, 159–60, 166, 176–77, 179–81, 185– 86, 189, 193, 196–97, 201, 202, 205, 216–17; and autobiography, 5, 27, 141, 145, 148–50, 168–69, 175, 180; defined, 16, 141; dying in, 5, 27, 138, 141, 151–54, 156–57, 163–66, 168–69, 171, 175–80, 183, 188–93, 194, 197–98, 202, 208, 211, 215–17; and interior monologue, 120, 132–33, 138, 153, 160, 162, 180, 192; as pseudofactual, 139, 144–45, 175; as signpost of fictionality, 4, 142, 145–46, 149–50. See also autothanatographic narrator; character; posthumous narration; third-person narration

Haywood, Eliza, 38–39, 75; and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, 93–97, 107, 112

Fludernik, Monika, 19, 21, 75, 90 focalization, 82, 131, 162–63, 227; and firstperson narration, 140, 143, 144, 147, 193–94, 212, 214; and free indirect discourse, 79–80 formal realism, 2, 3, 7–9, 12, 14–15, 19, 25, 27, 31–32, 49, 56, 63, 76, 109, 144, 218, 221

heterodiegetic stance, 150, 152, 168–69, 179, 202, 212; defined, 148 Heti, Sheila, 221–22, 223 Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (Sorrentino), 49, 66, 69 immersion, 25, 37–38, 43, 45, 47–48, 51, 66, 69, 71 In the Cut (Moore), 188–93 interior monologue, 73, 96, 120, 132; and consciousness scene, 90–91, 116–17, 131; and dying in the first person, 140, 153, 157–59, 161–62, 179–83, 186–88, 192, 194, 198, 203–4, 216–17, 224; and first-person narration, 143, 144; and free indirect discourse, 77, 79–80 inward turn, the, 4–5, 25–26, 71–73, 123, 204

244  •  I nde x

James, Henry, 30, 55, 110, 214; and consciousness scene, 72, 116–18; neo-Jamesian criticism, 14–15, 38, 45, 50, 76–77 Jameson, Fredric, 4, 13–14, 21, 111, 220 Joseph Andrews (Fielding), 19, 29, 31–32, 59, 85, 92–93, 94 Joyce, James, 119–24, 132; and inward turn, 25, 72 Keen, Suzanne, 45, 47–49 Knausgaard, Karl Ove, 221, 223 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence), 26, 108– 9, 119–20, 124–32, 137 Last Days of a Condemned Man (Hugo), 27, 153, 164–66, 167, 168, 174, 179–80, 198 Lerner, Ben, 226 Lifted Veil, The (Eliot), 193–99, 200 literacy, 6–7, 73, 84, 228; digital, 7, 24, 226; and fictionality, 6, 18, 19, 23, 77, 226 literally show me a healthy person (Wilder), 224–25 LiveBlog (Boyle), 224–26 Lovely Bones, The (Sebold), 148, 153, 211

dying or posthumous narrators, 178, 180, 188, 203–4 narrating, time of, 54; interpolated, 152, 154, 158, 180, 188, 190–92; prior, 152, 198, 201, 202; retrospective, 87, 142, 152, 163, 184– 85, 186, 189, 190, 192, 211; simultaneous, 140, 142, 143, 151–52, 153, 158–60, 180–81, 183–84, 186, 188 narrating instance, 140–41, 144, 152–53, 154, 173, 186, 198, 199, 203, 206, 210, 216, 221; in All Quiet on the Western Front, 158–63; and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 179–80; in A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, 183– 88; in In the Cut, 189–93; and Roland Barthes, 176–77 narrative level, 61, 64, 69, 141, 221, 225; and authorial intrusion, 51, 55; extradiegetic, 55, 59, 141, 144, 150, 163, 166, 177, 212; intradiegetic, 144, 146, 214. See also metalepsis narrative time, 34–37, 47; in Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, 63–66; in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 168–72; vs. story time, 35–36, 140, 145, 150–51, 157, 163, 177, 183– 84, 189–90, 201 narrative turn, the, 6, 23

Markson, David, 28, 222

narrative voice: defined, 16, 34; and free indirect discourse, 75–79, 103, 139. See also first-person narration; third-person narration

McKeon, Michael, 8, 13, 15, 79; and reflexive realism, 2–4, 9, 12, 16–17, 31–32

narratology, 3, 15–16, 34–35, 141–42, 143, 147, 205, 216

memoir novel, 6, 22, 27, 87, 139–45, 148, 153, 154, 158–59, 161–62, 164–65, 181, 203

narrator. See autothanatographic narrator; first-person narration; omniscient narration; third-person narration

Lubbock, Percy, 14–15, 50

metafiction, 2–3, 6, 11–12, 15, 18n5, 22–23, 24, 28, 49, 56, 59, 61, 66, 68, 77; and authorial intrusions, 34, 37, 38, 47, 50; and death of the novel, 2, 9, 11, 218; and fictionality, 2, 11–12, 17, 65; and postmodernism, 2, 9–12, 18n4, 22–23, 50, 63, 70, 71, 218; and realism, 2, 11–12, 25, 63, 220 metalepsis, 38, 68–69, 121, 210; and authorial intrusion, 34, 49–51, 70; in Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry, 64–66; in The Comforters, 56–63; in Shade, 212–13 metamodernism, 28, 220–21, 226, 228 Middlemarch (Eliot), 26, 111–16, 118 modernism, 5, 9–10, 14–15, 25–26, 31, 71–72, 77, 109, 123, 132–33, 143, 153, 163, 176; and

nineteenth century, 5, 44, 46, 139, 143, 153, 179; authorial intrusions, 25, 31, 33, 38, 43, 46–47, 71; and free indirect discourse, 78, 80, 111, 113; psychological analysis, 26, 76, 108, 110–11, 113; and sympathy, 5 nonreferentiality, 3, 5–6, 17, 20, 25, 32, 49, 226, 228; and character, 49, 55, 59, 64, 67–70, 130, 145–46, 148, 211, 222; and reflexivity, 22–23 novel, the: and cinema, 10, 66, 70, 162–63, 204, 215; death of, 2–4, 6–7, 9–14, 18n4, 22–23, 51, 71, 111, 124, 130, 153, 203, 205, 217, 218–19, 228; rise of, 1–4, 6–14, 17, 18n4, 22–23, 32, 70, 71–72, 80, 109, 124, 144, 203, 205, 216, 217, 218–19, 223; vs.

I nde x   •  245

romance, 8, 10, 17, 21–22, 23, 39–40, 43–44, 52–53, 55, 86, 98 omniscient narration, 22, 47, 88, 106, 111–12, 117, 139–40, 143, 145–46, 149, 153; in firstperson, 193–94, 198–202, 212–16, 221; and metafiction, 55–65; and self-examining heroine, 82, 86, 100–101 Orlemanski, Julie, 19, 21, 23 Paige, Nicholas, 8n1, 144, 159 Pamela (Richardson), 25, 74, 85, 89, 90–91, 225

and fictionality, 2–6, 8–9, 11, 17–18, 21, 22–25, 27, 32, 144. See also formal realism; reflexive realism reality hunger, 27, 223–24 reflexive realism, 5–6, 7, 21, 25, 27, 28, 48, 56, 63, 70, 71–72, 98, 218–21; and authorial intrusions, 32–33; defined, 2–3, 22; and first-person narration, 139, 144, 146, 166, 217; formal elements of, 16–17; and free indirect discourse, 76–77; historical formation of, 11–12; historicized, 22–24; and the proper name, 19–20, 222

panfictionality, 7, 28, 50, 220–21

reflexivity, 2–3, 11–13, 23–24, 32, 49; defined, 17; as literary dominant, 6; and realism, 3–4, 16, 18n5, 220

paralepsis, 60, 147–48, 153, 193, 198, 200

Richardson, Dorothy, 130–32

paratext, 29, 48–49, 67, 148–49, 226, 227

Richardson, Samuel, 14, 15, 44, 73, 74, 84, 85, 144; and autothanatographic impulse, 155–57, 165; and consciousness scene, 75, 90–92; and epistolary novel, 41, 87, 89, 180; and formal realism, 7, 9, 31, 76; and inward turn, 25, 72. See also Clarissa; Pamela

Poe, Edgar Allen, 153, 167, 174 Portrait of a Lady (James), 26, 72, 110, 116–18 posthumous narration, 5, 27, 148–49, 152–54, 157, 163, 202–17. See also autothanatographic impulse; autothanatographic narrator; first-person narration postmodernism, 6–7, 22–24, 28, 31, 49, 68, 124, 154, 178, 209, 219–22; and metafiction, 2–3, 9, 10–12, 18n4, 50–51, 63, 70, 71, 218 poststructuralism, 146, 149, 205–6, 210 probability, 5, 6, 8, 21–23, 32, 40–41, 46, 52–53, 55, 86–87, 90, 98 prolepsis, 3, 60, 62, 64, 171, 194, 198, 202, 213, 214, 218 proper name, 68, 114, 129, 183, 193; and autofiction, 222, 226; and autothanatography, 149; and dead or dying narrators, 148, 171–73, 174, 183, 201, 209, 211; and firstperson narration, 148–49; as signpost of fictionality, 19–20, 145–46. See also fictional nobodies pseudofactual, 10, 27, 31, 44, 87, 139, 141–44, 157, 175, 225 psychonarration, 58, 88, 90, 94–95, 99, 103, 117; defined, 61, 77, 79, 112 Radcliffe, Ann, 75–76, 78; and Mysteries of Udolpho, 98–101 realism, 2–28, 31–33, 48–50, 55–56, 58–59, 68, 71–72, 76–77, 98, 139, 189, 218–22; and authorial intrusions, 32–33, 38, 46–47, 50;

Rushdie, Salman, 220; and Midnight’s Children, 199–202 Scott, Walter, 41–42, 46–47 self-examining heroine, 4, 82, 94, 100–101, 105, 117–18, 138, 225, 227; and conduct books, 26, 74–76, 86, 101; and consciousness scene, 26, 74–76, 86, 108, 132, 154; and death drive, 180–84; and free indirect discourse, 90, 106, 111; and sex scene, 109, 125, 127, 131. See also conduct scene; consciousness scene sentimental novel, 27, 80, 153, 157, 163, 167 sex scene, 5, 26, 76, 109, 130–31; in Dawn’s Left Hand, 131–32; in A Girl Is a HalfFormed Thing, 137–38; in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 124–29 Shade (Jordan), 211–16 Smith, Adam, 26, 73, 74, 80–83, 86, 106 social media, 7, 24, 28, 224–28 soliloquy, internal, 73, 75–76, 77, 79–80, 86, 88–89, 90–93, 95, 97, 99, 101–3, 116, 120, 123–24; and first-person narration, 157– 60, 179, 183, 204 Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe), 157–58, 167–68

246  •  I nde x

stream of consciousness, 25, 72, 73, 90, 108, 144, 153, 192, 224; and As I Lay Dying, 203–4; in Fraulein Else, 180–84; in A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, 132–38, 186; and Samuel Beckett, 178; in Ulysses, 120–24 Sully, James, 44–45, 111 Survivor (Palahniuk), 173–75 sympathy, 5, 19, 44–45, 46, 111, 116, 126, 140, 194–97; and free indirect discourse, 26, 72, 73–74, 76–78, 80–83, 86 third-person narration, 6, 15, 82, 149, 157, 169–70, 193, 212–13, 226; defined, 16; vs. first-person, 22, 27, 101, 140–46, 160, 205, 214, 216–17; and free indirect discourse, 27, 72, 75, 79, 97, 103, 120, 143; and interiority, 87–89, 91, 105, 145, 198, 202; as privileged form of realism, 27, 139, 143, 145–46 thought representation, 25–26, 56, 57–58, 66, 91, 95, 101–4, 113, 117, 119, 132, 158, 183; and fictionality, 72–73, 76–80; and gender, 72–73, 83, 84, 93, 107–9; and the gothic, 97–98

Tom Jones (Fielding), 25, 87; and authorial intrusions, 31, 32, 36, 39–42, 49, 51–53, 54; and consciousness scene, 88, 93, 96 Turgenev, Ivan, 153, 199; and A Superfluous Man, 167–69, 193 twentieth century, 1, 2, 4–6, 10, 12–13, 17, 23, 25, 26, 30, 31, 33, 38, 48, 51, 53, 56, 59, 62, 90, 108–9, 119, 125, 142, 153–54, 157, 176; posthumous narration, 153, 157, 202–4, 211 Ulysses (Joyce), 25, 72, 109, 119–24, 132, 181 unnatural, 21–22, 162, 184, 188; access to consciousness, 22, 77, 142; narration, 141, 144, 150–51, 157, 159, 217 verisimilitude, 3, 4, 5, 21, 44, 52, 53, 56, 66, 177, 180, 192; and authorial intrusions, 35–37, 40, 46, 49, 50, 71–72; and fictionality, 6, 7, 9, 13, 15, 18, 32, 71–72, 77, 218, 221; and interiority, 26, 123; and narrative, 23, 223, 226 Wallace, David Foster, 24, 210–11 Watt, Ian, 1–2, 4, 7–10, 12–15, 19, 72, 80, 109; and authorial intrusions, 31–32

T H E O R Y A N D I N T E R P R E TAT I O N O F N A R R AT I V E JAMES PHELAN, KATRA BYRAM, AND FAYE HALPERN, SERIES EDITORS ROBYN WARHOL AND PETER RABINOWITZ, FOUNDING EDITORS EMERITI

Because the series editors believe that the most significant work in narrative studies today contributes both to our knowledge of specific narratives and to our understanding of narrative in general, studies in the series typically offer interpretations of individual narratives and address significant theoretical issues underlying those interpretations. The series does not privilege one critical perspective but is open to work from any strong theoretical position. The Story of Fictional Truth: Realism from the Death to the Rise of the Novel by Paul Dawson Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited edited by Lasse R. Gammelgaard, Stefan Iversen, Louise Brix Jacobsen, James Phelan, Richard Walsh, Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen, and Simona Zetterberg-Nielsen A New Anatomy of Storyworlds: What Is, What If, As If by Marie-Laure Ryan Narrative in the Anthropocene by Erin James Experiencing Visual Storyworlds: Focalization in Comics by Silke Horstkotte and Nancy Pedri With Bodies: Narrative Theory and Embodied Cognition by Marco Caracciolo and Karin Kukkonen Digital Fiction and the Unnatural: Transmedial Narrative Theory, Method, and Analysis by Astrid Ensslin and Alice Bell Narrative Bonds: Multiple Narrators in the Victorian Novel by Alexandra Valint Contemporary French and Francophone Narratology edited by John Pier We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction by Natalya Bekhta Debating Rhetorical Narratology: On the Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic Aspects of Narrative by Matthew Clark and James Phelan Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology edited by Erin James and Eric Morel Unnatural Narratology: Extensions, Revisions, and Challenges edited by Jan Alber and Brian Richardson A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives by Brian Richardson Playing at Narratology: Digital Media as Narrative Theory by Daniel Punday Making Conversation in Modernist Fiction by Elizabeth Alsop Narratology and Ideology: Negotiating Context, Form, and Theory in Postcolonial Narratives edited by Divya Dwivedi, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Richard Walsh Novelization: From Film to Novel by Jan Baetens Reading Conrad by J. Hillis Miller, Edited by John G. Peters and Jakob Lothe Narrative, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States edited by James J. Donahue, Jennifer Ann Ho, and Shaun Morgan Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative by James Phelan Media of Serial Narrative edited by Frank Kelleter Suture and Narrative: Deep Intersubjectivity in Fiction and Film by George Butte The Writer in the Well: On Misreading and Rewriting Literature by Gary Weissman Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet by Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu

Narrative Sequence in Contemporary Narratology edited by Raphaël Baroni and Françoise Revaz The Submerged Plot and the Mother’s Pleasure from Jane Austen to Arundhati Roy by Kelly A. Marsh Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions edited by Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice by Brian Richardson Ethics and the Dynamic Observer Narrator: Reckoning with Past and Present in German Literature by Katra A. Byram Narrative Paths: African Travel in Modern Fiction and Nonfiction by Kai Mikkonen The Reader as Peeping Tom: Nonreciprocal Gazing in Narrative Fiction and Film by Jeremy Hawthorn Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination by Suzanne Keen The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-First Century Fiction by Paul Dawson Feminist Narrative Ethics: Tacit Persuasion in Modernist Form by Katherine Saunders Nash Real Mysteries: Narrative and the Unknowable by H. Porter Abbott A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative edited by Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson Narrative Discourse: Authors and Narrators in Literature, Film, and Art by Patrick Colm Hogan An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance: Transnational Theater, Literature, and Film in Contemporary Germany by Claudia Breger Literary Identification from Charlotte Brontë to Tsitsi Dangarembga by Laura Green Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates by David Herman, James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future edited by Jakob Lothe, Susan Rubin Suleiman, and James Phelan The Vitality of Allegory: Figural Narrative in Modern and Contemporary Fiction by Gary Johnson Narrative Middles: Navigating the Nineteenth-Century British Novel edited by Caroline Levine and Mario Ortiz-Robles Fact, Fiction, and Form: Selected Essays by Ralph W. Rader edited by James Phelan and David H. Richter The Real, the True, and the Told: Postmodern Historical Narrative and the Ethics of Representation by Eric L. Berlatsky Franz Kafka: Narration, Rhetoric, and Reading edited by Jakob Lothe, Beatrice Sandberg, and Ronald Speirs Social Minds in the Novel by Alan Palmer Narrative Structures and the Language of the Self by Matthew Clark Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy by Kay Young Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses edited by Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik Techniques for Living: Fiction and Theory in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose by Karen R. Lawrence Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission by Leona Toker

Tabloid, Inc.: Crimes, Newspapers, Narratives by V. Penelope Pelizzon and Nancy M. West Narrative Means, Lyric Ends: Temporality in the Nineteenth-Century British Long Poem by Monique R. Morgan Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive Science, and Identity by Patrick Colm Hogan Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre edited by Jakob Lothe, Jeremy Hawthorn, James Phelan The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction by Richard Walsh Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative by James Phelan Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction by Brian Richardson Narrative Causalities by Emma Kafalenos Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel by Lisa Zunshine I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from Moll Flanders to Marnie by George Butte Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject by Elana Gomel Surprised by Shame: Dostoevsky’s Liars and Narrative Exposure by Deborah A. Martinsen Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms by Robyn R. Warhol Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism: A Rhetoric of Feminist Utopian Fiction by Ellen Peel Telling Tales: Gender and Narrative Form in Victorian Literature and Culture by Elizabeth Langland Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames edited by Brian Richardson Breaking the Frame: Metalepsis and the Construction of the Subject by Debra Malina Invisible Author: Last Essays by Christine Brooke-Rose Ordinary Pleasures: Couples, Conversation, and Comedy by Kay Young Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis edited by David Herman Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation by Peter J. Rabinowitz Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge by Daniel W. Lehman The Progress of Romance: Literary Historiography and the Gothic Novel by David H. Richter A Glance Beyond Doubt: Narration, Representation, Subjectivity by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology by James Phelan Misreading Jane Eyre: A Postformalist Paradigm by Jerome Beaty Psychological Politics of the American Dream: The Commodification of Subjectivity in Twentieth-Century American Literature by Lois Tyson Understanding Narrative edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz Framing Anna Karenina: Tolstoy, the Woman Question, and the Victorian Novel by Amy Mandelker Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian Novel by Robyn R. Warhol Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative by James Phelan