Abstract
AbstractThe novel often seems sidelined in political commentaries on democracy. In contrast, this essay argues that the novel’s formal capacity for metacommentary supplies an ironic and self-reflexive perspective that can encourage transparency and other values associated with a democratic ethos. Yet while the examples invoked here—Henry Adams’s Democracy: An American Novel (1880) and Joan Didion’s Democracy: A Novel (1984)—reveal this potential, they also illustrate its limit. The essay ends by considering how that limit lies in the novel’s confrontation with the unrepresentable sublime of nuclear war.The novel may thus have no special relation to democracy, and if we acknowledge this point, then the necessity of metacommentary is only a short step away: Why are novels aligned with democracy in the first place?
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