The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life by Peter Boxall

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life by Peter Boxall Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life. By Peter Boxall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2020. xi+ 411 pp. £29.99. ISBN 978-1-108-83648-7. Mimesis meets prosthesis meets the novel genre. The natural self encounters the artificial or automated self. The organic comes up against the mechanic. The expansive and the contractive drives oppose one another. These are some of the sets of forces that run through and operate in Peter Boxall's most recent book—a fine achievement that recasts the history of prose fiction from the perspective of the relationship [End Page 119] between the living and the non-living, the human and the natural, the natural and the artificial. From Thomas More's Utopia to the twenty-first century, Boxall covers a long history (that of the novel in particular) in order to answer questions that underlie the whole book but are ultimately spelt out in the last chapter: how do we picture the world and 'what amalgam of abstract idea and thrown being, of fact and imagination, of blind circumstance and structured forethought, constitutes the experience of enworlding' (p. 319)? While the former has always been the concern of the novel genre—the novel has invariably endeavoured to picture the world (real or imaginary)—the latter reveals Boxall's specific approach. His contribution is to re-evaluate the novel from a philosophical and political standpoint that takes into account the forms that connect the mind with the world. In a move very much in accordance with the genre's pliability, he believes that the present requires us to reread the novel so as to discover in it 'a new set of aesthetic and political possibilities' (p. 21). It is thus that he retraces the novel back to its origins and explores the dialectic between reality and imagination with the novel as mediator between mind and matter, life and death. Boxall suggests that imagination is a prosthetic device and that the novel itself, throughout its history, has also been a prosthetic device—an extension of the self, its task having been to transform inanimate into living material. In different works, the non-living is brought to life, erasing the distinction between the living and the dead, the real and the artificial—for example, hand, glasses, puppet, radio, wig, whalebone leg as tropes, or tools that enhance interior life and are attached to it. The prosthetic condition, therefore, brings together interiority and material extension and finds different means of expression in a wealth of novelists such as Daniel Defoe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jane Austen, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Don Delillo, to reach a certain climax in the discussion of Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood. Through a careful choice of novels and writers, Boxall makes a strong case for the way prosthetic materials have been mobilized to deal in the relation between thought and world. Engaging just in passing with canonical theorists such as Georg Lukacs, Ian Watt, or Mikhail Bakhtin, this study privileges an original take on the novel and on how the prosthetic imagination has amalgamated idea and material throughout novelistic history. Its five parts provide a strict chronological account of the body and the way it establishes new connections with its prosthetic extensions. Boxall's timeline has a target and a culmination in his last chapter, the most interesting and challenging of all, in my view. As Chapter 9 presents a round-up of the discussion carried out throughout the book, it also makes a projection into the future by imagining what prosthetic worlds could or would look like in the twenty-first century. It is an intellectual and imaginative exercise as well as a serious and brave attempt to think of our own contemporary times and the future of this literary form that has been with us for centuries now. Even though artificial life has been a feature of the genre since its beginnings, it seems to be more than ever a contemporary phenomenon, posing new challenges to the...