Performing Authorship in the Silver Fork Novel: Managing a Thing Filled with Objects

Abstract

This chapter explores the affinity of three peculiar aspects of the silver fork novel, its seeming endless listing of objects, its obsession over the power of representations (visual and textual), and its metareferential narrative commentary. While the genre seemingly ascribes to a stark human–nonhuman divide by emphasizing the difference between “truth” and representation, this divide is belied by the manner in which representations prove in the novel to be intimately tied to an individual’s power, reinforcing or undermining that power. Generically prescribed lists of objects furthermore suggest the genre’s status as a social-climbing guidebook, highlighting the novel’s agency while also undermining the author’s creative powers. As a result, professional silver fork authors turn to metareferential commentary, both to allay the negative effects of endless enumeration and to insist on their ability to write their own fictions. Silver fork novelists thus overtly perform a style of authorship as they insist on the human agency involved in a form that is already heavily dictated by material constraints.