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

IF 0.3 4区 社会学 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal Pub Date : 2023-08-01 DOI:10.1080/08905495.2023.2241269
Suzanne Keen
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引用次数: 2

Abstract

Carra Glatt’s ebullient Narrative and its Nonevents announces through its rhyming title an affinity with D. A. Miller’s Narrative and its Discontents (1981). In that work one can find a description of nonnarratable events with no narrative future, incapable of generating story, and productively in tension with the narratable. While Miller famously investigated the traditional novel’s vexed relationship with its condition of possibilities and narratability, on the one hand, and the narrowing event of closure, on the other, Glatt plumbs the depths of the unrealized possibilities, deselected plotlines, and unwritten events of Victorian fiction. These nonexistent or counterfactual materials are not quite the absent presences of the deconstructive 1980s. They make up the ocean of story in which Victorian realist novels bob like icebergs, their relatively probable, nonidealized, verisimilar surfaces concealing vaster volumes of deselected genres, allegorical character types, implausible outcomes, and fantastical imaginary worlds that, though mainly unrepresented in the visible novels above, accrete below the waterline to preserve the buoyant powers of romance. Glatt discerns three major types of unwritten plot: shadow plots from the romance tradition that act as underplots to the main plots in works by Charles Dickens; proxy narratives (implied, unnarratable alternatives) to the main plots in sensation fiction by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins as well as in the psychological realism of late Henry James; and hypothetically realist unwritten plots in novels by Thomas Hardy and Elizabeth Gaskell— those that “expand the limits of narrative and social possibility... envision[ing] possibilities that are currently inaccessible but potentially attainable in an improved future” (Glatt 2022, 31). She illustrates the productive potentialities of her proposed categories of the unwritten plot in lively, extended interpretations of episodes from eleven Victorian novels and a recent Booker-prize winning novel, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2015). Briefer treatments of dozens of other (mostly English) novels from the eighteenth-century onwards convey both Glatt’s wide reading and her open-mindedness about the variety and worth of diverse fictions in many modes and genres. Though her subject is a phenomenon of Victorian realism, she has a capacious sense of works deserving of that label (by back-formation), and if her range of reference overlaps with a Leavisean Great Tradition, it extends that canon by eschewing snobby border-patrolling. To read Narrative and its Nonevents is to keep company with an enthusiastic novel-reader, informed but not limited by narratology and theories of the novel, acute in her judgments, occasionally hilarious, and possessed of a pungent prose style. Reading Victorian fiction over the shoulder of such an author invites critical conversation: indeed, Glatt addresses us genially as Dear Readers, the co-creators whose opinions and decisions will participate in imagining the future of both fiction and its interpretation. So here are my two cents. When Glatt writes of generic struggles between older narrative forms and the newly dominant realism, relegated to the unwritten as “relics of the past,”or of the incoming portents of the future that “demote” realism (Glatt 2022, 32), I think of Raymond Williams’ cultural theory of residual, dominant, and emergent forms (1977, 121– 127). Williams as much as Miller can be felt as a guiding spirit in Narrative and its Nonevents, as when Glatt writes:
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叙事及其非事件:塑造维多利亚现实主义的不成文情节
卡拉·格拉特的热情洋溢的《叙述及其非事件》通过其押韵的标题与d·a·米勒的《叙述及其不满》(1981)相似。在那部作品中,人们可以找到对不可叙述的事件的描述,这些事件没有叙述的未来,无法产生故事,并且与可叙述的内容产生张力。米勒著名地研究了传统小说的复杂关系,一方面是可能性和可叙事性的条件,另一方面是封闭的狭窄事件,而格拉特则深入探究了维多利亚小说中未实现的可能性、未选择的情节线和未写的事件。这些不存在或反事实的材料并不完全是解构主义的20世纪80年代的缺席。它们构成了一个故事的海洋,维多利亚时代的现实主义小说就像冰山一样漂浮在其中,它们相对可能的、非理想化的、真实的表面隐藏着大量未经选择的体裁、讽喻的人物类型、令人难以置信的结果和幻想的想象世界,这些虽然在上面的可见小说中主要没有表现出来,但在水线以下积聚起来,以保持浪漫的浮力。Glatt区分了三种主要类型的未写情节:来自浪漫主义传统的影子情节,作为查尔斯·狄更斯作品中主要情节的潜在情节;玛丽·伊丽莎白·布莱登和威尔基·柯林斯的感觉小说以及亨利·詹姆斯后期的心理现实主义小说中主要情节的代理叙事(隐含的,不可叙述的替代);以及托马斯·哈代和伊丽莎白·盖斯凯尔小说中虚构的现实主义未写情节——这些情节“扩大了叙事和社会可能性的界限……设想目前无法实现,但在改善的未来有可能实现的可能性”(Glatt 2022, 31)。她对11本维多利亚时代的小说和最近获得布克奖的小说——保罗·比蒂的《出卖》(2015)中的情节进行了生动、深入的解读,展示了她提出的未写情节类别的生产潜力。对18世纪以来的其他几十部小说(主要是英语小说)的简要分析,既体现了格拉特的广泛阅读,也体现了她对多种模式和体裁的各种小说的多样性和价值的开放思想。虽然她的主题是维多利亚时代现实主义的现象,但她对作品的理解却很宽泛(通过反向形成),如果她的参考范围与里维斯的伟大传统重叠,那么她通过避免势利的边境巡逻来扩展了这一经典。阅读《叙事》和《非事件》是与一位热情的小说读者为伴,她了解小说的叙事学和理论,但不受其限制,她的判断敏锐,偶尔令人捧腹,并拥有辛辣的散文风格。在这样一位作家的肩膀上阅读维多利亚时代的小说,会引发批判性的对话:事实上,格拉特亲切地称呼我们为亲爱的读者,我们是共同的创作者,我们的观点和决定将参与想象小说及其解读的未来。这是我的两分意见。当Glatt写到旧的叙事形式和新占主导地位的现实主义之间的普遍斗争,这些斗争被视为“过去的遗迹”,被视为不成文的东西,或者是“贬低”现实主义的未来预兆(Glatt 2022, 32)时,我想到了雷蒙德·威廉姆斯关于剩余形式、主导形式和新兴形式的文化理论(1977,121 - 127)。威廉姆斯和米勒一样,都是《叙事及其非事件》的指导精神,正如格拉特写道:
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.20
自引率
0.00%
发文量
46
期刊介绍: Nineteenth-Century Contexts is committed to interdisciplinary recuperations of “new” nineteenth centuries and their relation to contemporary geopolitical developments. The journal challenges traditional modes of categorizing the nineteenth century by forging innovative contextualizations across a wide spectrum of nineteenth century experience and the critical disciplines that examine it. Articles not only integrate theories and methods of various fields of inquiry — art, history, musicology, anthropology, literary criticism, religious studies, social history, economics, popular culture studies, and the history of science, among others.
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