Systems Failure: The Uses of Disorder in English Literature. Andrew Franta. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. x+215.

Abstract

It is this standpoint, necessarily distinct from any particular character’s experience, that both establishes the novel’s critical posture and accounts for Franta’s interest in the impersonal dimensions of literary realism. If Systems Failure emphasizes what is external to—and larger than—the modern individual taken singly, it does so in order to show how literary systems interact with extraliterary systems in ways that are not simply mimetic. One of the overarching claims of Franta’s study is that much of the realist novel’s power (critical and otherwise) derives from its lack of correspondence with the so-called real world it is supposed to represent. Indeed, novels often succeed at doing what social and political systems cannot do: assembling their component parts within a comprehensible aesthetic order. Versions of this claim appear throughout the book, beginning with the opening chapter on Johnson’s biography of Richard Savage. Franta explains that Johnson in effect fictionalizes his subject’s life by fixing it within a discursive framework necessarily devoid of either genuine opacity or contingency—the stuff of real life. The subsequent chapter on Sterne develops this point further by showing how the biographer’s dilemma could be converted into the ordering principle of fiction: “Rather than novels about disorder, Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey are about the collision between the impossibility of ordering the world and the impossibility of not ordering the novel” (43). The novel is not so much a systems failure as it is a system that feeds on failure; as Franta shows, it is capable of doing its job very well.