The Novel and the Problem of New Life

Abstract

The stakes of Aaron Matz’s learned and engaging book on late nineteenth-century and modernist fiction do not fully emerge until the final chapter, which moves into the twenty-first century to discuss ambivalence about having children in a time of climate crisis. This context brings a historical focus to a study that up to that point has often seemed to lack one, arguing as it does for the persistence of a single theme through the works of a group of authors from different periods and with divergent political and cultural affiliations.The theme at hand may seem unsurprising: Matz’s book treats the decision to have children or not as a recurring concern in fiction by Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, and Doris Lessing. From the nineteenth century, though, besides Hardy, Matz takes as his points of departure the fiction and correspondence of Gustave Flaubert and novels by Samuel Butler, especially the utopian Erewhon and his quasi-autobiographical The Way of All Flesh. Flaubert and Butler make an odd couple as progenitors of modernism, and Matz’s readings of their work, satisfying in their own right, also introduce important motifs in the argument that follows. Flaubert is here to make the case that an antipathy to procreation is, if not purely a stylistic choice, at least of a piece with choices about form and style. Flaubert’s correspondence often attests to his distaste for procreation; among many others of his letters, Matz quotes one to Louise Colet in which he writes that “the idea of giving life to someone fills me with horror” (quoted on 3). Flaubert sent this letter two days after the much better-known one in which he contrasts his own self-withholding style to that of Honoré de Balzac: for Flaubert, “the author must be in his work like God in the universe, everywhere present and nowhere visible” (quoted on 2). Matz views these two passages from the correspondence in relation to one another, arguing that they express a single aversion to begetting, bearing in one case on the unwanted child and in the other on the garrulous Balzacian narrator: both are creatures whom Flaubert strives not to bring into existence.An analogy between the work of the novelist as a creator of imaginary people and that of the parent as a creator of real ones is one of the structuring assumptions of Matz’s book; it determines his overarching argument that for the novelist it is impossible to represent “the refusal of life” (67). The book’s local claim initially seems to be that skepticism about procreation is “the characteristic strain of the modern novel” (xi), in contrast to the nineteenth-century bildungsroman, which begins with birth, or the marriage plot, which ends with it. But as the work unfolds, the “distaste for accumulation of any kind” (24) that Matz says characterizes Flaubert’s style and Samuel Beckett’s is qualified and appears in most cases as an ambivalence. Even Flaubert, in the late correspondence and in the unfinished Bouvard et Pécuchet, has passages of sadness and self-satire on childlessness.Reading for ambivalence toward procreation in modernist fiction leads to strong chapters on Woolf and Lawrence. In Woolf, Matz focuses on the recurrence of paired women characters, one with children and one without, such as Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Bart in To the Lighthouse. Without resorting to a reductively biographical reading, Matz notes that these pairings reimagine the real-life relations between Virginia and her sister Vanessa Bell. In Woolf’s fiction and essays, childlessness, especially for women, is sometimes presented as a necessary condition for making art and is linked, moreover, to a desirable chastening of stylistic fecundity, as in Orlando’s representation of the nineteenth century. Still, Orlando does give birth in what Matz terms “a concentrated formulation of a basic procreative ambivalence” (113).In Lawrence, a theme of fecundity coexists with passages like the one from Women in Love in which Ursula and Birkin admire the idea of a “clean, lovely, humanless world” (quoted on 88). Matz pairs this novel with Hardy’s Jude the Obscure as, more than any other English fiction, “utterly hostile to the idea of new life” (91). In Hardy, ambivalence is harder to find than it is in Woolf or Lawrence. Matz’s short chapter is insightful about Jude and Sue’s choice to raise children who are not biologically theirs and about the novel’s critique of the exclusiveness of parental love. This anticipates motifs also to be found in Lawrence and in Lessing.Throughout this book Matz is at pains to distinguish between antinatalism and the theme of overpopulation, with its connection in the period to eugenics. With reference to Hardy, he writes that “anti-natalism is the very opposite of eugenics,” which “proposes to sort the right kind of procreation from the wrong” (54). Matz writes about antinatalism from the standpoint of analytic philosophy, focusing both on the individual’s choice to reproduce or not and on the possible wrong done to individuals by bringing them into existence.For me, the book’s distinction between individual antinatalism and population thinking strips its readings of an important context. In writing about his own childlessness, for instance, Hardy, in the late poem “Sine Prole,” views the end of his “line” as a collective rather than an individual event: it will be the end of a single “long life” stretching through history. His equanimity as a “modern” at the termination of this life is contrasted with the persistent collective identity of the Jews—of “Jahweh’s ancient nation.” The antinatalism of the figures discussed in this book could be read as displaying the self-understanding of Protestant northern Europeans, who view their “modern” hesitancy to have children in opposition to a love of offspring attributed to racial and cultural others.Matz’s book does not take this tack. It focuses on the choice of having children only as it pertains to individuals, without exploring the ways that choice, or even the ability to choose, might be historically compromised or overdetermined. Yet Matz’s focus on individual choice and responsibility is itself historically determined, in ways that emerge in the moving final chapter on climate fiction in the twenty-first century. In this context Matz’s framing of the dilemma of reproduction in terms of the wrong we might do our children by bringing them into being becomes most pressing, though it is a framing introduced in the book with the discussion of Butler’s Erewhon. In viewing novels as bringing new lives into the world, and in showing modern fiction’s surprising ambivalence to this work, Matz offers a valuable genealogy for a contemporary conception of fiction as embodying our responsibility to an uncertain future.