We take up the question of fiction’s relation to motive at a time when many literary critics, and perhaps most readers at large, appear to be abandoning the distinctive kinds of thinking that literary fiction enacts. Zadie Smith’s 2019 essay “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction” addresses the contemporary situation: As readers become more invested in “the supposedly unquestionable authenticity of personal experience”—and more suspicious of “appropriation”—they lose patience with fiction’s “doubts about the nature of the self.” Timothy Bewes’s Free Indirect (2022) similarly calls our time a “postfictional age” when “any idea is acceptable to the dominant order as long as it can be identified, named, located, and attributed, thus attached to a subject.” Today, reading is often approached as an ethical practice of acknowledging the agency or condemning the willfulness of other people. Fiction, especially the kind of fiction that prevailed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, may be losing currency—but it may also be gaining new critical distance from common sense.
By some accounts, “the novel” in the West rose in tandem with “the sovereign subject.” And yet novels often perform their own sophisticated analyses and critiques of human agency. The gothic tradition, in particular, confronts us with forces (unconscious, inhuman) that block self-determination and occlude self-knowledge. Our papers think with works of philosophically sophisticated fiction. We draw from intellectual traditions that locate motive forces outside personal identity, and we show how fiction’s own aesthetic techniques make motives palpable and effective, yet obscure.
The papers proceed in roughly chronological order, revisiting developments from the 1840s through the 1980s. In “Poe and the Aesthetics of the Effect,” Emily Ogden asks: What if we took the representation of the social to be merely incidental to fiction, an auxiliary to its production of an effect? Edgar Allan Poe argued that the fiction writer did not accommodate thought to incident, but the other way around: having conceived “a single effect to be wrought, he then invents such incidents” as may establish “this preconceived effect.” Poe’s tales served the psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte in her training analysis: to overcome resistances and elicit her own terror, she read Poe’s “Ligeia” at night, then discussed it with Sigmund Freud in the morning. Ogden develops a theory of fiction as effect, indifferent to the ethics of representation.
Caleb Smith takes his title, “Jealousy, Revenge, and Disappointment” from Charles Chesnutt’s 1897 story, “The Dumb Witness.” Taking cues from Ogden, Smith connects Chesnutt’s frame tales to Poe’s theories of motive and effect. Chesnutt often stages encounters between an old-fashioned Southern passion and a modern Northern rationality. In this way he dramatizes the arrival of a secular theory human agency as the pursuit of self-interest. Yet this theory proves inadequate to the fiction’s mysteries. Drawing from accounts of the “unspeakable” proposed by Eve Sedgwick and Toni Morrison, Smith shows how Southern gothic fiction points toward motive forces that possess personalities, rather than expressing them.
In Zadie Smith's "Two Paths for the Novel," Jennifer Fleissner finds a distinction that structures how most critics think about the subject and the ethical: a divide between a "lyrical realism" focused on deep interiority and an avant-garde tradition foregrounding impersonal systems of language and thought. But Smith’s essay, Fleissner shows, also suggests a third path—identified with novels by Melville, Beckett, Joyce, and others—that refuses the terms of this divide. Such novels are marked at both a formal and a characterological level by "obsessive" repetition. Rather than moving "beyond" persons and plots, Fleissner suggests, such repetition appears in dialectical tension with them. Returning to a text central to both the "ethical turn" and its rejection, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Fleissner’s talk works to move criticism beyond its deadlock around the question of human freedom.
The three panelists will present brief papers (12-15 minutes) to ensure ample time for questions and discussions. The presider, Marianna Torgovnick, will keep time and moderate discussion. We wish to be sure to address a question about our panel's implications: how can we approach fiction's thinking about the complexities of motive as a way of reckoning with, rather than withdrawing from, embodied histories of gender, race, and power?