The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space, by Anna Kornbluh

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space by Anna Kornbluh Lauren M. E. Goodlad (bio) The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space, by Anna Kornbluh; pp. xii + 217. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019, $82.50, $27.50 paper. Anna Kornbluh's new book extends the author's work on Victorian novels as both a lens on and subject for Marxist theory. The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space thus joins recent works by Ian Duncan, Elaine Freedgood, and Carolyn Lesjak in illustrating the diverse historical materialisms now flourishing in Victorian studies. While this new breed of materialists adopts varied approaches to Karl Marx's legacy—with Kornbluh standing out for her Slavoj Žižek-like merger with psychoanalysis—what they share is, first, a desire to invigorate materialism's luminous insights into cultural production (thus resisting the anti-historicism that sometimes travels under the sign of postcritique), and, second, an embrace of form and aesthetics that self-styled postcritics also uphold. Hence, while The Order of Forms calls out its allegiance to the resurgent formalism for which Caroline Levine's work is known, there are significant differences. Whereas Kornbluh builds on a longstanding Marxist tradition of theorizing literary form (including Georg Lukács's influential legacy), Levine participates in a project of ontological leveling which, via Bruno Latour's network theory, entered literary study from the social sciences. That explains why The Order of Forms still looks like a work of Victorianist criticism—with chapters on Wuthering Heights (1847), Bleak House (1852–53), Alice's Adventures [End Page 312] in Wonderland (1865), and Jude the Obscure (1895)—while Levine's Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015) is less literary criticism per se than a case for replacing the study of literary form with formalism as a prism for the world at large. It may also explain Kornbluh's choice of Emily Brontë's stormy poetics, Charles Dickens's multiplotted infusions of ghost story and murder mystery, Lewis Carroll's child's-eye surrealism, and Thomas Hardy's naturalistic proto-modernism to exemplify the realist novel. More than twenty years after Harry E. Shaw's Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (1999), readers of this journal will likely recognize Kornbluh's study as part of an ongoing effort to redeem Victorian fiction from the misreadings of prominent New Critics, poststructuralists, and others. Likewise, her debates with Lukács and Fredric Jameson speak to a movement in Victorian studies to embrace these inspired dialecticians while countering their tendencies to misunderstand British literature's formal vigor in the years between Wuthering Heights and Jude the Obscure. As Kornbluh riffs on Jameson's spatial motifs, she reminds us that realist storytelling need not reflexively hew to extant structures or pursue accurate reportage to the detriment of art. This strong case for realist plasticity affirms what Raymond Williams (in a legacy Kornbluh does not explicitly claim) called the nineteenth-century novel's "subjunctive" mode (Writing in Society [Verso, 1983], 161). By far the most original feature of the book is the role accorded to innovations in math. "Mathematical formalism," Kornbluh writes, "powerfully recognizes what forms do," making "relations among abstractions fathomable and reconfigurable" and thus affirming "the madeness" of "laws and states of relationality" (8). When Victorian mathematics radically altered "the basis of human knowledge," it marked a crucial synergy for novels (105). The "broad intellectual milieu of Bleak House," Kornbluh shows, "activates with important advances in formalist mathematics the idea of a limit as that which enables structuration" (84–85). She pairs George Boole's exposition of the topic with a reading of Dickens's work in which limit-building takes the form of "ratifying law" (84). Kornbluh's larger claim, however, is that mathematical formalism presents a unique opportunity to "mightily revise political theorizing" (8). In set theory, advanced calculus, and post-Euclidian geometry, she finds a formalism that places "abstraction above empiricism, consistency before concretude," and the sundering of "signs from things" (105). By triangulating the isomorphic formalisms of math, aesthetics, and politics, Kornbluh urges readers to think less of "present reality" than of what can be "rendered thinkable"—a move toward the antimimetic...