How Novels Think

I was walking home, inspired by a good day's work, talking, as I often do, into my hand-held micro-recorder, when the following rushed forth.

(Rene says if I don't use it I lose it, so blame her. Or enjoy a few hundred words on the modern liberal subject and how he came to be. Also: Rene: We could totally make this the article for your article club. Just tossing it out there. Hypertext links for those who might actually be interested.)

In How Novels Think Nancy Nancy Armstrong advances Althusserian thought about interpellation in order to demonstrate how “the novel” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England produced the modern subject. Armstrong draws on what Althusser calls “the bad subject” to show how individualist novels, such as those by Jane Austen, used the bad subject as a supplement to “[change] the character to which [the supplement] has been added into something with new and different properties and potentialities.”(28) In the case of Pride and Prejudice, for instance, the bad subject as supplement fundamentally altered the terms of social contract morality, and in doing so contributed to the “extraordinary web of fictions attending to the social contract” (51), the totality of which—the “novel” understood in the broadest sense of the term—came to function as “the supplement that [put] the modern individual in motion.” (51) In this regard the novel served both pedagogical and ideological functions, teaching the reader how to develop the types of selves that functioned according to the reconfigured social contract morality, and in doing so interpellating the reader into the modern subject, thus accomplishing its ideological task.

To understand the traditional morality of the social contract it is necessary to recognize that social contract morality is tied to the contradiction the social contract produces within individuals. “The social contract,” as Armstrong puts it, “demands that an individual restrain his or her individuality in exchange for the state’s protection of that individuality against other forms of self-expression.” The morality of the social contract, then, is figured by the extent to which individuals adequately curb moments of excessive self-expression with self-restraint: how well individuals conform to normative standards of behavior, etc., in the interest of a defined collective good.

In Jane Austen’s work there is a shift in social contract morality. To account for the full weight of this shift Armstrong first starts with the example of Robinson Crusoe, in which the terms of morality are defined in relation to the successful curbing of self-expression with self-restraint. In his negotiation of the implicit contradiction of the social contract Crusoe’s morality is also his rhetorical downfall—the more moral Crusoe becomes on these grounds, the less [the] “modern readers wish for the kind of homogeneity required of members in the new community.” (36) That is, the only way for Crusoe to achieve some level of morality is to curb the very individualism that initially compels readers to identify with him. As such, according to Armstrong, the traditional morality of the social contract demands a loss of individualism.

However, for Enlightenment intellectuals, such as Jane Austen, this “curb on selfish gratification [was] the first and best guarantee of full citizenship. To their way of thinking, such self-restraint entailed no loss of individuality but, quite contrary, guaranteed an accretion to the self of individual rights.” (48) According to Armstrong, Austen’s work set the terms of morality so that “self-expression and self-government exist in perfect accord.” (45) In doing so the terms of social contract morality, namely self-expression and self-restraint, shift from a relationship of antagonism, in which the success of one comes at the expense of the other, to a relationship of harmony, in which the success of one means the success of the other. How Austen accomplishes this reconfiguration of morality is directly tied to Armstrong’s account of how the novel interpellates readers.

In discussing bourgeois morality as it relates to the bad subject, Armstrong asks: “How can the bad subject become a good citizen? Bourgeois morality accomplishes this slight of hand.” (33) Bourgeois morality draws a distinction in the forms of self-expression, distinguishing “those passions and drives that serve the general good from those more likely to disrupt the social order. For the expressive individual to become a good subject, his desires must not only be strictly his; they must ultimately serve the general good as well.” (33) Understood in these terms, morality “appears to emanate from the very core of an individual.” (27) Armstrong notes that in Austen’s novels her heroines are converted into bad subjects by, for instance, rejecting unwanted sexual advances and advantageous marriage proposals. (43) Austen’s heroines are reluctant to “enter into relationships with men occupying a position above them” even though this is required of them by social dictates. “By saying no, these heroines challenge the marriage rules that maintain the social hierarchy” (43). In defying social dictates the heroines are transformed into bad subjects. It is through adhering to bourgeois morality that they become good citizens. How does bourgeois morality accomplish this task?

By way of an example Armstrong cites Elizabeth’s rejection of Mr. Collins. Elizabeth, in rejecting Mr. Collins, risks her father’s position as head of household, and thus acts as a bad subject. But in rejecting Mr. Collins’ proposal because she is “[holding] out for a contract based on a certain quality of feeling” (45) she defies social dictates in “the only way that can be morally authorized.” (45) In doing so Elizabeth transforms from bad subject to good citizen. What’s more, this is the only logical course of action for Elizabeth to take according to bourgeois morality. In the same way that Althusser argues that “the early modern church gave the individual freedom only to submit to external forms of authority,” (29) Armstrong argues that the individualist novel, by way of the rhetoric of bourgeois morality, sets the terms for how the modern subject should act, as evidenced by how Elizabeth acts. This is what Althusser means when he says that ideology has a material existence. “It therefore appears that the subject acts insofar as he is acted by the following system: ideology existing in a material ideological apparatus, prescribing material practices governed by a material ritual, which practices exist in the material actions of a subject acting in all consciousness according to his belief.” (170, italics mine) The modern novel enacts this sort of system.

Armstrong links this historical and textual discussion of Pride and Prejudice to the pedagogic and ideological work this novel accomplishes by drawing on Althusserian thought. Armstrong notes that Pride and Prejudice laid the ground work for bourgeois morality, a category that mediated between individual desire and social authority, and which in turn became the “rhetoric by which the novel [signaled] at different moments in history where exactly to draw the line that limits individualism so that a balance may be struck between [self-expression and self-restraint].” (51) In order for the rhetoric of bourgeois morality to do the necessary work to teach readers where to draw this line, the novel itself must function as a supplement.

We can come to understand the novel as a supplement, Armstrong claims, by way of Althusser’s reading of Rousseau’s social contract. Citing Althusser Armstrong states, “the [social] contract represents itself as a voluntary act on the part of the individual. That individual does not lose individual agency by submitting to the laws of the state, because he submits under his own volition.” (50) Submitting to a collective of similarly submitted individuals becomes understood as an act of personal freedom in exactly the same way that Enlightenment intellectuals such as Austen understood it. Armstrong continues: “The presupposition is that any and all individuals will not only submit but, in doing so, come to understand themselves and their personal interests in much the same way.” (50) Crucially important for Armstrong’s use of Althusser, however, is that Althusser proposes that this can only ever be realized if there is “some third party to ensure that the exchange between individual and collective is in fact an exchange between an individual and an aggregate of more or less similar individuals.” (50) Some cultural apparatus must see to it that a group of individuals “imagine their relation to the real in approximately these terms.” (50) The novel, Armstrong argues, is such a cultural apparatus. The novel creates a space in which bad subjects are transformed into good citizens by way of bourgeois morality, and in doing so teaches the reader to develop the kinds of selves that can be understood on this basis. In this way the novel interpellates its readers into modern subjects.

Thursday, August 14, 2008