Novel Theory Beyond Democracy

Abstract

AbstractWhy has scholarship persistently treated novels about politics as irrelevant to the politics of fiction? This essay examines moments when scholarship sidelines novelistic representation of political activism and action, and suggests that novels of politics trouble a persistent gesture in scholarship by which novels and their characters are treated as representative—individuals standing in for classes, novels standing in for societies. But novels of politics often foreground tactical questions that fail to be representative; they look at political strategies that can’t or shouldn’t stand in the societies they hope to create, or at the way taking political action estranges individuals from the communities they hope to act for. Novels of politics look at what happens when individuals set out to trouble realism’s sense of “the way things happen” (James), and, in doing so, they raise broader questions about the gaps between means and the ends that are supposed to justify them.Scholarship of the novel . . . tends to see politics not as something that people . . . do, not a form of action, but as . . . a kind of mimesis: a problem of how social structures and populations . . . are made visible.