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The Novel of Human Rights
James Dawes
Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 2018 Hardcover. v + 232 p.
ISBN 978-0674986442. $29.95 / £21.95 / €27
Reviewed by Frédérique Spill Université de Picardie Jules Verne
(Amiens)
The Novel of Human Rights is an ambitious book whose aim is to define the novel of human rights
as a new American literary genre. The book splits into four chapters of unequal
length, which shed light on different aspects of what Dawes has chosen to
consider as a new genre. Chapter 1, “The US Novel of Human Rights,” establishes
the novel of human rights as specifically American, mostly due to “the unique
history of the relationship between human rights and civil rights in the United
States” [200]. Chapter 2, “The Central Features of the Novel of Human Rights,”
endeavors to inventory the key formal aspects of the genre. Chapter 3, “Ethical
Concerns in the Novel of Human Rights,” and Chapter 4, “Perpetrators in the
Novel of Human Rights,” successively focus on “modes of representing the two
most basic figures in human rights discourse: the ‘victim’ and the
‘perpetrator’” [201]. The first two chapters thus emphasize the form of the
novel of human rights, while the last two center on its characters. From one chapter to the next, Dawes integrates key debates within the
contemporary human rights movement in the United States into his own discussion.
The book tries to assess the impact of historical documents upon the novel of
human rights, “treaties, protocols, and conventions,” which Dawes considers
“all culminate teleologically in the Nuremberg Trials (1945-1946), the
post-World War II Geneva Conventions (1949), and, most dramatically, the UN
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)” [198]. The book is thus scattered
with excerpts from key historical texts, shedding light on features or
evolutions that, Dawes contends, are reflected in the novel of human rights.
While Dawes’s attention mostly focuses on contemporary American novels, the
great variety of which testifies to his extended knowledge and voracious
reading, he also refers to the earlier traditions of slave novels, Holocaust
literature, war and expatriate novels, and, more generally, justice writing. In his introduction to his book, Dawes observes that “[a] globally
articulated human rights movement has infused US ethics, language, and thought”
[1]. The combined work of large organizations like Amnesty International and
lesser-known NGOs has contributed to engendering an unprecedented “popular
culture of human rights” [2]. Human rights have, indeed, known a recent upsurge
of interest within literary studies, marked by an increasing number of human
rights panels and conferences organized by American literature associations; as
a result of this evolution, the study of human rights no longer is the
exclusive domain of philosophy, history and political sciences. According to
Dawes, literature and human rights emerged as a subfield of literary studies in
2006 thanks to the simultaneous publication of a special issue of PMLA on human rights and of four
monographs. But, since the field is mostly dominated by “scholars who do not
self-identify as Americanists” [3], Dawes’s double goal with The Novel of Human Rights is, on the one
hand, to establish a firmer connection between the new subfield of literature
and human rights and Americanist literary studies; on the other hand, to
identify the novel of human rights as a contemporary American genre. In the introduction,
Dawes also establishes distinctions between human rights and humanitarianism,
while describing “distinct models of what human rights actually are” [15],
though, he argues, “[f]or my purpose, it is not necessary to pick a team” [17]. In Chapter 1, “The US Novel of Human Rights,” Dawes distinguishes
between two characteristic plot structures of the American novel of human rights
that emerge from the “myriad stories” [22] it tells: the justice plot and the
escape plot. Each type of plot corresponds to a different dynamic. Whereas, in
the justice plot, which recalls the detective novel, the narrative is one of “return,
of violation and its investigation, of the pull of past crime and attempts to
repair it,” the narrative of the escape plot, which is reminiscent of the
picaresque novel, is “a narrative of departure, of accumulating,
forward-pushing violations” [22-23]. In the process, escape is opposed to
repair. Justice novels are usually novels of displacement: displaced
protagonists indeed allow ways of pondering over the strategies of human rights
working in emergency zones around the world. In Chapter 1 Dawes also analyzes
“the creative tensions” [20] resulting from “the ideological split between the
‘generations’ of rights”: he argues that competing conceptions of rights are
reflected in a formal narrative tension in US literature, which he illustrates
through readings of three particular novels. John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire (1990), Karen Tei
Yamashita’s I Hotel (2010) and
Francisco Goldman’s The Long Night of
White Chickens (1992) are construed as stories that directly deal with the
human rights movement’s internal tensions and historical contradictions.
Chapter 1 concludes with an acknowledgment that constitutes one of the book’s
most recurrent concerns: “Atrocity as material for representation exerts
aesthetic pressure on writers and on the novel as a form. It raises unique
questions about the ethical responsibilities of authorship” [53]. Chapter 2, “The Central Features of the Novel of Human Rights,” is
devoted to the examination, through a wider array of texts, of “the defining
topoi of the novel of human rights” [20], among which three concerns are
granted special attention: privacy, mobility and family. Chapter 2 starts with
the observation that privacy, mobility and family, which can be considered
rights of character, are sites of protection that constitute “unifying topics
of concern” [55] across the novel of human rights, as they constitute “the
three primary themes of the genre as a whole: endangered privacy, restricted
movement, and damaged families” [55]. The method applied to this chapter, which
splits into three subparts respectively entitled “Privacy” [56-94], “Movement” [94-108]
and “Family” [108-116], is that of distant reading, as defined by Franco
Moretti. The notion of privacy is in turn analyzed through three successive
keywords, “three tropes, each conceptually linked by the way they mark the
boundaries of our intimate identities” [57]—homes, secrets and names. Through a
number of examples that include Dave Egger’s What is the What, Richard Powers’s Plowing the Dark or Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, the violated home is envisioned as “trauma’s symbolic
gathering point” [57]. Elaine Scarry’s concept of the room in The Body in Pain; The Making and Unmaking of
the World (1985) offers Dawes’s reflection on homes an effective
theoretical framework along the idea that violated homes engender images that
are all the more compelling as homes operate as physical extensions of bodies.
Secret is considered “the narrative counterpoint of home invasion” [69] through
examples taken from other novels including Chris Abani’s The Secret History of Las Vegas, Edwige Danticat’s The Farming of Bones or Ha Jin’s War Trash. Dawes concludes his argument
on the notion of privacy in the US novel of human rights by highlighting,
through a vast selection of examples, the contrasting uses of names that are
made in the novel of justice and in the novel of escape. Dawes’s reflection on
movement starts with the observation that “free mobility is depicted as a form
of resistance to state-defined space,” as opposed to residency, which appears
as “a primary site of conflict with state power, a form of defiant
secret-keeping” [95]. Through several examples, mostly borrowed from Dave
Egger’s What is the What and Zeitoun (though his argument bristles
with numerous other references], Dawes contends that “[t]he dramatic contrast
between free motion and constraint is a near-continuous structure of the novel
of human rights” [97]. Finally, in his development on the motif of family,
Dawes makes two key remarks on which he expands: he first notes that “the
orphan is a figure of almost obsessive concern in novels of human rights” [110];
he then argues that “the novel of human rights defines itself through the
heteronormative family” [111]. Chapter 2 is an extremely dense chapter that
goes in many different directions through an abundance of examples through
which the reader may sometimes find it difficult to keep track of the main
argument. In Chapter 3, “Ethical Concerns in the Novel of Human Rights,” Dawes
focuses his attention on the role of gender in human rights representations,
through the lens of power asymmetries and voyeurism. His aim is to examine how
the “inherited humanitarian tropes of perceived-vulnerable populations have
been reconfigured in contemporary rights novels” [118]. In this chapter the
representation of violence against women is set against “its ideological
counterpart in the novel of human rights: the representation of safe,
heteronormative union” [118]. Here again examples abound, ranging from Lynn
Chun Ink’s In the Time of Butterflies
or Bob Sachochis’s The Woman Who Lost Her
Soul to Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup
Girl. In this chapter Dawes emphasizes that fact that human rights
representations, whatever their form, are constantly faced with “the choice of
pornographizing for spectacular appeal” [123]. He wonders to what extent human
rights narratives need their heroines to be beautiful for their sexual
violations to strike the readers’ minds. Dawes demonstrates that using a
violated female body as “a resonant emotional symbol for a violated nation” [126]
has acquired the status of an aesthetic device. In the process, “[t]he
political is made visceral by the personal (feel the betrayal in your body),
and the personal is elevated by the political (the betrayal is not just to one
body)” [126]. The novels of Corban Ardison, “a morally serious attorney and
best-selling author” [127], draw a lot of attention in this chapter. Their
sometimes ambivalent use of sexual predation is opposed, in the last part of
the chapter, to self-reflexive works that challengingly disrupt narratives of
reconciliation to put humanitarianism into question. According to Dawes,
Richard Powers’s Operation Wandering
Souls, Chang-rae Lee’s The
Surrendered and Chris Abani’s The
Secret History of Las Vegas are such novels, which evoke “a world of
pervasive vulnerability” [150], in which blind humanitarianism is depicted as
being potentially hurtful. The meta-textual dimension of Powers’s novel, which
relentlessly lambasts its own narrative strategies, is considered quite
exceptional in the landscape of human right novels. Such novels relevantly
conjure up the stereotypical representations of human rights to undo them. Chapter 4, “Perpetrators in the Novel of Human Rights,” concludes the
book with “an in-depth examination of atrocity […] from the perspective of the
perpetrators themselves” [21], an approach that Dawes claims to be “somewhat
unusual” since “perpetrators are less frequently the subject of analysis in
human rights works than one would expect” [169]. The bulk of this last chapter
consists in a detailed critical analysis of US-born Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones, originally published in
French as Les Bienveillantes, which,
while exposing the bureaucratic roots of evil in the Nazi administration,
controversially presents two different models of perpetrators: moral monsters
as opposed to “ordinary men,” to borrow Christopher Browning’s phrase. Dawes
first comments on the novel’s most contrasted and controversial reception in
France compared to the rest of the world. Indeed, while the French awarded
Littell the Prix Goncourt and gave him the French citizenship he had long
sought to obtain, the novel was elsewhere “met with outright derision by
prominent literary reviewers” [181]. Dawes’s critique of Littell’s novel, and
more particularly of the character of SS officer Maximilian Aue, is accurate,
quite nuanced and challenging: two of its most interesting aspects lie in his
analysis of Littell’s “persuasive portrait of Arendtian evil” [191] and in his
examination of “the power of Nazi Spachregelungen”
[190]. Such convincing reflections on bureaucratic evil are, he continues,
unfortunately undermined by outright—and therefore
counterproductive—caricatures of evil Nazi villains. In the last analysis,
Dawes contends that the main failing of The
Kindly Ones results from its simultaneous attempt at understanding and
condemning: The Kindly Ones, he
concludes, “is a magisterially ambitious work that falls apart under its own weight.
But it is precisely because the book is so internally conflicted that I see it
as an emblematic text with which to conclude. The Kindly Ones’ inclusive ambitions lead inevitably to
contradiction: banality, exception; system, individual; historical generality,
historical specificity” [196]. James Dawes clearly articulates the purpose of The Novel of Human Rights—human rights and the representation of
violence in literature being topics on which he has published extensively—in
the opening statement of the first chapter, directly addressing his reader:
Over the next four chapters, I will try to persuade you that the novel of human rights exists as a genre and that it is aesthetically and intellectually
vital. Each of the texts I will discuss could be illuminated through the prisms
of existing, well-understood genres: the thriller, the war novel, the romance,
or even the mystery. It is my hope that reading these texts differently, as
examples of a newly developing genre of the novel, will help us better
understand not only the texts themselves, but also the ethico-political
contexts in which they are being written [22]. I believe that the book does effectively persuade us that there is such
a thing as the American novel of human rights; it also offers its readers a
rich survey of contemporary American fiction dealing with atrocity. Moreover,
Dawes’s constant preoccupation with “the way ideas and persons are commodified
and falsified by large-scale media’s market of desire” [171] constitutes a
valuable strength of his extended argument. But the abundance of examples and
plot summaries sometimes tends to submerge his argument. What is more, the
choice of distant reading as a method in most cases considerably limits the
attention paid to language, as a consequence of which the literary quality of
the selected texts is often neglected to the benefit of contents, arguments and
plots. In the last analysis, The Novel of
Human Rights is a good introduction to the new genre it strives to define;
it is an accessible book, which provides its readers with relevant tools for
the analysis of the representations of atrocities in contemporary American
novels.
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