Labored Romance: The Contemporary Novel and the Culture of Late Capitalism

Abstract

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.