Daniel Wright's fascinating new study The Grounds of the
Novel argues that novel worlds have even stranger ontological
foundations than ours. It is structured into four chapters which each
close read a different metaphor of 'ground' -- "Groundwork,"
"Underground," "The Ground Gained," "Meeting Grounds" -- in novels by
Thomas Hardy, Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf, Colson Whitehead, and
Akwaeke Emezi, as well as in essays on novel craft by Woolf, Zadie
Smith, and Henry James. Wright's interest in these metaphors is not
geological or ecological, nor related to "a historicism interested in
groundwork as a concept primarily of labor, economic value, and
enclosure" (38). Rather, this organising principle reflects the book's
method of reading 'fictional landscape, earth, tomb, dirt, work-ground'
as metaphors through which novels and novelists engage in 'philosophical
speculation about the forms and edges of being' (111), specifically of
fictional being. In other words, the sense of 'ground' in question is
the one sought for in William James's anecdote about infinite regress,
of the woman who 'described the world as resting on a rock, and then
explained that rock to be supported by another rock, and finally...said it
was "rocks all the way down"' ('Rationality, Activity and Faith,' 82).
This book examines what lies 'all the way down' beneath novels, bearing
up the soil on which characters walk. For Wright, the strange
ontological foundations of novelistic worlds become a "resource" (6) for
thinking through our own ambiguities and ethics of being.
The first chapter on Thomas Hardy most clearly exemplifies the book's
main interpretative move. It is also the chapter which follows most from
Wright's previous book, Bad Logic: Reasoning about Desire in the
Victorian Novel (2018), in taking up the implications of a
Victorian encounter with infinitude and philosophical paradox. Far
from the Madding Crowd's Fanny Robin, mentally dividing a gruelling
two-mile walk into ever smaller divisions, manifests Zeno's Paradox that
a finite distance can be divided into infinite intervals. As with
Bad Logic's discussions of desire, this chapter provides a
persuasive model for combining philosophical reasoning with literary
specificity, in this case observing the abstract puzzle of infinite
divisibility embodied Fanny's "tragically ordinary...affair of hobbling
steps" (57) and her despair of ever reaching a continually deferred
shelter.
The present book innovates on this model by emphasising the role of
figuration as a means for literature and literary criticism to "'do'
philosophy in its own language" (133). For example, when a blizzard
renders Hardy's landscape a 'colourless background' from which the
outlines of features emerge, Wright deftly argues that such blankness
not only figures visually for the snow as it covers the other objects of
the novel, but that the snow is a figure for the underlying blankness of
the novel world usually covered by its objects (32-33). What appears at
first ornamental to the fictional reality becomes foundational; like a
sudden reversal of gravity, such inversions between "underneath and
overtop," (34) concreteness and abstraction, expose the contingent
surfaces on which we rest fictions.
This chapter also introduces the book's attention to the metaphysical
disorientation of characters who encounter the foundations of their
world suddenly exposed or peeking out from gaps in reality. The
potential infinitude of Fanny's journey is not only a matter of material
or mathematical distances, but also of walking in the featureless
darkness, unable to judge how far she has travelled or has left to go.
She seems therefore to become lost within the void of narrative space
itself, indeterminate and amorphous unless the narrator delineates it
for us with landmarks and milestones. There is an echo here of Franco Moretti's admission in
Graphs, Maps, Trees [2005]: when we seek to translate fictional worlds into cartographic representations, these maps are actually
relational diagrams lacking absolute measurements. What do two miles mean for a "fictional body in
fictional space," (68) an unreality moving inside unreality? Wright
shows how falling between the cracks of one's reality in this way can be
horrifying or, as he suggests with citation to Sara Ahmed's Queer
Phenomenology (2006), potentially liberating.
These two ideas -- metaphor's surfacing of fiction's ontological
grounds, and the disorienting experience of standing on such grounds --
run through all four chapters. Waldo in The Story of an African
Farm, for instance, imagines the landscape around him as both
rooted in the body of a buried giant and edged by a fall into the void;
Mr and Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, feeling the land and
their certainties eroding around them, reflect Woolf's own struggle to
find a standpoint from which to establish the reality of her novel.
These complementary readings build on and contribute to a growing body
of work by scholars such as Elaine Freedgood, Audrey Jaffe, Jacob
Romanow, and others who have argued for the distinctiveness, artifice,
and hetero-ontologicality of novel worlds as meaningful to their
experience rather than, as Wright repudiates it, "an embarrassment [the
novel] must bribe us to forget" (6).
These readings constitute a compelling project in itself of rereading
realist fictionality, but what makes them brilliantly resourceful is how
they attach questions of ontology to arguments of racial and queer
justice. For example, taking further Freedgood's recent insights about
the connection between fictionality and coloniality (Worlds
Enough, 2019), the third chapter 'Underground' draws attention to
how Schreiner's ontological metaphors are grounded in figures of
blackness in an oeuvre with few literalised African characters. The line
between those characters who walk the grounds of the novel and those who
remain figured as the grounds echoes, Wright argues,
Schreiner's inchoate fantasies of racial segregation. The chapter poses
this tendency in Schreiner against Whitehead's The Underground
Railroad, a novel which literalises a historical metaphor and
brings the almost always figurative underground into literal fictional
existence.
Similarly, the question of who is afforded metaphysical reality and
recognition in novels -- and who is not -- becomes a means of thinking
about queerness. The novel's capacity to probe at its own foundations,
and then to insist on its self-evident reality on its own terms, might
model, as Wright puts it, "an ontological pragmatism that allows me to
be queer [...] without worrying at every moment, or at the beginning of
every day, about whether 'queerness' is real or fictional, a
metaphysically fundamental difference or a social construct" (7). The
final chapter's reading of Emezi's Freshwater connects the
novel form's ontological pragmatism to trans studies through their
shared interest of when "inhabitation of reality is complicated, painful
dysphoric' and of 'support[ing] the kind of in-between existence that
isn't always allowed to inhabit reality comfortably" (175). The word
"allowed" is key to this book's argument about the stakes in
determinations of fiction's reality, and the kinds of exclusion or
unrecognition the novel can be a resource for refusing.
As I hope is evident from this account, vertiginousness is both a
heuristic and major pleasure of reading The Grounds of the
Novel. Its close readings can feel like sudden drops in an
elevator, leaving us with a heightened awareness of the void beneath and
clinging gratefully to the surface that holds us up. "I'm not all that
afraid of infinite regress," Wright notes, "a problem that could easily
haunt this book" (27) and which he always neatly sidesteps, by making
sense and use of the vertigo, to show us that the grounds of the novel
are no less solid for their peculiarities.
More slippery ground, however, emerges when Wright moves from
interpreting these ontological metaphors in novels to essays by
novelists about novel-writing. This slippery ground is best represented
by the third chapter, on Henry James's ground metaphors in his New York
Edition prefaces, although other chapters also examine essays by Woolf
and Smith. There is characteristically much in play in this chapter,
including the capacities of close reading, the experience of rereading,
and the creative inception of fictions, but the aim and method remains
largely the same as that of the book in general, of "using the
techniques of close reading [...] to show how authors use metaphor to lay
bare the ontological basis of their fictional worlds," with the
difference being "perhaps only here I have taken as my object an
exemplary work of novel theory rather than a work of fiction" (133). The
argument remains persuasive in that it demonstrates how novelists
gravitate towards a certain family of metaphors to think through ideas
of foundation, inception, standpoint, and ontology, whether in novels
themselves or in writing about novels.
Yet there is perhaps more of a difference than Wright acknowledges
between theoretical and fictional metaphors of ground. As he argues
throughout the book, ontological metaphors in novels use the literal or
physical surfaces of their own fictional worlds to explore the
metaphysical foundations of that same world; in his incisive phrase,
"fictional being understands itself" (111). His examples frequently
feature characters who are happily or unhappily pinned to their plane of
existence -- Mrs Yeobright wishing to be "uncrushed" (62) from the earth,
or Mrs Ramsay imagining her husband as a stake driven into the seabed --
and who therefore concretise abstract metaphysical speculations through
their experiences of existing within those metaphysics. James, entering
as an author from the paratext, walks not onto the grounds of the novel
worlds to which characters find themselves rooted but ones
metaphorically neighbouring, perhaps the worlds of novel theory or
novel-writing as practices which can be the subject of their own
spatialised metaphors. When James feels, for example, that in revisiting
his early novels he wanders a snowy plain where his original tracks are
partly lost, it seems to me that he walks not through The Portrait
of a Lady (all the more because he does not specify a novel) and
the kind of novel canvas Hardy exposes in his snow scene, but rather
through the snowy plain of the experience of rereading. Where the close
reading in other chapters move or flip vertically, through layers of
figuration which specifically ground or unearth each other, this chapter
feels more like a sideways movement into mixed metaphor, synthesising a
"series of shifting metaphors that we find as we move from preface to
preface" (120).
The metaphor of ground is nonetheless significantly, insistently
attached to both novels' figurations of their own realities and
novelists' figurations of their novels, ultimately bearing out Wright's
argument of its ontological richness. It is a testament to the influence
of The Grounds of the Novel and its intimate attention to
detail that I gripe about one kind of metaphoric ground against another,
because the book shows us so convincingly that there is something
distinctly powerful and vital about the novel's own grounds.
Timothy Gao
is Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol, UK.
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