Revolutionary Violence and the Rise of the Art Novel

Abstract

How will we look in the eyes of history?Perhaps future historians will mark this moment in American history as one inflection point on a slope towards fascism. Or they might detect the beginnings of a resurgent Left. Or maybe these narratives will seem quaint, historically provincial—and the only story left to tell about us will be our failure to stop consuming the world's fossil fuels. When commentators bother to ask the question explicitly, they often take an answer for granted: voices across the political spectrum cloak themselves in a chameleonic mantle labeled “the right side of history”—as though the future's concerns are obvious and knowable. It's difficult to avoid this trap: many of the actions we take—from creating art to casting a ballot—ask us to guess how we will be measured by the audience of the future. To act on behalf of the future is also to make claims for it, to envision the shape of the mold into which time flows. Acting consequently risks a failure of imagination and the inscription of our own limitations onto a world that might not resemble us at all. When we imagine ourselves judged by eyes of history, there is no blind Justice. We ourselves are blind, judged by a gaze invisible to us. Yet we can't help but make these guesses—when we write, when we speak out, when we protest. We have to live, act, and create under the blank gaze of a history that we can't yet see.The fantasy—and the threat—of the judgment of the future has, since the late nineteenth century, formed the basis of a connection between the history of the Anglophone novel and the history of left-wing political activism. At a crucial historical moment, novelists saw that they shared with some revolutionaries a strategic and ethical problem: balancing the claims of the present against those of the future. Revolutionaries assaulted the present in order to clear space for some alternative social order they may scarcely have been able to glimpse; novelists began to imagine that they would have to spurn the audience of the present in order to create the audience of the future. Both the novelists and the revolutionaries attempted to answer the question: how can you create change when the masses resist it?This essay argues that the literary genre produced by this dilemma is what I call the novel of utopian crime, novels that consider violence committed on the assumption that it will be justified by the utopian future it will help to create. To contemplate utopian crime is to contemplate extinguishing a life today so that many others might flourish in the future. I use the term utopian crime to emphasize two particular elements of this genre. Crime implies its transgression of the norms of an apparently stable society: not the violence that occurs during a full-fledged civil war or revolution, though perhaps the violence that leads to such a war. A character assassinates a repressive minister in order to reveal the fragility of the government's power; a bomber kills civilians in order to eliminate the possibility of political compromise; or a cell of conspirators kills one of their own, believing him to be a police spy who might betray them.1Utopian implies its orientation towards the future, towards the prospect of a social world that dramatically differs from that of the present.2 Utopian crime imagines itself as temporary, as a necessary evil to clear space for something different. Such crime is preoccupied not with the design of society, as it is or might be, but with the modes of action available to change it.Utopian crime holds particular appeal for movements that struggle for mass support—facing an oppressed populace skeptical of the promises of radicals, unwilling to let go of a present order that might be unjust but at least offers a minimal stability. These are revolutionary acts before a revolution is occurring, acts of violence on behalf of people who aren't yet convinced that the cause, or its slender hope of success, is worth the cost. The term “propaganda by deed,” common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, suggests a distant relation between violence and the public. Utopian crime is violent action aimed at getting the people on your side; its perpetrators cannot presume they are already there.3 But the mode in which the perpetrators of utopian crime act is often antagonistic. Sometimes they assume that an oppressed populace waits to rise up at the first sign of a regime's fragility, but often they imagine provoking a violent counterresponse from the government that will eliminate the hesitant moderates. They attack society at a historical moment when many potential fellow travelers still imagine themselves as part of society.Two features of utopian crime—the moral tension it confronts between present and future, and its tendency to step out in advance of public opinion—combine to offer novelists from the 1880s to the present a compelling framework of analogies between the labor of producing aesthetically ambitious fiction and the work of planting a bomb or assassinating an aristocrat. The late nineteenth century not only saw the rise of real historical instances of utopian crime but also fostered the development of what Mark McGurl calls the “art novel.” Anglophone fiction “would now,” he claims, “stake a visible claim in the discursive field of the fine arts and, in doing so, would encourage certain novels, and certain novelists, to set out after unprecedented heights of aesthetic prestige” (McGurl 2).4 This essay will show that this transition—and its long-term consequences for the novel as a form—depended on how the novel dealt with political violence and a Russian literary tradition that takes on the challenge of utopian crime.The history of the modernist novel looks different when we track it back to the novel of utopian crime. Where Anglo-European criticism and theory tends to begin the genealogy of the art novel, as Georg Lukács does, with Gustave Flaubert, we might as easily locate its beginning in his contemporary Ivan Turgenev.5 And once we restore the Russian heritage to our theory of the Anglophone art novel, it becomes visible that the art novel did not seek to transcend politics and therefore history. On the contrary, the problem is that the art novel and political radicals simultaneously confronted rejection by the very masses to whom they intended to appeal, which compelled these artists and intellectuals to reimagine themselves in ways that could not be fully identified with the people.Russian revolutionaries, as I'll show, provided an influential example of radicals rejected by the very people on whose behalf they acted. Alongside political tropes like this one, the absorption of Russian literature into the Anglophone context brought a different configuration of the literary field. The major Russian novelists of the nineteenth century were writing for a country with low rates of literacy and a large rural population; for them, the contemporary reading audience would never reach the scale of “the people” as we imagine the concept today (Todd 403–4).6 Russia's nineteenth-century readership, in other words, reflected the same split between a coterie of dreamers and the dreamed-of future masses that characterized both Russian revolutionary politics and, to a much greater degree than heretofore acknowledged, the rise of the Anglophone art novel.7The fantasy of utopian crime became so central to the development of the modernist art novel because the art novel, like utopian crime, began to elevate the judgment of the future over the present. A work of fiction, novelists imagined, need not be immediately consumed but could acquire value over time and attract readers long after the moment in which it was written. What is more, the world itself might change dramatically in the meantime. In “The Future of the Novel,” Henry James, whose fiction provides my primary case study, declared that the task of fiction is to “move a step in advance of its farthest follower.”8 Joseph Conrad imagined himself as an artist speaking to a “solidarity” that connects individuals to a future beyond themselves, “the dead to the living and the living to the unborn” (Narcissus 6). While James and Conrad were themselves far from political radicals, they were nevertheless committed readers of Turgenev's novels of left-wing activism, and they found in the assassins, bomb throwers, and executioners of utopian crime secret sharers for their own artistic ambitions. The modernist novel followed their lead: the prospect of radical left-wing violence germinated and shaped the ideal of a novel that could be written for the future.9 The novelist recognizes in the perpetrator of utopian crime someone else who attacks what is for the sake of what might be, and who acts in the hope that the judgment of the future will justify his or her actions. The connection between utopian crime and the Anglophone art novel suggests that to think what art is for is to think about one's own responsibility to history, and that a novel aimed at future readers is a novel that begins to imagine itself responsible to history's judgment.The idea of a novel aimed at future readers would have wide currency throughout the twentieth century. Its connection to utopian crime, too, extends beyond novels that treat the subject directly: at the conclusion of this essay, I will argue that it's evident in novels that don't seem invested in political activism at all, such as James's late novel of sex and money The Wings of the Dove. The politics of Wings of the Dove, I'll argue, only become visible when we attend to a shift in the way novels could imagine their political purposes. When galvanized by utopian crime, a novel shifts the question it addresses from what does society look like, and what might it become? to the activist proposition what do we dare do to change it?One of most infamous bomb makers in modernist literature, the Professor, who wanders the streets of London in Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907), shares his author's suspicion of the capacity of the mass of people to bring about change: He was in a long, straight street, peopled by a mere fraction of an intense multitude; but all round him, on and on, even to the limits of the horizon hidden by the enormous piles of bricks, he felt the mass of mankind mighty in its numbers. They swarmed numerous like locusts, industrious like ants, thoughtless like a natural force, pushing on blind and orderly and absorbed, impervious to sentiment, to logic, to terror too perhaps.That was the form of doubt he feared most. Impervious to fear! Often while walking abroad, when he happened also to come out of himself, he had such moments of dreadful and sane mistrust of mankind. What if nothing could move them? Such moments come to all men whose ambition aims at a direct grasp upon humanity—to artists, politicians, thinkers, reformers, or saints. (67)The Professor is an anarchist whose hand rests on a detonator in his pocket, a suicide bomber waiting for his moment. It is a little strange, then, to encounter the catalogue of more sympathetic figures that conclude this passage, as the artist, the politician, the thinker, the reformer, and the saint join the terrorist.In one sense, the association between art and political violence was almost as tired a trope at that time as it is in our own. We might cite G. K. Chesterton's anarchist poet Lucian Gregory, who claims, “An artist is identical with an anarchist” (4), as he wanders the landscape of The Man Who Was Thursday, published, like The Secret Agent, in 1907. In his “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” André Breton offers “dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly . . . into the crowd” as an example of surrealist action (125). But Conrad aligns the terrorist with the artist on a slightly different basis. Rather than Chesterton's parallel between social and literary form—his poets debate whether poetry can be found in chaos or in order—and Breton's declaration of aesthetic antipathy to social order, Conrad's Professor focuses on the disappointing qualities of the crowd as an audience. While he might indeed resemble Breton's pistol-waving surrealist, as a figure of violence directed against the crowd, the Professor has a certain longing to engage the crowd even as he despises it. Like the artist, he desires a “direct grasp upon humanity.” The suggestion is that he seeks not simply an audience, but also an audience who will be moved. The catalogue of figures among whom Conrad arrays him suggests a whole universe of anxieties about audience: even saints seem to act, not for the eyes of God, but for the immoveable masses. The Professor imagines attacking the crowd, ironically, in order to enlist it on his behalf.In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, we find novelists and political activists alike poised between the dream of mass support and the darker compensation of working first for a small audience of fellow thinkers, between soliciting the action and encouragement of the people and attacking the present (and its inhabitants) for the sake of the future. Writers, thinkers, and readers for the first time began broadly to conceive of the novel as an art form rather than popular entertainment; this is exemplified most famously in English by Henry James's various essays and prefaces. Looking back today, one of the most important stories we tell about this period is that of the “great divide,” a term which Andreas Huyssen uses, following Theodor W. Adorno, to think about the vexed relation between high culture and mass media during the twentieth century. Modernism, in narratives of the history of the novel as a genre, is often understood to be the moment of this divide: the day the seas parted.10McGurl, in reference to the rise of the “art novel,” notes that the photographic frontispieces of the New York Editions of James's novels feature the closed doorways of monumental houses and so raise questions as to whether we should consider the novels themselves as elite spaces to which only a few might have “access” (38). An extreme version of this same statement can be turned against modernism itself, as when John Carey claims, “the principle around which modernist literature and culture fashioned themselves was the exclusion of the masses, the defeat of their power, the removal of their literacy, the denial of their humanity.”11 Yet the rising walls of the great divide are equally a story of the frustrated dream of democracy, in which authors don't shut the doors of their art to the public so much as long for interested visitors to the house of fiction. Indeed, McGurl has them wondering in more fretful terms, “who even cares to see what's inside?” (38). James was often skeptical as to whether the masses possessed aesthetic sensibility, but he never stopped wanting them to want his books, as Michael Anesko has shown, apparently for reasons beyond the financial stability that popularity would bring him.The story of the rise of the art novel as a distinct genre is also the story of the slow death of the dream of a populist art novel. From our vantage point today, it may be difficult to disentangle the dream of the art novel from the idea of an intellectual aristocracy that produces literature by and for people already rich in cultural, if not economic resources. But the masses need not be figured as an inhuman threat to an old aesthetic regime. The masses are also an object of hope and desire: for artists to fear that the broader public might not be moved by their work, they have to wish deeply that it might be. Conrad's Professor reminds us of a figure contemporaneous with modernism who similarly craved a popular response but turned to a secret coterie instead: the revolutionary. If modernism had its moments of figuring the masses as a threat (welcome or unwelcome, depending on the modernist in question) to preexisting cultural norms and standards, then it was equally inclined to resent the masses as impossible to stir against the very order that exploits them.12 From this perspective, the masses do not augur a future threat to the given social order but an obstacle in the path of such a future and a complacent medium for reproducing the past.The modernist period offered several well-known examples of revolutionaries who themselves confronted the problem of recalcitrant masses. The tension between a vision of populist revolution and a system of secretive cells was not new to Russian revolutionary movements, but it had a new prominence in the 1870s. This became especially explicit in one novel that had an outsized impact on both James and Conrad. Ivan Turgenev's Virgin Soil (1877) directly inspired James's The Princess Casamassima (1886), his only novel about class warfare, and influenced Conrad's Under Western Eyes (1911). Virgin Soil is about the Russian Populists, a group of primarily urban intelligentsia who in 1874 went to the countryside to encourage the peasants to rise up in revolt.13 The novel portrays this effort as a failure at once tragic and comic, as one revolutionary is betrayed to the police by the people he seeks to agitate, while another accidentally drinks himself insensible in an effort to blend in with them. The latter is the protagonist, Nezhdanov, who, upon deciding he cannot “simplify” himself—he likes poetry too much to feel at home among working men—commits suicide.14 Like Nezhdanov, the protagonist of The Princess Casamassima is the unacknowledged offspring of the nobility, an aesthete involved with revolutionaries, who encounters at the theater an aristocrat who invites him to live for a time in a country estate. There both protagonists become close to a beautiful woman whose own place among the aristocracy is insecure and whose commitment to the revolutionary cause they find inspiring. Eventually, both protagonists prove ill-suited to revolution and commit suicide.Historically, the failure of the Populists in the countryside was widely credited with catalyzing the formation of the People's Will, a much more secretive organization that undertook a series of assassination attempts, culminating in the murder of the tsar in 1881. The figure of the Russian terrorist quickly filtered into English culture: Oscar Wilde wrote Vera; or, the Nihilists in 1880, based on Vera Zasulich, who attempted to kill the governor of St. Petersburg in 1878. Turgenev's novel does not feature radical violence, but commentators at the time connected Marianna, the young woman who becomes a revolutionary in the novel, to Zasulich (Siljak 298–99). Between the two novels—Turgenev's in 1877 and James's in 1886—the idea of the revolutionary assassin had suddenly shot to international prominence. Thus, by the time James started writing The Princess Casamassima, he had already seen a real-life sequel to Turgenev's novel, in which failed populism led to assassination. Princess incorporates this history, so that the novels diverge at the moment of populist engagement, when James's Hyacinth Robinson is invited to join a shadowy conspiratorial organization and vows to carry out an unspecified assassination in the future.But the plot that The Princess Casamassima borrowed from Turgenev's novel had a more pervasive influence on James's career. Its building blocks appear in another James narrative, where a sensitive young man desperately seeks to make an impression on a broader, less sensitive world for the sake of a charismatic woman but ultimately dies, having failed to overcome his delicate aesthetic awareness. This is the plot of the 1895 short story “The Next Time,” which concerns a novelist who tries repeatedly to achieve popular success to support his family, but nevertheless produces fiction that is too accomplished to sustain him financially. James's fiction of the 1880s and 1890s is rife with such sensitive souls torn between the public and a love of the aesthetic. Although The Princess Casamassima is James's only direct engagement with revolutionary politics, in the aftermath of the novel's popular failure, he took to exploiting the analogical relationship between Turgenev's representation of activists' struggle with a reluctant populace and the struggles of the artist.That James might adapt the same story to address both the labor of art-making and that of revolution isn't surprising. The Jamesian artist in particular is associated with the same tropes that accumulated around Russian radicals during the 1860s and ’70s: rejection of romantic attachments, devotion to a single vocation. In Turgenev's Fathers and Children (1862), the nihilist Bazarov scorns romantic love, while in Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? (1863), the minor character Rakhmetov, widely received as a paradigmatic revolutionary type, declares his determination not to become attached to any woman. This same renunciation of emotional attachment recurs throughout James's tales of artists. The most extreme expression of this antisocial imperative was “Catechism of the Revolutionist” (1869). Likely authored by Sergei Nechaev with Mikhail Bakunin, its account of what it takes to be a revolutionary descends in part from the widely influential Rakhmetov: “The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no interests of his own, no affairs, no feelings, no attachments, no belongings, not even a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion—the revolution” (Nechaev 68). The second list here re-inscribes the first list at the level of abstraction, where concrete affairs, attachments, and belongings become more intangible thoughts and passions. The revolutionary sacrifices all his connections with society for the sake of revolution, which becomes an abstract version of the social connections it destroys.Compare, for instance, the older novelist St. George in James's The Lesson of the Master (1888), who speaks of the social difficulties of the artist to a young writer, Paul Overt: “He has nothing to do with the relative—he has only to do with the absolute; and a dear little family may represent a dozen relatives.”“Then you don't allow him the common passions and affections of men?” Paul asked.“Hasn't he a passion, an affection, which includes all the rest?” (Novels and Tales 15: 76)St. George and Nechaev both deny certain elements of human life and social connection—but they also imply that their chosen vocations will materialize those elements in some other form. They sacrifice romantic love and fellow-feeling for other human beings in the name of abstract versions of the same thing. The “passion” of the novelist's art “includes” the human passions he will not himself feel. Just as the revolutionary divests himself of attachments for other human beings and invests his “interests” in the revolution, so the artist places the representation of passion and affection above their actuality.This parallel also appears in what is perhaps James's most famous expression of the artist's labor, the climactic speech of one of many short stories he wrote about dying writers, “The Middle Years” (1893). The protagonist, Dencombe, who has published what he regards as his best novel yet, confronts the fact that he will not get the chance to publish another: “A second chance—that's the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art” (Novels and Tales 16: 105). Although Dencombe isn't thinking politically, there are structural (and even syntactical) parallels between this artist and Nechaev's revolutionary, with an accretive list of reasons for his commitment to an unstated ideal that culminates in “passion” for a cause rather than a person.15 Each credo follows with a climactic naming of that cause (revolution; art). The man without a name and the man in the dark, working tirelessly and devotedly for a cause that they will never see incarnated, look more alike than different.16 The artist is the man who, like any conspirator, makes plots under cover of darkness.It's unclear whether James had read the “Catechism,” but its basic outlines were notorious.17 Nevertheless, “The Middle Years” has a more direct connection to Russian literature. It is a story about an unexpected discovery of a literary audience, beginning when Dencombe encounters a young man who seems to be reading and enjoying his latest novel. The reader, Dr. Hugh, seems an unpromising literary disciple: “The admirer in truth was mystifying, so rare a case was it to find a bristling young doctor—he looked like a German physiologist—enamoured of literary form” (16: 87). The reason why Dr. Hugh is so “mystifying” is not because he happens to be a doctor, but because he resembles a literary character who is a medical man associated with German physiology: the nihilist Bazarov, in Turgenev's Fathers and Children. James even rewrites one of the most memorable scenes in Turgenev's novel. In this scene, Bazarov spots the father of his friend Arkady reading Alexander Pushkin and tells Arkady of its uselessness, prescribing instead a treatise in materialist philosophy by the German physiologist Ludwig Büchner. Arkady then replaces his father's Pushkin with Büchner. Dr. Hugh and Dencombe switch books, too, in “The Middle Years.” Instead of substituting a materialist treatise for poetry, however, James has his characters exchange copies of the same book, none other than Dencombe's novel, which unites rather than divides the generations.Turgenev's scene made an impression on James; he mentions Bazarov and his book in an 1873 essay: “Bazaroff is a so-called ‘nihilist’—a red-handed radical, fresh from the shambles of criticism, with Büchner's Stoff und Kraft as a text-book, and everything in nature and history for his prey. He is young, strong, and clever, and strides about, rejoicing in his scepticism, sparing nothing, human or divine, and proposing to have demolished the universe before he runs his course” (Literary Criticism 2: 985). James's depiction of the “bristling” Dr. Hugh, a “clever son of the age” who “had all the new learning in science and all the old reverence in faith,” rewrites Turgenev's nihilist scientist who believes in nothing (16: 96). Dr. Hugh fulfills a writer's fantasy of the ideal audience: he is an insightful reader, eager to share his favorite lines from the author's novel. James has transformed the art-hating devotee of revolution and German physiology into a votary of art.This is James's response to the problem of an apparently apathetic audience: to start imagining that a receptive audience may be out there in a form he can't expect or fully see. Dr. Hugh looks like Bazarov, like the sort of person who would disdain literature, but he turns out to be the opposite in this one respect. The ideal reader, in other words, is the person that you don't expect to be moved by your art; the ideal reader is not someone you can anticipate or understand. If the vocation of an author resembles that of a revolutionary, the story implies that the youthful energies of revolution might also be a capacity for aesthetic appreciation and that the work of the artist requires a kind of humility about your own inability to glimpse the future that will judge your work. The novelist, like the perpetrators of utopian crime, pins his hopes on the masses to come. The audience of art becomes infinite as it becomes distant from the artist, its incarnation incipient rather than present.18 “The Middle Years” converts Turgenev's narrative, preoccupied with literature's narrowing audience in the new generation and featuring a young man skeptical of the aesthetic achievements of the past, into a narrative that opens onto an impossibly expansive readership—at the cost of any immediate access to that readership.Dencombe's motivating conviction is that his latest novel is his best thing yet. Mortally ill, he senses that he has no time in which to take advantage of his artistic breakthrough: that time is the “second chance” he desires. The speech about “the madness of art” reflects his realization that the future will not be his to create, that he has made his contribution. As an author, his vision is partial, fallible, and therefore at the mercy of the future to come. But he believes that future is just around the corner, because it is one that he had a hand in creating. He might catch a glimpse of it in a representative of the future, someone like Dr. Hugh, but the future is not something he could ever imagine. When Dr. Hugh tells Dencombe, “The second chance has been the public's,” he suggests that the artist has a hand in creating the future by dint of what his fiction does to the reader: it estranges the audience, like the artist, from the social present (16: 103). In “The Middle Years,” that present is represented by the marriage plot.19 Thus we find the “infatuated” Dr. Hugh privileging his attachment to Dencombe to the extent that it exacts from him both a financial and social sacrifice. By attending to Dencombe during the period of his illness, Dr. Hugh loses favor with a wealthy patroness, and alienates a woman who had depended on him to continue receiving that financial support.James's stories about artists recurrently demonstrate that the artist and the revolutionary share both the key features of utopian crime: its tension between the claims of the present and those of the future, as well as its association with movements that do not yet appeal to the masses. On the one hand, the artist shares the revolutionary's personal estrangement from today's social world, along with his commitment to some form of abstract ideal. But the artist also shares the revolutionary's anxieties: the risk that the people of today, on whose behalf you desire to work, will reject your purpose, perhaps at gre