Thesis 1, Part Two

Here, at last, is an argument about—and, indeed, against—endings: Nineteenth-century novels were written for the professional and bureaucratic classes, for the kinds of people, in other words, who keep reports on the rest of us; good twentieth-century novels were not; and it is endings that most distinguish the one from the other. Readers of Juan Rulfo and Nathalie Sarraute have to make their peace with enduring uncertainty, relinquishing the expectation that a fiction’s final pages will notarize and tidily file away all that’s come before. In the classical text, by contrast—so Barthes—truth arrives “at the end”; “truth is what completes, what closes”; “the profound is what is discovered at the end,” “closing off the infinite repetition of dialogue,” “bringing the interplay of languages to an end.”  And here’s where things get tricky for the literary historian trying to make sense of S/Z. Anyone reading Barthes on “the classical text” is bound to feel, at some point or another, that they have just read some of the most penetrating pages ever written on prose fiction. I’m thinking especially of mini-essay #60, in which is explained the dilemma of any literature trying to establish its place in the epistemological society. In any “civilization of enigma, truth and decipherment,” realist novels have no choice but to pursue a certain ruse, producing artificial opacities which they will later offer to illuminate: Who is Pip’s benefactor? Who started the fire at Thornfield Hall? For if they were genuinely committed to truth, there would be no suspense—no tenterhooks, perhaps no story—since they could just authoritatively answer any riddle as soon as it arose: Look, the convict he once helped is sending him money from Australia. Watch out, he keeps his first wife in the attic. Hey, you know that singer? She’s a dude. Most narrators and all novelists are in a position, more than any overly detailed trailer or whispering aisle-mate, to ruin the coming plot-twist. They can always solve the mystery before the detective. The trick of realist fiction in a culture dominated by knowledge is to withhold the truth while seeming to be honest and truth-driven.

So again, “classical texts” do this. “Modern” ones don’t. It’s a brilliant argument whose only drawback is that it can’t possibly be right, at least not as a general proposition about narrative as such. One can hardly doubt that the description serves for some mid-shelf fiction, but do we really think it will hold for every story published before 1922? Where exactly are to we look to find these canons of uniformly closed storytelling? Are we to look to the ancient epic, to “the classical text” in its accustomed meaning? That won’t help. The Iliad ends so abruptly—with the burial of a single Trojan warrior in the middle of an ongoing war—that first-time readers typically feel cheated. Anyone finishing book twenty-four of Homer knows that there is more story left to tell, and woe to the great-books lecturer who has to break it to his students that there will be no wooden horse. For the fall of Troy, a reader will have to wait for the Aeneid, which itself terminates so suddenly, well before the conquest of Italy and founding of Rome, that scholars have generally concluded that Virgil died before finishing the thing.

So do we look instead to French neoclassicism? That might be one of the configurations Barthes had in mind when he grabbed the word “classical.” The problem here is that prose fiction, unlike eighteenth-century history paintings and seventeenth-century neo-Pindarics, is almost never described as “neoclassical,” since prose-writers were much less likely than tragedians or epic poets to invoke whatever few ancient models they had. The most obvious exception to this observation—that would be d’Urfé’s L’Astrée (1607-1627), a pastoral love story, with bonus side adventures, set in the fifth century—clocks in at some 5,400 pages, which means that it can hardly be accused of possessing a precipitate drive to closure. That prose fiction forgoes the claim to classicism can be glimpsed in the form’s accepted names; the European languages furnish two, and they both mark long prose fiction as innovative. This, I’ll grant, might at first be hard to see, since the most common term for “novel” outside of English is a word that also means “a citizen of antiquity’s great Mediterranean empire.” It is a trick of etymology, then, that a roman is precisely not Roman, but rather a story-no-longer-in-Latin, a vernacular tale, recounted in some post-imperial creole or another. “Novels,” meanwhile, are new stories about new things.

So maybe “the classical text” is actually just Barthes’s idiosyncratic gloss on “the realist novel” after all. Maybe this is what makes realist novels distinctive—and distinctively odious—that they go in for strong closure when so many forms do not, that they are the blind alleys on literature’s otherwise open map. But then how could anyone wishing to make that argument choose as his paradigm Balzac, the steamboat captain of the roman-fleuve, of the riverine novel-that-never-ends, the great novel-flux? The shady southern law student you read about in one novel reappears five years later, as a secondary character in another book, except now he’s under-secretary of state. The property speculator at the center of Zola’s Curée, from 1871-72, is still kicking around eighteen novels later. Any novel that appears in a cycle—any Leatherstocking tale, any Barchester chronicle, any episodio nacional—is liable to have its ending amended by some later entry in the series. The biggest shock is to realize that Roland Barthes is mistaken even about his proof text—not just about Balzac broadly, but about “Sarrasine” in particular. Let me read back into the record my summary of Balzac’s novella:

In southern Italy in the 1770s, a French sculptor falls in love with a pretty soprano without knowing that she is actually a cross-dressing and castrated man; that mistake ends up getting the sculptor killed. In Paris, a half century later, the now elderly castrato unnerves the Bourbon Restoration’s smart set, crashing their balls, sidling wordlessly up to their women.

What you’ll want to bear in mind at this point is that S/Z is often read, with some justice, as an early exercise in queer literary criticism. The Anglo-Foucauldian vocabulary of “the queer” may not have been available to Barthes in ’68 and ’69, but he is plainly interested in how “the classical text” deals with characters who fall outside of its governing schemes of sexual classification, and in pursuing that matter he ends up furnishing a later queer criticism with one of its signature arguments. The painter is killed; the queer love story is terminated; it leaves behind only images of itself—a statue of the singer, and then paintings made of the statue: “something dangerous,” writes Barthes, “has been contained, exorcised, pacified.” Queer desire has been foreclosed; Western discourse has opted to liquidate, as unreadable, the emasculated man, &c. But even my rushed précis should be enough to show you that Barthes has got this wrong, since “Sarrasine” is not one story but two, a narrative and a frame narrative—that structure is common enough—and what is pacified in the one lives on in the other. Sarrasine dies; the singer lives.

Nor is this a subtle point, the literature professor’s usual exercise in competitive exegesis. Barthes bizarrely implies that attenuated images of the castrato are all that remain of him: “the sinister story of La Zambinella grows distant, no longer exists save as a vague, moon-struck enigma, mysterious without being offensive.” (208) But Balzac’s non-realist idiom makes the queer soprano’s uncanny survival hard to overlook. The castrato doesn’t, in fact, just intrude upon the parties of the rich; he haunts them, deaf, desiccated, in outdated ruffles and hose, a queer “phantom,” a zombie of the ancien régime—a “vampire,” perhaps, a “walking corpse,” the story says. So yes, queer illegibility is in a sense killing, at least to a normal; the encounter with the queer term can be lethal. But Barthes has botched the bit about closure: The story does not know how to wish the queer away. The exorcism does not take. The Gothic language—realist? classical?—guarantees repetition.

So what’s going on here? How has the greatest work of post-structuralist literary criticism made such a hash of its central claims? Fortunately, Barthes himself has engineered all the tools one needs to work out an answer. Semiotics, after all, instructs us not to treat any writing as a simple report on the world; every account, every argument, every description involves a more or less arbitrary coding of the data, and our task now is simply to extend that insight to semiotics itself, to stop reverencing S/Z as a special vehicle of glossematic wisdom and to see it instead as cutting capriciously into the literary field. I can be more specific than that: Barthes, unlike many of his predecessors, insists that the codes in any text will always be multiple. That is, he forgivingly calls off the search for the master code to which all others reduce. At the same time, though, he argues that any given story will be organized around a central antithesis, a patterning of its information into some specially charged dichotomy (in whose circumference other codes might nonetheless float free). Indeed, it was in S/Z that Barthes furnished post-structuralism with one of its canonical attacks on binary thought, on any Manichean and stalled antithesis that carves the cosmos into ontologically polarized densities, “two plenitudes set ritually face to face like two fully armed warriors … the given opposition, eternal, eternally recurrent.” The “symbolic” universe posited by nearly all writing can understand the breached antithesis or union of opposites only via the conceptually impoverished category of “paradox,” to be strictly distinguished from the dialectical antithesis-in-motion, though Barthes also suggests that for a story to begin, for it to be experienced as necessary, there has to exist some such absurdity, something excessive, something that upsets the stagnant balance of the binary, an unresolved third term that will eventually and in unprecedented fashion mediate between A and B … or will be eliminated as a menace … or will survive its attempted purge and so open-endedly stalk the binary as free radical and unpaired abortion. The fate of third terms simply is the stuff of narrative; it is the only story anyone has to tell.

Examples of stalled antitheses are easy enough to find. Cowboy v. Indian, the grazia and ingegno of Renaissance culture v. the gross rusticity of medieval art, prudish mortal v. sabertoothed, libertine superman. Here are a few more—or rather one more variously named: the classical text v. the modern one; the readable text v. the writerly; closed texts v. open ones. These all come from Barthes, and their proliferation and near-redundancy suggest how central this opposition is to his system. Modern equals writerly equals open, though there is one term, common enough in Barthes’s writing, that we will want to keep out of this series, and that’s “plural,” since the semiotician himself remarks that all texts are plural by necessity, while only some of them are open. “Plural,” in other words, does not mean “open.” Cellblocks are variously populated but no less locked for that. Polyphonic but nonetheless closed—that idea is, in fact, Barthes’s great contribution to the fight over the novel, his signal innovation over Bakhtin. The realist novel might be a compendium of many voices, but if Barthes is right, they are all muttering slogans you’ve already heard. Choruses, we know, sing from off the same score. The Bakhtinians, then, are the ones who cannot distinguish between polyphonies, disregarding all the devices deployed by texts to weight and rank their voices, like sound engineers at a mixing board, amplifying this channel, fading out that, always ready, should a performer prove uncooperative, to cut the mic. Any time a critic uses the word “heteroglossia,” you can be pretty sure he can’t tell the difference between lead vocal and background sha-na-na.

If, therefore, I am reading S/Z as a semiotician, and not as a Bakhtinian, then I should be able to note that Barthes’s writing is plural—varied in its literary-critical methods, tessellated into numbered pseudo-fragments—and still not feel that this plurality counts for much, because he himself has told us that it doesn’t (or that it needn’t). S/Z, despite having a lot to say about literary plurality, is nonetheless anchored in precisely the kind of antithesis that stabilizes and organizes multiplicity: classical and not modern; readable and not writerly. To ply the distinction between texts open and closed is one good way to stopple your own argument. S/Z is less an open text than a closed one in service of the open. Old-fashioned stories, Barthes tells us, can’t accommodate freaks or “monsters”—his word—characters who fall outside the narrative’s coding of the universe into zero and one, those who are “outside any classification,” “outside the code,” “outside the norms.” Terminator 3, Silence of the Lambs, Thor, others I have yet to name: Any movie that both ends and doesn’t is the monster that S/Z doesn’t want to face, open and closed at once, the prodigal term that a bisected semiotics cannot accommodate.

There’s actually a pattern here. More than once, Barthes identifies one of the pitfalls of the “classical text” and then heedlessly falls straight into it, replicating in his strenuously modernist pamphlet the putatively outmoded iniquities of the old bourgeois literature and so undoing the reassurance he wishes to provide that the rhetorical failings of this latter can be identified and historically quarantined. So antithesis was one such pitfall; here’s another. If there is anything Barthes likes less than binary thinking, it is the related problem of common sense or ideology. No surprise there, though his account of how ideology gets produced is fairly distinctive. What needs tracking, he says, is the routine processing of new scholarly claims into anonymous and uncredentialed wisdom. Literature and journalism are the key devices in this transformation—the transmutation of expertise into street epistemology—seizing hold of what had briefly been specialized arguments, repeating them without attribution, and so lending them the insidious authority of the commonplace. A novel, by opening itself to other registers and discourses, doesn’t make itself more plural; it merely absorbs whatever in the dominant intellectual scene was already least thinking, its triteness and decay.  Or worse, literature and journalism are the making-platitudinous of once contested positions. A claim, once reproduced in a “classical text,” is no longer an argument that one might disagree with or feel challenged by; it is merely a topos and will pass back into general circulation in this imbecile form. Such, then, is the business of yet another of the coding mechanisms that Barthes theorizes in S/Z, “the cultural codes,” he calls them; you might think of them as the venders of chestnuts and sedative bromides. Among the fundamental elements in any piece of writing are the things that other people have told its author are true, unchallenged beliefs that are present in its paragraphs only as paraphrase and copied language.

The point we won’t want to miss is that the book in which Barthes describes the cultural codes is itself shot through with such codes—that Barthes’s writing, I mean, is an unweeded bed of borrowed wisdom and pilfered idioms. A few of these are especially salient. Indeed, if you follow these you’ll be able to spot for yourself the rhetorical mechanisms by which Barthes codes some endings as open and assigns to their openness an unchanging set of connotations. The ideology of the open text announces itself here:

(1)           The goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text.  ★ This sentence says little more than that we should prefer modernist novels to nineteenth-century ones because William Burroughs demands engaged and active readers and Victor Hugo didn’t. This idea is, I think, best understood as encouraging readers to refashion a text or to adapt it to their circumstances, to not be bound by what the author had in mind or indeed by a concern with what a given collection of words “really means.” For our purposes, the important point is that this notion could be phrased in two very different ways: as permission to “play with the text” or as permission to “work with the text.” I’m guessing you would say “play,” which is why you should notice that Barthes does not. Literature is labor; the reader fabricates or manufactures. Barthes has opted for the toilsome version of the active reader, and this in some maximally Marxist way—production!—even though once stripped of these rhetorical choices, his underlying argument is merely professorial and stick-to-it-ive: not that listening to the Mekons will make you want to go out there and start a band, but that reading Robbe-Grillet kind of feels like a job. The Barthes who talks about work is, at any rate, the Barthes we think we know, the Barthes of western Marxism, the Barthes who politicized semiotics, the Barthes who transformed structuralist linguistics into a stick with which to beat the bourgeoisie, the Barthes who thinks a difficult novel enrolls its cultivated readership into the ranks of the proletariat. There is more in this vein: Modernist novels are “production without product,” a utopian factory that need assemble no roadworthy Buicks. Realist novels, by contrast, are literature’s consumer goods, ready-mades arranged behind interchangeably orange spines. If this is the case, then the task of a materialist criticism is to steal from such “products” their finished face, to defetishize old novels the way one would any deceptively settled object, to insist that fiction is something made and that it might yet be re-made by any reader-producer “working back along the threads of meanings,” “observing the reversibility of the structures from which the text is woven.” The trick now for us—as readers not of Balzac but of Barthes—is to hear these sentences as language and solely as language, to register only their memes, and so not to start parsing them as stance or admiring them as argument, because if we are reading S/Z semiotically, then we are prohibited from saying that Marxism is authentically available in its pages as a method. Just tell yourself: Any point that Barthes couches in Marxist terms he could just as well have couched otherwise, without the workerism that makes of the novelist a weaver and of the novel a bolt of frayed organdy. In any particular paragraph, historical materialism announces itself not as an intellectual-political project, but only as a sociolect, the ornaments and epithets of the independent Left, a communism amputated back to its figures of speech, a trophy Marxism (REF. the Marxist code).

(2)     How can one code be superior to another without abusively closing off the plurality of codes? Only writing, by assuming the largest possible plural in its own task, can oppose without appeal to force the imperialism of each language. ★ These two sentences are a rumpus of political commonplace. If you’re still thinking that Barthes is a Marxist, then the term that just jumped out at you was probably the last, imperialism, around which the literature professor conscripts modernist fiction into the anti-colonial struggle (REF. the code of the Bandung Conference). That gloss is mostly spurious, though, because the passage’s several other ideologemes form around this scrap of liberationist rhetoric a rather different political constellation. Plural …  not closed … without force—at a half century’s remove it is easier than ever to see that this is the patois of Cold War liberalism and thus the verbal housing of a US-led and Wilsonian anti-colonialism rather than a Third-Worldist one (REF. the code of the UN Charter). This would be the moment to go back and renew our attention to the word closed, whose essentially Popperite register now looms into view. It is a tag Barthes uses often—realist novels are “closed,” bad readings are “closed,” antitheses are “closed,” actions assigned overfamiliar verbs are “closed,” dictionaries are “closed”—though the opposite of “closed,” in S/Z, is the Schlegelian “infinite” and not the expected “open,” such that one might mnemonically rename the book The Infinite Text and Its Enemies. The word “plural” occurs more frequently still, many dozens of times in the space of some 200 pages, though it, too, acquires an unanticipated antonym: neither “monolithic” nor “homogeneous” nor “uniform,” but “incompletely plural” (REF. the code of the separation of powers and the mixed constitution, of religious tolerationism, of institutionalist social theory, and of Americanism in Europe). Semiotically, then, the distinctive quality of Barthes’s writing lies neither in his extensive recitations from the anti-totalitarian liturgy, nor in his much scarcer deployments of red catchwords, but in his free-form recombination of the two, by dint of which the vocabulary of historical materialism is absorbed into and made to do the work of the open society. Marxist intellectual procedures—the critique of fetishism, the redescription of art and culture as “production”—get pressed into the service of liberal political arguments, the pursuit of the “integrally plural,” “the largest possible plural,” the diversissimo. That’s S/Z.

(3)     The difference between feudal society and bourgeois society, index and sign, is this: the index has an origin, the sign does not: to shift from index to sign is to abolish the last (or first) limit, the origin, the basis, the prop, to enter into the limitless process of equivalences, representations that nothing will ever stop, orient, fix, sanction. ★ Another argument about endings: Barthes asks us to dislike old-fashioned narrative—novels, but in this case, one suspects, plays, too—for preferring some denouements to others, for needing to end some particular way, and so for tamping down on our sense of the future as a field unenclosed, changing possibility into plot and routing the morrow through story’s variously convention-bound bottle-necks and border crossings. A novel can reach its foreordained conclusion without even having to deliberate over alternatives, just by relying on a given genre’s sense that this is how such characters are meant to wind up. Sense and Sensibility, after all, might be a more interesting book if one could at least conceive of Elinor Dashwood marrying Willoughby (or Lucy Steele) and not always awkward and dependable Edward Ferrars. Or: It doesn’t matter how many times you re-read Waverley, the Highlanders aren’t going to win this time. Barthes is never more anti-Aristotelian than when he objects that plot structures create, through repetition, an artificial sense of fate or destiny or historical necessity. The word he attaches to this argument is “reversible”: The “classical text” generates a sense of “irreversible order”; it installs an “incompletely reversible system.” But once that word is in play, the argument becomes easy to discard. That we should reject all claims to irreversibility is prima facie unconvincing. Are we really sure that everything is reversible? Every broken jug glueable? Every monarchy restorable? Are you confident that vanished glaciers can be re-frigerated? Have you ever known a Yemeni wedding party to be reanimated or retroactively un-mis-assassinated? Do you have a proposal for getting white people to leave North America? No action is irreversible is the sentiment of a man who has never oversalted his soup. Nor is it really clear that “the classical text” is as rigidly end-directed as all that. I can write that it is tough to imagine a Hamlet in which a briefly resolute prince successfully avenges his father, but as soon as that sentence is typed, one goes ahead and imagines it anyway: Claudius cut down at prayer, Ophelia no longer nunneried, the prince raised to the throne and dithering still.

More to the point: Does Roland Barthes actually believe that all sequences are reversible? Or rather, does he write as though he did? Go back and look again at the sentence quoted here:

The difference between feudal society and bourgeois society, index and sign, is this: the index has an origin, the sign does not: to shift from index to sign is to abolish the last (or first) limit, the origin, the basis, the prop, to enter into the limitless process of equivalences, representations that nothing will ever stop, orient, fix, sanction.

From feudalism, indices, and a world of ordered sequence; to capitalism, signs, and a world without such sequence. We’ll want to note right away that this sentence can’t possibly be saying what it seems to be saying—that Capetian France and the Holy Roman Empire lacked language or that in such societies words really did function like footprints or photographs, as the physical evidence left behind by their referents. Barthes has to be saying that pre-modern people typically thought of words as securely attached to their objects and that moderns to their credit know better, that they know language to be free-floating. So not: from index to sign, but: from sign-mistaken-for-index to sign-recognized-for-what-it-is. But now we have to bracket that clarification, setting aside the substance of Barthes’s historical claim in order to register the simpler, semiotic point that this sentence has borrowed the language of historical periodization (REF. the code of the philosophy of history). In the process of expounding the doctrine of reversibility, Barthes proves perfectly capable of proposing an irreversible series of his own. This isn’t just a gotcha point—the problem is more interesting than that, an incoherence and not just an inconsistency. In S/Z, the society-without-sequence appears as an item within a sequence, and the problem is that if Barthes can identify the shift from one to another, then the shift itself doesn’t exist. Or the same point in reverse: If it’s true that we live in a society-in-which-one-no-longer-thinks-in-terms-of-sequence, then Barthes shouldn’t be able to name the historical stages by which such a society came to be. All you have to do to make this paradox go away is concede that Barthes has written a literary manifesto and not the statement of fact that S/Z sometimes pretends to be. Modernity, Barthes writes at one point, is the time of “confusion,” of “the unbridled (pandemic) circulation of signs, of sexes, of fortunes.” Capitalism, queerness, and modernist literature—we don’t really need to know why he thinks these three belong together; it is enough to know that he codes them all as “modern” (or “bourgeois”) and not as “classical” (or “feudal”). Modernity is the period of generalized circulation, of wealth-, desire-, and language-without-ground. Barthes’s point was not that twentieth-century novelists couldn’t (or uniformly didn’t) attempt sequence or strong endings, but simply that such novelists were out of keeping with a consumer society that in 1970 was the true empire of signs. Realism is to be rejected not for being too bourgeois, but for being insufficiently so. S/Z is a petition to bring European fiction more fully into the market, to subject it irrevocably to the “limitless process of equivalences.” “Limitless process”: The first word in that phrase is going to require special comment, of course. Commercial and semiotic societies are “limitless,” governed, he says on the same page, by an “endless process.” Just follow the bleeping code: Capitalism and language are “limitless” and “endless.” The modern text replicates this condition in literature, “denying [the] final word (denying the end as a word).” Capitalism, language, and modernist literature thus make up a set. All three belong to a semiological modernity that, Barthes tell us, “nothing will ever stop,” an endlessness, then, that far from restoring to us the open future ensures only that it will never come.

So Barthes wants fiction writers to forego the temptations of the tidy ending, to commit to the infinite text as project and program. The only point that still needs making is that he needn’t have bothered, that this recommendation is, in fact, entirely redundant. His point about capitalism is accurate enough, after a fashion. I say again that Hollywood blockbusters go in for unresolved and ambiguous endings, and you reply, perhaps, that that you have a ready explanation for this. Open endings set up sequels, you say; they are just so many dropped cans of Barbasol. This is no doubt true, but if we pause now to mull this observation, the puzzle will merely change shape before us. So let’s say that the open ending is how franchises are built, hence the mark of commerce impinging on narrative form, and that in some unusually forthright way—the necessary re-organization that fiction undergoes if it is to be industrialized: mass-produced and sold in installments. As soon as we say that, we have to give up once and for all on the common belief that popular narrative requires strong closure: wedding bells sounding, bombs defused, families reunited, victory laps haughtily jogged. For popular narrative has for several generations now been produced in two antithetical modes: 1) the old, completed forms of romance (the good guys win!) and comedy (everybody wins!) coexisting with 2) oddly ongoing and undecided versions of same: novels sold chapterwise, novels serialized in magazines, novels serialized in newspapers, comic strips, movie serials, television. English fairy tales end with happily ever after, but German tales go out on and if they have not died, then they are still alive. And if pulp comes with endings both closed and unclosed, then we can no longer treat the open ending as one of modernism’s more sophisticated achievements—the art novel’s defining challenge to its downmarket competitors, the carrier of its abstrusely anti-teleological and anti-totalizing doctrines. Commercial imperatives and experimental writing attack traditional narrative in the same way and to similar effect, and the “modern text” mutates into a universal term without meaningful rivals.

MORE SOON…

A beginning

You may not be all that surprised to hear that Hollywood blockbusters have trouble finishing. You’ve seen enough of them; you’ve sat through some gangly third acts; you know to wait for the teasers and the stingers and the Easter eggs. All the same, I hope you’re at least a little bit surprised, since you probably also think that open and ambiguous endings are the hallmark of serious fiction and auteurist film. That is, you probably think that ordinary people, the ones who didn’t go to liberal arts colleges, demand, alongside singable choruses and lifelike paintings of trout fishermen, stories with unambiguous endings—triumphal marches, high fives, freeze-framed exultation. And if you think this, then you shouldn’t just shrug at the simple fact that a great many blockbuster endings aren’t all that emphatic; that often enough, epilogue follows upon coda follows upon now buried peroration; that Hollywood, which hasn’t gone in for actual cliffhangers since the 1940s, nonetheless prefers that its biggest movies stumble in their final moments or that their endings arrive breached and unsettled. Terminator 3 is, at heart, the story of a good killer robot from the future battling a bad killer robot from the future, and if you were talking casually to a friend, you would say that the movie ends when good robot eliminates bad. But that’s not quite right, since the movie actually ends when the US military’s in-house computer network becomes self-aware and launches nuclear strikes on all the world’s major cities. Humanity’s near annihilation is reported, but accorded the status of a subplot or loose end, such that one could plausibly leave it out in the re-telling: Oh yeah, I almost forgot—we all die. Hollywood endings, it turns out, are compulsively multiple: A defeated Loki decides to end his own life and leaps contritely into the Empyrean; the same Loki re-appears, unrepentant and un-seppuku’d, not six minutes later. Silence of the Lambs ends with one serial killer dead on the floor and a second serial killer on the move in Bimini. The most important book on narrative published in the 1980s explains in its opening pages that plots “demarcate, enclose, establish limits”; they involve “boundedness, demarcation, the drawing of lines to mark off and order.” But boundedness is not, in fact, the condition of many of our most widely shared stories. Some plots branch and end partially. Or they end and then promptly, uncannily, withdraw those endings and so end up only weakly demarcated, enclosed on three sides, half-limited and semi-ordered. Allow yourself to be puzzled. Wasn’t dominant supposed to return to tonic?

…which is all to say: You may not care that The Avengers trails off with five superheroes eating schawarma in silence, but if you begin thinking hard about such scenes—about finales false, weak, and plural, as about post- and mid-credit sequences and their now wholly conventionalized rescissions, their ticcish abrogation of ending—then it will turn out that nearly everything we think we know about how stories end is wrong. On the matter of closure, literary criticism has inherited from twentieth-century narratology a set of fixed positions that actual movies and novels do not reliably bear out.

I would like to propose some corrections.

Thesis #1: Modernist and experimental fiction possesses no monopoly on the open ending.

When revolution was attempted in France in May 1968—eleven million workers on the streets, French students in revolt against their home departments, speaking bitterness at their lecturers and mentors—Roland Barthes was leading a seminar on a single novella of Balzac’s. In January 1969, after a hiatus forced by the rebellion, Barthes resumed his course, moved to North Africa for a year, wrote up his findings, and then published them back in Paris in 1970 under the title S/Z. That’s a book we’re going to want to know about, because it offers what has been for many decades now literary criticism’s canonical defense of the open ending, though it does this mostly in the negative, by anatomizing a story whose ending it takes to be disingenuously closed. That story, Balzac’s “Sarrasine,” from 1830, is lurid enough to hold a person’s interest: In southern Italy in the 1770s, a French sculptor falls in love with a pretty soprano without knowing that she is actually a cross-dressing and castrated man; that mistake ends up getting the sculptor killed. In Paris, a half century later, the now elderly castrato crashes the soirées of the Bourbon Restoration, unnerving its smart set, sidling wordlessly up to its women, exerting a power few can fathom. But you don’t have to be interested in nineteenth-century French fiction to appreciate what Barthes is up to in S/Z. In most respects, the Balzac story is just a case study, an exemplum upon which to showcase a new method, which you are meant to deploy against whichever middlebrow novel you next read, though it has to be said that Barthes’s performance in this little book is so consummate—so expert and so businesslike in its expertise—that almost no-one in these last forty-five years has ventured to emulate it. For what most jumps out at a first-time reader of S/Z is its pretense to exhaustiveness, its determination to comment on the entire novella, which Barthes reproduces in toto, word for word and front to back, in a display of exegetical thoroughness more typically associated with constitutional law textbooks and rabbinic Judaism, as though the realist novel were getting its own Midrash. Barthes, this is to say, has broken down “Sarrasine,” only 34 pages in its modern edition, into 560 units, with the aim of identifying, by function, every one of these separate pieces, like a tinkerer disassembling a ham radio and carefully labeling each of its parts. Barthes’s book is in one sense just an annotated inventory of those units, though from out of these scholia, a theory emerges, as Barthes pauses every six or seven items to insert a short essay on How Narratives Work.

The theory goes something like this: When I read a novel, it is easy for me to feel that I am, as it were, listening to a single voice, that I am in the care of a single great storyteller. In many cases, I will take this voice to be the author’s; in some instances, I will know it to be a narrator’s. Either way, I reach for a novel because I enjoy being immersed in its sonority. Barthes’s guiding argument is that this view is wrong and the pleasure associated with it illusory, that prose fiction is always a welter of discourses, artfully rearranged; a composite of many voices; a chatter; a radio dial rapidly turned, fortuitously yielding sense. Thus Barthes, briskly stated.

Immediately, though, difficulties present themselves. For in this summary version, accurate enough as far as it goes, Barthes’s theory is hard to tell apart from rival accounts, and most notably from Mikhail Bakhtin’s, which holds that the novel is a plural genre, the literary form native to bourgeois-democratic societies, a play of competing and counterpointed voices, with no controlling perspective. That Barthes is arguing more nearly the opposite won’t be clear until you understand the claims he is making about literary history, which poses a problem, since on the face of it he seems to be making no such claims. Barthes, after all, doesn’t want to be telling a story; why we shouldn’t trust stories is finally what S/Z is about. The semiotician comes into being in the mid-twentieth century as the literary historian’s rival and replacement, as will be evident to anyone reading Barthes for the first time, wondering what to take away from the book’s spasmodicness, confounded by its collection of stop-and-go marginalia, its footnotes without body text.

But Barthes is telling a story all the same, giving a not unfamiliar account of the way literature used to be and the way it is now (or was in the now of 1968); and one of our tasks as readers of S/Z is to assemble its scattered historical claims and with them to reassemble the saga that semiotics claims not to be singing. Barthes’s position is most easily grasped, I think, as a claim about the rhetorical tradition, though this isn’t, in fact, how he frames it. Or rather, this is how he frames it, but in hard-to-perceive ways, by routinely calling Balzac’s fiction “classical”—that is, by making “Sarrasine” his signal instance of the “classical text”—and also by insisting that we prefer to any such paleolith a set of more recent novels that he calls “the modern text” or “modern writing,” which latter term sometimes mislays its adjective and so becomes just “writing.” For to call Balzac “classical” is to strip the realist novel of its usual claim to modernity and to associate it instead with the ancient literary education, the rhetorical education typical of Roman senators and Renaissance humanists. The important point, for any reader of S/Z, is that declamatory Latin trained its students to write in exceedingly conventionalized ways and this for a few different reasons. First, convention entered the prose of students when they were forced to mimic the good style of acknowledged masters: Cicero, Seneca, Tacitus. Second, any young  grammarian needing to stake out a position in some upcoming disputation was invited to scan a list of established argumentative moves, many of which recommended invoking the testimony of others: the argument to authority, the argument to law, the argument to rumor, the argument to common wisdom, and so on. Third, young orators were counseled to agree with their auditors whenever possible.  The classical idea is that when you step in front of an audience, your first task will be to reassure the crowd that you share with them an underlying set of premises and priorities—to show that you are one of them, a fellow Roman, a loyal Florentine, and that you understand the culture’s core convictions. You discern your audience’s chauvinism, and then you offer to reinforce it. The art of a shrewd speaker is thus to convince his listeners that some inventive and potentially troubling position flows seamlessly from views they already hold. In a literary culture of this kind, the best writers will be careful to submerge their voices beneath maxims and inherited elegance and the unchallenged assumptions of their own readers; indeed, it might not even make sense to talk about such writers as having had voices to begin with.

We’ll want to note that this position can be made to yield a full-blown theory of literary history, as when some medievalists argue that there was no specifically medieval literature, that anyone studying, say, twelfth-century writing is merely dipping at random into the essential continuity of Western civilization. Before the rise of the novel, and perhaps even before Romanticism, European art and letters were uniformly late–Roman, just so many riffs on the fourth century, discrete entries in the unbroken history of Christianized antiquity. If you find that claim convincing, then the task of the cultural historian will be to trace the continuities and small mutations in the European West’s common store of images and poetic formulas. You will want to study conventions and not authors or artists, on the notion that innovation or individual creativity didn’t count for much in Europe until Byron fled England in 1816. And with this frame in place, Barthes’s “classical text” can be heard for the periodizing term that it is. Indeed, something of this argument can be sensed simply by contemplating the many neologisms that Barthes proposes in S/Z, almost all of them derived from the Greek (semes, proairetisms, hermeneutisms), and which when added to the many Hellenistic terms he borrows unmodified (catachresis, asyndeton, cacography, endoxa) offer to transform structuralism into a twentieth-century ars rhetorica. Barthes steps forward as the counter-Curtius, writing temporarily from independent Morocco to lament realism’s fundamental allegiance to what he calls “Western discourse” and “Western thinking” and “the Occident.”  And with that, it becomes possible to say why Barthes’s position is, in fact, unlike Bakhtin’s, whose basic move, after all, had been to separate epics and novels, with the latter stepping forward as the great open and post-classical genre, willing to forego the oracular, soliloquizing authority claimed by the Homeric tyrant-bard. Barthes is making the case that even in the nineteenth century, innovation and individual creativity didn’t count for much, that writers like Balzac were still rhetorical—jugglers of commonplace, topos recyclers, weavers of purchased thread.

So why would he think this? There are a few different reasons; the pervasive conventionality of realist fiction can be spotted from a few different angles. Its heroes, for a start, get assembled out of routine verbal tags, which means, among other things, that you are going to have to stop treating your favorite characters as people. They don’t preexist the descriptions that conjure them into being, and those descriptions aren’t nearly as particularizing as we fondly take them to be. Even the most iridescent characters have been bundled together out of already existing memes. Julien Sorel and Maggie Tulliver are scarecrows improvised out of semiotic burlap.

Much the same point can be made about action. An attentive observer could, at will, describe any action in ever more minute and corporeal terms, off towards some vanishing point of micro-physiology, right down to the cosine of your briefly crooked elbow. A woman across the room has dropped her hands to her sides; she’s fingering her skirt on either side, as though preparing to check with both hands the thread count of hotel linen; now she’s looking at the floor—maybe something has shaken loose from her lap, just now, when she tightened the skirt’s fabric across her thighs—a contact lens? a bit of dinner roll?; and at the same time, her right foot has swung back behind her left, toes planted on the floor, heel cocked into the air, and her knees are angling outwards, left and right, yawing her legs into the exaggerated bow of a cartoon gunslinger, dragging her still unbent torso some eighteen inches closer to the floor. There is a serious question, of course, about whether we want to call such a description unmediated—presumably not, though it would be possible to rewrite those sentences with more math and less Yosemite Sam. Does more math mean less mediated? Again, probably not, but such a description would be estranging all the same and at least mildly autistic, the beginnings of a motion study in prose, withholding the summary terms that we habitually attach to such sequences: She curtsied. It is only if we keep in mind that fiction writers could if they wished commit to an off-putting literary Newtonianism, describing only bodies in motion, itemizing the hypothetical nano-gestures of made-up limbs, that we can begin to appreciate how important it is that they almost never do—almost never, but sometimes: Foster Wallace plays tennis!—preferring to burden their readers with the poverty of overfamiliar verbs, bringing actions before our minds already abridged, socialized, encased in their conventional meanings: He fell in love. The deed thoughtlessly named is the very stuff of old-fashioned novels, their cell form, as potted actions get organized into longer sequences that are themselves entirely routine: the tribulation, the quest, the courtship.

Barthes’s overriding point, then, is that Balzac’s novels are as conventionalized as any thirteenth-century allegory. Saying as much will now force us to reckon with those infrequent passages in S/Z where Barthes seems to be arguing the opposite point, distinguishing nineteenth-century fiction from what came before, as when he draws a line between “societies that are aware … of the linguistic nature of the world” (medieval Europe, apparently) and societies that aren’t (nineteenth-century France).  It’s hard to say whether this is, in its generality, an accurate account of the Middle Ages—one doubts that Angevin peasants were organic structuralists in quite this fashion, Saussureans of forest and field—but it is telling that Barthes thinks they were, since this bit of idealist cod sociology concedes to Balzac a certain deluded modernity after all. The old humanist and oratorical writing will have to mutate in any society as linguistically un-self-conscious as Restoration France putatively was—a society organized around science and expertise and institutionalized rationality, a society convinced that it is “truth” and not “force” that “brings an end to the confrontation of languages.” Literature itself will remain wholly conventionalized, while at the same time developing a most un-literary orientation towards knowledge or fact. Balzac’s fiction is in this sense at odds with itself, a rhetorical text become un-rhetorical, because not in touch with its own rhetoricity. The realist novel, in sum, is the classical text that does not know itself to be classical, whose suppressed classicism must be reconstructed and aggressively adverted to, which means, of course, that in a few important respects it is no longer classical at all.

At this point, it becomes possible to scan S/Z for claims about the realist novel’s innovations, and they are basically threefold:

1) Realist novels depend, no less than Anglo-Norman fabliaux or neoclassical threnodies, on stock formulas, but what had changed by the nineteenth century were the sources of fiction’s borrowed language, as journalism and the academic disciplines took over the role once played by mythology and holy writ. The point would be that Balzac and his fellows deploy medical knowledge—and history-writing and the psychology of the passions—in precisely the same manner that avowedly neoclassical poets deploy Trojan lore and minor episodes from the Second Book of Kings: citationally and at third hand. The paleontology on the first page of Bleak House is what Dickens has instead of a water nymph; the Megalosaurus is a second Cleodora.

2) But it is not just that the realist novel borrows this or that convention from fresh sources. Realism’s global innovation has been to disavow the conventionality of even its most etched-in patterns, to make them hard to see as conventions. Anyone reading a sonnet can judge for herself whether the poet has managed the 8/6 turn proficiently or not, and in much the same way that one might judge a gymnast’s well- or ill-stuck landing, which is to say: technically. The realist novel, however, does not invite us to scrutinize its technique; its objectionable virtuosity is to move imperceptibly across its borrowed idioms, to make quilt look like unstitched sheet. This is the moment to note that Barthes’s method fully carries his argument: The blocks into which Barthes has disassembled “Sarrasine,” sixteen of them to a page, are like shots in a movie—in fact, if you’re still trying to get the hang of what Barthes has accomplished in S/Z, it would be easiest to imagine a film critic who has taken it upon himself to comment upon every single shot in The Godfather, every close-up, every long take, every cross-cut assassination—except shots are ready-made and identifiable units and Barthes’s lexias are not. It’s hard enough for a film critic to get an audience to start paying attention to where the cuts in a sequence fall, but Barthes’s more audacious task is to insert those very cuts, such that one might begin to see the realist novel as a kind of montage. This idea might, indeed, force us to reevaluate Barthes’s use of the word “code”—realist fiction, we are meant to see, is an intertwining of multiple “codes”—which word choice has often been seen as furthering the case that structuralism and post-structuralism were, in their overlapping heydays, a kind of generalized cybernetics, an investigation into the world’s universal coding. There has got to be something to that line, yet one suspects all the same that S/Z’s profounder allegiance is to an earlier stage in the history of twentieth-century media, not to the computer but to the moving picture, in which case one might track in Barthes’s arguments the belated maturity of film criticism, able now to infiltrate the procedures of its literary elders, to suspend their accustomed prerogatives, and to insist that all pre-cinematic narrative be reclassified as proto-film. Upon finishing S/Z, we will have to struggle to read novels the way we already know to read movies—to read, Barthes says, “in the cinematographic sense.” But then perhaps this point is best made in broader terms. Barthes is not just commenting upon “Sarrasine”; he is reediting it, transforming Balzac’s decommissioned aesthetic into an experimental and twentieth-century one. S/Z is out to enforce a program, and its approach here is rather unusual, not just to hiss at “those who like a good story” or to attack realist prose for being “burnished” and “smoothed” and so insufficiently modernist, but to roughen and tarnish the Balzacian paragraph until it sheds its realist qualities and becomes appreciable as pastiche or nouveau roman, a miscellany of undirected text.

3) The other point to make about the word “code” is that it is in at least one respect pretty sneaky. Barthes says on the very first page of S/Z that he is no longer a narratologist in the usual sense—not for him the reduction of the world’s sundry stories to a single obligatory master plot, not any more. Such is the importance of Barthes’s ditching the old arguments about “structure” in favor of one about “codes.” Structuralism would instruct you to extract from “Sarrasine” its narrative skeleton and mappable grammar, on the expectation that the novella, at that level of abstraction, would be indistinguishable from any other story you’ve ever read. Semiotics, though, will make multiple what structuralism has just flattened, by spot-checking passage after passage, half-paragraphwise, and demonstrating that more than one code is chirruping in every one. I read out loud a single sentence in Balzac and hear him at once mobilizing a dumb commonplace from art history (what we think we know about Italian painting), organizing the novella’s action into a nameable sequence (going-to-the-theater), and inserting enough equivocation or engineered ambiguity that a reader seeking clarity will have to keep reading. This last operation Barthes calls “the formulation of the enigma,” and it’s the sneaky bit, because every time the theorist identifies a passage as contributing to the enigma, he is pointing to the incremental formation of a certain kind of plot—except no, not a “kind of plot,” because there is for Barthes only one plot after all, the mystery-suspense plot that he thinks the classical text strictly requires. The old narratological argument, disavowed on page one, thus reappears intact, and Barthes turns out to be a structuralist still. It’s just that “structure” has now been absorbed into the language of “codes” as one of its members.

The classical text requires a suspense plot, I’ve just written, though one suspects that this is the last and perhaps most important way in which realist fiction is unlike its medieval and ancient forebears. For the plot that Barthes claims to have discovered in all classical fiction is most evident in the fully modern genre of the mystery novel—“Narratively, an enigma leads from a question to an answer, through a certain number of delays”; that’s S/Z’s general description of all readerly novels—in which case the book’s unspoken claim seems to be that all literary realists are to a greater or lesser degree writing detective stories. That claim can be dilated in turn, simply by noting that the nineteenth-century detective novel itself partook of trends broader than itself, in which case we might conclude that in the protracted age of enlightenment, all fiction has shared its structure with science and philosophical system, posing questions and promising answers and stopping only when there is nothing important left to learn. At the end of a classic novel, you know who the main characters are; they have disclosed the important truths about themselves and so become fixed. At the end of the sensation novel, everyone knows who is and isn’t the woman in white; identities briefly up for grabs have been clarified and settled. At the end of the Bildungsroman, we know just what kind of adult this teenager is likely to be. Lizzie Bennett has to revise her judgment of Mr. Darcy once, but only once; their marriage renders Darcy legible and the revision permanent. Characters in novels will never elude their conditions. The waiter in the café will be a waiter still, David Copperfield a David-thing.

MORE ON THAT SOON…

 A few notes:

-I found the opening image — “There Is No Ending” — here: http://downlopaz.com/no-ending/

-The volume I refer to as “the most important book on narrative published in the 1980s” is Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot (1984).

-All quotations from Barthes come from Richard Miller’s 1974 translation of S/Z, except that I have rendered as “classical” the adjective that Miller sometimes (but inconsistently) translates as “classic.”

-The backstory to S/Z is detailed in Louis-Jean Calvet’s Roland Barthes: A Biography.

The proposition I would like to consider, in other words, is that novels—all novels: realist, modernist, and otherwise—have a hard time telling stories at scales larger than the nation, and that it is important for us to figure out why this is so. Consider the novel-in-letters. Dickens writes at one point that one must consider “all the work, near and afar,” that goes into making any not-really-solitary human life. Near and afar: Epistolary novels have their own tidy way of collapsing the distinction between the two, since familiarity-at-a-remove is their very métier. The letter is a wondrous device: Compatriots trade stories at a distance; each produces long-distance emotional effects in the other; one telegraphs moral claims upon his fellow’s far-off regard—any such novel obviously brings to the fore the idea that nations are synthesized in acts of reading. The early English novel often borrowed its scenarios from the theater, but if the novel helped readers imagine the nation and the theater mostly did not, then this is simply because characters in a novel don’t all have to be standing in the same room. Even novels with reduced character lists—which is to say, most eighteenth-century novels, since these had not yet worked out how to choreograph the street-filling multitudes of the high Victorian novel—even such novels submit their few personae to what by theatrical standards is a de-centralizing operation, often replicating the intensities of neoclassical drama, and peopling it with the stock types of the late seventeenth-century stage, but now in centrifugal form. The epistolary novel is the chamber drama in dispersal.

But then how far is afar? If the epistolary form is in part a way of narratively managing distance, then just how far can its techniques be extended? How thin can you stretch a novel before it begins to tear? Saliently: Can there be novels in which characters exchange letters between nations—or were there, in fact, such novels? That, yes, such novels were written and published raises a reader’s hopes; maybe transnational and even transoceanic fiction is viable after all. The bad news, then, must be instantly and soberly delivered: Epistolarity in such novels begins to seem makeshift and erratic. In 1792, Charlotte Smith published a novel called Desmond, whose title character some few hundred pages into the thing leaves for revolutionary France. Now that move is in itself not all that unusual: France is one place that characters in English fiction are routinely allowed to go. And yet even so, when Desmond leaves England, three remarkable things happen all at once: The gap between letters increases at least threefold and often widens rather further than that; the letters themselves get accordingly longer; and the characters repeatedly fret, at the beginning and ends of chapters, about the difficulties of maintaining a correspondence over very long distances: I haven’t heard from you forever; my apologies for not having written; “the opportunities I have of sending to the post are so few….” A novel committed to epistolary verisimilitude will have to factor in the limitations of the eighteenth-century postal service, absorbing the latter’s inefficiencies into its very form, where they will blossom into sympathetic arrhythmias and sentimental dysfunction. In Smith’s novel, characters ride beyond the reach of regular mails; letters routinely cross, which means that each party is writing from a position of relative ignorance; traveling friends become moving targets, less interlocutors than the blank site of recently vacated addresses: Fine feeling gets forwarded by cooperative landladies. The letters themselves, written in the company of an impatient carrier, begin to seem hurried—truncated and self-interrupting; or, conversely, letters never sent are bundled together and inflate into soliloquy.

This should allow us to specify the important point: Transnational novels aren’t nearly as good as their sedentary counterparts at the very things at which prose fiction is generally thought to excel. You might, for instance, think that eighteenth-century novels prompt readers to sharpen their sensibilities by inviting them to partake imaginatively in the lives of strangers, but a novel like Desmond shows something rather different—friendships put under pressure by distance, as characters themselves, corresponding only intermittently, are presented fewer occasions for sympathetic communion: “It is very uneasy to me, my dear Bethel, to be so long without hearing from you”; “time and distance are cruel enemies, even to the ties of blood.” Worse: A letter from another country will, when it finally arrives, still generate sympathy in its receiver, but that person will now have conspicuously fewer options for acting on his sentiments: “If these distressing scenes should become yet more alarming, I shall return to England”—because in another country my sentiments are for naught. In a sentence such as this, we witness sympathy, having flicked to the end of its elastic tether, begin its snapback and homeward journey. The transnational novel has to consider the possibility that sentiment is localizing and nation-bound. The sympathetic novelist stares unhappily at the limits of sympathy. Or there’s this: “Write to me instantly—Yet how shall I put off my determination till I receive your answer?” That dash is a kind of fracture, or perhaps a surveyor’s chain, melancholically measuring distance, at the distal end of which a character is realizing he is going to have come to a decision by himself, outside of his accustomed community of sentiment, and without the advice that would normally be wired in from the next county. This isolation is a problem for a sympathetic ethics, to be sure, but it is also a narratalogical problem, since in that same half-sentence we see one of this novel’s narrative strands achieving its reluctant autonomy; the hero’s story will now have to proceed without imported inputs. The novel’s multiple plots, far from knitting more tightly together in the genre’s accustomed fashion, begin to disarticulate. Epos reverts to episode. When, in a novel-in-letters, the communications begin to arrive infrequently, the back-and-forth that is the hallmark of the form grows muffled, to the point where the narration begins to resemble the running monologue of a plain first-person narrator, and the novel begins shedding its epistolary qualities. If made-up letters turn readers into virtual friends, then long distances tend to force even friends into the position of novel readers. The epistolary novel’s sense of time is accordingly unsettled. The status of events shifts in one of two ways, each of which inhabits a sympathy-defeating temporality: Either a correspondent writes to recount in full events that are no longer ongoing, that have already arrived at their conclusions and so present no possibility for sentimental intervention—or, odder: the correspondent writes to half-tell events that were ongoing when written, but will have been completed by the time the letter is read, their outcomes sealed, but to the addressee unknown: “Perhaps, before you receive this, for it is a long way from hence to England, he will be well—perhaps he may not need your prayers!”; “Before this letter reaches you, however, my fate must probably be decided.” And with sentences like those there collapses the shared time of the nation that novels are thought to generate. If cross-Channel epistolarity generates formal impasses of this severity, we can begin to understand why the trans-Atlantic novel in letters was left unattempted, since the problems of scale would have become that much more unmanageable. The epistolary novel, it turns out, suffered from the same difficulty as the British war command circa 1780—the insurmountable difficulty, that is, of transoceanic communication, of never being able to respond to events in real-time, of only ever knowing what happened in the war six weeks ago, of planning for the future with permanently and incorrigibly obsolete information. Verse epics, willing to scale impossible mountains or to send muses and angels screaming across the sky, don’t have this problem. We are used to thinking of novels as sprawling, encompassing, fully open to the world; and if you don’t like poetry—the way, for instance, Sartre didn’t like poetry—this might be because poems, you think, tend to be miniaturizing, inward-looking, preoccupied with language itself, in a manner that too readily turns its back on the world. But eighteenth-century poems routinely describe oceans and continents and spheres. Worldly novels and unworldly poetry—now consider please: What if it were actually the other way around?

This brings us back to our question, which we should naggingly repeat: Is it possible to write a novel about the entire world? Where is the novel that evenly divides its attention between the Chicago and Pakistani branches of the same family, without making either of those locations serve as mere backdrop to the other—as interlude or memory hole? Where is the periodical novel in which the Dedlocks divide their time every year between Melbourne and the Greek islands, in which Richard Carstone is still trying to make his nut in London, and Little Jo dies in Kinshasa? Could Gaskell’s North and South be rewritten so that its title refers to hemispheres and not counties? What do we do when we realize that Frank Norris’s Octopus is not just, as the subtitle has it, “a story of California”? If you wanted to sit down to write a planetary novel, what would you take as your model? What kind of novel would get you closest? And what about its techniques and conventions would you nonetheless have to change? What exactly do we take to be the pendular opposite to the domestic novel or literary regionalism? Jane Austen and Sarah Orne Jewett at one end of the geo-fictional spectrum and at the other end…well, what? Is it possible to compose a literary history of novels that were never written?

The problem is more complicated than that, since there are several different ways a book can fail to appear. There are, for a start, entire regions of our collective experience that seem inhospitable to narrative—the most consequential of these would be work, unsettling as it is to realize that the preponderance of contemporary narrative, novelistic or otherwise, takes place at the day’s margins, on weekends or during coffee breaks or after the whistle blows. Where, we might ask, are the great novels of the workplace?—though that question seems less like a judgment on novels than it does on factories or office buildings themselves, those austere and storyless zones—a judgment, I mean, on our lives’ blankest hours, routinized, repetitive, unproductive of incident. In other cases, a book’s non-appearance is a simple matter of literary access—of admittance to literacy and the quantum of leisure that alone makes writing possible—as when one learns, disbelievingly, that we possess no slave narratives in French, not a single one, not from Haiti, not from Guadeloupe, not from Martinique. Some institutions, in other words, don’t produce stories; and others don’t produce storytellers. But neither of those explanations seem to hold for the missing stories of empire and diaspora and global capitalism. So: Can we tell stories about the whole world? And if not, then why not? What’s keeping the novel from pulling this off? It is hard to shake the feeling that the novel should be up to the task. In inquiring about the planetary novel, we are, it’s important to keep in mind, not imposing on the form a reader’s private wish, arbitrarily spoken from outside its pages, alien to its design. We are not asking the novel to mop our floors or press our shirts and then complaining when it doesn’t. Quite the contrary: George Eliot writes that the novel produces “new consciousness of interdependence” or “fresh threads of connexion.” Goethe writes that “everything depends” on “knowing the connection of parts,” Salman Rushdie that “to understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.” One of the greatest accomplishments of the novel has been to generate on behalf of complex social systems a kind of hypothetical transparency, to allow us counter-factually to inhabit a metropolis the way we think villages and neighborhoods were once inhabited, to reduce the outsized back to the scale of the knowable. You read Balzac—or you watch The Wire—and you think: This is what it would feel like if cities were intelligible, which they’re not. So given that the tendency of the novel—or of one prominent strain of the novel—is already towards diffusion and dilation, and also towards complex causality and action at a distance, one would like to know why, when the novel’s compass was expanding, it stopped where it did. Why wasn’t that process arbitrarily extendable? Why, when characters in Great Expectations travel to Australia and Cairo—or when characters in Balzac’s Black Sheep voyage to Texas and Algeria—do the novels in question not follow them to those places? Dickens famously thought that the word “telescopic” was an insult. Clara Reeve’s Old English Baron, one of the first Gothic novels, from 1778, features one character who has, in fact, had many adventures overseas, but the novel poses as a found manuscript, and it turns out that the un-English pages have all been misplaced. Reeve simply leaves them out, tears them from the book. That names the problem pretty well: Where you expect to find the world outside England there is instead only a gap, a strikethrough, a coffee stain.

If you read a lot of novel criticism, you might want to track this observation back to Edward Said’s “Jane Austen and Empire,” itself twenty years old now and due for reconsideration. That essay was trying to evaluate one simple, easily overlooked literary datum—that Jane Austen over the course of Mansfield Park mentions Antigua some half a dozen times. What, the essay asks, are we to make of this flickering in the Caribbean distance, this dependency glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye? Said’s answer to that question was notably unsettled. In one sense, all he wanted to do was make sure that no-one thought he was doing something willful by introducing the question of empire to the study of literature, and the mere presence of the word “Antigua” in the library’s Austen concordance was all he needed to make his point, since it allowed him to argue, correctly, that the colonies were already inside of English literary history and that insisting on the importance of empire was, in fact, just one more way of being attentive to a great novelist. It turns out that even the most decorous, music-box fictions compulsively record their affiliations with spaces outside themselves. Fair enough, I’d like to say—but we should also note the particular ways in which Said overstates his claims, since by the time the essay has finished, he will have enrolled Austen, alongside Jean Rhys and Joseph Conrad, in the roster of colonial writers, the idea being, I think, that there were in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries no non-colonial writers. And this bit of luminous hyperbole, unmistakably generative and entirely flattening, is accompanied in Said’s essay by a palpable desire to correct Austen—to improve upon her novel—to bolster her few summary references to plantation slavery and thereby to transform her into the Tolstoy of Atlantic capitalism. Fredric Jameson has made the brilliant observation that large-format realist novels do not require footnotes to nearly the same degree as other types of literature. The discouraging experience of the undergraduate taking a seminar on Augustan poetry is one of spending a lot of time flipping to the back of the book and still not really understanding who Bolingbroke was. Most literary writing is hard to read without somebody constantly whispering explanations in your ear. But realist novels can get by with many fewer footnotes—and that’s not because the world they describe is more like ours—but because they are as it were self-footnoting, as though they had pre-emptively absorbed the apparatus of historical explanation and annotation into the fiction itself. It is in this sense a problem that so much of Said’s essay amounts to an extended historical gloss on Mansfield Park, with the critic providing the account of the sugar islands that Austen has in fact withheld. Said, in his own words, has made it his task to “reveal and accentuate the interdependence scarcely mentioned on [the novel’s] brilliant pages”; and in that sentence, he stops functioning as Austen’s commentator and steps forward instead as her collaborator, eagerly offering to draft Mansfield Park’s omitted scènes de la vie coloniale, praising Austen not for the novel she actually published, but for some imaginary other novel that the two of them cooked up together. But one needs, I think, to hold fast to the distinction between a novel in which Antigua is named and one in which it is brought before the mind as a narrative object in its own right. I hope this will begin to make clear the stakes of the project I am outlining here. The near absence of concertedly transoceanic novels is one of our literary history’s oddest lacunae. No less an intelligence than Edward Said was forced to make one up.

I don’t mean, by pointing this out, to admonish Said. That’s not it at all. I merely want to be clear about what he was up to so that we can, if possible, reformulate his point with greater precision. For if we have no choice but to become Austen’s deputies and co-novelists, we will need to know in much more detail what it’s going to take to write that other Mansfield Park. In particular, we will need to know how a novelist like Austen, having once spied the rest of the planet—having, that is, registered the globe as a possible object of narrative concern—nonetheless manages not to tell a story about it. What are the devices that, dyke- and levee-like, prevent the rising ocean from overrunning the novel’s pages? A demonstration is ready-to-hand—here’s a passage from Mansfield Park where you can see Austen deploying some of the canonical novel’s drainage techniques. The novel has just introduced a minor character; his name is William; he’s a sailor; he’s been abroad for several years; and he’s back in England on leave for the first time. This makes him a valuable guest.

William was often called on by his uncle to be the talker. His recitals were amusing in themselves to Sir Thomas, but the chief object in seeking them, was to understand the recitor, to know the young man by his histories; and he listened to his clear, simple, spirited details with full satisfaction—seeing in them, the proof of good principles, professional knowledge, energy, courage, and cheerfulness—every thing that could deserve or promise well. Young as he was, William had already seen a great deal. He had been in the Mediterranean—in the West Indies—in the Mediterranean again—had been often taken on shore by the favour of his Captain, and in the course of seven years had known every variety of danger, which sea and war together could offer. With such means in his power he had a right to be listened to; and though Mrs. Norris could fidget about the room, and disturb every body in quest of two needlefulls of thread or a second hand shift button in the midst of her nephew’s account of a shipwreck or an engagement, every body else was attentive; and even Lady Bertram could not hear of such horrors unmoved….

The first thing that this passage allows us to say is that Austen herself recognizes the possibility of global narration, and that our demand for such a form will seem accordingly less whimsical and arbitrary. Even in Austen’s Nottinghamshire, we find ourselves briefly in the presence not just of colonial wealth (Sir Thomas’s repaired finances)—and not just of colonial goods (Indian shawls and tea and spiced punch)—but in the presence, too, of colonial storytelling. The possibility of an entirely different narrative mode opens up in front of us. The second thing we’ll want to say, though, is that William is a rival narrator—not an ally who might piggyback on Austen’s own persona and thereby extend the novel’s geographic reach, but a competitor whose efforts must be parried. A sailor arrives spinning yarns, and the chamber novel registers his coming as an intrusion. Austen, we will note, has dealt with the challenge in much the way you might have expected her to—by absorbing William’s stories into her own apparatus, though to say this is not yet to say enough, since in most other cases that observation would mean that the young sailor’s Stories from the Sea had actually been reproduced or dialogically interpolated. Novels, after all, routinely feature guest narrators who show up for a few chapters to sit in with the band. But that’s not the case here. Almost nothing of the competing narrative has been preserved; Austen has undertaken not just to, say, recontextualize William’s adventures, but to neutralize them, to diminish them back to the mere fact of themselves. The visiting sailor “has a right to be listened to,” but that right will not be honored. The opening sentences are of special interest in this regard: What matters is the recitor, not the recital. The novel draws attention to Sir Thomas and allows him to model for us a way of listening to global or maritime stories—a mode of listening that purges the planet even from planetary relations, that brackets the world as narrative object and makes it subordinate to the world’s witness, that manages to transmute into a lyric solo the thronging chatter of port cities. That’s all you need to know about one strain of English fiction: that it knowingly makes a reading of the globe secondary to the reading of character.

You could make the same point in terms of genre, since the stories that William recounts have the quality of epic, and we can think of the novel as here reducing this more prestigious competitor form to a few amputated conventions—shipwrecks, battles, horrors. But I think the point is most compelling when made in terms of style. In Austen’s pages, we can see the globe acting upon novelistic style, making itself felt as a distortion in realist prose, a thinning of the form’s usual busy knit. The mark of the globe is a recourse to abstraction where we would otherwise expect specificity: “recitals, histories, an account, details.” Abstraction is the residue of an untold story—quite literally in this case—a history named ideationally qua history but then relegated to the Cone of Silence.

The problem of abstraction is worth thinking about some more. It will help, in this regard, to examine a passage from a novel that Elizabeth Hamilton published in 1800, called Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. It is not a novel that urgently demands to be rediscovered; it is enough, for current purposes, to imagine a gawky, Presbyterian Austen novel in which the scoundrels are all left-wing intellectuals. The book also goes in for a little light Shandeism, teasing readers about the expectations they bring to a novel and so flagging what by 1800 had already come to seem tediously conventional in prose fiction. The novel’s best bit comes in the final chapter, when the narrator announces that she is not after all going to be able to get everyone married before the book ends. And she imagines an irritated reader asking Why not? Sure, one of the novel’s men is so rascally as to be beyond marrying. But…

“If Bridgetina can’t have him [the truly vile one],” cries the [reader], “she surely may have Myope at least. His poverty is no obstacle; for what so easy, as to make him have some rich uncle come home from the East-Indies, or to give him a prize in the lottery; or—oh, there are a thousand ways of giving him a fortune in a moment….”

“Giving him a fortune in a moment”: The marvel of this short passage is that it brings to the fore a constellation of problems in the history of the novel that we could cluster under the rubric of Things That Just Happen. The reader is begging the novelist to exercise her emergency powers, and one of the terms that occurs in this context is “fortune,” which is linked to the lottery and thus to chance. There is an entire literary history behind that formulation—the history of a writerly device—since eighteenth-century fiction still routinely chalks events up to fortuna—or, alternately, to providence or accident. In other contexts, the distinctions between those three would need to be teased out, but for our purposes what matters is that all of them are higher order abstractions that introduce terminal gaps—great, shrugging perplexities—into a given novel’s chain of causal explanation. Fortune is the encompassing and vacant pseudo-cause, the mark in human affairs of implacable complexity or genuine randomness, hence the hollow into which narrative bottoms. If an event happened “because of Fortune,” then it just happened.

But then the second possibility that the impatient reader raises is that a character could be summoned in from India. This points to a problem that I don’t ever think has been sufficiently considered: Characters routinely appear in novels from afar—and they routinely exit novels, as well, as surely as they do stages, and one way to think about this would be to say that novels almost always generate for themselves a kind of offstage, a place from which messengers arrive, where events happen unseen and to which characters can pop out for a cigarette and a costume change. And the passage already makes clear why novelists might avail themselves of this void space; an offstage can solve all manner of different problems that are at once ideological and formal, furnishing spaces—many of them with names like “Egypt” and “St. Kitts”—where novels relieve themselves from the otherwise endless burden of narration, magic boxes from which poor characters emerge rich and nobody needs to know how or why. The offstage is in this sense a spatialization of what had seemed like the intrinsically temporal problem of fortune. It’s not that fortune can’t strike nearby—it’s just that events transpiring in remote places are more likely to appear to the mind as fortune-driven—and the territories involved become, again, places where things just happen—the Fortune Islands or the Archipelago of Accidents. The biggest island in the Bahamas is called Providence.

What we can say now is that events in prose fiction become abstract when they are, as here, declared exempt from the novel’s usual modes of analysis and elucidation—the curiosity about complex action that seems to be part of narrative’s permanent Aristotelian inheritance. And it this abstraction that will make itself felt at the level of the sentence, in a manner that we’ve already just seen in Austen. Verbal de-specification is how Fortune and the offstage—these temporal and spatial dullnesses—begin to colonize the very style of prose fiction. Two more sentences from Mansfield Park:

…Sir Thomas was still abroad, and without any near prospect of finishing his business. Unfavorable circumstances had suddenly arisen at a moment when he was beginning to turn all his thoughts towards England; and the very great uncertainty in which everything was then involved determined him on sending home his son, and waiting the final arrangement by himself.

This is as close as we come in Mansfield Park to a direct description of Antigua, and what stands out here, again, is the strange, ruthless weeding of the narrative underbrush: Business?—What business? Circumstances?—what circumstances? Arrangement—what arrangement? Everything? Sentences like these do, it’s true, push the concept of fortune one degree back towards a differentiated causal sequence, but only one degree, achieving the syntax of narrative while narrating almost nothing. They resemble an author’s reminder to herself to insert event here.

The question, then, is whether the novel could set itself loose from this or that place without degenerating into abstraction in this manner—or more simply whether, in an English novel, Antigua could function as a narrated place and not just as a placeholder. And I think that these questions furnish us with a series of fresh reasons to go back and read widely in the early history of the novel. There are some utterly basic things we still don’t know. What finally accounts for this literary deficiency? Is the problem, as with epistolary fiction, that the novel’s technology gets glitchy when upscaled? Or is the problem, as with Austen, that novelists have, one after another, obstinately discounted openings to global narration even when these have conveniently presented themselves? The epistolary novel might have specifiable limitations, but then why aren’t these lifted by authoritative and disembodied narrators—the narrators that in this of all contexts we are going to have to stop calling “omniscient”? And which features of the realist novel could we nonetheless imagine repurposing to planetary ends? Is it really all that hard to conceive of a multiplot Mansfield Park—an Austen novel reunited with its twelve mislaid Caribbean chapters? But then what are the various ways in which regional and national novels cauterize their edges? How does any given novel constitute its geographical borders? How does it set territorial limits to what it is willing to narrate or how does it mark out a beyond into which it will not follow even major characters? Do maritime novels have distinctive narrative strategies for expanding the realist novel’s scope? Do immigrant novels? And could the realist novel still learn from the genres against which it typically defines itself? Can it learn from science fiction novels, which, after all, have an easier time than most talking about planets? Are there things that neoclassical verse epics know how to do that even a Dickensian or Balzacian realism doesn’t manage? And if a novelist tried to import these epic features into a novel already in progress, what would she have to give up? With what exactly would they seem incompatible? If the realist novel is to keep its promises, will it have to cede its very realism? Even the most imperialist of epics allow the casualties of empire to call curses down upon their conquerors. Couldn’t brother William, just once, see St. Helena from the main-mast? Will Fanny Price have to play cards with the sister-nymphs who live at the world’s western edge? Will Sir Thomas be called to account by the gorgon spirit of Africa rising caustic from the drink?

A FEW NOTES:

-The map up top was designed by Aaron Straup Cope.

-I don’t mean to suggest that there are no planetary novels, only that we should pause to appreciate how unusual they are—and that we should read them again carefully to make sure that they are really doing what we think they are. Here are the beginnings of a list: Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, any of Pynchon’s long novels, and especially Moby-Dick. Other readers will forward their own candidates.

-Thanks to Christopher Flynn, whose Americans in British Literature helped me extend my thinking on Charlotte Smith.

-Jameson’s comments on the self-footnoting novel can be found in The Political Unconscious.

-For more on how novels deal with Things That Just Happen, see my “Providence in the Early Novel, Or Accident If You Please.”

On Viv Soni’s Mourning Happiness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010)

Now here’s a book that thinks you don’t even know whether you’re happy. The next time someone asks “Are you happy?”—inauspicious question that this is, prelude to a long talk and a probably sleepless night—the only proper answer you can give will be: “I don’t know” or, better, “It’s not for me to say.” The problem, for Vivasvan Soni, is not epistemological; it’s not that Soni has identified some new skeptical barrier that would prevent us from accurately identifying our own emotions: You don’t know whether you’re angry; you don’t know whether you’re contrite; &c. The issue is that happiness correctly understood is not, in fact, an emotion, not even a complex one, nor indeed any kind of inner state, and Mourning Happiness is the story of how we ever came to suppose that it was. But then this book is not just a history; it is an exorbitant labor of philosophical retrieval, rather, proposing that we return to another, all-but-vanished conception of happiness, which Soni anchors in the command, issued by the semi-mythical Athenian statesman Solon, that we “call no man happy until he is dead.” What this would mean is at least threefold: First, it would mean that happiness requires a difficult judgment; happiness will not wash over me, and I will never read it in the faces of others. Even following our current uses of the word, we accept that a person might be puzzled about her own happiness—unsure whether she is happy—whereas we would not expect her to be unsure, across even moderate durations, whether she is, say, in pain. Second, it would mean that this judgment will have to be spoken by others in my absence, since I will be dead, and that my fellows will thereby take responsibility for my life—for its course and its success. “Was he happy?” will inevitably, when spoken in grief, mean “Did we do everything we could to make him happy?” Third and most important: It means that you can tell whether someone was happy only if you take into consideration her entire life; to say that a person was happy is to say that, by some criterion unspecified, she lived her life well, and that life (or fortune or fate or God) did not at any point punish her irreparably. What’s more, if a person’s whole life is at issue, then there is no time of which you can say that her happiness did not matter. But then equally there is no month of which you can say that her happiness briefly ran high. Perfect moments do not enter into it. The day your first child is born will be important, of course, but no more than the reputedly routine Tuesday that precedes it. Soni’s most fundamental contention is that “happiness” used to be ordinary language’s one utopian term, broadcasting, even from its perch in everyday speech, the implacable idea that people deserve to lead good lives, and not just sometimes. The question, then, would have to be how we have ended up, by way of the very same word, with such a meagerness, a mere feeling, which you sometimes experience but mostly don’t—joy tempered with content; a seasoned gaiety; a composite pleasure; a reward for having endured long stretches of boredom and nausea; a treat: the weekend.

The good news, for some, will be that Soni is an eighteenth centuryist, and that Mourning Happiness is not just another happiness book, not the inescapable extension into its chosen field of one of academia’s more fashionable topics. For Soni’s is far and away the most brilliant reformulation of the question of happiness in recent years, the one book with reference to which all the other professors of happiness—the neo-Aristotelians, the SWB psychologists, sundry other late-model eudaimonologists—will have to frame their positions. Nor does Soni simply summon Augustan and Enlightenment proxies in order to ratify conclusions about happiness formulated in other venues. He draws out the specificities of eighteenth-century thinking and makes them indispensable for any serious consideration of the subject. Indeed, if you are in the habit of scanning the eighteenth-century lists, you would have to go back to Habermas’s public sphere book to find another volume of such reach and accomplishment—a book, I mean, that could carry the century to the rest of the academy, as vindication of the entire field, and that might generationally reframe entire subfields of eighteenth-century studies itself.

The bad news, then, at least for those who are protective of their period, is that Soni has come up with some entirely new reasons for hating the 1700s. If you believe, as he does, that modernity is the Time Without Happiness, then you might have thought the idea would be to recommend the eighteenth century to us as remedy—as the last period in which happiness was a central topic of philosophical and political debate. Our misery might be the occasion for a little Georgian revivalism. But that’s not it at all. Thus Soni: “One aim of this book … is to revise the common misperception that the eighteenth century taught us to think a secular, political conception of happiness, but that the nineteenth century turned its back on this utopian promise. I will argue, instead, that the failure to articulate a viable political conception of happiness is to be located in the eighteenth century itself, in the period’s putatively revolutionary and undeniably modern reinterpretation of happiness. … [H]ow is it that the eighteenth century’s very obsession with happiness culminates in the political obsolescence of the idea?” (3, 2)

That’s the question. Here, then, are the broad outlines of an answer: First, eighteenth-century fiction writers devised a new set of techniques for telling stories about unhappy people, stories in which the wretchedness of some lives serves a visible purpose, such that readers could in good conscience set aside, at least for long sections of a novel, their accustomed sense that people deserved to be happy. When we turn back to the question of happiness towards the end of such a narrative, this simple tear in the classical conception—the permission that eighteenth-century fiction has given us to temporarily stop thinking about happiness—will have left the concept permanently transformed: abstracted out of narrative; shorn in large part of its temporal aspect; given thinglike qualities; filled in with this or that arbitrary content; made deferrable, postponable, and so to some considerable degree optional; reclassified as pay or prize—as desert and, indeed, as dessert. This transformation might, in turn, help account for some of the impasses that scholars have already identified in eighteenth-century sentimentalism: the sentimentalists’ narcissistic regard for their own sensitivity; their persistent mistaking of anguish for virtue; their eagerness to weep, not to set suffering right but to relive it, not to abolish the position of the sufferer but to join her in her abjection. Once conceptions of happiness were made over, conceptions of unhappiness had perforce to mutate in their wake. Kant, meanwhile, took it upon himself to abolish happiness from moral philosophy altogether, but, then, upon reconsidering, scrambled to readmit it, though incompletely, as an awkwardly stitched add-on: happiness in the sheerest beyond, the thing that morality teaches you to expect but that you will never, in this lifetime, reach. The American Revolution, finally, presents a case study in the disappearance of happiness. Soni is palpably delighted to find a vigorous philosophy of happiness in much early American political thought—not just in the Declaration of Independence, whose “pursuit of happiness” is, as he remarks, actually rather hedged, but in various pre-revolutionary political tracts and insurgent state constitutions—all of it, however, vanished by 1787 and the drafting of the federal Constitution, which mentions happiness not at all. This last sequence demonstrates in fine grain what is Soni’s central and alarming point: that the late eighteenth century did not produce a politics of happiness. Quite the contrary, it was the period in which the politics of happiness was superseded—precisely a transition moment, in which we find political thinkers talking about happiness for just as long as it takes to privatize it. It’s not that the Americans—and their French allies—hadn’t been trying to establish a politics of happiness; some of them had been. But they were on Soni’s account trying to politicize the wrong happiness, a concept already so damaged as to be ideologically unserviceable. At this juncture, Soni’s thinking yields a series of grandly counter-intuitive and even paradoxical formulations: He finds an anti-utopian program at just the moment when we think the modern Left is coming to be. In Samuel Richardson, he discovers an amoral morality: Even the reader consents, after a fashion, to Pamela’s suffering, since the more she suffers, the more honorable she will seem. Studying Kant, he learns that the labor of philosophical ethics is to limit responsibility—to let you know what you are under no obligation to do—to let you, finally, off the hook. And in the end, the revolution’s happiness project turned out to be just another way of ushering felicity out the door. To judge by Soni’s recent essays—post-happiness—he seems to be gearing up to give a similar account of “judgment,” which concept Locke, Hutcheson, and others inherited from antiquity, but then mistranslated so badly that subsequent generations decided they could just as well do without it.[i] Such is the cast of Soni’s thought: We should worry less about the eighteenth century’s oversights than its obsessions, which are a ready guide to its mistakes. The period breaks everything it touches.

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If there is another book that Mourning Happiness resembles, then it is surely Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981), itself old enough now to merit a refurbishing, though MacIntyre is so routinely misread that to note the likeness risks condemning Soni to share in that misunderstanding. Casual readers retrieving his name off of half-remembered undergraduate syllabi typically have MacIntyre pegged for a Catholic reactionary—a postmodern de Maistre or late capitalist Donoso Cortés—and one might well wonder what such a person has to do with the thinker in front of us, whose philosophical mentors have been Derrida and Levinas and, indeed, Jameson. Soni quotes no saints. But MacIntyre began his thinking life as a committed socialist, and initially conceived of After Virtue as supplying orthodox Marxism with the moral philosophy that it had never, to its detriment, gotten around to proposing. Anyone re-reading the book at a thirty years’ remove is in a good position to appreciate just how close its language is to the Frankfurt School and French Maoism and even to a certain post-structuralism. MacIntyre’s still Marxist Left Weberianism turns out to be really easy to spot: his attack on bureaucracy and rule by experts, his sense that a manipulative social order attempts to legitimize itself by socially performing versions of knowledge that it couldn’t possibly possess. After Virtue reads like a parallel to Habermas’s work in the same period, as in: Horkheimer keeps telling us that ‘instrumental reason’ is a problem and has colonized the lifeworld—so … what was that other kind of reason again? It’s just that where Habermas looked to Kant to equip the Left with a non-instrumental rationality, MacIntyre looked instead to Aristotle, whose philosophy of virtue he wanted us to understand as an anti-capitalist ethos of non-alienated activity and human achievement. Well before 1981, MacIntyre and E. P. Thompson had joined forces in a fight against the English Althusserians, and one easy way to make sense of After Virtue is as a bid to double-down on the young and humanist Marxism that they both preferred. Nor did MacIntyre ever really shed his Marxism, not, at any rate, with an apostate’s venom. As late as 1987, he was arguing that Aristotelianism did in fact survive, here and there, residually, into the twentieth century—as evidenced by Mao’s army in 1940s China. And he ended a 1993 essay reflecting on the collapse of state communism by proclaiming that “The point is … first to understand [our defeat] and then to start out all over again.”[ii]

That is the sense in which Soni deserves to be read as MacIntyre’s successor: He has started out all over again. Their affinities are, at any rate, quickly listed. First, Soni takes over MacIntyre’s basic thesis—that the eighteenth century underwent a catastrophic breakdown of moral reasoning—as well as his basic hunch about where we might look for redress: classical antiquity, one might blurt out, though this is too vague—better to say: the everyday practices of the Athenian  polis. Second, Soni shares MacIntyre’s allergy to liberalism. There are moments when Mourning Happiness sounds anti-liberal notes in such a recognizably neo-Aristotelian key that the book seems briefly to be channeling Matthew Arnold: “Freedom must be the freedom to live well, or it is worth nothing” (429). Third, the two share that unspoken debt to the Frankfurt School. If you wanted to claim Soni’s work for the Marxist tradition, it would be enough to recall any of a dozen passages in which Adorno invokes the future’s “promesse du bonheur”; when the critical theorist can no longer bring himself to write the word “communism,” he calls it “happiness” instead. So it is that in one of his late lectures Adorno identifies that “extraordinarily damaging dialectic” by which “in the name of freedom … happiness of every kind falls victim to a kind of taboo and is banished from philosophy.”[iii] Soni’s is the most trenchant account we now possess of that particular banishing, which Adorno himself left largely unexpounded. MacIntyre, finally, begins chapters with cheerful avowals of his own crankiness: “If my extreme position is correct….”[iv] Soni, in a similar mood, calls the demands that happiness makes upon us—the demands, that is, that he wants to make upon us in happiness’s name—“excessive” and “unrelenting” and “mad” (410). Soni is by turns a first-rate intellectual historian, a virtuoso philosophical exegete, and a groundbreaking literary critic. Yet one of the wonders of reading his work is the creeping realization that beneath a prose this calm and expository, and beneath an argumentative style so entirely deliberate—precise to the point of fussiness—there can lurk an idea reckless and militant: single-minded, obsessive.  “Every life that we must judge unhappy is potentially a radical indictment of the world that permits this immeasurable tragedy and injustice” (207). Mourning Happiness means finally to foster in us the intransigent “will to make a world of happiness before another person dies whom we must pronounce unhappy” (410).

MacIntyre has of late allowed his work to be described as a “revolutionary Aristotelianism,” and it’s that last phrase that we might now wish to extend to Soni: Well-being storms the barricades. We will have learned something important about his thought, then, when we dig deeper into Mourning Happiness and discover that it actually contains targeted attacks on both revolution and Aristotle. Of the great national revolutions, Soni concludes that they, no less than early English novels, asked contemporaries to stop making a priority of their happiness. Only for a time, they said; inevitably for too long. Puritans and patriots and Jacobins black and white all put happiness to one side, declaring so many states of emergency and finally substituting for a politics of happiness the politics of legitimacy, in which the only thing left mattering is who has derived authority from whom according to what kind of (more or less fictional) political contract. The problem with Aristotle, meanwhile, is that he thinks that if you size up a high-achieving man at forty—a go-getter at the height of his powers—you are licensed to conclude that he is happy, even if in some few cases the future might overturn that judgment. Soni, in other words, is bothered that Aristotle makes happiness something that one can attribute to a living person and astutely traces this shift back to that philosopher’s distinctive notion of “activity,” which links happiness to actions, mostly famously contemplation, that are themselves fully achieved, complete unto themselves, not in the service of some other goal. Such a conception distorts all the fundamental tenets of happiness in its pre-Aristotelian rigor: It makes it easy to tell who is happy; it sidelines the community that would otherwise be called upon to take responsibility for my happiness; and it delinks happiness from the narrative of an entire life. Indeed, the best life on this account would, because organized around self-sufficient activities, be a narratively rather thin one. Aristotle, in other words, seizes upon Solon’s painstaking idea and makes it slack—that’s Soni’s charge, and it constitutes, for anyone already studying happiness, one of the more surprising turns in his book: the moment when we realize that Aristotle was not eudaimony’s master thinker, but already its betrayer. There is also a bigger point here. What most distinguishes Soni from MacIntyre is a marked Heideggerian strain in his argument—not in the substance of his claims exactly, but in his way of recounting the history of philosophy—in his commitment, that is, to reaching back behind Aristotle and Plato to retrieve for thought a certain pre-philosophical content. One glance at the table of contents will clue you in: Soni’s chapter on Aristotle is subtitled “The First Forgetting.” Like other late-generation Heideggarians, Soni makes his claim on our attention by proposing a new candidate for the title of all-important-thing-that-European-philosophy-has-never-been-able-to-grasp, a fresh contender for the Ever Foreclosed, with happiness now functioning as rival to Sein and alterité and Hoffnung and das Nichtidentische.

So Soni’s resemblance to MacIntyre is no sooner established than it begins to fall apart, and if we agree to call this counter-MacIntyrean strain in Soni’s thinking “anti-philosophical,” we will have captured something consequential about it. The question, if you like, is why one might prefer Solon’s cryptic and unelaborated position to Aristotle’s fluent and philosophically robust one. The answer, of course, is that philosophers are inclined to say entirely too much. Soni wants to allow as much variation as possible with regards to what counts as happiness: across cultures and subcultures, from one individual life to the next, indeed, across the stages and seasons of a single, unsettled human life. Solon doesn’t tell inquirers how to recognize a happy life, only that they will have to wait for one to end before they can even try, and Soni takes this to mean that how we determine happiness is almost entirely up for grabs. The issue is this: If MacIntyre has, in his retirement, felt compelled to append prefaces to new editions of his old books, explaining to readers that he is not, in fact, a conservative, this is at least in part because he sometimes mimics one so convincingly, and nowhere more so than when he explains that for people to be virtuous, they will have to go back to living in homogenous communities, small-scale collectivities that share a culture and a language, as also modes of deliberation and moral understandings. Soni, on the other hand, comes out against any such “social consensus” on the matter of happiness and claims that a scrupulous understanding of the same won’t generate even “implicit norms”—standards that anyone seeking happiness would have to scramble to meet (80). He means this for real: One good way to read Mourning Happiness would be to track Soni’s determined efforts, across five hundred pages, to not really say anything about happiness at all; to not fill it in with content; to not tell you what it is or even what anybody in the past used to think it was; to refuse you all possible insight into how to be happy. “Happiness is nothing but the name for what is at stake in existence” (235).

We’ll gain a better sense of what Soni is up to here if we play him off against Kant, who famously argued that the doctrine of happiness—or rather, of “so-called happiness”—is entirely “empirical.”[v] The idea of happiness issues the prudential command that I take care of myself, that I tend to my own well-being, but it understands what this means only in terms of pleasure (or desire or inclination). The philosophers of happiness say they’re going to teach you how to live well but typically end up just scribbling inventories of stuff people like; and it is against these pseudo-ethical grocery lists that Kant will ask us to conceive of morality as pure form. Soni is out to show that Kant is wrong on this score: Happiness is not just the more or less optional content of moral thought; it is itself a kind of form, a way of thinking about the organization of a life. A proper understanding of happiness would have to be as formalist as a theory of duty or the law.

But to say even this may already be to give Soni’s project too philosophical a cast, for what matters to him is not so much how we conceptualize happiness, but how we tell stories about it—our “narrative assumptions about happiness” (180). The distinctions between stories matter here, and some readers, no doubt, will admire Soni chiefly for his startling ability to differentiate between story forms or even to produce, out of the inherited materials of literary history, entirely new genres—new objects of narratological concern. I’m thinking especially of those remarkable pages in which he explains why the eighteenth-century fictions that most resemble tragedies are not, in fact, tragedies: Unlike the authentic article, modern pseudo-tragedies—Soni calls them “trial narratives”—“require us to accept as necessary and even valuable the conditions that produce unhappiness” (201). But more than a vindication of this or that story type, Mourning Happiness is a vindication of narrative tout court as a vehicle of moral and political reasoning. For narrative repeats, as philosophy cannot, the open-ended and detail-oriented indeterminacy of the Solonian command. “[I]f narrative is necessary for the community to be able to relate to the totality of a life, it is also the way to describe the heterogeneity of a life not reducible to a finite set of salient descriptors.” (70) Stories furnish examples of happy lives without letting these petrify into norms. In the absence of rules or abstract criteria, they present something like the logic of the concrete, a direct contemplation of some particularized happiness—or of some unknown other’s unrepeatable desolation.

Many readers are going to find this unwillingness to pronounce on the subject of happiness among the book’s most attractive features; it is, at any rate, how Soni smuggles a radical pluralism in past his own anti-liberal strictures. But there is a problem here all the same. In a sentence quoted on the back of the book, one of Soni’s early reviewers has proclaimed his work to be “a major contribution to … ethics.” But Soni doesn’t exactly think of himself as a moral philosopher; he thinks that in some suitably recondite way he is making a contribution to political theory. You can tell this from the volume’s subtitle, which is “Narrative and the Politics of Modernity.” This is yet another way in which he and MacIntyre are alike, since both believe that morality is only worth something when it exceeds itself, when, that is, it becomes real in the world, devising the practices and building the institutions that will give its precepts genuine ethical substance. But Soni also wants happiness to remain indeterminate and rejects as reified any felicity whose content has been even lightly specified; it is here that the book’s many references to Derrida and Levinas do their hardest work—Happiness will never be present to you; happiness demands of us an infinite and impossible responsibility towards the well-being of other people—and it is unclear how a moral imperative this abstract is ever going to attain institutional shape: indeterminacy made real, infinite responsibility with a street address. Within the span of a few pages, Soni insists both that Solonian happiness comes down to “a completely”—and magnificently—“empty question” and that it is “not an abstract philosophical proposition existing in isolation from social life” (177, 179). One might wonder, then: How do you institutionalize a question? More to the point, how do you institutionalize its emptiness?

Another comparison will make the dimensions of the problem clear. In Archaeologies of the Future, Fredric Jameson admits that his formalist approach to utopian writing is actually rather peculiar. It is odd, he says, for a scholar to be studying utopias as a genre, since this seems to cancel out the politics of this most political of literary forms. Jameson is, by his own account, more interested in the conventions that structure utopian writing than he is in the substance of this or that utopian proposal. And yet if utopias are so many attempts to imagine the best possible society, then there is a conceptual pressure, generated from within the form and not present in the same way in any other genre, to have a favorite. This observation, however, allows Jameson to give his argument its splendid twist: To study utopias as a genre, rather than giving readings of isolated utopian texts, is to refuse to choose between them; it is to want all the utopias at once and thereby to imagine a world whose utopian energies are entirely excessive and overflowing. And this, Jameson explains, is indeed a properly political demand: To love any one utopia is to play into the hands of utopia’s liberal enemies, who think of any perfect society as fatally closed or totalitarian. But to love the genre is to re-introduce multiplicity into the utopian equation, and so to ask that we build not a single perfect society, but a network of not-really-rival utopias, a global federation of good places. The reconciled world would resemble the well-stocked bookshelf of a sci-fi buff.

The point is, then, that Soni’s formalist account of happiness is plainly modeled on Jameson’s pan-utopianism and is driven by roughly the same concerns: We don’t need one happiness to share between us; we need all the happinesses. But what is nonetheless missing from Soni’s account is that final step, via which happiness in all its multiplicity would acquire a properly collective and political dimension. He wants to boast that Greek happiness, unlike our more paltry version, “took concrete political form in an institution” (452), but the institution that he submits for our consideration, the funeral oration, is agonizingly slight and not in any of the usual senses a political institution at all. This is puzzling on a few different fronts: Soni’s political program comes down to the claim that the Athenians made a point of talking about their dead, which seems to suggest that we bury our lost friends in complacent silence. At one point he proclaims that “everyone deserves a funeral oration,” which I suppose is meant to be another one of those impossible demands, until one recalls that this is already the practice, and mundanely so, even in advanced capitalist societies: I can count on getting a eulogy when I die and, failing that, a toast (431). Sometimes he even seems to forget that the funeral oration does not, in fact, institutionalize happiness—it makes no-one happy—but only the judgment upon happiness, which is something else again. This tentativeness on the subject of politics—or, if you like, the elevation to politics of an argument that really is ethical—introduces into the book a permanent misgiving around its own abstractions: We have to “accept the Solonian idea in its formal rigor and indeterminacy” (110)—but equally we “must not shy away from [the] work of specifying concretely, if always provisionally, how to put a politics of happiness into effect” (471). It is upon realizing that this extraordinary book has absolutely nothing to say about the latter that Soni’s most pointed indictments of eighteenth-century philosophy begin to sound like self-recrimination: We must hold to account any philosopher who “fails to imagine a concrete and institutionalizable politics of happiness” (465). A reader should feel flummoxed in the face of any philosopher who, like Bentham, makes “many formal pronouncements … about the priority of happiness,” but whose “concept of happiness” is “essentially abstract” (400). A footnote early in Mourning Happiness informs us that Soni has also been writing on literary utopias, and this gives us reason to hope that he might yet produce a utopias volume of his own. [vi] Any such book would surely be a follow-up to the volume at hand, a sequel in which he dissolves his first book’s abstractions and carries out its unfinished business. For utopias will always violate the Solonian injunction, and anyone who loves them will have to make his peace with that. They cannot leave happiness unspecified, any more than you, when looking for the right locality in which to live, hunting for the county or country that will make it possible for you to live a life out to its fulfilled end, can afford to wait for that place’s collapse or inundation before declaring it to be good.

THIS ESSAY IS ALSO AVAILABLE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE 37:2 (SPRING 2013)