PROCESS AS NARRATIVE EXCESS AND THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL

Tatjana Jukić

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb

tjukic@m.ffzg.hr

Hannah Arendt employs process to describe not revolution so much as a response of the revolutionary actors to the events in which they first took part without knowing them to be a revolution – a response steeped in “the metaphors of stream and torrent and current” in which “the revolution is not seen as the work of men but as an irresistible process” (On Revolution, 1990: 49). To Arendt, that is, process describes how revolution is eventually lodged in subjectivity as an index of unassimilated narrative work, so that modern subjectivity is kept in constant psychopolitical and narrative check. Indeed, Arendt notes that the revolutionaries were “possessed and obsessed” with this idea (1990: 42), which – given the formative function of revolutions in modernity, and the formative function of narrative in Arendt’s political theory – suggests that modern subjectivity is predicated on process as narrative excess.

Tellingly, Erich Auerbach argues a similar line in Mimesis, when he writes that the French Revolution was when the “process of temporal concentration” began for Europe, “both of historical events themselves and of everyone’s knowledge of them,” resulting in “modern tragic realism based on the contemporary” (2003: 459, 458). To Auerbach this implies emphatic conscious engagement; he speaks of forceful “modern consciousness of reality” (2003: 459). That he should call this realism tragic, however, suggests that modern subjectivity is kept in the same kind of urgent psychopolitical check that Arendt has identified. That Auerbach – a preeminent philologist – should align tragic realism with the novel in the nineteenth century suggests that the novel at the time was tasked with shoring up narrative excess against the intelligence of tragedy.

Auerbach credits Stendhal with formatting the novel against this task. I propose to argue that the invention of the focalizing consciousness in the nineteenth-century novel, often attributed to Jane Austen, was how this task was first accomplished, leading up to the novel’s own self-reflection and the foregrounding of narrative theory, with Henry James. It is in this sense that Jane Austen may well be Aeschylus, or perhaps Sophocles, to James’s Euripides, or even Aristotle; Matthew Arnold comes to mind and his Victorian grasp of Greek antiquity. Important stepping stones were provided by Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot. Finally, if this means that the nineteenth-century novel carries the same critical weight as the mourning play of early modernity (to mention only the studies by Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt), I will also suggest that the invention of detective fiction, in the nineteenth century, may have been how the intelligence of the novel was negotiated against the formats of tragedy and the mourning play. For this I will consult research on form, process and transformation by Fredric Jameson, Caroline Levine, Anna Kornbluh and Jürgen Osterhammel, among others.