|
Critical Modesty in Contemporary Fiction
Thom Dancer
Oxford: University Press, 2021 Hardcover. vii+204 p. ISBN 978-0192893321. £60
Reviewed by Émilie Walezak Nantes Université
In Critical Modesty in
Contemporary Fiction, Thom Dancer sets out to devise a new way of
envisaging the relations between texts, critics and the world, to meet the
challenge posed by the Anthropocene. Taking his cue from such thinkers as Bruno
Latour or Jane Bennett, Dancer attempts to read fiction and revise criticism
according to new paradigms that take into account the multiplicity of agencies
now informing our perception of the planet. Interestingly enough, the
“disposition” – rather than method – he proposes to adopt, allows him to
include fiction that does not necessarily address environmental questions
directly. Rather, he descries in such writers as J.M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, David
Mitchell and Zadie Smith, attempts at mediating between world and text or
author and reader / critic that allow for doubt and uncertainty rather than
imposing an authoritarian viewpoint. The book is meant to explore the “narrative
tactics of redescription (McEwan), partnership (Smith), weakness (Coetzee), and
inefficiency (Mitchell)” [4] that correspond to a relationship to the world as
modified by the climate crisis. Dancer uses the notion of modesty in the sense
of both moderation and limitation, in other words as a tool to work within the
confines imposed on humans by climate change. He applies a similar negotiating
spirit to criticism, transacting between critique and post-critique, or depth
and surface reading. He mobilises such critics as Andrew van der Vlies, David
James, and Eugenie Brinkema in order to define modesty by contrast to such terms
as “humility”, the latter being rather akin to a quality while the former
allows for a more open-ended “attitude”. Similarly, Dancer explains his choice
of the term “modest” for its more neutral aspect as he seeks to avoid any
overly positive or negative connotations – as would such terms as Sedgwick’s
“reparative” or “paranoid” – to focus on the questions rather than the outcomes
/ solutions. He clearly aims to demonstrate the affinity of novels with the
public debate and looks for ways for the critic to collaborate to this debate
without locking meaning in strong theory for instance, basing his argument on Wai
Chee Demok’s defence of “weak theory” as a way of bypassing polarisation. Some obvious references are oddly missing in the introduction, like Rita
Felski’s work on The Limits of Critique
and her reading theory based on a phenomenological approach to readers’ affects.
Similarly, Dancer’s reneging on the illusion of a mastering objectivity to make
way for what reads very much like situated knowledge – although the term itself
is not being used – fails to mention Donna Haraway. It is all the more
surprising as the first chapter starts with referencing the work of cultural
anthropologist Anna Tsing, who collaborated with Haraway to develop the
alternative Plantatiocene notion. Chapter 1, entitled “Critical Modesty in the Anthropocene”, lays down
the theoretical basis for Dancer’s argument. His approach of the modest
sensibility is predicated on the evidence of “a diminished sense of agency
against a background of planetary crises” [19]. Dancer thus considers the
ripple effects of this enforced humbleness in the face of large-scale
modifications on fiction writing and critical thinking jointly “regardless of
any direct thematic treatment of the typical environmental concerns around
climate change” [9]. He takes his cue from the title of Christophe Bonneuil and
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s book The Shock of the Anthropocene to define it
not so much as a geological period as an epistemic turn that forces an
anthrodecentric perspective on the world. To illustrate this shock, Dancer
compares Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation to Tsing’s critical method
of “noticing” discrete elements and piecing together a story in The Mushroom
at the End of the World that does not hierarchise through discrimination
but aims at registering the complexity of “cross-contamination” [27]. Dancer
sets his investigation of modes of writing that acknowledge the limitations of
our understanding against Amitav Ghosh’s argument in The Great Derangement
that literature has not yet risen to the challenge posed by climate change.
Instead, he posits that the writers operate precisely within the limits of the
representational form of the novel, which testifies to a modest attitude
towards the enormity of the task. The equivalent in criticism is the line
Dancer draws between a conceptual approach and an experiential one. Even though
many of Dancer’s references are new materialist, he does not use the term and
rather situates himself as a radical empiricist in the Jamesian tradition to
emphasise the practicality of his proposed modest disposition. He calls on Latour’s
own pragmatism to question the impact of introducing narratives in academic
lectures which he identifies as “a principle about writing derived from [Latour’s] commitment to radical
empiricism” [43]. Dancer thus equates Latour’s extolment of description with a
modest critical temperament. It is unclear how chapter 1 differs from the overall introduction and
the book’s layout is confusing as it is then divided into two parts devoted to
writers’ works while continuing with the chapter numbers. Similarly, the
unnumbered subtitle headings within the chapters, while they may prove useful
for a reader interested in one specific thematic in a writer’s work, seemed
like an unnecessary afterthought to provide organisation to a thinking process
that originally meant to proceed fluidly. They may have stemmed from the
publisher’s requirements but looked counterproductive, to this reader at least,
as they artificially break down into bits and pieces the author’s overall
argument and obscure rather than clarify it. The first part entitled “Modest
Temperaments” examines the works of Ian McEwan (chapter 2) and Zadie Smith
(chapter 3) while the second part of the book is dedicated to the “Modest Practices”
of J.M. Coetzee (chapter 5) and David Mitchell (chapter 6). The two parts do not have an introduction, which would have been
useful in distinguishing between temperament and practice. In chapter 2, Dancer reads Ian McEwan’s novels as criticising
“epistemological immodesty” [49] through redescriptions of the thinking
processes at work in such discourses as those of literary criticism (Atonement),
science and religion (Enduring Love) or environmentalism (Solar).
He starts his argument on McEwan by contrasting his own disposition towards the
text with the reception of the novel Saturday. Dancer references more
particularly the heavy-handed criticism issued by John Banville, which he reads
as immodest, based as it is on the unquestioned assumption that the value of
literature stems for its political subversiveness. Banville reproaches McEwan
with extolling the “think small motto” of a character from the book while
Dancer reads Banville’s criticism as exemplifying the same inability as
McEwan’s characters to see past their own convictions. Like David Malcolm, Dancer
reads McEwan’s novels as thematising “epistemological uncertainty” [54] through
characters applying “a single explanatory model, without attention to the
density of the matter at hand, that McEwan wants us to see as immodest” [60].
Thus, Dancer deems Banville’s reading to be inattentive to McEwan’s strategy by
mistaking his character’s position with the author’s own. Dancer further
details the redescription strategy of McEwan as a form of “psychoneurological
realism” [64] which sets “moments of temporal compression that describe the
complexity of thinking” in opposition to the characters’ “consummate
narratives” that are monofocal. Thinking small through redescription in
McEwan’s novels contrasts with master narratives and strong theory. Dancer
finally references Zadie Smith’s reading of McEwan as marked by the “absence of
a judging consciousness”, which Dancer singles out as the narrative
manifestation of modesty in his novels. In chapter 3, Dancer bases his analysis of Zadie Smith’s theory of
reading on both her own critical stance displayed in her essays and her
fictional writing. He distinguishes between two main lines in Smith’s approach
to reading: “the artist-as-critic” which seeks to couch an individual’s
personal understanding of a book in a public language to create a community of
readers based on shared experience, and the attendant “difficult partnership”
between author and reader in which the book mediates between their dissimilar
meaning-making experiences. Dancer emphasises the effort and the difficulty on
which Smith insists to describe reading, along the line of her famous
exhortation to “Read Better”. He thus outlines her critical modest disposition
as “an acceptance of partnership [between readers and writers] that sharply
curtails mastery and autonomy” [85]. Dancer equates mastery with what he labels
“system reading” which stands opposed to “the critic-artist reading” [88]. He
parallels Smith’s call for the acknowledgement of subjectivity in both the
reading and the writing aesthetic experiences with Michel Chaouli’s theory of
the reading encounter. The encounter raises the possibility of failure –
Chaouli’s failing-falling entanglement – both in the sense of failing to
understand an author’s view of the world and failing to communicate effectively
one’s own subjective understanding of a work. It echoes the correspondence
Smith establishes between her urge to “read better” and her admonition to “fail
better”, by which she means that both writers and readers should strive to “convince [themselves]
of the inviolable reality of other people” (“Fail Better”). Dancer illustrates
Smith’s critical practice by drawing a parallel between the Forsterian echoes
in her essay, “Love, Actually” and her novel On Beauty, in particular the
notion of the comic novel as a “muddle” that is “the most resistant to
certainty” [103]. Dancer reads the characters’ encounters with art works in On Beauty as a mise en abyme of the novel’s own
ekphrastic approach to criticism “by offering non-judgmental portrayals of
various styles of approaching aesthetic experience” [108], which he illustrates
through a close analysis of Howard’s and Kiki’s various reactions to art. To
Dancer, the difficult partnership required by Smith “prepares us to negotiate
without resentment the new epistemic condition we find ourselves facing today” [117]. The subdivisions in
chapter 5 are uncharacteristically imbalanced with the largest third portion
reminiscent of the book’s introduction as it is largely devoted to theories meant
to contrast modest readings with symptomatic readings. It draws a parallel
between Derek Attridge’s responsible reading, Timothy Bewes’ generous criticism
and Bruno Latour’s analysis of religious and scientific speech, in order to
highlight Coetzee’s ambition for an “equal marriage” between reason and
imagination. How it correlates with Coetzee’s modesty as practice, rather than
temperament, is unclear all the more so as Dancer discusses Coetzee’s “critique
of the rationalist temperament” [127]. Similarly, the title of the chapter –
“J.M. Coetzee’s Weakness” – is confusing as
the reader is left to deduce that Coetzee’s fiction gives shape to weak theory.
Dancer aims to demonstrate that Coetzee’s late fiction is anthropocenic in the
way that it resists polarised debate through evincing “the limits of both human
rationality and the authority of disciplinary knowledge” [125], through an analysis
of Diary of a Bad Year. Dancer focuses in
particular on the novel as an enactment of Dostoyevsky’s dialogism, based on Coetzee’s
own admiration for the Russian writer’s capacity to fictionally embody
large-scale abstract conflicts through particular individuals. Ironically
enough, this chapter is the weakest in the whole book due to its reliance more
on theory than on the actual works of the author under study. Chapter 6 starts
with a comparison between Leela Gandhi’s minor globalisation as “non adversarial
forms of protest” and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature to
delineate the contemporary novel as modestly resisting impotence in the face of
global scales by engaging with the limits of representation. David Mitchell’s
novels, in particular Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas, and The Bone Clocks, adopt “an
unconventional narrative structure that everywhere emphasises the relational
over the representational” [152]. Dancer situates himself in opposition to
readings of Mitchell as a global novelist that seek to descry a deeper
allegorical unity to his disconnected narratives because they rely on a
conception of the novel as “rounded and closed” [159]. By contrast, Dancer
emphasises scale variance in Mitchell’s work as upsetting causality and
efficiency, thus outlining the limits of both the novel’s representational
function and human agency in the global world. Dancer proposes the term “weird
realism” to explain Mitchell’s recourse to genre fiction within his novels that
helps to redefine realism in literature by echoing the new philosophical
perspectives on the real upheld by new materialism and speculative realism.
Mitchell’s weird realism gives shape to an understanding of reality that supersedes
the anthropocentric perspective: “the mystery and wonder in Mitchell’s novels,
and across his novels, is part of a speculative realist project to imagine
human life in a world in which ‘“man” is no longer the measure of all things’” [168].
Dancer analyses the narrative techniques of collage and sampling used by
Mitchell as means to bypass a Newtonian causality mirrored in retrospective
narration to emphasise instead chance and unpredictability as emulating lived
experience. Despite minor
issues of structure and clarity, Thom Dancer’s book provides a valuable
contribution to the ongoing debate on the epistemic changes brought about by
the Anthropocene. The originality of the book stems from its attention to
temperament as a way to register a process of transformation independently from
any thematic treatment of the environmental question in the novel. It is also
innovative in applying the same disposition to literary criticism and should inspire
future creative critical engagements with the contemporary novel.
All rights are reserved and no reproduction from this site for whatever purpose is permitted without the permission of the copyright owner. Please contact us before using any material on this website.
|
|
|
