Andrew's Wiki
Disorienting Fiction

Ideas

• Even while this era saw the arrogant anthropological imperialism of early ethnographers, Buzard finds that after the unification of the British Kingdom in 1801, English novel writers begin to turn in on small communities in a way that prefigures modern anthropological understandings of “cultures” as complex totalities in which behaviors can be understood as part of the same “signifying” structure, to the extend that each behavior contains larger meaning relevant to the value system of the community.
• The characters show an “insider’s outsideness,” halfway in and halfway out
• The development of modern anthropology couldn’t have happened without the development in the British novel of a specific way of dealing with narrative, specifically relationship of narrator and characters as a kind of Participant Observation. How? Because the methods used by anthropologists to analyze other peoples was first posited and discovered by British novelists b/c they use an approach that requires the concept of something close to “culture.”
• This development is concurrent with 1840s-50s change in the British novel from something more like “loosely assembled entertainment” to “a self-reflexive ‘service-delivery system’ with aspirations towards total formal integration.” This also coincides with novel’s new growth towards “Social analysis.” Thus, the development of this kind of novel—cohesive form, social content—is crucial to the development of anthropology.
• What does it do for anthropology? Well it makes it look less criminal. The narrative of anthropology’s evil roots, its connex with imperialism, won’t after THIS BOOK be the only strand of history….instead, you also have a British-about-British strand that is developed. So maybe it’s not so sinister.
• What kind of writing? Metropolitan autobiography
  • Dickens, Bleak House written to be a counter Great Exhibition, written expressly to make people think about BRITAIN again (think of Mrs. Jellyby and the critique of her missionary imperatives w/her sloppy dirty underfed overworked family)
  • Charlotte Bronte as “Sustained” endeavor in autoethnography as she “Shifts” from local to national to international themes
    • Jane Eyre shows an English nationalism that can only be found via “translation” from her experiencing self to her reflecting, mature self (Jane finds Englishness by explaining her own past selves, saying that now she’s different): she learns a detachment that is positively Participant Observer
      • her view of the “nation” must “incorporate locality” instead of have some abstract view of nation; she looks for a national identity that WON’T obliterate local identity within it
      • Englishness as heterogeneous
      • but must turn aside from otherness that looks threatening (ie Bertha)
  • George Eliot’s Middlemarch can only realize the “multiperspectival, sympathy-spreading realism” by making sure Dorothea isn’t overly privileged, making Eliot have brush Dorothea aside brusquely, despite the “suddenness and seemingly clumsiness” of the technique used to do so
    • I love how there’s a tacit realization that realism has this kind of neighborhood tough quality that is persuasive, but in a controlling, superego kind of way
  • William Morris, News from Nowhere
    • Even though he says it seems odd to put the first and foremost “practitioner” of realism, Eliot, next to the Marxist romancer, he says no that’s exactly what I mean to do: News from Nowhere is “a critical performance of Victorian novelistic self-interruption, affording us a strikingly defamiliarizing view of the romance of culture and authority being carried out in works, including Eliot’s, celebrated and often promoted for their unprecedented verisimilitude.” 299
    • Why? He says it’s actually a ROMANTIC URGE to create a knowable community for England b/c “utopian glimpse of an achieved community”
      • Tho’ Dickens, Bronte, and Eliot “Defer” this community, Morris shows it

Thesis

• After the Act of Union, “emergence of an anthropological culture”
• the novels “show a preoccupation with the prospects and pitfalls of autoethnography

How to Use It?

• I could use it as an interesting commentary on realism b/c its understanding of the novel as something that will influence anthropology is a new way to look at the mixture of science and narrative. But this time, narrative doesn’t follow science a la Zola’s The Experimental Novel, but instead science follows the novel.
• Realism now is an interchange of discourses, one of which is science, for they all consider how to find Authority, Objectivity, and Detachment.
• Lukacs “(who champions the realist novel for its ‘ambition to portray a social whole and to make that whole constantly ‘present [in] its parts’)”
  • The Meaning of Contemporary Realism
• “Raymond Williams (who saw realism as furnishing ‘knowable communities,’ in which ‘neither the society nor the individual is there as a priority’)
  • From The Country and the City, and The Long Revolution
• “Lionel Trilling, for whom the novel’s ‘field of research…[is] always the social world, its subject the distinct textures of ‘manners and morals’ constituting that world)”
  • The Liberal Imagination
• “Frederic Jameson…the telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the collectivity”
• Benedict Anderson: “General details” create “Sociological solidity” that represent the whole
  • Imagined Communities
• Homi Bhabha: “the scraps, patches, and rags of daily life…into the signs of a national culture” qtd 38
  • “Dissemi Nation?”
• However he says that there’s an overemphasis on realism b/c they often use the patterns of romance
  • I say that’s not enough of an answer b/c hardly any Victorian novel is “just” a romance or “just” realistic