Browsing by Subject "The Novel"

Just over 300 years have passed since John Locke proposed that the basis of the individual was property and, in turn, that the labor which was the individual’s first property in his own person was the source of all property he accumulates. Labor, in other words, and the property it produces would transform the subject into the independent individual of the liberal imaginary. When we turn to the realist novel, however, labor is notoriously absent, as if to make us aspire to a way of life in which we do not work for money but our money works for us. While the novel suggests that, to become an individual with a story to tell, one must transcend the world of work; liberal political economic theory argues that it takes work, as well as our capacity and will to do it, to become a full-fledged individual. To turn principle into paradox, the novel draws on romance as the means of redefining work as the obstacle rather than the means of rising in the field of social relations. Romance incites the individual to find a position apart if not above work, often in a household where one finds self-completion in a union with an ideal other. In this way, romance provides the foundation for a domestic sphere that restores the individual’s body and spirit by means of the freely given labor of love. As it reimagined the single-family household as a site of social reproduction, the novels of the Victorian period also leant both tangibility and accessibility to an apparatus that ensured that the relations of capitalist production would be reproduced down through the generations. Labored Romance: The Contemporary Novel and the Culture of Late Capitalism begins by showing how a classic work of realism, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, stages a struggle between the necessity of labor as the foundation of value and the work of romance as the transcending of waged labor. If the struggle between work and romance is realism’s legacy, then contemporary fiction calls attention to the fact that romance is missing from the novels that vie for critical recognition today. At the same time, these novels put not only the protagonists but virtually the entire field of characters to work and, indeed, they do little else. Given that novels such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder are not only works of fantastic fiction, the question is why? In the contemporary novel, both traditional romance and the household that constituted a world apart—a space of love without labor—has all but disappeared while labor is all but impossible to avoid. Instead of a space of personal gratification and replenishment, these novels offer us a virtually boundless workplace that has subsumed both the trappings and functions of the home. On the other hand, the discourse of romance, at once indexed to and detached from the household, is attached to and integrated into waged work. How, in its appropriation of many of the reproductive functions once served by the household, does information work make use of the infectious properties of romance? What purpose does romance now serve if not to compel and sanctify the composition of the basic consumer unit, the heteronormative family? These are the questions that Labored Romance asks of three contemporary novels published during the first decade of the present century.

“The Complete Bentham: Rationality’s Afterlife in Victorian Literature,” focuses on one of the nineteenth century’s most contentious attempts to imagine the social good in quantitative terms: Jeremy Bentham’s proposal to measure and manage “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” The last time literary studies took Bentham seriously, the guiding assumption was that his Panopticon prison trained individuals in the routines of self-policing that liberal government required, and that the novel carried that disciplinary training to the reading public. I show that this argument considers only a small part of Bentham’s massive corpus and so misses both the radical reformulation of liberal government that he was proposing and the aesthetic possibilities that his utilitarianism opened up as a result. The Victorians certainly thought there was something caustic in Bentham’s system of cost-benefit analysis, a worry expressed in charges that Bentham was an emotionally deficient thinker who would, like Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind, “weigh and measure any parcel of human nature and tell you what it comes to.” This critique, I argue, has its basis in the Victorian recognition that Bentham’s logic challenges liberalism’s normative commitments including the individual’s right to own property and the primacy of the family as the fundamental unit of society. When Bentham asserts that the only way to manage a population of rational individuals is to maximize pleasures and minimize pains, no matter their source, he imagined a form of cost-benefit analysis that makes any particular right or social norm expendable in the name of producing “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” Rather than show how the novel appropriates Bentham’s panoptic apparatus to reinforce the norms of liberal society, I argue that Bentham’s excessive reason is the means by which nineteenth-century literature found its way outside those norms. When Victorian novelists join liberal thinkers in chastising Bentham for translating qualities of life into quantities of pleasure and pain, they also memorably preserve the perverse implications of utilitarian rationalism and imagine new qualities of life. Even so obvious a caricature of Bentham as Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind offers a vision of a life passionately animated by the compulsion to calculate.

In order to see what became of utilitarianism’s calculating rationality in the Victorian cultural imagination, each chapter of my dissertation considers how a different novelist takes up one aspect of Bentham’s multi-faceted theory in order to contemplate its radical consequences. My first chapter, “Calculating Pleasure,” begins with Bentham’s assumption that individuals who imagine future pleasures and pains can be governed by means of a carefully calibrated threat of future punishment. Shelley’s Frankenstein takes up this calculating logic in order to reverse it: the more Victor and his creature imagine their futures, the more ungovernable they become as their disappointment and hope lead them to increasingly antisocial behaviors. In my second chapter, “Expanding Bureaucracy,” I show how Dickens enacts a different reversal when considering the universal suspicion that motivates Bentham’s plans for a universal bureaucracy. While Bentham, ever distrustful of government functionaries, insists on layering one level of government inspectors on top of another until the whole population is involved in monitoring bureaucratic institutions, Dickens’s late city novels (no less suspicions of government functionaries) see these bonds of mutual surveillance as the basis for forming bonds of trust and mutual aid. My third chapter, “Panoptic Economics,” returns to Bentham’s famous Panopticon prison in order to argue that even as it establishes the protocols for disciplining individuals it also imagines an alternative socialist economy that would care for and manage all unemployed people. While Wilkie Collins’s detective fiction has often been read in terms of totalizing panoptic surveillance, a revised understanding of the Panopticon allows us to see that these novels also imagine a utopian condition of full employment where everyone becomes the possessor of potentially valuable information no one can be dismissed as part of a disposable surplus population. My final chapter, “Sexual Irregularities,” considers the queer potential of Bentham’s utilitarianism. I show that Bentham’s little-known defense of homosexual, bestial, and necrophilic acts joins the aestheticism of Walter Pater in promoting pleasures that belong, not to the reproductive future of the bourgeois family, but rather “give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.” Taken as a whole, my dissertation offers us a way of seeing the word “utilitarian” as something other than the catch-all term of derision for a practical, depoliticized, and unaesthetic education that sometimes appears in op-eds bemoaning the “Death of the Humanities.” By returning to Bentham’s contentious place in the Victorian cultural imagination I hope to show just how impractical, political, and aesthetic utilitarianism can be.