Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewWorlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel. Elaine Freedgood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xxii+152.Daniel HackDaniel HackUniversity of Michigan Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWritten with her trademark combination of sharp-wittedness and bluntness, Elaine Freedgood’s short but ambitious book, Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel, aims to show that the prevailing understanding of the Victorian novel’s realism is fundamentally wrong and, more important, pernicious in its effects. In its place, Freedgood not only offers what she sees as a more accurate account of the formal workings and the ideological work of Victorian realism. By doing so, she also seeks to dethrone the realist novel and the perspective she sees it (and/or its critical treatment) as supporting so as to enable increased and improved critical attention to nonrealist Victorian fiction and, especially, non-Western novels. In Freedgood’s hands, that is, making the Victorian novel weird again becomes a means to advance the project of “decolonizing the novel” as a genre.The central concept in Freedgood’s multipronged effort to “restore the full oddness of the nineteenth-century novel” (x)—the key to all her demythologizing—is metalepsis, the term introduced by Gérard Genette to name the crossing of boundaries between narrative levels—the extradiegetic and the diegetic, “the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells” (Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983], 236). Thus, after an introduction that recounts what Freedgood argues is the belated and lamentable emergence of the Victorian novel’s status as “Realistic (in a French Way), Reactionary, and Great” (1), and to which I will return, Freedgood offers a series of five case studies of what she calls “the metaleptic effects of denotation, omniscience, reference, ontology, and paratext” (xvi). Analyzing such seemingly heterogeneous topics and materials as the use of historical characters in R. A. Henty’s Indian Mutiny novel Rujub, the Juggler (1893), the epigraphs in Middlemarch (1871–72), the representation of working-class subjectivity in Mary Barton (1848), and Victorian ghost stories, she shows the many ways in which “the quarantine between story, stories internal to stories, and the world is violated” in Victorian fiction (xvii). She also weighs the ideological effects of this violation—and, just as significant, the ideological effects of efforts to naturalize or deny such violations. According to Freedgood, the management of metalepsis—the learning to “just jump over, like so many small puddles, the existential crevasses, the ontological breaches, of realism” (94)—is crucial to (so-called) realist novels’ production of liberal subjects.Freedgood lays out this argument most forcefully in her chapter on what she calls “hetero-ontologicality.” There she asserts that referentiality itself is metaleptic: “Every sentence in which a fictional character traverses an actual city or an actual poet has dinner with a fictional character or an actual war is observed or fought in by a fictional character is a rupture of enormous existential proportions” (100). While this “impossible ontology” (103) is made most visible by the historical novel, it is definitive of the realist novel as such, due to “its twin commitments to fictionality and reference” (99). According to Freedgood, moreover, the fact that this ontology does not feel impossible or typically even noteworthy—that “such ruptures do not feel like ruptures” (100)—is what gives them their troubling ideological purchase: “It is this kind of rupture, and the ‘worlds’ that such ruptures proliferate, that gives the multilayered, embodied, and ensouled liberal subject practice in the imaginary conquest of space and time” (99). Her final case study, on reference, uses Victorian ghost stories (with detours through Shakespeare and Amos Tutuola) to make a similar argument, as Freedgood sees the undecidability of the ghost’s existence in many of these stories as constituting or creating a “metaleptic rupture” (124) that is less conspicuous but also present in realism, and that promotes the “radical ontological flexibility” (129) she associates with “liberal cognition” (124).Freedgood’s foregrounding of metalepsis (expansively understood) recalls at times her method of what she called “strong metonymic” reading in her previous book, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (2006), but there is an important difference: whereas strong metonymic reading is something the critic performs, metalepsis is something she discovers. Thus, in Ideas in Things, Freedgood typically sought to recover the historical significance of objects, such as mahogany furniture in Jane Eyre (1847) or calico curtains in Mary Barton, that are mentioned but “largely inconsequential in the rhetorical hierarchy of the text” ([University of Chicago Press, 2006], 2). Sections of Worlds Enough, especially in the chapters on denotation and paratext, recall that earlier approach, when for example Freedgood provides a fascinating tutorial on ballast or advocates “follow[ing] the birds, the fish, the goats, the fruit, and the trees out of the novel and into the journals of forestry, biology, ecology, and so on,” where one finds “a history of ecological imperialism,” a history nineteenth-century novels “contain” but do not “recount” (92). Even these sections, though, mark a shift from the earlier book, insofar as they purport to take their cue from the novels themselves: it is by virtue of the realist novel’s constitutive metalepsis that “the object world of the novel not only connotes, but also denotes—taking us away from the novel and toward other sources of information if an object is obscure” (35); similarly, the first step on the path out of Parr Traill’s The Canadian Crusoes (1852) and into other sources of information about birds and the like occurs within the novel itself, in a footnote metaleptically directing readers to view a specimen at the British Museum. Rather than read against the grain of her chosen texts, then, Freedgood reveals just how grainy that grain is.At their best, Freedgood’s fast-moving, provocative case studies push us to rethink the nature and stakes of ubiquitous, even constitutive, formal elements of the realist novel. There is an unacknowledged slippage, however, between this compelling emphasis on the uncanniness of realism as such, on the one hand, and, on the other, an even more frequent emphasis on what she calls the realist Victorian novel’s “formal failings and its lack of formal coherence” (x), its “formal breakdowns” (xx), which are the product of these novels’ status as “messy, mostly hastily written novels that have been transformed by critics into polished forms” (140). This latter, oddly derogatory formulation points to the book’s framing polemic: according to Freedgood, a half century or so ago there emerged for the first time an understanding of the Victorian novel as formally coherent, diegetically seamless, and (or which is to say) “realistic (in a French way)” (xii), and therefore great. Earlier efforts by critics such as Dorothy Van Ghent and Barbara Hardy to celebrate the Victorian novel’s formal achievement, and thereby raise its stature, failed—because, basically, Henry James was right: Victorian novels, with their “intrusive narrators, unlikely plots, and historical characters” (141), are loose, baggy monsters.While I applaud this attention to the history of the field and to these pioneering women critics in particular, it is quite a leap to conclude that all seeming critical advances since James are basically failed attempts to deny the fundamental truth he identified. Moreover, Freedgood’s account of both literary critical history and current practice is deeply misleading, and in ways that cannot be swept aside by her acknowledgment that “my story is selective and full of gaps and omissions” (x). For example, Freedgood insists that “it was not until strong theories of narration and of realism came across the Atlantic that the Victorian novel could be assimilated to realism and achieve greatness” (2), but she never addresses the Victorians’ own discussions of realism, on the one hand, nor the influential, prestructuralist canon building of figures like F. R. Leavis and Raymond Williams, on the other; the latter omission calls into question her claims regarding the status and stature of the Victorian novel pre–J. Hillis Miller. Similarly, Freedgood backs up her claim that “the minute and even boring representation of everyday life can be interpreted as significant in its very minutiae and its lack of apparent interest and value” only “in the wake of structuralism” by citing Franco Moretti on “fillers” (3), but Moretti himself cites Erich Auerbach’s classic Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), which goes unmentioned in Worlds Enough. The point is not that Freedgood’s account is incomplete but rather that these omissions suggest her argument for the impact of structuralism and poststructuralism is hyperbolic at best.More basically, while Freedgood observes that the notion of diegetically seamless, “classic realism” typified by the Victorian novel is “a fall guy and straw man” (ix) made use of by scholars of earlier and later novels, the notion that this view of realism has dominated Victorian studies for decades is her own fall guy and straw man. Freedgood comes close to acknowledging this in her preface: one page after demanding that we combat “our entrenched sense of [the Victorian novel’s] ‘realism’ and formal coherence” (xii), she writes, “Nonetheless, throughout this period, Victorian Studies scholars maintain a sense of the formal incoherences of Victorian fiction” (xiii). She goes on to cite approvingly the work of George Levine and Catherine Gallagher—critics who are, as she notes, hugely influential, but whom she then leaves aside.While it is often not clear, then, with whom Freedgood is arguing, two targets do emerge in the book’s conclusion, which takes on what she sees as “the dominant ‘world literature’ model” as visible especially in the work of Moretti and Fredric Jameson; this model, she asserts, “requires an ideal [which is to say, ‘smoothly realistic’] British and French novel” (137). Here, though, Freedgood seems to be pushing on an open door: not only because Moretti and Jameson’s work on world literature has already been subject to extensive criticism, but also because of the proliferation of counterexamples to Freedgood’s claim that we typically dismiss nonrealist forms in the work of writers “in Japan or Nigeria or Brazil” as “premodern and problematic,” as “defect” rather than “innovation” (136). No doubt work remains to be done in “decolonizing the novel,” but that work needs to account for rather than ignore the acclaim and popularity of, say, Haruki Murakami or Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, let alone the Western reception of the Latin American Boom in the very period Freedgood focuses on.Elaine Freedgood is an iconoclastic, inventive critic whose work is suffused with moral and political urgency. I found much to disagree with in Worlds Enough, and my sense of its most important contributions differs from that of the author. But while I find fault with Freedgood’s account of literary critical history and orthodoxy, I suspect I—along with many other readers—will remain haunted by her powerful accounts of “crazed diegetic layering” (94) and inspired by her insistence that, whether it takes the form of a ghost of indeterminate reality, bird footnotes, or simply a fictional character walking down a real street, this layering matters. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 118, Number 2November 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/711159 Views: 297 HistoryPublished online August 25, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected] Crossref reports no articles citing this article.