Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels and Nineteenth-Century Realism, by Mary L. Mullen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels and Nineteenth-Century Realism by Mary L. Mullen Gordon Bigelow (bio) Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels and Nineteenth-Century Realism, by Mary L. Mullen; pp. xi + 252. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, $110.00, $29.95 paper, $110.00 ebook. Americans used to scorn the procedural anomalies they perceived in Global South nations, using various popular nostrums and academic rubrics. They were so-called banana republics, kleptocracies, with low scores on something called the freedom index. The terms were all ways of pointing to the soundness of liberal institutions in the United States, whose constitution and surrounding mechanisms supposedly insured even application of the rule of law. The absurd bad faith of this contrast has only become more glaring in the past decade. The only thing that made "liberal institutions" appear to function consistently was a set of habits and relations of power (2). If somebody decided to break the habit in, say, Supreme Court nominations or voting regulation, the whole illusion would collapse. The distinction serves merely to express a political relation, a distribution of authority and administrative power. In Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels and Nineteenth-Century Realism, Mary L. Mullen makes a similar argument about realism. The term was used to describe a set of procedures European writers developed for representing everyday life. Their books were said to project a "shared social reality," and this vision of social coherence was reflected in the books' own internal formal consistency, their organic integration of multiple plots and voices (37). Novels outside this metropolitan core were seen, by contrast, as inorganic or artificial constructions, internally divided, didactic rather than probabilistic. In fact, Mullen argues, what was called realism in the Global North was as divided and didactic as anything else. It was only a set of critical habits that made these texts seem to be formally consistent and close-readable, with an overall design that seemed to express their thematic content. The distinction only ever expressed what Elaine Freedgood would call (in the same year as Mullen's book) "aesthetic racism" (Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel [Princeton UP, 2019], 139). So what happens if we set aside these crumbling imperial distinctions? For Mullen, what we find is a common set of features that govern the realist novel in both core and periphery. The best way to glimpse these, she argues, is to think about realism not as an aesthetic or epistemological practice but rather as an institution—a set of critical and consumer structures that organize social life. The most important feature of institutions, for Mullen, is that they work to manage time, to link past practice to future outcome. As such, institutions rely systematically on anachronism, grounding the present in some projected vision of past life. And while anachronisms are most often put to work to bolster a sense of continuity, to conserve the current social order and reproduce it, anachronism itself always carries the potential for showing us ways of doing things differently, for breaking a social order rather than conserving it. To make this case, Mullen compares Irish novels of the Victorian period—which over the years have been described as too episodic, too fantastical, or too historical to be counted as "realist"—with staples of the English novel in the period (3). She demonstrates that writers on both sides of this one-time critical border "work to represent a shared social reality," and ground their sense of present reality in ideas of past times and past lives (37). She begins with the Irish writers Charles Kickham and William Carleton, [End Page 507] showing how their work deals with the "politicised temporal divisions" of Ireland's colonial modernity (74), the "temporal gap[s]" (77) or "multiple temporalities" endemic to a society built on colonial extraction (95). She then shows a similar dynamic at work in George Eliot, whose plots often invoke literacy as an "index of modernisation," marking the past as a time of backwardness and superstition that could only be dispelled by widespread education (109). But, paradoxically, reading provides Eliot's characters themselves with access to the past, a view to the same temporal...