The Political Novel: Re-Imagining the Twentieth Century by Stuart A Scheingold, and: The Novel After Theory by Judith Ryan (review)

Abstract

SCHEINGOLD, STUART A. Political Novel: Re-Imagining Twentieth Century. New York: Continuum, 2010. vii + 261. $29.95. RYAN, JUDITH. Novel After Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. viii + 260. $29.50. If we fully accept Aristotle's often-cited view that wo/man is a zoon politikon, then we will necessarily despair of ever reading, or writing, a book carrying a title like Political Novel. very subject loses all contour and limit. So, inevitably, engaging and intelligent studies like one offered by Stuart Scheingold proceed on basis of a forgivable conceit, that is reducible to works with certain political themes, rather than all conceivable ones. For Scheingold, major themes of political novel in twentieth are political and political disengagement, especially as they manifest themselves in fiction devoted to, variously, two great world wars, Holocaust and its aftermath, and sundry political in United States and Great Britain from circa 1950 through to 2005. In chapter 1, Scheingold seeks to differentiate hi s own construction of political novel from two important, though not quite current, readings of genre: Irving Howe's Politics and Novel (1957) and, to a lesser extent, Robert Boyers's Atrocity and Amnesia (1987). He rejects Howe's optimistic faith in capacity of writers to evoke plausible models of heroic struggle in what he sees as, borrowing Winston Churchill's saturnine words, the terrible twentieth century (12, 1). Similarly, for Scheingold, Boyers's canon is too inclined to see politically affirmative quests at heart of political novel. He instead foregrounds alienation and cynicism as legitimate standpoints for political novelist (8). Basing his historiography on work of various British social scientists-Giddens, Hall, David Held, and Tony McGrew--Scheingold sees twentieth and twenty-first centuries as manifestations of late modernity, a world shaped by nation-state, global capitalism, bureaucratization, industrialism, liberal individualism, and separation of public and private spheres (4). Like Zygmunt Bauman, he assigns modernity responsibility for Holocaust; like Tony Judt, he attributes mad paroxysms of total to this same modernity. In each case, morally vacant bureaucratization and fearsome technological advancement serve as enabling agents of violence and apocalypse on a formerly unimaginable scale. In Kafka's Trial, Joseph K. becomes an early and exemplary victim of modernity's collapse into inscrutable systematization. The individual, writes Scheingold, viewed as agent in modern project, is seen as pawn in [Kafka's] late-modern critique (23). Joseph K.'s powerlessness presages that of millions of others as world goes to war throughout twentieth century. In chapter 2, Scheingold analyzes political in two clusters of novels drawn from inter-war and post-World War Two periods. These works are generally well known, but are obviously relevant here. In A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry makes his separate peace, bowing out of stupidity and mayhem of Italian Front in World War One. Similarly, as Scheingold summarily demonstrates, characters in other celebrated war novels respond to unspeakable dehumanizations of war through adoption of pacificism as in Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, or madness as seen in Pat Barker's Regeneration and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, or possessive individualism in Heller's Catch-22. Each of these novels, and others that are discussed, show how total causes progressive destruction of political agency and with this destruction an inexorable estrangement (51). Chapter 3 takes up themes of Holocaust novel: eradication of Jewish citizenship in Nazi Germany, life and death in concentration camps, and aftermath of Shoah. …