Mere Inventions of the Imagination

Abstract

Two different accounts of Enlightenment systems can both be true: that the desire to systematize life and knowledge was a hallmark of the historical Enlightenment and that such efforts to systematize often failed. That the latter is the case—as Andrew Franta elegantly demonstrates in Systems Failure: The Uses of Disorder in English Literature—has important implications for how we understand the Enlightenment genre of system. Franta's study calls attention to the ways novels and other prose texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries evinced skepticism of systematic understandings of the social world and offers thereby a compelling revision of familiar histories of the rise of the realist novel. As such, Systems Failure ends up having more to say about what constitutes novelistic realism in the period—and what novels do—than about the genre of system.I will get my main critique—really a partial critique—of Franta's book out of the way from the outset: the book does not engage enough with the Enlightenment concept of system itself to do justice to system's successes and failures (that is, likewise, to do justice to all of Franta's incisive readings). For one, even the most ardent Enlightenment systematizers, like Adam Smith, understood system as a kind of fiction (as opposed to a rigid imposition of order to which reality is ultimately reducible). In “Essays on Philosophical Subjects” (section 4, “The History of Astronomy”), for example, Smith writes, “All philosophical systems [are] mere inventions of the imagination, to connect together the otherwise disjointed and discordant phenomena of nature” (Smith 218–21). By Smith's account, then, the genre of system already proceeds from an admission that the world is messy—“disjointed and discordant”—and therefore the imaginative leap systematizing requires will never stand in simple relation to the messy world it aims to organize and know. In short, systematizing is a creative process that often, and rightly, looks similar to fictionalizing. A second and related point here is that a key feature of Enlightenment systems was error correction, the ability to know better by iteration. Which is to suggest that system failures are not necessarily repudiations of system or capitulations to disorder but rather moments at which one must revise or reimagine the relationship between the system and the real. It seems therefore that we could understand many of the narrative forms Franta discusses, forms that construct and revise systems of order, as evidence of systems assimilating their own shortcomings and correcting to meet the ongoing challenges of disorder.I call this a partial critique because I think Franta's readings already bear this out, just without much metadiscussion of what system and system failure entail. And I open with this partial critique to show how Franta's book evinces a productive demonstration of the humble, self-aware side of Enlightenment systems even as the book sometimes conflates system's reflexivity with failures or critiques of system. Franta's first chapter, on how Samuel Johnson's Life of Savage negotiates the stylistic and epistemological perils of life writing, contains a remarkable insight along these lines. In a reading of how accident and doubt animate and confound Johnson's effort to illustrate what Franta calls “Richard Savage's perplexing life,” the first chapter explains how life writing necessarily entails wrestling with the desire to tell things as they are and the inevitability of imposing order, sequence, interiority, and judgment upon the life being written (26). The chapter concludes with the concise formulation that “invention is less a mistake than the essential condition of life writing” (40). Through the example of Life of Savage, Franta captures precisely how the effort to systematize tends to force systematizers into self-awareness about what the act of systematizing is and is not. In other words, it forces awareness that systematizing and fictionalizing are in some ways overlapping practices and that the construction of system as a means of knowing will inevitably expose how and what one still does not know.From this point Systems Failure turns, in chapters 2 through 5, to a series of readings of prose fiction from Laurence Sterne to Jane Austen. Taken together, these readings make a significant contribution to the study of novelistic realism. In this way Franta's book is an important part of an exciting movement in literary studies over the last decade to reevaluate novelistic realism and the history of the novel. Texts like Sandra Macpherson's Harm's Way and Jesse Molesworth's Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, among others—both of which Franta references in his introduction—constitute important revisions of Ian Watt's influential thesis about the eighteenth-century novel's formal realism. We can think of Systems Failure as part of this scholarly tradition.The second chapter, on “Sterne and the Uses of Disorder,” argues that for Sterne the will to order is “inevitably thwarted,” but Sterne's narration nonetheless portrays and performs a desire to put messy realities into order and to ironize repeated failures to do so (43). This observation is important for reevaluating novelistic realism, because, as Franta puts it, “Sterne does not merely observe the tension between accident and necessity that characterizes the novel as a form; he makes it into an engine for the production of fiction” (44). In this sense, texts like A Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy depict worlds in which characters are at the mercy of circumstance, characters like Sir Walter are “less a character in the traditional sense and more an occasion or circumstance in Sterne's expanded sense,” and gestural communication leads often to guesswork and confusion (60). In such a novelistic world of missed connections and plans gone awry, what Sterne represents is neither a complete image of life as it is nor a simple “celebration of indeterminacy” but rather a world of contingency and unpredictable interpersonal relations to which Sterne's fictions of system failure respond (62).Franta builds on this argument about the difficulty (or impossibility) of a comprehensive representation of real-world contingency in the third chapter via a study of Humphry Clinker. Responding to William Hazlitt's judgment that novels represent “the very web and texture of society as it really exists,” Franta considers the possibility that Humphry Clinker performs a kind of statistical analysis of society as a “web of connections or a texture of relationships” (66–67). Humphry Clinker ostensibly takes the narrative form of a map across which the Bramble party travels, portraying diverse spatial and social scenes in London and Bath (the novel's scenes of “threatening modernity”) and Scotland (the novel's way of producing critical distance from which to understand the modernity represented in London and Bath) (80). As Franta argues, the consequence of Tobias Smollett's maplike narrative structure is that Humphry Clinker portrays not a “conclusive vision of a well-ordered society” but a way of “conceptualizing social organization that cuts against the idea of society as a coherent picture” (82). The “statistical analysis” Humphry Clinker enacts finds that the model of social organization is more like a network than a map (82).The fourth chapter, on William Godwin's Caleb Williams, is in my view the most ingenious chapter in the book, though also the chapter at which the book's argumentative through-lines on system failure and novelistic realism begin to fade. This is in part due to the fact that it breaks up intuitive connections between the third chapter and the fifth chapter, the latter of which is on how Jane Austen's novels effect not a linear transition into the characteristic psychological realism of the nineteenth-century novel but a structural arrangement of characters “sufficient for the purposes of the plot” (114). In this way, the treatment of Austen in chapter 5 would seem to cohere more straightforwardly with Franta's argument in chapter 3, on Humphry Clinker, about how Smollett's rendering of characters and episodic plot “reflect a novelistic aesthetic oriented toward a conception of society as a networked system” (both Smollett and Austen appear to plot characters as in a network chart) (116). Having recently made difficult choices about when and whether to break from historical organization in my own book, I am wholly sympathetic to the organizational difficulty Franta faces here, so my remarks on this score are mainly to draw out a connection I see emerging from Franta's readings of Smollett and Austen. Nevertheless, the placement of the fourth chapter on Caleb Williams between readings of Smollett and Austen breaks the momentum of Franta's original argument about how novels were and were not representing social realities.In an insightful approach to Caleb Williams, Franta reads and historicizes three instances of handshakes (or attempted handshakes) in Godwin's text and finds that Godwin's portrayal of handshakes complicates his political allegory. Beginning with Tyrrel's refusal to shake Falkland's hand, Franta explains that what looks like “Falkland's egalitarian gesture” toward Tyrrel is really Falkland's projecting an “air of superiority” (89). The meaning of handshakes, Franta tells us, underwent a transition during the eighteenth century, from intentional gestures signaling friendship, peace, reconciliation, or mutual agreement to more perfunctory gestures of “greeting or parting” (91). Tyrrel's refusal of the handshake, then, reflects either skepticism of Falkland's attempt at reconciliation or an understanding of Falkand's gesture as faux-conciliatory and nonegalitarian. Franta takes such moments as instructive: Caleb Williams portrays the impossibility of a successful or genuine handshake as a reflection of the impossibility of cooperation (following from Godwin's chapter “Cooperation, Cohabitation, and Marriage” in Political Justice). Franta claims further that Godwin saw the novel as a vehicle “not merely for reaching a different set of readers [from those of Political Justice] but also for advancing a different kind of analysis than that afforded by ‘books of philosophy and science’” (90).We can certainly understand the failed handshake as a kind of system breakdown, just as we can understand (as in A Sentimental Journey and Caleb Williams) a text that ends with unresolved problems as a reflection of the eighteenth-century novel's resistance to tidy systematizing. But here is where Systems Failure would benefit from more sustained consideration of what the concept of system and the historical acts of Enlightenment systematizing did and did not entail. As Franta shows, Caleb Williams indeed depicts kinds of system failure, but it also—as Franta equally shows—offers a parallel system to the philosophical system laid out in Political Justice. Franta is right to question straightforward political-allegory readings of Caleb Williams and to turn our attention to how Godwin's novel portrays a breakdown of cooperative possibilities. But fiction functions here like a philosophical system, or in Franta's words, “a different kind of analysis” (90).By the end of Systems Failure, Franta returns more explicitly to questions of system. The final chapter offers a fascinating account of Thomas De Quincey's reflections on system in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, “The English Mail-Coach,” and “System of the Heavens.” Reading De Quincey as a post-Enlightenment figure, Franta takes De Quincey's obsessive interest in systems as evidence that “the systematizing impulse is at once impossible to satisfy and impossible to escape” (136). From here Franta links De Quincey's concerns about publication—that it is inherently inequitable because publication of more books means fewer readers for each—with De Quincey's writings on the mail-coach, which was “at once a figure for publication and the vehicle by which the news [was] published” (140). De Quincey's concerns about this relationship suggest his “commitment to an ever-finer-grained account of the effects of systems on social life” (151). Following “System of the Heavens,” “The English Mail-Coach” was for Franta De Quincey's “attempt to bring . . . self-knowledge down to earth” (164). This final chapter ends with an account of systems as necessary fictions that necessarily fail (166).If we compare Smith's account of systematizing with which I began this review—systems as “mere inventions of the imagination”—to the final account of system in chapter 6—system as “necessary fiction”—we find that De Quincey's post-Enlightenment portrayal of systems looks quite similar to Smith's. From this we can understand that through a collection of careful and compelling readings, Franta has his finger on the pulse of Enlightenment systems and system breakdowns. The question remains, however, to what extent Enlightenment systematizers anticipated system failure not as evidence of the futility of systematizing but as part of the very iterative process systems are meant to engender.Regardless of whether we understand system failure in such an optimistic way or, as Franta's book suggests, as a reflection of system's explanatory shortcomings, Systems Failure enriches our understanding of Enlightenment systems and is essential reading for anyone interested in the subject. Beyond that, its chapters constitute major critical contributions to the history of the novel and the literary texts they treat, and they should be read by anyone learning or writing about Johnson, Sterne, Smollett, Godwin, Austen, and De Quincey. This is a highly readable and engaging book, well worth your time.