Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel. David Kurnick.

Abstract

David Kumick, Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and Novel (Princeton UP, 2012) xii + 254 $75.00 /$32.50 ppr Provocatively revising accepted genealogy the novel interiority, David Kurnick's Empty Houses reassesses fictional representation private individuality as, not proud product concomitant rise individualism and novel (pace Ian Watt, say), but evidence what he calls the melancholy generic distinction (9), specifically melancholic longing for collective and performative expression offered--actually or nostalgically--by theater. Like Freudian melancholics clinging to instead letting go their lost objects, some novelists nurse their unfulfilled theatrical ambitions and their disappointment with formal and institutional changes 19th theater. Kurnick focuses on W. M. Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin, all whom had theatrical ambitions that went awry and turned into novels or, case Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy (1868), poetry. Working at formal level well beyond thematic or metaphoric appropriations theater (such as, for instance, infamous nonperformance Lovers' Vows Mansfield Park), Kurnick's altogether elegant interpretations unsuccessful plays and their narrative reincarnations demonstrate how staples realist psychological inwardness--interior monologue, stream-of-consciousness, free indirect discourse, and delimited point view--import memory or fantasy of crowded theatrical space into psychic (11). Kurnick's subjects harbor agnosticism about what constitutes truth human personality (21), rather than gloating about their intimate knowledge it. They portray interiority as virtual theater--meager recompense for utopian collective spaces and events, performative political and social engagement, social response, offered by real theater. Kurnick therefore integrates these claims with broader history disaggregation reading and literature from real referents and effects world. As he puts it, in its continued invocation an absent theater novel interiority works to make reader dissatisfied with his status as reader by rendering palpable to him fact his social apartness (28). Kurnick thus departs from Emily Allen, whose beautiful Theater Figures (2003) describes way 19th century novels employed scenes theater to negotiate purportedly private act reading and public market for fiction. The first chapter, Thackeray Theater, describes Vanity Fair (1847-8) as a melancholy gauge reorganization affective space at Victorian mid-century to privilege domestic hearth; Thackeray employs theater not so much as a transcendental signifier disillusion, disgust, and ennui (31) but as depressive dissent levered against privatization reading, closing public fairgrounds, and Theaters Act 1843, which increased number theaters for nonmusical drama but also extended censoring purview Lord Chancellor and therefore accelerated general domestication theater into something tamer, mannered, even trivializing (48). Kurnick nicely delineates how Vanity Fair equivocally employs children as paradoxical emblems trivializing, alienating domestic exclusivity, which miniaturizes history and life, and yet as nostalgic monuments, too, the energies publicity. In Lovel Widower (1860), which Thackeray adapted from his failed play, The Wolves and Lamb (1854), novelistic interiority emerges as container for unaccommodated theatricality (61). Acoustics evokes space empty theater as paradigm for relation between novelist, his characters, and his readers, such that interior monologue or soliloquy fictional characters bespeaks loss live, participative interlocutors. …