Austen’s Swarms and Plots

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the way that things happen in Austen’s plots. It suggests that mobility and numerousness characterize not just a social universe represented in the novels but a particular view of physical reality at a different scale. What matters there is the capacity of things to enter into combinations with other things through movements both small and large, material and mental. Plot reveals itself as a field of ever-shifting positions. In this field, the boundaries between persons, between virtual and actual events, between movement, discourse, and plot are surprisingly unimportant. In Austen’s novels, as in other realist novels, plot actively takes the measure of a world understood to have a particular ontological character. Austen’s conceptions of motion and eventfulness can be linked to the investigations of matter made by natural philosophers before and after her, as well as theoretical work by Massumi, Levinson, and others.